The "Wasted on Youth" issue of Under the Radar doesn't have a conventional magazine cover. But then, Under the Radar isn't a conventional magazine. True to its title, the magazine is serious about its mission to provide exposure to the best new bands on the planet. Whereas other music publications rely exclusively on publicists and record labels to feed them tips on who to cover, editor Mark Redfern scours MySpace to find unsigned acts to cover in the magazine's "Pleased to Meet You" section.
Not that the magazine is just devoted to obscure newbies. Under the Radar takes its tagline -- the Solution to Music Pollution -- to heart. In this issue (which includes several of my reviews and my interview with Portishead's Geoff Barrow), various musicians and actors look back on their formative years and the movies, TV shows, and bands that influenced them as children and teenagers.
The cover story features Matt Berninger, the lead-vocalist for The National, along with his one-and-half-year-old daughter, Isla. It also includes interviews with each member of The National about their childhood influences, including films as Tron and The Dark Crystal, such TV shows as The Muppet Show, and such bands as Talking Heads and Joy Division.
The Wasted on the Youth section also includes the following articles:
30 Rock's Judah Friedlander on Pac-Man
The Antlers' Peter J. Silberman on TGIF TV
Being Human's Russell Toveyon Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Bloc Party's Kele on Gary Numan
Camera Obscura's Tracyanne Campbell on Grease
Fucked Up vs. Devo: A Conversation Between Damian Abraham and Mark Mothersbaugh
Here We Go Magic's Luke Temple on His Grandfather
The Kids in the Hall (a look back at the '90s sketch comedy troupe)
Let Me In's Chloë Grace Moretz
Liars' Angus Andrew on Duran Duran
Local Natives' Ryan Hahn on Street Fighter
Look Around You: Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz Rethink the Educational Film
Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss on My So-Called Life
My Morning Jacket's Jim James on Twin Peaks (includes a Twin Peaks-themed photo-shoot with James)
Portishead and BEAK>'s Geoff Barrow on Post-Apocalyptic Films of the '80s
Sigur Rós' Jónsi on Being a Metalhead
Tegan and Sara's Sara Quin on Phil Collins
Saturday Night Live's Fred Armisen on the Punk Music of His Youth
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World's Mary Elizabeth Winstead on Labyrinth
For its 40th issue, FILTER magazine has gone to a whole new plane -- a horizontal one! Eschewing its traditional vertical design, the landscape layout means that seven members of Broken Social Scene's can all fit on the cover.
In addition to an interview with the Canadian musical collective, the issue scored an exclusive feature with the illusive Will Oldham (aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy), who takes it upon himself to interview Merle Haggard. There's also a love-in between author Jonathan Ames and Matt Berninger of The National. Elsewhere, The Jam revisits its career and actor Michael Cera talks "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World." I also interviewed Delphic, a hotly tipped UK trio, for the issue. You can read my piece here.
So, check out the issue, now on newsstands, and visit Filtermagazine.com.
It ended, as I predicted, with the closure of Jack's eyeball.
The finale was at once the best possible finale and also the worst possible finale. Or, put another way: it was dramatically satisfying, and it was mythologically unsatisfying. It was better than the ending of "The Sopranos," but not as great as the ending of "The Wire."
There was a moment near the beginning of the episode -- Hurley's quip about Yoda, I think it was -- when I sat back and relaxed. I knew this was going to be a good episode. Another great line was when Kate said, "Christian Shepherd? Are you kidding me?" (The best laughs of the night, however, were during the commercial breaks with Target's "Lost" ads.) In all, it's been a pretty weak season, so this finale was a great reminder of how great the show could be. Sure, I kinda wished that the Dharma shark had gone all "Jaws" on the Smoke Monster/Fake Locke at the end, but, hey, he got his comeuppance.
The episode was like a greatest hits album. The interactions between the characters were consistently compelling and moving and, well, my Kleenex box is little emptier than it was at the beginning of the night. (Where were Michael and Walt?) How great was Sawyer and Juliet's reunion? (For those hoping to see Sawyer and Kate end up together -- well, they kinda did. One has to assume that they were a couple after they'd finally escaped the island on the plane.)
