Lost in the Movies: Past & Future - a status update (sort of)

These were my concluding thoughts in the previous post, which was also a grabbag of links and announcements. I realized they probably deserved their own space. See that entry if you want to know what I'm up to this year and much of next. This "status update" is about what's further along the horizon.

"Movies" have been my primary interest and endeavor for a quarter-century now, since I was an eager first-grader in the fall of 1990, captivated by a combination of new releases at the cinema, my cousin's video collection, and movie books from the local library. At the heart of this was always the notion that I myself would become a filmmaker. That's a much more complicated story that perhaps I'll get into later - not that it's particularly interesting - but as I approach my mid-thirties, the idea of making a living from film is pretty much out the window and even pursuing it as a passion may be fading. That could be the necessary relaxation of pressure before a windfall...or it could simply be the turning of a page, one I've been stuck on for far too long. For the moment, I have other distractions to keep me active on the margins of the film world but they too will pass, eventually.

As I recently noted on Twitter, if it wasn't for Twin Peaks and video essays, I'm not sure what role - if any - film would have in my life anymore. I virtually never go to the movie theater and when I do it's primarily a social event, not an aesthetic pursuit. I don't keep up with new releases on DVD or streaming either, and I barely even watch classic movies these days. By coincidence, I have been reading film books in the past few weeks, but that's more sporadic than it used to be, and I don't keep track of film news at all. Any engagement I have is with particular titles - usually a TV series I'm writing about or a film that I can cover for Fandor or a personal video essay - not the bigger picture of "the cinema." My cinephilia has always waxed and waned, with lean years in which I focused on other subjects - the Civil War, politics and history, music - only for the pendulum to violently swing back as I devoted myself to my core interest once again. What may be different this time is that, if the dream of filmmaking really does disappear, I don't have a real reason to go back again.

For me, the axis of my passion for cinema has always been the faith that one way or another, I am or would be involved in creating it. If I'm not, I don't think I would want to indulge my enthusiasm as a viewer or commentator; it would feel too one-sided. Video essays can bridge that gap somewhat, but not permanently...unless they evolve into something else. Likewise if a cultural moment emerges where movies - or much more likely, a new form of "movies" (probably online, fragmented, and far more homemade) - become relevant again I could experience a renewed passion and inspiration. However, it feels like my own personal disenchantment with the magic of movies has been accompanied by a more generalized pop culture shift away from that form. So we'll see. (Incidentally, I also suspect that even if I do manage to burst my creative drought, it won't be accompanied by a renewed cinephilia; going forward, obsessing over movie culture may only be a distraction from attempting to contribute directly to it - creation and appreciation don't go hand-in-hand as often as presumed.)

Recently, I've been watching (and re-watching, but mostly for the first time) Kevin B. Lee's video essays. Dubbed "the godfather of the video essay," he pretty much invented its online incarnation nearly ten years ago in the spring of 2007. I plan to keep doing this, a little bit each day, not only with Kevin's work but other figures in the video essay world, immersing myself in the history of the still-developing form. It's been just long enough that revisiting these roots evokes a sense of nostalgia (even though in many cases I never watched the actual videos at the time). Devotion to movies, engagement with this exciting idea that they were bigger than individual titles, that we were only brushing a part of the elephant, carried me through some frustrating times and helped me focus and develop myself and allowed me to create a body of work I'm proud of. But it isn't really something I want to return to - it served its purpose. It can either become something new in the near future or it can settle into its place as an artifact of the past, something you enjoy lingering over when you discover it in a dusty attic but leave there after a few hours to return to the life you live now.

In mid-2018, Lost in the Movies will celebrate its 10th anniversary. At that point I will have created a pretty sizable backlog of TV viewing diaries so even if I wanted to throw in the towel on blogging at that point, I would probably have years of material to keep auto-publishing. However, the second (and I'd wager, truly final) season of Twin Peaks will probably have just ended. Maybe I'll even have had enough time to create concluding chapters for Journey Through Twin Peaks. Any other projects will have been caught up with. And by then I'll have experienced a year and a half (beginning this month) of penciling in time every week to attempt creative writing. In other words, I should know where I'm headed that summer, and I will let you know too. Until then, I have enough work to keep me busy, whether it ends up being a last burst or a first full flowering. Here's to 2017.

