Lessons From Theodore White: How He Was One of the Few Writers, Then Or Now, Who Rejected Camelot

 

There's a belief that's a big part of  revisionist historians about Theodore White and JFK. The right wing as I said in the introduction argues that White was in the tank for Kennedy from the start to the point that they all but accuse him of getting him elected. That's laughable considering the book was published in March of 1961 and no one, least of all White, could have predicted just how successful it would become. It's like a conspiracy theorist suggested that the Islamic Revolution in Iran was staged not by the CIA or the neo-conservatives but ABC because Ted Koppel wanted the anchor's job on the nightly news and they decided to stage the hostage crisis to give him something to do at 11:30. (I really hope that I didn't start something on the Dark Web with this.)

Even if you wanted to believe White was in the tank for Kennedy from the start, it collapses if one actually reads the book. Yes White was with JFK and his camp on election night 1960. But he was one of two nominees for President. Somehow I doubt if he'd been with Richard Nixon the right would have argued his presence was responsible for Nixon losing. Because having read the book White spends as much time covering the Republicans as he does the Democrats, giving basically the same number of pages to Kennedy and Nixon in the fall campaign.

To a larger point, and I've written this multiple times, White may have been the own member of the 'Georgetown Elite' who went out of his way to give Nixon a fair shake. He would later acknowledge he had been taken in by him as President but in the 1960 edition (and indeed in the following two publications before Nixon was elected President) he went out of his way to treat him in a fair and balanced method. If he had any prejudice towards Nixon at the time I don't see it in his writing, if anything in the 1964 book he expresses sympathy and empathy for Nixon's political fortunes to that time.

Yes he did cover Kennedy extensively but that doesn't per se mean he was in awe of the man's charisma and aura. If there is a candidate he clearly admires in that book its Adlai Stevenson who gets by far the most sympathetic treatment in the boo. We see a similar approach to all four of the other candidates White follows for 1960: Rockefeller on the Republican side; Humphrey, Stuart Symington and LBJ on the Democratic side. He clearly has respect for those men and their accomplishments at the time (he would later write that he believed Stevenson, Humphrey and Rockefeller were more than qualified to be President) and I have little doubt had any of the also-rans been the nominees of their party who would have treated them with the same respect he did Kennedy.

The other argument from revisionists (I've made it myself at times) is that White was so taken in by the charisma and charm offensive of the Kennedy family that he overlooked so many of their sins that we now know about. The first is foolish, of course: White didn't have the benefit of more than sixty years of hindsight to do the research and judge them. There's also the fact that much of this is the issue of so many writers who wouldn't exist without White as their foundation judging their predecessors for not looking with today's glasses, which is a tail as old as time.

And most importantly there's the fact that it's not like this would have been a failure that existed solely to Theodore White. To this day, there are people of a certain age and even younger ones who will overlook, if not excuse, the truths we now know about JFK with that saying: "It was a different time." That was true, I should be clear, of the journalism of the era. Back then, the idea of looking into the bedrooms of political candidates was considered the stuff of tabloid journalism and exploitation. (And as we shall see White would indeed end up covering the first prominent effect of this on Presidential politics in his next book and do so relatively clear-eyed.)

Now its clear that White was granted an unparalleled amount of access to the Kennedy campaign – or to be more accurate the kind of controlled access that they allowed the media and the public to see for consumption. They were crafting an image that has held to this day in some circles and for a journalist writing his first major book (one whose success he couldn't possibly imagine) White would have been a fool to ignore. But that said having read his book multiple times its clear that while the Kennedys did much to curry favor with him he was pretty close to impartial when it came to reporting the bare facts of their campaign and it didn't stop him from talking with every candidate and having more empathy for some than others.

Having read the books its clear that while he may admire Kennedy and what he's doing he clearly has more sympathy for Humphrey during the primary fight. He admits that the Kennedy's wealth and stature appear as remarkable to the masses and actually argues that his ordinariness hurt him: "Humphrey was just like everyone else and a President, unfortunately for Humphrey, must be different from everyone else." Not for White is the belief in the likability of a candidate; he would mock the idea of the appeal of a President being based on whether you'd want to have a beer with him that has now become gospel.

Kennedy's ability did seem preposterous in Wisconsin in the winter of 1960. White relates how he went out of his way to shake the hands of so many people on the campaign trail and by and large they were aloof, even hostile, to him. The Kennedy charisma that won over the masses in the fall was not present to White in Wisconsin during that period. He acknowledges that the main reason Kennedy one was not so much a charm offensive but an organizational one, which money was the main driving factor. The Kennedy family did put a hue amount of resources into Wisconsin.

And as White reports the Kennedy family knew how badly they'd failed. They did win with 56 percent of the vote to Humphrey's 44 percent but it broke down on religious grounds. The four heavily Catholic districts all voted for him and he lost the four that were heavily Protestant. White makes it clear that Kennedy knows this at the time how badly he's failed.

What does that mean?" asked one of his sisters.

"It means," (Kennedy) said quietly yet bitterly, "that we have to do it all over again. We have to go through every one of them – West Virginia and Maryland and Indiana and Oregon, all the way to the convention.

Even at the time, it’s worth noting that even if Humphrey won in West Virginia, he had no chance of being nominated after he lost in Wisconsin: the fact he couldn’t win in a neighboring state crushed hopes of his electability. Indeed, if Humphrey had gotten out right then, there’s a real chance the Kennedy machine might have stalled right there: the primary path that they were travelling would have been meaningless if there were no viable contenders challenging them.

If realizing this, Humphrey had withdrawn at that moment, Kennedy would have faced zero opposition in West Virginia, thus any Kennedy victory there would have been worthless and been meaningless in terms of gaining power vis-à-vis the Eastern bosses.

White knew of what he spoke. In the 1952 Democratic primaries Estes Kefauver had won the lion's share of the Democratic primaries against limited competition. And because of that fact the party bosses had been sure he couldn't win and withheld their support at the convention, thus setting up the circumstances for Adlai Stevenson's eventual nomination on the third ballot.

Symington and LBJ had decided not to compete in the primaries, holding out for a convention deadlock. Aside from Humphrey there were no real candidates in any of the other states Kennedy was competing against. In a footnote White points out that Kennedy's only competition in the New Hampshire primary – the first primary in the nation – had been basically uncontested with Kennedy's only opposition coming from a ball-point manufacturer he doesn't even bother to name. Wayne Morse and Mike DiSalle might have had some more political weight behind them but no one considered them serious contenders for anything in Oregon or Ohio, respectively.

And it is worth noting that  White is ambiguous at best at how much the wins in the primaries in the states Kennedy campaigned in were to the long term strategy. As he points out in a footnote of the seven states that Kennedy chose to openly contest, five of them ended up going to Nixon in the general election. (For the record, those five states were  New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Indiana, Oregon and Nebraska. Only Maryland and West Virginia went for Kennedy in 1960 – and one wonders how much of that vote was driven by the presence of Lyndon Johnson as Vice President.)

During the lead-up to the Democratic convention and the convention itself White spends much of his time with the Adlai Stevenson campaign – one which, I should add, is basically going on without Stevenson agreeing to lead it – then he does with the Kennedy campaign itself. He clearly admires their efforts; however futile they end up being and there's an argument his heart truly is with Stevenson. And while he follows the Kennedy campaign from behind the scenes he makes it very clear that not even they were certain of a first ballot victory: it took until Wyoming, the last state in the role call for them to get the 763 votes they needed to clinch the nomination. White makes it very clear that for all the brave front they put forward no one was sure until the end of the role call that they got the nomination.

And it's worth noting that for all his clear admiration for Kennedy, White makes it clear it was Nixon who started the fall campaign like gangbusters and that Kennedy's faltered in the early weeks. He makes it clear that Nixon's vow to campaign in all 50 states clearly impressed the voters in a way that Kennedy's campaign struggled to in what he calls 'Round One. At the end of the Republican convention Nixon was ahead 53 percent to 47 percent in the Gallup polls and it took until September for them to build momentum. And its clear he has more sympathy for Nixon then Kennedy because of 'a series of episodes that wrung sympathy for him even from his most embittered opponents." He focuses on how Nixon struck his kneecap on a car door in North Carolina that became infected and eventually forced him to spend nearly two weeks in Walter Reed. He makes it clear how badly it hurt his health. And White makes it clear from the vantage of the press corps just how much contempt the press held for Nixon – making it pretty clear that Nixon's contempt for them may well have been justified.

