The Live Oscars Blog

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It’s a quiet night at one of the Addison Recorder headquarters, Alex and Becky’s home, but a tempest so mighty not even Russell Crowe and some CGI ark-building-action could withstand it is potentially brewing. And oh the eruption if American Hustle wins awards. There will be paroxysms of annoyance, laughter, and clever insults during the musical performances and the more groan-worthy moments, but how much hellish inferno and celebration there shall be is still to be determined. And my job, as one of the resident cinematic experts, is to both put all of this into perspective and document the reactions here.

We’ve seen seven Best Picture nominees and two other probable big winners, Frozen and The Great Beauty, and we’ve written a great deal already. We thank you for paying attention to all our opinions, and your indulgence as we express our final opinions as it’s too late to do any darn thing about it. Not that anyone was paying attention to us, although who knows…maybe somehow along the way, these links turned up on the Facebook page or inbox or Google search of the Academy voters and they thought, “Hey, Alex and Andrew and Karen and Travis really know what they’re talking about, I didn’t think about this movie that way, I should vote for it/him/her!”

Though probably not. YET. We can still dream.

And here is the required-by-law picture of Jennifer Lawrence.

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The Addison Recorder’s 2014 Big-Deal Ultra-Insider Oscar Preview

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The Addison Recorder has a lot of movie nerds on staff. Not all of us, of course, but enough to make the others bend to our will. So in anticipation of this week’s Oscar ceremony the staff is going to do their Will/Should/Dream winners picks for the category we care most about with some brief accompanying comments. The cinema nerds will have seen enough (or feel self-righteous enough) to really make it seem like their opinions and guess have weight and meaning. The others have said they are throwing darts. Either process is as valid as actual Oscar voters filling out a ballot proclaiming one work of art objectively better than another.

Also, sometimes an Alex can’t help himself and has to respond to the other writers. It’s just something an Alex does when shaken.

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A Cinderella Story: The Addison Recorder’s Brief Tribute to Harold Ramis

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Hollywood has sucked hard so far in 2014, in ways that have nothing to do with the quality of movies. The best are dying and dying so fast.

In the aftermath of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, so eloquently memorialized here by Alex, the number one clip I kept seeing over and over on the Internet was of the Lester Bangs scenes in Almost Famous, the scenes that made Hoffman feel like our cool older brother or uncle. In the same way, Harold Ramis, native of Addisonian territory, graduate of high school in Edgewater, former member of both the Second City and the Chicago Daily News, could truly be seen as a father figure for our generation.

Two examples from my personal life: I got my first pair of glasses just after I turned four years old in 1988 and I’ve worn them ever since. Back then, I had all the action figures and the Ghost Traps AND the firehouse headquarters playset for Ghostbusters. I watched the movie over and over and never missed the Saturday morning cartoon show. And Dr. Egon Spengler–Harold Ramis–was my hero. Venkman and Ray got the laughs, but Egon knew all the science. Egon came up with the plans that worked and kept the team together. Egon wore glasses and it didn’t keep him on the sidelines or make him be treated like a nerd the way all the other characters I saw who wore glasses were treated. 

And in my family, every time somebody says the line “I just talked to her last week…she was going to make a pot for me!” we all crack up.

But I need to take this beyond me. All of us who write for The Addison Recorder exercise our purely creative muscles beyond non-fiction in one way or another. Harold Ramis’s work shaped our ideas on how to be entertaining. How to be hilarious. How to tell the truth in an inventive way.

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“The Smell of Old People’s Houses” : The Great Beauty

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After the first woman he ever loved broke his heart, Jep Gambardella wrote a novel called The Human Apparatus. It won major literary prizes and everyone alive in Italy seemed to have read it and been inspired by it. Jep then moved to Rome, became a journalist and an even bigger celebrity, and never wrote another word of fiction. Now he’s just turned 65. His two best friends are a playwright lusting after a college girl and the foul-mouthed dwarf woman who edits his newspaper. He interviews performance artists who shave their pubic hair into Communist symbols and run headfirst into aqueducts. His upstairs neighbor in their apartment complex across the street from the Colosseum intrigues him. He’s unexpectedly connecting with a 42 year-old stripper. And everyone around him is starting to die. Not in a supernatural or murder mystery sense, but simply from aging, decaying, leaving only traces behind.

Paolo Sorrentino’s magnificent The Great Beauty is a film full of dichotomies, and here is the key one…

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A Tale of Three Rosters: Thoughts from the Dugout

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Philadelphia Phillies v Atlanta Braves

Good afternoon.

As the Addison Recorder’s resident baseball columnist/editor/self-appointed scribe, I’m making a resolution this year to bring you the weekly baseball column I’ve always wanted to write. I’ll continue to write about movies, theatre, and whatever other events cross my path, but after joining the IWBAA, I feel it’s my personal duty to live up to the standards that membership in such an organization calls for. (I.E., more baseball writing) Hence, consider this my first column from the Dugout across from Wrigley Field (otherwise known as Bag End). It is my hope to be the closest baseball writer of residence next to the greatest ballpark in America (and possibly any ballpark, unless someone can tell me that they live closer to a stadium than I do. The challenge is out!).

Having said that, I am aware that Spring Training has just begun. Which is awesome, but far from a wealth of immediate topics to write about.

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Olympics Recap: Fire On Ice, or, “Believe What You Want But That Glacier’s a Fact!”

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There’s something very special about this skater…read on to find out.

