Edwards Vs. Coulter

You have to wonder what Elizabeth Edwards was thinking when she called MSNBC and confronted syndicated columnist and all-around skank Ann Coulter, telling her to cease and desist with the personal attacks on her husband.

It reminds me of that famous line that, as far as I know, Orson Welles originated: Never handle shit, even with gloves. The gloves just get shitty. The shit doesn't get glovey.

Of course, both sides in this little contretemps were being more than a little disingenuous: Edwards knows that Coulter has no intention of shutting up her continuous stream of bile because: a) she's a sociopath and has no conscience whatsoever, and: b) bile is her bread and butter. What else has she got going for her? Certainly not talent. Take away her bile and she's nothing but an underfed skank in a cocktail dress at seven in the morning (which always shows such class -- don't you think?). On the other hand, Coulter and her bile helps the Edwards campaign raise money, and each of these what I suppose we can call bimbo eruptions has been a windfall for Edwards and his presidential campaign.

Coulter, of course, was being disingenuous when she claimed that it was a free-speech issue. Edwards does not want to silence Coulter -- she merely wants her to show a little class (fat chance of that happening this side of a lobotomy). And Coulter wants to be attacked by the left because it drives up her speaking fees and pleases the dozen or so people who read her pathetic excuse for a column (which appears in -- how many papers? Eight? Nine? Do we even know?).

So this is a grotesquely symbiotic relationship which actually benefits both parties. And both of them know it. You have to assume, therefore, that this whole thing was an exercise in mutually beneficial hypocrisy on both sides.

Tom Moran

Tom Moran's Best 100 American Films List: The Also-Rans

As sort of an appendix to my Best 100 Films list, I thought it might be interesting to show you the films that didn't quite make the cut. Out of all the films I considered, these were the 51 that did not make it to the list of 100.

I'll print them in alphabetical order:

America America
Apocalypse Now
Babes in Arms
Back to the Future
Badlands
The Band Wagon
Bataan
The Black Cat
Blade Runner
Cabaret
Cat People (1942)
David Copperfield (1935)
Deconstructing Harry
Dr. Strangelove
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
The Freshman (1925)
The Graduate
The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Ziegfeld
Gun Crazy
Hannah and Her Sisters
How Green Was My Valley
Imitation of Life (1959)
It's a Wonderful Life
The Kennel Murder Case
The Kid
King Kong
Laura
A Letter to Three Wives
The Life of Emile Zola
Little Caesar
The Little Foxes
Manhattan
M*A*S*H
Mildred Pierce
Mister Roberts
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Modern Times
My Darling Clementine
Network
North by Northwest
Only Angels Have Wings
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
The Scarlet Empress
Star Wars
The Terminator
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
The Truman Show
Wuthering Heights
Yankee Doodle Dandy

Not bad for a list of also-rans, I must say...

Tom Moran

Notes and Musings on the Best 100 Films List

I've been giving some thought to the Best 100 American Films list that I put on this blog and I'd thought some of those thoughts (and second thoughts) with you.

I said that when I put together this list I deliberately did not refer back to the list I put together in response to the AFI's original Best 100 list from a decade ago. But afterwards I pulled it up and gave it a look, and was intrigued by some of the differences. And the similarities.

Roughly 75% of the content of both lists is identical. The changes are mainly on the margins.

Only five of the top 50 films on my new list are not on the old list.

Those five films are (the number indicates their order in the new list):

24) The Kid Brother
26) Ace in the Hole
34) Trouble in Paradise
44) All the President's Men
48) Crimes and Misdemeanors

You'll notice in the first three of them that I was most likely influenced by the fact that they were previously hard-to-find films that have been released on DVD relatively recently (Ace in the Hole comes out on DVD next month from the Criterion Collection but has been on TCM recently).

The latter two films (All The President's Men and Crimes and Misdemeanors) are examples of films that have gotten better with the passing of time. Pakula's film seems better now than it did when it came out -- or at least it seems that way to me. And I think we're starting to realize that Woody Allen is America's greatest living filmmaker, who has made more great films over a longer period of time than any other active director. The trouble with Woody Allen was not what to put on but what to leave off -- I could have put another three or four Allen films on the list and felt completely justified. Will I feel that way in a decade? I guess we'll find out in 2017.

Here are the films that were on my original list but which did not make the cut the second time around (listed in chronological order):

Broken Blossoms
The Kid
42nd Street
Bombshell
Modern Times
Easy Living
History is Made at Night
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Detour
It's a Wonderful Life
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Fort Apache
Gun Crazy
Rebel Without a Cause
Psycho
The Manchurian Candidate
The Graduate
The Producers
Cabaret
Diner
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
Rumble Fish
Stranger Than Paradise
Blood Simple
Hannah and Her Sisters
JFK

They're all good films, but there are only two of them that I think probably should have been placed on the new list (Modern Times and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington).

