She Thinks Too Much [Such Girls Are Dangerous]

darrynek:

the nominees are

  • leonardo dicaprio
  • leonardo dicaprio
  • leonardo dicaprio
  • leonardo dicaprio
  • leonardo dicaprio

and the winner is *opens envelope*

  • adele

"

“It is a pity the young Pi was not nominated There’s not much you can do. He’s an Indian actor and nobody knows him so he was easily overlooked.

With peer voting, people will vote for their friends or based on their impressions. He’s a newcomer and we often said he had never acted before—that’s a disadvantage to getting nominated. But I do think his performance was the purest performance.”

"
—

Taiwanese director Ang Lee noting Hollywood’s tendency to overlook Asian actors to a Chinese radio station.   Ang Lee was disappointed that Suraj Sharma was not nominated for Best Actor for his performance in The Life of Pi.  Lee added that he felt Irfan Khan should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and that Zhang Ziyi was not nominated either for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, nor were any actors nominated for Slumdog Millionaire.

What’s a guy gotta do to get an Oscar?  Here’s some trivia about Sharma’s work on the film, from FirstPost.com.

  • Sharma beat out 4,000 other applicants (Ang Lee decided from the start the role would not be whitewashed.)
  • Sharma had never acted prior to this so Ang Lee assigned him a pile of homework and made him act scenes from Teneesse Williams and other playwrights just for practice.
  • Sharma didn’t know how to swim when he was cast for the role.  When he first started out he could only hold his breath for 14 seconds.  In the end he was able to go for one minute and a half.
  • Sharma spent most of the movie filming in a pool emoting in front of a blue screen to an invisible tiger.
  • Sharma lost 20% of his body weight for the role, eating a diet that mostly consisted of tuna fish, just like his character, so his ribs would show.
  • Sharma cut himself up frequently while working on the boat and used those injuries in his acting.  He would allow himself to get flipped along with the boat.
  • The production was banned from speaking to Sharma.  Ang Lee and Sharma agreed that he would not to talk to other people for almost two months so he would understand what isolation was like.

1.   This kid is badass.

2.  When white actors like Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio do stuff like lose 20% of their body weight or cut themselves and keep acting everyone cheers uproariously.

3. It is weirdly dismissive when films about characters of color get nominated but their actors do not.  Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Slumdog Millionaire, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The Last Emperor, etc.

4.   As FirstPost points out, a lot of the Oscar snubbed actors that people are talking about like Leonardo DiCaprio have plenty of other opportunities to star in other big movies.   When is the next big project for an actor of South Asian descent coming up?

(via racebending)


The Awful Gender Politics of “We Saw Your Boobs”

mostfamousman:


So let me just get two things out of the way before I get really, really deep in detail about one specific aspect of the Oscars intro last night:

1) it was super, super-long and self-indulgent. Even by Oscar standards. It was like half an hour before anybody got an award and I laughed maybe twice. Seth McFarlane being delighted by himself is ok when sublimated into a half-hour cartoon, it’s not really tolerable when mugged at the screen by a guy in a suit for the same amount of time. It isn’t actually funny, and thus fails the first test: the test of comedy.

2) in the thick of the “We Saw Your Boobs” song, which must have lasted five minutes all by itself, this line jumped out at me: “Jodie Foster in ‘The Accused’”. And I thought to myself “wait, isn’t her nudity in that movie part of a *rape scene*?” It threw a really sour note into what was supposed to be light-hearted.

But the in-depth thing I want to talk about is the “reaction shots” to the song, pre-taped by game actresses who were playing along. The substance of these reaction shots highlights just what’s so awful about McFarlane singing this song: mortification from most of the actresses and a little fist-pump of triumph from Jennifer Lawrence when he says we haven’t seen hers.

The song, the reaction shots and Seth McFarlane’s general attitude are all based on a commonplace and awful trope: that sex is a contest, and that men win and women lose when sex or nudity happens. It’s an archaic, prudish, creepy concept that derives from twisted notions about female purity and women-as-property.

