19 Movie questions (sorry but it’s 11:18pm, I can’t sleep and El Topo is even more inexplicable than usual.)

1. Is Hollywood done with trying to convince us that Toni Collette is ugly? Because we’re still not buying it. I will argue that that Ellen Pompeo is not even remotely cute though.

2. Will people now think that because Jennifer Hudson won the Oscar for Dreamgirls that the academy really isn’t blind to films with several non-white women in them? Or do the rest of the women have to be mediocre? How the women in Joy Luck Club or Ray managed to slip by the academy is beyond me. And while we’re on the subject of ignored women, what does Regina King have to do to get an Oscar nomination?

3. Am I the only person who cannot stand to watch Sean Penn act? Why does anybody think the look-people-acting-is-hard-work-just-watch- me-grimace school of acting is impressive? These are the same people who will go to their graves thinking that Mystic River was a better movie than Fast Times at Ridgemont High. And now, as GQ’s Tom Carson points out (rather brilliantly) every American actor from Dicaprio to Matt Damon is doing it. This is the Pearl Jam school of acting: Show absolutely no pleasure in the creation of the art itself. Thank God not everybody feels like taking acting into the well meaning toilet. Just look at Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson. On paper the role, drug addict victim and well meaning white liberal teacher seems concocted from PC hell. But watch how Gosling imbues deadly part with soul, grit, and humour, that last quality making the performance all the more devastating. Gosling, Terence Howard, Don Cheadle and Jake Gyllenhaal are all they got, folks.

4. Comedy and noir are the two genres that America does better than everybody else. So are the members of the Academy Swedish?

5. Does film get any better than The Godfather Part 2? Rhetorical question people.

6. Did that dimwitted twerp from Life is Beautiful really make another atrocity! It’s a comedy for everyone! flick about Iraq?

7. Am I the only person who thought Miami Vice was a great movie?

8. Or that Manhunter is still the best of the Hannibal Lecter flicks?

9. Or that the usage of a bad childhood to explain [insert perversion/sociopathic tendency here] is really played out?

10. Why can’t I write a book like Short Bus?

11. Why does the Academy keep giving the right actors Oscars for the wrong performances? Scent of a Woman? Gladiator? My Cousin Vinny?

12. Can you name the last 3 winners of the best picture Oscar?

13. Who has ever seen Out of Africa?

14. Where has Rififi been all my life?

15. Or Yojimbo?

16. Who in their right mind thinks The Departed can hold a candle to Infernal Affairs?

17. If Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are not the finest actors in the world then when did God started acting in films?

18. How many Bond movies will Daniel Craig have to make before people realize that he was the best Bond ever on just Casino Royale alone?

19. Who is McG?