Here are the films in the bottom 50 of my new list that were not on the old list (number indicates their position on the new list):

51) The Circus
53) Gunga Din
55) Out of the Past
58) The Big Sleep
59) American Graffiti
63) Fury
65) I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
69) The Philadelphia Story
75) The French Connection
82) Husbands and Wives
83) East of Eden
84) Footlight Parade
85) The Day The Earth Stood Still
90) The Thing from Another World
91) Ben-Hur (1925)
92) The Awful Truth
94) Hail the Conquering Hero
95) Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
96) Frankenstein
97) Queen Christina
99) They All Laughed
100) The Women

And, much to my chagrin, I find a film that was not on either my old list or my new list, but which really deserves to be on both of them. Its exclusion was and is a major mistake on my part.

That film is All Quiet on the Western Front.

Tom Moran

Addendum, 6/27: For those of you who would like the list broken down by decade, I decided to see how they would break down. 16% of the list is silent (two from the teens, 13 from the 20s and 1 from the 30s).

Here's how the films break down by decade:

1910s: 2
1920s: 13
1930s: 25
1940s: 20
1950s: 17
1960s: 1
1970s: 16
1980s: 3
1990s: 3
2000s: 0

I knew that the majority of the films would come from the 1930s and 1940s (the golden age of American filmmaking) but I was a little surprised that the 50s and the 70s came in almost tied. The 60s came up with only one entry, the 1980s and 90s with only three a piece, and this decade has had no great films as yet.

Tom Moran's 100 Greatest American Films

Man, they say, is a list-making animal, and it would appear that the only thing he enjoys doing more than making his own lists is criticizing those of other people. I know that's certainly true of me.

Ten years ago the American Film Institute put out their list of the 100 Greatest American Films, and their list really sucked. So, to show them up, I came up with my own list. It's on my old website, part of which is still online -- you can find it on Google without too much difficulty if you wanted to.

Now, a decade later, the AFI has made a new list, taking into account a lot of the criticisms that I (and a lot of other people) made of the original list. This "new and improved" list is in fact a big improvement over their original list.

Is it as good as it could be? You've got to be kidding.

So I decided to make my own rejoinder list again. I did not look at my original list from the 1990s, preferring to start from scratch. I didn't line up the film alphabetically or chronologically -- this time I decided to lay them out in order from 1 to 100.

This, briefly, is how I did it:

• I cut about 40% of the AFI's 2007 list.
• Then I went to their 400-film ballot that voters were given to choose from and picked films from there.
• Then I chose some films from the ones that the AFI dropped from its 400-film list of a decade ago.
• Then I chose some films that were never on any AFI list.

That gave me a large number of films to work from, and I wrote the titles down on index cards. I divided the list into two categories: upper fifty and lower fifty. Then just cut and moved around from there. Tough choices were called for and made.

I'm relatively satisfied with my list, which is unconventional in several respects. I won't break it down and/or analyze it in any way, but I'll be interested in hearing what if anything you guys think of it.

Here's the list:

1) Intolerance
2) City Lights
3) The General
4) Citizen Kane
5) The Godfather
6) Casablanca
7) Raging Bull
8) Gone With The Wind
9) Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
10) The Godfather Part II
11) The Searchers
12) On The Waterfront
13) Greed
14) Double Indemnity
15) Nashville
16) The Wizard of Oz
17) Sunrise
18) Singin’ in the Rain
19) The Birth of a Nation
20) The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
21) A Face in the Crowd
22) His Girl Friday
23) All That Jazz
24) The Kid Brother
25) The Shop Around the Corner
26) Ace in the Hole
27) Meet Me in St. Louis
28) Sunset Blvd.
29) The Adventures of Robin Hood
30) Scarface (1932)
31) The Crowd
32) Young Mr. Lincoln
33) Sweet Smell of Success
34) Trouble in Paradise
35) The Wind
36) Chinatown
37) Top Hat
38) The Magnificent Ambersons
39) The Conversation
40) The Apartment
41) Notorious
42) Rear Window
43) The Maltese Falcon
44) All The President’s Men
45) Sullivan’s Travels
46) Annie Hall
47) Jaws
48) Crimes and Misdemeanors
49) Avalon
50) Taxi Driver
51) The Circus
52) A Streetcar Named Desire
53) Gunga Din
54) Pinocchio
55) Out of the Past
56) Some Like It Hot
57) Mean Streets
58) The Big Sleep
59) American Graffiti
60) Wings
61) The Bride of Frankenstein
62) A Night at the Opera
63) Fury
64) Fantasia
65) I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
66) The Lady Eve
67) My Man Godfrey
68) GoodFellas
69) The Philadelphia Story
70) The Last Picture Show
71) The Gold Rush
72) All About Eve
73) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
74) Shadow of a Doubt
75) The French Connection
76) The Night of the Hunter
77) Duck Soup
78) Touch of Evil
79) Days of Heaven
80) Golddiggers of 1933
81) Safety Last
82) Husbands and Wives
83) East of Eden
84) Footlight Parade
85) The Day The Earth Stood Still
86) Vertigo
87) Ninotchka
88) Stagecoach
89) The Big Parade
90) The Thing From Another World
91) Ben-Hur (1925)
92) The Awful Truth
93) The Exorcist
94) Hail the Conquering Hero
95) Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
96) Frankenstein
97) Queen Christina
98) The Strong Man
99) They All Laughed
100) The Women

Tom Moran

The AFI Does It Again

Some of you who know me know that, almost ten years ago, when the American Film Institute put out their 100 Best American Films List, I tore it apart on my (then) website.

