Huh. That line’s not as good when it’s not being delivered by the Governor of California in a thick Austrian accent. Alas.

Anyway…here’s the question of the day: it’s 2010. “Survivor” has been on the air for ten years now. Reality is firmly established as a legitimate TV genre, not just a fad. How is it possible that there is not a reality TV series on the air today based on/inspired by/ripped off from the Stephen King novella/Governor of California sci-fi action movie The Running Man?

Okay, so you have to remove the whole “ghoulish, trumped-up public execution of convicted criminals” angle from the movie, obviously. But you get yourself some contestants, offer a million-dollar prize for a contestant who reaches a pre-determined goal “alive” (“alive” being determined by some means – maybe something like flag football, or like a paintball/laser tag kind of thing), you get yourself some colorful larger-than-life characters as “hunters” or “gladiators” or whatever you choose to call them, buy the biggest warehouse space you can find in Van Nuys or wherever and convert it into the Game Zone studio, and…well, how does this not work? Who would not watch this?

It’s got a hook for fans of “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race.” It’s got a hook for sports fans, especially if you get some retired pro athletes to play hunters. If you take the movie as your example and go more outlandish with your hunters – give them themes and characters to play – you’ll draw in the people who like pro wrestling.

Seriously, how is this not already on the air? I can’t be the first person with this idea, can I?

Best Picture – The Hurt Locker. I think that the two-dimensional foundation behind Avatar’s three-dimensional facade is just too much of an anchor, and Hurt Locker’s the best of the bunch. Whatever negative buzz was generated by the idiot producer’s campaign e-mails* came too late to hurt the film amongst voters.

Best Director – Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker. Just as it felt like it was time, at last, for Barack Obama to come along and break up the steady parade of White Guys in the Oval Office, it’s about damn time for a woman to win an Oscar for directing a movie.

Best Actor – Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart. Haven’t seen the movie, but Jeff Bridges, a constantly underrated workhorse of an actor is seriously overdue for some Oscar love.

Best Actress – Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia. I don’t think I want to live in a world where Meryl Streep winning an Oscar and Sandra Bullock not winning one is considered a major upset. It troubles me. Again, I haven’t seen either film. But the idea of Sandra Bullock, of all people, winning an award for the quality of her acting just does not compute for me. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one go either way, but I just can’t bring myself to predict a win for Sandra Bullock.

Best Supporting Actor – Christoph Waltz, Inglorious Basterds. The supporting awards seem to be the mortal locks of the night this time around. I haven’t seen ANYONE say the award will go to anyone but Waltz.

Best Supporting Actress – Mo’Nique, Precious: I Refuse to Dignify the Rest of This Movie’s Absurd Title By Typing it Here. At long last correcting the grave injustice of 2004, when the Academy failed to even nominate her for her outstanding turn as Jamiqua in Soul Plane. Fun fact: it’s hard to believe now, but Soul Plane didn’t receive a single Oscar nomination!

Best Original Screenplay – Quentin Tarantino, Inglorious Basterds.

Best Adapted Screenplay – Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air. Because at least one of the screenplay awards ALWAYS has to play as consolation prize for a highly acclaimed movie that’s not going to win any of the other awards it’s up for. Usually, this is the Original Screenplay category – and if Mark Boal wins for Hurt Locker, look for Avatar to win Best Picture in the classic Citizen Kane/How Green Was My Valley or Pulp Fiction/Forrest Gump, “Original Screenplay as Consolation Prize for the Real Best Film of the Best Picture Nominees That’s Getting Screwed by a Lesser But Often Highly Profitable Movie Winning Best Picture” scenario.

* – A controversy made all the more bizarre and hilarious by the implication behind shunning this guy that Academy Awards voting is somehow a process just swimming in integrity and the producer sending out these e-mails has somehow violated this sanctified tradition.

The issue today, my friends, is Oscar Justice. In the Telegraph, Tom Chivers offers his list of the 10 Worst Injustices in Oscar History. He hits several of the standards right on the head – the classic case of How Green Was My Valley winning over Citizen Kane, the baffling wins of Rocky over Taxi Driver, Ordinary People over Raging Bull, Dances With Wolves over GoodFellas (comprising the Academy’s astounding “Scorsese Got Screwed” Trifecta), and Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction. He makes only passing mention of the utterly unforgivable triumph of Crash over Brokeback Mountain.

I will disagree with him on a couple of points, however. First off, I’ve never seen Kramer vs. Kramer, but I am of the opinion (and I know that I’m a lonely dissenting voice on this) that Apocalypse Now is an overrated, overwrought movie that’s reasonably good up until the third act, when it completely goes off the rails.

