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.
So. Tired. Of. Talking. About. Juno.
Look, let’s get one thing straight: in that post that I wrote earlier this week, I wasn’t making a statement about Juno’s quality. I’ve done that elsewhere, but at this point it seems like my energy would be best directed elsewhere–it’s not THAT offensive, and it’s certainly better than Little Miss Sunshine. All I was saying, is that the idea that this film has “crossed over” from an “indie” sphere to mainstream success is a fiction created and promoted by Fox Searchlight in order to align Juno with past “crossover” successes. This is working for them, so that’s great. But the idea that Juno is “small”, that it’s some kind of an underdog––either at the box office or within the clusterfuck of award’s season––is categorically insane.
It’s also somewhat troubling to think that if this kind of marketing coup works so well once, it’ll almost certainly work again, and at some point, there won’t be room in the marketplace for actual “small” films that have actually “crossed over”, because they’ll be pushed out of the conversation by studio films (I don’t care how much Juno cost to produce–it was paid for by a studio and it has the full benefit of a studio’s marketing apparatus) masquerading as “small” “crossovers.”
I don’t think I have anything left to say about this, but feel free to have at it/me in the comments.
I’ve read two stories in two hours that refer to Juno as “crossover hit.” I’m not denying that it is, so far, a hit, both with audiences and with critics. But tell me again how this film––made by a not-exactly-maverick director for a studio specialty division, starring three known actors and one tabloid staple, targeted at teens and young adults, both thematically and stylistically indebted (or, at the very least, related) to previous hits like Superbad, Ghost World and Napoleon Dynamite––qualifies as a “crossover”?
Yes, Searchlight bought “indie” credibility by taking Juno to a bunch of festivals and rolling it out slowly. But we’re also talking about a film that’s been advertising on NYTimes.com for over three months. This is so clearly a studio film that, in a bit of smart awards season strategy, has been sold by its distributor as an indie. Why are journalists who should know better playing along?
Rare is the year that a studio moves up a release date, in order to ensure that their film is “the first Western in the marketplace.” But such is the case this fall, as Lionsgate has decided to open James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma a month ahead of schedule, in order to get a jump on the competition (ie: The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, and The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt). But while Lionsgate might have dodged their genre competition, September’s an increibly crowded month for “prestige” releases; still, 3:10’s biggest competition on that particular weekend will be hardly-fearsome The Nanny Diaries.
Spike Lee held another press conference in Italy yesterday, in which he wowed the local journalists with his usual “don’t call me mainstream, I’m just here to scout locations for my $45 million film” bon mots. Amongst other revelations, Lee intimated that recent success has hardly made his life in Hollywood any easier. “My last feature film, Inside Man, was my most successful so far, and I was naive enough to think that that meant I could go from there and make any film I wanted to make. But I was very, very wrong about that.”
Apparently attempting to replicate the, um, success of Bewitched, Nicole Kidman will produce and star in a wacky romantic comedy called Monte Carlo.
production company! Through which she’s going to make movies “about distinct characters that embody something relatable and relevant about human nature’s double-sided coin of vulnerability and mettle.” Anything you can do, I can do better! Even if you maybe married the homewrecker you knocked up whilst trying to rebuild New Orleans with your multi-culti band of orphans!
