It depends on what the meaning of "isn't" is.

I didn't have the patience to slog through that long article at Vox purporting to answer the question whether Tony Soprano died in the final episode of "The Sopranos," which ends with a cut to black as Tony and his wife and son are sitting around a restaurant table listening to "Don't Stop Believin'" as mysterious doings have been making us feel that we're about to see some carnage.

I blogged the end of the series at the time, in 2007, and I never got sucked into the confusion:

Soooo... I assumed they were all killed and the blackout was just to spare us from seeing it. But over on Television Without Pity, everyone's all confused, saying what happened, curse you David Chase, and I thought my cable went out.

Then, considering the "Don't Stop Believin'" lyric "It goes on and on and on and on," I added: "maybe they do go on and on and on. Or maybe there's going to be a 'Sopranos' movie."

And certainly — I'm adding this now — people would go on and on talking about it, even after James Gandofini died (in 2013), and there's not going to be a movie or some more episodes. It's not like we want more without Tony (though the show did find a way to get on without Livia, when the actress Nancy Marchand died after Season 1).

But I'm catching up on the Vox article this morning by reading Dave Itzkoff's short piece in The New York Times: "David Chase Says Remarks About ‘Sopranos’ Finale Were Misconstrued."

Speaking of cuts and Chase, Itzkoff cuts to the chase: The author of the Vox piece, "Martha P. Nochimson, an author, journalist and professor... when... she directly asked Mr. Chase if Tony was dead." Chase's answer was, in it's entirety, "No he isn’t."

Oscar nominations are out. What's your favorite snub?

Mine is: no foreign language film nomination for "Blue Is the Warmest Color" (discussed on the blog here, here, and here). [ADDED: I thought it was obvious, but since at least one person misread this (and didn't bother to go to my old posts linked there), "favorite snub" means I'm pleased it was snubbed!]

Other nominees for Best Snub by the Motion Picture Academy: Oprah. Robert Redford. Tom Hanks.

Worst snub? James Gandolfini! The man died! Sorry. Just kidding. No extra credit for dying. I appreciate the neutrality.

Here's the full list of nominees, announced this morning. I haven't seen any of these movies, but we would like to see "Inside Llewyn Davis," if we ever feel like showing up at a specific time and sitting in the dark for 2 hours. (Who does that anymore? Don't you want control over your time (which you always have with TV)?) "Inside Llewyn Davis" only got Cinematography and Sound Mixing, anyway, so it's more of a Snubbed by the Oscars than an Oscar-approved thing anyway.

I know, one answer to my parenthetical question above is: You've got to go to the theater for the fully immersive, giant-screen, 3D experience. I considered seeing "Gravity" in the theater for that reason. ("Gravity" got 10 nominations, equaled only by the good-for-you (as opposed to feel-good) flick "12 Years a Slave.") But I couldn't force myself to go. Like "12 Years a Slave," it felt like something I was supposed to do. When I really thought about how I wanted to spend my time, sitting through that wasn't the answer.

Creating this aura around a film that it must be seen — it's a must-see movie — is exactly what the promoters want to do, and it must work on many people, perhaps the kind of people — young people? — who see a large number of movies. Target the big spenders. Use the pitch that works with the people who spend the most money on the product. But to me, feeling like I'm supposed to do something — unless I'm legally required to do it — sets up my resistance.

CORRECTION: "12 Years a Slave" only got 9 nominations. It's "American Hustle" that equaled "Gravity" with 10.

"It may be just me, but the Drive-Bys are not talking about the amnesty bill vote from yesterday very much."

Said Rush Limbaugh today. (Drive-Bys = mainstream media.)

I think they don't want to report what's in this bill. They don't want people concerned with Alec Baldwin's latest rant to know what's in this. They don't want people occupied, focused on Paula Deen to know what's in this. They don't want people who can't believe the star witness at the Zimmerman case....

The latest is that it was reported by some British newspaper that Alec Baldwin's wife was tweeting smoothie recipes at the funeral for James Gandolfini.... Paula Deen said the N-word 30 years ago, and has probably cried 15 buckets of tears about it all week long...

"Someone wrote that my wife was tweeting at a funeral. Hey. That’s not true. But I’m gonna tweet at your funeral."

Tweets Alec Baldwin (referring to the James Gandolfini funeral).

More tweets from Baldwin's now-deleted Twitter account at the link. And I'd just like to say... in the future, we will be tweeting and texting from funerals. Won't we?

