Senator Ted Cruz announced over the weekend that he would run for President, and the liberal internet has by and large taken the opportunity to laugh at Cruz, because Ted Cruz’s positions are utterly crazy and should (in theory) make winning a presidential election extremely difficult. But I have a problem with this, and the problem is simple: I think it is in fact more than possible for Cruz to win the Republican primary, and possibly even the general election. Allow me to explain:

The primaries

The path to victory for Cruz in the GOP primaries was blazed by Rick Santorum in 2012. In that election, Santorum came much closer to winning the GOP primary than he had any right to do; in retrospect everybody likes to pretend that Mitt Romney was an inevitability based on money, but in February of the 2012 campaign Santorum had reasonable momentum and even through March still had a decent shot at stealing the nomination from Romney. Romney eventually sealed it up in April, but Santorum had a real shot, and had a real shot because the base didn’t like Mitt Romney. The wackaloon psychotic base of the GOP is still the one tried and tested route to potentially stealing the nomination from the money men.

Now consider: Santorum was and is crazier than Cruz by a longshot, as well as being a less gifted public speaker and, to be frank, much stupider than Cruz. (Cruz is not stupid. He’s a highly intelligent ideological extremist. There is a difference between that and, say, Newt Gingrich, who attempts to be an intellectual and fails miserably.) Santorum had next to no campaign funding; Cruz will better him. Cruz also has the benefit of being Latino, which will insulate him from a lot of the entirely valid criticism of stock GOP racism that other lily-white candidates always have trouble with. Cruz won’t have to deal with Santorum’s issue of inconvenient Senate votes that made him look maybe-sorta-moderate (something Romney hammered Santorum on in the debates and which was reasonably effective) because Cruz has voted ideologically for pretty much the entirety of his Senate career. Cruz doesn’t have any really big scandals attached to him that can derail his campaign; there are no Bain Capitals waiting to take him down, and likely no aggrieved sexually harassed ex-staffers either.1 With Cruz, the crazy you see is the crazy you get.

And Santorum was essentially the base’s last-ditch choice as the anti-Mitt, following the electoral collapses of Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, largely because of all the reasons I just mentioned, along with the flop-sweat loser-stink Santorum wore like perfume – whereas Ted Cruz is at this point arguably the base’s poster boy. The GOP base loves Ted Cruz. He’s their first choice and it isn’t even close. And that matters.

Look at the electoral battleground that’s coming and pay attention to the candidates who are already faltering: all those governors and potential moderate candidates are collapsing already. (Chris Christie will never even sniff the nomination, let alone the Presidency.) They’re doing this because getting the backing of the GOP money men is widely (and not unfairly) considered to be the real battle in Republican electoral politics.2 Most of that money is probably going to go to Jeb Bush or Scott Walker (with Rick Perry and Rand Paul fighting over the remainder).

Ted Cruz isn’t stupid: he knows he can’t out-fundraise Bush or Walker. But Bush and Walker will each likely view one another as the biggest threat to the other’s campaign. This happens in every hotly contested political primary: the two richest candidates attack each other and everybody else scrambles for attention. Ted Cruz has likely decided that his best chance to ever be President is to snake up the middle – to try and use his megapopularity with the GOP base to snag a few early primary victories while Bush and Walker are trying to buy them. Once Cruz has a few won states under his belt, the money will inevitably start drifting his way – not in a rush, but he’ll have enough to stay afloat. (Remember, Rick Santorum competed against Romney using about 1/5th the money.)

Now, granted, Bush or Walker – probably only one of them becomes the GOP money wing’s candidate, and I would bet on Bush because Walker’s money and popularity is in much more direct competition with Cruz – will try to outspend Cruz and win the primaries that way, and of course it might well work.

But we aren’t talking certainties here either way. Ted Cruz has a real shot at winning the GOP nomination, and he announced his campaign this early precisely because now he can set up advance offices in all the early primary states – he has announced before Bush or Walker or any of them because he’s going to run a grassroots campaign to try and win those early states, and if you’re running a grassroots campaign you need to start the work as early as possible and not mess around with exploratory committees.3 So far he’s doing exactly what he should be doing.

The general election

Okay, so let’s pre-suppose that Cruz wins the GOP primary. At this point the prevailing theory is that he can’t beat Hillary Clinton – or whoever the Democrats put forward, but let’s be honest, barring an unlikely asteroid strike it’s going to be Hillary Clinton. The craziness that makes him stand a real chance of winning the GOP nomination is exactly what keeps him from winning the general.

The problem with this theory is that Presidential elections in the United States are a binary affair (your Vermin Supremes aside). If Ted Cruz is the only realistic alternative to Hillary Clinton that voters have… well, he’s the only realistic alternative that voters have. We talk a lot about how Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 over John McCain and Mitt Romney were mudhole-stompings and about the new Democratic coalition and demographic truths and what have you, but the truth is Obama only won each of those elections by a few percentage points.

