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JUNO: Is it all about getting a stripper to come to your party for free?

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 10 months ago
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Check out this creeptastic quote from Lou Lumenick, lamenting Junos failure to win the New York Film Critics Circle’s vote for Best Screenplay:

I do regret that erstwhile stripper Diablo Cody will not be joining us for the awards on January 6. She sure had my vote.

Gross, right? If the guy really thinks Juno was the best screenplay of the year, he’s entitled to that (wrong) opinion, but then what does it matter that Cody is an “erstwhile stripper”? As it stands, it reads like Cody got Lumenick’s vote not because she wrote the best screenplay, but because she’s more likely than the Coen Brothers to do something sexy at the awards ceremony (and/or, Lumenick is more likely to enjoy fantasizing about it). At best, it’s a stab at Friar’s Club-caliber comedy that does nothing to dispel the notion that these critics circles are too old, white and male for their own good.

As if it wasn’t gross enough to think that Juno’s critical success could be the product of a bunch of journalists wanting to hang out with a sometime stripper, and all the “once a sex worker, permanently a whore ie: maybe she’ll get naked during our interview” bullshit that entails, it’s almost worse to think that these dudes are, like, patting themselves on the back for spreading the urban legend about The Stripper Who Actually Had a Brain. And this is, remember, all in service of a movie that was essentially made for young girls. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of vomiting to do before the HFPA takes this line of thinking to its inevitable conclusion.

New York Film Critics Circle Blind Items

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 10 months ago
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At The Envelope, Tom O’Neil has a no-names-named recap of what went on at yesterday’s New York Film Critics Circle vote. First: the inside story on I’m Not There’s aforementioned non-showing:

I’m Not There did surprisingly well in many top races today. It didn’t win any awards, but it came in third place for best picture after champ No Country for Old Men and runner-up There Will Be Blood. Ditto for its helmer Todd Haynes, who placed third in the directors’ lineup behind the winning Coen brothers and second-placed Paul Thomas Anderson…In the supporting-actress race, Cate Blanchett came in second place.

I don’t know how “surprising” that really is, considering that three of the critics in the room are on the record as giving the film a score of 90 or higher. I think the only surprise is that the staunchest suckers for Haynes’ soulless scrapbook schtick defenders of the film actually let it leave the room without a single honor, and apparently without a fight. But let’s move on…

…Read more

Trade Roughage 12/11/07

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 10 months ago
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  • The New York Film Critics Circle chose No Country For Old Men as their film of the year yesterday. The small body of mostly print critics also awarded prizes to Daniel Day-Lewis, Julie Christie, and No End in Sight.
  • The Hollywood Reporter has a long think piece on the impact of awards blogging on half-lives of award hopefuls. As usual, the blogosphere proves to be a convenient whipping boy for all manner of industry fluctuations and existential crises. There’s even a frantic quote from an unnamed publicist, who actually wonders, “What does it all mean?” Classic.
  • “They lie. And then they lie again. And then they lie some more.” So begins a WGA statement, directed at the AMPTP, released yesterday in the wake of the weekend’s disastrous strike talk flameout, indicating that it’s going to be a cold day in January or February at the earliest before the two camps have cooled down enough to meet again. In related news: there will be no TV press tour this spring, because there will be (almost) no TV this spring.
  • Chris Moore from Project Greenlight–you know, that reality show that had something to do with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon?–will produce a feature-length doc based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States–you know, that book Matt Damon namedropped in Good Will Hunting?