Oscar Back-lash

Winning the Oscar for "Best Picture" involves timing--when it gets released, when you place the ads and send the "screeners." All things you can mark on a calendar.

One thing you can't factor in or put in your day-timer is when the "back-lash" happens. Inevitably, each of the Big Five will have a few questions asked, its pedigree questioned, its validity besmirched (there's usually a post-mark around the location of Miramax when this happens). There was quite a bit of trashing "There Will be Blood" right before the Oscars, which probably didn't influence any votes. But "No Country For Old Men" was never touched.

Well, now that it's won "Best Picture" "the sleeper has awakened." I submit for evidence this article in the New Yorker by Nora Ephron. And here, more damning is screenwriter Bob Gale's eviscerating of it at Ken Levine's blog.

I recall after various folks in the blog-o-verse saw the movie there was much discussion of it and some of its more impenetrable secrets--this may just be a tembler of the post-release discussions (that's what Ephron's article from November 2007 suggests), Or it's post-Oscar sour grapes. Gale's arguments are legitimate, but if the lapses in logic hadn't have happened--would the movie be as good?

The defense brings up the point that a Delorean travelling at 88mph with a Flux capacitor can not travel through time (as one of the commenters on Levine's blog pointed out). And Ephron has a shady past--she wrote and directed "Bewitched"--talk about your "witch-trials."

The defense rests.