Wasn't it great to see the Locke we all fell in love with in season 1 back to his usual self? And the final scene between Locke and Ben was incredibly moving. Ben's contrition. Locke's forgiveness. (In the end, Ben was left out in the darkness -- in purgatory -- for his sins.) Best of all was the moment between a resurrected Locke and Jack.
In short, I loved the episode....
....but I hated the cop out to the key question: Where, and what, is the island? For a while now, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have on message with a constant mantra: The show is really about the characters and not the mystery. True, the show is about the characters and we all would have stopped watching a long time ago if we didn't care about these people. But, c'mon Lindelof and Cuse, we didn't spend years of our lives swapping emails and obsessing over theories about whether Kate would end up with Jack or Sawyer. The mystery and intrigue and complex mythology was still the prime driver. As Charlie put it at the end of the first episode, "Guys, were are we?"
We never did find out.
I've re-watched the final speech by Christian to his son, Jack, several times. Here's what we learned. The Sideways world was really just an illusory reality where the characters got to live out idealized, and redeemed, versions of themselves. It was a purgatory of sorts where they could all reunite and move on toward the white light through, significantly, the portal of a church. Christian told Jack that they had all died -- some before him (Juliet, Saayid, Jin, Sun, etc...) and some after him (Kate, Sawyer, Lapidus, Hurley, Ben, etc). But they had all reunited in Sideways world where time was as immaterial as their own selves. Christian also told Jack that all that he had experienced had been real. So, everything that happened on the island was real.
When Desmond went through his electromagnetic shock therapy, he was able to somehow become omniscient and see what transpired in the Sideways world. He told Jack about the Sideways world when they were standing outside the cave and Desmond believed, mistakenly as it turns out, that he would be magically transported to Sideways world as soon as he pulled out that cork.
(Side note: I can't figure out why Sideways world Eloise Hawking didn't want the characters to know about their pasts. And why did she want Desmond to keep Daniel Farraday from the final reunion?)
Which makes the lack of answers doubly frustrating. It's not just the central question as to what the island is, but also the many plots of the show. Take, for instance, the other Others at the start of this season. Who were they? How did they hear about the island in the first place? How did they discover it? The same question applies to Charles Widmore and co. Was the island a mythological place -- like Atlantis, or Shangrila, or Xanadu, or El Dorado, or maybe Eden -- that men have long sought to discover? The show should have better explained what this island represented to all these different factions and cultures. What was the underlying reason they came to the island in the first place? It wasn't to discover lost gold or treasure. So, was it perhaps the promise of immortality or the control of good and evil? The show hinted at the latter, but we never satisfactorily understood why so many men put their lives on the line to find this island. Why it was the white whale to Widmore's Ahab.
Unresolved question: If Smokey HAD gotten off the island, would it really have meant the end of the world? Or was that just scaremongering by Widmore and Jacob? Without truly understanding what the island is -- and whether it did indeed hold the balance between good and evil in the world -- I have less appreciation for Jack's (and everyone else's) sacrifice by the end of the series. We never got to understand whether the end of the world was truly at stake. Without an explanation about what the island is, the notion that the world was in peril just seems very abstract.
There are smaller questions that nag me. For instance, what was the significance of the Hot Tub Time Machine in the temple where Saayid was cleansed? How did it relate the other hot tub of water at the heart of the island? Was it like the evil version of that golden water? What was the point of that whole temple storyline?
The creators may have felt that it was better to just leave the big answers to our own imaginations. In a way, that may have been the smart thing to do. If they had explained what the island is, the actual answer may have disappointed millions. No matter what the answer might have been, it would never have matched the magnitude of answer that viewers had been bracing for because they had built it up in their heads.
The show has also teetered on the pendulum of science versus faith. If the producers had given us a scientific answer to the island, it would have been disappointing to those who had hoped for a more magical explanation. And vice versa.
At the very end of the recent episode devoted to the backstory of Jacon and his brother, the story shifts to Kate and Jack in the cave. She asks Jack where the skeletons came from and he answers, "You killed a boar. Where did that come from?" I think the writers were using telling us that some mysteries will never be answered and should just be accepted as open to interpretation. (So, never mind where the Alison Janney character came from, or who/what entrusted her to protect that pot of liquid gold, like a leprechaun at the end of a rainbow.)
