ANORA A DAY, AND THE OSCARS YOU'LL SLAY...

This morning Your Humble Narrator enjoyed conducting an "Oscar post-mortem" with Sam Dingman of The Show on KJZZ...

...you can listen to it here.

You can also check out my review of the PTSD drama My Dead Friend Zoe...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

ANOTHER LAST CALL

 Here's me, online at Phoenix Magazine, with more FilmBar memories.

92 TIMES UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

A few weeks ago on Saturday Night Live, the comedienne Melissa Villasenor performed song summaries of several of this year’s Oscar nominated films. Each time, her summary closed by noting that the film in question was rooted in “white male rage.”

It’s arguable that, in some sense or another, white male rage is the single most pervasive theme in the history of American movies, maybe of movies worldwide. But Villasenor’s point is taken; from Joker to The Irishman to Jojo Rabbit to 1917 to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, white male rage seems particularly well-represented among this year’s Academy Award nominees.

Anyway, here are a few notes on the 92^nd annual awards, to be presented earlier than usual, tonight, Sunday, February 9:

Best Picture: My prediction to win—and that of Vegas, at this writing—would be the Sam Mendes WWI drama 1917. It’s an absorbing film, but my own favorite of the nominated pictures is Bong Joon Ho’s hilarious, horrifying, wildly original class satire Parasite, followed closely by Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and then by Scorsese’s The Irishman.

Best Actor: Probably the closest there is to a lock is Joaquin Phoenix as the title character in Joker, and it’s hard to argue with Phoenix’s achievement. But in a subtler way, Leonardo DiCaprio seemed just as good to me as the jittery cowboy star in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Snubbed Robert DeNiro did restrained, ultimately moving work in The Irishman, and Jonathan Pryce was great as one of the title characters in The Two Popes.

Best Actress: Renee Zellweger is heavily favored to take the award for her impressive turn as late-vintage Judy Garland in Judy. Again, I’d be hard pressed to dispute the greatness of her acting feat, whatever the shortcomings of the surrounding movie. But a word should also be said for Charlize Theron’s flawless impersonation of Megyn Kelly in the slightly underrated Bombshell.

Best Supporting Actress: I thought Florence Pugh’s Amy was the best thing about Greta Gerwig’s generally overrated version of Little Women. But Laura Dern is favored to win for her turn in Marriage Story, and I’ve always been a fan, so that’s what I’m rooting for.

Best Supporting Actor: The current favorite here is Brad Pitt as the unflappable stuntman in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and his easygoing performance was a delight. So was Anthony Hopkins as cranky, troubled Pope Benedict in The Two Popes, and Tom Hanks as a relentlessly compassionate Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. But Al Pacino’s grandly clownish Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman is his most memorable performance in years.

Best Director: Sam Mendes leads the pack for 1917, and will likely take home the Oscar unless the opinion takes hold that his one-continuous-shot approach on the film is a gimmick. I loved his quote dismissing this criticism, however: “We experience life as a single shot. We go through life with one unbroken take. It’s editing that’s the gimmick.”

The Show: Like last year, the show is scheduled to do without a host, opting instead for a procession of presenters. Presumably this was seen as the likeliest way to prevent controversy. It’s also the likeliest way to prevent entertainment.

Snubs: No doubt any number of omissions could be cited, but two leap to mind: First, how does Rami Malek win Best Actor last year for lip-synching Freddy Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, but the excellent Taron Edgerton, singing for himself, get overlooked for (the admittedly uneven) Rocketman? Second, Lulu Wang’s The Farewell was overlooked in general, but especially for Best Original Screenplay, for Best Supporting Actress for Zhao Shuzhen as the formidable Nai Nai, and for Awkwafina for Best Actress. No offense to anyone in that category, but I didn’t see five better performances than her’s this year.

Snack suggestions: Peaches and “Ram-don” (Ramen and Udon) in honor of Parasite. Pizza and Fanta pop in honor of The Two Popes.

One More Prediction: …also a boast; this past year, on this very blog, I predicted that the animated short film Hair Love, which showed before The Angry Birds Movie 2, would be nominated for an Oscar. I was right; now I’ll go out on a limb and predict that it will take the award. But I could be wrong, of course; the film is definitely, and refreshingly, not about white male rage.

TAKING A BAO

Check out my "Friday Flicks" column, online at Phoenix Magazine, featuring reviews of the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts program playing this week at FilmBar, including the winner, Pixar's charming Bao...

