However, in a group interview with Movieline, Dermot Mulroney reminds us all not to forget that the heart of this film is the man on man on man on man on man action that cinema so desperately needs:

Dermot Mulroney: “I loved Jaws and Aliens and…Deliverance. So to me it read like those, I thought I’d like to be in a movie like that once, that’d be amazing. I’ve made a lot of movies that had both men and women in them, a lot of movies that were dominated by the woman’s storyline. And in this case it was a very different experience making the movie and enjoying the movie, when it was completed, because of the fact that there are no women in it… It was like thank God, I get to do a movie with just guys.”

Let’s get it out of the way that anyone referring to “actor” Dermot Mulroney needs to include those air quotes, so for him this quote stops, for all intents and purposes, at “thank God, I get to do a movie.”

Let’s also get it out of the way that Deliverance is a very…interesting film to reference in the context of two other films in which non-human monsters literally rip people to shreds.

Let’s also also get it out of the way that Aliens is, in fact, a movie about a woman who teams up with a small squad of Marines that includes two women to investigate an alien-riddled colony of which the only survivor is a young woman, and then proceeds to nearly-singlehandedly torch alien ass into oblivion.

I can’t help but picture Dermot Mulroney, sitting in the house that playing second fiddle to a bunch of vaginas all the time has bought him, wrinkling his nose and holding up scripts with two fingers as he deposits them carefully in a box labeled STORIES ABOUT WOMEN and a frowny face on them. He’s tired of it, don’t you see? He’s had to be billed under Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Emily Mortimer, and Glenn Close, and he BARELY edged out Anne Bancroft and Alfre Woodard that one time, and just a bunch of other bitches, all right? God, why is Hollywood so deluged with stories about women? Everywhere you look it’s just thoughtful, respectful, non-objectifying stories about the deep conflicts of women in a variety of situations that are never sidelined or belittled as being domestic or romantic, and Dermot Mulroney is TIRED OF IT. “Why can’t there be a movie about MEN, and THEIR concerns!”, Dermot cries, checking his junk casually just to get a look at some man-stuff before the day is over. When will Hollywood realize that men could be bankable, too, if only someone would give them a chance? Why won’t they give men leading roles? Why won’t these boardrooms packed full of women making all the key financial and business decisions that dictate the market and its gender attitudes finally stop asking for him to talk to women already? WHY?

No, seriously though, why.

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.

Despite its obvious Awardsness, The Artist, while always competent and sometimes clever, is the barest sketch of what it purports to be about; the hat-tips to Singing in the Rain are cute, but the movie rarely goes deeper than that. A slightly-dickweed silent-movie star is sidelined by the development of the talkies; he spends most of the rest of the movie drinking and feeling sorry for himself, while the young object of his affections rises to a potentially-interesting studio-system stardom we barely see, because her main function is to Love Hero. Jean Dujardin is clearly talented (though the dog was the most compelling aspect of this particular character), and Berenice Bejo is…there, but the movie was both jaded and blithely twee; the story and its central relationship are flat (unless you count the central relationship as Jean Dujardin/Uggie the Dog, in which case, it’s fine), and the eleventh-hour career solution is the kind meant to be an adorable, self-congratulatory transition to talkies, but only if you never, ever question it for one second; otherwise, the whole movie is a series of echoes of the early scene in which Our Hero shoves his leading lady into the wings so he can return and take another grinning bow himself.

The thing is, I don’t even dislike this movie because of what it isn’t. Silent film is a vast and complicated phenomenon that definitely deserves in-depth study, but not every movie that takes place in that era has to be that study. (Singing in the Rain wasn’t; then again, Singing in the Rain wasn’t trying to be.)

But like Berenice Bejo sliding her own arm into his tux so she can molest herself, this movie is too navel-gazey to be grand, too happy skipping to be sweeping. If it had gone for more complex characterization, or a smaller, better story instead of A Story of Art, The Artist might have been sweetly forgettable. As it is, it’s carrying the awkward burden of being Forgettable While Smug, which means that dog will be given its own musical number during the ceremony, just before it wins Best Picture for being a movie that’s proud of being The Movie about The Movies, while Tilda Swinton stands just backstage in her presenter’s dress, Watching, and Waiting.

