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Red Carpet Rundown: 2018 BAFTAS

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BAFTA Film Awards 2018 - Arrivals - London
It’s time for the BAFTAS, which are always sort of pleasantly transparent about the fact that the red carpet is Pretty Weird. (Turns out that Cirque du Soleil was there for a reason, and it was a Shape of Water aerial dance number, and you should probably see it, but it would have been just as fitting without the reason, somehow. Awards Season has become a thing that merits secondary entertainment. And why not? The carpet is always wild; let the bug contortionists have their turn.)   Normal red carpet show below. And honestly, this is just as weird. (I talk a lot about the ecosystem of all this and how those who appear are the top of an iceberg of red-carpet labor and intent, but it’s always nice to have moments like this, in which Margot Robbie is the only celebrity in this shot, to illustrate the point.)     And the BAFTAs know that. The show will do this red carpet business, because that’s an industry now, but it works so hard to be the event… Read more »

King Arthur

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thatsthemovie3
In a year in which everything is absolute garbage, there was one bright light, one burst of true art: KING ARTHUR. I tweeted about why. It's a terrible movie. This is not in dispute. It is also, however, easily in the top ten of movies that made me laugh the most. Here's why. — Genevieve Valentine (@GLValentine) September 15, 2017 The opening shots of KING ARTHUR. (It's a mage's tower. The mage is busy.) pic.twitter.com/Zh1asSkYki — Genevieve Valentine (@GLValentine) September 15, 2017 Prince Vortigern (you remember him) is jealous of Uther's giant sword! All he has to stab his wife with is that little dagger. pic.twitter.com/5If0OxO6Fn — Genevieve Valentine (@GLValentine) September 15, 2017 Vortigern, obviously, has been hard at work building a new, thicker, longer Mage's tower. pic.twitter.com/v5TXqYHWmS — Genevieve Valentine (@GLValentine) September 15, 2017 But how will he pull it? "Hands on the hilt, stupid," says D. Beckham. "10 digits…Give it a tug." (Actual line, I couldn't make this up.) pic.twitter.com/0s8QadWqUP — Genevieve Valentine (@GLValentine) September 15, 2017 King Arthur (2017), oil on canvas… Read more »

Red Carpet Rundown: The 2017 Golden Globes

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  It’s time for the Golden Globes, that shot across the bow of awards season that offers us our first real glimpse of the public images the potential awardees are going to be wearing this year. As always, if you’re worried I’m making fun of outfits on the red carpet because I think it’s fancy dresses and frivolous nonsense, and somehow my previous rundowns don’t convince you, never fear: I wrote two novels about weaponized public image as the world’s most bulletproof cover for political machinations, so probably not. (Those novels are Persona [Indiebound | Barnes & Noble | Amazon] and Icon [Indiebound | Barnes & Noble | Amazon].) Icon opens on a red carpet. I respect the red carpet. It is a merciless machine of celebrity and its power only grows. (My favorite red carpet game: How Many People in This Picture are Actually the Celebrities? I see one. I thrill to the idea that she might be the only celebrity in this picture.)   If you’re here, you probably know all that already.… Read more »

Nonfiction Catch-up Post: One Wedding and Nine Funerals

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andthentherewerenone blog
There has never been a fictional wedding/funeral ratio more to my tastes, has there? The wedding happened on BATES MOTEL, which I covered for AV Club; you could not have picked a better week for me to drop in on a show than the week two characters with a deeply repressed slow burn have to marry each other for plot reasons and then trip over their feelings for the next forty minutes. Naturally, I talked about tragedy the entire time. One of the great hooks of tragedy is watching people struggle after it’s too late. Bates Motel is a veritable playground of it—this is a version of the story whose earliest minutes turned out to be evidence Norman’s doomed, and it’s never stopped seeking out impossible things for its characters to rail against. This pall of predestination falls across the series’ of humor (sometimes balancing pathos on a knife’s edge of camp), across its noirish season arcs, and darkest of all across the house on the hill….This show is a tragedy; we know just how… Read more »

Red Carpet Rundown: The Oscars 2016

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Oh, we knew this day would come. The stylist gauntlet, the carefully crafted personas, the subliminal messages we’re meant to read into a dress being worn by a person who, the vast majority of the time, is a talented professional actor who desperately hates having to wear this dress and play some version of herself who’s somehow too charmingly artistic to care about awards even though she has to answer half a dozen questions about the half-million-dollar jewelry she’s wearing as someone on her styling staff tugs on her train so it looks good in photos: The Oscars. The levels of navel-gazing and self-congratulation possible with the Oscars have yet to be fully plumbed by science. This year, given public outcry about a lack of non-white nominees (practically a calling card for this award), producers bedecked the red carpet with any vaguely-related PoC it could find, all of whom were looking into the camera with a collective You Know Why expression. Winner of this particularly awkward category: Duane Howard, probably. And the red carpet is… Read more »
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