Now a decade later, the AFI has put out a new list of what they contend are the 100 Best American Films. Is the new list any better?

I've made a cursory examination of the list, and have come to some tentative conclusions that I may refine in the next few days. This is what I think at the moment -- my first impressions.

But first, let me remind you of the critique I made of the original AFI list, a decade ago:

Of the silent era, only four films were chosen: three by Chaplin and one by D.W. Griffith.

And actually, when you consider that both "City Lights" and "Modern Times" are sound films (albeit sound films that just don't happen to have dialogue), that makes only two silent films on the entire list.

Not one film by Buster Keaton was on the AFI's list. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" was.

Not one film by Preston Sturges was on the list. "Dances With Wolves" was.

Not one film with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers was on the list. "Tootsie" was.

"Intolerance" was not on the list. "The Jazz Singer" (one of the worst movies ever made) was.

"Sunrise" was not on the list. "Doctor Zhivago" was.

"Greed" was not on the list. "Midnight Cowboy" was.

Okay, you get the point.

The new list is marginally better than the old one, and a lot of the flaws of the old list have been taken into account and corrected in the new list. Both Intolerance and Sunrise made the cut this time. Buster Keaton, Preston Sturges, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers -- all are included this time. This is all to the good.

But some classic films that were included ten years ago have been pointlessly dropped -- such as All Quiet on the Western Front and The Birth of a Nation. The former is still one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever made, as is the latter, Griffith's 1915 masterpiece, which almost certainly fell victim to America's passion for political correctness.

Offhand I counted at least 20 films on the list that for one reason or another I didn't think belonged there. And while the previous list was just a ploy to sell videocassettes, this list is pretty much just a ploy to sell DVDs.

The more things change...

Tom Moran

Leon Wieseltier and His Gemeinschaft

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic (which has recently reinvented itself as a fortnightly), has written a backpager for the magazine on the final episode of the HBO series The Sopranos.

Here is a (brief) excerpt from that article:

The hobbled and true language of Chase's people is an essential element of his devastating portrait of the dictatorship of ordinary life, of the alternately quickening and deadening influences of the commonplace. (So, too, is his exegetical use of popular music, whose salving effect has never been made clearer. I speak as one who is also inwardly fortified by "Denise" and "Oh Girl," and lifted up by "The Dolphins." And I can almost not forgive the show for leaving me so absurdly affected by "Con Te Partirò.") The Sopranos is a searching study of the problem of small horizons. The problem is that they are beautiful and they are crushing. Who does not come from a place that mistakes itself for the universe? All metaphysics is local. If it is possible to have a vision of the Virgin Mary, then it possible to have a vision of the Virgin Mary at the Bada Bing. The Sopranos locates the human lot in north Jersey, but the human lot is available everywhere or it is available nowhere. And the gangland Gemeinschaft provides the same satisfactions as any Gemeinschaft. (And the same hilarity. Meadow: "The state can crush the individual." Tony: "New Jersey?") Yet it provides also the same airlessness: the authenticity of these made communitarians does not exactly leave an impression of radiance. The bitter joke of the show is that these people are repulsive not only for their baseness but also for their provincialism. There is no Archimedean point outside the new Avellino. These are peasants with latte machines. Their insularity, their superstition, their immutability, their self-love: these, too, are human failures, like evil.

When I read this, I had the following reaction: you know, it's probably a good thing that Wieseltier is the literary editor of the magazine, because if such a pretentious piece of utter bullshit had come in over the transom, it probably would have been laughed out of the office.

Doesn't it read like a parody of head-up-their-ass intellectuals such as you might find in the pages of a Saul Bellow novel? It reminds me of when I worked at Newsweek, years ago, and Meg Greenfield used to write essays for the magazine. Or at least she called them essays -- in reality they were rambling, chaotic screeds whose sentences went on and on like Proust, only pointlessly. The problem was that all the editors at the magazine, knowing how close Greenfield was to Mrs. Graham (the owner of The Washington Post Company, which owns Newsweek), were afraid to edit her.

Let me repeat that -- they were afraid to edit her. So her windbaggy blatherings went on, unedited, to the end of her life.

So it's good to know the boss -- or, in Wieseltier's case, to be the editor. How else are you going to make an utter ass of yourself with impunity? But for me, I would just say: Leon, why don't you take your pompous article and stuff it right up your gemeinschaft. Bada bing!

Tom Moran

Vanity, Thy Name is Bloomberg

Mayor Bloomberg has officially announced that he has abandoned the Republican Party that he cynically joined to become mayor in order to become an "Independent." This is widely seen as the first move towards a White House run as an Independent in 2008.