Election Day Status Update

After a slow summer, this site has been quite busy in the fall, finally wrapping up the last (more than) half of my Favorites series by adopting a daily schedule after grinding away, off and on, for four years. Several projects are wrapping up simultaneously, while others are waiting to get started, and those projects plus work plus actually needing to get out to vote...all keep me from doing what I had planned for last night or this morning: finally talking about current events on this blog for the first time all year. My reflections on 2016 will have to wait to go up till tomorrow, if I feel like it - aside from brief thoughts right now, and some links to previous political/cultural essays that represent where I was at the time of writing, not necessarily where I am now.

First, though, how am I voting? My most enthusiastic vote will be cast for Carol Shea-Porter in New Hampshire's first district, a candidate who avoids corporate PAC money (as a result she was not the DNC's desired nominee, email leaks have revealed). But that's probably not the vote you're curious about. I will be voting for Hillary Clinton for president because I currently reside in a swing state and consider this strategy the best one to ensure Donald Trump doesn't become president, despite my many objections with Clinton specifically and, much more importantly, to the entire system she represents and participates in. While I have, to put it mildly, major disagreements with anyone who thinks Trump is a preferable choice, I also don't have much tolerance with those who condemn third-party voters or abstentions. Yes, not voting for Hillary Clinton could be seen as privilege. You know what? Voting for her could be seen as a privilege too. Both actions have dangerous consequences, and can be deeply repellent to the people most directly affected by those consequences. I've made my calculation, and now you must make yours. (A few minutes ago, I published this piece without this paragraph, but I don't want to seem coy - so there it is.)

Film as Film, and what is film? (a status update in the form of rambling personal musings)

Three and a half years ago, I recorded some of my frustrations with writing about and watching movies. In Vertigo, Vertigo Variations, and Watching Movies While Blogging, I wrote about "a disengagement from actually experiencing, enjoying, and understanding the movies themselves" that resulted from almost obsessively trying to organize that experience. Since then I have experienced both an escalation of that process and a re-discovery of the central phenomenon that was getting eclipsed at that time.

Growing Up is Hard to Do: Boyhood, The Giver, fragments of memory, and notes on the "death of adulthood"

The following is a double review of two recent coming-of-age films followed by images, videos, and observations gleaned from a much longer essay for which these reviews were originally intended.

Jonas did not want to go back. He didn't want the memories, didn't want the honor, didn't want the wisdom, didn't want the pain. He wanted his childhood again, his scraped knees and ball games. He sat in his dwelling alone, watching through the window, seeing children at play, citizens bicycling home from uneventful days at work, ordinary lives free of anguish because he had been selected, as others before him had, to bear their burden. 

But the choice was not his.

The Giver (1993), by Lois Lowry

When the first whispers of Richard Linklater's Boyhood reached my ears - or rather my eyes, since I "heard" about it on Twitter - I knew I would like it. Shot sporadically over an entire decade, the film anchors its universal coming-of-age tale in a very specific place (rural and suburban Texas) and time (the post-9/11 era). Onscreen we simultaneously watch Mason, the character, and Eller Coltrane, the actor, grow from 7 to 18. While widely acclaimed, this novel approach has also been called a gimmick, implying that novelty masks an uninteresting story. But the approach is the story.

