So, this year The New York Times‘ Carpetbagger Oscar season blog will be written not by David Carr, who created the brand and helmed it for four Oscar seasons, but by Melena Ryzik, a reporter, video blogger and sometime poet previously on the paper’s general culture beat. The Variety story on the matter suggests that Carr stepped down from the post in order to fully focus his attention on “the quickly changing world of publishing,” and also because last year’s Slumdog-centric race bored the shit out of him and he couldn’t fathom pretending to care about a non-competition again contributed to “simple burnout.” Which happens. Even if you’re only doing it part time, four years is a long time to stay chained to a blog.
It is hard to imagine The Carpetbagger sans Carr’s red-carpet-outsider Bagger persona, but I wish Ryzik (seen above, posing with Karl Lagerfeld) luck and I’m excited to see what she brings to the beat. And not, unlike some of my chromosomal compatriots, just because of “girl power.” Because, really — the game of Oscar yelling is already overcrowded. Her being a broad (and, as Carr put it on his Twitter, a “fresh young” one at that) isn’t going to matter much if she doesn’t have something interesting to say, and maybe even more importantly, a way of saying it that cuts through the noise and demands attention.
In other words, I’m not concerned with gender quotas in Oscar blogging. I’m concerned that Oscar blogging has lost its urgency –– as has much of year-round film blogging, as so many of us either waste time bickering amongst ourselves, or piling on the same semi-stories in a desperate quest to chase the traffic that keeps us alive. I don’t know what the solution is, but I hope for Ryzik’s sake, she finds a way to shake up the cycle.
April 2008: David Carr (a former drug addict turned respectable media reporter) publishes a massive profile of Robert Downey Jr (a former drug addict turned respectable media phenom) pegged to Downey’s upcoming film, Iron Man, in the New York Times. At the time, there is a whiff of bad buzz in the air about the film––that the feature can’t sustain the energy of the trailer, that one political party won’t appreciate messages inserted the film apparently to the delight of the other; that audiences won’t buy Downey as a superhero.
May 2008-July 2008: Iron Man opens huge and goes on to make a shit ton of money, even earning the respect of critics and, to some extent, the kind of person who reads long profiles in the Sunday New York Times.
Late July 2008: An excerpt from Carr’s memoir, The Night of the Gun, is printed in the New York Times Magazine, Reaction is insanely positive, and buzz starts to spread online like wildfire. (It lands in bookstores today.)
August 2008: Robert Downey Jr, who signed with HarperCollins last year to publish his own autobiography, returns his advance to the publisher. “Maybe he feels there are just too many of those “how I came back from addiction” memoirs out there,” whispers Liz Smith.
Are the above incidents related? Probably not! But maybe!
My favorite part of David Carr’s NYT profile of Robert Downey Jr (and, judging by the way he foreshadows it in the story’s second paragraph, maybe Carr’s favorite, too):
[Downey's] romance with mood-altering chemicals didn’t end after he got out of prison. By 2003 he was an uninsurable serial relapser famous for being pulled out of hotels or other people’s homes in an addled, disheveled state. As a movie star with a lot of pals, he lived a life beyond consequence until he finally wore out the endless mercies of the entertainment business. After he was fired from his spot on Ally McBeal, the bottom finally came, at a Burger King of all places.
On or around Independence Day in 2003, he stopped at a Burger King on the Pacific Coast Highway and threw all his drugs in the ocean. And while he was sitting there chewing on a burger, he decided he was done. This being America, five years later you can walk into that Burger King, and if you order a Kids Meal you can get your own Robert Downey Jr. action figure, wrapped up in gadget ware. (And what does Tony Stark want when he escapes his kidnappers? A good old American cheeseburger — from Burger King, natch.)
Isn’t it funny how it all comes together? Downey’s recovery, his personal victory over almost-certain death. His character’s victory over almost-certain death within his big Hollywood comeback movie. The marketing of said big Hollywood comeback movie. It all revolves around Burger King, and specifically, the Burger King cheeseburger as touchstone of both near-death experience and synergistic lunch. “Is this a great country or what?” Carr asks––smirkingly, maybe, but not totally disingenuously. Surely, nowhere else in the world could an actor’s biography be modified to better showcase a studio’s corporate sponsor.
