Flickgrrl

Gotta love a show where celebs show up soused and moon the audience, as Jack Nicholson did when he won a Golden Globe, his fifth, in 1999. Due to the Writer's Guild of America strike, Wacky Jack and fellow members of the Screen Actors Guild will not be crossing the picket line on Sunday when the Golden Globes (GGs) ceremony was scheduled for broadcast on NBC. Instead, no red carpet will be rolled out. Winners will be announced at a downsized "news conference."
Does this global cooling, the scaling-back of the movie industry's most-superfluous kudos-fest -- an award conferred by 90 or so underemployed entertainment journalists -- matter much in the scheme of things? The awards frenzy was best summed up by Woody Allen's Alvy Singer in Annie Hall: "Awards! All they do is give out awards! 'Greatest fascist dictator: Adolf Hitler.' "
As I see it:
1) Hollywood producers -- the people the Writer's Guild are striking against -- will get a little less free publicity for their product, as the GGs are useful to them in its promotion of nominated movies.
2) The fashion and beauty industries, which have for all intents and purposes hijacked the event, will not have human billboards for their products.
3) Nominated actors and actresses will get less face time at the decisive moment that Academy viewers are making out their Oscar ballots.
4) The television audience will be deprived of the goofiest, most self-congratulatory and entertaining spectacle of swag season, that statuette-silly period that begins in December and continues through the Oscars. For much as I love to hate the GGs, I have a grudging admiration for this unscripted affair where the champagne, and the fun, freely flow.
If the GGs have any significance apart from entertainment, it's as a triage system for Academy members. If you belong to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you have 200 or so "academy screeners" in your den, DVDs of awards-eligible films you haven't yet seen. A GG winner is likely to be shuffled to the top of the stack.
When it comes to the GGs, are you a lover, hater, indifferent?
Do you have a beloved GGs moment?
I split my sides when producer Dick Clark trained the camera on legendary actress Sylvia Sidney as she contemplated her plate of heavily-garnished Chateaubriand. "I used to have a hat that looked like this," she cracked.

As Hillary Clinton faces the full-court press this primary season, I am reminded of Joan Allen in The Contender (pictured), where a U.S. Senator (D. - Ohio) stands firm against defamers who fear a female vice-president.
From The Man (1972) to 24, there are a number of movies and TV shows that feature an African-American president. But besides Glenn Close as the veep in Air Force One and Geena Davis as the prez in the short-lived Commander in Chief (not coincidentally created by Contender director Rod Lurie), I can't think of any representations of fictional female chief executives. Can you?
Is it a failure of imagination or that old pest, sexism, that there are precious few examples of women in the White House who aren't wives-of, secretaries-to or advisers?
And while we're on the subject of movies about politics, your favorites?
This scribe from the great state of Pennsylvania nominates:
1) Bulworth (1998), which boldly imagines what would constituents do if their Senator (Warren Beatty) told the truth?
2) Election (1999), biting satire about a student-body presidential campaign (go-getter Reese Witherspoon v. Mr. Popularity Chris Klein) that eerily presaged the deadlocked 2000 national election.
3) Being There(1980), in which a simple-minded gardener (Peter Sellers) is mistaken as a political oracle because he speaks in sound bites.
4) The Great McGinty (1940) Cynical comedy about Chicago political corruption in which a homeless man (Brian Donlevy) who subscribes to the belief "If it wasn't for graft, you'd get a very low type of people in politics," becomes governor.
5) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) Because Jimmy Stewart's idealism as Sen. Jefferson Smith renews mine.

Your nominations?

