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captainsblogThe Oscar nominees were announced yesterday. I was relatively pleased that the small portion of the sample size of “nominated films” matched up nicely with the even smaller sample size of “movies we actually saw from last year.” The small size of those two lists highlights the problem with the industry that is leading to so many cinemas going out of business.
First, the good news, of the good things:
We managed to see two if the five nominees in the animation category. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is up for best animated! Wonderful stop-motion and a sweet story. Del Toro's Pinocchio would've been my favorite up against anything else. Their marketing strategies were very different. Marcel was given a full theatrical run, although in a small number of cinemas, and has been very limited in its home video distribution. Streaming it is expensive, and discs are only available from the studio’s own shop and only on Blu-ray, which also prevents it from being rented out through things like Netflix DVDs and anything homegrown that might come from them. The Pinocchio animation, on the other hand, went almost direct to streaming. It only got a very limited theatrical run, and that was only to qualify it for Oscar nomination.
Same thing, and somewhat the same distinction, with the two Best Picture films we saw.
Everything Everywhere might just win everything everywhere! Loved it, and saw it in a theater over the summer before it finally dropped onto home viewing. Banshees of Insherin also scored a bagful of nominations and is very deserving. It went the other road, with a very short cinema window and arriving on a streamer pretty quickly.
But those are it. We haven’t seen any of the other Best Picture nominees and can't even see many of them. Sarah Polley's Women Talking isn't and hasn't been anywhere in town- closest is the Little in Rochester where it just opened. I snagged a ticket to it for Monday night, because I'll be at the Little anyway for a music performance by some friends; and though we both love Sarah's work and many of the actresses in the film, the subject is probably too dark for Eleanor to handle without a pause and fast-forward button. The Little is also showing Bill Nighy's film Living, also up for a number of awards, but that's not playing anywhere in Buffalo's environs, either.
It all seems a variation on the old Yogi Berra line, Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
It's a long-standing movie studio tradition to hold back the best films of the year until the very end of the year. The Academy requires only that a movie be released into an actual brick-and-mortar cinema to a paying audience for at least seven days in at least one of six qualifying US cities. NY and LA were always on the list, but now Atlanta, Miami, Bay Area and Chicago will also do. Studios have generally kept their best products from summer blockbuster season, and they've done the minimum public showing to maximize the ka-ching from Oscar buzz once a film gets talked about for, or nominated for, or even better winning, one or more of their goofy little statues. When theaters were full and flush, that made a lot more sense than it does now. Cinemas are struggling, cutting back showtimes, even closing whole multiplexes now because of the complications of COVID and competition from streaming services. Do the studios care? Probably not; they can make their bank selling to Netflix, or waiting for the post-Oscar period to "go broad" with their release schedule. The big players like Regal, and smaller ones like the Little, have no such flexibility, and the movie lovers who work at them and attend them are the ones whose names aren't called when they announce And the winner is....
----
Meanwhile, let's hold our own awards ceremony. The nominees for the Biggest Waste of Ray's Time In The Past 24 Hours are....
* Last night's court. A few days ago, I posted about the dumbed-down form now required to evict a tenant in our local courts. Last night was when the hearing was originally scheduled, although it was a given that it would be rescheduled, dumb forms or no forms, to a different date by virtual appearance through a countywide program called "the Hub." My evil plan was to serve the tenant with the new form at the hearing on its originally scheduled date, just to move the case along. She wasn't there (she's never there), but that wound up not mattering, because, when I showed the new improved dumb form to the clerk to make sure every box was checked properly, she told me, Oh, they took your papers after all. Nice of them to have called to tell me that, huh. So I still don't know when it will be heard, but at least I don't have to muck about with useless acts of service again.
