"Don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear. For I wear a thousand masks,
masks that I am afraid to take off and none of them are me." —Unknown

04 March, 2005 - 12:19 p.m. - Creative sentencing
I'll bite.

I think this Martha Stewart business is bunk, and i'll tell you why: the punishment does not fit the crime.

People love white collar crime. It is, supposedly, victimless. We of course know better than that, right?

What Stewart did was not the worst offense on the books, there's no question. But she's basically gotten off with a slap on the wrist. Prison time? In a minimum-security institution? I don't think so. That wasn't punishment. House arrest? In this day and age, house arrest is a joke.

Here's what i think. I think the juge should have engaged in some creative sentencing, to wit:

- Martha should be forced to give up all the money she made on her back door deals twice over (she was fined $30,000; i can't find any information on how much her insider trading did or would have netted her). I think all of this money should go to inner city schools.

- She should have to volunteer with inner city children on after school programs. (If you've ever seen her attempt to work with children on her television show, you'd understand why--she appears very uncomfortable with them.)

- Finally, she should be forced to live for a full year on a $25,000 salary, with no additional income--not to punish her for being rich, but to show her that with all her money, her actions were absurd (really, what ratio of her assets would she have lost to Imclone's falling stock prices?).

People complain that her sentence was too harsh. I find this laughable. If anything, her sentence has done nothing to make her regret her actions and has not given her cause for enough self-reflection to understand what it was that she did wrong. It's only made her that much more self-righteous--what an embarrassment to society!

28 February, 2005 - 12:15 p.m. - Post-Oscars post
Although i hadn't planned on it, i watched the Oscars last night--almost the entire ceremony. And i have to say, there's something about it that i really find fascinating, like picking a scab. Sick, i know.

Anyway, i noticed a few things about last night's ceremony that i thought i'd rant about here. So here's my post-Oscar rant. For the record, i'm not a Hollywood insider in any regard, so don't hold me liable for any factual errors. Just take this as a rant and nothing more. Enjoy.

Every year, there always seems to be one film that's poised to sweep the awards. For the last three years, the Oscars have been dominated by the Lord of the Rings trilogy. At one point, i think Titanic was it; at another point, Gladiator was it. I think of this film as the "hog film"--a film that has won the hearts of the AMPAS so completely that it just gets nominated over and over, sometimes to an absurd degree. Sometimes the hog film doesn't seem to deserve all those nominations. Sometimes it does. It doesn't necessarily win any of the awards for which it's been nominated--it just keeps popping up in every single category (Gangs of New York is a good example of one of these--nominated for ten awards but recieved not a single one). This year's hog was The Aviator, with eleven nominations.

Now, i haven't seen The Aviator, and i don't think i want to. I'm not a huge fan of Leonardo DiCaprio, and i'm not all that interested in the life of Howard Hughes. The one friend of mine who saw the film fell asleep through part of it and claimed that the film's only redeeming quality was that it portrayed Hughes' particular case of OCD very well. As much as i'm interested in mental illness, and despite the success of A Brilliant Mind, i'm not sure that this should be the draw for a film. In any case, judging strictly from the clips of the flim that i've seen (and, admittedly, this is not the best way of critiquing anything), The Aviator strikes me as one of those films that's good but perhaps a little overdone and not as nuanced and subtle as it could be.

I think this is a particularly American thing. We seem to love films that fall squarely into certain categories: Drama, Comedy, Action, Horror, and so on. You don't find this so much with foreign films. Just about every foreign film i've ever seen crosses all those lines and never really falls easily into any of them. Take Malena, for example. It's neither purely drama nor purely comedy, though it has moments of both. In the end, it's a whole story that doesn't need to be categorized. You don't find enough contemporary American films that defy categorization so well. Maybe that's part of our problem as a society. Anyway, i'm rambling.

So there you have it: The Aviator is the hog film, and quite frankly, it makes me sad that i have so little interest in it. But. Then you've got Million Dollar Baby and Clint Eastwood, who turns out to be well-spoken and very kind, and Morgan Freeman, whose speech and bearing were both regal and gracious--truly, the most deserving winners of the night.

But then there are my gripes and comments:

• Chris Rock's digs at President Bush. I said this last time with Michael Moore and i say it again: the Academy Awards are not the best platform for discussing politics. It's an awards ceremony for motion pictures. While i agreed with much of what Rock said, i just think that saying these things during the Oscars is a bit gauche. Use it in your stand-up routine. It's more appropriate there.



• Scarlett Johansson, Renee Zellweger, and their respective fashion statements. Ladies, "thin," as they say, may be "in," but that doesn't mean you should sacrifice your abilities to breathe and walk (respectively). Really. Unless, of course, you were doing some sort of Yoko Ono-style performance art remarking on the absurdity of our cultural concepts of women and femininity.



• Drew Barrymore. This one's not a gripe so much as a sigh of relief: she looked fabulous. No, she's not a stick figure, and yes, she's absolutely gorgeous. Hey, Johansson and Zellweger, take note, will you?



• Why is it that so many of the films nominated for sound-related awards were animated? Not a gripe, really, but an honest question.



• Best phrase of the night: "the dog's bollocks," stated so plainly by Andrea Arnold, who won for her live action short, Wasp.



• Something that really bugs me: When they show the clips for those nominated for acting awards, they always, without fail, show clips with the most melodramatic moments. One would think that it's far easier to act with melodrama than to act with a certain amout of subtlety, right? I mean, think soap opera or stupid comedy versus everyday drama or comedy: it's a lot harder to pull off the conflicting emotions duelling behind an attempted poker face than to cry until you look like Tammy Faye Baker, right? I wish they'd show scenes that truly highlight an actor's ability to capture complexity rather than sheer overwhelming emotion.



• Adding insult to injury: So they give awards in the aisles or line everyone up on the stage at once. Hell, if they're going to show these winners that their awards are somehow less important than the rest of the awards, they should at least let them finish their acceptance speeches.



• Best acceptance speech: Jorge Drexler, singing "Al Otro Lado Del Río." Sweet.



• Best presenter: Robin Williams and his impressions. They should let him and Whoopi Goldberg co-host the awards sometime.



• Best presenter, a close second: Edna, from The Incredibles, voiced by Brad Bird.



• And my final gripe: If they're going to give awards to live action and animated shorts, why not show clips of them? There's so much else that could be cut from the Oscars to make room for these. It's not like anyone in the home audience really ever gets to see shorts, unless they make a point of going to film festivals. Personally, i think they ought to show shorts before most major films, but that's just me. Anyway, clips at the very least would've been nice. I'd like to get a glimpse of the work for which these people have earned such important awards.