Oh, so it wasn't just me who noticed how contrived the relationship between James Franco and Anne Hathaway seemed during Sunday's 83rd AnnualAcademy Awards? ----- TheWrap Academy Chief Sherak: Franco and Hathaway Had 'No Connection' By Daniel Frankel Published: March 03, 2011 @ 5:22 pm
Pelted by critics of the 83rd Annual Academy Awards telecast over the last three days, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Tom Sherak quipped to TheWrap Thursday that he remains in a "bunker."
"I'll climb out as soon as I hear Winston Churchill say it's OK," he added, conceding that the host pairing of James Franco and Anne Hathaway wasn't as dynamic as hoped, but defending the overall ratings performance of the ABC telecast, which drew an average of 38 million viewers.
Oh, I get it. Anne Hathaway in tails and James Franco in drag, all so he can make a Charlie Sheen joke. But really, do you think that people watching the Academy Awards show LIVE in Germany or Eastern Europe when it was 4:15 a.m. or so found it so damn hysterical? Me, I've got to think they just groaned. Like I did here in Anytown U.S.A., Hallandale Beach, Florida For whom it was intended...
Well, at least someone didn't needlessly mention Sarah Palin just to make her a liberal punchline and show how "edgy" they are!
Gothamist: James Franco Says "F*** The Yale Daily News" http://gothamist.com/2011/03/04/james_franco_says_f_the_yale_daily.php
The whole show reminded me of the very awkward relationships created when people are thrown together like a salad during long car rides from IU to Fort Lauderdale or Daytona Beach during Spring Break, tales related to me by friends once we were all back in cold Bloomington. I once even personally experienced that clash of personalities on such a drive down here. I was ready to jump out of the car somewhere between Chatanooga and Atlanta, probably near Franklin, home ofParamore, home of some very steep mountains on I-65, and those runaway truck pits on the side of the road are no laughing matter when it's raining hard.
And the drama didn't end once the four of us actually got here, either, when we were staying at the Sheraton Yankee Trader -and that fabulous swimming pool of theirs that was such a great people-watching magnet. One of the girls on the trip down just "vanished" in Fort Lauderdale, so we had to call her parents up in Fort Wayne and then get the Fort Lauderdale police involved once her folks said they hadn't heard anything from her. Shocker -she met some guy from some other school who was also visiting, and and she just decided to spend all her time with him and his friends -without telling us. In comparison, at least nobody had to call the LAPD for either Anne and James once James seemed to check-out mentally and just sleepwalked his way thru much of the show.
So much for the great idea of having one of the hosts be someone who was nominated for an Academy Award!
Great Cate! Every inch a movie star: Cate Blanchett. She is transcendent in every film she does. Her dress was fromGivenchy Couture, and was NOT so keenly received by the fashionistas: http://www.vogue.fr/mode/look-du-jour/articles/cate-blanchett-en-givenchy-couture/6999
Bosom pals from Down Under with talent-to-spare: Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman.Nicole is wearing Dior Couture.
Mr. Sherak, the answer to who should be hosting the Academy Awards show if they are not nominated for an award themselves is obvious. It's right in front of you: Jackman & Kidman. The two of them have more natural (and honed) singing and dancing talent than almost any two other actors you could've found in the Kodak Theater, and everyone knows it, too. And everyone also knows what great friends they are, too, and that enthusiasm and synergy will surely show up in their performance as well. Case closed.
