And the Oughttabe Goes To…

 

There’s a certain anticipation — and dread — that comes with every Oscar season.

On the one hand, the Academy Awards are a clear demonstration of film as art.

On the other, that art often sucks.

But this year will mark a seismic shift, at least in tenor, to the annual self congratulations: Expect a kinder, gentler publicity campaign for Oscar gold.

There was a time when diplomacy during awards season was as rare as truth in a political campaign. Rumors would swirl about difficult directors. Stories would circulate about cast unrest on set. Studios would fact-check each other in their sprawling biopics — the industry’s Best Picture half-nelson of choice.

Not this year. The reason? No Harvey Weinstein.

Weinstein was a personal publicity force — and took personal blame for the Academy’s  reputation for seasonal dirty politics from January to mid-March.

In retrospect, it’s hard to argue with the griping that, at the time, sounded simply like sour grapes. Sure, everyone considers Shakespeare in Love one of the greatest heists in Oscar history (it stole the gold from Saving Private Ryan). But, given the Nixonian level of the accusations, expect an anti-Weinstein approach to campaigning. Already, his name has come off all the credits of films and TV shows he produced (and there were dozens). The Weinstein Company  still hasn’t decided on a name change, but it has decided not to do any serious lobbying for films,  including the well-regarded The Founder.

And with no backbiting, rumor mongering and mudslinging, that leaves us with the hallmark trait of the show, which turns 90 this year.

Boredom.

This wasn’t a big deal when the gala was a private dinner party, as it was in 1927, held at the regal Roosevelt Hotel. Now, though, it’s a ratings bonanza, Hollywood’s Super Bowl. Which makes its traditional awards, like sound mixing, makeup and honors for best animated, live-action and documentary short film, irrelevant. Or at least unwatchable. I’ve covered the movie industry for more than a decade, and cannot name a single winner from any of those categories, let alone the actual people who went onstage to thank the world.

Eventually, Oscar will have to accept what TV learned long ago: If it runs more than three hours, it’s too long. For a TV show, a movie, a play, a concert, a class and a conversation. Three hours is about the human American capacity for attention span.

Fortunately, the key to brevity couldn’t be simpler: Get to the point. In that spirit, the HollywoodBowles presents its first annual Outtabes, dedicated to films and categories that out to make up the entirety of the back pat annually trumpeted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (plus winners):

The Most Enjoyable Film of 2017: The Lego Batman Movie

Yes, the film industry is overrun by cartoons and comic books movies, which will ultimately be the ruination of moving pictures. For now, though, Warner Bros. put out the most clever, dry-witted skewering of genres. It deserves the Outtabe for this line of dialogue alone:

Computer: What is the password?

G’uzor Batman: Iron Man sucks.

The Most Beautiful Film of 2017: The Shape of Water

Guillermo del Toro’s literal wet dream: A misfits love story between a mute and The Creature of the Black Lagoon. The concept is as unique as the vision, a collection of gray and steel blue hues that out to have the beauty of a federal prison. But from aesthetic to action, del Toro has made the most touching movie of his career — and continues the Latino New Wave Movement that Hollywood historians will eventually note.

The Most Thought-Provoking Film of 2017: Marjorie Prime

While this visual essay on Artificial Intelligence had its thunder stolen by the sublime Her, Prime is even more original. While Her imagined a romantic relationship between human and computer, Prime goes a step further: If your Alexa could use a hologram to replicate the shape, voice and memory of anyone who has passed on, what memories would you feed it? How old you make your dearly departed? Alas, the film will likely suffer the same fate as human memory: to be forgotten.

The Most Over-Hyped Film of 2017: The Post

Why does Hollywood get newspaper movies so wrong? Given how much time the industry spends lying to and cajoling the media, you’d think they would have a better idea of how the fifth estate works. And this looked liked a shoo-in, with Meryl Streep and Ben Bradlee as the heads of my old employer. But the raves for this flick are as misleadingly hyperbolic as the ads for the latest Star Wars. When your lead actor is less handsome and colorful than the man he’s portraying, your movie’s in trouble.

 

 

No Time to Wallow in the Mire

As a reporter who began in Arkansas, I was a quick study in natural disasters. Tornadoes, river floods, even Arkansans.

And I thought I knew fire. Once, my photographer buddy Spencer and I worked a massive house fire. As reporters gathered in front of the house, the wind suddenly shifted. Blue sky became black. And when you turned your back, closed your eyes and coughed your lungs out, there was a weird disorientation. The commander in charge yelled at us to freeze until the wind shifted, lest any of us walk blindly into the inferno.

But nothing compared to the fires this week, particularly the Bel Air blaze, about six miles south of me. The smell was as if the city planned a romantic evening in front of the fireplace and forgot to open the chute. I awoke in the middle of the night from the acrid stench, certain a room was ablaze. My living room was speckled with Esme’s small footprints as she walked inside from the ash-covered back patio.

