Jane Campion Had Nothing To Apologize For. So Why Did She Have To?

 

I usually don’t like getting in the middle of ‘controversies’ on social media. I know just by observing that this is a war nobody wins and the loudest voices trump all logic. But after seeing what happened on social media forums to Jane Campion after her speech at the Critics Choice awards on Sunday –  remarks, by the way, I thought were totally appropriate – I feel, as someone who knows the history of Hollywood intimately, must comment. I suspect I will get a fair amount of flames for this – I’ve learned just by making similar comments on other people’s blogs that often there is no reasoning with many of them – but because this is such a tempest in a teapot I feel I have too.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about: On Sunday night, the Critics Choice awards gave its Best Director Prize to Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog. Campion is one of the most skilled directors of my generation, and based on the record of all the awards leading up to this, is the front-runner for the Oscar a week from Sunday. 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.

Now I have to give what is always missing from every remark that someone makes: context. In 1993, Jane Campion stunned the world with her masterpiece The Piano. An extraordinarily well-crafted film she wrote and directed, it debuted to extraordinary acclaim for everybody involved, especially stars Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin. It won the Palm D’Or at Cannes and instantly became an Oscar contender. There was just one problem: that was the year that Steven Spielberg had made Schindler’s List.

More context: Hard as it maybe for those under thirty to remember, there was a time when Steven Spielberg was pretty much shutout by the Academy. He was famously denied Best Director nominations for Jaws in 1975 and The Color Purple a decade later, even though both films were nominated for Best Picture.  This was galling in the former case because they went for Federico Fellini for Amarcord, which had won Best Foreign Film the year before, and in the latter case, doubly so because The Color Purple received eleven other nominations, but the Academy thought Akira Kurosawa deserved a Best Director nod for Ran. (The Color Purple holds the dubious distinction of being the most nominated film to not win a single Oscar.) There were examples of this throughout the 1970s and 1980s: Close Encounters of the Third Kind got a nod for Spielberg but not for Best Picture and my mother is still outraged that E.T. was basically shutout to the ponderous epic Gandhi in 1982.

So when Schindler’s List came out in 1993, the narrative was: he’s earned, we will give Spielberg the Oscar. The problem was the critics weren’t willing to go along with it. The National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics and The LA Film Critics all gave Schindler’s List Best Picture, but they also all gave Best Director and Screenplay to Jane Campion for The Piano.  And oh, the backlash started and the contortion journalists made: One said that the awards of New York didn’t make sense, but rather than logically say the Best Picture should go to the best directed and written film of the year had the audacity to say: “Call the cops Steven, cause you were robbed.” Many of those same critics had spent the last twenty years saying Spielberg was too ‘mainstream’ to deserve an Oscar but why let the fact get in the way of the story?

So everybody turned on Campion and The Piano. And should we be surprised? Campion was only the second female nominee for Best Director to that point, but rather than celebrate this, the whole world turned on her for messing up their celebration for Spielberg. It wasn’t about whether Schindler’s List was a better film than The Piano: it was about making restitution to someone the Academy has spent twenty years screwing over. How dare this woman – from New Zealand, of all places! – spoil our fun?  She’ll have another chance. It’s Steven’s turn. The fact that it took another ten years for another female director to get nominated by the Academy – Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation ­– wasn’t the point.

We all know that Hollywood is a sausage fest and that the worst male director in Hollywood will find financial backing for any film (Uwe Boll just keeps making movies even though they’re all horrible) while the best women directors are always struggling. And Hollywood never sees the irony. Barbara Streisand’s Yentl was a vanity project to be sure, but to complete shut her out for any nominations – especially given that she was the first woman in history to win the Golden Globe for Best Director – was as inexcusable then as it forty years later. Mel Gibson’s Braveheart was a far worse film that was ravaged by critics and didn’t make its money back at the box office. The Oscars Gibson got for Best Picture and Director is among the lowest points in the Academy’s history.

The Academy may say that they have made strides in recent years, and that’s all well and good but its still stage dressing. Campion was the first woman in Academy history to get two Best Director nominations. That’s actually appalling when you consider there were two examples crying out to be honored this past decade. Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty was critically acclaimed and unlikely box office success. She earned a second Best Directors nomination. On nomination day 2013, the world was outraged – for Ben Affleck, who hadn’t been nominated for directing Argo. Greta Gerwig’s Little Women was one of the best films I saw in 2019 (I would rank it just below Marriage Story and Joker) but she was shutout for Best Director that year.

So when Campion made her remark to the crowd at the Critics Choice, she wasn’t just speaking for herself when she said “I only compete against the boys.” She was speaking every single female director, writer or any woman in Hollywood who doesn’t have the patience to just smile for the camera when she’s asked a question. It was funny, but it was true and no doubt painful.

But none of that – 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 what it comes down to is nothing Campion said but the same biases. I don’t think any of has to do with gender or even race strictly. No, this has to do with the fact that a white woman who I’m willing to bet almost nobody watching the awards knew from Eve before the awards dared to equate her struggle with those athletic icons. There’s a sad parentheses to this. Twenty eight years, Campion underwent a firestorm in the media for daring to deprive the most successful director in history from winning an Oscar. He’s gotten four subsequent nominations (ironically one is this year for West Side Story) and has had a grand total of six films since then nominated for Best Picture. Campion hasn’t had a major success since then, and had to make her film with Netflix for it to be made at all. Now on the verge of finally realizing her twenty-eight year dream, she’s being slammed for making an off the cuff remark about two of the world’s greatest athletes, who had to struggle just as hard to get their film made in the first place. At least King Richard got a theatrical release.

I take it back: part of this is about being a woman. It goes to the narrative than any female who isn’t an actress (and even some who are) must give a pitch perfect acceptance speech and not say anything that even seems controversial. A man can say whatever the hell he wants for winning any award and get cheered by everybody. Hell, there was an example of it that same night. Kieran Culkin was Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for Succession and gave a messy speech in which he humiliated himself and a couple of his fellow castmates. I saw an article online calling it ‘Best Worst Speech Ever’ while even said: “I’ll never win one of these again.” Campion’s speech was perfect on every level but for four seconds and she’s being raking over the coals by social media. Of course, Culkin’s a white actor with a legacy playing a white character who is a legacy while Campion is you know, a woman nobody’s heard of from New Zealand.

