Name Dropping

Post-mortems on the recent announcement of the Golden Globe nominations for movies and television were predictably less about the heavy favorites that predictably got much of the love (The King's Speech, the nominee leader with 7, followed by The Social Network and The Fighter with 6 each), then several critical darlings that got royally screwed. Foremost among them are the Coen Brothers’ expansive remake of True Grit, which was shut out; and Ben Affleck’s gritty bank-robbery drama The Town, which scored but a single nomination (Jeremy Renner’s supporting turn).
And then, of course, came the howlers—out-of-left-field nominations for performances and films that seem to make no sense whatsoever, until you remember that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an assemblage of less than 100 entertainment journalists and freelancers, is not taken all that seriously. And it never will be when it produces multiple nominations for the likes of pedestrian works such as The Tourist and Burlesque. As predictors for eventual Oscar nominees and winners, the Golden Globes has a mixed record—its Best Picture last year, for example, was Avatar, while the Oscars chose The Hurt Locker), but what Globes recognition does yield is enormous promotional value for print and broadcast Oscar campaigns. As for the television selections—for shame HFPA for overlooking Blue Bloods—in terms of influencing the Emmys, less so.
If there is one odds-on, overwhelming Oscar favorite this year, it is Colin Firth as Best Actor for The King’s Speech. It is a stunning, richly textured and emotionally charged performance (as England’s future King George VI, suffering from a severe stammering problem) in a handsomely mounted, crowd-pleasing film that doesn’t leave many dry eyes in the house. No less effective is Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, the unorthodox Australian therapist who helps the monarch.
Rush (a previous Best Actor winner for Shine!) will almost certainly get a Supporting Actor nomination, and that will beg the question for many as to why exactly Rush, who shares above-the-title screen credit with Firth and seems to have as much screen time as him, shouldn’t be nominated in a lead rather than supporting category. But then we know the answer, don’t we? The producers won’t want to split the vote.
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In today’s lesson, biding our time while the year-end movie-critic awards begin to roll in — expect ample recognition for The Social Network and not enough for The Town -- we’ll try and dispel some myths about myths surrounding the Emmys and the Oscars.
First we’ll concentrate on the Emmys, some of whose officials, during my years at TV Guide Magazine, were relentlessly pushing the idea that their prizes reflected what industry professionals and audience members already knew, that today’s television fare — in its sheer diversity (a fractionalized programming universe with hundreds of channels will do that), graphic treatment of even the rawest subject matter (thanks to premium cable, anything goes, and who says that’s such a good thing) and pure entertainment value — constitutes the medium’s real golden age. “What is it with this nostalgic haze,” a CBS executive asked me at one Emmy ceremony in the ‘90s, “lamenting the shows of the ‘50s and ‘60s as if they were truly superior to today’s programs?” The so-called 1950s-‘60s golden age of television, went the argument, is a myth.
But I wonder if that itself is a myth, and whenever I took up the golden-age-then-or-now question (a generational one, I grant you, relevant only to viewers of a certain age) with a veteran actor whose work spanned many decades, as I once did with Jackie Gleason  and Jack Klugman , the conversation generally pivoted on two words: live television. There were giants indeed among the writers and directors working in live TV during the ‘50s — Chayefsky, Mosel, Foote, Serling, Mandel, Rose, Cook, Mann, Hill, Frankenheimer, Lumet, Pollack, Schaffner and Nelson among them. “There will never be another time like that,” said a wistful Klugman at a press tour event in Los Angeles. Like many of his contemporaries such as Jack Lemmon  and Charlton Heston, Klugman got his start and honed his craft doing countless live TV anthologies, including Playhouse 90, in the ‘50s. Live television was America’s national theater.
So where are the new, trend-setting writers and directors who might energize the medium today? There are a handful of true innovators (J.J. Abrams  and Matthew Weiner  among them), but so many more toil invisibly in a steady churn of dramas and comedies that come, go and register with few.
That is, if they can find a scripted show, at least on network television. Scripted shows once dominated the medium and there was also a time in the ‘70s and ‘80s when the long-form miniseries and a full slate of made-for-TV movies flourished and gave next-generation artists like Steven Spielberg a chance to grow. Now TV thrives as a niche-driven, specialized-content-for-every-conceivable-taste landscape populated with an ungodly number of reality series (filling one-quarter of network line ups according to one estimate), a few of them — such as the reigning Emmy reality winner Top Chef, Amazing Race (which won the prize the preceding seven years in a row) American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and Project Runway -- earning loyal followings.