It Was 20 Years Ago Today: When A Star Moves

Where there's a will there's a way, even if it makes no sense. On July 31, 1993, twenty years ago this day, I began shooting my first movie in the woods behind my aunt's house in New Hampshire. We used my dad's Hi-8 home video camera, several friends, an alien made of tin-foil (I provided the voice live, just off-camera), and several toy dinosaurs filmed in close-up (later to be intercut with the actors in an effort to disguise their true size). It was a surprisingly organized beginning although this orderly kickoff would soon devolve into a mess of delays, personal conflicts, and technical difficulties - all surprisingly ubiquitous even at this early phase. I utilized a formal screenplay, detailed shot list, out-of-sequence shooting (timecode diligently logged on Hi-8 tape), and a shooting schedule soon fragrantly disobeyed. My father was the cinematographer and I shouted orders from behind his knee, a four-and-a-half-foot tyrant in sweatpants two sizes too big.

5 Years: The Complete History (more or less) of Lost in the Movies, 2008 - 2013

I began my journey on July 16, 2008, in a small-town public library in New Hampshire. At the time I knew so little about blogging that I worried about my computer being able handle Blogger's format. False alarm after all, but somehow I prefer this particular genesis anyway: the image of a neophyte blogger sitting at a public computer, excited yet not quite knowing what he's doing or where it will lead.

The past five years have been fairly tumultuous and my blogging has often reflected that. Despite numerous changes in format, approach, and output my blog - initially titled The Dancing Image but renamed Lost in the Movies about nine months ago - has been an anchor for me, an always-welcome port in the storm. I'll tend to skirt over most of the geographical relocations and personal/professional adjustments of the past five years to focus exclusively on the evolution of my blog, but certainly my work was part of a larger pattern.

Not a fan of navel-gazing? Let this serve as fair warning: excessive belly-button lint ahead. That said, I suspect many bloggers (and even some non-bloggers) will enjoy this lengthy read; perhaps it will remind them of their own evolution, inviting a warm, maybe bittersweet, sense of nostalgia. The blogosphere is still very young today, but the past half-decade has brought many changes and much experience.

Links are sprinkled throughout this piece; think of it as a long hallway with many doors to be opened and explored. For that reason and because it's so damn long, you may want to read in installments. Or not.

Let's begin...

What I feel needs to be said

Very rarely do I post on political issues or news stories, or non-movie related topics in general, mostly because I feel it's generally outside of this blog's purview. Only when I feel pushed or compelled beyond my usual vaguely depressive disengagement with contemporary U.S. politics or the daily news cycle do I step outside of this avoidance and post something from my gut about what's going on out there in the non-movie/arts world. The last time I did so was in April, when a bomb exploded at the Boston Marathon and I was drawn back to my connection to that city; what resulted was probably one of the more autobiographical posts I've shared on this site.

Tonight, a day after the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmermann verdict, it's hard to say why I feel so personally invested that I want to write a blog post on the subject. And yet I do. I've tweeted more on this topic than any other, and almost entirely since the verdict. I did not follow the trial very closely, and I didn't even know the details of the case until a few months ago (when it happened, I was in the midst of a move to L.A. and not following the news closely at all - I only knew the names and none of the specifics, so that until a few months ago when I delved into a Wikipedia article, and the relevant sources, on the subject I didn't even know that George Zimmermann had killed Trayvon Martin during an altercation in a neighborhood both belonged in). And yet here we are. I'll attempt to make sense of my jumbled reactions below; take it as you will. Maybe I shouldn't have posted this at all, yet - as a co-worker of mine is fond of saying - "let me tell you where my heart is."

Boston, You're My Home

Boston skyline, August 31, 2009, taken from my cell phone

I feel compelled to write something. It isn't relevant to anything and offers no new information or perspective on today's events, so I'll try - and probably fail - to keep it short. But I didn't want to remain silent, because Boston is a city that has meant and continues to mean so much to me, so I wanted to mark the tragic bombing of the Boston Marathon somehow. I lived far longer in New York, currently reside near and work in L.A., and even when I "lived in" Boston for just over two years, my actual address was in Malden, a separate town on the outskirts of the metropolitan area. And yet no other city feels like "home" to me the way Boston does. So I'll share my memories, pointless as they may be. They're personal, and that's something. I hope any fellow New Englanders will share their own; at moments like these they are all we've got.

