So I was watching The Avengers again over the weekend and during one of the fight sequences, there is of course a Wilhelm Scream. This was not something I failed to miss the first time I watched the movie. More precisely, when I watched The Avengers the first time through and the Wilhelm Scream happened, my reaction was “oh, Christ. The Wilhelm Scream.” And this is because the Wilhelm Scream now must be in every movie ever, because it’s stopped becoming an in-joke and started becoming a sign of nerd credibility. I mostly blame this Youtube video for that:

And now every action/blockbuster movie has to have a Wilhelm Scream in it somewhere. All of the Harry Potters had them, The Hunger Games had one, all of the Marvel flicks have one, I think The Expendables had about half a dozen, et cetera. But the problem is this: whenever I hear a Wilhelm Scream I am taken out of the movie experience. My suspense of disbelief ends and I am just a guy sitting in a movie theatre who realized he just heard the same damn scream for the umpteenth time, because I recognize it. Every time.

I hate that feeling of being reminded I’m watching a movie, and for the sake of a cheap in-joke at that. When I watch a movie, I want to be thrilled during the fight scenes and exciting bits where a Wilhelm Scream might conceivably be heard. I want to experience that “ooooch” feeling when somebody really gets it, and if that moment is punctuated with a Wilhelm Scream then I’m not going to get that feeling. Instead, I’m just going to be thinking “oh, a Wilhelm Scream. Huh.” I mean, it would be as if a character stopped acting and suddenly just turned to the camera holding a handful of bacon and said “look! Bacon!” Because people love bacon. You would want to smack them if they did that, right? I mean, I already want to smack every webcomic artist who uses “bacon” as a punchline, and I’m not even paying for the webcomic, whereas I am typically paying in some manner for the movie.

Seriously. Sound people in Hollywood. Go find some other scream noise. Don’t use the Wilhelm Scream for another ten years at least. We all need a break from it.

The first thought: It’s tricky. Obviously, Marvel has provided a blueprint on how to create a blockbuster film that acts both as a standalone film and as a sequel to numerous other standalone films featuring the origins of the cast of your current movie (so that you don’t have to spend the first ten hours of your two-hour movie just explaining who everyone is.) They’ve shown not just that it can be done, but that you can structure the contracts to retain (almost all of) your cast and have a strong studio involvement to keep things consistent from film to film while still attracting A-list directors with unique personal styles (like Branagh, Joe Johnston and Joss Whedon.) But Marvel had a big advantage that DC doesn’t: They hadn’t made a whole bunch of movies already before coming up with the idea.

DC, on the other hand, has a high-profile Batman trilogy that isn’t even wrapped up yet, one which establishes an internally consistent mythos for the character that doesn’t involve any other superheroes. It’d be difficult to imagine Nolan and Bale’s Batman standing on the same screen with Green Lantern and Superman, even if it seemed likely that Bale would return to the role (which it doesn’t.) They have a Superman franchise whose most recent movie has been more or less entirely disavowed by the studio despite positive reviews and box-office success. And they have a Green Lantern movie that woefully underperformed both financially and critically. The Superman reboot that could serve as the beginning of a hypothetical Justice League launch is coming this year, but it’s anyone’s guess whether Warner Brothers had gotten its act together sufficiently by the time Man of Steel went into production to be able to think of their comics properties in these terms. (I have insisted, and will continue to insist, that the reason Marvel’s films have done so well while DC’s have done so poorly is because Marvel is in a position to be able to dictate terms to the studio, while DC is ultimately just “the hired help” at Warner Brothers.)

So the first thought ultimately leads to the second: There’s gonna be a lot of rebooting going on. Two of your three core members (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman) need a new movie to establish themselves as part of the DC Movie Universe, and one of your second-tier members has a stinker that needs to be swept under the rug (a la Ang Lee’s Hulk.) How do you handle this?

You start by ignoring it. You’ve got an Aquaman movie, a Wonder Woman movie, a Green Arrow movie and a Flash movie to make. By the time you get through those four films, there’s a pretty good chance that you can go back and do a soft reboot of Green Lantern that isn’t so obviously an admission that the previous film tanked. Then, with five films under your belt, you can go in and do your Justice League film.

“Wait, what, five?” I hear you say? “What about Batman? What about Superman? What about the Martian Manhunter?” But honestly, I don’t think you need a movie to establish Batman and Superman before putting them in a JLA film. Batman and Superman are, at this point, such iconic characters with such iconic origins that babies practically come out of the womb knowing that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed and he was inspired by a bat to fight evil. The last thing we need, pardon my mild frustration, is yet another goddamn retelling of the origin of Batman and Superman. (You can see how excited I am for the Man of Steel movie, aren’t you?) Just mention them from time to time in the other films, establish that they exist, and then throw them in the final flick.

As to the Martian Manhunter, he’d be filling the Nick Fury role on the DC end. He’d appear in all of the different movies, talking to the different heroes about how he’s getting them together to face a larger threat, one that he knows about as a telepathic space alien. (Maybe even one that killed off the Martian race…) This would link the various heroes together, whet interest for later films, and give audiences time to get used to the Martian Manhunter, who is definitely something of a legacy from a very different age of science fiction and comics.

So who would the villain be? Actually, surprisingly enough, I’d pick Libra. Go back to his original roots, where he was a supervillain attempting to steal the powers of the entire Justice League, and give a tip of the hat to his recent role in ‘Final Crisis’ by a) having him do so in order to better prepare Earth for the coming of Darkseid, and b) having him recruit a passel of henchmen to help him out. Then, in the Justice League movie, you pull a big surprise at the end…in the third act, after he steals the powers of Superman and the Flash and Green Lantern and seems pretty much unstoppable, you find out that the Martian Manhunter’s been recruiting a lot more than just the heroes who have movies. The final battle would have cameos by dozens of superheroes, from Zatanna to Black Canary to the Elongated Man to Steel to everyone who you haven’t gotten the rights to, all dogpiling on Libra and his Secret Society. In the end, Libra overloads himself absorbing everyone’s powers and blows up (a la his original appearance…) but the greater threat is still out there.

But all that, of course, assumes that Warner Brothers is interested in replicating Marvel’s success, something which has never been particularly clear from their actions. Certainly, it’s hard to believe that the people who made ‘Batman and Robin’ are interested either in making money or in bringing joy to the lives of others.