“I see a lot of new faces, especially on the old faces”—host Johnny Carson scanning the audience at the Oscars
So now that they’re named two new faces to host the 83nd Academy Awards telecast—Anne Hathaway and James Franco —the pairing has been announced as one that, say the producers, “personifies the next generation of Hollywood icons.” Their selection is clearly designed to serve and attract a younger viewing audience, and that’s all well and good, but can we please not liken these talented and pleasant young actors to icons. Icons are always stars, but not all stars are—or ever will be--icons. It’s about indelible personality as much as artistry, awards or longevity.
True icons, the for-all-time legendary faces that would be carved on Hollywood’s Rushmore, are—from the sound era--the likes of Grant and Gable and Davis and Garbo and Stanwyck and Crawford and Fonda (the elder) and Cooper and Garland and Rooney and Stewart and Astaire and Bogart and Cagney and Welles and both Hepburns and Peck and Wayne and Douglas (the elder) and Lancaster and Tracy and Monroe and Holden and Brando and Taylor and Dean and Newman and Redford and O’Toole and Eastwood and Streep and Pacino and Poitier and Streisand and Nicholson and De Niro and Freeman.

And then there’s the class of cross-generation possible-icons-in-waiting (depending on your own particular grading curve), which might include a select few from among Roberts and Hanks and Keaton and Beatty and Duvall and Bridges and De Caprio and Damon and Washington and Clooney and Cruise and Pitt and Depp. Our young hosts are a long way from either group, but it does invite the question as to whether the right host, any host, solo or in partnership, can elevate the Oscar from a tedious, self-congratulatory affair with way too much industry business to conduct (and awkward acceptance speeches to endure) into a bona fide entertainment showcase that does the movie business proud.

I have my doubts, but every circus does need an affable ringmaster and even if you can’t get the likes of a modern-day Will Rogers (the host in 1934), we would benefit from one with a comedic bent who can deliver a sharp monologue and has the ability to toss out an ad-lib or two—18-time host Bob Hope (“How about the pictures this year? Sex, persecution, adultery, cannibalism—we’ll get those kids away from TV sets yet”) and eight-time MC Billy Crystal  (“a billion people are watching tonight, except for Linda Tripp—who’s taping it”) having set the standard.

If we fess up to the fact that the primary reason we once liked watching the Oscar telecast—to see old-style Hollywood glamor and real icons (such as those listed above) is now as relevant as black and white movies, then we can admit to ourselves that the present-day ceremonies, say beginning with those in the 1980s, are basically about six things: 1. The office Oscar pool. 2. The red-carpet pre-show in which nominees would have us believe (we don’t) that “it’s honor enough just to be nominated.” 3. The gowns. 4. The hair styles. 5. Wondering who's had plastic surgery. 6. The shots of the major-category nominees in the audience, their faces impassive and seemingly frozen, and our wondering whether any of them might visibly express what they really feel—abject mortification?--when their names are not announced as a winner.

Steve Martin  and Alec Baldwin  were a tandem with good chemistry last year (Martin: “There’s that damn Helen Mirren.” Baldwin: “That’s Dame Helen Mirren”), but you can’t fault the producers for going young this time. So let’s give the kids a chance—maybe Hathaway and Franco, with good material and stage presence, are the freshness the show needs, plus if both score Oscar nominations—Franco is the better bet for a Best Actor nod for 127 Hours and Hathaway less of a sure thing for Love and Other Drugs--well, it would give the show a little more juice. And even if they don’t work out, remember, even disappointing one-time hosts can leave us with something memorable. In David Letterman’s case, in 1995, four words that live in Oscar infamy: “Oprah, Uma. Uma, Oprah.”