Its worth noting while the verdict on the Kennedy-Nixon debates as to how important they were, White himself thinks that they little to actually educate the audience. And he makes it clear that throughout the campaign neither campaign did much to contrast the difference between their views on the issues he considers important to the voters. In a sense he agrees that perception of Kennedy to Nixon was importance but never once does he think Kennedy ever did anything to clarify how he was different than Nixon on the issues.  In his book on the 1972 campaign White gives a list of the four Presidential elections that he believed offered the greatest contrast between the two candidates – and 1960 is not one of them. (I will mention which four later on.) At the end of the day he thinks Kennedy won the election because he seemed to win a popularity contest, not because he was necessarily more qualified to be President.

He comes to the conclusion at the end of the book that he doesn't know whether Kennedy's election is a consequential one in American history and he has no illusion about the fact that Kennedy didn't get a mandate as the Republicans gained two seats in the Senate and 25 in the House of Representatives. The Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress by a considerable margin but Kennedy had not provided his party with that most glorious things: coattails.

If the Democratic Party at best, in 1960, held even with the Republicans and at worst suffered a defeat, then only one lesson can be drawn therefrom: that this was a personal victory for John F. Kennedy and not his Party.

And White is unclear at the end of his book if that is a good thing for the country or a poor one.

Ted White acknowledges Nixon’s campaign was more successful as part of a general map: he divided the country into eight regions, and said Nixon carried five. The three Kennedy carried were New England, the Northeast, and the South. Indeed when it comes to the total number of states carried Nixon carried 26 to Kennedy's 22. And he makes it clear the real accomplishment Kennedy managed was convincing the overwhelming majority of Protestant voters – who had famously rejected Al Smith, the previous Catholic candidate for President in an electoral landslide – to end up choosing to vote for him to provide his narrow margin of victory. And he makes it clear how it  

Like everything else related to the Kennedys I think Making of A President came to be viewed as a favorable portrait looking back through history and after the assassination.  To be sure White reports all of the well known anecdotes, puts up a favorable look at both the candidate and his family on the campaign trail and off and makes him sound knowledgeable on subjects. But that's no different then the other candidates he talks to during the book or indeed many of the ones that will come in the future. He's clearly impressed by Kennedy's accomplishment and winning both the Democratic nomination and the Presidency against seemingly impossible odds but that means little once when has power.  He ends the book the way he will all that follow: looking at the obstacles the President will have to face and whether he is up to it. And after giving a picture of the country and the world this what he says about the man's ability to do so:

It can be certain only, at the incumbency of the now 35^th President of the United States, that he would certainly try.

That's essentially a variation of what George W. Bush would say about Obama when he took the Presidency in 2008: "I want him to succeed." That's all White is prepared to say even after spending a year in his company. He has no idea of the future any more than the rest of us would and no certainty that he will.

In the next part of the series I will look at how White viewed both Robert and Ted Kennedy in his books in a way that makes it very clear that they he never looked at either man as part of 'the Restoration of Camelot' future generations would.

Reflections on this Year's Oscars, Part 2: Someone Reviewed The Oscars And You Know I Have Something to Say About THAT

 

 

I knew that no matter how quick or entertaining the Oscars were this year, it was inevitably  going to be attacked as being too long, self-important and unentertaining. And sure enough the Washington Post ran a column that had nothing to do with the winners or what the author thought of them but could have just as easily been a column written by any one who criticizes any awards show.

I'm now beginning to think Hollywood's biggest mistake is televising its awards shows. I understand why they did it, it was an attempt to bring in millions of viewers on live TV. But even before streaming and cable started cutting into the ratings this was always going to be a battle it could never win with the critics because at a basic level they always have this wall that goes up every time they see anything that is on TV involving Hollywood. In their minds if something appears on a screen, it is subject to criticism and must be graded as a work of entertainment.

An awards show is a live event which means it can't run on schedule. It's about the people the nominees and winners and about recognizing them and the industry first and foremost. That means it has to be self-congratulatory.  And this is where the real elitism of critics come in: they don't real care enough about who edits or shoots or costumes a film, not really. They might individual appreciate details in a film or TV show or a play but they don't want to hear them speak and they don't care about recognizing them.  To be sure they are vital to contributing to a work of art but they're not special, not like writers, actors or directors. (They don't really care much about them either but one thing at a time.) And they certainly don't give a damn about them realizing their lives dream or what it might mean to be on the same stage as all these people.

No all they care about is that they are distractions from what these critics seemingly care about: the writers, directors and actors. Except they don't really care about them either except as abstractions. Sure they love their work (some of it) and they like their performances and some of them might even agree with their politics. But the critics don't really care how much this might mean to them to be recognized by their peers, how this realization of their dreams is a big deal. No, what they care about is that they can't deliver a short, rehearsed, charming and warm speech when they don't have a script in front of them. Yes this is a glorious moment for you and we understand how much it means but do we have to listen to you drone on and one about how important the craft and your work means to you?  Our opinion of your work is all that matters; we don't care what you think of it.

And who cares what people in the film industry think about movies or what people in TV think about film or people in theatre think about plays? Sure your industries might be struggling for recognition right now and this is a night that theoretically is supposed to celebrate it. But why should that be our problem. Can't you celebrate yourself as quickly and efficiently as possible? As well as being completely spontaneous and entertaining as every other play and live event we watch, of course?

And sure the host may have a tough job entertaining both the audience watching at home and keeping the mood light in the theater. But is that any real excuse for not having every single joke be a genuine laugher every time? Sure that's not a standard we apply for any comedy movie or TV show or for that matter if they host a late night show but that's not the point. You're not doing this for the audience in the theater or at home, you're doing for us, the critics, the ones who can only pass judgment on anything.

If by this point you've realized that I'm genuinely exasperated by the continued and ludicrous process that so many seemingly intelligent people seem to throw away when it comes to reviewing an awards show as if it were say, Sinners and One Battle After Another, gold star. I honestly think at some point some genius is going to say: "You what would make these Oscars better? No awards!" And that person will be taken seriously because that's the world we live in today.

 The columnist in the Post who wrote the most recent column who  is a Gen-X who has written non-fiction bestsellers and has done a tour in Hollywood in the early stages of her career. Yet she maintains the brain rot that I expect more from millennials and Gen Z when it comes to most subjects they don't understand yet for some reason is ever present when it comes to treating an awards show.  I'm not even going to dignify this person by giving their name; for all intents and purposes it might as well be any of the dozens of critics who keep making it harder for individuals to take my profession seriously. (She's not actually a critic by the way. Doesn't help.)

At this juncture in my career I'm beginning to think the people who review the Oscars for any publication are only hate-watching it. Not in the way those people who claim that they only are doing so for Emily in Paris or …And Just Like That, the ones I think secretly love these shows but are ashamed to say so. And not like the far right political people who will argue that the Oscars are just another night of left-wing politics gone mad. No I think these people watch every Oscars with a stopwatch in their hands, are yelling at every awards recipient "shut up already!" long before they start getting played off, have a detailed list of every joke that makes them cringe and hate the In Memoriam segments not because of the music involved but because they can't understand why Hollywood is paying tribute to people who were important to the industry. "All they did was die," I imagine they say out loud at home.

I don't think my judgment of these  individuals – I won't dignify them with the term 'critics' – is too harsh. Its one thing to take the awards themselves too seriously; I passed that point in my life by the time I got into college. But in the case of the author of this column not only am I not convinced she cared who won, I'm not sold she even saw any of the films. Which brings me back to the question I ask every time: if you don't have a vested interest in the nominees or winners, why in God's name would you choose to spend three hours of your life watching an awards show honoring them?

My long-time readers know this isn't a rhetorical question. Whenever I cover any major awards show, Emmys, Golden Globes, any number of the Critics Awards, what I spent the majority of my time talking about are the winners of the awards and their acceptance speeches. This is what I think my job is about and because I actually have an emotional investment in the nominees and some of the winners that's why I watch these awards shows. And for the record, I do care about the technical winners such as editors, cinematographers and makeup artists. I've been watching and covering the technical Emmy as long as the actual Emmys. I think they play an unsung role in creating so much of my favorite TV so at the very least they deserve to be paid attention to.

