Yeah, if they were aware of the possibility for provocation and chose it anyway, whatever. But using "It's just a name, it's just what we call ourselves" as a defense is just stupid.

I mean, I think a lot of people do want to see them, though. The vast majority of people don't care about the winners, aside from Best Actor/Actress and Best Picture. They're watching specifically for the performances and the jokes and the clothes, etc.

I mean, they basically do, they just don't call it that, right? This year there was a tribute to The Sound of Music, last year they did The Wizard of Oz, a year or two before that they did one to James Bond. I think there was even one for John Hughes movies.

The impression that I get is that nobody involved with Selma thought it was going to be nominated for any major awards (maybe Oyelowo for acting, but nobody thought it had a chance at Best Picture/Director or anything) until previews, when reviews came back way more favorable than anybody had predicted. At that point…

I was just thinking how, once the Oscars reach their 100th birthday, we should have two Oscar ceremonies every year—one for this year's movies, and one for the movies of 100 years ago, this time with the knowledge of how those films actually aged so we can rectify all the calls the Academy got wrong the first time…

I really miss the glory days of Kelly Clarkson.

I watched the first episode, thought it was ridiculous, and didn't watch it again for, like, two years. Then somebody told me that the first episode was bad and you just had to get through it, but it got way better—so I went back and watched the entire first season, thought it was ridiculous, and stopped. Then…

Hatesong as written by commenters' dads would be a way better feature than Hatesong by musicians.

I mean, King's famous quote on white moderates begins, 'I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the…

I mean, of course Johnson in real life was not the kind of "white moderate" that King was complaining about. But the movie uses him as a convenient stand-in for King's views on the harm that white moderates can—and did—do, because using Johnson is far more interesting and has far higher stakes than some nobody off the…

Fucked up in what way? I mean, that reading of the ending is obviously out of line with the historical record, but it fits pretty well in line with the story the director/writers were trying to tell and the set of King's views they were trying to highlight.

He's just the generic guy who has a change of heart in the last act

I think Selma is different from a lot of films in that there's both a primary antagonist and a primary villain, but they're two different people. LBJ isn't the primary villain—that'd be Wallace—but he's definitely the primary antagonist. King versus Wallace creates the struggle on the bridge, but King versus Johnson,…

I thought Selma did a wonderful job of placing you in the mindset of its characters, with their dilemmas and uncertainty, even though it took place in an era that's been so widely represented in pop culture that it's hard to cut through that. Having grown up significantly after the Civil Rights Movement, I've always…

Selma is set up like a conventional biopic, but I do think that DuVernay and Webb did something really interesting with the structure by using LBJ as the primary antagonist rather than the expected George Wallace. Wallace is an antagonist, of course, but sort of an afterthought—his motivations are far less complex and…

Yeah, I'd actually make the argument that the artifice in Anderson's earlier films is usually just whimsy for whimsy's sake, but in GBH, it serves an important purpose—it's the mechanism by which Anderson distances the story from real-world parallels that have so much baggage attached that audiences are incapable of…

The movie didn't finish editing until the end of November, so I think it's entirely possible—likely, in fact—that they were aware of Michael Brown when they were constructing the film. (Not during filming, of course—but filming wrapped in July, I think, so Brown's death easily could have been on their mind as they…

I don't think it's his best, but it's by far his most ambitious. He's moved from making movies about interpersonal relationships and emotions to ones that are also about bigger questions about history and memory and tragedy and philosophy—that sounds super-pretentious, but he's doing it in a way that's funny and easy…

I don't think that the film was necessarily endorsing the poverty-makes-you-purer position, though. It was just depicting characters who did. There was enough directorial distance from the characters to suggest that we were supposed to view Hushpuppy's father's choices differently than he did, I thought.

Yeah, I think Stritch's absence is far more surprising. Rivers' film roles were mostly voice work, bit parts, and cameos in lowbrow comedies—not exactly something that the Academy tends to reward. Stritch did some actual serious acting, and the Academy loves associating itself with people who have been more successful…