And the real heart of the matter here: I will defend to my dying day the choice of Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan as the Best Picture of 1998.

I’m not saying that Saving Private Ryan is bad by any means. The Normandy invasion sequence and the battle at the end are both terrific scenes; bold, fearless filmmaking that deserves to be remembered as two of the best scenes of their kind ever shot. What comes in between, though, is essentially an A-List “Group of WWII GIs sent on a suicide mission behind enemy lines” picture. It’s very well-done, probably the very best example of its genre, but it’s essentially a very well-done version of The Guns of Navarone or The Heroes of Telemark. And then there’s the framing sequence. Oh, my God, the awful, awful, awful awfulness of the ham-fisted and pointless “I’m going to fool you into needlessly believing that this is Old Tom Hanks when it’s actually Old Matt Damon” framing sequence nearly derails the entire enterprise.

Shakespeare in Love, by contrast, is something unique. The only other movie I can think of that so merrily makes use of anachronism for comic and/or dramatic effect is the underrated A Knight’s Tale (which has the awfulness of Shannyn Sossamon hanging around its neck like an anchor, one of many factors that prevent its reaching the dizzying heights of Shakespeare in Love, but I digress). You must admit that a movie set in Elizabethan England which features a waiter in a tavern telling customers, “Our special today is a pig’s foot marinated in juniper berry vinegar, served on a buckwheat pancake…” and has Shakespeare visiting a therapist and telling him, “My quill is broken” was made with a certain gutsiness that deserves reward. That gutsiness allows the movie to present us with the almost heretical idea of William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, the bedrock foundation of English-language literature, being a hack churning out “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter” (“Good title!”) until he encounters his muse. It may be near-heresy, but it works, and the idea is so appealing, so utterly delightful, that we come away almost imagining that this is how it must actually have happened, even though we know better.

Is Shakespeare in Love dead-serious and dramatic and made in honor of those who fought and died for our freedoms? Certainly not. Is it bright and witty and beautiful to behold? Absolutely. Does it feature indelible performances, memorable lines and engaging characters? Definitely. Does it stick in your mind as something special, something unique, something worth remembering and watching again? Well, I can’t speak for you, but for me? Most certainly.

There are actors out there who can do accents. Cate Blanchett comes to mind right away, having capably transformed her native Aussie lilt into just about anything you can imagine, from standard-issue Hollywood American to English to a dead-on recreation of the distinctive tones of Katharine Hepburn and even a cartoonish-but-consistent Russian in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. If you’re familiar with Hugh Laurie only from “House,” it’s a bit jarring to hear him speaking with his native British accent because his American accent is so convincing.

There are actors out there who don’t do accents. Ben Affleck cleans up his diction a bit to play Ned Alleyn in Shakespeare in Love, but wisely avoids any serious attempt at a British accent. He brings so much gusto to the role that you never really notice. Kevin Costner dropped his half-hearted effort at a British accent halfway into Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and played Robin Hood with his usual stoned-surfer-boy voice. I won’t say it works, exactly, but it’s better than the alternative.

And then there are those actors who shouldn’t do accents but do anyway. Standing out among these is Leonardo DiCaprio. Leo’s a fine actor and for the most part turns in A-grade work in in Shutter Island.

The thing that sticks out, though, sadly, is his awful, hammy effort at a Boston accent, a holdover from his previous collaboration with Scorsese, The Departed. I was left wondering whether perhaps Leo had studied the truly dreadful Boston accent attempted by fellow good-actor-who-shouldn’t-do-accents-but-does-anyway actor Tom Hanks while they were filming Catch Me if You Can. I understand that the accent actually highlights something of a key plot point, but it sounded mostly like Jimmy Fallon and Rachel Dratch on SNL shouting “You’re retaaaaahded!” “No, you aaaaah!” at one another.

As for the film itself, Shutter Island is quite good. It definitely falls into the C-level of the Scorsese canon – it’s slick, commercial work more along the lines of The Color of Money and Cape Fear than his A-list classics (GoodFellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver) or his B-list great-but-maybe-not classics (where I’d say all of his previous work with DiCaprio – Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed – falls). Fortunately, we can grade on a curve and C-level Scorsese is easily the equal of a solid B from most other filmmakers. That is to say, this isn’t Scorsese at his best, but even when he’s not at his best he’s still very good.