I've never felt the same connection to the Oscars but I have always watched it, perhaps more out of muscle memory then anything else. But every time I watch it, I know going in what I'm going to get. It's going to be three and a half hours long on a good night. If we're lucky half the jokes any of the host tells will land and the rest will be awkward. Some of the banter between presenters will work; some won't. The acceptance speeches will be heartfelt and going on extensively and I probably won't recognize most of the technical winners by obligation. There will be more than a few political comments done solely to enrage the other side with no other purpose.  That's where the bar has been set for me since 2000. Some times it gets a little over that, sometimes it really sucks, but most of the time that's what its like.  I've come to accept that. It astonishes me that there are still people out there who seem to be expecting more.

No one is even pretending Hollywood has anything but an uncertain future these days; certainly not the columnist for the Post. And I'm not going to pretend that they haven't done much to bring it on their heads and that they don't deserve criticism where its due. But listening to this columnist you almost seem to think they're looking forward to it with in the same 'we're doomed to oblivion' approach that makes up so many of these columns about anything these days.  That's the definition of kicking someone when they're down.  And to do so on a night that is about celebrating their industry strikes me as the equivalent of not only writing a eulogy before the body is dead, but saying in it that the deceased was boring, self-indulgent and long-winded when they were alive. This would be in bad taste no matter who did it, but for one who does so under the guise of criticism, it's the kind of thing that makes all of us look bad.

So on the oft-chance that the writer of the Washington Post reads this column, I will channel Pauline Kael and Rex Reed at their meanest in response to them:

"I really hope your piece was generated by AI because if you are a human being, you only did a slightly better job then a third grader suffering from dyslexia and did so disgracing all actual third graders and those who struggle with dyslexia. You demonstrate the kind of elite snobbery in your writing that I've come to expect from those who think opera and ballet are thriving industries and that movies will go extinct first.

The Academy Awards is an awards show in Hollywood. It is not a production of the Royal Shakespeare company, the Bolshoi Ballet, a Taylor Swift concert or The Brutalist. To review it my that metric demonstrates that not only could you not appreciate any production of them if you were to attend them but that you probably would leave before the first intermission of any because they didn't speak to you. And by that I mean none of the performers mentioned your name personally while they were performing and therefore they were of no meaning to you.

It is not enough to say that people like you make critics look bad. You make journalists look bad, writers look bad, TV viewers look bad and anyone whose completed the process of evolution look bad. If I were you, I would go back to writing your books and making a living that way. I will not be purchasing any of them and indeed if I see any at my local bookstore I'm going to place them with the pages facing forward in the shelfs so that customers overlook them. You might consider that petty and vindictive, but that perfectly matches the context of your review.

No one ever puts a gun to anyone's head and forces them to watch an awards show. And no one ever asked for anyone to review an awards show based purely on artistic merits. Everyone in Hollywood knows what the Oscars is and how tough it is to put together. They have to deal with critics every day of their lives. They really don't need it on one of the days that is solely and totally about them and no one else.

And as to the fact that any other profession is like this – I see that one of your pieces was short-listed for a Pulitzer. How would you feel if that awards show was televised to the whole world and someone criticized you on your acceptance speech? If you were too long and self-indulgent? If everyone said the ceremony was bunch of elitists congratulated themselves and said: "Does anyone honor fry cooks?"

We all want some kind of recognition for what we do. Hollywood just does it publicly and in the most extravagant fashion. They at least try to make it fun. They don't need pedants like you shaming them for not being entertaining in their tension and agony.

So do us all a favor. Next Oscar night or any awards show, don't watch it. Read a book. Binge-watch your favorite series. Hell, watch one of the movies that was nominated that night. You'll have a better time and so will the rest of the world because we won't have to read another one of your self-indulgent pieces of detritus the following day."

I won't lie. That was kind of fun. I won't make it a habit.

Reflections on This Year's Oscars From A TV Critic Part 1: Why Wasn't The Race for Best Actor Over In April?

 

 

This article requires a bit of introduction for those of you who might not know how voters pick winners in the Emmys.

At the end of each season everyone in the cast of a show, whether it is a drama, comedy or limited series, picks a single episode that they believe represents their best work and submit it to every single awards show from the Golden Globes to the Emmys. I don't know how that would work if multiple nominees from the same show are competing against each other. For example when someone was looking at the episode Kieran Culkin submitted for Best Actor for Succession in 2023 did they solely focus on Culkin or did they also focus on Jeremy Strong's presence in that episode when it came to making their decision? Some day I may write on that ambiguity but this isn't the time because I want to focus on how I judge a performance for the Emmys.

My approach, which I imagine is similar to the majority of viewers even if they aren't critics, is to look at a performers entire body of work during a season even episodes they have a smaller role in. When I was watching Better Call Saul I wasn't going to judge Jonathan Banks work in every episode, Rhea Seehorn's, Bob Odenkirk's and so on. I made similar judgments when I was looking at that for every nominee in every category I've seen.

For that reason I've always given what you might call a 'degree of difficulty bonus' if during the course of a season we learn something about a character which adds a completely new layer to their performance that makes us call into question everything we previously believed about them. The obvious example would be Lost and such brilliant performances by Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson. The entire cast was extraordinary, of course, but the two of them were playing variations on who they really were to the rest of the characters but at such a level that we believed it was genuine.  This was true for Emerson from the moment we met him as Henry Gale and if you watched the fifth season of Lost you know that by the end of the season we learn the man we have thought was John Locke for the second half of the year is not who he said he was.

These kinds of performances within performances are rare even in the era of Peak TV but I've seen the majority of them. There was Gregory Itzin's work as President Charles Logan on Day Five of 24, Damien Lewis's work as Nick Brody in the first season of Homeland, Giancarlo Esposito's work as Gustavo Fring on Breaking Bad (that layer is largely absent in Better Call Saul but it shows up quite a few times) Martin Short's performance as Leonard Winstone in Season 3 of Damages, Christian Slater in Mr. Robot (especially in the first season) and Yahya Abdul-Mahteen's work in Watchmen. I realized I've left women out in this recounting so here are some clear ones: Evan Rachel Wood and Thandiwe Newton in Westworld, everyone in the cast of Severance (obviously), Kathy Bates's work in Matlock and Julia Roberts work in Season One of Homecoming. And that's without counting the entire run of Dexter, both Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell's work in The Americans and Jon Hamm's work in Mad Men. I'm sure there are countless others I've forgotten but let's not let the list get endless.

The overwhelming majority of these performances were either nominated for Emmys or won them. In my opinion many of them are among the all-time great character works in 21^st century TV and I don't think I'd get that much pushback for saying so.  That brings me to last night's Oscars.

Now I'm not going to engage in the debate over whether Sinners deserved to be Best Picture more than One Battle After Another because I don't care enough about the Oscars. What I do want to make an argument for is something that became clear to me the first time I saw Sinners on cable in August.  After I saw the film the first time and have watched it multiple times well before even the nominations came out, there was only one question in my mind: which of the four other nominees will end up getting trounced by Michael B. Jordan at the Oscars?

I have to say I was genuinely pissed as the awards seasons went on and every major award group right up until the Actors on March 1^st seemed determined to crown Timothee Chalamet or Wagner Moura the next winner. I had much admiration for the work Leonardo DiCaprio did in One battle After Another but the longer the awards seasons went I was beginning to wonder what the hell was going on.

Now I realize most of you don't pay attention to all of the Film Critics Groups that meet in December and January: by this point I'm beginning to think that they're beginning to breed like rabbits even as films themselves begin to struggle. I'll save you the trouble. Jordan managed to win the Best Actor prize from twelve of those groups; Chalamet won 17 for Marty Supreme, Leonardo DiCaprio won 6, and Ethan Hawke won seven for Blue Moon. That part didn't bother me; I know that unless a performance is absolutely extraordinary there will never be universal agreement from the critics on who will win any major acting award and some critics groups will give awards to actors who I know won't get there or if they do for a different film. Case in point Sebastian Stan won multiple awards last year for A Different Man but got nominated for The Apprentice. (No comment.)

So when the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice gave their Best Actor prizes to Timothee Chalamet and were shutting Jordan out, I began to wonder what was going on. Now I need to be clear, race did not enter my discussion at any point as to why. What I was wondering was why that degree of difficulty bonus – which critics and especially Academy voters really tend to lock on to – didn't seem to be working for Jordan when by their own rules, it applied.

Now as everyone who has seen the film and even those of who haven't know Jordan played twin brothers nicknamed Smoke and Stack. So he was giving two performances in Sinners.  No, I take that back. He was actually giving three.