...as well as of the old-school thriller Bullitt County...

 
...out this week on VOD.

Also, check out my short article on the 55th annual Phoenix Scottish Games...

 ...Saturday, March 2, and Sunday March 3 at Steele Indian School park.

RIP to the magnificent, sexy, hilarious, lovable Katherine Helmond, departed at 89.

Have a great March everybody!

FORWARD MARCH

Check out the March issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

…for my “Four Corners”column on new and newish Valley joints with four and five star ratings on Yelp.

After last year’s bungling of the Best Picture award, the focus at this year’s Oscar show seemed, understandably, to be on having a disciplined, orderly presentation. And indeed, from a set of metallic crystal that looked like the interior of a giant geode, the 90^th annual honors went reasonably smoothly last Sunday.

During a straightforward but funny opening monologue, the host, Jimmy Kimmel, offered an incentive to keep the show tight: A jet ski was offered as a prize, game-show-style—with Helen Mirren impressively handling the Carol Merrill duties—to whoever gave the briefest acceptance speech. It was one of his funnier gags, compounded later when, needing to up the ante on the prize, he also offered a stay at Lake Havasu.

There was also a becoming focus on history. My favorite aspect of this year's production were the clips that preceded each acting award: quick, dazzling montages of previous winners. It had the effect such sequences do when they're well-done; they made me want to shut off the show and watch those movies.

BEIRUT-ING INTEREST

Opening this week:

The Insult--A nominee for best foreign-language Oscar this year, this drama from Lebanon, one of the most compelling, absorbing movies I've seen in a while, starts over a drainpipe.

Tony (Adel Karam), a forty-something Christian mechanic and garage owner, gets into a petty dispute over his balcony drain with Yasser (Kamel El Basha), a Palestinian construction foreman working in Tony's Beirut neighborhood. Yasser throws an obscenity at Tony, and Tony demands an apology from Yasser's boss. When Yasser, who lives in a refugee camp and whose employment is tenuous, can't spit out an apology he feels he doesn't owe, Tony flings a pretty intolerable ethnic taunt at Nasser, who lashes out violently.

From there, this tale directed by Zaid Doueiri from a script he co-wrote with Joelle Touma escalates into courtroom drama, domestic crises, violent clashes in the street and, gradually, into a national epic exploring the lingering hatreds of the Civil War of the mid-'70s to the early '90s. Building all this turbulence around an ugly but minor altercation between two guys gives the film the flavor of a classic short story, like something by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

What keeps the device from feeling pat is Doueiri's confident directorial touch, as well as the performances, not only of the leads but of the supporting players. Camille Salameh as Tony's wily, grandstanding lawyer, Diamand Bou Abboud as Yasser's quietly principled (though not agenda-less) defender and Rita Hayek as Tony's beautiful, good-hearted but fed-up younger wife, among others, humanize the conflict.

But it's the leads that give The Insult its force. Karam and El Basha are both commanding, virile presences, and Doueiri and Touma cunningly show us that Tony and Yasser are similar men--bitter, short-fused and stubborn, but also honorable on their own terms. In the American vernacular, they're stand-up guys, embarrassed that the whole thing has gotten so far but unable to give it up. Privately both of them, as well as their often critical families and allies, are even shown to be sensitive to the injustices suffered by the other side in the case. You get the sense that they could be friends, and the impossibility of this is what makes the movie sting.

Yet there's a level at which American audiences, indeed probably any non-Lebanese or non-Middle-Eastern audiences, won't be able to understand The Insult. The context is too obscure, too complicated, too confusing, and the depth of these resentments too intense for us to grasp. We're likely see the dispute only in terms of the specific personalities of the characters, and on those terms it was hard for me to find Tony sympathetic, despite Karam's likability. Yasser's insult is personal (and justified), while Tony's is openly bigoted and vicious. It's clear that his Christianity is factional and cultural rather than philosophical; at one point he flatly states "I'm not a Jesus Christ who'll turn the other cheek."

Counterbalancing this, of course, is the legal and moral principle that one shouldn't respond to a verbal attack with a physical attack. Even so, on an emotional level I was pulling for Yasser, and I expect I won't be alone in that.

