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I know, I haven’t been posting the last few weeks. I got lazy. What can I say? But this mornings Oscar nominations woke me up and have me back on target. For the first time […]
Born and raised in Utah and currently residing in San Francisco, I’m the Director of Marketing for Steamworks, the bathhouse chain. I have a long history with LGBT activism, mostly in Utah where I was a founding member of Queer Nation Utah, the LGBT Liaison to Salt Lake City Mayor Deedee Coradini, a board member of the Desert and Mountain States Lesbian and Gay Conference, and active in leadership and membership of many other community organizations and LGBT employee groups over the years. As a former Mormon, I have a particular interest in the intersection between the LGBT fight for equality and the Mormon Church’s battle to deprive LGBT folks of full equality.
I was a member of the Drag group “the Lovebirds” for 3 years in the 1980’s, and also performed briefly in the 90’s as part of “Sylvia and the Pykettes”. I clearly have thing for girl groups.
As a voracious consumer of pop culture and film I have a lifetime of obsessive knowledge about film, television and music. I’m an opinionated queen and happy to share my thoughts with anyone who will listen or read.
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Comments
I think Avatar is going to win most of the awards its nominated for, just on the basis of its huge popularity and success, and not by the fact that it actually deserves those awards..really I think the only awards it actually deserves are the technical ones, like best visuals..I mean the movie was pretty much 99% CGI!!! the visuals were all it had going for it..yet that seems to mask everything else that made the film mediocre, especially when you compare it to the other films….really, I will be satisfied if any film besides Avatar wins best picture and best Director..cos Avatar dosen’t deserve either dammit!
I haven’t seen some of the other popular films like Precious, Up in the Air, or The Hurt Locker..I will at least try to see The Hurt Locker before the Oscars….
Having 10 nominees in every catagory is making the Oscars more like the Grammys, where it’s not always about excellence or peer opinion, but about ticket sales and public opinion. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
THere were regularly as many as 12 nominees for Best Picture in the first 14 years of the awards. The decision to expand the number of nominees, by all accounts seems to have been a purely commercial decision based on the declining ratings of the telecast over the last several years. When the Dark Knight didn’t squeak into the list of nominees it was widely viewed as a not only an arguable critical error as the film was very well received by critics, but a mistake as a reflection of the public’s taste and interest in the awards. The thinking is that if the public doesn’t have a stake in the winner, they won’t bother watching. The nominees over the last few years were mostly critical successes, but not popular box office hits.
I think the results are largely positive. Yes the Avatar and Blindside noms reflect purely commercial popularity in my mind. Avatar at least made many top 10 lists, and is a film with historic implications for the future of the art and business of film making. If they can continue to find a balance of strong contenders that mix the purely critical successes with a few popular films that have some strong redeeming qualities, I have no problem with the expanded field.