What cemented for me the certainty Jordan should have won was when Stack became a vampire. (I really don't think I'm spoiling anything at this point.) As anyone who knows the first thing about this and as the film's own dialogue explain, a vampire is completely different version of the human it once was. So Jordan had to play:

Stack pretending he was still Stack

Stack as an undead monster

And he had to make that change believable in less than a minute of screen time.

I don't care how method Chalamet went to play Marty, either onscreen or when he was campaigning to get the movie seen.  Jordan had to play two versions of one character and then play his brother reacting to learning the truth that his brother is dead and gone forever.  That scene alone should have ended the discussion of who Best Actor was right then. The fact that it didn't – and more importantly that so many people seemed determined to give the award to either Chalamet or Wagner Moura during January was insulting.

To be clear its not like the Oscars weren't unwilling to give nominations to performers whose roles themselves were performances. We saw Emma Stone get multiple nominations for her work in Bugonia which not until the final minutes do we realize that this is an entirely different kind of performance. And the Oscars were more than willing to honor Amy Madigan for her work in the horror masterpiece Weapons for her work as Aunt Gladys, a performance that became iconic even quicker than Jordan's in Sinners. (On a welcome note the 2026 Oscars were among their many other accomplishments the best year that horror as had collectively in its history.) So the question is why did it take until the Actor Awards two weeks ago for the rest of Hollywood to realize, yes, Michael B. Jordan was the Best Actor in a Leading Role?

The go-to answer is race but it was harder to make that obvious call as the awards season went on. Teanna Taylor won Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes a week after Madigan had won the Critics Choice Awards in that category and Wagner Moura did prevail for Best Actor in a Drama for The Secret Agent. (Let's just work around the fact Sinners and One Battle After Another were in the Comedy/Musical category.) And its not like the vibes weren't shifting. The BAFTAs did give Best Supporting Actress to Wunmi Mosaku who was basically empty handed to that both in the red carpet season.

The other explanation is the Oscars has never truly been able to deal with performances that involve these kinds of lifting unless it comes in the form of Peter Sellers. They were unwilling to nominate Armie Hammer for his work as The Winklevoss Twins in The Social Network any more then they would Eddie Murphy for The Nutty Professor and they couldn't bring themselves to nominate Alec Guinness for his work in Kind Hearts & Coronets. They will make these accommodations in the works of Charlie Kaufmann – they've nominated Nicholas Cage and Kate Winslet for playing these kinds of roles in Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine – but it doesn't fit the 'mold' that the Oscars tend to give for performances. Their degree of difficulty, sadly, has far too often been seen in how they give awards for actors who play autistic characters or with some form of physical disability (satirized so well in Tropic Thunder) wear extensive levels of padding and makeup (Brendan Frasier in The Whale is the most recent example of that) and of course versions of historical characters. (Unless you count Jesse Buckley's work in Hamnet we actually didn't have that many of them among this year's nominees.)

TV has had very few of those from category one in the last quarter of a century (and when they do appear their increasingly played by actors who actually have them), has more than a few characters with makeup and CGI but rarely gives them the awards, and while we'll always have period pieces and historical series (The Crown is the most awarded of the group) they've always been far less omnipresent then they are at the Oscars every year. I don't pretend the Emmys are based more on merit then the Oscars are (though I'll gladly put their track record in this century against the Oscars any day of the week and expect to come out ahead) but they certainly recognize that degree of nuance more. And it isn't lost on me that Jordan, long before he became one of the biggest box office stars in this century, cut his teeth working in some of the greatest TV shows of all time. (That's actually going to be the subject of a future article.) When you cut your teeth working for David Simon and then become a featured player in the work of Jason Katims you learn subtlety and nuance in a way that film has increasingly become far less capable of delivering.

All of which is to say that the Oscars did the right thing and gave Best Actor to the best performance by anyone in that category this year. I'm happy for Jordan and I'm delighted he won. As a critic an observer I'm  slightly irritated that it took so long for everyone in my circle to realize what for me was obvious six months ago. Do better, guys. Do better.

 

Lessons From Theodore White: A New Series Showing How The Making Of The President Tells Us Stories From The Past That May Show Us Where We Ended Up – And How to Get Out, Introduction

 

I make no secret on how much regard I hold for Theodore White, the journalist and author of the groundbreaking Making of the President series of books that covered political campaigns during four of the most consequential elections in American history while giving a snapshot of America during an era where the reverberations are still being felt to this day.

I have regularly used White's writing as a primary source for so many of the articles I've been writing about American history and politics, whether in regard to the Kennedys, Hubert Humphrey, George Wallace and the antiwar campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. His clarity on political issues at the time, whether the U-2 flights, the Civil Rights movement, the growing antiwar movement and the conservative movement that came out of the Goldwater campaign have given insight into this critical period in American history. And the views he has on both political parties, even more than sixty years after he published his first book, incredibly still have tremendous insight into so much of partisan and internecine fighting in both parties to this very day.

White is still held in enormous regard by historians and other journalists that followed, all of whom have tried with varying degrees of success to capture what he did so well in his first four books. Yet in recent years revisionist historians on either side of the political aisle have done much to reject him, whether by vilification on the right or omission by the left.

The far right's behavior, as one might expect, follows the same pattern they've basically held long before White came on the scene. They believed White was an agent of the so-called 'liberal media' and was therefore suspect. That said, the main reason he is dismissed by conservatives is because of the false flag that somehow White was able to throw the 1960 election to JFK and creating a false narrative about both Nixon and Republicans.

That part doesn't stand up to scrutiny if one actually reads White's books, not just in regard to 1960 but every subsequent book he did right up to America In Search of Itself. The idea that he was in the tank for the Kennedys pretty much goes out the window when one reads 1960 and by the time he gets to the follow up books, its clear the bloom is off the rose. As we shall see in the articles I've written White may have been the only journalist who never bought into the Myth of Camelot and while he might have been fooled initially by John, that blindness was not granted to his younger brothers when they made their runs for office.

The left's decision in the course of time to increasingly ignore White's writings is more understandable when you consider the time. White's look at the decade, particularly when it comes to the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement looks at it objectively and with a candor that belies the one both movements did in the immediate aftermath of the rise of the conservative movement.  The left has always tended to argue that they were this close to a revolution and America let them down and the further one gets away from that era, the more rose-colored their glasses become. White, who was actually there and was writing how it unfolded in real time, shows all of the flaws of the movement under a microscope and it is not flattering to any part of it. He understands the issues and what is being discussed as well, if not better, then many of the protestors and demonstrators did and he asks questions that very well may never have occurred to them at the time – and more importantly that they still haven't been willing to answer.

Most controversial to the left may be how he chooses to sit in judgment of their approach to politics as the 1960s progressed and moved into the 1970s. White clearly had liberal principles – that much is hard to ignore – but it was liberalism as it had been defined classically for nearly two centuries. He saw both how the liberal policies were starting to stagnate even before Nixon took office and just as importantly how what was becoming the liberal approach was increasingly leading the Democratic Party to disaster.  Considering that the Republican revolution basically was taking its roots as the Democrats were increasingly making this part of their platform gospel is a standard that in the 21^st century the left has done everything in its power to argue was a moral failing of both Republicans and the nation.  That they have no reached the point that the word 'liberal' itself became so toxic that it has currently been replaced by the left with 'progressive' shows another example of how this branch of America will deal with language more than policy.

And it's worth noting that at the end of every book White would take a look at the results of the election and try to predict where the country was going to end up going under the next administration. He would look at the patterns of the vote but not in the breakdown of identity politics that has become gospel among pollsters. Rather instead he looked at America through its various regional sections and tried to see why the winner had appealed to one candidate and why the loser had failed. He also picked up on trends in both the political and general sphere of the nation that gave insight into the problems America might have as well as trying to see the future. In many ways he was more correct then he knew about where America was going and its hard to argue that we as a country might be better off had more people in power at the time taken the lessons White was telling the country into consideration.

White was very much a colleague of the old school of politics and he was increasingly becoming uncomfortable with the growth of the presidential primary and how he thought it was ruining the electoral process. This is a view, I should add, that is increasingly becoming common among scholars and other elitists who worry about the health of democracy. With that said, White gives a very clear view of what conventions were like before primaries eliminated all the drama and they became made for television events.  You couldn't get a clearer snapshot of what political conventions and the nominating process was like then from reading White's books.