2002 in 2012: The Making of My Movie, Class of 2002

The how & why of my adventure in filmmaking, followed by the end result.
Click here to watch the film first.

Commencement: Discovering a Premise

My long journey began in, of all places, Hollywood.

Not behind the closed doors of a cushy studio office, or in a limousine winding between the (literally) star-studded sidewalks, nor even on a sweaty camaraderie-boosting soundstage but at a wings joint on Sunset Boulevard. It had been nearly two months since my quixotic arrival in Los Angeles, but this was the first time I had actually gone out in the city itself, after weeks of scrambling to find a place to live and work. Now, as the clock rolled past midnight, and April gave way to May, I was unwinding with co-workers after a stressful week.

Having finally secured a position at a fundraising organization, I set to work immediately pursuing my real goal, making movies, only to discover, like the characters in Godard's tragicomic La Chinoise, that what I thought had been a great leap was only the beginning of a long march. Additionally, the week had seen my blog disappear into thin air (later resolved, although at the moment my prospects appeared bleak) and offered reminders that, even once hired "permanently" this high-turnover job was hardly a sure thing (indeed, within a few days, I'd be the only one at this table left at the office).

Tonight, the talk quickly shifted from work to movies - street fundraisers, like all impermanent employees in this city, tend to be supplementing work, or dreams of work, in the entertainment industry. I turned to a younger co-worker, who had earlier claimed many story concepts he didn't know what to do with (in other words, the exact opposite of my problem), and asked him if he had any short film ideas he'd be willing to share.

He responded, "Yeah...I haven't written much on it, but I'd love to see a movie about a bunch of characters waiting at a train station for the afterlife. It wouldn't be about where they were going or what happened when the train arrived, but what they were thinking, and who they were."

With that, the wheels began to turn...

Lucasfilm Lost

Which is the bigger movie news? That a Star Wars: Episode VII is in the works? Or that the Disney corporation will be making it, having bought out Lucasfilm on Tuesday? Let's begin with that first story. What will Episode VII cover? Conceived as Anakin Skywalker's rise, fall from grace, and eventual redemption, where could the Star Wars narrative possibly go once the fallen Jedi's corpse goes up in flames on the forest moon on Endor? I've long thought that the most compelling angle would be to show the Rebel Alliance, having finally and impossibly brought down the Evil Empire, becoming something of an Empire itself. Perhaps a new resistance could emerge, radical, indignant, making the former Rebels question who they have really become. Certainly such a storyline would have historical precedent - how many revolutions have turned into regimes resisting the next revolution? But it would also neatly reflect the Star Wars saga itself, by which I mean not the movies onscreen but the grand ascension of a unique, original myth into industry gamechanger, pop cultural icon...and big, billion-dollar business.

Precocious Pastiche: Recycled Culture in 80s Kids Cartoons - and Beyond

About a month ago, as several friends got drunk and prepared food for a party later that evening, the TV droned somewhere in the distance. At some point in the afternoon, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein appeared onscreen, and no one bothered to shut it off. For an hour or two the hypnotically grating high-pitched rodents serenaded us with their screams and weirdly precise vocal delivery; I caught very little of the movie as I wandered in and out of the room but what I saw (and heard) fascinated me. How bizarre that from a dark and stormy night early in 19th century Geneva, as a group of Romantic poets and intellectuals told ghost stories to keep themselves amused, we wind up with a colorful cartoon of squeaky-voiced, commercially-driven anthropomorphized animals chased around by a creature so familiar to us that it's naturally assumed even the toddlers watching will already know his name.

Who's Killing Cinema - and Who Cares?

