Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Oh, The Irony
We interrupt the mind-numbingly single-minded concentration on politics to bring you an incomparable bit of silliness: I hear that Hollywood Motion Picture Academy voting member Tony Curtis -- who at 80 still apparently thinks he can get leading-man roles and so wants to make heterosexually nice with the studio heads -- claims that he and many of his fellow Academy members flatly refused to see Brokeback Mountain, which was nominated for (and in a just world would have won) Best Picture, because he was allegedly offended by its gay themes. Let's skip over the fact that, as a voting member of the Academy, you would think he was duty-bound, or at least honor-bound, to see all the nominated films. This is Tony Curtis we're talking about. The guy who starred as a cross-dresser in Some Like It Hot. The guy who was Kirk Douglas' best, ah, friend in Spartacus, one of the most homoerotic films Hollywood ever made. The guy who himself stated that he had embarked on sexual affairs with men in his youth. The guy who posed nude for Vanity Fair last year. Please, Tony. Give it up. You can't crawl back into the closet and pretend you're really some great arbiter of Baptist sexual morality. Showing off your naked bod at age 80 has, um, queered that, even setting aside your bisexuality.
Other than that, I agree, Tony needs to buy some cigars and sit in the backyard of the playboy mansion, not try to score more roles. Act your age man!
: 3/08/2006 09:13:00 AM Reasonable people can argue the respective merits of both Brokeback Mountain and Crash. But Crash wasn't picked because the Academy members thought it was a good film. It was picked because a) they were NOT going to vote for Brokeback Mountain, and b) they were NOT going to vote for anything involving Steven Spielberg because of their long-standing hate-on for him. (Even though Munich may be his one truly great film, the one that lifts him above the middlebrow.)
I read the story but haven't seen the movie. I've seen parts of the script for the movie and it seems to be less liberated than the 1972 made for TV movie "That Certain Summer," with Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen. And that movie had the obigatory tragic gay tear shedding scene in the end.
Tony Curtis, it's over. If you want to try playing leads ever again look at the Mae West fiasco "Sextet". Do you want to risk something like that happening to you?
: 3/09/2006 07:46:00 AM << Home
More blogs about politics.