Okay, so before the nerd hordes charge with their bat’leths held high (or Mjolnir replicas, or whatever), I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy watching The Avengers. Indeed, I came out of it feeling truly entertained¹. On that score, let us be clear: The Avengers is quite successful. I would particularly mention that the final third of the movie, wherein the Avengers fight the baddies in New York City in a top-notch extended battle, is probably the best super-extended action sequence since the final third of Hard Boiled when Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung fight the army of gangsters in the hospital. There are plenty of amusing quips, as one would expect from a Joss Whedon movie (and one hopes this elevates Joss Whedon, finally, to the directorial A-list, because there are many people who are there who deserve it less, and that is even given all my issues with Whedon’s oeuvre), although only three of them really made me laugh out loud and two of those involved the Hulk. The performances are good, although there are levels of excellence – RDJ and Mark Ruffalo top the list, of course, but nobody is bad.²

But here’s the thing. When I came out of Captain America and Iron Man and even Thor, I came out and said to myself, “well, that was a great movie.” Because all of those were great movies.³ I did not say that after coming out of The Avengers, because, well, it’s not a great movie. It’s not even a really good one. It’s an okay movie. At this point someone usually says “but it’s a great thrill ride!” and… well, no. At the end you might think it’s a great thrill ride, but again – that’s after the superb third act. The first two thirds of the movie are not a great thrill ride – there are thrilling moments interspersed with a lot of waiting for the awesome moments. There is, let us be honest, barely a plot to this movie: it is a bunch of Awesome Character Moments (well, mostly) and big fights, but the Awesome Character Moments aren’t really earned like they are in the previous and better Marvel films because no character gets enough time to really build a coherent storyline, and some of the plot twists in this movie are really amazingly stupid.⁴ Also, the movie unfortunately points out multiple times how stupid it is for anybody in a superhero universe to use a bow and arrow, which is a shame because Jeremy Renner is great, but nobody put a gun to his head and said “hey, be Hawkeye.”

So it’s not a great film. It is about as good, though, as I think an Avengers movie can be in the modern era of film: it is entertaining, competent on most levels, and if you’ve seen all the other Marvel films you can appreciate it as Adventure of The Guys From Those Other Movies well enough, and I have and did. It could be so much worse than it is, and it’s not really “worse” in any way. It’s just not great, and it’s not because it’s a team movie because The Incredibles was a team movie and it was splendid – it’s because it’s product, and product has to hit the expected beats, and in a movie like The Avengers there’s so much less room to hit them well. Which it does, right down to the end-credits reveal of Guess Who to make the fanboys come in their pants.

1. Although I wish I had not spent the money to see it in 3D. The 3D is ass. See it in 2D, folks. [↩]
2. Although Samuel L. Jackson just phones in a paycheck Samuel L. Jackson performance, which is not terrible but let’s be honest, he’s basically the black Christopher Walken at this point. [↩]
3. Okay, Thor less so than the other two by a fair bit, but even so, Thor is at least a decent movie with some really great moments. [↩]
4. Loki’s mind-control can be beaten by punching them in the head, which is basically the shittiest mind-control ever. [↩]

Black Mage: Does Thomas Mulcair have a good shot of winning the next Canadian election? Is it a better/worse shot than any of the other NDP contenders?

I would say yes and I don’t know, respectively. I think Mulcair is perhaps better positioned to leech votes from the centre than any other of the NDP candidates were and he’ll protect the new Quebec base, but the fact that he is from Quebec will be at least a slight negative in the West because they get incredibly pissy about that. I think on balance he was the best choice, not because he of geography or politics, but because he’s a political gut-punch fighter, and that’s what going to be necessary until the next election. But the NDP bench was really deep this time around (due in large part to Jack Layton making sure that it would be), so Mulcair is just the best of a strong lot.

supergp: If you were going to write a big comic crossover event, what would your premise be?

Old DC: Probably something involving most of the major heroes being mind-controlled with Starro or whatever and a few stragglers left to save the day. Probably including Empress, Major Disaster, and Geist the Twilight Man as some of the rebel fringe. (Yes, I know both MD and Geist were supposedly killed in Infinite Crisis. My answer to that is simple: “nuh-uh.”)

New DC: Something that brings back the old DC.

Marvel: Victor Von Doom. Infinity Gauntlet. *drops mic*

JDR: Can you compare Canada to some country(ies) that aren’t the USA?

Well, we’re colder than Botswana, freer than Yemen, less blonde than Sweden, better at parking than Italy, have less Japanese people than Japan, have better McDonald’s than Australia, less jiggly at most times than Brazil, less shaky than Djibouti, less class-riddled than England, have more Tamils working as line cooks than Sri Lanka (seriously, in Toronto Tamils fill the same role that the various Central American immigrants do in American kitchens; one of my former roommates, a sous chef and thoroughly white dude, spoke decent Tamil), easier to pronounce than Kyrgyzstan, less desert-y than the Western Sahara, and our French bears only a slight resemblance to France’s French. How’s that?

Greg Morrow: What is the most important difference between the constitutional laws of Canada and the United States? Not the procedural stuff about how the legislature is constituted, but the substantive stuff about civil rights and limited government power.

Probably the existence of s.1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the limitations clause. (Which, for the uninitiated, allows the government to pass laws which limit individual rights, so long as those laws are relatively specific and enumerated and that the limitation is justifiable in a free and democratic society.) It prevents a lot of “this absolute principle is clashing with that other absolute principle” confusion that arises whenever rights collide with other rights, which actually happens just about all the time. Of course, I know more than a few Constititional scholars who absolutely loathe the existence of s.1, so who knows.

Der Whelk: Is there an old series or property out there you think deserves and would be a perfect for a big budget re-make?

It’s not so much a remake as it is a continuation or sequel or even logical endpoint: Quantum Leap.

You would still have Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett, clearly having aged in real time from the end of the show, leaping from life to life, his memories continually fogged, and you would still have Al traveling alongside him, guiding him in his tasks, and that would be the first quarter of the movie or so – maybe one or two quick leaps – and then Sam jumps into a timeframe he shouldn’t be able to jump into normally, a time well after his death would have occurred. Something has gone wrong in the quantum stream. Somebody is interfering. Al is completely panicked and Sam is at a loss.

And that’s when he meets a second Leaper – one Al recognizes, not that he can tell Sam this – and although Sam doesn’t quite understand it, suddenly they’re working together to do something he can’t quite understand. The three of them are now leaping together, and every time she reminds him of what’s been happening so he doesn’t lose track. She’s working with slightly more advanced technology than Sam is, but even her advances aren’t enough for her to do what she needs to do, so she has enlisted Sam’s help. Two Leapers, working in tandem across multiple times, can pull it off. There’s no other way.