I've just finished one of the best essays on film I've ever read. It's called "Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?" and it's by David Denby in The New Republic. Denby's essay is about the effect that over-digitalization and informal formalism have on movies: how the narrative art has been pruned to the point of poisoning the tree, how a concern with fleeting impression over deep-seated effect has destroyed the relationship between the spectator and the spectacle. In six pages, Denby effectively conveys things I've been feeling and saying for years. I don't necessarily agree with all of Denby's examples (some of the films he sees as exceptional I think are endemic, and vice-versa) but his overall point seems irrefutable. Movies are no longer made, marketed, or (especially) received the way they used to be, not in an evolutionary sense (these goalposts are always shifting) but fundamentally. This passage in particular had me shouting "Yes!" aloud as if I was watching the Patriots score a touchdown:

"The glory of modernism was that it yoked together candor and spiritual yearning with radical experiments in form. But in making such changes, filmmakers were hardly abandoning the audience. Reassurance may have ended, but emotion did not. The many alterations in the old stable syntax still honored the contract with us. The ignorant, suffering, morally vacant Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull was as great a protagonist as Julie Marsden. The morose Nashville was as trenchant a group portrait and national snapshot as the hopeful Stagecoach. However elliptical or harsh or astringent, emotion in modernist movies was a strong presence, not an absence." (emphasis added)

Connecting the Movies

I like that title. I like that picture. They probably deserve a post that's more than, essentially, a link, but for now that's what I've got.

Like Clint Eastwood, I often find myself in imaginary conversations though - the state of the American politics being rather depressing - they more often revolve around the cinema than the presidency. Sometimes, however, that topic can be equally downbeat. I think we are living in a golden age of cinephilia, but a dark age of mass movie appreciation.

Jason Bellamy addressed this subject recently, from a somewhat different angle, in a widely-circulated piece on the recent Sight & Sound Top 10 poll. It has 43 comments at present, including 10 from me. The last five of mine, in particular, are what led me to write this post on the dead of a Saturday morning. Besides, I'm tired of looking at The Big Chill post atop the page (while I'm happy with some of the insights, it was a bit of a chore to write and I fear it may be a bit of a chore to read), and I don't want to put up my periodic placeholder post (in this case an end-of-summer incantation to, as ever, explore my blog via colorful directory pages) until after Labor Day weekend. Plus, I spent all yesterday compiling a quixotic reorganization of my Cinema of Pictures post which I ultimately deleted, so I want to put something up.

So, for now, I encourage you to reflect on the topic of whether and how cinephiles have "failed" cinema, and to read what Jason and his readers have to say on the subject. The aforementioned quintuplet of comments I left began when I woke up this morning, and after an hour of hammering away on my iPhone I wisely moved to my roommate's computer and (relatively) quickly finished my thoughts. They had to be split into several different comments, which should indicate how much this whole discussion triggered thoughts that had been circulating in my mind for a while. Well, it beats ranting at a chair.

Without further ado:

"Sight & Soundless: How Cinephiles Are Failing Cinema"

And because it seemed like a good idea, I've reprinted my entire comment after the jump. Typos and all.

Lost and Found - and Back in Action

In which The Dancing Image is removed, restored, and - as of today - reactivated

I thought it was all over.

Last week, I passed my blog on to a co-worker, thinking he would enjoy some of the features. When I came to work Monday, I was told the address didn't work. Thinking he must have typed it in wrong, I jumped on his smart phone to connect him directly. What I found when I reached thedancingimage.blogspot.com made my blood run cold..."This blog has been removed." No explanation of who/what/where/why/when just a simple message apparently sweeping away 4 years of dedication, passion, and organization - what (embarrassing as it may be to admit) was the work I valued most from the harried, often frustrating time known as my mid-twenties.

Vertigo, Vertigo Variations, and Watching Movies While Blogging

This concludes "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. The film is addressed below, nearer the end - but, fair warning, there are many pit stops along the way.

Good evening. Nearly a week ago, I wrote my final review of 2011, a piece to conclude an era of blogging, an era which began in the summer of 2008 when I sat down at the town library and addressed Be Kind Rewind and the Lumiere short films in typed prose. The page was all-white, there were no images, there was no sidebar and, of course, there were no readers, except for me. I closed that review with an admonition to myself and the invisible reader, stating that I would return to revise my first blog post since it wasn't quite satisfactory. I never did.

