Academy Awards Tonight!

I’ll be in my pajamas early this evening but I’m prepared for the inevitable exhaustion tomorrow. I’ll be staying up late to watch the Oscars and I’m not alone. The Oscar ceremony is the highest-rated entertainment show of the year, second only to the Super Bowl.

Why such an audience to see movie stars walk across a stage? Well, we live in an awards culture in which everyone seems to be judging or being judged and Oscar night is the night to enjoy as much judgment as you want. From the purely cosmetic to the politically controversial, every kind of statement will be made—and critiqued. 

You can join in.  Make your self a set of Olympic-style score cards and rate everything: the hair-do’s, the dresses—best and worst-- and of course, the acceptance speeches.  We can expect to hear good, bad and ugly thank you speeches. We can hope for the outré and the tears, prayers and peace signs. That’s all part of the show .The Academy Awards is a show about shows. It’s style on steroids.  And part of the appeal is that this is one of the last remaining experiences we have of live television.  There are fewer of us now who remember when most television was performed live and therefore had the greater creativity that comes with spontaneity, improvisation, accident and recovery.

I know some people like to pretend they are too smart for the Oscars or that this is some kind of Culture-Lite.  I don’t buy it. As Yogi Berra taught us, “You can see a lot by watching”, and it’s truer than ever when watching the Oscars. After all, the Academy Awards is a television show about filmmaking which underscores the ultimate state of our visual culture. When the Motion Picture Academy Awards each year wins an Emmy award for television production we have the paramount example of a recursive universe. 

It’s also tempting to disdain movies as just entertainment, but we have to remember that movies, even bad ones, become part of us. They are now what plays or poems were in the past: important sources of metaphor and imagery that we draw on in our own identity formation. Human beings are always making stories and talking to themselves. Stories with pictures are even better.

The best movies, of course though, are the ones in which we star.  No need to be embarrassed, it’s a fact: Most of us are narrating our own story a lot of the time: “This is me shopping, this is me eating, this is me walking down the street.”

It’s one of the reasons that retailers—even outdoor shopping plazas-- have piped-in music –is that it facilitates this “story of me” narration that we constantly do in our heads. In the movie version of our lives we’re always seen from our best side so we deserve the car, the dress, the shoes, the meal. Having that little sound track helps the fantasy —and the spending.

Our need for stories and the editing of our own story come together this Oscar night. So pile on the rhinestones with your favorite pajamas. Serve up good snacks and be prepared: What will you say if they call your name tonight?

Recovery Film Festival

It's not happening until September 2012 but this is worth putting in your calendar now. Together: a newspaper of Health and Recovery will present the first "Recovery Film Festival" September 28 to 30 2012 in New York City.

So you know, because it's New York City, that you may want to make a hotel reservation now or rekindle that waning friendship with the folks you know who have an extra, bed, couch or guest room in Manhattan.

The Recovery Film Festival will have 30 hours of films in several venues. They will show great classics like "Days of Wine and Roses", "Lost Weeekend" and "Under the Volcano" as well as contemporary recovery films like "28 Days"--with Sandra Bullock as the scariest wedding guest ever, and "When a Man Loves a Woman" with Meg Ryan as nominee for cutest drunk Mom.

And because we are hearing about this now--9 months away--there is time to enter a film or documentary short to the jury for possible showing at the festival. No fee to submit a 20 minute or shorter video.

You can read more at www.together.us.com

Academy Awards

I’ll be in my pajamas early this evening but I’m prepared for the inevitable exhaustion tomorrow. I’ll be staying up late to watch the Oscars I’m not alone. The Oscar ceremony is the highest-rated entertainment show of the year, second only to the Super Bowl.

Why such an audience to see movie stars walk across a stage? Well, we live in an awards culture in which everyone seems to be judging or being judged and Oscar night is the night to enjoy as much judgment as you want. From the purely cosmetic to the politically controversial, every kind of statement will be made—and critiqued.

You can join in. Make your self a set of Olympic-style score cards and rate everything: the hair-do’s, the dresses—best and worst-- and of course, the acceptance speeches. We can expect to hear good, bad and ugly thank you speeches. We can hope for the outré and the tears, prayers and peace signs. That’s all part of the show .

The Academy Awards is a show about shows. It’s style on steroids. And part of the appeal is that this is one of the last remaining experiences we have of live television. There are fewer of us now who remember when most television was performed live and therefore had the greater creativity that comes with spontaneity, improvisation, accident and recovery.