And because he's clearly an objective reporter he makes it very clear that those processes might not have been as great at nominating candidates as so many reporters and other scholars think when they think about using them today. This is true not merely when he covers the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago which was just the climax of a year of chaotic politics in the party but when he covers the leadup to both the 1964 Republican Convention that nominated Goldwater and the leadup to the 1972 Democratic Convention that nominated McGovern. He makes it clear that the disasters that led to two of the biggest electoral landslides in history climaxed in genuine onscreen drama for both parties – and it makes it clear that in all politics, there is such a thing as bad publicity.

As an amateur historian I find White's books increasingly comforting in a turbulent time because they tell me something that in today's endless news cycle, and where everything that happens is picked apart by everybody on social media, the average person would do well to remember: all of this has happened before and the past can give us lessons if we are willing to learn them. And since increasingly the media that followed after White has failed spectacularly in learning these lessons and far too many politicians show a similar lack of cognition, I believe we as a society have a moral obligation to try and learn from them ourselves if we are too move forward.

What will follow will be stories from all five of White's major books, both popping the bubble of myths that so many generations that have followed have taken as gospel and relating narratives that have either been forgotten or telling familiar stories with the perspective of a first-hand observer. Many will involve politicians who are still familiar names from that era as well as other major figures from that perspectives. Others will involve incidents and individuals that may very well have been forgotten completely by history but whose actions foreshadowed many of the struggles that we see to this day.

I believe that true objectivity from any historian may be impossible but I also think White tried, with all his power, not to let his internal bias show in his writing. That cannot be said of those who came after him and it is something I respect him for and judge his successors. I strongly urge the reader of these columns to seek out the first four books: they were issued in a reprinting in the 2010s and no doubt can be found on eBooks or Kindles if one tries.  Are they the best record of what happened during this period? I can't say with certainty.  But if you want to see a perspective of what America was like when it was in search of itself as White put it, this is a great place to start for anyone.

Homicide Rewatch: Blood Wedding

 

Written by Matthew Witten ; story by Tom Fontana & James Yoshimura

Directed by Kevin Hooks

 

In 1996 network TV  - the only game in town but not for much longer when it came to drama – had never been big about killing series regulars. Tom Fontana had done so quite a bit on St. Elsewhere, famously having Doctors Wendy Armstrong and Peter White meet onscreen ends and nighttime soaps, such as Dallas and Dynasty, as well as Melrose Place, were willing to do so in the 1990s. But by and large network dramas weren't doing that. David Milch was reluctant to do so on Hill Street Blues and despite the fact that David Caruso helped give him a heart attack in the first season of NYPD Blue he still didn't hold enough of a grudge to kill John Kelly off when Caruso left the show at the start of the second season.

Series regulars had never had that kind of protection and as the 1990s progressed it was starting to become a common occurrence.  It had happened quite a few times in 1996, One of the first tragic deaths on NYPD Blue came when Andy Sipowicz's son met a tragic end not long after becoming a police officer himself and the fourth season of The X-Files had begun with the shooting of Steven Williams' X who had been a series regular for the past two seasons.

While none of the characters had been thrilled about the fact that three of their series regulars had to be shot in order to boost their ratings back in Season Three Homicide had already proven itself to be the kind of series that would kill off associates and friends of the detectives for emotional power. One of the first brilliant stories had been the shooting of Officer Thormann and Giardello had witnessed the loss of his friend Sam Thorne back in Season Three.

Ed Danvers was by this point in Homicide one of the biggest recurring characters who wasn't a series regular. He appeared in three or four episodes a season, had dating Kay Howard during the first two seasons before the two broke up. A recurring storyline involving Danvers has been his upcoming nuptials. So when we see Danvers with his fiancée shopping for a wedding dress and a robber comes in and points a gun at Danvers, it wouldn't seem to be much of a cheat to have the show kill him off. The fact that this is Pembleton's first case as a primary might seem like a bit of a stretch had the series not made it very clear of the random nature of who gets what murder since the Pilot. The fact that the squad would now have to deal with the death of a colleague – and in Kay's case, a former lover – is the kind of thing Homicide was good at doing.

So when the detectives arrive and we see Danvers still alive, our first reaction is relief. Until we learn that Homicide has yet another kick in the teeth to give us.  It's not Ed Danvers who's the victim of a robbery gone wrong; its Meryl Hansen the women he was days away from marrying. And Zeljko Ivanek, who has been known for being known as very much as an everyman, gets to give the most wrenching performance he will ever give during the series run.

As I mentioned previously every season Homicide has done at least one episode a year in which the process of investigating a murder is turned around and we have to look at it from the perspective of those left behind. 'Blood Wedding' is the first episode since 'Crosetti' that turns this narrative on its head and forces a character we are familiar with to have to endure that loss from a fresh perspective. Homicide will deal with this theme quite a few times during Season Five, bringing it to its ultimate end in the season finale, so this episode can be seen as transitional because of Ed Danvers status on the show: he's a recurring character but not one we see every week so in theory this shouldn't be as terrible as 'Crosetti' was. Critical words: "in theory."

Because the moment we see Danvers standing over the body of Hansen with blood still on his shirt we know how wrecked were going to be. Long-time viewers have to be reminded of 'Bop Gun' where Robin Williams' character spent much of the first act and well into the second with the blood of his wife on his shirt. Only this time Homicide goes even further: every time Danvers hears his name mention, we cut to a flashback of Meryl and Danvers' shouts 'Get Down!"

The bigger problem is that because of Danvers' position as a states attorney when he gets in the face of Pembleton or other witnesses he can't be pushed aside the same way they would if it were any other witness. When Danvers starts getting in Frank's face about the tape recorder he gets annoyed and when he starts berating the cashier for her description as part of a conspiracy it’s the kind of thing any decent defense attorney if they found this out would have a meal with. Frank knows this and tries to tell Gee as much when they meet in his office. Gee knows in his heart this is true but because Danvers is a vital part of the office – and more because he wants to look him in the eye when this is over – he tells Frank that he has to take him seriously. Considering how much Al doesn't like it when the bosses stomp all over any investigation its telling Al is willing to bend over backwards to accommodate Danvers.

When Danvers demands Frank be taken off the case because he's not up to the job – and critically goes to Kay with this first – it’s the kind of undermining we've seen the bosses to and Al always takes his men's side. He does so with Frank here. It becomes easier to do so when Danvers comes back to the squad room having skipped going to the hospital with eight possible suspects.  Pembleton gives Danvers some rope – more, I should be clear, then he would give anyone else in this situation. He only humors Danvers because Al looks over his shoulder and he takes the suspects.

Then when Danvers tries to press him, he goes with Bayliss on what he knows will be a wild goose chase. Ed then shouts angrily at him and everyone else, and only when he nearly faints from a combination of shock and blood loss does he agree to go to the hospital. Howard has no illusions; she gently orders the paramedics to cuff him if he gives them trouble.

The bigger issue is the continuing friction between Bayliss and Pembleton. Tim thinks the robber is an amateur, a coke fiend who screwed up his first big job and he wants to pursue it that way. Frank believes that this is the job of a professional, who struck in broad daylight. Tim keeps pushing the theory until Frank points out that the robber has a car and that even if he was in the neighborhood, even the most brain-dead crackhead has the sense to have a robbery in a place he isn't know. Frank finishes with "I am not incompetent."

And Frank is proven correct. He finds a pattern of robberies that each take place one block or less from an exit on the interstate, each involving a cash register. Using a state troopers description they narrow it down to a list of the cars and then do a lot of good old-fashioned policework the type that the detectives are very good at but that the sequences in the box often distracted us from. (We're about to get another good one, of course.) This leads them to Julius Cummings, a former felon who was on parole for armed robbery and who doesn't want to go but is facing a violation.

They find ammo but no gun, ski masks, none of which are orange and an orange thread. As States Attorney Conroy says: "Evidence of evidence, but no actual evidence." Bayliss and Pembleton start out with the Miranda warning, go through the first two and skip the number three: right to an attorney.  Cummings can't afford an attorney of course and he makes it clear he wants a 'public defender'.

This is the plan of course. Then Pembleton tells him that Meryl Hanson was a public defender. The moment Cummings hears Hanson was the woman who was shot, he clearly gets unnerved. He keeps denying it but Pembleton makes it clear that not a single one of them will want to defend him. (Which isn't true but they won't be thrilled to do it.) Then they drop Danvers name and his relationship to Hanson, and they make it very clear that the states attorneys will be lining up to prosecute him. (That's closer to the truth.) The more evidence is piled up they paint a picture which is true: a bunch of prosecutors, mostly white, itching to put an African-American on death row and that the public defender will do nothing to help him. That this is a situation that would later be used to put innocent men in jail for life and on death row is a scenario that has aged poorly, I will admit; it is only muted if it were not for the likelihood that Cummings doesn't confess.