Today, however, I have deleted my "final" piece, the 32nd post in "The Big Ones," on Vertigo, one of my favorite films. The piece was terrible and while I've no doubt posted crummy pieces in the past, I feel I've mostly managed to skirt mediocrity. Not this time - so the "Vertigo" of December 31 is gone, replaced by this "Vertigo, Vertigo Variations and Watching Movies While Blogging" (the date remains for archiving purposes, but in fact I'm posting on January 7.) The irony of such tangled identities and convoluted elisions and replacements, of past and present overlapping and intertwining in both the subject of my post and the post itself, is not lost on me.

The Big Picture: The Movies and Me

A memoir, a confession, a manifesto, a declaration of principles...

"The real crux, I think, is this. The cinephile loves the idea of film.

That means loving not only its accomplishments but its potential, its promise and prospects. It's as if individual films, delectable and overpowering as they can be, are but glimpses of something far grander. That distant horizon, impossible to describe fully, is cinema and it is this art form, or medium, that is the ultimate object of devotion." - David Bordwell

I had known movies for a while, but I discovered the cinema sometime between the first day of school and Christmas Eve in 1990. I was seven years old, and the discovery took several forms at once, all of which have stayed with me ever since.

Dishonorary Awards: Why Not to Watch the Oscars This Year

By refusing to broadcast the Honorary Awards for the third year running, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has blown a raspberry at the luminaries of film history. Perhaps we should return the favor. 

(originally appeared on 2/21/11, republished with some modifications before the 2012 broadcast)

This is not a clever list of "Top 10" reasons to ignore, criticize, or make fun of the Academy Awards. Right now I'm only interested in one deeply unfair and indicative reason. That said, a brief bit of background may be in order.

The Year of the Blog: The Dancing Image in 2010

Year-end highlights and reflections

Permit me a bout of navel-gazing (this post is not the round-up of other bloggers' best work; that will appear here in a week or two). In past years, I have offered resolutions which were rarely fulfilled; this year, I'd like to focus on the past rather than the future. Apologies for the self-serious tone and inordinate length. I got tired of revising it: blame the blizzard...

Anyway, I am very happy with 2010, though it's hard for me to believe a mere twelve months passed - it was a year of ups and downs, twists and turns, but with a definite narrative and a true progression. This is true for my "offscreen" life as well but, as concerns us here, it's certainly true of my blog. The path of my blogging through 2010 had a few central themes: 1) consolidation, as I centralized my diffuse activities, initially scattered over several websites, back onto The Dancing Image; 2) visual presentation, as I started using more screen-caps, presenting "visual tributes," and making over the blog so that it was more appealing and navigable; 3) self-expression, as I moved away from trying to fulfill certain criteria and moved towards simply saying or showing what I wanted to say or show.

On November 1, 2009, I was reviewing independent films for the Examiner website, and writing occasional pieces for The Dancing Image. But I wanted to reserve the latter site for more ambitious undertakings and ongoing projects, while still putting up regular, random postings and linking up my Examiner articles. So I decided to start a new blog, The Sun's Not Yellow, which would be both a conventional outlet for my musings and a locus-point for my increasingly scattered output. I was visiting friends in New York, and it was my twenty-sixth birthday. I made a resolution to myself to focus on writing about movies for the next year, and to temporarily put aside other goals (save for meeting my financial obligations month to month). It would be the Year of the Blog. What follows is the story of that year...

Cities of the Imagination

"Dread of what?" Carl Jung wrote in his memoirs. Reflecting upon his youth, and his fellow students' incapacity to "admit unconventional possibilities," Jung continued, "After all, there was nothing preposterous or world-shaking in the idea that there might be events which overstepped the limited categories of space, time, and causality. Animals were known to sense beforehand storms and earthquakes. There were dreams which foresaw the death of certain persons, clocks which stopped at the moment of death, glasses which shattered at the critical moment. All these things had been taken for granted in the world of my childhood. And now I was apparently the only person who had ever heard of them. In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into. Plainly the urban world knew nothing about the country world, the real world of mountains, woods, and rivers, of animals and 'God's thoughts' (plants and crystals). I found this explanation comforting. At all events, it bolstered my self-esteem, for I realized that for all its wealth of learning the urban world was mentally rather limited."

