About those Oscars.

I haven't blogged about the Oscar nominations. I've been a little distracted! Scroll down if you're new or just checking in after a long while. I feel it's my obligation to say something about the Oscars. I was all over the Golden Globes quite recently. But the truth is, the only movie I've seen of the ones in contention is "Finding Neverland" and I didn't think it was very good. I did see "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and wish Kate Winslet well. I've only seen a few movies this year. My favorite was "Kill Bill -- Volume 2" which doesn't seem to have gotten anything, nothing significant anyway. The Academy stays in its same old rut, genuflecting at historical dramas and biopics. How tedious! Where is the nomination for Uma Thurman? Why should I care what you people think?

Looking for a standard Oscar nominations link, I ran across this article from Stephen Holden in tomorrow's NYT:

I wonder if I'm the only moviegoer who was suffering from Oscar fatigue even before the Academy Awards nominations were announced yesterday morning. After the Golden Globes, the People's Choice awards, the critics' awards and the guild nominations, any savvy handicapper could have boiled down the information and come up with a list of 95 percent of the nominees in the major categories.

Yet that doesn't say quite what I'm feeling. I'm tired -- and I feel as though I've been tired for decades -- of the Oscar-worthy projects that extract Oscar recognition from the Hollywood fossils. If you have your wits about you and you think about what you really want, maybe you won't want to go to the movies. It's all so overplanned and artificial. Actors! Do I even like them at all anymore?

UPDATE: I wrote this post at 10 at night after having had only 2 hours of sleep the previous night and still feeling the after effects of my car crash on Sunday. Now, I'm reading it on Wednesday, after a great long night's sleep. First thing I notice: I said I liked Uma Thurman, but I spelled her name wrong. Corrected. Second, I meant to express irritation "for the Oscar-worthy projects that extract Oscar recognition from the Hollywood fossils," but I wrote "Oscar-worthy projects that extract Oscar recognition for the Hollywood fossils," which is an even worse sort of mistake because it makes sense and just means something I didn't intend to say. Looking at the statement this morning, however, I'm thinking I could intend that statement to some extent. There seems to be an attempt going on to extract Oscar recognition for the "Hollywood fossils" Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, but I wouldn't have used that epithet against them intentionally.

I will say though that Clint Eastwood looks horrible on the cover of the new Entertainment Weekly. When I saw it, I exclaimed "he looks like a snake head" about five times. Would grizzled old Clint get a face lift? Instead of a face full of interesting lines and crags, his thinned out skin is stretched back, forming a taut, glossy surface that does not look human. And it sure doesn't help that his ears are so far back that they are scarcely visible in the full frontal view. Why? Why? Why would someone that old do something that can't make him look young, but only make him look very weird? Why would an actor who is only suited to play weathered old men ruin his face -- his instrument -- in search of an unattainable look that belongs to men who belong in roles he could never have anyway? And why did Clint Eastwood get a nomination instead of Paul Giamatti? Maybe the old fossils look at his new, old snake head and see themselves.