And of course, even though Campion did nothing wrong she apologized on social media and in person. Not that it will make a difference. Those trolls who cover Oscar night without having bothered to even watch any of the films will just say racist and sexist slurs about her when she wins. I have no doubt Campion will be just as humble in her acceptance speech, but it won’t matter.

I don’t know how many flames of my own I will draw for writing this article. And I honestly don’t give a damn. Jane Campion shouldn’t have apologized. She made a light-hearted comment about a serious subject at a glorious achievement. She had no intention of offending anybody, certainly not the Williams sisters who again, she was amazed she was in the same room with. She probably didn’t offend the Williams sisters, who by the way if you’d bother to see King Richard (which again I doubt many of this trolls did) have had to undergo far worse in their careers. This moment should have been a triumph for women everywhere. Why am I unsurprised that it led to a moment tearing one down?

Will The Thing About Pam Be Your Thing?

What does it say about me as a viewer that I’ve gone my entire life and never watched a single episode of Dateline? I know more about the kind of ‘true-crime stories’ they’ve been telling for decades more from the SNL and other late-night parodies than any actual episode. I know about the smarmy narration and the ridiculous stories they seem to tell from second and third hand sources, but generally my path would never cross with theirs. Maybe that makes me the wrong target audience for The Thing about Pam.

The limited series is basically the first fictional adaptation of a Dateline story that NBC has ever done. It plays to all intents and purposes like a Dateline episode, complete with Keith Morrison doing his bizarre narration that I’m told millions must love. It features its story not so much on the actual crime than on the neighbor who is adjacent to it, the title character. And if you’re going to have someone who can truly play the perfect tone of not taking yourself seriously, it helps immensely to have Renee Zellweger as your lead.

Zellweger has always been one of Hollywood’s great actresses, in both comedy and drama, but I don’t remember a role since her time as Bridget Jones that she genuinely seemed to be more committed to making herself look ridiculous. That she is doing so in what is ostensibly a serious drama makes her work all the more astounding. Playing Pam Hupp, a Missouri hausfrau who seems like another ordinary wife and mother (the series actually opens with her telling the audience how ordinary she is) the audience instantly see just how much of a busybody and schemer she truly is, pushing her way into the life of a friend dying of cancer (a real American Housewife Katy Moxon) and making herself utterly invaluable to her as she goes through chemo and drives her home as her husband is busy at ‘game night’. Of course, the next day said friend is found stabbed to death almost sixty times and the poor husband (Glenn Fleshler) ends up being detained by the police.  The poor sap is utterly unprepared for the cops, and probably could have gotten himself locked up on his own, without the assistance of Pam who does everything but hand photos to the cops showing him standing over the murder. Pam seems to be doing everything in her power to insert herself into the investigation and you’d think the cops and the DA (Judy Greer, relishing every moment onscreen) would be a little more suspicious.

The thing is they’re not clueless. In fact, the entire circus around the arrest and trial of the husband is as much in the bag as a Southern trial of a white man for killing a black one until, let’s be kind and say, this year. Of course, this is the converse. There’s no blood evidence, the alibi he has is solid, there’s no confession. But the DA has no probably putting him on trial, and even less of a problem having a party with the cops, the jury pool and the judge. The captions practically scream “This is a miscarriage of justice waiting to happen”, but I’m guessing that basically Dateline’s subtitle.

Here’s the main problem I have with The Thing About Pam. I don’t how seriously to take it, and I’m not entirely certain the creators do either. It doesn’t play as a docudrama or a dramatization of an actual Dateline story; it plays like the Saturday Night Live version. Which would be fine if the underlying story – at least as I seem to read is – is about a real decision to convict and imprison a man with no evidence at all. This kind of tone wouldn’t have even been considered by the creators of When They See Us or Women of the Movement or really any series that ended up with somebody on Death Row. The decision that the writers seem to have made is that since all of these people white people in flyover country, it’s okay to treat all of them, except for the husband and his attorney (played by Josh Duhamel with relish) as though they were buffoons and that the murder and everything else that happened should just be considered a clown act. It doesn’t help that everybody in the cast plays it as if it were a pure comedy. And the thing is, as a comedy it doesn’t particularly have many laughs.

Don’t get me wrong, everybody in the cast seems to having a grand time, particularly Zellweger, who seems able to convey pure entertainment just by the way she sucks down the giant sodas she always seem to be having. But the thing about The Thing About Pam is that I really don’t know what anybody from top to bottom thought they were trying to tell when they decided to make this story. It might work as a serious drama, but none of the writers seemed to want to commit that. It doesn’t work as a comedy, because if you stop and think about it – which clearly none of the cops or attorneys did – it’s a travesty of justice.  And I can’t see who the writers were telling this story for – TV Guide points out they’ve gone back to the well about the real Pam Hupp several times, so I don’t know what kind of viewership they were hoping to gather. People who wouldn’t watch Dateline because it’s too lowly for them but would watch a dramatization of a Dateline show because, in the era of Peak TV, that’s classier? In my case, that seems to be what has happened.

All I can say is, if you really want to watch Dateline without having to admit you watched Dateline, The Thing About Pam might be a good reason to.  If you want to see Renee Zellweger having a grand time in her first TV role, I imagine there’s a call for that as well. Otherwise, if you want to see an Oscar winning actress play a character who’s on the verge of real criminal conspiracy, wait another month and watch Julia Roberts play Martha Mitchell on Gaslit.  That was a bizarre story too, but the stakes were clearly higher and the lead character infinitely more interesting.

My score: 2.5 stars.

 

The Critics Choice Awards For TV Were Everything I hoped For...And More

 

I have always said the Broadcast Critics Awards are arguably my favorite when it comes to television, not just for the quality of the nominees and winners but also because of the genuine joy that everybody –audience, presenters, hosts – genuinely seem to be having. I was not shocked when the awards were postponed from January to this past Sunday because of the understandable fears of the omicron strain of Covid. But it was worth the wait, not just these past two months but the entire year and a half since the virtual version we got last January.

