So, a few days back I got a phone call informing me I had won the 2012 Crawford Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. It might say something about how bowled over I was that I forgot to blog about it here for two days.

The ballot this year was incredibly strong, and the list of prior winners is intimidating, and I am truly honored to have been chosen.

Thanks so much to everyone who has offered well-wishes; I’ve been smiling for two days straight. I hope that events will conspire to allow me to attend ICFA this year (both so I can accept in person, and so I can squint at the sun and say things like, “I don’t know about all this…brightness.”)!

So, largely thanks to Jennifer Lawrence practicing her hostage face this morning, the Oscar nominations are out!

What a shithole.

Shame, which I thought was an obvious awards contender for both quality and General Awardnesness, was utterly ignored. Drive has it even worse, with one piddly nomination for Sound Editing. (Shame at least got a nice clean cut direct; the Academy walked past Drive, turned around, came back, and flicked it right in the nose. That’s why Ryan Gosling’s face looks like that. That shit stings.)

In other news, we live in a world in which Puss in Boots is up for consideration for Best Anything, and Jonah Hill can now put “Oscar Nominee” in front of his name forever. Didn’t they understand what that means? You can’t take them back! No amount of 21 Jump Street can ever take that away! THE OSCARS INVITES YOU TO 21 JUMP STREET, OKAY? THAT IS WHERE WE LIVE NOW.

But that horror aside, the dual snub of two of the best films of the year seems especially cruel since the new 10-slot Best Picture slot had plenty of room for the appalling Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the Are You Kidding Me With This The Help, and the middling Midnight in Paris, and still had a slot left over. They only used nine out of ten, and STILL wouldn’t nominate Shame or Drive. That’s sort of when you know that you’ll be in for an evening of watching Steven Spielberg and/or Martin Scorsese repeatedly take the stage and pretend like either of their nominated movies is anywhere close to their best. And that’s if you’re lucky. (Also when you knew that: as soon as those movies were announced. Be real.)

Amid rare victories (If a Tree Falls gets rightly nominated for Best Doc), there are other small outrages (Rooney Mara and not Tilda Swinton? I see), and some all-around sighing (so, we can nominate actresses of color…as long as they’re playing maids, I see, yes, that is an excellent thing to reinforce, thank you, definitely we should have more of that), but honestly, the movie that annoys me most in terms of the accolades being showered upon it is The Artist, because seriously.

Here’s why; very vague spoilers under the cut. Continue reading

For a movie that doesn’t try to be anything more than solid, slightly pulpy fun, and that succeeds in the execution, there is a lot being said about Haywire. (Don’t all get surprised at once!)

That seems to be largely because its star is MMA all-star Gina Carano, who does her own stunts, and who is under the sort of scrutiny most male action stars never see. (Among some bizarre pearl-clutching about her fight scenes, her acting ability has been repeatedly questioned, which is strange, because I do not remember a lot of interviews asking Jean-Claude Van Damme how his workshops with Meryl Streep are going.)

We live in a world that makes it impossible to leave discourse at the door about this kind of thing, and means that the movie hits theatres under a lot of baggage it doesn’t deserve. But Haywire itself seems to be blithely unconcerned about it all. Instead, it focuses on turning in a slick action movie that can be boiled down to Vasquez: The Motion Picture, and is exactly as fun as that sounds.

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Hollywood’s Homecoming Dance was last night! I was pleased to see that my guess about the Stump Everybody theme is going strong, even though I spent a lot of my time with my hand propping up my dismayed face.

For the Golden Globes, many people decided to keep the baffle in the details, so mostly-lovely garments are supplanted by a single rogue element that was clearly designed to make my heart hurt.

And no one was immune from Baffle Fever. Not even Tilda Swinton. NOT EVEN TILDA.

I could not love 80% of this more – the shoulders, the sleeves, the tailoring, the silhouette of the skirt are all great. A case could even, maybe, be made for the color, though I would have liked to see it a greyer, less Easter Egg pale. But something about the skirt-matching sash disaster make her look like a mother of the bride from SyFy’s Children of Dune, and that is no place you want to be, Tilda. Trust me.

Other people’s attempts to baffle me with their outfits under the cut!
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