Now: Hillary’s perceived electoral strength relies largely on the Democratic coalition all being happy to vote for her, or at least willing, and there are plenty of Dem voters who might grudgingly check their ballots for her but aren’t wildly thrilled to vote for her. Lots of voters who want the first woman President would prefer Elizabeth Warren. Lots of liberals think Clinton is a centrist who won’t make things better. Lots of Democratic men are probably being, well, men.

All it takes is one big mistake and Hillary goes from being the presumptive President to being in a dogfight. And here are two truths about Hillary Clinton: first, she’s a serviceable campaigner at best who tends to trust the wrong people when it comes to campaign management, which is why Barack Obama is President right now. And second, the media by and large haaaaaates her, always has, and they’ll be looking for opportunities to take her down, both out of dislike and because any successful Clinton trip to the Presidency will be a boring story and they hate that even worse. Clinton’s campaign will not be a boring one, because the press will not let it be a boring one.

And Cruz probably has one final benefit to running in 2016, which is that the GOP money men kept a lot of their powder dry in 2012 precisely because they suspected Obama wouldn’t lose as an incumbent President – and in 2012 the Dems outspent the GOP, but only to the tune of ten percent more money. In 2016? Who knows how much the GOP elites will spend to get back in the White House and nominate a few conservative Supreme Court judges to safely replace Scalia (79) and Kennedy (78) – or worse, Breyer (74) or Ginsburg (82)? I would bet on it being a lot – and the Presidential election can be swung by money, because it almost always is.

To be sure: Ted Cruz’ chances of winning the Presidency should he win the election are low. But they are not negligible and his personally crazy positions will not, by and large, interfere with his opportunity to win the Presidency. He’s only a joke once his campaign ends in ignominy. Before then, he’s a threat – and should be considered a serious one.

1. Well, it’s always possible. But as a general rule, politicians aren’t that good at hiding it when they fuck around or grope unwantedly; they have a reputation in advance, like Herman Cain or John Edwards did. [↩]
2. To be fair, it’s very much the same for the Democrats. Hillary Clinton is the presumptive nominee because the Democratic money has all decided she’s either the one or she’s not so bad to raise a primary fight over her. [↩]
3. Exploratory committees are for candidates who want to know exactly how much rich-people money they’ll have to work with. [↩]

This week’s recap covers the fact that nothing much happened, since it was a non-elimination leg that involved one team being stuck at the airport for ages. But Phil makes it sound more exciting than it was, because he’s Phil!
continue reading "Amazing Race Recap: “The Great Amazing Nasty Race”"

Last week on the Race, as Phil reminds us from the get-go, it proved to be an extremely dumb idea to take selfies next to a moving train. (Although not as dumb as taking them in front of one.) Team Broken Compass was eliminated, but they saved the obnoxious “peace out” gesture for this episode just to make sure we didn’t miss them!

continue reading "Amazing Race Recap: “#MurphysLaw”"

Since the Amazing Race did a Wednesday premiere before settling in on its regular night, you’re getting two recaps in pretty short succession. I hope this is a positive for most of you. 🙂

continue reading "Amazing Race Recap: “I Got the Smartest Dude”"

One of the big reasons I’ve usually resisted recapping ‘The Amazing Race’ is because I’ll be honest, I always felt like Television Without Pity already did the same thing and they did it better than I could. (You can feel free to jump in and boost my ego in the comments, but it’s not required.)

But now, there is no Television Without Pity. Entire seasons of the Race are going by, unrecapped by snarky commenters who have nothing better to do than explain what happened in an episode of a TV show to people without access to Hulu, Netflix, DVR or any one of thousands of bit-torrent sites! It’s a crushing injustice, and I’m here to correct it. On to Amazing Race 26, Episode One!

continue reading "Amazing Race Recap: “Great Way to Start a Relationship”"

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

The neighborhood I live in now is a lot like the one I lived in when I grew up. It’s a little suburb of a big city (Minneapolis now, St Paul then) with rows of little tract houses filled with friendly, happy families. There’s a mall nearby, and although it’s a bit bigger than the mall I grew up near (it’s the Mall of America), it’s not that different. It’s a place where teenagers go to hang out, and parents come to shop. There are good schools, because that’s always been a priority for our state, full of giggling children that get a little bit wiser every year. (We hope.)

There’s a Muslim community center a few blocks away from my house. It’s over by the corner gas station, and on spring mornings you can see them unroll a long prayer mat in the parking lot as they teach a gaggle of energetic kids how to face Mecca. A few doors down, there’s a halal market, and hardly a week goes by that I don’t see a woman wearing a headscarf as she goes to her daily job, or a young girl at the library proudly wearing hers because she thinks it makes her look grown-up.