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“What art? What science?”—D.W. Griffith


In the annals of prizedom, there have been, of course, momentous screw-ups. After all, the Oscars and Emmys wouldn’t be much fun without them. I’m not talking your traditionally nutty, are they-KIDDING? brand of head-scratchers—say the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ unfortunate and occasional habit of bestowing Best Director statuettes on favored actors in their membership, two particularly egregious examples being Robert Redford’s 1980 win for Ordinary People (beating out Martin Scorsese or Raging Bull) and Kevin Costner’s a decade later for Dances with Wolves (burning Scorsese again, this time for GoodFellas)—but rather those of the apocalyptically mindless variety that forever stains the Oscars’ credibility, rooted perhaps in a bias against East Coast filmmakers and so-called “popcorn entertainments,” or, as was the case for example in the 1980s, in a bias FOR politically correct epics.

Looking back, it’s hard to discern exactly how voters justified the director’s 1982 win for Richard Attenborough (another actor) for the fairly unwatchable Gandhi over Steven Spielberg —who had previously been denied winning for Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark—for the much loved (by critics and audiences alike) E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Spielberg would, in 1985, become the focal point of Oscars’ most celebrated snub ever when The Color Purple received 11 nominations and he, its director, was shut out. OMISSION IMPOSSIBLE ran one headline, and the Academy, in a clear demonstration of brazen envy from those in its ranks, seemed to again be punishing him for possessing, at so young an age, prodigious talent and from having honed it in--horrors!--television. The Color Purple did not receive a single win.

Being a wunderkind in Hollywood, therefore, isn’t necessarily wonderful; it can inspire craven pettiness (see also: Orson Welles). In 1986, the Academy gave Spielberg the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award (which is a producer's award, the Academy thinking perhaps that, well, an award is an award is an award). His competitive Oscars as director would come in the 1990s, when Spielberg was segueing from Young Turk into Old Guard, for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.

Back to Scorsese. The classics for which HE should have won Best Director come to mind because both starred his favorite actor, Robert De Niro,  who, as it happens, will at long last be receiving the Cecil B. De Mille Award for lifetime contributions at the 68th Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, Jan. 16 (Scorsese was so honored at last year’s ceremony). Presumably the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will get around to Woody Allen--if he'd bother to actually show up and accept the award--or Michael Caine or Meryl Streep before they're 90, and what's with the fact that only one minority, Sidney Poitier in 1982, has gotten the DeMille; Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones are long overdue. For De Niro, I suppose, it's better late than never and at this stage of his distinguished career, he does seem today to be coasting in a series of harmless “Focker” and “Analyze” comedies (with sequels), threatening to become the next Fred MacMurray (himself a great star with a long, ever-evolving career who, you should know, never received a single competitive nomination. But then again, neither did Edward G. Robinson.  Nor Donald Sutherland. Nor Spike Lee (at least, not as director). Nor Mia Farrow. Nor Jerry Lewis. (The Emmys has its own share of shameful oversights—like the Great One himself, Jackie Gleason, being a non-winner—and we’ll get around to them in a later column.)

The various newspaper critics awards will start rolling in soon, and the Golden Globe nominations will be announced on Tuesday, Dec. 14. Sometimes they’re a good predictor of Oscars, sometimes not. But for sure, it’s then that Oscar campaigning seriously begins and we draw closer to wondering about the next great snubs.

By Alan Appel
Television ratings were once HUGE, but audience interest for Oscar broadcasts in recent years does seem to be plummeting faster than Harrison Ford’s career. Maybe if more sophisticated, crowd-pleasing films were nominated, and maybe if the Academy could settle on a quick-witted, continuing-year-to-year host (come home, Billy Crystal) , and maybe if telecasts didn’t have painfully long running times to accommodate lame performance segments and lamer acceptance speeches for even the minor awards, there would be hope. I’m not holding my breath that this year’s 83rd ceremony, slated for Feb. 27 at the Kodak Theater, will be an appreciably livelier or better-paced affair.
On another gloomy front, there’s yet another film adaptation of The Great Gatsby in the works, this one to star Leonardo DiCaprio  and Carey Mulligan  and directed by Baz Luhrmann. Listen up, old sports: some Great American Novels simply defy adaptation; five previous versions didn’t work, and if Francis Ford Coppola’s script couldn’t save the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow Gatsby from 1974, then just give it up. Another remake in production, however, does have intriguing possibilities—Colin Firth in a big-screen version of John LeCarre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which got a spectacular six-part adaptation back in 1979 on PBS’s Great Performances franchise.