Will it be okay, once we get used to it, to tweet at funerals?
	Yes, funerals and tweeting are all part of life. Celebrate humanity.
	No, never. It's callous and crude. Put the devices away for once.
	Maybe, if the person who died was very old or if there's reason not to be all that morose.
	Maybe, if the tweets are about the deceased in a cool or sweet way.
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Wake up to what Drudge is saying about Hillary.

The link on "921 days to go..." goes to the cheerful Washington Post headline "Welcome to the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential speculation sweepstakes," which is full of babble like "It’s a double-edged sword. Early hype can deter viable challenges, but it also invites the kind of scrutiny that can deflate a bubble very quickly."

"921 days to go" seems like a fair enough teaser, but subliminally, what is Drudge doing? I suspect he's saying she's got a long, long way to go, and — look — she's already 65. She'll be 69 by Election Day 2016. I think he's working the too old message.

My suspicion arises before I read the next line:



So connect that photo of Hillary to the big, old dead body of James Gandolfini. And also worry about whether the Clintons give special preference to Hollywood celebrities... and it's okay with Drudge if you merge Gandolfini with a Mafia crime boss.

If you think I'm overeager to attribute meaning to the photos and juxtapositions at The Drudge Report, remember that Drudge actively and obviously played the Hillary is too old game in December 2007. Here's the notorious photograph:



... under the headline "The Toll of a Campaign."

Is she up for another campaign, 6 years later, with 3 years of running, trying to convince us that she can labor on for 4 years after that? I don't know but I fully expect Drudge to inject those doubts into us. He'll try to do it subliminally, so listen to me, and you'll at least be able to be conscious as Dr. Matt approaches with his syringe full of doubt.

"Gandolfini’s death prompts rampant fat-shaming."

Says Salon, displaying lots of tweets. I question whether that stuff ought to be called "shaming." What I'm seeing looks more like This should be a wake-up call to anyone who's fat.

[Fill in the blank]-shaming is a meme, and it includes defining shame downward. I get that. But let's think about whether we want "shaming" to be a commodious category or a narrow one. I'm inclined to recommend narrow, but I'm highly influenced by the time I spent at the Wisconsin protests, amongst angry people chanting "Shame, shame, shame."

In this "fat-shaming" example, we might say the death of a respected actor ought to be an occasion to praise him, and not to offer up ideas about what he might have done to avert his fate. But I don't hear shaming in that. I hear this wish to avoid death: If only he'd lost weight, he might not have died. And: Fat people need to lose weight, or they might die too. That's more fear than shame.

The person who calls the response "shame"... what's his motivation? He might think "fat-shaming" is a funny, trendy way to refer to any statement about anyone being fat. But I think it's more like: Don't you dare talk about how anyone is fat, because fat people now have a way to bounce what we hear as an insult right back at you.

Goodbye to James Gandolfini.

Dead at 51, of an apparent heart attack.

This is very sad. What a great actor! "The Sopranos" was — must I add perhaps? — the greatest television show of all time, largely because of him.

ADDED: Here's the NYT obituary.

James Joseph Gandolfini Jr. was born in Westwood, N.J., on Sept. 18, 1961. His father was an Italian immigrant who held a number of jobs, including janitor, bricklayer and cement mason. His mother, Santa, was a high school lunch lady....

He had an impressive list of character-acting credits but he was largely unknown to the general public when David Chase cast him in “The Sopranos” in 1999.

“I thought it was a wonderful script,” Mr. Gandolfini told Newsweek in 2001, recalling his audition. “I thought, ‘I can do this.’ But I thought they would hire someone a little more debonair, shall we say. A little more appealing to the eye.”

AND: The show's creator, David Chase, said: "He was a genius... Anyone who saw him even in the smallest of his performances knows that. He is one of the greatest actors of this or any time. A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes. I remember telling him many times, 'You don’t get it. You’re like Mozart.' There would be silence at the other end of the phone."

(I just watched the first episode again. So brilliant!)

"'I’m still in love with Edie,' says James Gandolfini of Edie Falco, the woman who played his television wife, Carmela..."

Remembering "The Sopranos":

“Of course, I love my wife, but I’m in love with Edie. I don’t know if I’m in love with Carmela or Edie or both. I’m in love with her.” Falco reveals a similar possessiveness over her HBO-wedded husband. “It was weird to sit down at a table read with the actresses playing Tony’s girlfriends. Occasionally I would get a sharp twinge at the back of my neck,” she recalls. “I’d have to kind of keep my bearings and remember, No, no, no, this is your job, and at home you have your life. Even years later, I remember when I saw Jim in God of Carnage on Broadway, and he was Marcia Gay Harden’s husband, and I had this ‘How come I have to be O.K. with this?’ kind of feeling.”

