In the heart of every storm there's a quiet night

[sovay]

I slept nearly ten hours last night. I am unclear as to precisely why my brain took this as an invitation to an anthology of nightmares, but here we are. Next time I had better at least get Rod Serling as a host or something.

spatch and I wanted to make feijoada for dinner, but due to a shortage of sausage and black beans we ended up making chili con carne instead, if you can make chili with lentils and smoked paprika. Whatever it was came out spicy, savory, and very filling, served over buttered rice. We had sequestered Autolycus the Mooch, but that left room for the stealthy Hestia to put one casual paw upon the dining room table and then another, just taking the air, not too close to the food, nothing to see here, move along. (She was tragically, discourteously removed.) I think we did all right.

I did not expect The Shape of Water to win Best Picture! I had my fingers crossed for Get Out and would have been happy with Lady Bird or Call Me by Your Name, but I had braced myself for something safely prestigious like Darkest Hour or The Post. Instead: fish people. This was a surprisingly congenial set of Oscars. When the nominees were announced in in January, I did not expect that anything I cared about would actually win. But Coco won for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, Jordan Peele took Best Original Screenplay for Get Out, Guillermo del Toro pulled off Best Director as well as Best Picture, and Paul Denham Austerberry et al. really did take Best Production Design for the rain-stained, river-rippling world of The Shape of Water. I would have liked to see Daniel Kaluuya as Best Actor instead of Gary Oldman and Willem Dafoe as Best Supporting Actor instead of Sam Rockwell. Frances McDormand was not a surprise as Best Actress, but she did nice things with her speech. I am fine with Dunkirk winning its two awards for sound design: it was very well done. I am ambivalent about Roger Deakins winning Best Cinematography for Blade Runner 2049 because of my feelings about the movie, but at least it didn't go to Hoyte van Hoytema (and since Rachel Morrison shot Black Panther as well as Mudbound, with any justice in the universe she'll return next year). I didn't realize I had a stake in Best Adapted Screenplay until I was delighted to hear about James Ivory and Call Me by Your Name. Ditto Best Foreign Language Film and A Fantastic Woman. I could have lived with Peele and del Toro splitting Director/Picture between them, if that was who the votes came down to, but I am fine with Christopher Nolan not walking off with either. I am very sorry that Lady Bird won nothing at all; it did not look like my kind of movie, but it looked like a very good one of its kind, not to mention a written-directed-starring female triple threat. Next year.

In short, the 90th Academy Awards: BITE IT, LOVECRAFT.

Comments

[gwynnega]

He plays Father Leviatch, one of the teachers at Lady Bird's school. He's directing the students in a production of Merrily We Roll Along, and he challenges them to a game of "the one who cries first wins." None of the kids can cry on cue, but then we see that he's the one weeping uncontrollably and apologizing to his students. The moment is funny, but I also found it the most genuinely affecting moment in the film. One of the girls tells Lady Bird that his son died of a drug overdose, and we see him struggling with grief and depression in a couple more scenes. But then he sort of falls out of the movie.