----- See also:
Official website of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: http://www.oscars.org/
Transcript ofLive Chat: After the Oscars, with David Denby http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2011/02/david-denby-oscars.html
On subplot of Banksy's "Exit Through The Gift Shop," he himself says, "Maybe it should have been called ‘Don’t Bite the Hand that Feeds You.’” How can you not appreciate the wit and gall of a guy who turns the tables on someone so brilliantly? And that my friends is why there will be an infinitely larger number of people around the world than usual actually paying attention to who wins the Oscar for the Best Documentary at tonight's Academy Awards. http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=13011445
Los Angeles Times Getting at the truth of 'Exit Through the Gift Shop' Thierry Guetta, the Oscar-nominated documentary's subject, says it's '100% real.' Public records support his biography, but questions persist about Banksy's role. By Jason Felch, Los Angeles Times February 22, 2011 http://theenvelope.latimes.com/news/la-et-oscar-exit-20110222,0,7905421.story Washington Postvideos by Jen Chaney: Mr. Brainwash on Banksy, Oscars and 'Exit Through the Gift Shop'
Related Washington Post article: Posted at 11:10 AM ET, 02/26/2011 Oscars 2011: Talking with Mr. Brainwash, aka Thierry Guetta of 'Exit Through the Gift Shop,' about Banksy and Oscar nightby Jen Chaney http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2011/02/26/VI2011022601407.html This article appears at the WaPo's consistently reliable and amusing Celebritology blog, which I subscribe to thru my blog's Dashboard, a frequent topic of emails to friends.
Celebritology is light years ahead of anything the South Florida news media offers in the way of pop culture or sociological ponderings, the Herald in particular, which seems to think it's still 1995, judging by their truly dreadful content. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/celebritology/
Sorry, talking to dopey self-absorbed rappers and self-promoting chefs visiting South Beach is nobody's idea of serious or interesting cultural insight, high-brow or low-brow, yet they persist in constantly cranking it out when there are so many stories that should be appearing in print. IY'S EXASPERATING!
Plus, and this is the real sad lesson of how bad things are over there, too many of the Herald's "reporters" act more like publicists or wannabe PR consultants than they do journalists. Even worse, so many are sycophants for particular points-of view in South Florida that already over-represented, with more than enough people already speaking on their behalf.
Photos:Oscars: Banksy Does L.A. - ABC News Swedish TV's (Sveriges Television, SVT)take on the race for Best DocumentaryOscar: http://svt.se/2.150121/pgrp_januari_2011
SVT's fascinatingDocumentary homepage, whose newsletter I receive, and which even has films you can actually watch online: http://svt.se/2.118538/dokumentar
Exit Through the Gift Shop: http://www.banksyfilm.com/?utm_source=dailysugar&utm_medium=email&utm_term=20100416&utm_content=email_link&utm_campaign=dailysugar_email_20100416
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/movies/14banksy.html New York Times April 14, 2010 Riddle? Yes. Enigma? Sure. Documentary? By Melina Ryzik
Is there an art-world equivalent of crying wolf? If so, Banksy has probably done it.
Banksy, the pseudonymous British street artist, has built his reputation on stunts — like inserting his own work among the masters’ in museums — that taunted the market in which his pieces sold for millions. But with his latest project, the documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” he is laboring to convince audiences that he’s playing it straight.
The film, which opens on Friday in New York and California, follows Thierry Guetta, an amiable Frenchman who lives in Los Angeles and videotapes everything — or so we’re told. When Mr. Guetta and camera eventually tunnel into the world of street art — he was introduced to the scene through a cousin, the Parisian artist Space Invader — his enthusiastic recording melds nicely with the artists’ desire to have their otherwise ephemeral work documented. He captures that scene’s luminaries, like Shepard Fairey and Swoon working on rooftops and in alleys under cover of night.
It seems to be a natural fit for a documentary. But Mr. Guetta’s nonstop footage turns out to be unwatched (he has boxes and boxes of unlabeled tapes) and even when he cobbles something together after years of shooting, largely unwatchable. “He was maybe just somebody with mental problems who happened to have a camera,” Banksy says in the film.
So Banksy decides to take control of the material himself — or so we’re told. Robbed of his camera and prodded by Banksy, Mr. Guetta, meanwhile, morphs into a street artist, inventing an alter ego called Mr. Brainwash and staging an opening exhibition in Los Angeles that turns him into an overnight sensation, all of which is captured in “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”
The film itself was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival this year, especially after Banksy works (including stenciled images of a cameraman shooting a flower) began popping up on storefront walls in Park City, Utah. At the Berlin International Film Festival in February, he called a news conference, only to cancel it at the last minute and show a video, in which he appears in shadows, cloaked in a hoodie and with his voice disguised, as he does in the film, to vouch for its veracity.