Questions after watching last night's "Sopranos" and "Big Love."

1. Is Tony Soprano going to die? I don't know, but people keep Googling their way to this blog looking for the answer, so please speculate in the comments.

2. Does James Gandolfini enjoy playing a reclining man in a hospital gown with a gaping wound on his mountainous belly? Or is wandering around in dream sequences without any other actors satisfying enough? Are they punishing Gandolfini with these scripts?

3. Are these scripts a gift to Edie Falco? Is the actress groveling for an Emmy with all of these harshly lit, no-makeup bedside scenes?

4. Did "The Sopranos" and "Big Love" coordinate their Episode 2s so that we could spend as much time as possible in hospitals?

5. Do you think the arsenic is coming from the mysterious liquid Harry Dean Stanton keeps delivering to Bruce Dern? I don't. It's too obvious!

6. Don't you love Harry Dean Stanton and Bruce Dern?

7. Bill Henrickson is going to get arrested, right? The questions are: When? And who's going to bring the law down upon him? Tina Majorino?

8. Do you like the scenes that show Barb, Nicki, and Margene in their intra-household strife? Or are the scriptwriters a little desperate in looking for ways to illustrate this -- what with the loud noises and open doors during sex acts?

9. How does Chloe Sevigny convey so much while looking so impassive? Don't you love to hate Nicki?

New Interpretation of Soprano's Dream.

Now I've rewatched the episode of The Sopranos I wrote about yesterday, and I have also been reminded that they are still doing another season (something I'd previously read they were not). Since there is to be a final set of 10 episodes next year, that affects what this season's pay off can be. It doesn't mean Tony can't get killed, though. It's shocking to kill off a lead character early (Psycho is the classic example), which might make it a good plot idea. Godfather II went on and was quite great without Marlon Brando. Also, since Gandolfini has been troublesome, that makes killing his character compelling for non-plot reasons. Let Buscemi take over!

So here's my interpretation of the dream and new prediction. In the dream, two key things happen to Tony. First, he's being instructed to do something (the phone call at the beginning, the constant pointing), which appears to be to kill someone. Second, he's constantly experiencing impotence (he doesn't have a gun, the gun malfunctions, Christopher takes his Toblerone, he loses his teeth, the coach who's chewing him out has a big cigar). I think the person to kill, based especially on the way he is driven up to the house in the car of death, is Carmela. When he is in the house with Carmela, he's on a horse, which she disapproves of. His being on the big horse obviously represents having sex (there are several other incidents in the dream that combine riding a horse and having sex). The horse is another one of the many phallic symbols in the dream. But here he is successfully riding the horse and approaching his wife: but she turns him away. In his real life, his horse was burned to death, and in this episode, before the dream, his girlfriend is badly burned. So the horse represents both sex and death. One could say the dream means he must either kill or get back together with Carmela. In the dream, there is also the idea of another man doing the murder instead of him. His cousin (Tony/Steve Buscemi) arrives at a scene and shoots a man before Tony Soprano can, so I think there is a good chance that cousin Tony will arrive at the scene and kill Carmela before Tony is able to. Tony will have a failure of will, as he had 20 years ago, when his impotence left his cousin to do a crime without him, to his endless shame. His failure as a man is tightly interwoven with the story of cousin Tony, so the key role in the end for cousin Tony makes sense.

The appearance of Annette Bening in the dream reinforces the prediction that Tony will try but fail to kill Carmela. Bening appears in the dream as herself. Other movie stars appear in the dream, but on a TV screen, in their roles--most notably, Gary Cooper, in High Noon, who is the model of a man who has some killing to do and does it. Bening appears in person, at the restaurant, and interacts with Tony. Now, clearly, Bening is most associated with the movie American Beauty, which has a marital breakup at its center and ends with the shooting death of the husband. In the end of American Beauty, Bening drives up to the house with a gun--she's got herself a gun--yet it is someone else who gets there first and does the shooting. Now this might mean that Carmela is going to be the one who tries to kill Tony, but I think all of the impotence symbolism in the dream suggests Tony will go to kill Carmela and cousin Tony will end up shooting her. It's hard to believe Carmela will die, but it would be very shocking, and there could be a great death scene. Emmy for Edie Falco. Oh, what the hell: let Tony die too (or instead). The new season: it's all about Steve Buscemi, the new boss, who hung an I'm-the-boss plaque on his wall in this episode.