What has happened? Thanks to the interference of the second Leaper (who is much younger than Sam), Sam has traveled into her timeline. This leaper dies much, much later than Sam will – a century or more later – and this means she and Sam, together, can effect the events necessary for a future Leaper to leap backwards and give her the technology she so desperately needs to return Sam home. And so the present changes the future changes the past changes the present…

…because Sam Beckett’s daughter wants her father back.

(previously, slightly less previously)

supergp: What game would you use to introduce a young kid to boardgames, and at what age?

Start them early (and this isn’t just me espousing the hobby, incidentally – any childhood dev expert can tell you that the problem-solving and analytical skills kids can pick up by playing boardgames will go a long way in their lives). You can start playing boardgames with kids as early as two thanks to games like Go Away Monster! (among others). Animal Upon Animal is a dexterity game first and foremost but there’s strategy to be found there (enough that I have played it with adults and had fun, albeit using variant rules); Geistesblitz never, ever stops being fun either, whether you are four or sixty-four. As kids get older you can introduce them to slightly harder stuff: Liar’s Dice, Blockers! or Zooloretto or even Ticket To Ride. And then you can get them into the big-name stuff like Settlers or Carcassonne.

Evil Midnight Lurker: Have you ever killed a man in Reno just to watch him die?

Seems like a waste of a perfectly good murder to do such a thing.

A2H: Will there ever be any more Who’s Who columns? And if not, would going over the Official Guide to the Marvel Universe be a possibility?

Yes to both. I was actually working on a fairly lengthy Who’s Who entry (one of the more think-piecey ones, although I do especially want to do another Crime Tailor segment at some point and have a couple of villains in mind for that) last week and didn’t have time to finish it for that Thursday. Maybe this Thursday if everything goes smoothly. Or not. It depends.

As for the OHOTMU, probably, yes. Rex the Wonder Dog’s awesomeness is not constrained to one universe.

Mitchell Hundred: Does Armond White actually believe all the crazy shit he writes, or is he just trying to garner publicity? I’m really not sure about this.

I think Armond White is a born contrarian, and contrarians are extremely skilled at making themselves believe that the contrary opinions they hold for the sake of being contrary are also correct. Seriously, if Armond White is trying to get publicity, there are much easier ways to do it than by arguing that latter-day Michael Bay films are unrecognized works of genius.

Nicodemus: If you were a flavor of soup, what flavor would it be?

Presumably “mangled flesh” flavour.

Jonathan: Do you have any opinions/insights into the current Alberta election? Does it even have any meaning to you as an Ontarian?

Yes. I said on MetaFilter a couple weeks ago that I thought Danielle Smith – not Wildrose, Smith – represented the future of Canadian small-c conservatism because she was what it needed to be to survive (or at least pretending to be so): fiscally radical-conservative and socially liberal/libertarian. Youth polling in Canada – even in Alberta – makes it quite clear that social conservative positions are wildly unpopular with young voters and that is only trending downwards. Libertarian-conservatism is really the only way for conservatism to truly survive in Canada over the next fifty years, and Danielle Smith was trying to sell Wildrose as being that.

The problem, of course, is that Wildrose was actually chock-full of the usual old white Reform Party psychotics who have always been the backbone of Canada’s far right and once it became obvious that this was the case, the moderates and youth that might have considered voting Wildrose suddenly found they weren’t so interested in voting for Canada’s religious right and went for the Progressive Conservatives, who have moved to a decidely centrist position over the past few years. So generally, I’m quite happy with the results, as Alberta politics seem to have shifted from all-right-wing-all-the-time to a centrist/conservative fight, and that’s a leftward shift in the most conservative province in Canada.

KD: Nearly a year in, what are your thoughts on the DcNU?

I’m reading I, Vampire and that is pretty much it (and I don’t know how long I’ll hang on to reading it). The Nu52 basically killed DC for me – the emotional attachment that I always had to the DCU is still there, but it’s strictly to the old DCU and not this shitty new EXTREEEEEEME version. Really, most of the Nu52 comics are just appallingly bad, and the ones that aren’t are crossing over with the bad ones far too often. But at the end of the day, it’s not about quality but about the fact that my DC comics, the ones I grew up with, have been mostly discarded for something else. Even if they were good comics, I still wouldn’t want to read them, because without the emotional tie they lose all resonance for me. I mean, I’m not even reading Legion of Super-Heroes! This is the first time basically ever that I am not bothering to read Legion. It just feels weird for me to type that, but it’s true.

And look – DC has greatly increased their sales, so good for them, I suppose. But it’s not for me any more. I used to dream of writing for DC; I don’t any more, because it’s quite clear that even if I could get past their abominable treatment of creators (and I don’t think I could), it’s just not a place I’d want to work now.

As per yesterday:

Andrew Miller: What’s the best horror movie that most people haven’t heard of?

I’ll go with Demons 2, Dario Argento’s sequel to his somewhat more famous but less scary Demons. For those not in the know: the Demons films are essentially “fast zombie” films twenty years before fast zombie films became a thing – the titular demons attack and either kill their victims or turn them into more demons in a very zombie-like way, and the movies are gory and violent. The first one is okay, but the second one takes place entirely inside an apartment building where the demon attack begins when a girl watches a TV show with a demon in it and then the demon on the TV sees her and comes out of the TV – which is ridiculous, of course, but it sells the horror quite effectively and the movie as a whole is a pretty good take on the “locked in the building with zombies” genre. Except, as I said, twenty years before that was really a thing. The original Demons isn’t bad either, but I like the second one better.

What’s the best horror movie that has an undeservedly poor reputation?

Probably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Yes, the one with Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey. I’m not going to say it’s good exactly, but it got pilloried for being total shit because it’s not like the earlier films in the series – this one is just sort of insane in a weirdly entertaining way and I think it deserves to be resurrected as a bold failure if nothing else.

Goattoucher: Why, God? WHYYYYY?!?

Bud Dry.

Darren K: Do you like travelling? Have you done much of it? Left the continent? Been to Winnipeg?

Yes, no, yes (Australia, Bolivia, and South Africa when I was little), and yes (it’s quite pretty along the river, but other than that – sorry, too small for me).

Bret: Pete Ross (The Superman supporting character): Why doesn’t he work?

Pete Ross doesn’t work because there is nothing special about him; he learns that Clark Kent is Superboy completely by accident and that is basically all there ever has been to the character, and it’s simply not enough because A) Lois either already knows or will eventually figure out that Clark is Superman, B) there’s a strong argument that Perry White and Jimmy Olsen know (or have at least guessed) and are just playing along because Clark is their friend and they’re covering his ass, as friends do, and C) Batman knows, and if you’re gonna write a Superman story, are you going to team him up with Batman or Pete Ross? The answer to that question is never going to be Pete Ross.

mason stormchild: Do you think reddit is basically becoming 4chan with a veneer of respectability?