The thing is, both Banksy and Mr. Guetta are pretty unreliable narrators. The immediate scuttlebutt was that Mr. Guetta either didn’t exist at all, that he was in cahoots with Banksy or that he was Banksy himself. Even aficionados of the scene were unsure what to think.
“Is it real?” asked Andrew Michael Ford, the director of the Last Rites Gallery in New York and an independent curator who has worked with street artists. “Is it a hoax?” The film, he added, offered so many circular possibilities that it was “tough to comment on it directly.”
But everyone involved has vouched for it. “Of course the more I try to say it’s all true, the more it sounds like I’m somehow perpetuating the conspiracy,” said Mr. Fairey, a friend of Banksy’s.
Mr. Guetta did not respond to a request for comment — though he does seem to exist and to be as idiosyncratic as he is in the film.
“I don’t know why so many people have been fooled into thinking this film is fake,” Banksy, or someone purporting to be he, wrote in an e-mail message from Los Angeles, where the film had a premiere on Monday night. “It’s a true story from real footage. Does it bother me people don’t believe it? I could never have written a script this funny.”
As Marc Schiller, the proprietor of the street-art-enthusiast Web site woostercollective.com, put it, “It is one of these cases where Banksy has found in his art that truth is stranger than the best fiction you can imagine.”
Both Mr. Schiller and Mr. Fairey said that “Exit Through the Gift Shop” was of a piece with Banksy’s site-specific work, like a guerilla Guantánamo installation at Disneyland and an ersatz pet store in the West Village.
“Banksy is making a movie that’s 100 percent like a Banksy exhibition,” Mr. Schiller said. He called it a prank, then corrected himself, labeling it “a Banksy event.”
Mr. Fairey, who said that he and Banksy were in the same situation in trying to recover the footage of their career-defining moments from Mr. Guetta, added: “This is a way for Banksy to tell his story but at the same time critique the street art phenomenon. It’s perfectly aligned with how he does things. But it was a very shrewd adaptation to a problem that existed, not something premeditated.”
Banksy said it was a stretch to call the film his directorial debut.
“I didn’t take the director’s credit because I thought that was a bit unfair,” he wrote. “The editors essentially built the whole thing, and I deferred to the producer on the scenes I feature in — otherwise I’d just have picked the shots where my silhouette looks good.”
Still, he added, making it was “an all-consuming process, and my vandalism has certainly suffered as a result.” And Mr. Schiller said that Banksy was “involved in the smallest little detail of every aspect of this production and of the marketing of the film.” (Banksy said he financed it himself; new graffiti appeared in Los Angeles for the premiere.)
The surprise, Mr. Ford said, is in how quickly non-art-world audiences were to accept the notion of graffiti as a major spectacle.
“It’s one of those things where I’m not quite sure what I’m here for, but I’m excited about it,” a fan in line for Mr. Brainwash’s 2008 show, where works sold for tens of thousands — still far less than Banksy’s prices — says in the film.
“Banksy cares very much about selling art and what people think of him,” Mr. Fairey said, “and he understands thoroughly that people’s fantasy is a far better marketing tool than reality.”
Ultimately, wondering whether “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is real or not may be moot. It certainly asks real questions: about the value of authenticity, financially and aesthetically; about what it means to be a superstar in a subculture built on shunning the mainstream; about how sensibly that culture judges, and monetizes, talent.
Asked whether a film that takes shots at the commercialization of street art would devalue his own work, Banksy wrote: “It seemed fitting that a film questioning the art world was paid for with proceeds directly from the art world. Maybe it should have been called ‘Don’t Bite the Hand that Feeds You.’ ”
Banksy's Bristol showcase from June of 2009 http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/watchlisten/gallery/banksys+bristol+showcase/3208362.html
Bosom pals from Down Under with talent-to-spare: Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. Nicole is wearing Dior Couture.