What do we think of this?

First, a little background.

Michael Bloomberg was a billionaire businessman and a lifelong Democrat who decided that he wanted to be mayor of New York. He realized that he didn't have a chance in hell of winning a Democratic primary, so he cynically switched his party affiliation to Republican (of the RINO -- "Republican in Name Only" variety) to order to get on the ballot.

Even with that, and his incalculably deep pockets, he would have been a long shot. A very long shot.

But then 9/11 happened.

Bloomberg owed his eventual election to Osama Bin Laden to such an extent that I'd be surprised if Bloomberg didn't send him a thank-you note. Without the attack on the World Trade Center Bloomberg would never have become mayor. New Yorkers decided that, in the aftermath of the devastation of downtown Manhattan, it would take a businessman to lead the city into the future, and when Bloomberg was practically annointed by Rudy Giuliani (who then tried to use the attacks as a way of staying in power after his term was over), Bloomberg beat out Mark Green and became mayor.

So he was once a Democrat who left that party when it was no longer useful to him. Now he has left the Republican party because he feels that they're no longer useful to him. Does that make him pragmatic and independent, or does it indicate that the man has no principles whatsoever except a simple, cynical expediency?

Now Bloomberg seems to think that he can run and win a third party candidacy for the White House. Once again his deep pockets (he is said to be willing to spend as much as half a billion dollars to buy the White House) will serve him in good stead.

But there are two things that he's not counting on.

1) No third party candidate has won the White House in more than a century -- or even come close. Teddy Roosevelt, a former president, couldn't do it in 1912. H. Ross Perot couldn't do it in 1992, with equally deep pockets. Bloomberg won't be able to do it either.

2) Bloomberg represents everything about New York and New Yorkers that people in flyover country can't stand: he's rich, he's pro-gun control and pro-choice, he's obnoxious, he's pushy, and oh, yeah -- he's a Jew. This is Jesusland, after all, and in a nation where the biggest fuck-up in the history of the White House can still manage to hold onto the blind loyalty of roughly a third of the electorate simply because he "Loves the Lord," I wonder just how many states below the Mason-Dixon line Bloomberg thinks he has a serious chance of winning (answer: none). Bloomberg's administration was a total fluke, and if he thinks he can parlay that into a successful run for the White House then he's delusional.

But if he wants to toss half a billion dollars down the toilet in a vain attempt at becoming president, I say let him do so. After all, it's a free country. Or so they tell me.

Tom Moran

The Sound of Silence

Today is an anniversary of sorts. Can you guess what it is?

Okay, I'll give you a hint. It's a date in literary history. Does that help?

No?

Okay, I'll give you another hint. It's a date in American literary history. How about that?

Still stumped?

All right, I'll spill it. If you insist.

Today marks the 42nd anniversary of the issue of The New Yorker magazine containing the very last (to date) piece of original fiction ever published by J.D. Salinger.

The story, "Hapworth 16, 1924" ran in the June 19, 1965 issue of The New Yorker. It took up pages 32-113. Don't look for this story in bound copies of The New Yorker in public libraries (those pages have long since been ripped out of the magazine by frenzied Salinger fans), and if you'd like to buy a used copy of the issue online be prepared to feel it financially -- it sells for $359.00. To give a gauge of comparison, it would be cheaper to buy the first 80 years worth of issues of The New Yorker in electronic form than it would be to buy that one back issue.

In the 42 years since the publication of that story, rumors have been rife about what if anything Salinger might have been writing since. He is said to have a safe in which he keeps at least one manuscript to be published posthumously (and posthumously might be any time now -- Salinger is 88 years old).

But Salinger's protracted silence leads to a lot of interesting questions about writers and what, if anything, they owe what used to be called "their public" back when people still read books instead of crap. Does an author have an obligation to write and to publish? Or can an author like J.D. Salinger, having published one novel and 13 stories in book form in slightly more than a dozen years, just ride out the rest of his life without feeling any obligation to provide his readers (the ones who have, amazingly, allowed him to live in comfort on the royalties from such a skimpy output) with anything new?

After all, in the years since Salinger stopped publishing, the equally reclusive Thomas Pynchon has published five novels, some of them of nearly Victorian amplitude -- in fact, some people asserted that Pynchon was really Salinger publishing new work under a different name.

In my opinion Salinger is a victim of what I like to call Radical Freedom -- where you are so rich and so famous that the rules that govern ordinary human conduct don't seem to apply to you. We've seen Radical Freedom destroy such famous people as Howard Hughes, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, Michael Jackson and, possibly, Lindsay Lohan. When you have so much money that you have no obligation to be anywhere or to do anything so that you can, in theory, sit around and smear yourself with Ding-Dongs if you want to, some people will get seriously weird without any external compulsion to get unweird -- like a boss who can fire you or a landlord who can evict you. When you are totally insulated from the normal world your inner demons can become your daily life.

