ANYONE ELSE HEAR THIS YESTERDAY ON NPR?

It's well worth listening to, so hit the "listen" link. More proof of the lunacy and destructiveness of the right, in this case Glen Beck:

http://www.npr.org/2011/02/27/134104527/when-glenn-beck-attacks-someone-could-get-hurt

THE OSCARS [AWARDS SHOW 2011]

Gotta admit, I found James Franco and Anne Hathaway fun, funny, and adorable. I couldn't see them as hosts, but ended up totally enjoying their presence.

The pacing seemed really off right from the start though, not of the hosts bits but of the rest of the show.

And too predictable, except for the original screenplay award, where the winner (David Siedler for THE KING'S SPEECH) said he was the oldest winner in Oscar history and then said he hoped that record would be broken soon and frequently. Hear hear.

And Charles Ferguson, the director of the best documentary, INSIDE JOB, who began his acceptance speech by saying something about how it's been three years since the economic collapse and no one has yet been indicted let alone convicted for the fraud that was perpetrated by the Wall Street firms that caused it.

[His actual quote: "Forgive me. I must start by pointing out that three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong."]

Otherwise it was mostly a no-surprises event (although Melissa Leo "dropping the f-bomb" as Christian Bale put it and giving a confusing acceptance speech was kind of out of the ordinary).

We'll all be hard put to remember the winners by this time next year, but it's still fun to watch, at least for me, and always has been since I was a kid (which reminds me that the historic references were handled terribly, completely unexciting and unemotionally engaging).

FOURTH ANNUAL LALLY'S ALLEY MOVIE AWARDS(?)

As a lot of you know, since my brain surgery, a little over fifteen months ago, a lot of things changed in the way my mind works (including my still making many more typos than I used to before the surgery, though thank God not as many as I was making for the few months right after it) (i.e. I've rewritten this first sentence many times to correct a slew of typos over and over again).

One of the main ways it changed, as I've pointed out many times, is that the compulsion to make lists in my mind when it had any down time—like before falling asleep, or to help myself fall asleep or back asleep, or when walking around or pretty much doing anything that didn't engage my mind fully—that I had as long as I can remember, completely disappeared.

I included a lot of those lists on this blog, usually a couple a week. Ones with very intricate requirements, like favorite movies with titles that start with the first letters of the alphabet and contain only one syllable etc. But since the operation I can hardly get myself to make any list, let alone many of them throughout any given day.

So my usual obsession with the Oscars, again since childhood, and my own movie awards each year since I started this blog, just isn't there. I don't think I even offered my choice for my own awards last year.

But I thought I'd try this year to at least lists my picks for the Lally's Alley Movie Awards, if not the nominees etc.

My choice for best picture wasn't even nominated for an Oscar: BARNEY'S VERSION.

A close second was THE FIGHTER.

My choice for best male actor is Paul Giamatti for BARNEY'S VERSION.

Again, he wasn't even nominated. There are other great performances, some not nominated also, like Mark Wahlberg, whose performance was the heart of THE FIGHTER, and a very generous performance it was, letting the other actors do most of the talking and emoting, while he played the fighter Micky Ward as the relatively quiet center of the storm that he was.

It seems like Colin Firth is the top contender for the Oscar, and his was a fine performance in THE KING'S SPEECH. But he really deserved it for A SINGLE MAN last year, and if he wins it will be partially for that performance as well that a lot of Academy members probably didn't even see until it was too late and felt guilty they hadn't rewarded it for the amazing performance it was.

My choice for best actress is a tie between Anette Benning for THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT, another amazingly nuanced performance that pretty much played every note in an actor's instrument, and Rosamond Pike in BARNEY'S VERSION, also a beautifully nuanced performance that didn't have one false note in it.

A close second was Jennifer Lawrence, the teenage actress who starred in WINTER'S BONE. An impeccable performance that deserves the Oscar nomination it got, and if the competition wasn't so tough, may even have taken the Oscar home (and still might if Natalie Portman and Bening split the vote for top choice).

I'd be surprised if Christian Bale doesn't win as Oscar for best male supporting actor for THE FIGHTER. There's some who think Geoffrey Rush might win for THE KING'S SPEECH. But as good as a lot of actors were in supporting roles, no one can touch Bale's performance. It's seminal. Historic. Bale does what people got so excited about Diniro for in Raging BULL, only Deniro, for my taste, was way too obvious (especially the weight fluctuations, which were seen as so uniquely brave at the time). Bale so embodies Dicky Eckland's ways of talking and walking and throwing punches and speaking and just being, that if you watch footage of Eckland and compare it to Bale's performance, it feels like Eckland's spirit has actually entered Bale and taken possession of him. It's one of the greates film performances in movie history, period.

