"Best Popular Picture"...

Is a new category being introduced by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences (AKA "The Oscars") in a attempt to improve the TV broadcast's ratings and hand a statue to a profitable film production with a high recognition factor. The critics have pounced on the proposal and mocked it as a "dumbing down" of the Oscars, which is ironic to me, because the Academy Awards are hardly "movie night" at your local Mensa chapter. There is also some criticism to the effect that this is a transparent ploy of obscure the heavy round of allegedly partisan politics that overshadows the balloting. There is a shit ton of politics in the lead up to the Academy Awards but it isn't always a bicoastal liberal caricature, there is definite "block voting", notoriously by British Artists working in Hollywood, how else to account for Eddie Redmayne's sudden vault to the A-List? And then there is Hollywood's ongoing exploitation of women In Front and Behind the Cameras, everyone sweats and tugs their collars about it, then hands a golden statuette to Judi Dench or Meryl Streep to ease the collective anxiety...for one night anyway. No...I'm guarded FOR this idea, I know it sounds like half baked pandering, but hear me out. Correctly deployed, this might finally get American Comedies they recognition they so desperately deserve, comedy remains the USA's best and most reliably self regenerating genre, it is overlooked almost every single year during "Oscar Season". Science Fiction and Fantasy (once Hollywood's "Red Headed Stepchild") gets a friendlier reception from The Academy that the hard work of Kate McKinnon or Seth Rogen or even James Franco... Granted the whole premise of the Oscars is bullshit from start to finish, anxiety wracked creatives and certain technical guilds none of whom have a strong sense of job security all voting themselves awards down to laughably obscure categories without any critical or outside input of any kind. I say the comedians and the comedy writers in Hollywood, who get Academy Ballots" ought to do some "block voting' themselves, how else to finally grab off what Jim Carrey has called "The Ultimate Tchotchke"? And who knows, this might be Gal Gadot or The Rock's Once Chance to Get Up on that Podium...or (dare I say it,) Bobcat Goldthwaite?

Whatever happened to Slapstick Comedy?

Ya never see it anymore in the movies save for the redoubtable Johnny Knoxville and his crew (and they are rapidly aging out of their "JackAss" racket sad to say). Even the crazy hilarious Kate McKinnon clearly had recourse to a stunt person for a half-dangerous half funny trapeze fight in "The Spy Who Dumped Me". There are still comical chases and explosions and the like in the movies, but the sort of intensive physical slapstick where the performer clears metes it out and or receives it is becoming a thing of the past. The only other example I can think of, is Jackie Chan, and he has pretty much aged out of the slapstick racket entirely alas and alack... I'll say this, Johnny Knoxville's last movie "Action Pointe" lasted a bare two weeks this summer and proved an unstable mix of fiction and "real time stunt work", but it was also likely an epitaph for the whole "JackAss" phenom. You now cringe with fright when a careworn middle aged Johnny gets himself catapulted thru the side of a barn, like when you see an elderly relation slip & fall in the kitchen. This is sad to me, can anyone out there think of even one performer in Hollywood whose comedy schtick is preeminently physical in nature? Sadly CGI has pulled the fangs of strict slapstick I think...you can literally use computers to create sequences that a Charlie Chaplin would have shot in real time. The modern justification is that CGI saves wear and tear on performers, but it also deals the artist out of the creative process in some ways. If Chaplin denied the sound era as long as he did (up to 1939 or so) then he'd a never ever have tolerated CGI on his sound stage. Bring Back the Clowns I Say....

Apropos of Nothing...

Insofar as "Christopher Robin" is concerned, (a new release told from the entirely superfluous perspective of Winnie-the-Pooh's humanoid sidekick)how much money do you suppose Buena Vista/Disney spent to dig up voice actors that could successfully impersonate Sterling Holloway and Paul Winchell? I'm thinking a million bucks and some digital intervention as well....