Deeper Problems at the Oscars

Most people are understandably still talking about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock in the face at last week's Oscar ceremony, after Rock made a tasteless joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's hair (she has alopecia or hair loss).  What Smith did was wrong, no doubt, but thinking back about that broadcast, I'd say that incident was the least of the Oscar ceremony's problems:

1.  First, what Smith did was indeed not noble but wrong.  We parents spend a lot of time teaching our little children to use words not hands to express their anger, however justified it might be.  An actor resorting to violence on a world-wide stage sends out a very bad message.

2. Smith did also use words to express his outrage at Rock, shouting "Keep my wife's name out of your fucking mouth" to Rock several times.  Unfortunately, we here in America were deprived of hearing that.  ABC, ever fearful, like other broadcast networks, of FCC (Federal Communication Commission) fines, bleeped out the offensive tirade.  (Fortunately, it was heard in Australia and other places with less repressive regimes than the United States.)  And it also must be noted: the FCC does absolutely nothing about Fox News and its dissemination of outright lies about COVID and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine -- lies so grievous that it got Chris Wallace not to his contract with Fox, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to recommend Fox News.  Surely, those lies are not broadcasting "in the public interest" -- the lies about Covid vaccines and bogus "cures" have literally cost lives.  And maybe the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) should investigate the very name Fox "News" as a form of false advertising.

3. Speaking of COVID and the Russian invasion, neither received much mention at the Oscar ceremony.  COVID was actually the subject of an early joking skit.  Ok, but the pandemic is no laughing matter to the more than six million people around the world who lost their lives, and the millions more in their families.  Would've been appropriate to say something about COVID in the Oscar "In Memoriam" segment.

4. The same egregious oversight about the heroic Ukrainians fighting for their very lives and country marred the Oscar event.  Sean Penn suggested that Ukrainian President Zelensky be allowed to address the world via the Academy Awards ceremony.  Not only did that not happen, there was no official mention of the Russian attack of Ukraine at all, other than some silent words briefly up on a screen.  Ukrainian-born Mila Kunis alluded to but didn't mention by name the savage Russian invasion of her birth place. Were the presenters and winners told not to mention Ukraine?  It was left to Francis Ford Coppola to defiantly proclaim from the stage, "Viva Ukraine"!

All in all, though there were many very worthy winners, a sad shambles of an award ceremony

.

Gemini Man: A Missed Time-Travel Op

I saw Ang Lee's 2019 Gemini Man on Hulu last night.   Mainly because of what it could have been, but wasn't.  It had lots of star power with Will Smith and Clive Owen, and lesser-known Mary Elizabeth Winstead was good, too.  The action scenes were excellent.   As to the plot ...

Well, the story features Smith's Henry Brogan fighting a younger version of himself, sent to do him in by Owen's Clay Veris.   Smith not only acted well, but looked his younger self via a de-aging process I last saw in The Irishman, which worked very well.  My initial thought and expectation is this could amount to a good time-travel narrative, in which young Brogan has the advantage over his older self, in that the younger version could kill the older version, but not vice versa, since if the younger version were killed that would instantly erase the older version from existence.  (Of course, that time travel scenario would have had to account for why the older Brogan didn't remember being attacked by a younger version of himself, but that could have been fun to work out, too.)

Instead, the explanation for the older and younger Brogan is cloning.  Now, that has the advantage of certainly being possible in reality, in contrast to time travel, which (a) hasn't happened yet (as far I know), and (b) is likely to never happen, owing to the paradoxes involved (like the grandfather paradox: if you travel back in time and prevent your grandparents from meeting, how did you exist to travel back in the first place) and the "solutions" which are even more incredible than time travel (travel to past generates alternates realities, one in which the time traveler exists and one which the time traveler does not).  But, in my view, the cloning explanation for more than one Brogan makes for a more mundane, less intellectually challenging, even boring narrative.

But, hey, if I feel so strongly about that, maybe I should write a story with that time-travel mechanism, and get it to a Hollywood producer, rather than complaining about Lee's movie (for which Game of Thrones' David Benioff wrote the screenplay, with two others, so it's not even mostly Lee's fault).  Anyway, see the movie, if you haven't already, and see what you think.