Many of those young girls are at my child’s school. When I go to class presentations, the children form an eclectic mix of racial backgrounds. Some of them are already wearing headscarves even in third grade, and I’m sure the number will only go up as we move from watching elementary school concerts to middle school concerts. They all smile nervously before the program starts, though, and smile much more genuinely once it ends. Their parents all smile back.

Most of those parents have jobs in the area. Some of them work with me in my office; some of them work over at the Mall of America. We all shop at the Mall from time to time, although I’m sure they’d agree with me that it’s mostly for tourists and you can get cheaper prices at the outlet center a few minutes down the highway. But at the end of Ramadan, the Mall fills with happy and excited families, eager to break their fast and celebrate Eid al-Fitr. It’s a little bit hard to find a table on those days, but it’s a lot of fun wishing people “Eid Mubarak” and seeing them smile.

I’ve been told a lot, by a lot of different people, that I should be afraid of the threat of Islam. I’ve heard people saying that Muslims are violent extremists, that they’re a threat to America, and that they take over whole areas and make things unwelcome for people who don’t share their religion. I wish those people could come here, and see my neighborhood, and talk to the people who live there. Because when I see the parents shopping, the teenagers hanging out, the giggling children and the happy families in their little tract houses, all I can think is:

The neighborhood I live in now is a lot like the one I lived in when I grew up.

Welcome to the results of the 2014 Theszies / Rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards.

This year we officially hit 1,000 voters – and I mean exactly 1,000 voters, after we manually eliminated the usual bunch of duplicate/scam voters (seriously, guys, why do you do that, it just makes this all take longer). We came out to exactly one thousand, which is pretty amazing.

For next year, we’re looking at some ways to improve the Awards. We may end up killing some of the “worst” Awards – not all of them, but people are generally less enthusiastic about them, and also it gets boring seeing people use various awards to complain about how much they dislike John Cena (or, presumably, Roman Reigns next year). We’re also looking at ways to streamline the nominations process for at least some of the awards.

Finally, I’d like to thank Justin Henry, Christopher Robin Zimmerman, Herb Kunze and all those who have previously run the Awards and contributed to their legacy; everybody who chipped in to promote the awards; all of you voters, of course; and finally and most importantly an extra-double-sized thanks to mgkdotcom’s Tech Guy, James Young, without whose invaluable assistance these Awards would almost certainly have failed to be anywhere near as successful and user-friendly as they in fact were.

You can find the results for the “Best” Awards HERE.

You can find the results for the “Worst” Awards HERE.

Finally, you can find full ballot counts for all awards HERE.

See you next year!

Torontoist asked me to write a eulogy for the now-departed Sun News Network.

So last night Triple H appeared on Stone Cold Steve Austin’s wrestling podcast (LIVE ON THE WWE NETWORK ONLY NINE NINETY NINE MAGGLE) and spoke for about an hour, non-kayfabe, about the challenges of booking pro wrestling in an era where everybody who wants to know anything about wrestling can essentially know at least half of everything that goes on backstage. A lot of it was interesting. A lot of it was self-serving, and I don’t mean that in a condemnatory way: Triple H is for all intents and purposes the second-in-command of WWE and protecting himself does, to a certain extent, mean protecting the company as well. (Of course, when asked about CM Punk, HHH did his best to quietly and effectively shift blame back to Punk for the entire situation, and that was mostly crap.)

But what really struck me was when Triple H discussed Chyna, who revolutionized women’s wrestling in the late 90s and who is now effectively stricken from WWE’s history books, more or less, because following her wrestling career she did porn. The question of Chyna was raised because someone wanted Steve Austin to ask about whether she would ever be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Triple H danced verbally around the issue and never said the word “porn” or “adult film” or stated in any way what Chyna did; it was left unspoken or assumed. And he said, more than once, that there wasn’t any issue from WWE’s side and that he wasn’t judging her for her life choices – but what if his eight-year-old kid Googles “Chyna” and finds out about the porn?

This isn’t really about Triple H personally: if you look at how women wrestlers are treated in NXT (which Triple H books and runs) versus how they’re treated on the main roster (which Vince McMahon books and runs), it’s night and day: NXT women are allowed to be full, wide-ranging characters, and prove themselves as wrestlers. RAW Divas are eye candy at worst and at best have a choice of “fun-loving,” “bitch” or “crazy” as their character options, are dismissed or ignored by the announcers and treated as an afterthought, wrestling-wise. Clearly Triple H wants women’s wrestling to be a thing that sells tickets, which is both the progressive option and also the monetarily sensible one, and by any standard he’s clearly the person you want in charge of booking and running women’s wrestling overall in WWE (from the available choices, anyway).