And its negated completely by Danvers attitude. When Helen Carey makes it clear the case may not be strong enough for a conviction he gets pissed. When Howard tells him he'll be going back to Jessup for the parole violation and robbery charges, it's not enough. And when Carey flinches on the idea of the death penalty, Danvers gets nasty saying: "She's never taken a case beyond life without parole." Carey is calm reminding Danvers yes she is against the death penalty but so is Ed and so was Meryl.

The last two scenes involving Ivanek are his finest hour on the series. He comes to lockup and confronts Cummings, who makes the mistake of asking what he wants. Danvers slams his briefcase at the bar: "What do I want? I want to kill you. But unlike you I don't have a gun. I'm going to kill you the only way I know how. Through the law…It may take the rest of my life…but I will live to see you die."

Much of the episode sees Kellerman  acting very much like a spoiled child. We see the aftermath of his night with Juliana but when she gets beeped to the Hansen murder, he takes things way out of context. First he takes a sick day, and then he shows up at the morgue – while Juliana is in the middle of her job – and tells her to go with him on a sailing trip.

Cox, its worth noting, asks very much like the grownup in the situation (and it must have been refreshing in 1996 to see the woman give the guy the brushoff the morning after) and wants to do her job. Kellerman asks very much like the temperamental child he's been for the last few weeks and when Al acts like he's being so, he acts just as childish towards him. Much of the last few weeks have done much to make us forget of Mike's judgmental attitude involving the grand jury investigation. To be clear he's getting drunk in the middle of the afternoon and tells Al "If you can't do anything at least spare me the lecture." If Giardello was the boss we know him to be he would have slapped the drink out of Mike's hand and told him to get his head out of his ass.

But as we know Al has always tried to do right by his men. When this began he said they couldn't fight the Feds and he knows that this is true in a sense. But he's also spent a month two men down and he needs every man he's gone. So he decides to try and work behind the scenes and talk to the other three detectives who've been indicted.

Pires and Goodman tell Giardello that they won't give the prosecutor anyone she doesn't already have. They both make it clear that Ingram is trying to make a name for herself and that name comes from indicting as many cops as possible. There's a different context that Ingram is only interested in indictments and getting as many people in jail as possible; Roland and the three detectives are going to get relatively light sentences for their cooperations. Ingram is clearly as much a boss as Bonfather and Gaffney: all she cares about are the splashy headlines of the indictments and the convictions which she hopes to leverage in moving up the ladder. (This pattern will be seen later on in a different context in The Wire a few years from now when the idea of 'dope on the damn table' is more important than doing something about the real problem.) Connally is much harsher: he's angry and bitter at being cut dead and he doesn't care whether Kellerman's dirty or not. All he cares about is going home in three years.  We also remember he thought Kellerman was the original rat and the fact that Mike chose to beat him up in the Waterfront has to be considered as good a reason as any to throw him under the bus.

The key scene comes when Giardello goes to Deputy Commissioner Harris practically with hat in hand. Harris then makes it very clear that he blames Al for the fact that the department caused Wade to be indicted and consequently lost the election. This was, as we know full well, something that Harris went over Al's head to Frank Pembleton, that he followed Harris's orders to the letter and when the truth came out regardless Frank was held out to dry. Frank did everything possible to protect the commissioner and the bosses. That Wade ended up losing the election was entirely because of Harris's maneuvering.

But Harris is like every boss on this show: he sees the world as he wishes to see it and has the power to mete out punishment. When he makes it clear that Gaffney was promoted over Al last year on his orders he makes it clear who the buck stops with and its not him. Harris believes everyone should dance to his tune and if things go wrong, it is their fault and not his. This is unnerving enough – and when we learn the truth of Harris rise to power by the end of the season, it is genuinely frightening. Al Freeman is magnificent in his last appearance as all of the genial attitude he showed towards Frank before is gone and we see a man who gloats in showing his power over his underlings.

At the end of the episode we see everyone feeling lost. Kellerman has just learned that the grand jury has been postponed until mid-January. So he now he must spend the holidays not knowing if he has a future. Seeing Kellerman confess he can't handle his family's kindness shows just how lost Mike is and it’s a good moment of humanity in this dark period.

Then we see Danvers in his office looking through his old cases and plea agreements looking lost. Danvers recognizes the indifference in Pembleton and Maggie as what he's seen in himself, and realizes how he came into this job with the determination to mete out justice and then:

Unless a case was absolutely winnable I'd make a deal so I wouldn't lose a court! If we can't get first degree, let's set second degree…manslaughter!....involuntary manslaughter! …Put him away for a year or two, maybe he won't do any more drugs, maybe he won't rape any more girls, rob any more stores!"

And then he collapses in tears in Kay's arms.

The episode ends with Al wondering if he has failed in Kellerman's path, something Frank never picks up on. Because then he gets a call and goes to see Danvers. Cummings has committed suicide, having hung himself with his shirt. And as always the ambiguity is maintained: we will never know whether Cummings did so because he was guilty of the crime or because he believed he was boxed in because of what Pembleton and Danvers said.

So in typical fashion the case is over and there's no closure: Meryl Hanson's name will be in red forever because no one was charged. And most horribly Danvers will go back to work in a few months with no new approach to his job. He'll still be cutting deals, still playing politics, still not going into court unless a case is winnable.

This is vastly different from how Law & Order played things in the aftermath of Claire Kincaid's death, which took place in May of 1996. McCoy became more of a heavy drinker, more inclined to push the boundaries of his profession and more often to risk his job. (We'll actually see the consequences of this in a crossover between the two shows.) In Homicide Meryl Hanson's murder is never mentioned again, not when Danvers shows up in the squad.  This is the detectives being polite and Danvers, who never wore his heart on his sleeve before, doesn't do it ever again.

Blood Wedding is the last show Homicide aired in 1996 before the Christmas hiatus. And no one, Kellerman least of all, is eager to celebrate the holidays. No one knows that 1997 is going to bring in even worse personal problems for the squad, only some of which have to do with being murder police.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

 

Brodie is on the Move! We find Brodie sleeping under one of the body bags in the morgue this week and giving Scheiner a heart attack. He actually asks Scheiner what he has for a headache. "We don't do requests," Scheiner says gruffly. Which leads to…

Detective Munch: Spotting Brodie he says: "You look like a corpse." Brodie actually gives back as good as he gets: "I slept like a stiff." In recounting Brodie's failures over the past week, he asks if he'll choose Pembleton's walk-in closet, an offer Brodie seems considering. In fact Munch then shows Brodie the classified ads this time. Brodie says he can't afford a deposit. Lewis suggests a roommate. "I hear Sigfried and Roy split up," Munch says. Brodie has an answer to that: "I'm allergic to cats." (Remember this is 1996, the incident that would end things forever for that team was still seven years in the future.)

Hey, Isn't That… R Emery Bright was making his TV debut on Homicide as Julius Cummings. He would have a brief career in TV, appearing as Doug in The Corner and a Community relations officer on the third season of The Wire. He would do some work as a writer and producer, most recently producing Loudmouth, a documentary on Al Sharpton.

On The Soundtrack: As Pembleton tells Danvers about Cummings death in the final minute we hear 'Reason' by Torn and Frayed. This can be heard on either the DVD or streaming.

 

A Tale of Two James: A Season 42 Jeopardy Update

 

 

With the 2026 postseason in the books Season 42 resumed on February 23^rd. And three full weeks we have two players both named James who have qualified for next year's Tournament of Champions: one unofficially but looking good, one a certainty.

The potential qualifier began his run on February 24^th.  Facing off against Trey Hart, who'd won his second game the day play resumed, James Hirsh, a lawyer from Toronto managed to win one of the most thrilling games played so far in Season 42 with all three players finishing Double Jeopardy with $15,600 or more.  James won with $32,418. He then ran away with the next two games.

Then on Friday he ran into Diana Miller, a fellow attorney. The two of them fought it out in both rounds along with Tim Leung. At the end of Double Jeopardy James led with $16,400 to Diana's $11,600 and Tim's $9800. It came down to Final Jeopardy.