Secondly, something extremely fun happened!

Recently, Esther at Fantasy Magazine asked if I wanted to write about dragons.

DID I EVER.

“Three Dragons” is the result of some serious nerding out and a refusal to cull quotes (they’re all awesome, I put them all in there, I regret nothing). The research was fun, and kind of dangerous, since now I have a whole separate research folder for a project that may or may not include “The Imprint of Her Foot Serpentous” in the title, because as soon as I saw that phrase I figured I either had to write something for it or start a band, and I’m all out of band.

Please also note that in the middle of an article that pretends to know what it’s talking about I still managed to fangirl Smrgol, because that dragon deserves it.

P.S. A close runner-up for the photo was this dude, who looks completely flummoxed by the stupid human who shoved itself into his mouth and insists on being eaten.

As everyone who ever participated in high school theatre knows, Shakespeare is pretty resilient. You can have a Midsummer Night’s Dream where the lovers are Greek, the players are Elizabethan, Titania’s fairies are ballet dancers, and Oberon’s are bikers, for example, and the play will probably survive. (I hope. If not, and that comedy has been ruined forever, then my sophomore-year production apologizes.)

In an attempt to warm up for whatever comes of my Magick4Terri offering of watching the worst movie the winner can imagine, Eileen and I sat down to watch an “edgy” update of Macbeth, starring that supreme thespian, Sam Worthington, and what I hope is a terrible wig and not his real hair, because yikes.

An hour later, looking as confused as he does, we gave up. (Just typing it makes me sad, but not as sad as the movie was making me.) Turns out the Bard is resilient, but as it turns out, not unbreakable, and if you try hard enough you can completely ruin it.

This isn’t the first time The Scottish Play has been updated to a drugs-and-gangsters drama; the BBC version with James Frain did it better – not flawless, but well-acted, with some interesting changes (the Weird Children) and an overall sense that it was being made by people who had a plan.

Here, no dice.

First of all, here is Sam Worthington in a shirt that is doing more acting than he does:

(At one point Eileen pointed out that she was angry, not just because this film was so bad and an hour of our lives was gone forever, but because Sam Worthington can put on his resume that he played Macbeth, and he really, really did not. The camera might have been pointed at him, but that’s not the same thing.)

And their other artistic choices involved a lot of wood paneling, mumbling, everyone being packed to the gills except the two guards who conveniently only carry knives instead, and the Weird Sisters being lovely young ladies who enjoy extremely awkward smooching with Macbeth in empty nightclubs filled with fog.

I would like to say there was a moment so bad that I flipped my desk like a cocktail table and peaced out, but the movie is just such a soup of unfortunate things that I honestly can’t even remember where we left off. I just know that, when the moment came, it was beautiful, and now when people try to defend Sam Worthington to me as an actor, I have definitive proof that it’s not his lack of material that’s the problem, which I suppose is worth something. (“Sure, he was terrible in Clash of the Titans, but -” “NO BUTS, WE ARE FINISHED.”)

Since I walked away from this movie without being able to stick it out, and can say nothing about how the conclusion reflects the movie as a whole, let’s have a nice palette-cleanser about this whole thing and talk about terrible Shakespeare productions you have seen and/or been in. (Fair cop – I was one of Oberon’s fairies, so technically I was part of the problem, but it was a non-speaking costume-assistant stage-fighting part of the problem and take responsibility for nothing except the togas and some of the doublet work.)

FIRST: I have joined the chorus of awesomeness that is Magick 4 Terri, in the service of the inimitable Terri Windling. I have offered to sit through, and write up at length, the very worst movie of your choice that you want me to sit through! Do your worst, you monsters, etc.

SECOND: In looking at notes from the last time I offered this, for Con or Bust, I was mortified to realize that ckd had been one of the winners, and yet somehow I had never reviewed the actual film! GREAT WORK, ME. ckd has, very kindly, never raised a fuss about it, but as a review is clearly owed, as soon as the Return of Captain Invincible DVD gets to my house, I will be making good on it. (This is, I realize, not the best possible advertisement of timeliness; however, the other two winners got theirs in good time, I promise!)

Anyway, please do go and take a look, and if you’d like to help Terri while making me suffer, by all means!