MADness—the Blog

Several of the things I’ve been reading this week in one way or another relate to women in Hollywood.  Here are a few links, in case you’re interested.

How Oscar Found Ms. Right
There are times when I think the best writer covering film today is Manohla Dargis at the New York Times.  When I read this article it was one of those times.  Dargis gives the best take I’ve read on the Oscars for Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker and takes on a few other women to make her point.  (Read more about scopophilia here and here.)

Unless they star Meryl Streep, movies about women are routinely dismissed because they’re about women, as the patronizing term “chick flick” affirms every time it’s reflexively deployed. But chick flicks are often the only movies that offer female audiences stories about women and female friendships and a world that, however artificial, offers up female characters who are not standing on the sidelines as the male hero saves the day. It might not be much and usually isn’t, at least in aesthetic terms, but it’s sometimes all there is. Ms. Bigelow doesn’t make those kinds of movies. (Her vampires don’t sparkle, they draw blood.) She generally makes kinetic and thrilling movies about men and codes of masculinity set in worlds of violence. Her technique might be masterly [sic], because she learned from the likes of Sam Peckinpah. But she is very much her own woman, and her own auteur.

Pretty ugly: Can we please stop pretending that beautiful women aren’t beautiful?
I don’t watch TV much.  At some point in my adult life, I came to the conclusion there were better things to do with my time.  But I watched a lot when I was younger, and I remember having very much the same conversation back in a college dorm.  Actresses you see on TV, or on the big screen, for that matter—even the ones you who are supposed to be playing “ugly”—and still quite beautiful by almost any standard, and yes, that distorts even further what society thinks about women and beauty.  (Some things never change.  Bette Davis at times described herself as the ugly ducking.  You wouldn’t know it from looking at the picture here.)

Does a Best Actress Oscar Lead to Divorce?
Something  more than coincidence seens to be going on, I’d say.