* This morning's court. Small claims in the city, defending a client against a bullshit claim from her ex-snowplow contractor. Ex, because he had a tendency to not show up or plow actual snow. He was claiming she, and others sued at the same time, owed him extra money on account of a badly written clause in his contract. That wasn't the Oscar-nominated time waster, though. Nor was her case, and all the others, getting rescheduled after we'd been down there for close to two hours because he didn't bring a lawyer with him and he'd exceeded his limit for cases he could bring without having one. Those are the kinds of delays I get paid to endure. No, the members of the Nominating Committee cited the first case called before they got to any involving him: a custody dispute over a cat. First thing the arbitrator told them is "I can't do anything but award money judgments from one of you to the other," but they then spent the better part of an hour arguing anyway over the best interests of the cat and whether they could come to an agreeable joint custody or visitation agreement. Somebody asked why the whole thing wasn't in Family Court; I replied that it would have taken even longer there because Boo would have been entitled to the appointment of a guardian ad litter to represent his specific interests in the matter.
* And the resolution of yesterday's cyber-clusterfuck. I updated my last entry about hacked LJ passwords with some quick reports about how that would up screwing me up after I did as recommended and changed passwords on both that old site and this one. LJ's switched over without incident, and Dreamwidth's did, too, as far as it went. I still had to remember all the different places I had them stowed, which are now, I believe, all updated. What messed me up was that in the software I use to post these entries to DW, a password isn't a password. As an extra layer of security, Dreamwidth doesn't allow anything to post to its site from another site (crosspost from something like LJ, or editing software like Semagic) unless the incoming data is accompanied by something called an an API key. You log in on this site, and then generate one off your profile page at this link. And THAT is what you paste into the password box on any login other than a direct one to their site on your actual page. Would have been nice if Semagic made that clear on the interface itself, or if Dreamwidth had an actual FAQ about it. Eventually, though, I figured it out and, if you see this entry, it means I succeeded. (I also succeeded at waiting out a temporary banhammering because, in the course of figuring the problem out, I tried logging in through this software one too many times. I'm off double secret probation now, or at least I think I am.
First, the good news, of the good things:
We managed to see two if the five nominees in the animation category. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is up for best animated! Wonderful stop-motion and a sweet story. Del Toro's Pinocchio would've been my favorite up against anything else. Their marketing strategies were very different. Marcel was given a full theatrical run, although in a small number of cinemas, and has been very limited in its home video distribution. Streaming it is expensive, and discs are only available from the studio’s own shop and only on Blu-ray, which also prevents it from being rented out through things like Netflix DVDs and anything homegrown that might come from them. The Pinocchio animation, on the other hand, went almost direct to streaming. It only got a very limited theatrical run, and that was only to qualify it for Oscar nomination.
Same thing, and somewhat the same distinction, with the two Best Picture films we saw.
Everything Everywhere might just win everything everywhere! Loved it, and saw it in a theater over the summer before it finally dropped onto home viewing. Banshees of Insherin also scored a bagful of nominations and is very deserving. It went the other road, with a very short cinema window and arriving on a streamer pretty quickly.
But those are it. We haven’t seen any of the other Best Picture nominees and can't even see many of them. Sarah Polley's Women Talking isn't and hasn't been anywhere in town- closest is the Little in Rochester where it just opened. I snagged a ticket to it for Monday night, because I'll be at the Little anyway for a music performance by some friends; and though we both love Sarah's work and many of the actresses in the film, the subject is probably too dark for Eleanor to handle without a pause and fast-forward button. The Little is also showing Bill Nighy's film Living, also up for a number of awards, but that's not playing anywhere in Buffalo's environs, either.