This response on my part would likely confirm Tony in his sense of grievance that Palestinians are given kid-glove treatment by the Lebanese left, like Yasser's lawyer and, in Tony's view, the courts. It's here that Americans may get some insight into the social and political knot that's depicted: We often hear the same sort of petulance from right-wing whites, especially evangelicals, interpreting any sympathy or even acknowledgement of minority disadvantage as a backhanded aggression.

Doueiri understands that this kind of enmity is too intractable to be resolved, and yet somehow the end of The Insult has a moving, and oddly convincing, sense of serenity and uplift that's hard to explain. It's as if the protraction of their squabble has given Yasser and Tony, and maybe even their respective camps, a mutual exhaustion that offers its own sort of intimacy and emotional release, regardless of the outcome of the case. It's a thin, highly tentative sort of reconciliation, but for an honest audience, anything more optimistic would be an insult.

OSCARRED

Best Picture is usually the least interesting of all the awards at the Oscars. At least, that’s how it seems most years. Which film will win often feels, after the results of all those other awards shows, like a fait accompli going in, and even when it doesn’t, by the time we’ve arrived at the last award of the night, you typically have a sense of how things are leaning. There are exceptions, of course—Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan in 1999, for instance—but as a rule, Best Picture tends to be an anticlimax.

That sure wasn’t the case this year, however.

The show Sunday night began in normal fashion. Host Jimmy Kimmel, not being of the Neil Patrick Harris, Seth MacFarlane or Billy Crystal mold, didn’t try to wow everybody with a big semi-ironic song-and-dance production number, so that duty was managed by Justin Timberlake, extravagantly performing “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” his nominated song from Trolls.

Kimmel took over from there, and handled himself well, with some relaxed, mostly uncontroversial but quite funny standup and an unobtrusive modesty. There were oddball routines—like concessions dropping from the ceiling in tiny parachutes, or a group of Hollywood-star-home tourists being led through the Dolby Theatre by surprise—that seemed, as such bits often do, like more laborious trouble than they were worth, but they still had some charm.

There were touching moments as well, like the real-life, 98-year-old NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, played by Taraji P. Henson in Hidden Figures, being wheeled onstage to a thunderous ovation. And a friend called me, convulsed with hilarity, after a segment in which Seth Rogen, discussing 1985’s Back to the Future, observed that “They really, like, captured future clothing pretty well, ‘cuz if you saw, like, Tilda Swinton wearing that exact outfit, you would not think it was weird.”

For most of its length, the show chugged along agreeably, if without any particular excitement. Casey Affleck winning Best Actor for Manchester by the Sea was perhaps a slight surprise, as Denzel Washington had taken the SAG Award for Fences. But on the whole, nothing suggested that La La Land wouldn’t win Best Picture as expected.

That Moonlight took the award instead would have been a surprise to begin with, but what made the upset great TV was an unfortunate mix-up: Presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were somehow accidentally given the wrong envelope, a duplicate of the one reading Emma Stone for Best Actress in La La Land. Beatty was confused, paused, and showed the card to Dunaway who, thinking that Beatty was just clowning, glanced at it and announced La La Land as the winner.

The cast and producers of that film came onstage and were in the midst of their acceptance speeches when the error was pointed out to them. Producer Jordan Horowitz stepped to the microphone, announced the mistake, and graciously called the Moonlight team to the stage, saying he was proud to present the award to them.

While I was less enthusiastic than most critics about La La Land, and while the stirring Moonlight topped my Top Ten List this year, it was hard not to feel for the La La Land gang, and harder still not to admire the grace with which they handled the situation. It was painful, but it sure wasn’t dull.

Another friend called me after the show to tell me he had the inside scoop on how the practice of two sets of envelopes originated. He claims that at the 1964 Oscars, the agent for Pricewaterhouse (then still known as Price Waterhouse) suffered a fatal heart attack just before showtime. These being the days when, probably mostly for the sake of showmanship, the operative would be presented onstage handcuffed to the briefcase containing the winners, the misfortune created an obvious problem for the ceremony, and the need for a backup became clear.

But there was another twist to the tale, according to my friend (who claims he knew the Price Waterhouse man's family as a kid in Reseda, California). He says the guy's heart attack was brought on by stress because he was related to Governor John Connally of Texas, who had been wounded a few months earlier in the Kennedy assassination. So there you have it: Last night's Oscar telecast was one more casualty of that fateful day in Dallas.

I have been unable to find any independent confirmation whatsoever for this. But hey, if you can't trust the testimony of a guy who calls you late at night after playing bar trivia, what can you trust?