Where to begin? I don’t think I’ve given enough credit over the last few years for the wonderful job that Taye Diggs has been doing hosting this show. He is funny without being offensive, charming without being smarmy and utterly delightful.  His enjoyment seems far more genuine than any other awards show host I’ve seen in recent years and I love watching him work. There was a certain potential for awkwardness as Nicole Byer, a brilliant comedian in her own right co-hosted, but the two of them really seemed to be enjoying each other, particularly as Nicole had to constantly talk Taye down from doing musical numbers. I’d make a request for Diggs to host the Oscars someday, but who would wish that on anybody?

I will focus first on the awards themselves. First of all, my prediction rate was higher than usual which came as something of a shock to me. The Critics Choice are notorious unpredictable in the awards as you can’t tell whether they will lean towards the season that has passed or the season that is still going on. This year, they leaned more towards the latter. With the exception of three awards which I will get do in due course, all of the awards they gave were for the season that started, more or less, in September. And while there may not have been excitement, there sure as hell was a lot of fun being had.

Ted Lasso. as I expected even though part of me really did yearn for Only Murders in the Building to triumph, was the most dominant show of the night, winning four of the five awards in the comedy. Brett Goldstein took Best Supporting Actor, promised not to swear in his acceptance speech, and then ended up doing it near the end when he thanked Juno Temple. (Sadly he still wasn’t able to talk with idol Ray Romano as the cast was mostly in London shooting Season 3.) Hannah Waddingham won her second consecutive Supporting Actress award and was even wilder than she was at the SAG awards. The series won Best Comedy and Jason Sudeikis continued his dominance in the Best Actor category for the second straight year. Sadly, he wasn’t there to accept it. Sudeikis win was all the more joyful when you consider that one of the presenters was fellow SNL cast member Kristen Wiig. But it was even more delightful watching her and Annie Mumolo, pretty much in character from Barb and Star  go through byplay with co-star Jamie Dornan, who was there as part of the cast for Belfast. They seemed astonished that Barb and Star wasn’t his only movie, thought Belfast had to do with Slim-fast, and then had an even greater number when Jamie told them he had been shooting a movie called Slim-Fast. “Is there a lot of nudity?” Wiig asked. “Yes actually,” Dornan replied. (Have I mentioned how much fun these awards are?)

Of course, Jean Smart completed her sweep of the Best Actress prizes for Hacks and got a standing ovation, but she threw away her notes to give thanks to show-creator Luci Anello, who wasn’t there…and then she told us why. “Friday afternoon, we were shooting a scene and Luci went into labor…she was directed us between contractions, I kid you not! And on Saturday she won the top prize at the Directors Guild!” She then dedicated the award to her and her new child. I didn’t think I could love Smart more.

The Limited Series award had most of the focus on the past, giving the grand prize to Mare of Easttown and Kate Winslet, who like Smart also completed the sweep. (She wasn’t there to accept it though.) Michael Keaton, as expected, took the Best Actor prize for Dopesick, and this time was more fun. He started his speech by saying he needed to go to the bathroom (which is why Selma Hayek was left hanging for so long at the SAGs) then said he loved awards season ‘the smell of fake humility is in the air’, which got a huge laugh. Then he became more solemn and said how sad it was to accept an award on the back of a tragedy like the opoid epidemic, gave a personal story about one of the patients he met during the series and how strong the women who helped them were as well as mother in general and ended his speech with a shout out President Zelensky.

The best sign for the future came for the Supporting Actors which both went to The White Lotus I was overjoyed to see Murray Bartlett finally take home a prize (I will admit I didn’t recognize him without the mustache) and was only saddened by the fact that Jennifer Coolidge was not there to accept her trophy. Both gave truly magnificent performances and I hope this bodes well for a triumph at the Emmys later this year.

I now turn to drama which more or less went as I expect. Once again, Succession took the prize and once again Squid Game made it sweat. Lee Jung-Jae who had a better command of English this time, duplicated his Best Actor prize at the SAGs and officially becomes the frontrunner (at least until Better Call Saul premieres in April; then we’ll reassess) and the series also took the prize for Best Foreign Drama which has been here for awhile and wasn’t just created to give a consolation prize. Sarah Snook took Supporting Actress and Kieran Culkin took Supporting Actor and fell over himself in astonishment that you really wonder if he’d taken Cousin Greg’s speech by mistake. (Snook has tested positive for Covid and wasn’t there.)

But the shock of the night came for Best Actress when front runner MJ Rodriguez lost to Melanie Lynskey for the brilliant new horror comedy Yellowjackets. Lynskey was completely caught off guard (her cast mates weren’t) and gave a beautiful speech, thanking the child actress who plays the younger version on the show, cheering all her fellow castmates and thanking her agent “whose made almost zero dollars off me the past twenty years.” It was a charming and witty speech for an actress whose career started nearly thirty years ago in Heavenly Creatures and has never reached the heights of her co-star (and fellow winner tonight) Kate Winslet. Will she be the front runner at the Emmys? We’ll see.

And all of these were only the awards. When you consider how almost every presenter seemed to knock it out of the park, it was a joy. Joel McHale and Ken Jeong bantering about their days on Community and McHale, taking the piss out of his friend by saying ‘it took him 28 seconds to mention he was in The Hangover’; the women of Pose giving the prizes for Supporting Actor and Actress in a Drama in the same style they did on the catwalk; Taiki Waititi leading up to the presentation of Best Director and the international level by finishing with a shout out to New Zealand “the country all Americans want to move to, but we will not let you. Ray Romano led up to his speech with a priceless bit: “I’m going to thank my wife because I’m not going to win tonight. I’ve never thanked her in my previous acceptance speeches. Sex and acceptance speeches are not place you remember names. And since neither is going to happen tonight, I’ll just mention her now.” When the laughter died down just a little: “It’s definitely not happening tonight…no, we’ve done March already.” It says a lot about the quality of the awards and the presenters that Serena and Venus Williams showing up on stage to give the Best Drama was not the high point of the night. (I actually liked when Jane Campion referenced them in her acceptance speech for Power of the Dog. “I’ve taken up tennis too....You’re great player, but you don’t have to face the boys. I have to face the boys.’ And everybody laughed and cheered as much as when her fellow Kiwi hugged her hard before she gave her speech)

I couldn’t mention all of this and not pay tribute to the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award which was given to Billy Crystal. Jimmy Kimmel presented it and was both slightly delivering barbs and self-deprecating at the same time. The highpoint of a great speech came, perhaps inevitably, when Kimmel discussed when he asked Billy about hosting the Oscars. “He sent forget about the audience at home and concentrate on the people at the theater. And I did just that. The people in the theatre had a good time and now no one watches at home.”