“Becoming”?

Brendan: What do you think the best policy is for coming up with fantasy names/words without making them sound too silly?

Take a name from the culture you want the character to reflect/imitate (since nobody is really imaginative enough to truly come up with their own completely original culture, when you get down to it). Change 1-3 consonants depending on how many syllables the name has (if it’s two syllables or less, only one), keep the vowel sounds intact, and you’re done.

Kai: Marvel Studios, riding high on their successful series of movies all leading up to the Avengers (which is going to be a hit whether it’s actually awesome or manages to totally suck, let’s be honest here), is looking for their next big Marvel-verse thing and comes to your door with a dump truck full of cash and a request for you to take the helm of their newest project, a Doctor Strange movie. So how do you do it? Who do you cast? What’s your script breakdown look like? Bear in mind that you have to try and keep things roughly within the style and tone of the Marvel movies we’ve seen so far, but beyond that you can tackle it however you like.

Dr. Strange is, I think, one of the great unexploited origin stories in comics and a film version of it would be the wisest course for an initial Dr. Strange film: a bad (but not irredeemable) person becomes a good one when his quest to make himself whole becomes a quest of an entirely different sort. The overall tone would be more contemplative than your average Marvel film (although still with comic moments) and lean more in the direction of Guillermo del Toro visuals than Joss Whedon-style wit because you really have to sell the otherworldliness of Dr. Strange in order to make him stand out from the superheroic crowd, but you’d still have the vicious and awesome magical battle with Dormammu as your closing piece. I would probably borrow a few story elements from JMS’s Strange miniseries since it had some excellent ideas in it.

And: Benedict Cumberbatch as Strange, Daniel Dae-Kim as Wong, James Hong as the Ancient One, August Diehl (from The Counterfeiters) as Baron Mordo and Rosario Dawson as Clea.

First two acts are perfectly serviceable and okay meta-commentary on horror tropes that some will claim are more clever than they in fact are; third act is some of the most ambitious, exciting horror filmmaking in years, and since it’s the last bit, you’ll forget that the first two-thirds of it was only okay.

A couple weeks back Alyssa Rosenberg wrote a great piece about white actors Hollywood keeps trying to push despite their continuing failure to succeed. (For those who quibble about Sam Worthington’s inclusion: watch Man on a Ledge and then try to tell me differently.) These actors are not bad actors per se (although I would argue Jason O’Mara is pretty bad), but they are pointedly non-special-in-any-way actors who keep getting breaks until something happens for them. Alex O’Loughlin is a good example of this: he was boring in Moonlight and then he was boring in Three Rivers and now he is boring in Hawaii Five-O, but on that show he is surrounded by more entertaining actors and pretty scenery so it has become successful and now O’Loughlin is the Hollywood equivalent of a made guy. The point is that minority actors, by and large, do not get these same types of chances. Idris Elba in particular should be huge now. Morris Chestnut seemed tailor-made to be an action star – muscular, attractive, charismatic, – but it never happened and he got shunted into “urban” romcoms. And so forth.

Anyway, I mention all of this because I just saw the extended trailer for Step Up: Revolution. (Yes, I know some of you are going to just click over to Reddit instead of reading the rest of this post, but try to bear with me.)

Now, if you are not familiar with the Step Up films, there is a simple pattern to them: boy meets girl, they are both dancers, one or the other has a crew and for some reason that crew has to win a big dance battle which is awesome, Love Conquers All, happy ending. Now, the first Step Up starred Charming Potato but since Mr. Potato was not available to do Step Up 2 The Streets, as he was now rich and famous and too important for such things, instead the film transitioned to his character’s previously unmentioned little sister analogue and she took the role of The Girl in the second movie.

Since all of the Step Up films take place in the same universe where dance battles are bigger than UFC, the third film, Step Up 3D had to be connected to the second and this time around the primary transition character was Adam Sevani’s Moose. Now, Sevani is a pretty badass dancer, and in fact he gets a romance subplot, but instead of being the lead he is secondary to some blandly attractive model-esque dancers who aren’t bad or anything but certainly aren’t the sick dancers that the rest of the cast are – and really aren’t so amazing as actors that they merit any additional consideration on that front. But they’re definitely attractive and Sevani is, let us be honest, geek chic rather than traditional leading man.

However, Step Up 3D also introduced Stephen “Twitch” Boss to the cast, and Twitch, as any fan of So You Think You Can Dance knows, is charismatic, articulate, a decent actor, a ridiculously good dancer, has an existing fanbase, and most importantly for our considerations at this point is quite handsome:

And producers promised that Twitch would get a greatly expanded role in Step Up 4 (which later got renamed to Step Up Revolution as they jiggered the plot to tie it into Occupy Wall Street, sort of, if Occupy Wall Street danced in far more badass ways than they usually do), so a lot of people, myself included, naturally assumed that he would be the transition character into the fourth film. But instead of this happening, Twitch is still a supporting character and the leads are going to be a white girl and a not-terribly-dark Hispanic guy.

Granted, one can’t get too upset about Kathryn McCormick playing the lead white girl, because she is totally awesome in her own right, but why can’t she just romance Twitch instead? I mean, interracial relationships are common nowadays – particularly in the dance community. But this is one area where Hollywood continues to be weirdly reactionary.

Dammit, this hits me right in my sweet spot:

It’s become an overused and empty catchphrase with almost depressing speed; faced with sexist caricature after sexist caricature, feminist comics fans said that they wanted strong female characters as an alternative to women who serve no purpose other than to be the eye/arm-candy for male protagonists. And seemingly within days, every character was being described as a “strong female character”, from Ripley to Buffy to Catwoman to Lady Bullseye to X-23 to Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose. Because there are so many different kinds of strength and different ways to depict it, just about any character could be described as “strong” according to the writer’s personal lights, even while feminists continued to decry them as sexist caricatures. Which just led to a sort of hurt puzzlement among clueless male writers…after all, how could Lady Bullseye be considered “sexist”? She beats people up! Having read more than a few of these debates that always seem to trail off into anger on both sides, I thought I might present some of what I think are tangible, clearly-defined differences between actual strong female characters, and those just called “strong female characters”. Here are some of the characteristics of the “strong female”, as opposed to the actual strong female:

1) A “strong female character” is strictly limited in the scope of where she is allowed to be strong, usually to combat; she is strong, but she is not active. The best example I can think of for this particular trope is Cherry Darling, Robert Rodriguez’ supposedly strong character in ‘Planet Terror’. Certainly, she’s strong in one sense–she is able to kick lots of ass, mowing down dozens of zombies and Marines and zombified Marines in the film’s action climax. The ending of the film even shows her as the leader of the group of survivors. But when the film isn’t showing her shooting people and blowing people up and openly defying the laws of physics in various violent ways, it’s showing her…taking orders from El Wray, the male protagonist. He tells her to stop moping. He gives her both her wooden leg and her gun-leg. He practically drags her along through every scene of the movie. Even her final decision, to become the group’s charismatic leader and take them south to an easily defensible coastal region, comes from a scene where El Wray says, “Honey, time for you to become a charismatic leader by following my plan.” “Yessir.” She is never a decision maker, only an exceptional fighter. The two should not be conflated, and all too often are. (This is what John Scalzi referred to as “Spinny Killbot Syndrome”.)