But the truth is, that it's been increasingly clear in recent interviews that the show creators made up the show as they went along. I think the only thing they knew about the final episode was that it would end with Jack closing his eye. I don't think the show's creators know what the island is. But they kept promising answers, time and time again. They shouldn't have enticed us with that illusive and tantalizing final revelation. It's a bit like Dorothy discovering that the Wizard of Oz was just a fraudulent man behind a curtain.
It was one helluva ride, though. And the characters were great companions along the way. And in that regard, "Lost" was a great success.
P.S. Here's a list of some of the unanswered questions:
Egyptian symbols?
Taweret: the Egyptian statue
Walt being special?
The numbers.
Who was in the raft that fired on Sawyer's raft while crossing between the two islands?
In season 1, why did we watch an episode in which various people insinuate that Claire is pregnant with, well, Satan's spawn? Where did that whole storyline go?
Now on newsstands: the new issue of Under the Radar magazine, which includes a few pieces by yours truly. (The Joanna Newsom cover on the former could revive a dead man's heart. You may have to plead to your girlfriend/wife that you only read Under the Radar for the articles...)
Glastonbury may be the world's most famous music festival and certainly the most prestigious, but Coachella is surely the finest festival in the world.
For starters, The Coachella festival site (a polo club) is an unbelievably beautiful setting. It's an oasis in the middle of the Southern Californian desert: palm trees, lush green fields of lawn, rows and rows of flowers, and a backdrop of huge snow-capped mountains. I'll take this over Glastonbury mud any day! At night, colorful lights are projected on the palm trees and the grounds themselves -- filled with exotic works of art -- take on neon hues.
There are two main outdoor stages and then several concert tents (which hold thousands of people) as well as numerous other attractions (a "learn to DJ" tent, for example) and also a welcome "hose down" area. Also some, er, interesting attendees, too, dressed in odd and colorful costumes. At times, I wondered whether I had mistakenly wandered into the Burning Man festival. I saw a guy in a body-hugging red devil suit and I wondered how he could possibly endure spandex in the desert heat. Others were naked with "clothing" spray painted on, like pages from the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition come to life.
I had a backstage pass and although that didn't mean that I could use Beyonce's gold-plated toilet in Jay-Z's pimped-out compound, I was able to use proper air conditioned toilets rather than portapotties. (I have no idea, actually, if Beyonce had a gold-plated loo -- I've just been watching too much MTV "Cribs.") I had many surreal experiences in the restricted artists area ranging from a long talk with Serj Tankian of System of a Down about how Obama reneged on his campaign promise to recognize the Armenian genocide, to opening the restroom door and almost knocking over Danny DeVito -- who is shorter than a midget. I also saw Melanie Griffiths' collagen-inflated lips in close-up. (Imagine a bee-sting version of the Rolling Stones logo.)
After watching Yeasayer (fun, but the songs evaporate from memory seconds later), a regal Gil Scott-Heron, and escaping the Dillinger Escape Plan, I headed to the main stage as the sun (and thermometer) plummeted.
Early on, it was apparent that the festival was going to be affected by the volcano ash as just about all the British and European acts, including Bad Lieutenant, The Cribs, and Delphic (who I had recently interviewed) were stranded at airports.
Fortunately, John Paul Jones -- the linchpin of Them Crooked Vultures -- wasn't among the stranded musicians. He emerged on to the main stage with the most bizarre-looking instrument I've seen in my life. It had 12 strings and a screen in it and then proceeded to play it with a bottleneck slide. Loved how TCV improvised on the original song arrangements and reveled in thrilling executed handbrake turns and sudden stops and starts. One of my fave songs on the album is "Scumbag Blues," a 21st-century update of Cream, which was elongated to include a trippy psychedelic interlude. One of the wonders of the entire festival was Dave Grohl's drumming. He threw himself into each beat with such attack and physicality that it's a wonder he wasn't taken off stage in a stretcher. I watched TCV with Steven Wilson and John Wesley from Porcupine Tree and we all enjoyed the show immensely. Compensation for an afternoon of less-than-enthralling sets.
Afterward, I was torn between heading to a tent to see Imogen Heap or staying to watch LCD Soundsystem. Since I recently saw Imogen's show and had never seen LCD Soundsystem, I opted to take in their epic dance grooves and wasn't disappointed.