Crystal was pitch-perfect in his speech. “I look at all the moments in the montage and one word occurs to me: “Residuals.” He looked at Kimmel. “Here’s the thing. I asked for Jimmy Fallon…Now what do I do?’… When I heard I was getting a Lifetime Achievement Award, you think ‘Do they know something I don’t?’” Then he went back to his past, thanked his wife of 52 years and his children ‘in order of appearance’ and gave a special salute to the people of Ukraine, which had meaning because as he told us the first audience he ever performed to were his relatives who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. He said: “The best is yet to come.’ With Crystal, I wouldn’t doubt it.

I’ll close this article with a remark Kimmel made early in his intro. “I love the Critics Choice awards more than the Peoples Choice Awards. The People are kind of stupid.” And when you make the comparison between the kinds of TV shows the People’s Choice have made and the Critics Choice do, I couldn’t agree more. Nights like this make me proud of my chosen profession. (I’ll admit I’m annoyed that Oslo beat Zoey’s Extraordinary Christmas for Best TV Movie, but we’re Critics. We’re not perfect.)

 

How Harvey Weinstein Destroyed The Oscars, Conclusions: Before, During and After Oscar Night

 

Note: I accidentally cut out the last paragraph of part 2 of this article, for which I apologize for confusing my readers to this point. I will repost it with the final paragraph later this week.

 

Usually in the weeks leading up to Oscar night, there is a feeling of anticipation the closer one gets to the actual awards. In the days leading up to March 21, 1999 - a Sunday, a move the Oscars had made for the first time in all their years of broadcasting – the feeling seemed to be closer to dread. Leaving aside the conflict in Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love, the weeks the nominations and the awards had shown a series of battles between many Hollywood forces.

Lynn Redgrave’s marriage of thirty three years – one where she had saluted her husband in accepting her Golden Globe for Gods and Monsters just a month before – broke up when it was revealed her husband had been having an affair with a much younger woman. The ugliness of the revelations may very well have damaged any chance Redgrave, previously the favorite for Supporting Actress, had for winning.

New York based producers John Roberdeau and Bobby Geisler had approached Terence Malick about adapting The Thin Red Line in 1989 and had gone to great efforts to support his return to filmmaking. But the longer production went on, a rift began to develop between Malick and the producers to the point that when the film was finally released Malick refused to speak to them and made it clear on Oscar night, that if they were in attendance (as was their right when the film was nominated for Best Picture) he would not be. Malick, a notorious recluse, ultimately chose not to attend.

Dwarfing all of this was the controversy of the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, Elia Kazan. Director of such brilliant films as On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, Kazan’s reputation had been clouded for decades because of his appearance before HUAC in 1951 where he had appeared as a friendly witness and given up the names of ten colleagues who were never able to work in the industry again. His actions were considering even more galling because due to Kazan’s successful theater career, his livelihood was in no real threat. The announcement of his award divided Hollywood, even including those who had not been born before Kazan’s testimony.

I have personally always found the decision to give Kazan a lifetime achievement award one of the strangest decisions in the Academy’s history, most blatantly because it went against one of the general reasons they give such awards. Winners of the Lifetime Achievement are traditionally those who have never won in Oscar in regular competition: the best examples among directors being Alfred Hitchcock, Sidney Lumet, and just the previous year, Stanley Donen. By contrast Kazan had won two Academy Awards for On the Waterfront and Gentlemen’s Agreement so it wasn’t like he was lacking recognition from the Academy already. If the Oscars had wanted to really honor someone lacking in recognition, there were still quite a few candidates from that era who were still alive, most notably Jules Dassin and Stanley Kramer – Dassin would have been an example of a great director who stood up to Hollywood, and Kramer would have been a premier example of the kind of message pictures that the Oscars tends to pay tribute in their endless montages and there would have been barely a ripple. (But who am I to understand how the Academy operates? Four years earlier, they had given a lifetime achievement award to Clint Eastwood, who had won for Unforgiven just two years prior, and for whom we can definitely say, the best was by far still to come.)

A final gloomy bell rang just a week prior to the Oscars when legendary critic Gene Siskel, who had suffered from cancer for the last two years, passed away. In retrospect, his death was the end of an era – the respect for a film critic on TV. Roger Ebert would carry on for nearly a decade before suffering a stroke that would take away his ability to speak, but no one could fill Siskel’s shoes and we all knew it.

The best one can say about Oscar Night 1999 was that it was not the kind of fiasco we got with the Rob Lowe Snow White dance number a decade before and would similarly see when Anne Hathaway and James Franco would host the show more than a decade afterwards. But it was one of the most joyless and uncomfortable Oscar nights I have witnessed in more than thirty years of watch the show. Whoopi Goldberg came out on stage dressed as Elizabeth I (two women had been nominated for portraying her that year) in whiteface and after startled laughter said: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am the African Queen.”

It was all downhill from there. Goldberg, normally one of the better Oscar hosts in my lifetime, had her weakest stint overall, somehow off-key and off-step the whole night. Other legendary comedians presented, but their jokes had the ring of darkness. Coming out to present, Jim Carrey burst into mock tears: “It doesn’t matter if you win. It’s an honor just to be nominated…Oh God.” Then he pointed a barb straight at the man who took spot. “I have made way for Roberto! He has jumped into my ocean!” Everyone laughed, even Benigni who didn’t seem to notice or care he’d just been zinged. Chris Rock, who even before he hosted the show for the first time had a history of making people uncomfortable went right for the jugular involving Kazan. “Robert Deniro’s outside. And you know how he feels about rats.” You could sense the discomfort everyone was feeling through your TV screen.