Something like that happened, I believe, to J.D. Salinger. I think that he came home from World War II with a severe case of what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that in the ensuing decades he became more and more unhinged until he was pretty much incapable of writing anything that anyone else would want to read. There is evidence of this in Salinger's own writings, as well as the writings of his daughter and his one-time lover Joyce Maynard. So I strongly doubt that we're missing anything amazing from the pen (or typewriter, or word processor) of J.D. Salinger in the past 42 years.

But you never know -- he could always prove me wrong posthumously. And I doubt I would mind if he did.

Tom Moran

What Should Have Won, Part V: The 1970s

If the years 1932-1945 represent Hollywood’s Golden Age, then a case could be made that the 70s were the Silver Age of Hollywood. For five years after the record-breaking triumph of The Sound of Music in 1965, every studio in Hollywood tried to recapture its success with one expensive, bloated musical after another, from Star! (which reunited Julie Andrews with her Sound of Music director, Robert Wise) to Paint Your Wagon, in which Clint Eastwood proved to the entire movie going world that, as they say down South, he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

On top of this disconnect, the country was changing and it was painfully obvious that Hollywood was behind the times. By the late 1960s kids were growing their hair, protesting the war in Vietnam and smoking pot like it was going out of style, and the men in suits running the studios were at a loss as to what the youth audience wanted to see at the movies. So they decided to gamble on a new, untested generation of young filmmakers, many of them right out of film school. By giving them artistic freedom, provided they stay under strict budgetary limits, they opened the floodgates to what became an extraordinary period in American film.

The Academy, on the other hand, was slow to embrace this new generation. Possibly because the average Academy voters in those years were older than The Three Stooges, and worked about as often, they were slow to realize what was happening under their noses. Nonetheless, in my opinion the Academy made more right choices in this decade than in any other – and at least one choice that was spectacularly wrong.

So let’s get started. Once again, a reminder of the rules: the film that I choose for Best Picture has to have been nominated in at least one category that year – it doesn’t matter which one.

1970

What film won Best Picture: Patton
What film should have won: M*A*S*H

Journeyman director Franklin J. Schaffner made a decent enough film about the eccentric WWII general, from a script co-written by future Godfather auteur Francis Coppola, but in retrospect it’s pretty obvious that the film of the year was Robert Altman’s breakthrough black comedy about army doctors in the Korean War, M*A*S*H. It was nothing less than revolutionary – from its mocking of religion to its completing the transformation of cinematic dialogue that Orson Welles has begun almost three decades earlier with Citizen Kane. Nothing would be the same after M*A*S*H, while Patton was just another war epic – albeit one with a masterful performance by George C. Scott. If you’re interested, the New York Film Critics Award that year went to the now badly dated Five Easy Pieces. The Golden Globes went to Love Story (Drama) and M*A*S*H (Musical or Comedy).

1971

What film won Best Picture: The French Connection
What film should have won: The Last Picture Show

This one is really a toss-up. I can’t argue that the Academy blew it, because if any two films ever deserved to be in a tie for Best Picture, it’s William Friedkin’s riveting crime drama and Peter Bogdanovich’s bittersweet ode to small-town Texas, from Larry McMurtry’s novel. If I give the nod to Bogdanovich over Friedkin, perhaps it’s because The French Connection has the same structural defect of the 1959 Ben-Hur – the biggest scene in the film comes two-thirds of the way into the story, making the climax somewhat anti-climactic. The Last Picture Show, on the other hand, just keeps getting better and better with the years. The New York Critics gave their Best Picture Award to Stanley Kubrick’s hateful A Clockwork Orange, and the Golden Globes went to The French Connection (Drama) and Fiddler on the Roof (Musical or Comedy).

1972

What film won Best Picture: The Godfather
What film should have won: The Godfather

People forget that The Godfather, while it did win Best Picture, wasn't the big winner at the Oscars that year. Bob Fosse’s Cabaret ended up winning eight Oscars to The Godfather’s three – and Fosse beat out Francis Coppola for Best Director (that was the year that Fosse won the triple crown – the Oscar, Tony and Emmy for directing – in the same year). James Caan, Al Pacino and Robert Duvall were all nominated for Best Supporting Actor – and all three of them lost to Joel Grey, who reprised his Broadway role as the emcee in Cabaret. But there’s little doubt that The Godfather is probably the greatest American film of the post-World War II period, so in the Best Picture category at least the Academy made the right choice. Ironically, the New York Film Critics blew off The Godfather on all the major awards – Best Picture went to Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, and Best Actor went to Laurence Olivier’s bravura performance in Joseph Mankiewicz's Sleuth. The Godfather and Cabaret both won Best Picture Golden Globes because they were nominated in different categories.