It all seems a variation on the old Yogi Berra line, Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
It's a long-standing movie studio tradition to hold back the best films of the year until the very end of the year. The Academy requires only that a movie be released into an actual brick-and-mortar cinema to a paying audience for at least seven days in at least one of six qualifying US cities. NY and LA were always on the list, but now Atlanta, Miami, Bay Area and Chicago will also do. Studios have generally kept their best products from summer blockbuster season, and they've done the minimum public showing to maximize the ka-ching from Oscar buzz once a film gets talked about for, or nominated for, or even better winning, one or more of their goofy little statues. When theaters were full and flush, that made a lot more sense than it does now. Cinemas are struggling, cutting back showtimes, even closing whole multiplexes now because of the complications of COVID and competition from streaming services. Do the studios care? Probably not; they can make their bank selling to Netflix, or waiting for the post-Oscar period to "go broad" with their release schedule. The big players like Regal, and smaller ones like the Little, have no such flexibility, and the movie lovers who work at them and attend them are the ones whose names aren't called when they announce And the winner is....
----
Meanwhile, let's hold our own awards ceremony. The nominees for the Biggest Waste of Ray's Time In The Past 24 Hours are....
* Last night's court. A few days ago, I posted about the dumbed-down form now required to evict a tenant in our local courts. Last night was when the hearing was originally scheduled, although it was a given that it would be rescheduled, dumb forms or no forms, to a different date by virtual appearance through a countywide program called "the Hub." My evil plan was to serve the tenant with the new form at the hearing on its originally scheduled date, just to move the case along. She wasn't there (she's never there), but that wound up not mattering, because, when I showed the new improved dumb form to the clerk to make sure every box was checked properly, she told me, Oh, they took your papers after all. Nice of them to have called to tell me that, huh. So I still don't know when it will be heard, but at least I don't have to muck about with useless acts of service again.
* This morning's court. Small claims in the city, defending a client against a bullshit claim from her ex-snowplow contractor. Ex, because he had a tendency to not show up or plow actual snow. He was claiming she, and others sued at the same time, owed him extra money on account of a badly written clause in his contract. That wasn't the Oscar-nominated time waster, though. Nor was her case, and all the others, getting rescheduled after we'd been down there for close to two hours because he didn't bring a lawyer with him and he'd exceeded his limit for cases he could bring without having one. Those are the kinds of delays I get paid to endure. No, the members of the Nominating Committee cited the first case called before they got to any involving him: a custody dispute over a cat. First thing the arbitrator told them is "I can't do anything but award money judgments from one of you to the other," but they then spent the better part of an hour arguing anyway over the best interests of the cat and whether they could come to an agreeable joint custody or visitation agreement. Somebody asked why the whole thing wasn't in Family Court; I replied that it would have taken even longer there because Boo would have been entitled to the appointment of a guardian ad litter to represent his specific interests in the matter.
* And the resolution of yesterday's cyber-clusterfuck. I updated my last entry about hacked LJ passwords with some quick reports about how that would up screwing me up after I did as recommended and changed passwords on both that old site and this one. LJ's switched over without incident, and Dreamwidth's did, too, as far as it went. I still had to remember all the different places I had them stowed, which are now, I believe, all updated. What messed me up was that in the software I use to post these entries to DW, a password isn't a password. As an extra layer of security, Dreamwidth doesn't allow anything to post to its site from another site (crosspost from something like LJ, or editing software like Semagic) unless the incoming data is accompanied by something called an an API key. You log in on this site, and then generate one off your profile page at this link. And THAT is what you paste into the password box on any login other than a direct one to their site on your actual page. Would have been nice if Semagic made that clear on the interface itself, or if Dreamwidth had an actual FAQ about it. Eventually, though, I figured it out and, if you see this entry, it means I succeeded. (I also succeeded at waiting out a temporary banhammering because, in the course of figuring the problem out, I tried logging in through this software one too many times. I'm off double secret probation now, or at least I think I am.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 2
So go ahead and decide which The Winner Is:
View Answers
The total wasted trip over the dumb form
1 (50.0%)
The case of the Conflicted Cat
0 (0.0%)
That thing about API code I understand even less than you
1 (50.0%)
The Ticky Box to Bountiful!
0 (0.0%)
no subject
Date: 2023-01-26 12:57 pm (UTC)