The category was COMPANIES. Historian Louis Hyman wrote this company's sales method undid the power of the 'consumerism of Jim Crow'. Diana was the only one to figure it out: "What is Sears and Roebuck?" I didn't know that, according to Ken: "With the Sears and Roebuck catalog black shoppers didn't have to worry about racist shopkeepers, they could shop from home." James thought it was Coca Cola?" and left with $67,418.

The Jeopardy Archive doesn't officially have James Hirsh listed for the next Tournament of Champions but that's to be expected; typically that doesn't happen until after Jeopardy makes it decision leading up to the next Tournament of Champions. That being said it's $10,000 more than Mike Dawson won in that number and $7500 more than Brendan Liaw won and both men were invited back without having to deal with the Wild Card business. I'm relatively confident he'll be brought back and when he is, he'll be competing against another James.

One week after James Hirsh was defeated James Denison, a college professor from Alexandria, Virginia made his first appearance. He demonstrated a verve for correct answers and responding correctly on Daily Doubles. He finished Friday with $24,200 to his nearest opponents $12,200. And on Final Jeopardy we got a sense of the kind of player he was.

The category was COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD. "Its island province of Anodon lies at 1.4 degrees south latitude; its mainland begins at .92 degrees north latitude." James figured it out: "What is Equatorial Guinea?" He only needed to wager $201 to win; but he bet $11,999. He ended up winning $36,199.

Watching James the during the last week is very much like watching Icarus; it is thrilling to watch him fly so high but the way he plays he kept getting dangerously close to the sun. At first it was thrilling: he managed to win $81,798 in two days, the kind of total one associates with super-champions. But it was an incredibly risky way to play as well and it only paid off as long as two things happened: he got every Daily Double right and his opponents kept getting Final Jeopardy wrong.

We saw the seeds of his downfall in his third appearance against Sapana Vora and Tim Swankey on Tuesday. All three played excellently and at the end of Final Jeopardy James had $20,000 to Sapana's $13,200 and Tim's $9000. Then came Final Jeopardy.

The category was BOOKS & AUTHORS. "In this 1897 work the title character enters an in with his face almost entirely covered in bandages."

Tim thought it was The Count of Monte Cristo. Not a bad guess but wrong. He lost $4602 leaving him with $4398.

Then came Sapana. She wrote down Phantom of the Opera. Closer but also wrong. She bet $6801 and finished with $6399.

It came down to James who was the closest with Dracula. It was actually The Invisible Man. (Full Disclosure: I knew the correct response but only from a different Jeopardy clue. James wagered $10,999, leaving him with $9001.  This time his big wager in Final Jeopardy could have worked against him big time but he held on. (I expect that we'll see Sapana and possibly Tim in the next Second Chance Tournament.)

In Game 4 for the first time Tim got a Daily Double wrong and it cost him everything. He was still ahead at the end of the Jeopardy round. He played well throughout the game and managed to win but yet again all three players got Final Jeopardy wrong.

Yesterday against Luke Henson and Lydia Cawley he started out like a rocket. At the end of the Jeopardy round he had $11,000 to Luke's $3600 and Lydia. Then on the sixth clue of Double Jeopardy he found the first Daily Double. He had $13,800 to Luke's $6000. He bet $5400 in LAKES & RIVERS:

About 2/3 of Venezuela's oil output comes from the Basin of this large lake, now greatly polluted as a result. He guessed: "What is Lake Titicaca?" It was actually Lake Maracaibo. He dropped to $8200. To his credit he recovered and finished with $14,400. But Luke went on a late run and finished with $8400 while Lydia had $1200.

It came down to Final Jeopardy. The category was 21^st CENTURY WOMEN. "The Iowa legislature passed a resolution declaring February 22, 2024 her day across the state."

Lydia guessed:  "Who is Coco Gauff?" That was wrong. She lost $27.

Luke wrote down: "Who is Caitlin Clark?" That was correct. (Ken: "The 22^nd because she's jersey number 22." And well known in Iowa basketball.) Luke bet almost everything to finish with $16,798.

It came down to James. And his response was: "Who is Collins?" His wager of $5999 was irrelevant as Luke became the new Jeopardy champion.

Now to be clear $99,400 in four games is an impressive total by anyone's standard. We've seen more than our share of Jeopardy players who've won five, six or even eight games who never got that high. (I won't embarrass them by naming names; I've done that indirectly too often in recent years.) And it certainly was exciting to watch James Denison play.  But we can also see him as the flip side of so many super-champions we've watched the past few years; the Matt Amodios, the Amy Schneiders and of course the original Jeopardy James, Holzhauer. Perhaps if Denison had been more cautious in the last Daily Double he encountered he might be finishing this week. Still I won't deny it wasn't a lot of fun watching him flirt with danger even if danger came back to bite him.

I'm going to wait until the end of the month to remind my readers how many players are on the roster for next year's Tournament of Champions. What I know for sure is that the triumphs of these two James's are going to cause me endless headaches – and fun – by the time we get there.

 

They Won Best Director But Their Films Never Won Best Picture, Conclusion

 

 

I should start this entry with the proviso that with the notable exception of one of the directors who is essentially retired, the remainder on this list are still active and may very well someday have a film that earns a Best Picture win. Whether they will have a corresponding directing win to go with it is another matter. Combined these five directors represent seven times so far this century that a film has won Best Picture without a corresponding Best Director win and that's not counting both Alexander Gonzalez Irratu's second director win for The Revenant in which Best Picture went to Spotlight and the notorious night that La La Land joined that list went Moonlight won Best Picture.

 

Steven Soderbergh

 

In the 21^st century few directors have had a more brilliant year than Soderbergh did in 2000. In February Erin Brockovich became a critical success and box office hit and at the end of the year his second film Traffic managed to do both. Soderbergh won the Best Director prize for both films at all four of the major critics' awards that year because groups like the New York and LA Critics Associations give prizes for bodies of work as much as a single performance. (To use one example that year the same year Soderbergh was winning Best Director in LA, Frances McDormand was awarded Best Supporting Actress for her performances in both Almost Famous and Wonder Boys. She would be nominated only for the latter.)

Soderbergh would be nominated for directing both films at the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild Awards and in both cases he would lose to Ang Lee for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. (We'll be getting him further down.) Soderbergh was nominated for both films by the Oscars the first director to be nominated against himself since Michael Curtiz in 1939 for Angels With Dirty Faces and The Adventures of Robin Hood. The general consensus was Soderbergh would cancel himself out on Oscar night.

But on Oscar night of 2001 (one of the rare times the Oscars as a body more or less gave all the awards to the appropriate winners) Tom Cruise revealed to the audience that in fact Soderbergh hadn't canceled himself out after all and that he'd won Best Director for Traffic. It was night when three of the major nominees Tiger and Gladiator had been breaking even with each film winning four Oscars. However when Traffic won both Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director, putting it into a three-way tie, the natural assumption was it would win Best Picture. Instead it turned out to be Gladiator, the first movie since Around the World in 80 Days to win Best Picture without winning either for directing or writing (though Gladiator is a far superior film then that one.)

Soderbergh has never been back to the Oscars since despite retiring and unretiring multiple times.

 

Roman Polanski

 

If one can separate the artist from the art – which in 2002 was easier then it is today – Roman Polanski remains one of the greatest directors in the history of the medium as well as one of the most ill-fated. His personal history is one of the most recounted in Hollywood lore so let's move on to 2002.

Few had realistically given a chance for The Pianist to be a major contender on the day of the Oscar nominations: 2002 represented by far the level of peak proliferation by Miramax with three Best Picture nominees – The Hours, Chicago and Gangs of New York  - dominated the nominations. They did so to such a degree that many promising contenders in the early stages such as Far from Heaven and About Schmidt were shutout of the majority of the awards when the nominations came out and The Two Towers became the sole film in The Lord of the Rings where Peter Jackson was ignored for Best Director. So when The Pianist managed to get seven Oscar nomination, few insiders if any, expected it to have a presence at Oscar night. Polanski hadn't even been nominated for a Golden Globe even though he had been nominated for a Directors Guild Awards. He lost to Rob Marshall for Chicago.

But then Adrien Brody stunned everybody when he won Best Actor over such powerhouses as Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day Lewis. Then the film won Best Adapted Screenplay. Then Harrison Ford announced that the Best Director went to Roman Polanski. You could hear the shock in the theater in TV.