1973

What film won Best Picture: The Sting
What film should have won: The Exorcist

This might be the biggest injustice of the decade. It was a tight and crowded Oscar race that year, and a lot of worthy films weren’t even nominated for Best Picture – including Last Tango in Paris, The Last Detail, Serpico, Paper Moon and The Way We Were. The film that won was a fun, well-written comedy that had great star power in Newman and Redford and benefited greatly from being released at the height of the nostalgia boom of the early 70s, when people wanted to feel like they were living in pretty much any decade other than the one they were in. But the fact is that the film of the year was The Exorcist, and if it hadn’t been for the Academy’s bias against certain genres and the controversies about the film that flooded the press in the weeks before the voting (mostly concerning Linda Blair’s performance) it would have won Best Picture and probably an acting Oscar or two. The New York Film Critics gave their Best Picture Award to Truffaut’s delightful Day for Night (which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film) and the Golden Globes went to, respectively, The Exorcist and American Graffiti – which were exactly the right choices.

1974

What film won Best Picture: The Godfather Part II
What film should have won: The Godfather, Part II

This was a weird year for the Oscars. Although they picked the right film in a very crowded field for Best Picture, some of their other choices were downright bizarre. How can you explain the fact that The Towering Inferno got a Best Picture nomination? Or that in one of the most competitive Best Actor fields ever (Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, Dustin Hoffman in Lenny and Al Pacino in Godfather II), they went with Art Carney in the awful Harry and Tonto? They did get Supporting Actor right, though – even though three actors from Godfather II were nominated (equaling what happened with the original Godfather) Robert De Niro still won for playing the young Vito Corleone. Chinatown won the Golden Globe for Best Picture Drama (Coppola thought it would win the Best Picture Oscar), while the NY Film Critics gave their Best Picture Award to Fellini’s Amarcord.

1975

What film won Best Picture: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
What film should have won: Nashville

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ran the table at the Oscars – it became the first film since It Happened One Night to win all five major Oscars (Picture, Writer, Director, Actor, Actress). It’s hard for me to talk about because it’s one of the very few major films of that era that I didn’t see at the time – I didn’t catch up with Milos Forman’s film until thirty years later. But I think that the film of 1975, at least in retrospect, is Robert Altman’s Nashville (although Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon would come in a close second, and might have been my choice if Kubrick had only thrown away his zoom lens when he started shooting). The NY Film Critics gave their award to Nashville, while the Golden Globe went to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

1976

What film won Best Picture: Rocky
What film should have won: Taxi Driver

This was one of the toughest choices the Academy had to make in the last forty years – and they blew it. Three films nominated for Best Picture have become undisputed classics: Network, Taxi Driver and All The President’s Men. Choosing between them is almost impossible, and the idea of making it a threeway tie is very tempting. But the Academy chose to reward Sylvester Stallone’s personal Cinderella story of an aging boxer given one last chance (or so people thought that at the time – little did they know that no less than five sequels were in the offing!) at redemption. Any one of the three other films I mentioned would have been a better choice, but my vote would have gone to Martin Scorsese’s shattering vision of the underbelly of New York City, from a screenplay by future director Paul Schrader. If Woody Allen’s films provide us with a romanticized view of Manhattan, here Scorsese gives us the reverse side -- a bleak vision of Manhattan as Hell. Those of us who were around in the 1970s know that this vision wasn't all that far from the truth (God, I miss those days). Rocky won the Golden Globe (Taxi Driver didn’t even get a Best Picture nomination) and All the President’s Men won the NY Film Critics Circle Award (Robert DeNiro won Best Actor for Taxi Driver).

1977

What film won Best Picture: Annie Hall
What film should have won: Annie Hall

Woody Allen’s bittersweet romantic comedy almost became the third film in the history of the Oscars to pull off a sweep. Annie Hall won Best Picture, Woody won Best Director, Woody and Marshall Brickman won for Best Original Screenplay and Diane Keaton won for Best Actress. Only the fact that Richard Dreyfuss (for The Goodbye Girl) beat out Woody for Best Actor kept Annie Hall from winning all five of the major Oscars (collectors of injustices, however, will note that Gordon Willis was not even nominated for his cinematography). Irate science fiction geeks will take solace from the fact that Star Wars actually won more Oscars than Annie Hall did – if you count the Special Achievement Award to Ben Burtt, George Lucas’s space opera won seven awards to Annie Hall’s four. Annie Hall won Best Picture from the NY Film Critics, and the Golden Globe went to The Turning Point (Drama) and The Goodbye Girl (Comedy or Musical). Annie Hall wasn't even nominated in either category. To paraphrase the young Alvy Singer: What assholes!

1978

What film won Best Picture: The Deer Hunter
What film should have won: Days of Heaven

What an irony it was when the terminally ill John Wayne (he would be dead from cancer two months after the ceremony) presented the Best Picture Oscar to Michael Cimino’s anarchic Vietnam epic. It was a popular choice at the time, and it could be argued that the film suffers only when seen from the perspective of Cimino’s plummeting reputation in the wake of the whole Heaven’s Gate debacle, after which people would take a scathing revisionist look at his previous success. But I would assert that the clear winner this year is Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. It won Best Cinematography, and was nominated in other categories as well, but it was not a Best Picture nominee. Almost 30 years after the fact, though, it’s pretty obvious that Malick’s poetic epic was the best film of the year. Days of Heaven was nominated for a Golden Globe but lost to Midnight Express. The NY Film Critics gave their award to The Deer Hunter (although Malick won Best Director for Days of Heaven – explain that if you can).