I'm not much of a hip-hop guy yet nevertheless stayed to watch Jay-Z come on stage to the introductory music of the James Bond theme followed by "Live and Let Die." Hova was elevated through a hidden hatch in the stage. Quite an entrance. Soon after, I headed over to one of the tents to see Fever Ray. I never did see Fever Ray. Her stage was shrouded in darkness apart from multiple household lamps and some cool lasers. She and the band were just silhouettes in the murky darkness. She sounded great, though, as she played her debut solo album.
Porcupine Tree's set on the second outdoor stage during lunchtime on Saturday was top-notch with a set nicely tailored to festival goers and the uninitiated. Setlist: The Start of Something Beautiful/Sound of Muzak/ Anesthetize/Lazarus/Blackest Eyes/ Time Flies/Halo.
The show received the following rave review in the Orange County Register: Porcupine Tree proved to best several more high-profile hard rock bands that I also saw perform on Saturday, including buzz trio Band of Skulls and main stage rockers Coheed and Cambria. Indeed, I thought the relatively-unnoticed English group performed one of the most impressive sets of day two, with several concert-goers coming up to me and asking “Who are these guys?”-styled queries.The nuance of the British folk-meets-progressive rock of Porcupine Tree was a revelation, notably the beautiful and reflective “Lazarus” featuring lead singer Steven Wilson seated at the keyboard and singing one of the key songs from “Deadwing.” Later in the set, he set out with his bandmates on the ambitious “Time Flies.” One of the featured tracks on 2009’s “The Incident,” “Time Flies” featured him playing both acoustic and electric guitar and showcased the natural comparisons that can be drawn between this band and genre pioneers such as Pink Floyd.Although the quartet has been around since the late 1980s, it’s nice to see Porcupine Tree getting some well-deserved accolades. Count me among the group’s newest fans.
By contrast, Jon Pareles at the New York Times clearly didn't watch the band's set at all because in his blog post about progressive rock bands at Coachella, he made an off-handed mention of "the early Genesis-loving Porcupine Tree." No one who has actually seen or heard PT would compare their sound to early Genesis. The mind boggles....
Another reviewer for the Los Angeles Examiner shrewdly noted, "a night slot would have really solidified this band to the thousands of people not familiar with the Brit’s transcendental material. With over 20 years of experience, asking a band to only play a short, single-filled set is near disgraceful."
Indeed, few festivalgoers had arrived on site when the band took to the stage and those that did opted for the shelter of the tent stages which routinely attracted several thousand people. It's difficult to comprehend the calculus that determined Porcupine Tree's slot on the bill. There were so many bands in the tents with better time slots that were obscure/unknown or just riding blog buzz. These are bands that are still on the club circuit. None of them could sell out LA's Nokia Theater or Royal Albert Hall months in advance. Certainly, few if any of them has had a top 25 album or the kind of sales Porcupine Tree has had.
I watched Faith No More with the guys from Porcupine Tree on Saturday night and we were delighted by their leftfield opening number: a cover of the 1970s soul tune, "Reunited." Later, they did Michael Jackson's "Ben." They rocked out, too, during a vital set that included "Epic" and "We Care a Lot." Mike Patton waded into the audience and crowd surfed during the set. At one point, a shirtless Danny DeVito ran across the stage. I think that was quite possibly a more disturbing sight than Melanie Griffiths' plastic surgery.
Saturday's headliners, Muse, DESTROYED the place. I was flabbergasted by great they were. Truly one of the great live bands. From their showmanship to musicianship to sheer playfulness (spontaneous excerpts of Ennio Morricone and Hendrix), they were utterly astonishing. The wide-ranging set included "Uprising," "Supermassive Black Hole," "Time Is Running Out," "Starlight" and "Knights of Cydonia." Widespread consensus that it was one of the best sets anyone had seen a band play. Even Jay-Z and Beyonce were rocking out on the side of the stage.