I guess, ultimately, I was hoping for a little more out of the film. It’s very good, and definitely worth seeing, but I’ve been blown away enough times by Scorsese that to see a film where he doesn’t blow me away is a little disappointing. This is a disjointed effort at a movie review because I’m trying to go in two directions at once. Purely as a movie, independent of all other concerns, it’s an excellent example of the puzzle-box thriller, by turns exciting, frightening and confusing with some good twisty-turny kind of stuff. But if I look at it as a Scorsese Movie rather than as just a movie, it falls a little flat.

Beautiful, but empty.

I’m linking you to Linda Holmes’ Monkey See blog on NPR again – second time in as many posts – because she articulates something I’ve been trying to say for a while: Avatar is, plain and simple, not Best Picture material. She compares it to The Blind Side, about the Best Pic nomination of which there have been howls of protest from critics and serious movie buffs. I haven’t seen The Blind Side and – barring it being the in-flight movie on a very long plane ride wherein I’ve already read the complimentary airline magazine and thoroughly perused and mocked the absurd objects for sale in the SkyMall catalog and have nothing else to read and dead batteries in my iPod and my laptop – I will almost certainly not see it, so I can’t really successfully judge its merits.

But, yeah: Avatar. Did I like it? Yeah. Did I love it? Not really. Did anyone really love it? I don’t know. I guess. There were those people in some news stories a while back who are all depressed or something because they can’t live on Pandora in real life, and they must have loved it. But there are also people who write “Jedi” as their religion on census forms and people who claim to be really real for reals vampires, too. Obviously, it’s made a boatload of money at the box office, the kind of money you don’t get without repeat viewings, so people at the very least want to look at it again.

And that’s the thing: the movie is really something you look at. It was utterly gorgeous to behold, and its slam-dunk Oscar wins for Art Direction and Visual Effects will be well-deserved. But beyond a couple of indelible images, a couple of months after seeing it, the movie doesn’t really stick out in my head. Weeks after watching The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air, the performances and human moments in those movies have really stuck with me. The jittery intensity of Hurt Locker, the magnetic way that Jeremy Renner ably handled the unique challenge of playing an addict who didn’t use any drugs, the way it worked as both an action movie and a closely-observed character study…that’s memorable. The terrific performances in Up in the Air by George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick (and, while we’re at it, Jason Bateman and JK Simmons in smaller roles), the delicate balance Jason Reitman achieved between funny and sad, that moment when Clooney shows up in Chicago and you get walloped out of nowhere by a plot twist that is both completely unexpected and perfectly logical…that’s memorable. That’s what Best Pictures are supposed to be made up of.

What is Avatar missing? Here’s a hint: tell me something interesting about Jake Sully, the hero of Avatar. Tell me something about his personality. He’s lost the use of his legs. He’s replacing his dead brother in service on Pandora. He ostensibly falls in love with the Na’vi in general and one in particular. And…? That’s what he does, but, what’s he like? Try the same thing with the heroine, Neytiri. What’s she like? What, for that matter, are any of the Na’vi like? Do any of them have any internal life at all, or do they all exist as mere Noble Savage stereotypes to teach Jake about harmony with nature and show him the error of human ways? What about Colonel Assholington (I don’t remember the character’s actual name, but in a movie where the writer/director decides that literally using the term “unobtanium” for the film’s MacGuffin is an acceptable choice, he might as well have been named Colonel Assholington), or the Corporate Suit Guy played by Giovanni Ribisi? Why are they such dicks? “Because the script requires them to be” isn’t a good enough answer for central characters in what is ostensibly Best Picture material. I want a character in a movie to feel like a real person, and to achieve that, they require personality.

For all the depth of the 3D images on-screen, the characters in the script have two dimensions at most. And while showing me beautiful sights is fine, a perfectly laudable aim for a movie, I expect more from something that has a legitimate shot at being crowned the Best Picture of 2009. I don’t really see it as the sort of technical achievement that will change the way we see movies that some people are claiming it is – I don’t think Avatar did anything that the previous FX-extravaganza Best Picture winner, The Return of the King, didn’t do first and as well or better. It happened to be the first in the wave of new 3D movies to hit it really big, but that’s sort of the Columbus Day problem, for me – Columbus happened to be the first guy in a boat to bump into the Americas, but someone else would have done it within a few years of him. Same thing here – immersive 3D is the trend in movies right now, and it may stick around or it may fade away (again), but if Avatar hadn’t hit it big, then another 3D movie would have.