OFFICER JUDY

Opening this week:

Zootopia—The title refers to a city that looks like a theme park, with frozen tundra, desert, rainforest and other ecosystems all conveniently connected by highway exits. The inhabitants, you see, are animals—anthropomorphic, bipedal, civilized mammals of every sort, from pachyderms to rodents, living side by side.

It’s not Utopia, however. Inter-species tensions continue, especially between predator and prey species, and there are glass ceilings in certain professions. Our heroine Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), for instance, is a bunny who has internalized the high-minded idea that “Anyone can be anything,” and she wants to grow up to be a police officer, normally a job for the likes of tigers and rhinos and cape buffalo.

Through determination and resourcefulness, Judy realizes her dream, but as with many pioneers, she gets stuck with traffic duty. Before long, however, she’s caught up in a mystery involving missing predators, and develops a tense alliance with Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a wily vulpine con artist.

The buddy-picture plot that ensues is surprisingly dark and noir-ish at times, and in some ways Zootopia is one of the least sentimental Disney movies I can remember. It’s fraught with unmistakable racial and class subtext, and although it has the struggling underdog protagonist standard to animated features, it honestly grapples with the complex and painful realities behind the believe-in-yourself platitudes of the genre. Thus, the movie’s ultimately positive conclusions feel hard-won, and all the more uplifting.

Zootopia is delightful, but I did have a complaint: the freakin’ 3-D. At least at the screening I saw, it dimmed and washed out the images, and added not one effect that I thought was worth the eyestrain. See it in old-fashioned 2-D.

In case anybody still cares, a few notes on the Oscars:

It was gratifying for me to see the number one movie on my Top Ten list, Tom McCarthy’s low-key powerhouse Spotlight, win Best Picture at the Oscars this year. It was even more gratifying to see the great, 87-year-old Ennio Morricone, who had never won an Oscar for Best Original Score (he won an honorary Oscar in 2007), take the statue for his superb music for The Hateful Eight. It makes up, sort of, for Morricone not even being nominated for his greatest score, for 1970’s Two Mules for Sister Sara.

But most of the satisfactions of this year’s surprisingly enjoyable Oscar show had little to do with the nominees, and more to do with the host. Interest in the Oscars was high this year, less because of any particular suspense as to who would win, and more because of what the great Chris Rock would say and do. While the telecast was glacially paced and overlong as usual, Rock, who had not too memorably hosted the show in 2005, brilliantly managed his tricky duties this year.

What made it a tricky gig was, of course, the controversy over the lack of racial diversity among this year’s nominees. Some African-American industry notables had boycotted the show, and Rock himself had been urged to decline the job.

His approach was marvelously disarming. From the very first line of his monologue, he attacked the subject straightforwardly, good-naturedly and in all directions—his jokes were at the expense of the Academy, the boycotters, and himself, and they ranged from daringly tasteless to thoughtful. A high percentage of them were genuinely funny, and all of them put the controversy into perspective, without disrespect to the validity of the boycott’s grievance.

Perhaps most amusingly, however, was that Rock wouldn’t let it go. I expected he’d try to dispense with the subject with a few jokes at the beginning of his monologue and then move on to a business-as-usual Oscars, but bit after bit kept coming back to it. The show was so single-mindedly devoted to the controversy that, ironically, it probably brought attention to racial inequities in Hollywood in a way that no number of minority nominations could have, deserved though they might be. And it seems pretty unlikely that this would have been the case if Rock hadn’t hosted.

A couple of disappointments: Names eyebrow-raising-ly omitted from the “In Memoriam” segment included Abe Vigoda, Geoffrey Lewis, George Gaynes, Tony Burton and Pat Harrington, Jr. Also, while the brilliant Mark Rylance entirely deserved to win Best Supporting Actor for Bridge of Spies, I still found it slightly disappointing—I wanted to see Stallone win for Creed. But I suppose it’s in the spirit of the original Rocky, where even though he didn’t win, Rocky triumphed just because he got to the Main Event.

BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED DISADVANTAGE OF PERSONA)

“Dear Lady Gaga, thank you for that wonderful tribute.” These are not words I ever expected to hear Julie Andrews saying.