I got to meet Matt Bellamy on Sunday as he was just hanging out in the artist area. He's now one of the biggest rock stars on the planet (Muse were just announced as headliners of Glastonbury) so it was great to discover that he was completely approachable, grounded, engaging and no ego at all. I said to him, "Let me be the 1 millionth person to tell you how incredible your show was." "You're only the 7th," Bellamy quipped. "She was the sixth," he said, pointing to my friend. I told him he also had the quickest costume change in concert history. He explained that he had ripped his red trousers. "Nobody wants to see my knobby knees," he joked. He also said that when he played the guitar with his teeth it was meant to be deliberately cheesy but nobody gets that it's done in humor. And when I told him that all that was missing from their show was a hot air balloon with acrobats suspended underneath it (a la their Wembley stadium gig), he said they're coming to L.A. in September -- with the acrobats! Clearly, these musicians should be given laminates that say "Excess All Areas." They're ridiculously fun.
I got far more of a kick chatting to Bellamy than watching the likes of Beyonce, Kate Hudson, Paris Hilton, and the dude from Twilight swan around.
Over the weekend, I saw several great sets, including those by Beach House and Dirty Projectors. But the breakout band for me was Mutemath. The band were so energetic that their set could have generated nuclear fission as a byproduct. At one point, the frontman placed a snare drum on top of upstretched hands and then clambered on top of that drum somehow before leaping into the crowd. When it was over you could hear the collective "wow" by the crowd. It was a tough act for the keyboard and drums duo of Matt & Kim to follow. But their enthusiasm sustained the crowd's euphoria.
Unfortunately, I missed Jonsi, though I heard he wasn't all that great, but then I started chatting with the drummer from Passion Pit as we tried to get access to watch Phoenix from the backstage. No dice. Beyonce and Thom Yorke had arrived at the same stage and so it was a total lockdown with no access for anyone. Phoenix had a MASSIVE crowd even though they were on the second stage. Sounded really great, though not much variance from their albums.
After that, Thom Yorke and Atoms for Peace took to the second stage. Since no other acts were playing, he drew perhaps the biggest crowd of the festival. They played Thom's "Eraser" album in its entirety and Flea turned out to be an inspired choice of bassist for songs such as "Black Swan" (that bass riff!) and "Harrowdown Hill." Thom performed three Radiohead songs -- an acoustic "Airbag" (wow!), a solo piano rendition of "Everything is In Its Right Place," and the b-side "Paperbag Writer." One new song, "Judge, Jury, Executioner," is a band composition -- Flea tells Rolling Stone that the band has been busy recording -- and it's likely we'll see an Atoms for Peace album or EP before any new Radiohead album. (The album might also include recently debuted compositions such as "A Walk Down the Staircase," "Give Up the Ghost," "The Daily Mail," and "Mouse, Dog, Bird.")
I stayed for three songs into the headliners, Gorillaz -- a huge multimedia spectacle with a setup that included an orchestra + The Clash's Steve Cook and Paul Siminon -- before heading out at 11 to beat the traffic back to LA. Arrived home at 1:30.
It was the best fun I've had in forever, though my aching feet might disagree with that statement.
During a commercial break of the NCAA championship basketball on Monday night, I watched a trailer for the new "Battlefield: Bad Company" video game (see above).
I was nauseated.
Just two hours earlier, I had watched the leaked classified video of a US Army helicopter killing a group of Iraqi men in Baghdad -- including two journalists for Reuters. (The video, below, contains disturbing images and language.) The footage, a film from the helicopter's point of view, looks uncannily like the video game scene in "Battlefield: Bad Company." Worse, the soundtrack to the actual killing sounds like a videogame. A spokesperson for WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that brought the footage to light, even commented that the helicopter pilots act "like they are playing a computer game and their desire is they want to get high scores" by killing opponents.
At one point, one of the pilots laughs amid the carnage. Worse, the footage reveals US ground soldiers firing on people trying to help a man wounded in the helicopter assault. Two children were injured as a result.
I'm not advocating videogame censorship. And I'm not someone who believes that videogames inspire players to perpetrate real violence. But anyone looking to play "Battlefield: Bad Company" might wanna watch the real war video and then reflect on just how fun the game seems afterward.
Now on newsstands, the new issue of FILTER magazine. Yours truly has several pieces in the magazine, including a feature on Jesca Hoop, whose excellent second album, "Hunting My Dress," is as gratifyingly unusual as it is full of great hooks and melodies. I also penned the issue's lead album review on Midlake's "Courage of Others" as well as a review of Shearwater's "The Golden Archipelago" (though flawed, it's my favorite album of the year from one of my very favorite bands). Also in the issue: interviews with Beck and Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jeff Bridges, She & Him, and The Besnard Lakes (the Montreal band's "And the Night Roared" is my second fave album of 2010 so far).