But Triple H also wants it both ways. He wants to say he doesn’t judge Chyna for her “life choices,” but he also wants his ostensibly family-friendly corporation to not extend recognition to a sex worker, which is judging her for her life choices. He’s trying to both be Paul Levesque, who probably feels bad about his ex-girlfriend’s career going south and who probably doesn’t care at all that she decided to do porn (or at least thinks “well, whatever you gotta do, I guess”), and Chief Creative Officer of WWE, who has to care about that a lot.1 It’s a shitty, passive-aggressive way to deal with the issue – and of course we could write an entire essay about the sex/violence double standard with respect to “family entertainment,” and many have, so let’s just say we recognize the cognitive dissonance and move on – and that’s entirely on him. Look: I might not agree with a condemnatory attitude towards sex work, particularly from someone working for a company with a long history of questionable behaviour. But it would have at least been honest to simply say “we can’t celebrate someone who did porn” rather than hedging.

1. Of course, Triple H tries to have it both ways a lot – witness him saying both that wrestlers have to live and breathe the business 24/7, and then right after that say that Bret Hart cares too much about wrestling. Of course, what he really meant is “Bret Hart is a great wrestler, but kind of a humourless dick.” [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

So last night the annual WWE Royal Rumble happened and it ended up being an absolute disaster because of the Royal Rumble match – the annual modified battle royale that is one of the most popular events the WWE runs every year, and certainly one of the most anticipated. The short short version is that the wrong guy won the Rumble match and fans were furious. But to reduce it to that level suggests that it’s simply fans throwing a temper tantrum when it’s so much more than that.

Bear with me for a second: for the last month or so, the internet has been Ground Zero for jokes about Mortdecai, the ginormous Johnny Depp flop film. Mortdecai is a wrongheaded move on so many levels: as someone pointed out, it’s essentially a children’s film that happens to have an R rating that’s based on a series of cult British crime thrillers. But Mortdecai is also the product of corporate entertainment culture. Mortdecai is just a symptom of the larger problems with corporate culture taking over the production of entertainment. Lionsgate, when they released Mortdecai, said without irony that they intended for the film to become a franchise. Think about that for a second: they weren’t just hoping for the film to be successful. They were, quite literally, planning for it to be so successful that it could become a staple element of popular culture for decades (at a minimum). They thought they could do this about a wacky movie where the premise is that Johnny Depp wears a stupid moustache.

They did this for the same reason that Disney has three Star Wars films lined up alongside a dozen Marvel movies for the next six years. “Franchises” are more or less reliable, stable revenue generators for movie studios/entertainment companies; they’re the reason that people keep trying to re-start Terminator as a franchise, because you can sell new Terminator movies and TV and whatever with a minimum of explanation. People are familiar with the concept. People will predictably spend money on them. Hollywood wants franchises, because franchises are the definition of cover-your-ass so far as studio executives are concerned; any nimrod in a suit can say “but I had this and this and this and they had always been successful before” when he’s about to get fired, because that gives him the excuse he needs for his next job. That the movies become somewhat more soulless is besides the point.

And if you dislike Mortdecai and make fun of it and it flops – well, from Lionsgate’s perspective that’s not their fault. They tried to create a new franchise, it didn’t work out, these things happen. They’ve still got Hunger Games and most of you will go see Hunger Games movies. Hollywood makes terrible things literally all the time that make tons of money and regardless of people’s complaints about them, they still go. There hasn’t been a single decent Transformers live-action movie; in fact, those movies are legendarily agreed upon to be terrible. Transformers: Age of Extinction got a C grade in Cinemascore (the audience rating thing, the one where any piece of crap can get a B+ without trying hard because audiences will cheerfully say “oh I just turned my brain off and enjoyed the ride”) but it still made over a billion dollars worldwide. So, before we go back to wrestling, let’s make one thing clear: just about everybody spends money on things they suspect they might not enjoy out of a sense of inertia, to some extent.

Okay, now back to wrestling.

WWE went public about fifteen years ago and what we’re seeing the ascension of corporate thought in the most important wrestling company in the world. Brand management is a top priority for this company. Their performers aren’t wrestlers, they’re “Superstars” (or, for the women, “Divas,” because god forbid WWE not be rampantly sexist). It’s not wrestling, it’s “sports entertainment.”1 Individual wrestlers are brands themselves, each successful gimmick providing multiple merchandising and branding opportunities. There is, reliably, a new color of John Cena gear approximately every eight months – new John Cena shirts, new John Cena armbands, new John Cena do-rags, the whole kit and kaboodle, because WWE wants to make sure they maximize the Cena brand. And although not every wrestler can be John Cena, they want every wrestler to perform, merchandising-and-branding-wise, as profitably as possible.

WWE wants wrestlers who will be longterm corporate brands that they can put in video games, cartoons, et cetera. They need John Cena to always be Hustle Loyalty Respect John Cena. But that means they need predictability and stability. And predictability and stability is death to pro wrestling, which is an artform that thrives on chaos. So creating that stability, creating those longstanding stable brands that modern corporate entertainment ideology demands, while still providing the fluidity that pro wrestling fans require to enjoy the form – it’s an intense art. And it’s one WWE simply has not mastered.