Does this old house look familiar? It's the ruins of the Reata, the Victorian mansion isolated on the windswept Texas plain of Marfa, Texas in George Stevens' Giant (1956), the saga of cattle, oil and egos big as the Lone Star State, that won Stevens a best-director statuette. Something about that austere landscape that Oscar loves, for the two-most nominated films of 2007 are No Country for Old Men (8 nominations) and There Will be Blood (8 nominations), both shot in Marfa. And both regarding the sprawling Texas plain as an epic stage for its outsize characters.
All in all, no earth-shaking surprises among the Oscar nominations, though I was surprised at the Denzel Washington shutout: I predicted he'd cop an acting nomination for American Gangster and a directorial nod for The Great Debaters. I was also sad that Into the Wild received only one bid, for Hal Halbrook's transcendent performance (unbelievably for this 83-year-old, his first Oscar nomination!). Zodiac, alas, received no recognition. Likewise disappointed that Mira Nair's The Nakesame and its extraordinary actors were passed over. Am encouraged that four out of the 10 screenwriting nominees are female.
Are you happy with the results? Predictions? My gut tells me the gold will be distributed among many movies and that Michael Clayton will probably take the top prize. It's a film that everybody likes. If Juno, the only nominee that's made real money at the box office, won, it would be the first win for a comedy since, I think, Annie Hall 31 years ago.

"He coulda gone the heartthrob direction. He didn't. Gotta respect that integrity," says FlickGuy, a reader who shares his thoughts via voicemail. Well said.
Because Heath (short for Heathcliff, his Mom loved Wuthering Heights) Ledger seemed so personable, it's hard not to take his passing personally. Can't think of another actor under 30 who boasted such range. Ledger possessed the mercurial magic (and the shape-shifting sexuality) of Johnny Depp. You never knew what he would play or how he would play it. Call it Ledger-demain. He followed up his Oscar-nominated performance as the crabbed, closeted Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, stunning as it was shattering, with the boisterous, bawdy sexual-action hero of Casanova. He was a serious actor who didn't take himself seriously, didn't exhibit that Russell Crowe/Sean Penn compulsion to draw attention to the dark cloud around his head.
When I learned of his death, I mentally replayed this Ledger montage. The high-school Petruchio clownishly serenading Julia Stiles in the lovely 10 Things I Hate About You. The medieval knight jousting to the power-rock soundtrack in A Knight's Tale. The tightly-wound son of Monster's Ball who tells his father he loves him as he implodes into suicide. The grieving survivor of Brokeback, tenderly stroking his beloved's shirt. Flirty Casanova, defending himself against charges of deflowering a virgin by cracking, "She was no novice." The flawed family man in "I
m Not There," struggling with the competing demands of career and clan.He acted with his whole body, loose-limbed and raucous in comedy, cramped and clenched in drama, strangling his dialogue in that throaty rumble. Like many Ledger fans, I feel like Jake Gyllenhaal's character Jack Twist in Brokeback, I don't know how to quit him.
Here's my colleague Steve Rea's 2005 interview with Ledger.
Your cherished Ledger performance(s)? Why? Is he the Generation Y James Dean?

UPDATE: According to news reports on January 28, the unfinished Terry Gilliam project starring Heath Ledger will be completed.

While his family and friends mourn Heath Ledger, the actor's death leaves Terry Gilliam (pictured), Monty Pythoner and imaginative director of Brazil and 12 Monkeys, in the lurch again. When his star Jean Rochefort had a heart attack, Gilliam famously had to stop production on his Don Quixote co-starring Johnny Depp and brilliantly chronicled in Lost in La Mancha, made by Temple U grads Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe.
Ledger died during production of Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, a twisty, Fausty story starring Ledger, Christopher Plummer and Tom Waits. The film's fate is in the hands of its insurers. Our hearts go out to Gilliam, who has not only lost a beloved colleague (he and Ledger worked together on The Brothers Grimm), but may have lost a second movie.
As the link above reports, it's rare that a major star dies during production. It happened to Jean Harlow on Saratoga, with her part fleshed out by doubles. It happened again with Marilyn Monroe on Something's Got to Give, which was never completed. And with Natalie Wood's Brainstorm, which was completed using a stunt double. Apart from I, Claudius and the John Candy western mentioned, I can't think of other unfinished films. But given the footage from Don Quizote shown in Lost in La Mancha, that's one I'd certainly like to see. You? Your favorite Gilliam film?