But they seemed heartfelt, and they were deserved: Lady Gaga’s broadly-played imitation of Andrews, in a Sound of Music medley, was one of the few high points of a generally slow, unappealing Oscar show. Other high points included some good acceptance speeches, especially by Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish director of Ida, who managed to be funny and even, in an unpretentious way, a bit reflective.

The low point, for me, was Neil Patrick Harris making a joke at the expense of the dress worn by one of the two ladies who had just won a Best Short Subject Documentary Oscar for Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press One. As a friend of mine pointed out, it’s one thing to mock a train wreck worn by some actress who’s a red carpet veteran, quite another to pick on the questionable fashion choice of a “civilian.” Besides, the lady in question had just been talking, seconds before, about losing her son to suicide. Harris may not have been listening, but the effect was ugly in any case.

As for the winners and losers, the big disappointment for me was Michael Keaton not winning. I didn’t much care for Birdman, but I love Keaton’s work, including in that film, so much that I really wanted him to win anyway, as I wonder if he’ll have ever this juicy a lead role again. My wife, by comparison to me the expert Oscar handicapper in our house, was also rooting for Keaton but predicted that Eddie Redmayne would win for The Theory of Everything, as his role as the young Stephen Hawking ticked off too many Oscar-bait boxes: Physical challenge, real-life figure, Brit. One theory floated on some of the talk shows is that Keaton may have been perceived as “just playing himself” in Birdman, as opposed to Redmayne’s transformation.

When people say this about an actor, what they really mean (though they may not know it) is that he or she always or usually plays the same basic character. That’s certainly true of Keaton, but it was also true of Henry Fonda, John Wayne, James Stewart, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman—it didn’t stop any of them from winning Oscars.

One last note: I was also sorry that the Glen Campbell song “I’m Not Gonna Miss You,” from Glen Campbell…I’ll Be Me, didn’t win for Best Song—it lost to the admittedly beautiful “Glory” from the ridiculously under-nominated Selma. But at least it was treated to a fine, simple performance on the show by Tim McGraw, and hopefully it will call more attention to this powerful documentary about the Alzheimer’s-afflicted country great. Please don’t skip this movie on the (understandable) fear that it will be a depressing bummer. It’s sad, of course, but also uplifting.

IT DOESN'T BLOW

Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-nominated animated feature The Wind Rises, opening here in the Valley this weekend, is one of the most visually and kinetically beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. Miyazaki has claimed that this dizzying paean to the glories of aviation will be his last film, and if so, he’s certainly going out on top, although it’s a morally complicated, troubling triumph.

In content, the movie is a heavily romanticized biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer whose designs for Mitsubishi in the ‘30s led to the Japanese warplanes of the WWII era. According to Miyazaki’s script, as a boy Horikoshi idolized the Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caproni, and the movie dramatizes this hero-worship by making them “friends” through shared dreams of riding in the sort of huge, elegant, multi-winged passenger airplanes that Caproni envisioned, like his magnificent and hopeless nine-winged “Noviplano.” The young Jiro wears coke-bottle lenses on his face, and thus glumly knows he won’t be a pilot, but his dream mentor tells him that designing airplanes is a far more prestigious pursuit anyway.

As a child in rural Pennsylvania, I lived along the runway of a small recreational airpark and flight school, and while I never had aspirations to be a pilot, I can vividly recall dreams not very dissimilar to Jiro’s—blue skies full of impossibly large, roomy flying contraptions. This imagery gives The Wind Rises an epic grandeur, as do, on the darker side, such scenes as a depiction of the 1923 earthquake that demolished Tokyo.

But the film also has, or at least it had for me, a riveting perceptual intimacy. Miyazaki’s intense primary colors, the subtlety of his light-and-shadow effects (and sound effects), and the eccentricity of his compositions deliver the past to us with a joyous hallucinatory immediacy that live action filmmaking, no matter how fine, couldn’t equal. There are moments, lots of them, which feel, somehow, like time travel. Strictly as cinema, The Wind Rises is heavenly.

It’s not that simple on the level of content, however. In one of their dream conversations, Caproni also tells the young Jiro that airplanes aren’t for war, or for making money; that airplanes are, rather, “beautiful dreams.” Well, yeah, but….

Herein, of course, lies the difficulty with The Wind Rises. The charmingly told hero struggle we’re watching is the development of the Zero, the airplane that attacked Pearl Harbor and brought so much misery and death to so many people, Allies and Axis alike. Toward the end of the film, Jiro and a friend are discussing the uses to which their design will likely be put, the other countries against which it will be used. “Japan will blow up,” says one, little knowing how literally right he will be, as a result of another, less aesthetically pleasing innovation in weaponry in another country.

