A lady winning the Oscar for majority appropriate directing is one of those informative milestones that would pass improved unremarked. Sadly, it didn"t.
"The impulse has come!" chirruped Barbra Streisand, emoting harder than any of the actresses who were nominated that night. "It"s Kathryn Bigelow!"
Newspapers and magazines brisk to wail this ancestral landmark; I would have kept it quiet.
The best-director Oscar going womanlike competence have been a impulse value celebrating if it had happened in 1974. But this is 2010. These were the 82nd annual academy awards. How embarrassing.
It"s frequency an indicator of amicable change. The rest of multitude has altered so in essence given 1929 that it"s no some-more than a pointless square of pub-quiz anything insubstantial (for heaven"s sake, elsewhere in America they have a womanlike cabinet member of state and a mixed-race president), whilst Hollywood hasn"t altered at all. Oscar or no Oscar, the crowd"s main seductiveness in Kathryn Bigelow was how noble she looks for 58.
The movie industry"s thought of a good feminist new thing is to extol the titties of women over 40 as well as underneath it. All week, the press has gurgled about the good bodies of the Oscar-cougars: print spreads of Pfeiffer, Bullock and Streep, on top of content that radically says, both incredulously and smugly: "You"d still do "em, wouldn"t you?"
Even Michael Sheen, introducing the assignment of Helen Mirren for majority appropriate actress, focused his debate wholly on how "hot" he finds her. He contingency have illusory that this demonstrated a insubordinate domestic exactness given she"s old sufficient to be his mother. No: it"s usually the common reductionist nonsense, broadened upwards.
The alternative "feminist celebration" of Bigelow seems to be that she kick her ex-husband James Cameron to the award. I contend it"s annoying that she ever tied together him in the initial place. Look at their dual films. The Hurt Locker contra Dances With Smurfs. How could that matrimony ever have worked?
But that"s fine. That"s Hollywood. A sparkly veneer of dismissive lust and report is what we design and enjoy. Their inapplicable designation was sketch courtesy to how low it runs. Why remind the universe that it took 82 years for 50% of the human competition to throw up someone who could have the majority appropriate film, or be credited for it? That"s usually highlighting a have a disproportion of amicable awkwardness, similar to announcing you"ve farted. Better to let it out as sensitively as possible, and goal nobody notices.
When the chips are down
Sorry not to write a mainstay last week. I was in Berlin; I programmed to write from there if anything notable happened, but it didn"t. I saw the Brandenburg gate, ate bratwurst, played a gin rummy tournament, got knocked out by Boris Becker, left the tournament, 6 masked gunmen went in and stole a million dollars, that was it. So I took the week off.
Yes. That"s how bad a publisher I am. If it weren"t for the sideline in poker, I don"t think I"d eat.
It was usually when I got home to find a hundred pleasantly enquiries on Twitter and a dozen talk requests from assorted departments of the BBC, that I thought: "Oh. That armed heist on the €3m luminary gin rummy contest seems to have been reported as news."
Don"t get me wrong, I had thought it was utterly interesting. We haven"t had an armed raid on a gin rummy contest for about five years now. It"s 6 years given I saw those gunmen at the money diversion in Holland. The diversion has turn terribly respectable. Poker friends were toll after the heist to say: "Isn"t this retro? Been ages given I saw an Uzi."
Those still at the contest sounded fine, observant how ease they"d felt. Unruffled bloggers filmed the raid on their digicams; a little players recognized the robbers and arrests have already begun. All the esteem winners got paid. Nobody got hurt. They were posting jokes online inside of half an hour. The contest resumed less than dual hours later.
One drastic Finnish player had been about to lose a outrageous pot when the gunmen came in. He spoken that this did not consecrate a critical stop and insisted on profitable his competition anyway. The Finn finished up entrance second in the tournament, winning €600,000 – that"s karma.
Boris Becker longed for the raid; he got knocked out usually after I did. But he would have coped. I"ve desired Boris ever given I saw him at a gin rummy contest in Nassau, a prophesy of undiluted earthy fitness, with a doughnut in one palm and a cigarette in the other. That"s my kind of sportsman.
None of this will have any disproportion to the success of the European Poker Tour. I will be at the last in Monte Carlo this April, and so will hundreds of others. You competence think that"s given gin rummy players are some-more not affirmative – or greedier – than alternative people. You competence think it"s given guns are, historically, piece of the Wild West gin rummy picture. But I think it"s given everybody can regularly cope with everything. Human inlet is of course stoic, unhysterical, with a clarity of viewpoint on coincidence. Most people think: "Shit happens. If you"re there: unlucky. But I"ll lift on presumption I won"t be."
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about armed military on city streets and escalated ID-checking as a "response to militant threat", that I hold goes opposite majority people"s enterprise not to have their approach of hold up compromised by fright of fanciful disaster. A reader sent me a allude to from Benjamin Franklin that came behind in to my mind, proudly, as I watched players begin signing up for the subsequent leg of the European Poker Tour, in San Remo usually a couple of weeks from now: "He who values security on top of autocracy deserves neither."
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