academy awards

Last night’s Oscars ceremony was a hostile shitshow. Which is too bad, because if the night wasn’t marred by sexist jokes, all the headlines today should have been about the fabulous Jennifer Lawrence.

She contorted faces into the red carpet cameras, face-planted up the stairs in her tricky couture gown, and confessed that she literally wrecked herself with a shot of swill on an empty stomach before the post-show press question roundup. If you aren’t enamored with Jennifer Lawrence already for her steadfast refusal to take herself seriously under any circumstances, or for her acting chops, you have to concede this: when she used the arm not wrapped around her Oscar statuette to extend a middle finger on her way to the press microphone, she made the Oscars’ tedious and ugly into a platform for how she actually felt.

BOOM. I love her. She might as well have been playing cupid in the Hunger Games, loosing arrows into my heart.

Lawrence has repeatedly addressed the media’s reduction of the healthy female body to skin and bones with the self-effacing and defiant assertions to the mainstream women’s lifestyle magazines. Elle notoriously quoted her in their December cover story, “In Hollywood, I’m obese. I’m considered a fat actress. I’m Val Kilmer in that one picture on the beach.”  

As for the rest of her body, she has quickly accumulated enough physical skill to become a superhuman—without obsessing solely about her body.. In her training for the Hunger Games, she had to learn archery, hand-to-hand combat, and trained without dieting, saying “You can’t work when you’re hungry, you know?” Director David O. Russell mentioned her endurance during her Silver Linings choreography training and and yet she “wants to punch people” who talk about how much they love working out.  

Another big reason to love Lawrence: She takes on great roles. Her characters in Winter’s Bone and the Hunger Games are complex and interesting. In playing the role she won for last night, Tiffany in Silver Linings Playbook, it’s clear she takes her job and her responsibility extremely seriously. Without as smart and compassionate an actress, Tiffany’s role could easily have slipped into being a manic pixie dream girl.

In all honestly, Lawrence is one of those rare people who make it big in Hollywood and who we all still feel like could be the friend we could drive around with on a Friday night, cracking jokes about fitness clubs and wheatgrass addicts.  

So, Jennifer Lawrence, brush off the haters. There are a lot of us who can’t wait to see what you’ll do next. We'll be your best friend/backup whenever you need it. 

More reading: Our illustrated ode to Jennifer Lawrence's character Tiffany. 

Scarlett O'Hara and her mammy in Gone with the Wind. 

With their Oscar wins last night, Django Unchained and Lincoln have taken their places in the top-tier pantheon of Hollywood’s slavery films.  As Official Slavery and Jim Crow Epics, both films have the full support of the Hollywood machine, enjoying obscene budgets and lengths, and use the power of image and story to re-create the history of the eras. They also both, in my opinion, absolve the white majority of guilt for upholding systemic labor exploitation. 

Slavery and Jim Crow Epics are a whole mini-genre in Hollywood. These films are often released in an important anniversary year and rake in the box office dollars, and often  wind up hindering meaningful conversation about the legacy of slavery. Whether the films employ benevolent omission or base humor, these versions of America’s racial history continue to write African Americans out of the scene.

Here is a brief history of America Slavery and Jim Crow Epics, from 1915 to the present. 

 

Last night was the Academy Awards, which means my Facebook feed was awash in comments from high school acquaintances along the lines of, “WTF was up with Kristen Stewart!?!? She was totally frowning and had some kind of bruise on her arm!!! What a slut!!! #TeamEdward.”

In my opinion, there were lots of moments last night more notable that Kristen Stewart’s facial expression. Here’s my list for best and worst moments from the interminable broadcast:

Loved It: Quvenzhané Wallis. The 9-year-old star of Beasts of the Southern Wild was the youngest Best Actress nominee to date. Not only did she rock a stuffed puppy dog handbag on the red carpet, she was unabashed in the fact that she was damn proud of herself. When they announced her name along with the likes of Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence, Emmanuelle Riva and Naomi Watts, Wallis spared viewing audiences the false modesty of batting eyelashes, shrugged shoulders and downcast eyes. Instead, she flexed her arms like a champion and grinned.

Hated It: So many of host Seth MacFarlane’s jokes! 

This Sunday is the Academy Awards which, while increasingly tedious and irrelevant, still has a major impact on the kinds of movies that we're able to see in theaters. Let's at least hope no one tells an actress to eat a cheeseburger this time around. 

If you're tuning in to the broadcast, check out all our past coverage of Oscar-nominated films.

• Silver Linings Playbook: The film puts mental illness issues front and center, though it could use more nuance. Meanwhile, here's our illustrated ode to Jennifer Lawrence's character Tiffany.
• Flight: Denzel Washington has a solid role, but please don't let this movie win any award, except one for "most sexism." 
• Anna Karenina: This is a fresh take on a century-old narrative about gender roles, slut-shaming, and the importance of practicing train safety.  
• Zero Dark Thirty: Fingers crossed that Zero Dark Thirty wins the best picture award so that Bret Easton Ellis's head will explode. 
• The Sessions: Our Tales from the Crip blogger dug into the film's central issue of sex surrogacy.  
• Skyfall: The Academy seems to agree that the best thing about the new Bond movie is just the intro song. 
• Life of Pi: A boy and a cute tiger lead the audience through a colorful, entrancing limbo. But what's up with people of color's stories being told only through the lens of white authors? 
• Beasts of the Southern Wild: An illustrated tribute to Hushpuppy, the toughest kid in the bayou. 
• How to Survive a Plague: The documentary on AIDS activism combined old and new footage to make an inspiring flick.  

And big picture: Why don't more female directors get nominated for Oscars? It comes down to money, money, money. 

Mad about sexism at the Oscars? Sign our letter telling the Academy five things they need to change right now. 

This morning, the nominees for the 84th annual Academy Awards were announced. And this morning, as has happened every Oscar nominee morning for the past 83 years, the roster of hopefuls is filled with white dudes.

After the 83rd Academy Awards, late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel quipped that the only African-American nominee at the Oscars was Black Swan. "Happy Black History Month," he added sardonically. Kimmel’s far from the only one bemoaning the dearth of black Oscar nominees this year. Clearly, the producers of this year’s Oscars recognized the omission as well and took measures to ensure the telecast at least featured entertainers of color.

Just 14 years ago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson called for a boycott of the Academy Awards due to the dearth of African American entertainers nominated for Oscars. In the new millennium, however, the Academy Awards have consistently nominated blacks for Oscars. Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Jen Hudson and Forest Whitaker have all nabbed Academy Awards in recent years. And Sophie Okonedo, Will Smith and Don Cheadle are among the blacks to receive nominations in the 2000s.

Read on for more on the 2010 nominations...

Well, I watched the whole darn Oscar ceremony.  And I've blogged it...

After the jump, some of my thoughts on the winners, the oddities, and the guys and dolls of the Academy Awards.