By Alan Appel
Sometimes, more isn’t actually less; it’s effectively more . . . and better. That came to mind as I watched HBO’s telecast of Avatar. James Cameron’s
boldly imaginative and technically eye-popping fusion of sci-fi adventure and ecological fable set on the planet Pandora is—even in a televised non-3D format—an epic for the ages.
Yes, it won three second-tier Oscars (for art direction, cinematography and visual effects) and has become the highest grossing movie of all time (presently at $760 million, and that’s only domestic, and counting), but it was not last year’s Best Picture. Nor was Cameron the Best Director. Those honors went to The Hurt Locker and its gifted director Kathryn Bigelow (Cameron’s ex-wife). That movie is the lowest grossing Best Picture of all time.
Which demonstrates, once again, that audience approval, even on a globally grand scale, sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t in forecasting the Oscar for Best Picture. Or maybe the Academy just doesn’t get sci-fi films. I mean, we all love Annie Hall, but beating out Star Wars in 1977?
What the critical consensus is for the Most Important Picture can be a better barometer. Here, story and cast do count, but a weighty message—and the artfully visceral way it’s delivered—can seal the deal. And make no mistake, The Hurt Locker, an almost unbearably intense chronicle of a U.S. Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal Team in Iraq—how they defuse devices, why they do it and, if they survive, how it leaves them—is an important piece of work. More meaningful, for sure, but in what impressively ambitious technical or narrative sense was it more Oscar-worthy than Avatar?
And that’s the odd, totally unpredictable (and irritating) thing about the Oscars and what exactly “Best” means. Cameron gets jobbed last year, yet won the big prize more than a decade ago for Titanic, a soggy romance with a pair of dream boats in the leads. Call it “reverse payback.”
That is, belatedly rewarding the veteran, even legendary, actor (or director or writer) for a lesser film to make up for past oversights (how else to explain John Wayne for True Grit or Paul Newman in The Color of Money or, yes, even Sandra Bullock  last year for The Blind Side), is one thing (and makes only sentimental sense), but the Academy, getting all guilty conscience on us, is occasionally wont to stiff an artist for superior work if that person somehow previously copped an underserved prize. Maybe that explains Cameron’s loss last year and, never mind how he must have felt--it screwed up our Oscar pools.
So what’s the Best Picture outlook for 2011, sprawl vs. small? Expensively mounted (and mega-hyped) studio entertainments vs. provocatively themed smaller, independent films? Next week we’ll size up the early field of favorites—including one much-touted drama that pairs prime candidates for “payback” and “reverse payback” Oscars.
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By Alan Appel


There have been a handful of long-ago significant exceptions along the way (Dallas, The Rockford Files, Miami Vice and The Brady Bunch among them), but generally speaking, Friday night, in terms of viewer numbers, is a graveyard for TV shows. Yes, it is marginally better broadcasting real estate than Saturday night but that’s not saying much. So what’s a network to do when it suddenly strikes ratings (and critical) gold with a Friday show—as, for example, CBS did in the fall of 1990 with a little number titled CSI , which became the first TV crime series ever to be No. 1 in the Nielsen charts (and explains why it continues to spin off a seemingly unending parade of other CSI hours)?

As in the case of the original CSI, it quickly expanded its audience by moving it to another night, and while the official network line at present is that there are no plans to shift the Tom Selleck  drama Blue Bloods, don’t bet against it. The series is just too artfully written, performed, directed and photographed (in New York), and it along with Selleck—whose one and only Emmy came more than 25 years ago for Magnum P.I. —will not likely be forgotten when it comes to end-of-season nominations.

The show handlers (and writers) Mitchell Burgess  and Robin Green —yet two more veterans of The Sopranos who have gone on to a follow-up success—like to describe the multi-generational Blue Bloods as an ensemble family series melded with a police procedural, and there’s something to that. But the greater truth is that Selleck—as widowed Police Commissioner Frank Reagan, whose sons (played by Donnie Wahlberg  and Will Estes are also cops, daughter (Bridget Moynahan) is a prosecuting attorney and own father (Len Cariou) is a former police official—is its wise if somewhat rigid center, investing a commanding multi-layered character with a raw emotional depth that seems to lift the series around him.

