2014 Annual Oscar Whoo-Whoo Thingy

With the coming spring is a perpetual event over which we all salivate hungrily in anticipation, procuring salty snacks and drinks, hiring babysitters, pump up with predictions and insightful analysis, and after which we go all go our separate ways and discuss for weeks on end, perhaps until June’s arrival, musing on this celebratory bonfire of artists embodying the multifaceted energies of human problems.

But enough about Wrestlemania.

Rather, it’s Philomania that’s runnin’ wild. The 86th Annual Academy Awards ceremony is this Sunday. In line with how wonks try to perfect a science applied to election predictions, Oscar bloggers and prognosticators continue to have a fun time going over the formula for what will win Best Picture, studying the timing of ballots in relation to the unpredictable atomic evolution of buzz, the impact of critical circles, guilds, the Oscars’ drunk kid-brother the Golden Globes, and what happens across the Atlantic with the BAFTAs. Last year was on a suspenseful track as, beginning in September 2012, Argo was hands down favorite with its premiere in Toronto and Telluride, its spot usurped by David O. Russell’s bipolar romantic comedy Silver Linings Playbook, which was itself tossed aside when Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln proved to not be the schmaltz many predicted but rather one of the filmmaker’s most sophisticated and masterfully woven films, and reaching a peak of excitement with Kathryn Bigelow’s unnerving and stark CIA procedural Zero Dark Thirty–which would win 2012′s first Best Picture prize from the New York Film Critics. Then a controversy sparked by cinematic illiteracy torpedoed Bigelow’s chances, people complained that Lincoln was too austere, and Argo, a fine but hardly extraordinary work of plot-driven proficiency steered by Ben Affleck’s affable direction, swept everything–the smaller critics’ groups, the Globes, the guilds, the BAFTAs. And so a good movie would blemish its legacy by somehow besting a half-dozen more deserving pictures by Oscar night’s end. Not that I at all cared (whatever, I was pissed off; I mean how does Argo beat Tony Kushner’s impeccable work in the adapted screenplay category; total bullshit. But I digress).

FOR THE FULL 2014 OSCAR COLUMN GO TO L'ETOILE MAGAZINE

In Dreams: David Lynch "Surreal Marvel" Series at the Trylon

My ardor for David Lynch began at an awkward time. I don’t mean to say as a teenager, when the sticky possibilities of sex and desire emerge in forms that are just as uncontrollably emotional or spiritual as they are corporeal, though that certainly makes what Lynch calls “the darkness of confusion,” highlighted throughout the psychosexual interior landscapes of Eraserhead (uncontrollable, giant sperms leaving a mess), Blue Velvet (wherein a young man awakes to the power of love and lust, as life and death), Wild at Heart (the boundless, almost agitated, hotter-than-Georgia-asphalt libidos of Sailor and Lula), and Twin Peaks (to quote Laura Palmer, “Isn’t sex weird?”), more viscerally felt. The time to which I’m referring was during Lynch’s dark age, following the cancellation of Peaks and ill-regarded fate of its movie prequel, Fire Walk With Me, when the phenomenon that landed the director on the cover of Time was written off, to quote Murphy Brown, as a mere fad. In these years, Lynch, who’d created for film, TV (in addition to Twin Peaks, there was the doomed sitcom On the Air and an HBO miniseries Hotel Room), art exhibitions (paintings, sculptures, photography), comic strips (“The Angriest Dog in the World” for L.A. Weekly), and music (Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night and The Voice of Love albums, Industrial Symphony No. 1), had burned out in the public’s–and media’s–imagination. In Entertainment Weekly magazine, the annual “Cool” issue put Lynch’s picture next to other former cover celebrities M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice: yesterday’s news, and embarrassing news at that. This was around the time that a certain young filmmaker, who similarly captured the attention of the post-modern counter culture, was in Cannes promoting his debut, Reservoir Dogs, and mentioned, “David Lynch had disappeared so far up his own ass that I have no desire to see another David Lynch movie until I hear something different.”

Such are the vacillations of favor to disfavor. Twin Peaks anticipates the present day’s golden period of enthralling serialized television constructed in a proficient manner that often feels suited for a motion picture: pronounced extreme close-ups, wide angle lenses, memorable scoring by Angelo Badalamenti, etc. The ensemble, led by the mystic FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) who struggles to unravel the murder of local homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), was replete with memorable characterizations, all with their own style and brand but fitting in perfect consonance with the jazzy industrial and deep woods cauldron of an isolated small town in the American North West, a locale existing somewhere close to both the 1950s and the 1980s–and to both heaven and hell (or White Lodge and Black). How different might have Twin Peaks‘ fate have been had it been not a weekly network show in a pre-Internet/streaming/download time? In 1990, the aesthetics and marvelous richness of something like Peaks couldn’t sustain momentum or retain much beyond a “demented soap opera” descriptor, and it quickly collapsed into a gimmick box. It lost its way after about fifteen episodes and was soon cancelled.

READ THE FULL COLUMN AT L'ETOILE MAGAZINE