“We’re not arms merchants,” says the other. “We just want to build good aircraft.” That justification might be acceptable from a boy, but from grown men, fully aware of the implications of their work, it just sounds obtuse.

Of course, anyone can find themselves on the wrong side of a war, and even if you’re on the “right” side you’re still peddling ruin and slaughter to the innocent if you’re a weapons designer. It doesn’t necessarily invalidate you morally, but there’s something a little queasy about celebrating the pure creative spirit that led you to build flying death machines.

That Miyazaki fully recognizes and acknowledges this difficulty, maybe even regards it as the point of his movie, doesn’t entirely banish the queasiness. Like Miyazaki’s other works, The Wind Rises is a movie to be savored, even loved. But it carries with it a stubborn unease.

Check out my list, on Topless Robot, of 10 Terrible Earlier Movies by this Year’s Oscar nominees. Enjoy Oscar night, if you care. Come to think of it, enjoy the night, whether you care or not.

DARK LORD OF THE SETH

I understand that Seth MacFarlane has gotten poor reviews online for his stint as Oscar host last night. I’m no particular MacFarlane fan, but I thought he did just fine. He made some of the mildly tasteless jokes that were, of course, precisely why he was hired, and he made a solid effort at old-school song-and-dance showmanship. His opening routine, opposite William Shatner, went on a little too long, but I thought it was pretty funny all the same.

I maintain, as I wrote here about last year’s show, that the reason that middle-aged viewers so often react with cranky petulance toward the Oscars isn’t that the show is on the lame side—though it usually is—but that they fail to feel the excitement that the spectacle gave them as kids. Many viewers in my own circle are also show-biz wannabes, wash-outs or bush-leaguers ourselves, so there’s often an unacknowledged streak of career envy behind the Oscar-hatin’. The fault, dear Brutus, is typically not in these overhyped stars, but in our tired-ass selves.

This weekend The Kid and I also caught up with Escape From Planet Earth, a computer-animated flick that wasn’t screened for critics, in Phoenix at least, prior to its release.

It’s the story of a milquetoast, blue-skinned, nose-less alien (voiced by Robb Corddry) from the planet Baab who travels to Earth to rescue his hotshot brother (Brendan Fraser), and winds up imprisoned with him and other wacky aliens at Area 51 in Nevada by an evil General (Shatner again!) who’s running a technology sweatshop there.

The movie is watchable and pleasant but mostly routine. The conflicts are standard for the genre—caution versus recklessness, the desire to seem heroic to your kid—but there are some odd, almost free-standing episodes that struck me as curiously witty and erudite. Then, in the end credits, I noticed an “additional material by” credit, and the first writer listed was Stephen Fry. That probably explains the erudition.

SNUBSTANDARD

Somebody gets snubbed by the Academy Awards almost every year, but this year might just go down in Oscar history as The Year of the Snub. At this writing, Ben Affleck has won a BAFTA award, a Golden Globe and a Director’s Guild Award, among others, for directing his splendidly entertaining political thriller Argo.

The film itself has also been widely honored—indeed, it received seven Oscar nominations. But even if his movie won all seven on February 24, Affleck can’t be honored with an Oscar for Best Director, because he wasn’t nominated.

Argo indulges in a bit of hairbreadth-escape melodrama in its final stretch, and one could argue about whether the movie might have been equally tense and satisfying with a more realistic resolution, instead of this sort of corny Hollywood action. But this is a question of artistic taste, not of execution—corny or not, the picture, these scenes included, is rousingly suspenseful, and must be considered one of the best-directed movies of the year. It would be disappointing but perhaps legitimate if Affleck didn’t win, if the award went to Spielberg or Tarantino or Ang Lee or even to the visionary young Benh Zeitlin of Beasts of the Southern Wild. But for him simply to be ignored is arguably the most egregious Oscar snub in decades.

It seems to have happened for two reasons. First, Affleck has been a fashionable figure of ridicule for years, for reasons I don’t understand. I’ve never been a particular fan of him as an actor; though I think he’s given some fine performances—notably in Hollywoodland—he’s also been a bland lightweight at times. He’s impressively low-key and haunted in the lead in Argo, however, suggesting that he may, on top of everything else, be his own best director.