Avatar, in short, is the very definition of spectacle – it thrills us while we’re watching it, but in the end it leaves us (or at least me) unmoved. I guess my ultimate judgment comes down to this: after we saw Up in the Air and after we watched The Hurt Locker, Emily and I had long conversations about them, parsing out our thoughts and feelings about what we had just seen – in the case of Hurt Locker, especially, we spent the entire hour-long drive up to my parents’ house discussing the movie. After we saw Avatar, the conversation was, more or less, “Boy, that sure was pretty.” “Yup, sure was.” “It was about what I expected it to be…so…what should we do tomorrow?” Roger Ebert once offered as a definition of a great movie one that engages your right brain while you’re watching it and your left brain after it’s over. Up in the Air and The Hurt Locker (among others this year) did that. Avatar simply does not live up to the second half of the definition.

Over at NPR’s Monkey See pop-culture blog, Linda Holmes interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson (who’s promoting his new NOVA special, The Pluto Files), who as always has interesting stuff to say.

In particular, he says this:

The center line of science literacy — which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point — is how you think. If someone comes up to you and says, “I have these crystals. If you rub them together, it will heal your ailments.” I don’t want you to say, “Oh, that’s bunk.” No. Because extreme skepticism, such as that, and extreme gullibility are two equal ways of not having to think at all. And I don’t think I’m the first to say that.

So the thought is — what’s your next thought when someone approaches you with the crystals? It should be, “How does that work? How do you know it works? By what mechanism does it work? How much does it cost? Where did you get the crystals? What evidence do you have that it would work on me?” Start asking questions. And people who are just charlatans out there, or are self-deluded, you’ll reach a point where they don’t have answers to those questions, because if they did, they wouldn’t be trying to sell you crystals.

And this:

Parents come up to me, “How do I get my kids interested in science?” They’re already interested in science. Just stop beating it out of them.

People fret and wring their hands and wonder about why the USA is doing so poorly in science education compared to so many other countries. And the answer, as it turns out, is pretty simple: because we’re not listening to people like Neil deGrasse Tyson. Because we still, to this day, buy at least somewhat into the notion that children should be seen and not heard. That “well-behaved” is better than curious and skeptical. That kids need to be able to regurgitate information by rote on standardized tests to prove that they’re learning, but not that they should at any point be allowed or encouraged to think for themselves and question what they’re being taught.

That’s the thing about science: it’s not biology, chemistry, physics, or at least, it’s not just those things. Science is how you look at the world and how you treat the information you’re given. Science is saying, “That doesn’t sound right to me, I need to figure this out for myself” when someone presents something as fact. Scientific literacy, as Tyson defines it, is about being able and willing to ask questions. As such, scientific literacy is important not just when you’re in biology, chemistry and physics classes, but in language arts and social studies and everyday out-of-school life. In short, teaching scientific literacy means teaching critical thinking.

And all of this means, as Tyson observes, not stifling the natural curiosity and exploratory nature of children. And this means, for example, not banning the dictionary because you’re worried that children will discover “words of concern” in it. It means not being afraid of ideas, no matter how much we disagree with them or think they’re wrong or stupid or perhaps even dangerous. Children who are trained to be scientifically literate are children with a finely-tuned bullshit detector, and the ideas that are wrong or stupid just don’t stand up to scrutiny from a finely-tuned bullshit detector. And any idea that fails under scrutiny like that can’t really be all that dangerous, can it?

Tip o' the hat for this post's title to Randall Munroe's xkcd.

After picking up yet another set of brand new phone books from our front step this morning, probably already the ninth or tenth new set of phone books delivered unbidden to our house this year so far (these ones are en Español, no less), I was inspired with a brilliant idea for a new business. Here’s our hypothetical Yellow Pages/Qwest Dex/Verizon/Yellowbook ad:

Page from proposed new South Dakota public high school science textbook.

Apparently, according to the South Dakota House of Representatives, through legislation (and maybe clapping your hands and saying “I do believe, I do believe, I do I do I do believe!”), you can make any damn foolish thing you want into the truth. They’re trying to legislate away climate change not by demanding greater fuel efficiency standards for cars or creating incentives for innovation in the field of renewable energy, but by making sure that – as with another issue that is divided along similar lines – science need not necessarily be taught in South Dakotan science classrooms.