1979

What film won Best Picture: Kramer Vs. Kramer
What film should have won: All That Jazz

Francis Coppola and Bob Fosse were both in their great periods at exactly the same time, and it seemed that they always went head-to-head when they had films out in this decade. Fosse beat Coppola in 1972, Coppola beat Fosse in 1974. But in 1979 they both lost – to Robert Benton’s adaptation of Avery Corman’s novel of divorce, Manhattan-style, Kramer Vs. Kramer. At the time people chuckled that Academy voters couldn’t identify with self-destructive choreographers or dazed and confused soldiers slogging their way through the jungles of Vietnam – but they could all identify with going through a messy divorce. In retrospect, though, Benton’s low-key drama, even with impressive performances by Dustin Hoffman and Merlyn Streep (the latter won her first Oscar for her relatively small role), doesn’t live up to the competition. The Oscar should have gone either to Coppola’s monstrous Vietnam epic or Fosse’s scathing personal vision. Although it’s a tough call, because of the trouble with Coppola’s ending (or lack of such) I would go with Fosse. The New York Film Critics gave their award to Kramer Vs. Kramer, as did the Golden Globes. They were all wrong.

Tom Moran

The Winning Ticket?

Here's a little tidbit from Page Six of the New York Post:

June 13, 2007 -- DON'T count out Al Gore as a presidential candidate - Bill Clinton certainly hasn't. Clinton, whose wife, Hillary, is leading a pack of Democrats for the 2008 nomination, was at a recent Air America relaunch at the apartment of the liberal radio network's new chief, Mark Green, when political blogger Andy Ostroy asked him, "Do you think Gore's going to run?" Clinton replied, "Someone's got to fizzle. If someone fizzles, then, yeah, he could enter the race. He's got plenty of money, his own money, to do it." Ostroy predicts: "It'll be [Barack] Obama who will fizzle by September, and Gore will toss his hat into the ring and enlist the junior senator from Illinois as his running mate. An unbeatable ticket."

To which I can only add: from your lips to the ear of the almighty, baby. I'll take a Gore/Obama ticket anyday.

Tom Moran

Stick a Fork in Him -- He's Done

Where's a vote of no confidence when you need one?

At times I think that it's a real shame that we don't live in a parliamentary democracy, because if we did we would have rid ourselves of this pathetic disgrace we call a president by now.

Bush's poll numbers are close to being as low as any president's have ever been since they started polling. 29% of Americans now approve of the job he's doing. 66% of Americans disapprove.

Those are the lowest numbers that any president has had in more than 50 years.

Even Ann Coulter, that usually reliable right-wing skank, has had it with Bush over the immigration issue. When she makes idiotic jokes about Bush's drinking instead of about Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, you know there's been a sea-change in conservative thinking on this president.

This administration has so dumbed-down the definition of success in Iraq that I wouldn't be surprised if they claimed that, if one American serviceman is still breathing on Iraqi soil by Labor Day, the surge has been a success.

This administration still has roughly another 19 months to go before they're replaced by Democrats who will know what they're doing, whether they're lead by Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or, as I profoundly hope, Al Gore. But what are we going to do until then?

And who are those 29%? Aren't you curious? Wouldn't you like to meet someone who feels that George W. Bush is doing a fine job and see if they can manage to wriggle their way out of the strait-jacket?

Inquiring minds want to know.

But in the meantime, I think we all just need to hold tight and just do what we have to do to survive these next 19 months. But I have to tell you, January 20, 2009 can't come soon enough for me.

Tom Moran

Schadenfreude 101

I don't fucking believe it. I actually feel sorry for Paris Hilton.

How is this possible?

If you saw the footage (or even a still image) of Paris Hilton, shorn of makeup and cell phone or cute little dog or any of her usual accessories, bawling her eyes out in the back of a patrol car, you might feel in spite of yourself, even if you believe that she's a spoiled bitch who broke the law and who's getting what she deserves, a little twinge of sympathy.

The fact is that Ms. Hilton seems to be caught up in a pissing match between a judge and a sheriff who have conflicting agendas. The judge wants to show that he's tough on crime and that rich bitches can't get away with anything. The sheriff is under a mandate to ease overcrowding in the prisons. The judge specifically stated that there was to be no house arrest, work furlough or electronic monitoring -- she was to do prison time and that was it.

The sheriff, knowing full well that if this woman was named Kathy Sparks and she was a 38-year-old mother of two she wouldn't be doing any jail time whatsoever, claimed that she had an unspecified "medical condition" and sent her home with an ankle bracelet after only five days in prison -- in direct contradiction of the judge's order.

The judge, hearing about this, got pissed and took it out on Ms. Hilton, dragging her out of her home back into court and tossing her back into the slammer.

For the first time in her life Paris Hilton is facing forces she can't control, and it looks she'll spend the next forty days in the slammer.

And I feel sorry for the woman. I probably shouldn't, but I do.