McFarlane thinks if he has seen a woman’s breasts, he has won and she has lost, and he is now entitled to gloat about it. Women whose breasts Seth McFarlane has seen are meant to feel humiliated and degraded by that fact, even though it’s expected of actresses to show their breasts to get work. Meet the expectations placed on you by your industry, talented actresses? Too bad you’ve now injured your own dignity such that Seth McFarlane can mock you about it in front of a billion people. Even if your character is naked *because she’s being raped* (see point 2 above), it still amounts to a victory for Seth McFarlane to have seen your breasts.

McFarlane presents the whole skit as something he shouldn’t do, which makes it even worse, because he wants to get credit for the cleverness of his idea while also pretending it is beneath him. Which is completely candy-ass and cowardly.

The sexuality-as-contest-between-men-and-women thing is bubbling underneath so much that is awful: rape culture, workplace harassment, slut-shaming, abuse-themed porn, pick-up artist culture, etc., etc. It sets aside women as a separate thing from a person, and makes them into an object that is “ruined” by sex or nudity.

In a culture with a healthy attitude about sex and sexuality, McFarlane’s song would have no sting at all, because nudity in film would be a completely different sort of animal: it wouldn’t be compulsory for actresses to draw that “I am pure and don’t ghet naked”/”I am fallen and thus am only good for getting naked” line, and there wouldn’t be shame associated with having been naked on  screen. There would be no sting in McFarlane smugly taunting women whose boobs he’s seen.

We don’t, yet, live in that culture. And when Seth McFarlane plays “sex is a contest and YOU LOST, Kate Winslet” for laughs, it’s depressingly clear how far we are from it.


"

Seth MacFarlane made a whole bunch of sexist, reductive jokes at the Oscars last night. It’s frustrating enough to know that 77 percent of Academy voters are male. Or to watch 30 men and 9 women collect awards last night. But MacFarlane’s boob song, the needless sexualization of a little girl, and the relentless commentary about how women look reinforced, over and over, that women somehow don’t belong. They matter only insofar as they are beautiful or naked, or preferably both. This wasn’t an awards ceremony so much as a black-tie celebration of the straight white male gaze.

MacFarlane’s opening musical number, “We Saw Your Boobs,” might as well have been a siren blaring, “This isn’t for you.” Come on, everyone likes boobs, right? No. The answer is no. They’re not something I hate, and heck, I have a pair to call my own, and yet my takeaway from The Accused was not “Finally, I’ve seen Jodie Foster’s breasts.” My lasting memory of Boys Don’t Cry is not “Hey, free breasts!” At least there was that super timely and relevant reference to Kate Winslet’s many nude scenes.

Jeez, the song was a joke! Can’t you take a joke? Yes, I can take a joke. I can take a bunch! A thousand, 10,000, maybe even more! But after 30 or so years, this stuff doesn’t feel like joking. It’s dehumanizing and humiliating, and as if every single one of those jokes is an ostensibly gentler way of saying, “I don’t think you belong here.” All those little instances add up, grain of sand by grain of sand until I’m stranded in a desert of every “tits or GTFO” joke I’ve ever tried to ignore.

Then came the joke about actresses getting the flu to lose weight. “It paid off,” MacFarlane said. “Looking good.” Well, thank God, because what matters to all women is that we look good for Seth MacFarlane. How many women did he introduce over the course of the night by mentioning how they looked: “Please welcome the lovely ___ ,” “the beautiful ______”? How many men?

Uh, those are compliments! Now he can’t even give women compliments? Compliment away, friends. Let’s compliment the shit out of each other. But let’s be really cognizant of what we compliment each other on, and what that says about what we expect from each other, and what we consider valuable and worth mentioning. It doesn’t matter what Salma Hayek says, because she’s so pretty!

You just don’t like Seth MacFarlane’s sense of humor. What did you expect? Actually, I do like Seth MacFarlane’s sense of humor. (Sometimes. No one likes everything all the time!) I’ve been a loyal Family Guy viewer for almost fifteen years. I’ve been to — and adored — Family Guy: Live. If MacFarlane had sung “Shipoopi” all night, I’d be writing a really different story right now. Instead, there were jokes about how Rex Reed would probably call Adele fat — because that’s what’s important about her — and how someday Quvenzhané Wallis will be old enough to date George Clooney — because that’s what’s important about her — and how sometimes, gasp, a woman might have body hair — because that’s what’s important about them. Women are nags, and Jews run Hollywood! Thank you, Seth MacFarlane, for this cutting-edge humor. Like Mark Wahlberg said, the party’s at Jack Nicholson’s house. You remember, that place where Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha.