I, for one, applaud this effort, and think there’s so much more we could accomplish through such means. To this end, I’ve taken the liberty of preparing another resolution for your perusal. Someone out there in South Dakota, call up your legislators and point them to this blog entry! They’ll want to see this:

A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Calling for the balanced teaching of models of the Earth and its place in the “Solar” System in the public schools of South Dakota

WHEREAS, it really, really, really looks like the Sun and the planets are orbiting the Earth when you look up in the sky; and

WHEREAS, this viewpoint is enhanced if you willfully and purposefully ignore the evidence presented by men and women who have devoted their lives to studying such things, using tools designed and intended for the purpose; and

WHEREAS, the concept that there’s something called “gravity” that is a fundamental force of the universe and which governs the way that bodies of mass interact with one another is, after all, only a theory; and

WHEREAS, nobody’s even ever actually been to the Sun and it therefore remains entirely unproven that the Sun isn’t actually a chariot driven by the god Helios; and

WHEREAS, Aristotle and Ptolemy were perfectly cromulent scientists, every bit as much as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Isaac Newton; and

WHEREAS, you can probably find lots and lots of people who call themselves scientists who would be willing to make the claim that the Earth is the center of the universe and probably even believe they have lots of facts to back up this idea; and

WHEREAS, the idea that humanity is entirely incidental to the existence of the universe rather than the very purpose for the existence of the universe is weird, scary and unsettling to many people:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to cosmology include the following:

(1) That the so-called “Heliocentric/Copernican” model of the so-called “Solar” System is only a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;

(2) That there are a variety of theories based on the idea that the Earth is, in fact, the center of the universe and that what forces cause the Sun and the planets to orbit the Earth are entirely speculative;

(3) That the debate on cosmological models has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of Helio- and/or Geocentric models of the universe; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Legislature urges that all instruction on the theory of gravity be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.

Tip o’ the cap to the Bad Astronomer, without whom I would have gone through life blissfully unaware of the outrageous stupidity of the South Dakota state legislature.

…there’s a lot of truth to be found in this:

Cory Doctorow has some further discussion of this image and its concepts over at BoingBoing.

Okay, I hate the trailers on a DVD*, and they make me purple with rage when they’re unskippable (though I don’t think they’ve managed to create trailers that you can’t fast-forward thru as of yet). I hate them even more when they’re listed on the DVD’s Special Features menu with some sort of vague name like “Bonus Previews” or something, so when you choose them, you’re not only watching an ad for a movie you don’t care about, but you’ve been suckered into watching it. I despise the various FBI Anti-Piracy warnings – on a disc that, as Doctorow observes, I’ve legally purchased or rented – invariably followed up by disclaimers in three or four different languages wasting a further 30 seconds each informing me that that I can’t sue Warner Bros. for things in the interviews and commentary contained on the disc that may offend me. And after that, there is often, these days, yet another little thirty-second-to-a-minute bit where they’ve made another little movie – either new material or cleverly-edited clips from an old movie – to remind me that piracy is wrong, wrong, wrong. But none of that, amazingly, is what bugs me the most.

* Though, curiously, the trailers are one of my favorite parts of actually going to the movies. I guess I expect more control over the movie-watching experience in my living room. At the theater, it feels like an essential part of the experience; at home it feels like being forced to watch ads when I’ve got a remote with a gawt-dammed “Chapter Skip” button on it in my hand.

What bugs me the most is the fucking animated menu screen, often listed on the back of the case as a selling point for the disc. It makes me long for the old days (can something only ten years old be considered the old days?) where the DVD menu was completely static. Yes, it looks kind of quaint on the screen when you pop in an old disc these days and you get a static image and no music or sound effects, but isn’t it mighty nice? But now, oh, no. The people putting together the DVD have to dazzle you with their clever and innovative menus. I’m certainly an advocate of presenting information in clever and interesting ways – but I contend that a DVD menu is not, in fact, a presentation of information, but rather a means to an end. I put the disc in the player because I want to watch a movie, not because I want to check out the latest advances in DVD menu technology.

I mean…I mean…I sit through all the other extraneous bullshit to arrive at the menu screen, and then I have to wait thirty seconds or a minute more for the menu screen to even let me select an option? And then once I hit “Play Movie,” I get thirty seconds more of “animated menu” bullshit before the movie actually starts? It just ain’t right.

The menu – like a non-skippable Flash-animated splash page for a website – is content-free. I understand it can be pretty, and it can be interesting to look at…but at the same time, I shouldn’t have to sit through a pointless 45-second-long animated tour of Cerebro if I want to pop the disc in the player and watch X-Men for the tenth time. Hell, I shouldn’t have to sit through it if I want to watch a movie for the first time. If it doesn’t improve the experience of using the disc, if it only increases the frustration factor of using the disc, why is it included?

I don’t know. Maybe static imagery and silence is too 20th-century. Maybe I’m destined to be an old curmudgeon, complaining about how things were better back in my day, when it was okay if something wasn’t moving and flashing and beeping and playing music and sound effects for us at all times. But I’d like to think I’m not alone in my curmudgeonity.

Look at them!

Behold them in all their glory!

You cannot look away!

Norwegian.

Curling.

PANTS.

Women want them. Men want to be them.