The actual awards didn’t make people much happier. While people applauded Judi Dench and Gwyneth Paltrow’s wins, they only truly became enthusiastic on three occasions. And I have to say even more than a quarter of a century earlier, the first one never made me happy. When they presented Best Foreign Film, and there were cries even before Sophia Loren, shouted out: “Roberto!” the audience went wild as Benigni jumped on to the seats and climbed over his fellow patrons to accept the prize. I could quote his broken English speech here, but I haven’t the heart: even at twenty everything was embarrassing – especially the standing ovation they gave this buffoon. I think I was utterly stunned when Benigni took the Best Actor prize – it made less sense to me then than it does now.

Aside from Steven Spielberg’s standing ovation, the only truly happy memory I have of the entire awards was Norman Jewison, the legendary director of In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck, receiving the Thalberg award, dancing a little on stage and receiving  a genuine ovation. He seemed vibrant and full of energy and his speech was the one pure moment of the night, finished with a note of optimism: “I hope to see you here again next year.” (He was putting the finishing touches on The Hurricane, a Denzel Washington biopic of Ruben Carter that would warrant its own level of controversy. But that’s a story for another article.)

In contrast, the presentation and acceptance of Elia Kazan’s award was one of the most excruciating moments in all my years of watching the Oscars. At home, it may have looked like he was getting a standing ovation. In reality, the camera went out of its way to avoid showing how many people were sitting down – and that those standing were seat-fillers bussed in for the occasion.

All of this paled in comparison to the final award. When Harrison Ford came out to present Best Picture, Saving Private Ryan had won five Oscars to Shakespeare’s six. Ford – Indiana Jones himself – looked like the fix was in. But I can still remember the shock in his voice and the massive exhale that filled the theater when he announced the winner was Shakespeare in Love. The applause that followed seemed stunned and a little perfunctory.

 

 

Almost a decade after the fact, Entertainment Weekly ran a poll of Oscar voters anonymously, asking them, going back through five year intervals, whether there were any choices among the winners of certain years that they had regrets about. One such year was 1998.

Asked which film they would vote for Best Picture, a plurality of voters said they would rather they’d chosen Saving Private Ryan.

I’ve always question the veracity of polls, and this one was no exception. A major reason for my doubts were that, when it came to Best Actor, these same voters would have passed over Roberto Benigni not for Tom Hanks or Ian McKellen, but Edward Norton for American History X, a film I doubt Academy voters had seen, at the time of the poll or before. But even if that was a true reflection of most voters’ thoughts, my reaction is simple: Too little, too late. The genie was out of the bottle, and there was no putting it back.

 The night after the awards, Weinstein called Ian McKellen and supposedly said: “You gave the performance of a lifetime. But I saw an opportunity and I took it.” It was as close to an apology as Weinstein ever gave for anything.

McKellen, of course, has had a certain measure of revenge – his post Gods career in the Lord of the Rings and X-Men franchise led to him being discovered and finally receiving the commercial success rivaling his critical one. Benigni, in contrast, disappeared almost immediately afterwards. He would never have anywhere near a success like that, and after appearing in a disastrous adaptation of Pinocchio, he was pretty much finished in Italy as well. He has become what he should have always been, a punch line.

DreamWorks, the studio behind Saving Private Ryan, vowed revenge. The next year their major Oscar film was American Beauty a dark comedy that didn’t receive nearly the praise Ryan did and looks far worse in hindsight given all the controversy surrounding Kevin Spacey in recent years. But the studio learned the lesson and campaigned American Beauty as relentlessly as Miramax had pushed Shakespeare. In 1999, the film won five Academy awards and utterly devastated Miramax and its big films The Cider House Rules.

The ripple effects of the battle of Weinstein’s campaign would not truly be felt for years. For several years major Oscar nominees would still come out in the summers, films as diverse as The Sixth Sense, Gladiator and Moulin Rouge. But none would have the same gravitas that Saving Private Ryan did and slowly but sure the kind of film that Ryan was – the serious blockbuster that came out in the summer – became scarcer and scarcer until it became all but non-existent.

Weinstein and Miramax, by contrast, never had the same cache that they did at the Oscars again. It would be awhile before the ramifications were felt – the studio would have a nominee for Best Picture every year for the next decade. But the sense around Hollywood was that he had gone too far in his drive for Shakespeare and had done damage to Miramax’s brand. This became clear in 2000, when his pushed for the relatively ordinary romantic comedy Chocolat  - a film with Juliette Binoche and Judi Dench that was Oscar bait with no quality – managed to get nominated for Best Picture over such clearly superior films as Wonder Boys, Almost Famous and Billy Elliott. Even when his film would dominate – such as in 2002 when three of the five best Picture nominees – Gangs of New York, The Hours and Chicago – were Miramax films, it became clear the studio could no longer bully the Oscars into submission the way they once had. Weinstein relentless to push to get Martin Scorsese his first Oscar backfired spectacularly when Roman Polanski, a truly controversial figure even then, took Best Director for The Pianist, a film that looked very much until the last minute on Oscar night looked like it was going to take the grand prize away from Chicago. It didn’t, but the fact that Weinstein was clearly sweating by the end showed just how little Hollywood wanted to recognize him.

But even as Hollywood began rejecting Weinstein, they continued to follow his methods. The Oscars have in the nearly quarter of a century since Shakespeare in Love’s upset have been becoming far less about artistic blockbusters and more about campaigns. Fewer and fewer people now see the films that get nominated for Best Picture, and it is hardly a coincidence that the ratings for the Academy Awards themselves have been going in a straight downward trajectory ever since then. And considering the direction Hollywood has been going when it comes to the films they make, it is unlikely this trend will ever reverse itself, if it even can.

Something else happened Oscar night that I’m sure no one else –certainly not me –was paying attention to. While every other major network ran reruns, HBO on Oscar night 1999 was continuing its schedule and running an episode of its new hit series The Sopranos. I’m sure no one in Hollywood knew or even care about it, but I remember the Golden Globes in 2000. And I know the property that had everybody thrilled beyond words was none of the movies that were nominated, but rather the way that The Sopranos completed dominated the TV awards, taking four prizes and becoming the first cable drama to win Best Drama. I don’t think that correlation equals causation in this case, but the era of Peak TV began pretty close to the time that filmmaking became far less ambitious, certainly for Oscar nominated films. HBO was the only channel at the time that would have dared run any episode of an original series the same night as the Oscars or the Super Bowl, or the World Series.  Now it’s a given – if you’re not watching some streaming form of TV.

