Thoughts on the Oscars

• Guillermo del Toro is the Mexican Peter Jackson. From the beard to the glasses to the paunch, he looks like him. And like Jackson, he started out making fun, unpretentious visually bizarre movies that critics didn’t pay much attention to. Eventually someone will entrust him to direct a fantasy blockbuster. The Hobbit, perhaps?
• Does anyone in Hollywood speak English any more?
• I knew Alan Arkin was going to upset Eddie Murphy. You can’t be a self-absorbed jerk for 25 years and expect your fellow actors are going to give you an Oscar. I’m surprised he didn’t get up and leave after he didn’t win.

An Inaccessible Island

I was curiously unmoved by Letters from Iwo Jima.

I went in fully expecting–wanting, really–to be awed by the power of Clint Eastwood’s vision. The conceit is certainly ingenious: turn a legendary American victory on its head by showing it exclusively from the perspective of the losers.

But he makes a wrong move right from the start. Rather than immediately jumping into the wartime action on Iwo Jima, he pans across the remaining detritus of the battle in 2007. A team of Japanese archaeologists, in white jumpsuits, with high-powered flashlights, makes their way into a bunker–a fancy word for a cave really, since neither the floors, walls nor ceilings end in smooth right angles–to search for artifacts. They come upon a cloth sack buried in the dirt. Before they open the bag, the screen fades out, and the action moves to Iwo Jima’s south-facing beach in early 1945.

She-Devil

As a professional journalist, I’m always a bit skeptical of movies about journalism. So often it’s presented as either more glamorous or more corrupt than it really is. To be vulnerable to corruption you need power, and to live glamorously you need money. Most journalists have neither. But there are exceptions.

One is Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine. She reportedly makes $5 million a year, dates wealthy older men and refused to put Oprah Winfrey on the cover until she lost weight. Her decisions launch designers and set trends. She is, by all accounts, an autocratic and impossible boss.

In The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep plays Miranda Priestly, a thinly veiled satire of Wintour. She gives orders that are either impossible to fill–procurement of the unpublished manuscript of the next Harry Potter novel by three, please–or too vague to comprehend–”Book me a table at that place that I like.” She is relentlessly critical and never smiles.