Years ago I wanted to play a game with a friend where we listed actors who we could safely claim would never get an Oscar. My friend said that was a stupid game, because anyone could win at some point. I think Hilary Swank, 90210 alum, was his example.

And I'm pretty sure my response to him was that I could confidently say Data from The Goonies would never get one.

It's almost like I'm psychic in reverse

It's not like Chunk won.

Wardrobe malfunction update: I thought Eva Longoria was going to bust a nip on Colbert this week, but now she's leaning right into that edge of fabric obfuscation.  And I love it.

Jinnistan wrote:

If you're going to use a Beatles song to shill for a Big Tech company, it might as well be their worst song ever.

What song was it?

Hell yeah RRR

DGAF about the rest of the awards
 

crumbsroom wrote:

Jinnistan wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

What song was it?

All Together Now.

I've grown to like the simplicity of it but, yeah, it's hard to argue that it is probably deserving of being in the discussion of worst ever.

Honey Pie is clearly the one that no one should argue in defence of though. It's so bad no one would ever even think of using it in some shit ad
 

And obviously "Glass Onion" is better than both

I took a piss during the In Memorium segment, but apparently they didn't include Charlbi Dean, who only happened to be the star of one of the Best Picture nominees.  Someone probably needs to get fired over that.  Other snubs were for Paul Sorvino, Anne Heche and Gilbert Gottfried.  (Tom Sizemore was probably too late for inclusion.)

I want to highlight this AV Club article because it somewhat goes against the grain.  There's a contradiction to these G/O sites in that they're purportedly very woke, but ultimately they're also corporate shills, which is about as conservative as it gets.  Now, some of these entertainment corporations get flack from conservatives for being woke - like Disney's mermaid inclusiveness - even though the Disney CEO was actually working with DeSantis, using nameless employees as scapegoats, trying to keep their tax havens intact.  The AV Club is unapologetically Disney cheerleaders, not because of their wokeness but because of their capital dominance in our cultural currency.  The promotion of every and anything Disney, Marvel, Star Wars amounts to about 3/4s of all of their entertainment coverage, and they're always very defensive against critics of these franchise-pimps, not just Scorsese but anyone in the entertainment industry who questions the prevalance of this kind of IP saturation becomes just as persona non grata as JK Rowling or Chris Rock.  Some celebrities have found themselves having to issue apologies for these corporate infractions.  And whenever an actor gets a role in a Marvel/Star Wars project, they're given the equivalent of a debutante quinceanera, welcoming them "into the family".  It's all very Cosa Nostra.  Such actors are then protected from woke scrutiny (which is why no one talks about how Robert Downey Jr is a Republican).

So  in an awards season where all of the nominees, winners/losers and snubs are filtered through the lens of respective demographic agendas, this corporate favor-currying has mutated into a novel type of wokeness which manages to mirror the more conservative anti-woke grievances, that ostensibly claims to represent the rather broad demographic of the "average movie-goer".  This is the same language used by conservatives against the more diverse offerings that have won Oscars recently, but this article goes out of its way to point out that this is not the case, in fact minorities apparently love blockbusters as much as anyone, which may be why Black Panther has become the rallying emblem of Black cinematic achievement rather than far more artististically superior films like Moonlight, Pariah or Sorry To Bother You.  After all, Black Panther is family.

The aspersions against smaller, independent films isn't particularly subtle here: "head-scratchers for middle America", "smaller films unseen by a vast majority of the planet"; while pining unambiguously for "films that people have actually watched", "IP-rich couch-potato content".  Call it the Couch Potato Demographic, those poor foolish unseen slobs.  And "IP-rich" is key here as well, specifically alluding to pre-marketed franchises as opposed to original scripts and stories.  Cui bono?  Probably the studio behemoth with the largest IP riches.  And note the feigned sense of ubiquity throughout the article, where blockbusters are "universally loved and seen", and the "last remaining Oscar viewers" are portrayed as invariably being the kinds of average movie goers who don't want to hear about films that they didn't see on posters at the multiplex.  This "popular tastes" vs "Oscar tastes" is framed as a "fight for the soul of the Academy", and because Top Gun and Avatar didn't win, that means we must be losing the war.  Let's Make the Academy Great Again, like the "happy days" when Titanic won!