When this year’s Oscars take place in two weeks, the ratings will probably have gone up from last year absolute nadir – its hard to imagine they won’t have. But as much as the Academy wants to consider it Hollywood’s Biggest Night, it really isn’t any more. There are countless reasons why this is so, but at least a substantial part of it can be traced back to the effects of what happened when Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan. Is it the worst thing Harvey Weinstein ever did? Not by a long shot. But in all honesty, I think there are more people in Hollywood upset about that than all the hundreds of women’s lives he utterly ruined. It would not shock me if there are people in Hollywood who make sick jokes along the lines of: “I’m not surprised. Guy was screwing the Oscars over for years.” And why wouldn’t they? Careers in Hollywood are always disposable, but Oscars matter. Then they’ll go on with the same kind of campaigns that he created, because imitation is all Hollywood does now, even if the ‘inspiration’ was a monster to begin with.

 

How Harvey Weinstein Destroyed The Oscars, Part 2: Life Is Beautfiul and the utter shamelessness of Roberto Benigni

There are some movies that I refuse to see. Some of them have to do with genre – I’ve never been a fan of horror – or some by director – Michael Bey’s entire oeuvre has never been one I wanted. But there are some films that appall mainly because I have never been unable to understand how, any time in the process no one said that this was a bad idea.

Life is Beautiful is one such example. I can’t understand how Roberto Benigni, even given the star power he had in his native Italy, was able to find funding for a film which featured an Italian Jew who gets married and has a child just prior to World War II, is taken by the Nazis into a concentration camp, and then spends all his time making the experience delightful for his young son, turning it into a game. Did no one at any time even suggest to Benigni, whose father died in a concentration camp even though the son was not Jewish himself, that this might not be the best idea for a movie?

Leaving aside that the film was made, that Harvey Weinstein decided that this was perfect for American, strikes me as wondering why no one questioned his character then – as a film producer, as a Jew, or hell, as a human being. Yet Weinstein not only bought the picture for Miramax, he put Benigni front and center to sell it. (I’ll get to that monstrosity in a minute.)

Now first of all, leaving aside the film’s appallingly high rating at imdb.com (it currently ranks 25^th all time) most critics at the time were openly disgusted by the film. While Siskel and Ebert both raved about it and put it on their top ten lists (an aberration for both men) the lion’s share of film critics were repulsed by the subject, by the writing and performances, and basically every aspect of the film – the ridiculousness of the early scenes, how the camp that the characters get thrown in is the ‘cleanest concentration camp’ you’ve ever seen, and the maudlin behavior of every aspect of it. At least one major critic put it bluntly: ‘Life is Beautiful made me want to throw up.” Benigni would wave off almost every criticism by saying the movie was ‘a fable’. I’m not sure what the moral of this fable was supposed to be.

Benigni made the talk show circuits and Hollywood media conferences taking on the persona of the clichéd Italian buffoon. At the Cannes Film Festival upon the film taking the jury prize, he bowed at Martin Scorcese’s fit and kissed his shoes. On talk shows, he would gallop onto stages, stomps on desks and babble in extraordinary broken English while fellow guests looked on alarmingly. It was performance art from beginning to end, and indeed during the process of promoting the film Benigni would give the game away when he was interviewed on 60 Minutes he spoke seriously and in flawless English.

Now I know that Hollywood is a town that loves great performances and its clear that Benigni’s act promoting Life is Beautiful was a masterpiece far outdoing his actual performance is Life Is Beautiful. But that performance actually bothers me less than Weinstein’s promotion of this travesty until it became one of the highest grossing foreign films of all time - $57 million in 1998 dollars. It was a comedy that was not funny, and a tearjearker that was as mechanical in jerking tears as a Harlequin romance, and somehow that was enough to launch the monstrosity into Oscar talk for Best Picture.

What makes this more appalling was while this was going on another foreign film with crossover was also making a transition: Walter Salles’ Central Station. A much darker film with a more uplifting story, the moving center on Dora (Fernanda Montenegro) a dour old woman working in a rail mailing station who begins to come out of her shell due to her interaction with a 9 year old boy who has never met his father. The film and Montenegro were highly praised and the film managed to gross well for a foreign film, though not nearly as well as Life as Beautiful. Salles, a Brazilian director who unlike Benigni would have crossover success in America later on, admitted: “This is not a fable.”

The critics reaction in the end of year awards was a hard pass to the promotion of Life is Beautiful: it didn’t win a single foreign film award. Central Station took the top prize from the National Board of Review, Thomas Vintenberg’s The Celebration took the top prizes from LA and New York, and Abbas Kuristiomi A Taste of Cherry took the National Society of Film Critics Prize.  Benigni won nothing from any of the critics, while Montenegro took the Best Actress prize from the National Board and LA and led in the early balloting in New York, until in a shock move they gave it to Cameron Diaz for There’s Something About Mary. Nor was there any redemption at the Globes: due what was considering a ‘rules conflict’ Life is Beautiful was deemed ineligible for Best Foreign Film while Central Station took the top prize.

None of this made a difference when the nominations came out: Life is Beautiful became the first film nominated for Best Foreign Film and Best Picture since Costas Gavras’ Z in 1969. Central Station was nominated for Best Foreign Film and Best Actress, but hardly anyone noticed. Very quickly Montenegro’s front runner status was pushed behind the move for Gwyneth Paltrow for Shakespeare in Love.

Benigni received nominated for Best Director and Best Actor, which was fairly appalling when you consider the four other nominees in the category: Ian McKellen for Gods and Monsters, Tom Hanks for Saving Private Ryan, Nick Nolte for Affliction and Edward Norton for the very dark American History X, a surprise nomination at the time that looks far better in hindsight. If the level of performance should have stood for anything, McKellen and Nolte should have the clear frontrunners – the two had split all the major Best Actor awards up to that point. And not even Weinstein would dare to say that Benigni’s performance was anywhere near their level. The reason everyone seemed to believe he should win because of ‘aura’ or ‘personality’  which is ridiculous on the face of it and when you consider the personalities of McKellen, Nolte and even Tom Hanks its fairly ludicrous. (Hanks was even then beloved among Hollywood, McKellen has a very dry and British wit and despite his troubles with the law, Nolte is an actual eccentric not a manufactured one like Benigni.)