The choice for best female supporting actor is a tough one, but again, Melissa Leo creates such a believably genuine mother of Micky Ward and Dicky Eckland in THE FIGHTER, it's transformative. Some folks think Leo screwed her chances for the Oscar because of a not very tasteful series of ads she did promoting herself for the award. It'll be interesting to see if that's the case, because no matter what she may be like outside her roles (and full disclosure, I read my poetry at an event with her a couple of years ago and had lunch with her and others afterwards), she's one of our best actors working in movies and TV right now, period.

My choice for best director is David O. Foster for THE FIGHTER, mostly because everyone is so perfect in it, from the stars to the bit players who were often amateurs, Lowell locals used either as themselves (as in the trainer O'Keefe) or people like themselves. To make a movie in which everything rings true and every player seems genuinely who they're playing is not easy, but THE FIGHTER pulls it off, and that's because of the director.

My second choice, even though I disliked so much about the movie, would be Aronovsky for BLACK SWAN because despite what I saw as cheap emotional tricks to create the kind of heightened melodramatic tension and had half the actors chewing the scenery, it is still incredibly powerful filmmaking, and that's Aronovky's doing.

My choice for best original screenplay is Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg for THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT. Because even though I didn't like some of the story's devices, it felt to me like the most original in many ways and uncomfortably unpredictable at times.

The Oscar will probably go to Aaron Sorkin for THE SOCIAL NETWORK and that's a pretty valid choice too, because with his usual panache he made what should have been the most boring story with the most boring legal details into an incredibly dramatic work of art with the kind of tension usually only found in thrillers.

For best adapted screenplay, again my choice is BARNEY'S VERSION and Michael Konyves for his adaptation of the Mordecai Richler novel the movie's based on. It's a huge challenge to reduce a person's entire adult life down to two hours but they did it, and did it brilliantly.

PS TO LAST POST

Here.

HMMMMMM...

So, gas prices are skyrocketing supposedly because of the "unrest in the Middle East."

Even though oil corporation profits are greater than ever in the history of the world!...

...and there is still a surplus of oil in the USA!

Hmmmm....

I wonder if oil corporations would be so low as to take advantage of circumstances to do some "profiteering" as they used to call it?

CHRIS MASON'S HUM WHO HICCUP

Got my copy of Chris Mason's HUM WHO HICCUP (Narrow House, Baltimore MD) in the mail yesterday and felt the same delight I've been feeling all my adult life when I get a book in the mail that I dig, or think I will, or by a writer/poet/etc. whose work gives me great satisfaction.

I've written about Chris on this blog before, his poetry and his music with The Tinklers and Old Songs (the latter put "archaic Greek poetry" to music).

I had already read this book, because I was asked (along with old friends the poets Terence Winch and Charles Bernstein) to write a blurb before it was published. So I'll just quote myself from the back of the book:

"There is no other book of poetry like Chris Mason's HUM WHO HICCUP, it's wonderful (and all that implies, including full of wonder). Mason has always been an original, but in HUM WHO HICCUP he outdoes himself. Whether it's his 'Hiccup' version of what most would see as Haiku (two disparate images joined unexpectedly in seventeen syllables—only Mason's Hiccups are eleven syllables), or in his what used to be called 'concrete' or visual poetry, only Mason riffs off scientific formulas and discoveries all the while choosing poetry over physics, lyricism over logic, and Escher-like poetic architecture over classic lyric structures (or a combination of both). HUM WHO HICCUP is a tour de force of unique poetics, but as entertaining as it is sui generis, just like the poet himself as he comes across in this collection and in all his writing and music."

[PS: I forgot I wanted to include a sample poem, so here's the first one in the book from a series called "HOMERIC HUMS"

Radiant round
unbounded light
too bright for sight
bursting through the clouds:
Hail, Morning Sun,
old exploder
of my coldness
into warmth, you
fill my bowl with
neutrinos, thanks
for everything.]

PS TO GEORGE SHEARING R.I.P.

Thanks to everyone who sent links to Youtube videos of George Shearing playing various songs, his own compositions and standards etc. after my post on his passing.

I chose the one below out of all of them, partly because it was suggested by friend and poet Tom Raworth who, like Shearing, is English and who did something as totally original with his art, poetry, as Shearing did with music.

I especially dig that this video (which from the suits I'd guess was made in the early 1950s) shows how humble Shearing was, that even with his great gifts, he didn't grandstand, (maybe his blindness gave him a natural humility). And also because if you aren't smiling by the end of it, you must have gotten distracted.