The funny thing, for any one semi-cinematically literate, is that the most dated Oscar winners tend to be those which won on the strength of their box office.  My Fair Lady over Dr. Strangelove; Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction.  There's really nothing new about this dynamic or the conversation it spurs.  Back when Chariots of Fire beat Raiders of the Lost Ark and Reds beat ET, you had similar complaints, none of which affected the Oscar telecast's ratings.  Why are ratings down now?  Well, for one, people don't really watch a lot of live television anymore.  That's across the board.  The obvious second is the depression at the movie theater and the more diffuse ways that people can enjoy watching films.  And has the Oscars made some boneheaded decisions recently in terms of the films they've chosen to award?  Absolutely, but the problem isn't due to those films' relative low budgets or independent status.  There's no shortage of similarly low budget independent alternatives in recent years that most definitely deserved more award recognition in their place.  The bottom line is that it would be piss-poor populism to revert to using box office as the overriding metric for qualitative award celebrations, and that's true even without measuring the films' couch-potato potential.  (Why isn't McDonalds three-stars in Michelin?  23 Billion hamburgers can't be wrong!)

Surprisingly, it gets worse.  Like a lot of the thoughts in this direction, they tend to break down as soon as you take them around the block.  They mention how in 2009, the Oscars added five more slots to the Best Picture category, precisely to "ensure more popular films earned a Best Picture nomination" (aptly inspired by the first Avatar), but amazingly the ratings have fallen even compared to that year.  Maybe this populist pandering isn't the problem.  The other theories rest on twisted demographic logic.  There's an attempt to paint this as a generational divide, and in this war for the soul "we’re looking at a turf war between younger Academy voters and a large group comprised of older voters and those living in countries far removed from, and largely disinterested in, Hollywood’s superhero factory."  Old people with their Tyranny of Maturity!  But this is completely undermined in a previous paragraph where the writer admits that Everything Everywhere, a low budget independent film with 1/10th the box office of Top Gun and Avatar, appeals to "future voters" of "youthful vintage".  Maybe younger viewers aren't so readily obedient to swallow whatever Disney serves to them (those Marvel box office receipts are dropping pretty precipitously as of late).  But that dig at "those living in countries far removed" hints at something more distasteful: With the recent expansion of the Oscar memberships, "49% of those memberships were from abroad, representing 68 countries", "50% of potential new Oscar members were from overseas", "These world-class filmmakers are products of the cultures they’re from and are not necessarily enamored with Hollywood blockbusters", "since international members now comprise a big enough block to skew any category towards more international or indie fare, the possibility of smaller films winning big awards only increases which, in turn, could drive away more Oscar viewers".  Obviously these "worldclass" foreigners are in direct opposition to the interests of American Oscar viewers.  That's woke as fuck.

I also like how this writer brushes off the award success of All Quiet and RRR to Netflix's vigorous marketing campaigns.  There were a few other G/O articles which complained about this Netflix arm-twisting influence.  And completely ignoring how Disney and Warner Bros. spent portions of the actual telecast openly promoting their films.  But, hey, Netflix, distributing films that the major theater chains refused to carry, managed to secure a few minor noms and awards for their films, so obviously they are an existential threat to super heroes everywhere.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

Similar to when Chadwick Boseman lost to Anthony Hopkins. 

This one was extra funny because they rearranged the ceremony to put Best Actor Last and also refused to let Hopkins attend remotely, so instead of the big emotional Boseman win they were expecting, they got a still photo of Hopkins who wasn’t even there to give a speech.

My theory is that they produce the montage the night before, and the process is a few of the show producers go on a bender and try to list the names, taking a shot every time they correctly remember a celebrity death.