It actually looks worse when you consider some of the other actors and performers whose slot Benigni probably took: Jim Carrey for The Truman Show, who despite his clownish persona has an infinitely greater acting range than Benigni could ever hope for; Warren Beatty for Bulworth, the dark political satire that marked his last truly great film and in other years would have been considered a comeback story; Joseph Fiennes for Shakespeare in Love, the one actor from the cast Weinstein seemed to go out of his way not to promote for a nomination, and John Travolta’s work in two different studio releases, Primary Colors, where he gave a spot on imitation of then President Clinton and A Civil Action, where he played a corporate attorney trying to win a major class action.

 

How Harvey Weinstein Destroyed The Oscars, Part 1: Shakespeare in Love and the Campaign to Unseat the Front Runner

In the last five years since the accusations Harvey Weinstein began his trials in multiple jurisdiction and the fact that he will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, a reckoning has begun among the men in Hollywood that have spent decades abusing their power and the toxicity it has led to the film industry. I was amazed in the rapidity of his fall from grace, because in another sense Weinstein toxic approach to Hollywood had done damage to many other institutions.

Compared to the dozens if not hundreds of women he abused and the careers he helped destroy as a result, the fact that while Weinstein was in charge of Miramax he also pretty much laid waste to whatever remaining integrity the Academy Awards might still have is minor by comparison. But considering that the ramifications of it have been nearly as destructive to Hollywood and are in many ways just as vital to the problems the industry is now facing in a larger sense, it is worth noting just how bluntly he destroyed an institution that Hollywood clearly held more dear than the lives of the women he ruined – and how equally destructive the counter-reaction was. So in this article, I will look how in two separate campaigns for Oscar glory in 1998 – one an admittedly good film where the campaigning quickly became a fiasco, the other for a despicable film where personality trumped any ideal at quality – Weinstein would utterly lay ruin to whatever claims the words ‘Best Picture’ had.

In the summer of 1998, it seemed a foregone conclusion that the Best Picture would go to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan a blockbuster war movie that dazzled critics with its extraordinary battle scenes and changed the conversation on who Americans viewed an entire generation. Even though at the time critics like Kenneth Turan and Rex Reed questioned the key elements of the plot – why eight men should be sent out to save one unremarkable one, a problem the screenplay itself seemed unable to resolve – the film was the towering achievement of 1998, the highest grossing film of that year. Some movies that were later to debut were considered possibilities – the mostly frequently mentioned movies at the time were Oprah Winfrey’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (critically received but a box office disaster) and The Thin Red Line, another World War II movie, the first movie to be directed by auteur Terrence Malick in twenty years. (We will get to that film later.) But it seemed mere a formality.

Then the awards season began and it started to seem that momentum had shifted.  The National Board of Review gave its Best Picture Prize to Gods and Monsters and Best Actor to Ian McKellen. Best Director when to Shaker Kupur for Elizabeth. Saving Private Ryan went on to take Best Picture from the LA and New York Film Critics, but Spielberg only took the best Director prize in LA – New York gave the trophy to Malick, even though the version they saw was the six hour uncut version. The National Society of Film Critics gave a coup de grace by giving their Best Picture and Director prize to Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (admittedly a brilliant film that in a lesser year might have competed for Oscars). Shakespeare in Love had entered the discussion by this point, but didn’t do particularly well with these awards, taking only the Best Screenplay prize at New York and the Supporting Actress prize for Judi Dench at the National Society.  The wealth was generally being spread fairly evenly – Gods and Monsters, A Simple Plan and Bill Murray for Rushmore were the biggest winners of the group.

Already there were warning signs that sailing would not be clear for Saving Private Ryan, signs that became even clearer at the Golden Globes that January. The film did take Best Drama and Best Director, but two other films won more awards – Shakespeare in Love, which took Best Comedy, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress for Gwyneth Paltrow and The Truman Show, which took Best Actor for Jim Carrey, Best Supporting Actor for Ed Harris and Best Score.

When the nominations were announced in February, Shakespeare in Love led with thirteen nods, while Saving Private Ryan got twelve. (The other three nominations for Best Picture went to Elizabeth, The Thin Red Line and Life Is Beautiful, another Miramax film I will deal with later.) It was then that things truly turned ugly.

Harvey Weinstein’s determination to win awards for Miramax had been clear for years, from the days of The Crying Game to Pulp Fiction to the company’s first Best Picture win for The English Patient in 1996. And there had been clear hints at Weinstein’s utter willingness to do anything to get a nomination – he literally mimed the corpse of Marissimo Triosi, the lead of Il Postino in 1995 to get him and the film Oscar nominations. There were signs even then of the ugliness of his character – when the company was unable to win the rights to Shine in 1996, he berated the producer to his face: “You f---ed me! You f----ed me! All the while, he continued to mask Miramax as a ‘small, independent film company’. During the campaign for Shakespeare in Love, the lie finally stopping being believable.

Why Weinstein was so determined to beat Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture will never be known for certain; what is clear was that he was willing to do anything possible to do it. The mailing campaign he waged was the most aggressive and probably the most expensive in Oscar history, though just how much Miramax will never be known for sure. Weinstein insisted it was less than $5 million, but it was probably as much as five times that. And the blowback was fierce and immediately, not just from Spielberg and DreamWorks, but almost all of Hollywood. It became a point of lunacy so that by the time of the Independent Spirits Awards just prior to the Oscars, Ilana Douglas, an independent film queen (whose own career would be torpedoes by another powerful man) would make several gags hosting the awards. The most innocuous was: “The Weinsteins couldn’t be here tonight. They were too busy pressing Gwynnie’s dress.” (That line is actually creepy considering what we know about Weinstein.)

The thing was it seemed to be bearing fruit. Spielberg had won the Directors Guild, but Shakespeare in Love took the Writers Guild Award and dominated the SAG awards, taking Best Ensemble Cast and Best Actress for Paltrow. (They weren’t the only Miramax winners as you’ll see.) But the aggressiveness and relentlessness of the campaign seemed to be backfiring by late March, and many believed that while the campaign might have pushed Shakespeare in Love over the top, the backlash had now made the biggest film of 1998 the ‘sentimental favorite’. On the eve of the Oscars, even Weinstein secretly believed he might have pushed too hard.