I dream of someday watching women win all the non-performance categories, of women making as many films as men do, of women and men being nominated for a comparable number of awards. There are a lot of reasons why that day is far, far in the future. But I’ll tell you what’s not helping: the biggest night in film being dedicated to alienating, excluding, and debasing women. Actual gender equality is a ways away, but I’d settle for one four-hour ceremony where women aren’t being actively degraded.

"

Can someone summarize what S.L. Jackson did that was so disrespectful to VFX during the Oscars?

Whatever is being referenced here?

Because at that point I couldn’t even tell what the fuck any of them where saying, or whether or not their exchange was scripted banter or forrealz, so an explanation would be swell.

Cause…if it’s anything like the OMGZORZ CHRIS ROCK IS THE WORST HOW DARE HE from last Award Season, I will poke you all with a scorpion. 

Halp?

posted 2 months ago with 1 note

sepia6:

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that even when you are the youngest person ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, many people will use the occasion not to hold you up for all of the amazing things you obviously are, but to tear you down for the ways you don’t look like them, the ways your name isn’t their kind of right, the ways you don’t remind them of themselves, the ways you are not blonde or blue-eyed, as if those things could possibly matter when set against the otherwordly talent and beauty and brilliance you possess.

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that you come into it already expected to be less than you almost certainly are, the genius and radiant darkness you possess already set up to be overlooked, dismissed or erased by almost everyone you will ever meet.

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that even when you are everything, some people will want you to be nothing. They will look at you through the nothing-colored glasses they will put on every time you enter a room. And the bigness of you, the outstandingness, the giftedness, will be invisible to them.

The thing about being a little black girl in the world who is already, at nine years old, confident enough to demand that lazy, disrespectful reporters call you by your name, is that most people will not understand the amount of comfort in one’s own skin it takes to do that, will not be able to grasp the sheer fierceness of it, the boldness, the certainty, the love for yourself, and will not be blown away at seeing you do it, though they should be.

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that your right to be a child, to be small and innocent and protected, will be ignored and you will be seen as a tiny adult, a tiny black adult, and as such will be susceptible to all the offenses that people two and three and four times your age are expected to endure.

But take heart.

Because the thing about being a little black girl in the world is that you are descended from people whose incredible strength and resilience are alive and kicking in you.

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that you are made from beauty and struggle and soul.

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that if you are lucky enough to know your own worth, you know everything you need to know.

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that when you have talent, you probably have more of it in your tiniest toe than most of the people who tear you down have in their entire families.

The thing about being a little black girl in the world is that you will be surrounded by other black girls who know. And they will hold your hand and braid your hair and laugh with you. They will tell you that you are a gift. They will let you be perfect and let you be flawed. They will rock you in their arms and protect your heart. They will whisper and shout about all that you are. And in a world that wants you gone from the very moment you are born, they will help you stay alive. Some of them will even help you get free.

We got you, girl.

With so much love.


thatlupa:

fearandwar:

If you want to see how sexism and racism operate, think about how many people had to approve the script for tonight’s Oscars. How many people had to read over MacFarlane’s jokes (because none of those were improv, all of this was written beforehand) and think “Yeah, it’s okay to insult a 9 year old and it’s okay to make an entire song about objectifying the female body.”

THANK YOU.

I hate when people see horribly bigoted material in the media and disregard how many desks it passed before reaching them. Managing Directors, Executive Directors, Directors of PR, etc all see these things before they’re published and SAY NOTHING. 

Doesn’t that tell you something about their character? What’s more, doesn’t it indicate just how few members of marginalised groups hold those or similar positions in order to BE there to speak up in the first place?



jessiphia:

I DIDNT MEAN TO START CRYING

lmfao

GIF LIKE JIFFY, GOD DAMNIT.


shirogiku:

erdgeist:

shinydemon:

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer [x]

Everyone needs to stop what they are doing and watch this. It’s amazing.

Claim that people should watch the aforementioned trailer due to its metacognitive brilliance.
(Seriously, though, this is really neat!)

everyone watch

“Ho ho, friendly Black optimistic advice.”