For all that I’ve pointed out about John Cena being a brand, it’s worth remembering that, although a lot of hardcore wrestling fans might dislike John Cena – because Cena has been the WWE Top Brand for over a decade, and you get tired of anything after a while, let alone a decade – that his rise to the top was remarkably organic. Certainly WWE wanted Cena to become The Guy: he looks like The Guy should look. But he stumbled through a bad gimmick and then successfully was recast as a comic-relief bad guy. People forget that John Cena’s first real step to becoming SEVENTY BILLION TIME CHAMPION JOHN CENA was a sketch where he dressed up as Vanilla Ice for Halloween.2 In 2005, people wanted John Cena to be the guy. The chants of “John Cena sucks” that you hear today are reactions against the stability and predictability and seemingly endlessly length of John Cena’s reign as Top Guy, rather than against John Cena himself – most wrestling fans who chant “Cena sucks” will readily admit that the guy himself is a fine wrestler who can really work a great match and whose work with Make-A-Wish kids is nothing short of remarkable.

But WWE’s problem is simple: John Cena is turning 38 this year. He’s in the final third of his career now, and WWE needs – or, at least, believes that they need – the next Top Guy, the next predictable, stable brand who can carry their company for the next decade. Enter Roman Reigns.

Now, I don’t want anybody to think I don’t like Roman Reigns. He’s a good wrestler. He has the potential to be a great one. He has The Look, he’s a decent power wrestler who is increasing in skill, he’s shown he can connect with the audience when he needs to, and although his promos are somewhat dreadful at present – to say the least – when he’s given material that isn’t wildly outside his wheelhouse he’s good enough at being a speak-softly-but-carry-a-big-stick total badass. To be frank, if you were going to design a Long Term Wrestling Brand by committee, it would probably look like Roman Reigns: he’s muscular, he’s handsome and sexy, he’s the Rock’s second cousin for god’s sake.

But what WWE did at the Royal Rumble was to pull the wrestling equivalent of releasing Mortdecai.

Because – and this is where we have to go into wrestling arcana for a moment, so bear with me – last year, at the Royal Rumble, everybody who watched wrestling knew it was Daniel Bryan’s year. The WWE had just spent six months writing a great story where Daniel Bryan, the scrappy 5’8″ underdog who just happened to also be the most popular wrestler in the company and also the single best professional wrestler in the world, had been screwed out of the WWE title by the corporate Triple H and Stephanie McMahon for not being, in essence, what they considered a marketable brand. Everybody expected Daniel Bryan to win the Royal Rumble in order to get his title shot at WrestleMania, the biggest show of the year. And instead, what happened is that WWE brought back Batista – who non-wrestling fans might know better as Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy – more or less on the basis that Batista was in movies now so people would love him. Daniel Bryan didn’t even wrestle in the Royal Rumble match.

The fans at last year’s Rumble went apeshit and booed the hell out of the match, out of Batista, and even out of universally beloved babyface Rey Mysterio (on the basis that Rey entered #30, the final slot in the Rumble, and confirmed that Bryan wouldn’t wrestle in the Royal Rumble match.) Ironically, when it came down to Roman Reigns and Batista as the final two in the Rumble match, the fans started cheering intensely for Roman Reigns – who was at the time still a bad guy. Strictly speaking, they weren’t cheering for Reigns. They were condemning the cynical, corporate act of writing a marketable product like Batista to win the Rumble rather than their guy.

Anyway, fans booing the WWE constantly at every arena in the country managed to get them to realize – after only two months! – that MAYBE Daniel Bryan should have been the guy all along, so at the last minute they turned Batista into a corporate heel and inserted Daniel Bryan into the WrestleMania main event, where he won and the crowd went absolutely insane, and WWE managed to turn a massive clusterfuck into what is quite possibly the single best video package the company has ever done.3

Shortly after last year’s WrestleMania, Daniel Bryan got injured and had to spend about eight months in rehab; he came back in time just to announce his entry into the Royal Rumble, and instantly the WWE fanbase knew that they wanted him to win the Rumble again. See, once again there’s a perfect story in place: in the interim since Daniel Bryan got injured and had to vacate the WWE title, Brock Lesnar won it. And nobody can beat Brock Lesnar. So you have the unstoppable monster who’s beat everybody – except the one guy who never lost the title in the first place. On top of that, Brock Lesnar is very likely leaving the WWE after WrestleMania because he’s only in wrestling for the money and he might be able to make more money elsewhere, so you’ve got the storyline that not only can nobody beat Brock, he’s going to take the WWE title with him when he leaves – forcing the evil corporate overlords to have to rely on Daniel Bryan in order to keep the title where it belongs. It practically writes itself.4

But instead of having Daniel Bryan win the Rumble, they eliminated him in a meaningless elimination about halfway through the match. No drama, no build, no story to it. And they did this quite specifically because they had decided that Roman Reigns is a Highly Successful Brand, and they did not want fan anger over Bryan’s elimination to taint the Reigns brand, so they did it as early as possible.