2) A “strong female character” is strong in a way that does not threaten male gender roles. The implication that’s always given in these roles is that anytime women are anything other than helpless and simpering, they are automatically challenging sexist assertions and should be lauded for it. But the fact is, in practical terms, there is a strong societal belief that violence is perfectly acceptable for women under the right circumstances. Take Ripley, for instance. She is definitely seen as a feminist icon, and there’s certainly a lot of justification for that. But her most iconic scene is actually her least feminist; when she confronts the Queen Alien at the end of ‘Aliens’, it is with the intent of defending her surrogate daughter. It is automatically assumed, in fiction and in life, that a woman standing up for her family (her children, her husband) is going to use violence far more effectively and with less hesitation than a man would in the same situation, because her primal maternal instinct is aroused. The “Mama Grizzly” stereotype is every bit as sexist as the “Damsel in Distress”, even though one involves inflicting grievous bodily harm on people and the other involves helplessness in perilous situations. So are all the female characters who fight with determined efficiency while the battle is going on, only to faint when it ends because they’re so relieved, so are the femme fatales who vamp their way through combat. In ‘Aliens’, it’s Vasquez who is the truly challenging female character, determined to succeed better than men in their own field. (Unsurprisingly, people seem to prefer Ripley’s brand of “feminism”.)

3) A “strong female character” is either sexless or hypersexualized. The “virgin/whore” dichotomy is a classic complaint about the treatment of women in both fiction and life; female characters, it seems, are never to mention that they have body parts that produce orgasms or otherwise they’re supposed to be teases, sex kittens, vamps and sluts. Red Sonja is one example of the former; she’s a “strong female character” whose actual motto involves a vow of chastity to be enforced at swordpoint, while Catwoman gives us a view of the opposite extreme, a character who fights crime in a slinky catsuit and high heels. There’s very rarely a middle ground (and ironically, characters who inhabit it are all too frequently deemed “sexist”, because in the minds of many feminists, it’s better to fall on the “sexless” side of the divide than the “hypersexualized”. Slut shaming is all too common, even among people who know better. Of course, that isn’t to say that all sexual characters can be or should be defended by saying, “Oh, you’re just slut shaming!”. Sometimes hypersexualization is exactly what it appears to be, turning a female character into nothing more than an object of male lust. Are you listening, Scott Lobdell?)

4) A “strong female character” derives her strength from victimization. And speaking of Red Sonja, her origin story is par for the course for about two-thirds of female heroes…she was made helpless and victimized (“sexually” is often implied even if not outright stated), and she has made it her mission never to be helpless and victimized again. Lady Bullseye, Beatrix Kiddo…even X-23 has an element of pointless victimization grafted into her origin, as she apparently spent some time as a prostitute with an abusive pimp. When the female equivalent of Wolverine gets sexually abused, you know the trope is a little bit nuts. (By the way, it’s worth pointing out that the number of male heroes with the same element of victimization is exactly one: Batman. And he was a ten-year-old when it happened.)

And 5) a “strong female character” has an existence that revolves around the male protagonist. This is why I grew less and less enamored of River Song, even though I couldn’t articulate exactly why at the time. It’s because while she started as a mysterious archaeologist with a hidden past, she rapidly became “The Doctor’s assassin who became the Doctor’s lover who became the Doctor’s wife who became the Doctor’s murderer who became the Doctor’s Doctor’s Doctor’s…” While she’s active, competent in ways other than the merely physical, and has an active sex life but isn’t defined by it, she does come to be defined by her relationship to ther Doctor. Her story revolves around his, it does not cross it independently; this is all too common regarding “strong” women. (One of the biggest and most positive changes to Lois Lane was when she stopped trying to prove that Clark Kent was Superman so that she could marry him and started becoming an actual journalist.)

Now, appearing on this list does not immediately mean that a female character is sexist, or that their creators are sexist. Every character is on a journey that may involve them overcoming personal issues like those mentioned above (take River Tam, who moves from being passive to active over the course of a season of ‘Firefly’.) Some characters are meant to be flawed, but still admirable (River Song, for all that she has become obsessed with the Doctor, is nonetheless an active figure who refuses to blindly trust him or follow his orders.) If your character can check off a box on this list, it doesn’t mean you’ve made a huge mistake. (If they can check off all five, on the other hand…) But they are things worth discussing, and they are definitely things worth remembering when creating future female characters. Because an actual strong female character shouldn’t be that hard to create.

Only serious flaw is that without Katniss’ internal monologue, the moments where Katniss is acting badly will come across as Jennifer Lawrence acting badly to those unfamiliar to the source material.

It’s not going to make any end-of-year best-of lists (certainly not mine), but despite a plot that is achingly predictable this is still an entertaining enough way to pass two hours because, despite its predictability, the best word to describe every single aspect of this movie’s craft is “competent,” and there are worse things, and also the Martian dog is hilarious.

The other day, I was reading a book called “A Galaxy Not So Far Away”, a book of essays about ‘Star Wars’. The essays varied wildly in quality from “kind of mediocre” to “crimes against the English language”, but one of the things that stuck out about them was the way that they all talked about the meanings that the author projected onto what they ‘knew’ to be ‘escapist fiction’. Normally, I’d chalk this up to a failing of the author, much in the same way I’d ding them for not realizing that a Boba Fett vs. Predator website might not be entirely serious, but this view isn’t unique to this book. Critics as diverse as Roger Ebert, Nathan Rabin, Tom Shone and Peter Biskind have all called ‘Star Wars’ a piece of pure escapism, with varying degrees of respect and appreciation. It has come to be the fundamental received wisdom about the original film. No allegory, no message, just a classic Boy Becomes Man story set so far away from anything we know that everyone can enjoy it.