The best male and female screen performance of the past 12 months? Sorry, Meryl and Jeff, it's neither of you. The winners in this category are easily Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the Canadian skating pair who won gold medals last night in Ice Dancing at the Olympics. For good measure, they ought to take home little gold statuettes as a bonus.
I'll return to the duo's remarkable thespian abilities in a bit. But first let's recap just how many great performances (of the non-acting kind) we've already seen at the Vancouver games.
Memorably, Shaun White showcased a move called the McTwist in which he rode his snowboard up a rip curl of ice and catapulted himself into a void in the night sky where even Icarus wouldn't dare take wing. White somehow defied the very laws of space and time because, in less than three seconds, the red head contorted himself and his board through a mathematically impossible combination of twists, corkscrews, and horizontal and vertical rotations. Then he tapped into his inner Capt. Sullenberger to pull off a miraculous switch-side landing. If NBC had affixed a camera to the bottom of his board, your television would likely have keeled over from the vertigo.
Even more impressive: The aerial skiers who briefly turn into human helicopters, their upended skis twirling in futility as the grappling hooks of gravity take hold. The skeleton crews who hurtle, head first, around icy chicanes at 90 mph fall into the same bracket of life-insurance premiums and are just as entertaining. I also marveled at the downhill skiers who careen off the edge of a precipice and somehow manage a semblance of flight that a Dodo would envy.
Best James Bond tribute: Even the skiing biathletes who shoot targets with rifles weren't as showstopping as the 007-inspired short program by Korea's Kim Yu-Na. She ended her record-score routine by pointing her fingers like a gun. But her real firepower came from a triple lutz-triple toe loop that made one look to ceiling to see if there wasn't a puppeteer pulling marionette strings. (Scott Hamilton's squeal triggered an avalanche in Whistler.)
Bode Miller, whose threatened to become known as Miller lite after his hard-partying lifestyle led to a dismal showing at the Torino games, notched several medals at the games, including one gold. On the podium, the natural-born skier displayed a humility and inner calm few would have imagined him capable of.
Lindsey Vonn, the famous swimsuit model and occasional downhill racer, had sports writers churning out stories about her injured shin threatened her Olympic participation. Silly rabbits. This is a girl who was evacuated by helicopter after a crash in the Torino Olympics and still checked herself out of hospital to compete the next day with a bruised hip. Was there any serious doubt that she wouldn't compete? Girl's got grit. Her triumph was hard won and an early highlight of the games.
America's Evan Lysacek wasn't favored to beat Adrian Brody lookalike Yevgeny Pluschenko. The Russian gold medalist seemed superhuman. Who else, after all, could pull of a quadruple toe loop. But Lysacek won out thanks to rigorous training, finer artistry, and the canny tactic of accumulating points by executing several jumping passes in the second half of the program.
If I seem overly US-centric in my list of highlights, forgive me. It's NBC's fault. The coverage is heavily skewed toward American competitors. Anchor Bob Costas shows off a chart of the medal count so regularly that you'd think we still lived in the mercantile era rather than one of globalization. Props to Steven Colbert for pin-pricking the balloon of jingoism with his "Defeat the World" mantra. Which brings us back to the Canadian skaters, Virtue and Moir. As brilliant sports writer Mark Sappenfield observes in The Christian Science Monitor, their routine was so winning that, "For a night, it seemed, the 48th parallel disappeared and we were not two brotherly nations, but brothers." (If you missed the duo's events over the past three nights, watch them here and here.)
Indeed, their performances over the past three nights were transcendent. Not just because of their inspired choreography, perfect synchronicity, surprise moves, and agile athletic ability. The duo's second dance was distinguished by a red-hot passion that threatened to turn the icy stage beneath their skates to slush. It was there in the deeply affectionate glances between the two as they held hands during a turn around the arena prior to the most important skate of their lives. And it was there in the tender embrace concluded their elegant routine, a ballet on ice in which the swan-like skaters seemed to fall in love while millions watched. The duo could have performed in an arena filled with fans of UFC extreme cage fighting and there wouldn't have been a dry eye in the audience.