Monday night, while watching Meryl Davis and Charlie White take home a magisterial gold medal for the USA during Ice Dancing, all five male Addisonians ended up in a twitter conversation regarding how attractive the female halves of the pairs were. (Including Travis, heroically joining in from a stalled Megabus.) My own comment was that this relates to why I love figure skating, as mentioned in my earlier recaps: the particular meld of athleticism and aesthetic gracefulness. Female figure skaters in particular look like Gainsborough and Reynolds paintings come to life in their elegance, but more importantly, they have trained their bodies to do things hardly any of us are capable of doing. Quadruple jumps and spins on ice at incredible speeds on bodies that have less muscle? Call me astonished every time.

But no one will equal the grace of bronze medalists Elena Ilinykh and Nikita Katsalapov, so remarkable that MY MOTHER called to tell me to watch them. Not as technically brilliant as the competition, they conveyed so much emotion and poetry to make up for any deficiencies: many tweeters called it “a true dance on ice.”

Ilinykh and Katsalapov

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Philomena and the New Oscars

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I.

Miss Williams and I agreed this scene is one of the diamonds of the film. Not saying anything more…

It may surprise you that Philomena has outgrossed both Dallas Buyers Club and her at the American box office. It should not surprise you that Philomena is an excellent movie. Like Gravity and Twelve Years a Slave, it is perfectly executed in that it fully works out its theme, never wastes a minute of its running time without feeling too short or too long, and has a marvelously constructed screenplay by Steve Coogan (who also produced and starred) and Jeff Pope. It’s the sort of script where the setups and payoffs are both logical and emotionally earned. There is one scene near the end, for instance, where the action takes a turn I initially thought was far too abrupt; by the end of that scene, however, I understood why the characters were acting the way they did at the beginning and what made them change. And the overall effect of these setups and payoffs was enough for it to be the first Best Picture nominee this year to make me cry. (I saw this with fellow Addisonian Meryl and she basically concurs on these opinions.)

(Editor’s Note: As someone who sat next to Andrew during 12 Years a Slave, this is definitely not the first Picture nominee of 2013 to make him cry. – Alex)

(Editor’s Note 2: As someone who sat down aisle of Andrew during 12 Years a Slave, I decidedly have to agree. Although he wasn’t alone in the crying. No sir. – Travis)

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Olympics Recap: Costas Rises

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Bob Costas is back! He’s back, and a lot less pirate-looking!

During Costas’ absence, Russia has taken the top spot in the medal count (if you count total medals — Germany currently has the most gold medals). Norway has been dethroned from the count, and if you believe the gents from Oslo, it’s partially because of a ski-wax conspiracy. This isn’t the only controversy that Costas has missed: some lugers are positive Russia turned up the temp on the sled track to give their sledder better odds; the Russians, for their part, are still protesting that disallowed hockey goal against the U.S. Men’s team.

We’ll come back to that, and all the other hockey goings-on. But first, WE CURL.

Canadian skip Jennifer Jones, using her superpowers to render Newtonian physics moot.

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Winning Time: Alex Rejoins the Oscar Discussion

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So…this took a while. Andrew was kind enough to write an article to the Oscar nominations right after they were announced nearly a month ago and the expectation was that I would chime in with a reply quickly. Then, um, well. I’m writing now! So there’s that. The Oscars are about two weeks out, the voting period has begun, and all the major precursor awards have been handed out. So the time is right for me to jump back into the Oscar fray. I’ll take a look at the major categories, make my predictions, and then hear what Andrew has to say.

All the Technical Awards

The only question in the tech categories is exactly how many Oscars Gravity will win here. It will be quite a few. Cinematography, Editing, and Visual Effects seem assured. That first category should give Emmanuel Lubezki a long over-due Oscar, which I will find just thrilling. I think he and Roger Deakins are the best cinematographers working today and neither has an Oscar. Let’s see that fixed. An Editing win for Gravity will award an Oscar to Alfonso Cuarón, which is to be celebrated. He’s an incredible filmmaker, and the critical and popular success of Gravity is immensely gratifying as an endorsement of cinema as a visual medium. Beyond that I think Gravity will get two other tech Oscars for Sound Editing and Sound Mixing, bringing its total haul to five before we get to the majors.

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Growing Up Jeter: Looking Back to Look Ahead

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jeter

I’m getting this column out a little early. It would normally be posted some time in October/November, but I’m predicting that I’ll have…something going on then that would prevent me from giving this particular piece the due attention that it deserves. So we’re running it a little early.

Derek Jeter announced this week that this upcoming MLB season will be his last playing the professional sport of baseball. No more October glories. No more leaping throws to first. No more singles dumped into right field with scientific precision. No more articles about his lack of defensive prowess. Well, actually, those aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they’ll breed like roaches after the apocalypse. Sorry, Internet.

It would appear that Jeter saw the season-long hero’s tribute that Mariano Rivera received last season (rightfully so; the man was hands down the greatest closer the game has yet seen), where as the Yankees traveled from city to city, Rivera was treated like Napoleon passing through the Arc D’Triomphe, receiving gifts of plenty and beneficence from dignitaries and opposing teams alike. It was particularly unreal, something that seldom happens in sports because of our tendency to vilify everyone and everything under the sun. (The NFL season is too short for a farewell tour, basketball’s greats tend to hang on until the last minute before retiring (three times), and hockey is apparently a sport that’s popular in Canada.)

If you thought last season’s six-month tribute to Rivera was crazy, wait until you get a load of what Jeter’s farewell is gonna look like this year.

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