But if the city represented cold, hard, narrow realism to rural mystics, a scientific rationalism which was blind to the stream of rich unconsciousness imbuing everything, it could also be invested with a kind of alchemical magick, a dream-projection of civilization taking the same subversive approach to the functional architecture of the metropolis that urban minds took towards the natural wonders of the countryside. The utilitarian skyline could be transformed into an oneiric dreamscape, a mental correspondence to the byzantine mazes of the imagination. This post, using images from Zhang Ke Jia's film The World (reviewed last week) and Michel Gondry's music videos alongside quotations and my own thoughts, will offer a brief reflection upon this perennial theme.

And the winner was...

After recovering (barely) from an excruciatingly embarrassing opening number (of which we need not say any more), the Academy Awards ceremony proceeded with few surprises last night, but nonetheless proved a satisfying experience. As hosts, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin managed to pull off a surprising amount of the clunkers they were handed (this was one of the worst-written telecasts in the show's history, which is saying something). More importantly, at least within the parameters the nominations set, many of the winners were deserving. Apologists and naysayers alike could agree on the merits of Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges was by consensus the "his-time-has-come" victor for Crazy Heart, and while I'd probably suggest Quentin Tarantino was the "best director" of his bunch, I'm much, much happier to see Kathryn Bigelow win.

Bigelow's victory was the high point of the night, and is sure to be seen as such in the Oscar coverage (at least the coverage unhindered by early deadlines). She was of course the first woman ever to win in this category, a victory only slightly hampered by the fact that every man onstage seemed to be groping her. James Cameron took his ex-wife's victory in stride; and while he never made it to the stage, Avatar swept plenty of awards - except for the top one. I was glad Hurt Locker pulled off its predicted success; while I don't think it was the best picture of the year (Antichrist probably deserves that honor) or even necessarily of the nominees (the often frustrating Inglourious Basterds just may look that way in retrospect, though I'm more comfortable calling Tarantino the "best director" than the movie the "best picture") - but it's the right Best Picture for its time. The greatest movies don't need Oscars, anyway.

Nor, for that matter, do the greatest personages, though it's nice to see them receive the recognition eventually (and belatedly). Which brings us to the biggest blemish on last night's broadcast (and I'm not talking about the this-is-my-first-appearance-in-a-school-play of the Twilight tots nor the intervention-staging of the Best Actor/Actress presentations). Where were the honorary awards? We know, of course. We were told, very briefly and superficially, that the reception of these awards happened off-screen and that Roger Corman, Gordon Willis, and Lauren Bacall, among others, were honored. We even got to see brief snippets of the ceremony, which the show's producers seemed to think was enough, returning us quickly to the more important matters of who's wearing what, stale repartee, and interpretive dances of The Hurt Locker (question: was that guy supposed to represent the Bomb Disposal outfit or a walking IED?).

An institution which ignores its own history deserves only scorn. I'm sure Willis and Corman, as a behind-the-scenes craftsman and B movie auteur, respectively, don't expect to be openly celebrated in the limelight beside vapid celebrities and the like. But Bacall? Couldn't Hollywood have honored one of its leading lights, a woman who stole scenes from Bogie, openly and prominently? What must it have felt like to be the first star to be palmed off in this manner? That she didn't put her lips together and blow the Academy a raspberry is to her credit, and an indication of the grace and gravitas the industry's public face was once capable of.

For those who missed it, I rounded up all my reviews of Oscar-nominated films (as well as the reviews of several others) on Wonders in the Dark this weekend. Including a couple recent reviews of Bright Star and Inglourious Basterds.

This post was originally published on The Sun's Not Yellow.