Oscars

Viewing the ceremony – not comprehensively – after a multi-year hiatus. (Oscar-cast doubles as storm alerter tonight.)

I’m old enough now to be less intrigued by the living than by the honored dead:

• Robert Duvall
• Graham Greene
• Diane Keaton
• Val Kilmer
• Robert Redford
• Rob Reiner
• Terence Stamp, etc.

(Some heavy hitters.)

Of the nominated movies, I’ve seen Sinners. Delroy Lindo, who plays a tragicomical virtuouso drunk (Cat Ballou’s Lee Marvin, anyone?), lost his contest to Sean Penn but would have been a worthy laureate.

And I’ve seen KPop Demon Hunters: unworthy but, tonight, triumphant.

Paul Thomas Anderson will win, one year or another (probably this year); and so will Jessie Buckley, who’s too good for the movies that get released nowadays. She has acted with Olivia Colman, which yields dividends, Oscar-wise. I’d like to see Jessie win for something schlocky like Beast or Men. (Or for a Richard Linklater adaptation of Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man.) Not for a prestige picture about one of Shakespeare’s love interests (everybody wins for that).

It’s been a grueling weekend. Daniel puked, I puked, and now Samuel has just puked. Three of us down, two of us to go.

My bracket, pt. 2; Beast; Orwell; the clink

Out go Nebraska and New Mexico, my underdogs. I’ve fallen from ~250,000th to ~400,000th place.

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I saw Beast (2017), set on Jersey in the English Channel. The leads are Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn. I was going to say, Flynn is one of the best young actors; but he’s forty-one; he’s been playing good and bad young men for almost two decades. In Beast, he’s a suspected serial killer. Is he guilty? And how is this possibility regarded by the turbulent woman (Buckley, even better than Flynn) who’s drawn to him “as a moth to the flame?”

Critics say this is a Badlands- or Bonnie-and-Clyde-type story. I think it’s more like Chabrol’s La cérémonie or, especially, Le boucher. Anyway, it’s an old story.

Much of Jersey seems manicured for tourists. But there are unkempt places. Buckley and Flynn climb cliffs, swim in the sea, roll in the dirt, tramp through forests, shoot rabbits.

Buckley wounds one. Flynn tells her to finish it off. It’s kinder, he says. As if kindness were the motive.

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I found a cheap copy of the large volume of Orwell’s essays and have been reading through them. He was a fine blogger from the get-go (“journalist,” I guess you’d call him). What essay are you reading, Samuel asked. “The Clink,” about how Orwell gets himself jailed for drunkenness, I said. Samuel built an enclosure with blocks and soon was playing that his action figures were in the clink.