California isn’t going to break off into the sea. It’s going to burn to the ground.

Still, it got me thinking: Is there any place safe from disaster?

The answer, of course, is no. A recent study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that the safest place to live to avoid a natural disaster is actually Montana’s Sweet Grass County, located just 160 miles southeast of the capital Helena (apparently, volcanoes are no longer an issue).

Conversely, the most dangerous county to live in is Ocean County, N.J. Nestled  along the Jersey Shore, Ocean County offers little in terms of a buffer for severe weather and hurricanes, most recently sustaining massive damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, a storm that displaced as many as 26,000 people in Ocean County alone.

But here is their list, based on frequency (not fatalities). The study, for some reason, does not consider dimwits a natural disaster. I guess that’s more a political study. Mother Nature’s favorite wrath by locale:

  • Alabama — Tornadoes
  • Alaska — Wildfires
  • Arizona — Wildfires
  • Arkansas — Tornadoes
  • California — Earthquakes
  • Colorado — Wildfires
  • Connecticut — Snowstorms
  • Delaware — Snowstorms/Hurricanes
  • Florida — Hurricanes
  • Georgia — Tornadoes
  • Hawaii — Hurricanes
  • Idaho — Wildfires / Flooding
  • Illinois — Tornadoes
  • Indiana — Tornadoes
  • Iowa — Tornadoes
  • Kansas — Tornadoes
  • Kentucky — Tornadoes
  • Louisiana — Hurricanes
  • Maine — Summer Storms
  • Maryland — Hurricanes
  • Massachusetts — Blizzards
  • Michigan — Tornadoes
  • Minnesota — Tornadoes
  • Mississippi — Hurricanes
  • Missouri — Tornadoes
  • Montana — Floods
  • Nebraska — Tornadoes
  • Nevada — Earthquakes
  • New Hampshire — Floods
  • New Jersey — Blizzards
  • New Mexico — Wildfires
  • New York — Blizzards
  • North Carolina — Hurricanes
  • North Dakota — Blizzards
  • Ohio — Tornadoes
  • Oklahoma — Tornadoes
  • Oregon — Floods
  • Pennsylvania — Blizzards
  • Rhode Island — Hurricanes
  • South Carolina — Tornadoes
  • South Dakota — Tornadoes
  • Tennessee — Tornadoes
  • Texas — Tornadoes
  • Utah — Earthquakes
  • Vermont — Floods
  • Virginia — Floods
  • Washington State — Wildfires
  • Washington, D.C. — Blizzards
  • West Virginia — Floods
  • Wisconsin — Tornadoes
  • Wyoming — Landslides

 

 

A Funny Thing Happened…

 

The matriarch of the Bowles family, Thelma, died shortly before Thanksgiving this year. She was 103 years old.

103. The things Thelma saw.

Charlie Chaplin made his first film in 1914. The first stone of the Lincoln Memorial was put into place. Woodrow Wilson signed a declaration commemorating Mother’s Day. Babe Ruth made his major league debut for the Boston Red Sox.

As we do so many of our kin, the Bowles honored Thelma in the little churches where she was raised. The ceremony was followed by the small, somber-but-love-filled reunions that seem to follow all hollowed departures. I used to not understand funerals. Now, it seems, I speak their language as a second tongue.

Which, before this Dinosaur Edition of Factslaps (Trump may soon be receiving a Round Earth or Sound It Out Edition soon), I’d like to make formal my funeral requests. These are my wishes, being of unsound mind and body:

  1. I want to be cremated, and have my ashes donated to science.
  2. I want multiple headstones (who says you can only have one?), dotting the nation’s unsuspecting cemeteries.
  3. I want every tombstone to read “I’m Just Resting My Eyes.”
  4. I want my funeral service to include a break dance contest.

And now, a word from our sponsors:

  • Dinosaurs lived on Earth for 150 million years. We’ve been around for just 0.1% of that time.
  • Dinosaurs are not, technically, extinct, since birds are considered by science as a type of dinosaur.
  • The longest complete dinosaur is the 27 meters (89 feet) long Diplodocus, which was discovered in Wyoming.
  • The smallest known dinosaur was about four inches (10 cm) tall and weighed less than a chihuahua.
  • Most dinosaurs are known from just a single tooth or bone.
  • The word “Dinosaur”comes from the ancient Greek and means “terrible lizard.”
  • If Earth’s history were condensed into 24 hours, life would’ve appeared at 4am, land plants at 10:24pm, dinosaur extinction at 11:41pm and human history would’ve begun at 11:58:43pm.
  • There’s a limestone cliff with more than 5,000 dinosaur footprints in Bolivia, with many dating back 68 million years.
  • The dinosaur noises in the “Jurassic Park” movie were made from recordings of tortoise sex.
  • 40% of Americans think that humansand dinosaurs lived at the same time.