But whether or not Shakespeare in Love was a better movie than Saving Private Ryan – and it’s pretty clear that point was basically irrelevant to Weinstein – one could not argue that the former was a clever, stylish and witty film. It may not have been any more special than the films Miramax might have considered to promote for Best Picture in the fall of 1998 – Little Voice, a smaller, more delicate comedy actually was considered and actually got as many Golden Globe nominations as Shakespeare did – but you couldn’t argue that it was a ‘quality film’ in the terms the Academy used and maybe even on the merits. The same could not be said for the other major film he spent longer promoting for Oscar glory, Life is Beautiful. In the next part of the article, I’ll discuss why I personally find this an even greater offense.

 

 

I Try To Pick The Critics Choice Awards Concluded: Best Movie/Limited Series et all

 

I don’t normally comment on the awards for Best TV Movie because most of the time I don’t care. This time I do. So I’ll be blunt. If Zoey’s Extraordinary Christmas doesn’t take the Best TV Movie prize, I will be mad as…cutting to opening credits.

And now, on to my predictions for Limited Series and the Acting awards.

 

BEST LIMITED SERIES

This is tougher than it usually is. While much of the times the Critics Choice does mirror the Emmys in this category, there have been more than a few deviations. When They See Us ended up upsetting Chernobyl in 2020 after all, and considering that the miniseries that swept last years awards – The Queen’s Gambit – isn’t here, and that there are no FX limited series eligible (they’re currently the all-time leader with four wins, two apiece for the first two incarnations of Fargo and American Crime Story) this is fairly wide open.

I’d like to see Wandavision prevail but the Critics generally don’t like comic book series. Dopesick or Maid might have something of an edge for later awards, and given the momentum I think the former has a good chance of contending. Ultimately thought I think it will come down to a choice between Mare of Easttown and The Underground Railroad. Under other circumstances, Mare might be the easy winner, but considering that it triumphed at the Golden Globes and the Image awards, I’m giving the edge to Underground Railroad.  This kind of correction is the ones the critics tend to favor – I have a feeling that’s why When They See Us won too.

Should Win: Wandavision.

Will Win: The Underground Railroad.

 

BEST ACTOR IN A TV MOVIE OR LIMITED SERIES.

This was tough to predict when the nominations were given in December; now I think it’s a foregone conclusion who’s going to win. Michael Keaton has this wrapped up for his work Dopesick. Everything points to it – the Golden Globe and SAG awards he’s already won; the fact that he’s an industry veteran and the profoundly moving speech he gave at the SAGs two weeks. The only question, will he leave the presenter hanging for awhile before he walks up to the stage to accept it?

Should Win/Will Win: Keaton.

 

BEST ACTRESS IN A TV MOVIE OR LIMITED SERIES

I will admit there’s room for an upset here. Margaret Qualley is gaining momentum for her work in Maid and she might triumph her. Thuso Mbedu managed to prevail at the Independent Spirit Awards and the Image awards for her work in The Underground Railroad and I imagine a lot of people were pissed when she wasn’t even nominated for an Emmy.

But honestly, I think the winner is nearly as easy to pick as it was for Best Actor.  Kate Winslet is likely to complete her sweep of the four major awards Sunday night for her extraordinary work in the title role of Mare of Easttown. Critics said it was one of the most towering achievements of 2021 so it makes sense she would prevail her.

Should Win: Qualley/Elisabeth Olsen.

Will Win: Winslet.

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR IN A TV MOVIE/LIMITED SERIES

This is where things get tougher and where there is usually room for some kind of upset. So let’s realistically consider the most likely possibilities.

Evan Peters has the Supporting Actor Emmy. Courtney B. Vance took the prize from the Image Awards earlier this year. William Jackson Harper is well overdue an award. And anyone who saw Murray Bartlett’s work on The White Lotus knows that it was a star making role.

It comes down to whether the Critics choose to recognize the year past (as they did in 2020 with Stellan Skarsgard for Chernobyl and his son in Big Little Lies in 2018 ) or the year ahead (as they did in 2019 with Ben Whishaw for A Very English Scandal or Donald Sutherland for The Undoing). This is a very, very tough call but at the end of the day I’m going to assume HBO has more momentum. Bartlett is my personal preference, and I think he’ll prevail, but it could just as easily go to Peters.

Should Win: Bartlett.

Will Win: Peters/Bartlett.

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS IN A MOVIE/LIMITED SERIES

This by far is the toughest category of the group as all six candidates are more than deserving. Julianne Nicholson won the Emmy for Mare of Easttown. Kathryn Hahn seemed to take every prize in the book (from the MTV Movie and TV awards to the HCA) for her incredible work on Wandavision. Jennifer Coolidge was incredible on The White Lotus and is likely to be one of the major contenders for this year’s Emmys. Kaitlyn Dever is a brilliant talent, whose shut out in 2020 was…, well, Unbelievable. Melissa McCarthy was pretty close to perfect in Nine Perfect Strangers.  And only Jean Smart’s certain win in the comedy category takes her out of contention here.

I would really like to see an award in this category go to a brilliant comic performance like the ones given by Coolidge or Hahn, both remarkable actresses who are more than deserving and certainly owed. My preference is for Hahn because she lost at last year’s Emmys and won’t get another chance this year. Still I think there’s a momentum for Coolidge building so I’ll give her a minor edge. It’s going to be tough for the Emmys to choose this fall (and that’s before talents like Andie MacDowell get in the game).

Should Win: Hahn/Coolidge.

Will Win: Coolidge (but there are no bad choices in this category.)

 

The only other category here I give a tinker’s cuss about is Best Talk Show. I think John Oliver will prevail, but I would really like to see Desus and Mero or Amber Ruffin end up pulling an upset. And these are the Critics Choice, so don’t rule it out.

I will be back on Monday with my reactions to the winners and the overall award show. If it’s anything like we’re used too, it’s going to be fun for everybody. So find time, watch it, and see what you’ve been missing.