Which is totally wrong. ‘Star Wars’ is actually an intensely political story, with a scathing and vicious statement to make about modern American politics cloaked in an allegorical “space opera”. The reasons that nobody appreciates this are twofold: One, the political landscape changed so much during the film’s lengthy journey from script to screen that much of its impact was neutered, and two, Americans have an amazing ability to assume that they’re the “good guys” in any allegorical story. This, combined with Reagan’s later appropriation of the imagery and terminology of the film, made it seem like an all-purpose battle of good and evil, but it wasn’t always intended this way.

It’s important, when looking at the political elements of ‘Star Wars’, to look at the era in which it was written. When Lucas first envisioned his follow-up to ‘American Graffiti’, Nixon had just been re-elected in an astonishing landslide. The Vietnam War had outlasted both the President who started it and the President who championed it, and was now continuing into the second term of a President who had promised to end it…and had instead escalated both its intensity and its scope. Watergate, the scandal that would eventually grow to consume the Nixon presidency, was at this point merely seen as a couple of muck-rakers trying to stir up trouble for a man as unpopular with liberals as he was popular with conservatives. And George Lucas? He was hanging out with radical, political film-makers like Francis Ford Coppola and his then-wife, Marcia Lou Griffin. He was potentially tapped as the director of ‘Apocalypse Now’, before ‘Star Wars’ came along to occupy his attention at the time. He was consumed with the idea of a political film about what he saw as the end of American democracy as we knew it.

This is actually worth repeating, because we’re at this point so far removed from the era that many people have forgotten the most troubling aspect of Watergate. It wasn’t that the President had bugged, burglarized, and “ratfucked” his opponents on the way to his victory. It wasn’t even that he’d paid hush money to his co-conspirators to make it all go away. It wasn’t even that he’d discouraged the FBI from pursuing the case. It was what people saw as the very real possibility that Nixon might simply tell the United States Congress to shove their investigation up their collective ass sideways, and to tell the Supreme Court exactly what they could do with their 8-0 ruling that he turn over the tapes. It was the idea that we had a President who genuinely saw himself as not subject to the rule of law. “Imperialist Presidency” gets bandied around a lot by both sides of the political spectrum, but everyone was worried that Nixon was setting one up.

And what did Lucas write against this backdrop? He wrote a story about a democracy that had become an Empire, with a ruler who (all together now) “dissolved the council permanently”. The Empire is now constantly on a war footing, using technology they perfected in the wars against its enemies on its own citizens to stifle dissent. Only a group of anti-establishment rebels who remember The Way Things Used To Be can possibly restore the Republic. In case the symbolism isn’t blatant enough, should I mention that the ending of ‘Jedi’ (in which a bunch of foreigners/aliens with primitive weapons overwhelm a technologically and numerically superior force through use of cunning, ambushes and a superior knowledge of the local area) was originally planned to be the ending of ‘Star Wars’ before budgetary constraints forced him to move it? Even the costume design for the Rebel pilots evokes early Russian cosmonauts. (If you don’t believe me, just drop by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum sometime.)

In ‘Star Wars’, the Empire is America. The Emperor is Nixon. The oppressor is us, and the call in the air everywhere is “Revolution!” George Lucas, the supposedly escapist film-maker who wanted nothing more than to entertain, was advocating for the armed overthrow of the United States government. By the time his film hit theaters, of course, it was already dated; nobody could look at “the sanctimonious impotence of Carter” (to borrow a phrase from James Lileks) and see a menace that had to be toppled from his iron throne. But by couching his work in the language of allegory, Lucas created a story that survived its political origins in a way that many other political films could not. Which is a good thing for us, but I suspect the idealist that Lucas used to be is a little bit sad about it.

(Post-script: I hate to have to mention this, because it seems like it should be self-evident, but…yes. I am serious. This is actually sourced in J.W. Rinzler’s “The Making of Star Wars”, which took contemporary interviews with Lucas and his friends and co-workers, along with drafts of the script, to show how the atmosphere of political idealism and frustrated radicalism that Lucas lived in during the 70s informed the work. Lucas has explained all this, but he’s offered so many contradictory explanations of the genesis of his work that most people ignore it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.)

8:12: Red carpet bullshit. Other people can blog this. I have my limits.

8:15: Oh jesus they’re doing recaps of the red carpet now?

8:16: No, seriously, whose idea was that, anyway? “Okay, we’ve got about fifty minutes’ worth of softball interview time, so let’s flashback towards the end of it and talk more about the dresses we already showed.”

8:21: Natalie Portman explains that Billy Crystal will be wonderful as host because he won’t be mean and he’ll only want to entertain. The Oscars are the only place and time on the entire planet where anybody expresses enthusiasm for Billy Crystal any more, you know.

8:25: Chris Rock says that he has given Billy Crystal some material but doesn’t know if Billy will use it. Let’s see if Billy is funny! Then we’ll know.

8:33: One minutes and thirty seconds – that was how long it took Billy Crystal to drag out his Sammy Davis Jr. impersonation. Which, it seems, now must be done in blackface. Good call there, Oscars! Boy, I sure am glad we fired Brett Ratner for being homophobic so Billy Crystal could be sorta-racist.

8:35: One thing about the BillyCrystalVerse that is in its favour: The Adventures of Tintin was, it seems, a much bigger deal than it was here.

8:37: One good joke in his first pre-singing part of the monologue (the economy and millionaires giving one another golden statues) and now we’re into the singing, which is excruciating. I mean, James Franco was really bad last year, but he didn’t sing, and at least Anne Hathaway was pretty. Billy Crystal is cheesy – not the good kind of cheesy either – and he’s fallen so deep into his schtick that the jokes are increasingly about his schtick. And he’s not pretty like Anne Hathaway. And he’s arguably less funny than Hathaway is now. Actually forget the “arguably.”

8:43: Tom Hanks gives away the award for Best Cinematography. Should go to Tree of Life or War Horse, I think, but ends up going to Hugo, which is not an indefensible pick. Does this mark the start of a Hugo landslide? And then ten seconds later we jump to Best Art Direction, which goes to Hugo as well. Interesting! And then they give the winners like fifteen seconds to accept their speeches because who cares about these people and their life achievements, am I right? Arrrrrgh I hate how the Oscars have cut down the victory speeches for non-celebrities to basically nothing.

8:45: Jaime Weinman, on Twitter, says that Art Direction always goes to a period film or fantasy film because otherwise the art director (is deemed) to be doing basically nothing. By my count, the last film which argues against this hypothesis is All The President’s Men, which won it in 1976. Ow.