Which is why it was heartbreaking to discover that Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue (who resembles a young Kate Beckinsale) aren't romantically involved. Theirs is not a tale of love off the ice, like Torvill & Dean, Jamie Salé and David Pelletier, or even Moira Kelly and that hockey player in "The Cutting Edge." They’re just great friends. Indeed, Moir is dating another prominent skater. All of which underscores how powerful the duo’s performance was. Like actors in a great romance movie, they made us believe in a great love story. In the process, they created the single defining moment of these games.
Just about every year, weary journalists and pop-culture pundits trot out opinions on how to save The Academy Awards because the Oscars no longer draw big viewership figures. In 1970, the televised ceremony had a 43.4% share in the ratings. Today, it's less of an event. Last year's show -- which was up 6% on 2008 -- boasted an "American Idol"-scale audience. Which is pretty good, but hardly phenomenal in this era of long-tail media fragmentation.
Typically, suggestions on boosting numbers tend to go like this:
If you can't get Billy Crystal as emcee, how about Jay & Conan as co-hosts?
If you can't bring back Björk and her egg-laying swan dress, how about inviting Lady Gaga (with Cher as her stylist).
If you can't get star power like Brangelina on the red carpet, how about Snooki and The Situation?
How about inviting Steve Jobs to the podium to unveil a new Apple product?
Or how about just awarding Best Picture to "Twilight" for that all-important 13-18 demographic? (Bonus idea: Have Justin Bieber hand over the statuette.)
Such cosmetic changes will move the needle some. But our culture has fundamentally changed since Oscar's heyday. For starters, Hollywood movie stars aren't as important anymore. In part, it's because there's less mystery and less golden-era glamor.
There was a time, long ago, when stars weren't over-exposed. Apart from the occasional appearance on Johnny Carson or a Jerry Lewis telethon, your only opportunity of seeing actors outside of the movies was tuning into the Oscars. Nowadays, you can watch Clooney picking his nose on TMZ. In the old days celebrities were largely presented in publicist-controlled puff pieces in "Life" magazine. Now, you can read about Brangelina's sex life in US Weekly right after you've flipped past pictures of J.Lo pumping gas in the "Stars: They're Just Like Us!" feature.
More fundamentally, stars no longer have the currency they once did. Studios now rely on well-branded properties and high-concept stories, rather than big-name actors, to pack theaters. That's true of nearly all 2009's top-grossing films: "Avatar," "Star Trek," "Transformers," "Harry Potter," "Twilight," "Alvin & The Chipmunks," "The Hangover," "X-Men: Origins," "2012."
There are one or two exceptions to that hardening rule: Robert Downey Jr. helped sell the "Sherlock Holmes" brand name with the capital he gained from starring in "Iron Man 2." Sandra Bullock and Meryl Streep can reliably draw a crowd in the right project. And Will Smith could probably star in a sequel to "Howard the Duck" and still notch a big opening weekend. But can they turn the awards telecast into a "must see"? Nah.
So, if celebrity is no longer a significant draw for the Academy Awards, how about the movies? The gambit of expanding the Best Picture nominees to 10 films will likely improve audience numbers as the category isn't just limited to middlebrow fare. The 9 nominations for "Avatar" will be a cause for celebration for the Academy and ABC because the last time America gave a damn about the Oscars was the year of "Titanic." The studios will cheer, too, since the awards are primarily about selling movies (and flattering egos).
Problem is, the Academy awards are all over before they've even begun. The awards season is oversaturated with award shows, many of them televized, ranging from The Golden Globes to the Spirit Awards. Moreover, each of Hollywood's major guilds -- Actors, Producers, Directors -- hold their own ceremonies and the big winners in each category tend to be a safe prediction of who will win in the corresponding Oscar category. We now know that Jeff Bridges will win for Best Actor, Sandra Bullock for Best Actress, Kathryn Bigelow for Best Director, and The Hurt Locker for Best Picture.
All of this happens before the Academy Award nominations have even been announced. In fact, the only surprises today in the widely predicted nominees was the inclusion of "The Blind Side" for Best Picture and "In the Loop" for Best Adapted Screenplay.