But no one really disputes the excellence of his work as a director. By any other name, the guy who directed Gone Baby Gone and The Town and then Argo would be hailed as, quite simply, a new Hitchcock. Because it’s Ben Affleck, however, much of the praise has seemed either grudging or insultingly astonished. Enough already—it’s time to declare him paid up for Gigli (sad to say, I’m part of that small cult of outcasts who thinks that Gigli, while certainly flawed, is overall a worthwhile movie).

In the long run, the snub will likely work to Affleck’s benefit—the standing ovations he’s been getting while he wins all those other directing awards suggest that it may have caused the filmmaking community to look at him with new eyes. And his oh-so-gracious-and-humble acceptance speeches, though probably sincere, are also flawlessly played.

The other reason for his omission seems to have been the need to find a place among the nominees for director David O. Russell, for Silver Linings Playbook. Russell is a superb director, rightly nominated for 2010’s The Fighter; snubbed himself for his terrific 1999 Three Kings. But while Silver Linings Playbook is a watchable, generally touching comedy-drama, I don’t think it represents anything near Russell’s best work, and it doesn’t come within a mile of Argo. I’m not sure why it’s been so rapturously received.

Silver Linings Playbook also seems to have figured into this year’s worst acting snub, that of John Hawkes for his star turn in The Sessions. I admit that I’ve had a hard time warming up to Bradley Cooper, but I thought his performance in Silver Linings was quite creditable and poignant. But it isn’t in the same galaxy as the luminous work of Hawkes—in any year in which Daniel Day-Lewis didn’t play Lincoln, Hawkes would deserve to win.

I was delighted, however, that Helen Hunt received a Supporting Actress nomination for her lovely turn in The Sessions. It’s a pleasant surprise, as Hunt—an authentically great actress—has long been fashionably sneered at in the same perplexing way as Affleck.

One other note: I was also delighted that the Best Animated Short nominees included The Longest Daycare, a riotous Simpsons cartoon that played before Ice Age: Continental Drift. Nice to know that Maggie Simpson wasn’t snubbed.

OSCARS, THE GROUCHES

A couple of Oscar notes: The verdict online appears to be that last night’s show sucked, sucked, sucked, or at best that it was boring. This is the usual verdict any more, & I don’t think it has much to do with the quality of the show (except for last year’s, which got particularly venomous notices).

Over the last twenty years, the hosting duties have been given to a variety of comedic geniuses—Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, David Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, Ellen DeGeneres, Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin—most of whom have been declared failures. I liked them all (I thought Martin was especially funny). All of them have been found wanting by comparison to Billy Crystal, who hosted the show for the 9th time last night. But when he’s hosted, he too has usually been found wanting by plenty of viewers.

I think that the petulant response that so many contemporary fans have to most Oscar telecasts in recent years has more to do with the show failing to give them the sense of giddy excitement that it did when they were kids. Last night’s show did kind of suck, & it was kind of boring, but my suspicion is that Oscar shows always have been—they’ve always represented the lamest of a species of self-consciously old-fashioned variety show, & that’s what we want. We want to hate the Oscars, & we’d hate them even more if they were somehow made “modern.” We’d probably hate them most of all in the unlikely event that they ever were a couple of tightly-paced hours of really first-rate entertainment.

I thought that Crystal, maybe the last of the comedians who sees doing a song-&-dance number as a routine part of his job rather than something for which he should get extra credit, managed his duties last night excellently, more relaxed & confident than he’s been in some past years. The Cirque de Soleil number was impressive, & I also loved this short sketch with Bob Balaban, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Fred Willard, Christopher Guest & Jennifer Coolidge about a focus group for The Wizard of Oz, although I understand that it was poorly received...

When Crystal said “Weren’t they hilarious?” afterwards, many (likely similar) people online were quick to reply “No.”

The only remotely surprising win of the night, I thought, was Meryl Streep’s for The Iron Lady. It was a pleasant surprise—the movie was thin & weak apart from her, but that performance was sensational.

My gripe this year, as so often, was with the necrology. It was cool that George Kuchar was included, but here’s a list, compiled with the help of some friends, of those omitted: Harry Morgan, Charles Napier, Jeff Conaway, Sid Melton, Yvette Vickers, Tura Satana, Zina Bethune & Zalman King, among others.

You could quibble about some of these, maybe, but…no Harry Morgan? Really?