8:51: Billy Crystal explains that the theatre is made up like the “movie palaces of our youth.” The movie palaces of my youth were strip malls with shitty seats, so I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. And to make his point here are a bunch of random scenes from famous movies! Quick – what do Jaws, Ghost, Avatar, The Princess Bride, The Godfather, The Hangover, A Few Good Men, Star Wars, Twilight, Amelie, Raging Bull and Midnight Cowboy have in common? If you said “they are all movies,” you are correct!

8:54: Costume design! Where Anonymous is nominated, amazingly enough, as celebrities explain why costume design is important. I was wondering if perhaps Hugo was going to go three-for-three, but no, The Artist takes it. Ugh ugh ugh The Artist.

8:56: Makeup! Will Albert Nobbs take it because Glenn Close pretends to be a guy, or will it be Harry Potter because wizards and monsters? Neither! It goes to The Iron Lady, and Meryl Streep’s odds of winning Best Actress just went up a couple points. Makeup people’s speeches are actually very nice and there is no musical hustle off the stage, so that’s all right.

8:59: And now: celebrities in a dark room will tell you about their first movies! Hilary Swank of course names three or four because she is an overachiever and she is all “and I won two Oscars already, not that I would tell you this.”

9:03: Ad for The Lorax. Hey, did you know the Lorax is now shilling for an SUV? Probably you did, but it turns out the Lorax is shilling for many other products as well! It’s almost as if they missed the entire point of the book!

9:06: Sandra Bullock says we are going “to try something new,” which is always a sign for “joke that will fail.” This time, it is Bullock explaining that she will be speaking in Chinese, but instead actually speaks in German. Which is the sign for Best Foreign Language Film, which goes – not surprisingly – to A Separation, because it was very good. In fact it was better than most of the Best Picture nominees! But this is nothing new. Also, I somehow managed to miss that a Canadian (e.g., Quebecois) film got nominated for Best Foreign Film this year. I’m out of the loop!

9:08: A Separation guy explains that Iran is actually mostly filled with people who don’t hate everybody, which should be a fairly non-controversial statement, which means it will enrage Fox and Friends tomorrow morning for at least two minutes and thirty seconds.

9:10: Christian Bale presents Best Supporting Actress because he won Best Supporting Actor last year. Did you forget about that? And it’s going to Octavia Spencer, which is not a big surprise because she has a good performance in what was, admittedly, a terrible movie, but at least she gets an Oscar out of it. Octavia completely melts down when she gets the award, which is cute. Maybe now she’ll get a post-Oscar career bump! Wait, no, that only happens to guys and young ingenues, and she is neither of those. Oh well.

9:18: Billy Crystal does a bit about old-timey focus groups, which actually means Christopher Guest and his usual gang get to do a really good bit about focus-grouping The Wizard of Oz, and that is nothing I can complain about. Then Billy Crystal thanks everybody famous who was in his terrible opening number and the show returns to being insufferable.

9:22: Editing! Usually goes to the winner of Best Picture, because most of the voters don’t really think about what editing is but assume the best movie is also the best edited. (Which, given that editing is supposed to be invisible and unnoticed, is not really the worst argument around.) Sometimes, though, it goes to a movie with very obvious and dramatic edits, because those films can say “hey, editing!” to voters. And it goes to… Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which I do not think will win Best Picture and had showy editing. The winners clearly had no idea they were going to win and apologize for stammering by saying “we’re editors.” Heh.

9:25: Best Sound Editing, meanwhile, goes to Hugo, and there’s definitely some momentum building now.

9:27: Best Sound Mixing! Hugo is nominated for this one, and… yep that’s another win. See, in the last week, all of the buzz has been about The Artist, The Help and The Descendants. All of these technical wins for Hugo might indicate a steamroller building up, but then again with the exception of The Artist none of those films are particularly deep in the technical categories. In short: I have no idea what’s going to happen! This type of incisive analysis is why you tune in to these liveblogs, folks.

9:34: Kermit and Miss Piggy show up to be briefly amusing and break the tedium… by introducing Cirque du Soleil, who then present the opening number that the Oscars never have any more because they’re too cool to do that, I guess.

9:41: Robert Downey Jr. comes out with a camera crew claiming to be the subject of a documentary, and does a bit with Gwyneth Paltrow. Which is funny. (I am not one of those people who hate Gwyneth.) This is all to present the documentary award, which goes to Undefeated, the great football documentary which is approximately nine months away from being fictionalized by Disney.

9:44: And we have our first “play them out forcefully” moment of the night, because we need more time to make sure celebrities tell us about their first movie experiences while in a dark room.

9:45: Chris Rock does a brilliant bit about race and voice acting for the best animation awards, which unfortunately downplays the difficulty of voice acting, which is a problem Hollywood has nowadays. (I blame Robin Williams.) And the Oscar goes to Rango, because Pixar didn’t make a movie last year, despite rumours otherwise that they might have done. Those rumours were not true. Ignore them.

9:52: Crystal does a bit with Melissa McCarthy where she does her bit from Bridesmaids, because that is what Melissa McCarthy does now as deemed by Hollywood. Emma Stone and Ben Stiller do a bit and she is much funnier than him. Also, she is taller than him. Jonah Hill is in this sketch for approximately two seconds and is funnier than Billy Crystal has been all night.

9:54: Visual effects! Hugo is nominated: will it take the award from those movies with far more elaborate effects like Harry Potter or Rise of the Planet of the Apes? And it will! Momentum, Hugo has it.

9:57: EXTREMELY MEAN-SPIRITED JOKE I COULD HAVE MADE ABOUT THE MELISSA MCCARTHY/BILLY CRYSTAL BIT FROM EARLIER: “Man, Meg Ryan has gained a lot of weight.”

9:58: Melissa Leo shows up to present Best Supporting Actor. Christopher Plummer wins – note that he is wearing his Order of Canada pin! – and gets a mammoth ovation. Plummer gets off a crackerjack joke about how he was practicing his acceptance speech when he was born. Nolte looks pissed that he didn’t win. Christopher Plummer winning officially redeems all of the shittiness thus far of this year’s Oscars, which have been remarkably shitty.

10:07: Billy Crystal does his “telepathy” bit. Mostly lame, although Scorcese trying to play along with Crystal’s schtick is cute. Also, the dog from The Artist shows up, because it is my theory that secretly The Artist is so popular because people want to give the dog awards but there are no major awards where the dog is eligible.

10:11: Crystal actually gets off a decent joke about the stupidly elaborate stage prop for the musical portion of the awards. The world stops dead, the universe is instantly annihilated, and then we are all recreated anew. So that happened.