Like few other male TV legends (only James Garner comes to mind), Selleck’s easy charm, a mix of humor and vulnerability, has largely defined his three-decade-plus durability as a star. He never really got his due on the big screen (check out, in particular, a terrific performance in Quigley Down Under  and wonderful comedic turns in 3 Men and a Baby and In & Out), but charisma together with fan loyalty goes a long way and now, in Blue Bloods, we’re reminded once again of just how accomplished an actor he is.
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Will Mad Men win the Best Drama Emmy for the fourth consecutive year?
Probably, though its season finale two Sundays ago was a real head scratcher, what with Don Draper somehow deciding that ravenous secretary Megan was worth marrying based on the romantic epiphany that, hey, any woman who could remain composed and calm in the face of his kid spilling a strawberry
shake was someone to spend the rest of his life with.
In my book, that’s worth giving an engagement ring (even if it once belonged to another woman, the wife that Don adored of a man whose identity he took! You Mad Men neophytes have a lot of catching up to do.) Plus, where exactly has partner Bert Cooper gone? Will jilted Dr. Faye tell her mob-connected father?
And what ever did become of Sal? Still, why quibble—Mad Men, in all its opaque brilliance, is rightly in the pantheon of Great Shows We Love and will return
next season.
Not so the AMC series Rubicon that preceded it on Sunday nights, and whose renewal is up in the air. Here is the perfect candidate for the Woody Allen-coined (in his film Manhattan) Academy of the Overrated. Really, has there ever been a more highly praised (though, let’s be honest, cheap-looking) conspiracy thriller with more loose ends, false leads and red herrings?
Ordinarily, any series in this genre that plants clues in a DVD copy of Meet Me in St. Louis would have my attention, but Rubicon goes down so many blind alleys with so many bland, button-down types constantly shuffling papers (or folders) that nothing dramatic ever seems to happen. There was one intriguing mystery, however: why the show’s best character actor, the wonderful Harris Yulin, was killed off in the first episode and given virtually nothing to do?
No, come Emmy-nomination time, there will be two new faces in the Best Drama field, and Rubicon, despite the hype, if there’s any justice, won’t be one of them. One of the newcomers is a chalk pick, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (more about it in a later column) and the other demonstrates that while even a great star (like Jimmy Smits in Outlaw) cannot save a deeply flawed series), sometimes an icon (Tom Selleck in Blue Bloods) can elevate a solid ensemble cop drama into a bona fide keeper. Now let's see if CBS is smart enough to move it from its graveyard Friday-night slot.

Has there been a better character actor than Steve Buscemi over the past two decades? Not really. A wiry and weirdly endearing presence in a spate of Independent films, and a favorite of filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino (beginning with Reservoir Dogs) and the Coen Brothers   —he was the bungling kidnapper deposited head first into the wood chipper near the end of Fargo.
Buscemi is a uniquely riveting and idiosyncratic performer, making an art of portraying characters who seem somewhat menacing, if forlorn, wild-eyed eccentrics. I love the range he has and his dramatic sense, and also his sense of humor, Martin Scorsese (who directed him in the first episode of HBO’s sensational Prohibition-era drama Boardwalk Empire) told a gathering of TV critics this past summer. There’s something that’s very, very strong on camera. .  with Steve as a character, whatever he plays.

Buscemi has been Emmy-nominated before. He was Tony Soprano’s doomed trying-to-go-straight cousin in The Sopranos , and he directed several episodes in that series, including the much-acclaimed season-3 Pine Barrens. Considerable Sopranos writing and directing talent is involved with Boardwalk Empire, and halfway through its 12-episode first year (a second season is on order), it seems almost a foregone conclusion that the next round of Emmy nominations will present the lion’s share of nominations in all major categories, including Best Drama, to (again) Mad Men (created by another Sopranos alum, Matthew Weiner)  and Boardwalk Empire.
Veteran character actors can sometimes make the sudden leap to top-line star. Certainly James Gandolfini  did just that in The Sopranos, and on the big screen, Anthony Quinn and Walter Matthau are among a handful who used an Oscar win to instantly propel them to marquee attractions. In Quinn’s case, a revitalized career followed supporting Oscars for Viva Zapata! and Lust for Life; for Matthau, it came after a supporting Oscar for The Fortune Cookie. By the same token, some of our best character actors remained forever just that—wonderfully invaluable, below-the-title performers essential to their films. But unable to carry them.


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ZUCKERBERG UNBOUND