But it didn’t work. Reigns won the Rumble but it didn’t matter because from the time Bryan was eliminated the Philly arena5 absolutely turned on the entire event. They booed everything. They booed Goldust and Stardust turning on each other, they booed Kofi Kingston’s annual stupid elimination spot, and they sure as hell booed Roman Reigns. They booed Roman Reigns so hard that the WWE sent the Rock out to save Roman from a beating and the crowd booed the most popular wrestler in history.

I’m not sure what’s saddest about that GIF – the Rock realizing that the crowd is booing EVEN HIM, or poor Roman Reigns realizing that the plan didn’t work and wrestling fans now hate his guts. Actually, no, it’s Roman, because the Rock has millions and millions of Hollywood dollars, which are better than normal dollars. Roman Reigns, meanwhile, has to deal with the fact that the WWE, after writing an epic storyline where corporate-selected champions were the villains and which trained fans to boo the storyline corporate-selected champions, was so clearly himself a corporate-selected champion that fans had no choice but to boo him.

And that’s why wrestling fans are irate. Wrestling fans, more than any other fan of anything else, prize the idea that they decide who the stars are – which, given the relationship between wrestlers and fans, is not an unreasonable proposition to hold. Last night, in act of pure corporate cynicism, WWE told the fans that their preferences don’t really matter. It’s like if Marvel Studios had released Mortdecai – and then let everybody know that in the next Avengers flick, Mortdecai will join the Avengers and kill Ultron with his moustache. Given that, is it any wonder wrestling fans got pissed?

(A protozoan version of this post originally appeared on Twitter and Storify.)

1. Granted, this phrase was initially a dodge by Vince McMahon to avoid having to satisfy state athletic commission requirements, because if Vince McMahon can find a way to spend less money on keeping his employees safe, he will do that. [↩]
2. Mostly because in the career retrospective videos WWE makes about John Cena these days, they edit that part out, along with how his finisher used to be called the “F-U.” [↩]
3. As an aside: WWE’s video package producers are widely considered to be the gold standard in sports media. They’re ridiculously good at their jobs, especially given the often ludicrous material they have to work with. Take the time to watch that video; it’s amazing work and draws you into the story perfectly. [↩]
4. And here’s one more thing I’m stealing from elsewhere: Daniel Bryan is the ONLY credible challenger to Brock Lesnar. Because you can’t out-brawl Brock Lesnar, you can’t out-MMA Brock Lesnar, you can’t out-power Brock Lesnar, you can’t out-size Brock Lesnar. None of those things work. Historically, the only way you can ever beat Brock Lesnar is to out-professional-wrestle him, to use the tricks of the universe where Irish whips and DDTs are things that actually work – and Daniel Bryan is the best professional wrestler in the world. [↩]
5. It should be noted: Philly fans are some of the most hardcore wrestling fans in the world. [↩]

QUESTION ONE (Film adaptations of Shakespeare plays)

a. Whose first instinct was not to feed the tarantula?
Olivia in She’s The Man

b. Who once crashed into a car on purpose?
Kat Stratford in 10 Things I Hate About You

c. Who always wanted to be a hawk?
Hugo in O

d. What promoted rust?
The atmosphere of Altair IV in Forbidden Planet

e. Who considered herself an underachiver?
Pat MacBeth in Scotland, PA

f. Which pair of gardeners hated one another?
Mrs. Montague and Mr. Capulet in Gnomeo and Juliet

g. Who kept nunchaku in his trousers?
Striker in Get Over It

h. Who was unaffected by fifty-dollar words?
Mike in Deliver Us From Eva

i. Who explained that knowledge of kung fu was a statutory requirement in his home?
Han Sing in Romeo Must Die

QUESTION TWO (Roman characters in Asterix books)

a. Who changed his name when he became a matador?
Spurious Brontosaurus (El Hispanie) in Asterix in Spain

b. Who informed the audience that he knew his enemies had a secret?
Caligula Minus in Asterix the Gaul

c. who was followed by jealousy everywhere he went?
Tortuous Convolvulus in Asterix and the Roman Agent

d. Who was given property by the seaside?
Tremensdelerius in Asterix and Caesar’s Gift

e. Who used their knowledge of soldier’s songs in pursuit of a seat in the Senate?
Crismus Cactus in Asterix and Son

f. Who was defiantly proud of not being a work of art?
Goldendelicius in Asterix and the Laurel Wreath

g. Who loved fried boar’s tripe with honey?
Varius Flavius in Asterix in Switzerland

h. Who invented the latest thing in baths?
Squareonthehypotenus in The Mansions of the Gods

i. Who argued that peace was beyond all price?
Caius Preposterus in Obelix & Co.