Chicago did win Best Picture after all this, of course, and the Oscars had to deal with the fact they'd given Best director to a fugitive from the law. But then considering how good a night Miramax had…

 

Ang Lee

 

Few directors in their long and storied history have had such a peculiar record with the Oscars as Ang Lee.

After years of working in international movies he made his American film debut in collaboration with Emma Thompson in Sense & Sensibility. He would get quite a few directors prizes from various critics groups in the lead up to that year's Oscars but when the nominations came out Sensibility wasn't nominated for Best Director even though he was nominated for Best Picture. That whole year had a strange vibe. Ron Howard went through the same thing with Apollo 13 and Leaving Las Vegas and Dead Men Walking would both be nominated for Best Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay but not Best Picture. Braveheart's win on Oscar night seemed to make as much sense as anything.

I went over what happened with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon so let's go to 2005 and Brokeback Mountain. The movie dominated all the major awards leading up to the Oscars and Lee won basically every director's award imaginable. He won the Golden Globe, the DGA award and the Independent Spirit Award for directing the night before the Oscars. And he did win Best Director and the film won Best Adapted Screenplay. But in what is now clearly one of the worst choices the Oscars ever made – and one that has to be based in some form of homophobia  - Crash took Best Picture. (I don't hate that film as much as many other critics so it did win a lot of other awards in the weeks leading up to the Oscars. But the fact it wasn't nominated by the Golden Globes for Best Picture and still won is a big sign that the Oscars really wasn't willing to be that open to the LGBTQ+ community in 2005-2006.)

If that was weird enough I'm completely baffled by what happened in 2012. As I've written in previous articles there were a lot of excellent movies made that year and that is true of the majority of the films nominated for Best Picture. But for the life of me, I can't comprehend what the people who voted in the directing branch were thinking. It's not just that they chose to ignore Ben Affleck for Argo for Best Director, it's that they seemed to go out of their way to ignore the low-hanging and other great nominees such as Quentin Tarantino for Django Unchained and Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty.  I'm not saying that Lee's nomination for Best Director is the poorest of the five who were chosen – that one goes to Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild, in my opinion -  but he certainly wouldn't have been in my top five either. I acknowledge Life of Pi is a superb film but even among those directors who were present it's not close to the work of Steven Spielberg for Lincoln or even David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook. Even Lee seemed surprised when he won that night.

Lee's only made two films since Life of Pi, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Gemini Man in 2019. Each film was poorly received both by critics and the box office. He hasn't made a film since that last one. He was the first director since George Stevens to have won 2 Oscars for films that didn't win Best Picture and seven years later that club got another member.

 

Alfonso Cuaron

 

Cuaron worked in Mexican cinema for ten years before making his American film debut for such intriguing experimental remakes of A Little Princess and Great Expectations. He went back to Mexico for his first genuine classic Y Tu Mama Tambien a film that won many Best Foreign language films but wasn't nominated in that category. Cuaron received his first Oscar nomination for the screenplay.

By the end of the 2000s Cuaron was considered part of the vanguard of 'New Mexican Cinema, along with his comrades Guillermo Del Toro and Alexander Gonzalez Irratu. Between 2014 and 2019 the three men dominated the Oscars winning five of the six potential awards for Directing and eight other awards between them.

In 2013 Cuaron directed the masterpiece Gravity a film set in outer space that looked like it was done in a single shot. Co written with his brother Jonas it was one of the biggest box office hits of 2013, grossing over $274 million domestically and over $723 million worldwide. However because it was one of those films that had the qualification of 'technical achievement' rather than the kind of artistic one the Oscars love to celebrate  while Cuaron won multiple directing awards, including the Golden Globe and eventually the DGA's award it won almost no major critics prizes for Best Picture. And despite being the biggest overall winner on Oscar night – with seven prizes including two for Cuaron for both Directing and editing – sure enough Best Picture went to Twelve Years A Slave, which is the definition of the kind of film the Oscars give Best Picture to: a film that is 'significant' rather than entertaining.

During the next four years Irratu picked up four Oscars for directing and writing and in 2017 Guillermo Del Toro won three Oscars for The Shape of Water. In 2018 returned, this time in collaboration with Netflix. Roma told the story of an upper-middle-class family's maid in Mexico city during the 1970s. Made in conjunction with Mexico, it was one of the first international movies since Amour that had a genuine possibility of crossing over into the category for Best Picture. Considering it was winning every major award from every major critics group for Picture, Director and Foreign Language film this seemed like a very real possibility.  Which you have to figured alarmed the mostly American membership of the Academy. For all their talk of saying that film is the Universal language, they've been pretty clear that their awards for Best Picture should go to American films.

So Roma won Best Motion Picture Foreign language film at the Golden Globes but Cuaron won Best Director. Then on nominations day it became only the fifth film in history to be nominated for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language film along with eight other nominations, including directing, screenplay and two acting nominations. You can feel the Academy sweating.

The film did win Best Foreign Language film and Cuaron got two more Oscars, for directing and cinematography.  But when Green Book (which had won the Golden Globe for Best Comedy that year) ended up winning Best Picture, African-Americans might have been irked but the Academy breathed a sigh of relief.  The foreign infidels had been stopped.

Until, of course, the following year.

 

 Jane Campion

 

My heart breaks for Jane Campion. It really does. More than 28 years after Hollywood got itself in a tether because a woman looked like she was going to stop Steven Spielberg from winning his first Oscar, the Oscars finally seemed ready to honor her. In 2021 she made her biggest critical success since The Piano with The Power of The Dog. She was winning every Best Director prize in the book from the Critics Awards. And then in the final months everything turned against.

First her triumph at the Golden Globes happened the year that NBC chose not to broadcast it and many celebrities didn't attend.

Then came the Critics Choice Awards. The movie won four awards and Campion won Best Director. I've written about this before:

 

 Understandably giddy and perhaps a little buzzed (the Critics' Choice does provide a fair amount of liquor to everybody) Campion expressed amazement that she was in the same room with Venus and Serena Williams, who were there as producers for King Richard, which has earlier taken the Best Actor prize for Will Smith. Campion joked about taking up tennis and then in that spirit of good humor said: “Venus and Serena don’t have to play against the boys. I only have to play against the boys.” I have a recording of the entire room laughing hysterically and applauding, including Venus Williams. Serena looked a little shocked. I appreciated the joke because of the larger statement it made not just about Campion’s life in Hollywood, but of any female director trying to have a career in Hollywood.

…Campion’s struggles over the past three decades, which mirror every female creative force in Hollywood, the fact that she’d said she was in awe of the two of them seconds earlier, the fact that she was no doubt giddy for triumph (maybe even a little buzzed), the fact that she was joking – was relevant to social media. All the internet cared about was that somehow Campion had diminished everything the Williams’ sisters had accomplished. The fact that her struggle for appreciation has no doubt gone on as long as the Williams sisters – hell, the fact that they were even there for a movie about their lives illustrates what they had to go through – wasn’t relevant.

 

And as anyone who remembers the Oscars that year the Williams sisters, indirectly, overshadowed Campion's triumph and the entire night. Will Smith famously slapped Chris Rock and that is all the 2022 Oscars will ever be known for, certainly not the triumph of Campion.

It almost seems irrelevant that Power of the Dog ended up losing Best Picture that year to CODA which for all the power of the film seems the same kind of slap in the face that giving Best Picture to Crash sixteen year earlier did. I'm fully aware that it is also directed by a woman Sian Heder but the fact is Campion was nominated for Best Director, Heder wasn't. Power of the Dog got ten nominations. CODA got three. Power of The Dog won twelve Best Picture prizes in the lead-up to the Oscars and Campion had won the Best Director prize; CODA won the PGA and the SAG awards. Power of the Dog was a cinematic achievement. CODA is the kind of film the Oscars give Best Picture to in order to make themselves look inclusive in order to balance their often problematic history.

I may be pontificating a bit here but the fact is Campion was twenty years older than Heder on Oscar night 2022 and has not made a film since. I don't deny that Heder deserved her moment in the sun and this may be yet another occasion of Hollywood forcing one deserving woman to win over another. But Campion isn't going to get many more chances and Heder will. In that sense I think it's unfair to a director that she now has the dubious distinction of being one of a handful of directors whose trophy for Best Director was the only Oscar for their film. (Then again that club does include George Stevens and Mike Nichols so its not such a bad group to be a part of.)

 

Looking forward to Oscar night when it is possible the membership of this club will grow by one more.