10:13: Best Original Score (as opposed to Best Stolen Score, removed as a category in 1931) includes a nomination for some film called “The Adventures of Tin Tin,” but who cares because The Artist wins its second award of the night! The composer has no formal training in music, because absolutely everybody involved with this film is a plucky underdog. His mike seems to be sorta metallic for some reason, which is probably why when he asks for another ten seconds to thank his wife, he gets it.

10:16: Will Ferrell and Zach Galifakanis come out banging cymbals. They are actually entertaining. Hey, remember when Best Original Song included performances of the songs? That was great. Now, you get ten seconds of the song. But since “Man or Muppet” from The Muppets won, nobody is going to complain about that, even though they should. Brett McKenzie doesn’t thank Jason Segel, and I wonder if Segel’s strained expresson is a bit or not. My guess is that it’s a bit.

10:23: I don’t know if Americans are getting similar ads at all, but here in Canada, that was about the seven hundredth advert for Missing, Ashley Judd’s new TV series. It is not making me enthusiastic.

10:24: Angelina Jolie presents Best Adapted Screenplay, telling us that people think writing is easy but in fact it is very hard! Nobody has trouble believing this. (People have trouble believing that when they write, it it hard for them to do it poorly.) The movies are presented with little minimalist art things like you would find on the Internet when people do those “hey what if movies were old Penguin books” dealies, which is nice. The Descendants wins in what is its first real opportunity of the night. So that is interesting!

10:28: Original screenplay. I have this sick feeling that The Artist will win, particularly after Bridesmaids gets one of its most boring scenes for the presentation reel. (They have been pimping its few nominees all night because a lot of people actually went to see Bridesmaids.) But no, Woody Allen wins for Midnight in Paris, because he really had a lot of difficulty writing a movie about a screenwriter who wishes he lived in the good old days.

10:31: Celebrities in a dark room talking about movies! Best bit: Reese Witherspoon admitting that her favourite movie is Overboard. Second best bit: Robert Downey Jr. saying “this needs Werner Herzog to say something complicated” and then cutting to Herzog. Worst bit: the rest of it.

10:37: Billy Crystal welcomes the entire cast of Bridesmaids, who are good enough to show up and juice ratings but not quite good enough to win awards. They are presenting short film awards, so Kirsten Wiig and Maya Rudolph make a bunch of dick jokes and instantly win my loyalty forever. The winners of the dramatic category are a father/daughter team, and dad says that “now I don’t have to wait till her wedding to say how brilliant she is,” and the audience goes “aww,” and then the daughter dedicates the win to her mother and the audience goes “awww” again. Rose Byrne and Melissa McCarthy interrupt their speech to shout “Scorcese!” and do shots. The Best Documentary short winners are the ones who did the one about plastic surgeons working in Pakistan and they give a short but enthusiastic speech. Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper don’t do anything really interesting. The Best Animated Short award goes to The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, and the title is really long and I have nothing else.

10:47: For some reason, at the commercial breaks, the oscars have girls dressed up as old-timey confection vendors walking up and down the aisle. I’m not sure what the point of that was except to make viewers say “what the fuck?” But on that level, it certainly is effective. Because: what the fuck?

10:50: Michael Douglas sounds raspy and looks much more gaunt than usual as he presents Best Director. I hope he’s doing all right. The Best Director vignettes are unintentionally hilarious, especially the Terrance Malick one where the actors basically just throw up their hands and say “I don’t fucking know, okay? We don’t get it either.”

10:51: And the Oscar goes to Michel whatsisname from The Artist, which… fuck off. People keep asking me why I hate this movie, and my answer is this: you remember how people hated on, and continue to hate on, Shakespeare In Love for being fluffy and inconsequential? Well, Shakespeare In Love actually makes some statements about the ennobling pursuit of art above all, and about the craft of writing. The Artist says, figuratively speaking, not a goddamn thing. It actually merits all of the complaints Shakespeare got. That’s why I bitch about it.

10:56: The Governor’s Awards recap, which used to be the lifetime achievement awards they presented on the main show, but now that would take up too much time from covering the fucking red carpet, I suppose. Better to do a brief, edited recap and then trot out James Earl Jones, Oprah Winfrey and makeup artist Dick Smith for a perfunctory standing O. Ugh. The Oscars were always schmoozy and shamelessly opulent, but now they’ve become just soulless.

11:03: Memorial reel time. Billy Crystal gives a shout-out to two former Oscar producers: Gil Cates and the other one who died this year, who is not as important as Gil Cates apparently. The reel this year is filled with still images, because that is classier, I suppose, then actually showing the actors doing what they did on screen. God, they can even overproduce the memorial reel?

11:10: Celebrities sitting in a dark room talking about movies, part three! Jonah Hill explains that film people are crazy because they want their film to be the best thing ever and then says that it’s because they care more about the movies than themselves, which doesn’t quite work if you think about it for more than two seconds.

11:13: Natalie Portman presents Best Actor. Instead of having five actresses give actors verbal blowjobs this year, instead they are going to have Natalie Portman give all the blowjobs. In other contexts this would be far more enjoyable, but unfortunately we are on this Bataan death march of an awards show.

11:14: Portman claims that George Clooney made us all believe he was “just a regular guy,” which – not so much, and I liked The Descendants but Clooney is always going to be a movie star even if he gains weight to look schlubby. For Jean Dujardin, they pick one of the two non-silent scenes from The Artist just because they want to fuck with people. And then Dujardin wins and that fucking Artist score plays again.

11:19: Dujardin thanks Douglas Fairbanks for hosting the first Oscars and then screams a bit. He can get away with this, because he is French.

11:23: Colin Firth gives the ladies nominated for Best Actress their blowjobs, because the Oscars are equal-opportunity. Because he is Colin Firth, he can give the trite emotional boilerplate real heft and meaning. The only fun bits come when he references Mamma Mia while celebrating Meryl Streep, and when he tells Michelle Williams she taught him so much despite being twenty-three years younger than him.

11:29: And Meryl Streep picks up her third award for a great performance in an otherwise shitty movie. Somebody in the audience is screaming “YEAAAHHHH” over and over again. Despite the fact that Viola Davis probably should have won, I can’t get upset, because Meryl Streep is wonderful and awesome. She first thanks her husband and then her makeup artist, who won earlier tonight, and they both spoke about having worked together for thirty years, which is really nice.

11:33: Best Picture montage! Which is kind of pointless, since The Artist seems like a lock at this point.

11:36: Yep, The Artist. Ugh. Okay, I am out.