QUESTION THREE (talking ducks)

a. Who liked toast, but was suspicious of muffins?
Ajax Duckman from Duckman

b. Who was concerned about the expense of nuclear weapons?
Negaduck from Darkwing Duck

c. Who was given a bare belly when he was hit with 200 million volts of electricity?
Danger Duck from Loonatics

d. Who gained superpowers from a starfish?
Rubberduck from Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew!

e. Who once went to purchase uranium for children?
Super Duck from Archie Comics’ Super Duck

f. Whose reincarnation involved ketchup?
Count Duckula

g. Who was too smart for hard work?
Gladstone Gander

h. Who always wore a floatation device so that he would not drown?
Wade Duck from U.S. Acres

i. Who earned a dollar for peeling potatoes?
Lucky Ducky from Tom The Dancing Bug

QUESTION FOUR (princesses)

a. Who was once endowed with the power of love?
Wonder Woman (Princess Diana)

b. Who was adopted by a demon?
Morrigan Arnsland from Darkstalkers

c. Who refused to fight the King of the Rock?
Mulan

d. Which rose was plucked by the younger son of a king?
Sharra, the Dark Rose of Cathal from The Fionavar Tapestry

e. Who remembered a cat?
Anya from Anastasia

f. Who hated the smell of humans?
San in Princess Mononoke

g. Who is estimated to have a fortune exceeding one billion dollars?
Princess Peach

h. Who believed there was a star expressly for her?
Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars

i. Whose middle names were the result of a local tradition?
Princess Esmerelda Margaret Note Spelling of Lancre

QUESTION FIVE (television characters involved in crossovers)

a. Who was the brother of a mortician?
John Munch in Homicide: Life On The Streets – crossed into Law and Order: SVU and The X-Files

b. Who appeared in pornography under an assumed, but real, name?
Ursula Buffay in Mad About You – crossed into Friends

c. Who considered amaretto a “wussy drink”?
Carla Tortelli in Cheers – crossed into St. Elsewhere

d. Who started smoking at the age of nine?
Chandler Bing in Friends – crossed into Caroline and the City

e. Who did not discover he had a son until he was thirty-two?
Crosby Braverman in Parenthood – crossed into About a Boy

f. Who considered the revelation of his baldness a firing offense?
Alan Brady in The Dick Van Dyke Show – crossed into Mad About You

g. Who assisted in an escape from a Dyson Sphere?
Montgomery Scott in Star Trek – crossed into Star Trek: The Next Generation

h. Who had a firm belief about the distinction between a custodian and a janitor?
George Jefferson in The Jeffersons – crossed into All In The Family, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, others

i.Which journalist refused to speak to her birth mother?
Natalie Green in The Facts of Life – crossed into Diff’rent Strokes

QUESTION SIX (judges)

a. Who once requested some French cologne?
Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd

b. Who gave up his dream to move to Italy?
Marshall Eriksen in How I Met Your Mother

c. Who acted only in the ultimate greater interest?
The Living Tribunal

d. Who knew that the form of the devil was a griffin with wings of leather?
Theodoric of York, Medieval Judge

e. Who was a fool without a crown?
Judge Frollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame

f. Who committed suicide and then helped a soul escape Purgatory?
Adrian Chase (Vigilante)

g. Who always considered being from Texas to be a capital crime?
The Hangin’ Judges in Deadlands

h. Who was born and raised in a bad block?
Judge Anderson in Judge Dredd/Dredd

i. Who was a 1951 model?
Doc Hudson in Cars

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Keira Knightley for The Imitation Game is a lock because that movie is going to get nominated anywhere it can get nominated. Meryl Streep for Into The Woods is Meryl Streep doing Good Acting in a popular, financially successful, critically well-received movie and really, it has to be an amazing year for Meryl Streep not to get nominated in that scenario. Birdman is a movie about movies, and Hollywood fucking loves movies about movies, and Emma Stone has gotten good nods for her turn in it – including a sweep of nominations for the other major film awards and a shit-ton of awards from critics’ circles – and ALSO she’s a young actress who hasn’t gotten an Oscar nom yet in the category that almost always goes to either “elder stateswoman as yet unrecognized” or “young ingenue” so I think she gets it easy. Patricia Arquette in Boyhood seems very likely because Boyhood is, I think, the prohibitive favorite to Win Everything.