Tom Moran

The Last Time We Saw Paris

I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of this story already.

First she was going to do 45 days. Then it was down to 23 days. Then she was in prison. Then she was out of prison. Then she might go back to prison. Then she had to go back to court but she could phone it in. Now she's being dragged back to court in handcuffs with the sirens blaring on the police car.

Enough already.

It's getting to the point where I'm feeling sorry for Paris Hilton -- and I didn't think that was possible.

I just want this story to be over.

Tom Moran

Paris in the Slammer

Paris Hilton has officially begun her sentence. Society is now safe for at least the next 23 days.

She is, according to TMZ.com, in a 12x8 cell, with a bunk bed, a toilet and wash basin. She'll be in that cell for 23 hours a day, and will not be interacting with any of the other prisoners -- at least for now.

This is going to leave her pretty bored -- don't you think? After all, it gets pretty tedious sitting in a cell all by yourself for 23 hours a day.

So I think the enlightened readers of CelticProgressive should do what they can to pitch in and help. Why don't you drop Paris a line and tell her that you're pulling for her, and that you hope she learns something from this latest debacle? After all, some people come out of prison and it makes a big difference in their lives -- for the better. Look at movie producer Walter Wanger, who did time for shooting MCA agent Jennings Lang in the groin for having an affair with his wife, actress Joan Bennett. Wanger served four months in prison, and after he came out of the slammer he began producing hard-hitting films that exposed the injustices of the prison system -- films like "Riot in Cell Block 11" and "I Want to Live!," which won Susan Hayward an Oscar.

I'm not saying that Paris is going to become a more useful and productive member of society when she gets out of prison, but you never know. Anything can happen.

So why not drop her a line and let her know that you're thinking of her and hope that this becomes a learning experience for her.

Here's her address for the next three weeks:

Paris Hilton

c/o Century Regional Detention Facility

11705 South Alameda Street

Lynwood, CA 90262

She might be glad to hear from you.

Tom Moran

Better Late Than Never

It's hard to tell at this point who has more contempt for the Bush Administration, liberals or conservatives.

That's kinda interesting -- don't you think?

Judging by Peggy Noonan's latest column, it might be a toss-up.

What I find so fascinating about Noonan's column is that it shows conservatives saying about Bush exactly what liberals have been saying since 2001. It's like the boys and girls on the right may be a little slow, but they've finally caught on to what this administration is all about: we want our way, and fuck you if you don't like it.

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

Isn't it ironic? as Alanis Morissette might say. The conservatives have been totally had by this president, and they're only just now figuring it out. Priceless.

Then Noonan complains about the tactics that the administration is using to stifle dissent on the right about the immigration bill:

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

Gee -- if you don't agree with their policies you're unpatriotic. I wonder where we might have heard this before? I didn't notice Peggy Noonan (or any other highly-placed and highly-paid conservative pundit, for that matter) complaining when the administration used exactly these same tactics to stifle dissent from the left on the war, by insinuating that anyone who wasn't eager for young Americans to get their balls blown off in a hopeless cause were practically in the pay of Al-Qaeda.

In a New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Goldberg, Republican discontent with this group of thugs and criminals currently in power is stated about as strongly as it can be stated:

Disillusionment with the Administration has become widespread among the conservatives who once were Bush’s strongest supporters. Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, said recently, “The Republican Administration has shown itself to be completely incompetent to the point that, of Republicans in Iowa, fifty-two per cent thought we should be out of Iraq in six months.” Edwards, who left Congress in 1993 and now teaches at Princeton, is helping to lead an effort among some conservatives to curtail the President’s power in such areas as warrantless wiretapping. “This Administration is beyond the pale in terms of arrogance and incompetence,” he said. “This guy thinks he’s a monarch, and that’s scary as hell.”

Did you get the most revealing part of that paragraph? If not, let me underline it for you, because it's worth emphasizing: "of Republicans in Iowa, fifty-two per cent thought we should be out of Iraq in six months."

Of Republicans. In Iowa. The people who to a large extent will help choose the next Republican nominee. If this is true, then John McCain's strategy of sucking up to Bush and his policies on the war has been a gigantic miscalculation that will cost him his party's nomination and, given his age, whatever chance he might have had of ever being elected president.

If you had told me as recently as a year ago that the GOP rank and file would loathe this administration to this extent, I would have thought you were crazy. But I guess I didn't give them enough credit. What some of us knew from the very early days of this administration is now apparent to almost everyone -- everyone, that is, except the craziest of the evangelical zealots -- that this administration is the most arrogant and incompetent in our history and might have doomed the Republican party to minority status for a generation. This after idiots like Tom DeLay and Karl Rove boasted not long ago that they would forge a permanent Republican majority that would allow them and others like them to hold onto power indefinitely.

Not bloody likely, as the British would say. The Bush administration and the neocons who have been its driving engine have failed as badly as any administration in American history. And now it will be up to the Democrats to pick up the pieces and clean up the mess these incompetent criminals will leave behind on January 20, 2009.

Tom Moran