That fifth nod is tough for me to call. The smart money is on Jessica Chastain in A Most Violent Year but there isn’t a lot of buzz about that movie or her; it feels like people still have leftover Chastain enthusiasm from the last few years where she’s been so good (and maybe don’t want to give her award for a genre piece like Interstellar, where she was very good). I don’t think she gets it. I think there’s two serious options: Rene Russo in Nightcrawler (a little movie that nobody expected to be good, was very good, and has been gathering steam) and Carmen Ejogo in Selma (a good – if small – role in a good movie and a nomination which would make the category not all-white, which a significant part of the Academy prefers to not have happen nowadays). I lean towards Ejogo, mostly because I saw Selma more recently.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: JK Simmons is winning it for Whiplash. Who gets a nomination as a consolation prize? Ethan Hawke for Boyhood seems likely. Ed Norton for Birdman because it is a movie about movies. Robert Duvall for The Judge, because fuck it it’s Robert fucking Duvall and how many more times will the Academy get to celebrate him? Annnnnnnnd I dunno geez maybe Tom Wilkinson for Selma? Or Mark Ruffalo for Foxcatcher maybe? I’m flipping the coin and betting on Wilkinson.

BEST ACTOR: Michael Keaton for Birdman is already the favorite here to win the whole thing, so duh, he’s in. Benedict Cumberbatch for The Imitation Game is Benedict Cumberbatch and he’s going to get the nod. Eddie Redmayne is British and he’s playing someone in a biopic and said person has a visible disability, so really the nomination is his to lose, regardless of whether The Theory of Everything is good. I think the I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Controversy over Selma is going to pass and David Oyelowo gets in for playing MLK.

Conventional wisdom has either Steve Carell for Foxcatcher or Jake Gyllenhaal for Nightcrawler getting in for the fifth slot, and I think Gyllenhaal gets it; I think Foxcatcher is going to be the snubby loser this year in terms of nominations. But I’m going to throw a curveball here: I think Bradley Cooper is going to displace one of the four non-Keaton people just mentioned (Cumberbatch, Redmayne, Oyelowo or Gyllenhaal) for American Sniper, because the Academy fucking loves Clint Eastwood and because he’s a classic Hollywood leading man type doing a traditional Hollywood leading man performance in a category that doesn’t have one of those. Probably Cumberbatch is safe too but he’s not a super-lock like Keaton is.

BEST ACTRESS: Julianne Moore has never won an Oscar (amazingly) and she has a big meaty role in Still Alice where she is a person dealing with early-onset Alzheimer’s, which is a big worry to people in the Academy voter demographic (well, maybe just regular Alzheimer’s). I have no idea if the movie is good and half of the Academy voters won’t even have watched it before they fill out their cards and she’s still the frontrunner to win, let alone be nominated. Reese Witherspoon for Wild seems very likely because that is an Oscar Movie and the Oscars are, in their way, quite predictable. Rosamund Pike for Gone Girl is the category’s nod at movies that made actual bank; she won’t win, the nomination is her prize.

Those are the three locks, I think. After that it’s harder. A lot of people are thinking Jennifer Aniston gets a nod for Cake, but nobody has seen it yet (like Still Alice it got a very tiny limited release to qualify for the awards and opens nationally only after nominations hit) and unlike Still Alice its sexy issue is less age-specific to the Academy (chronic pain). It’s basically the same role as Still Alice except that Aniston’s nomination story is “finally I get recognized for being good at acting” and Moore’s is “I should have three awards already” and… I don’t think it happens. I could easily be wrong about that. I think Marillon Cotillard for The Immigrant gets that fourth slot.

As for the fifth, fuck it, Felicity Jones for The Theory of Everything, which is this year’s Crash – a movie that Looks Important but probably isn’t any damn good, not that this matters.

BEST DIRECTOR: Richard Linklater is the favorite for Boyhood and I think he wins it, both for that and as a long-overdue consolation prize for not even being nominated as Best Director for any of the Before trilogy or even Dazed and Confused (and is there seriously a movie that has aged as spectacularly well as Dazed and Confused?). Ava Duvernay for Selma is a black person and a woman and I think the double-dose of diversity, combined with Selma being very good, does the job for her nomination. Alejandro G. Iñárritu for Birdman because I think it gets nominated everywhere possible and because it’s very “directorly.”

After that it gets harder. The Academy will want one or two big names in the category, which means one of David Fincher for Gone Girl or Clint Eastwood for American Sniper. I don’t think Wes Anderson for The Grand Budapest Hotel is a Big Name per se but he’s big enough to be considered, especially since I think Budapest is a possible spoiler nominations-horse (Ralph Fiennes for Best Actor seems more plausible every time I think about it. I don’t even know who directed Imitation Game and Theory of Everything and I don’t care enough to check. I think it’s Anderson and Eastwood taking the final two slots.

BEST PICTURE: Boyhood, Birdman, Selma and Grand Budapest Hotel all seem likely to me. After that… I dunno. Imitation Game probably, because it’s the sort of biopic that Oscar loves. Theory of Everything probably not because I don’t think anybody who likes it as a potential Best Picture will like Imitation Game less, which is what it needs in order to get that Best Picture nod. American Sniper because it’s Clint Eastwood and there is literally no other reason. And then… man, I’m only at six? Seems low. Let’s add Whiplash as a seventh just because.