I know some people like to pretend they are too smart for the Oscars or that this is some kind of Culture-Lite. I don’t buy it. As Yogi Berra taught us, “You can see a lot by watching”, and it’s truer than ever when watching the Oscars. After all, the Academy Awards is a television show about filmmaking which underscores the ultimate state of our visual culture. When the Motion Picture Academy Awards each year wins an Emmy award for television production we have the paramount example of a recursive universe.

It’s also tempting to disdain movies as just entertainment, but we have to remember that movies, even bad ones, become part of us. They are now what plays or poems were in the past: important sources of metaphor and imagery that we draw on in our own identity formation. Human beings are always making stories and talking to themselves. Stories with pictures are even better.

The best movies, of course though, are the ones in which we star. No need to be embarrassed, it’s a fact: Most of us are narrating our own story a lot of the time: “This is me shopping, this is me eating, this is me walking down the street.”

It’s one of the reasons retailers—even outdoor shopping plazas-- have piped-in music –it facilitates this “story of me” narration that we constantly do in our heads. In the movie version of our lives we’re always seen from our best side so we deserve the car, the dress, the shoes, the meal. Having that little sound track helps the fantasy —and the spending.

Our need for stories and the editing of our own story come together this Oscar night. So pile on the rhinestones with your favorite pajamas. Serve up good snacks and be prepared: What will you say if they call your name tonight?

Jill Clayburgh The Unmarried Woman

I read today that actress Jill Clayburgh has died. Her great breakthrough role was in the movie, “An Unmarried Woman.” Maybe you remember this film? Clayburgh’s character was a woman in a kind of recovery—her husband leaves her and she is devastated and then slowly with therapy, good friends and a love of art she changes. She changes so much she glows. She dances.

So many things stand out from the movie and Clayburgh’s role. The art she collected, her dancing in her white tank top and undies, the great clothes, the Coach bag!

Part of Clayburgh’s genius in this film was the subtle changes of body and movement as her therapy and consciousness-raising (yeah 1971) took hold.

I remember watching this movie over and over in the year before my recovery began. Yes, true-- I was drinking glasses of wine and crying as I watched the movie but I wanted what this woman had. Maybe in some way Jill Clayburgh got inside of me and helped me to believe that I could change too.

“An Unmarried Woman” is a great woman’s classic. If you haven’t seen this you’re missing Jill Clayburgh at her very best—and some inspiration for whatever you want to change in your life. Put this on your Netflix list for sure.

Why Women Love Bull Durham

The past couple of nights I have been watching Bull Durham. This is the movie from 1988 with Kevin Costner playing an aging catcher in the minor leagues. This is a movie that appears to be about baseball life with its travails and hopes and the desperate desires of men who want to play ball for a living. It is seemingly a men’s movie with all the swearing, ass slapping and drinking and real life baseball lore. But no, this is really THE all time best chick flick.

Yes, we love Kevin Costner from the first moment he arrives in the locker room wearing his navy blazer, rumpled white shirt and khakis that are the perfect shade of tan with a hint of olive. He’s a manly man who in the first 20 minutes gives the fabulous, if too artful, monologue about his beliefs which includes, “I believe in the cock, the pussy,, the small of a woman’s back…that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap”, and which ends with his belief in “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days”.

Yes! You had us at “long, slow and deep”—and yes, at the Susan Sontag part too.

But there is a later scene that truly grabs woman because it’s something we really want.
“Do you want to dance?” Sarandon asks Costner, sitting in the kitchen late at night. He says yes, but surprises her by not dancing but instead by sweeping all the food and dishes off the kitchen table onto the floor. He spins Sarandon onto that now empty table and they go at it rolling and clutching.

Oh, yes, what he does is part of it; We want a man to want us that much; we want a man who wants to make love a second time and who will go for it on the kitchen table. We want that kind of passion in our lives. But, there is something else in this scene that is a woman’s dream come true. What most women truly desire is not what Costner does, but what Sarandon does NOT do. As all of her dishes and the leftover food crash onto the floor Sarandon allows herself to be swept onto that table instead of diving for a broom, or a dish cloth and saying to her lover, “Hold on a second, I’ll clean up this mess and then meet you in the bedroom.”

No, she is in the moment and desires this man and this sex more than she desires a clean floor or neat kitchen. She wants the rapture of this man and his body even with cereal and milk oozing under the fridge. And she is not saying, “Oh dear God that was my mother’s china bowl.” Nope, she’s on that table screwing her brains out.

Oh, to be that kind of woman. We assume the power is in the man, that to be taken that way would free us. But what we see in Bull Durham is a woman who CAN be taken. She is not thinking, “When did we last wash these sheets?” while a man is dutifully going down on her.

Oh, we may wish for a partner to love us with such sweet abandon, but Sarandon, in Bull Durham, shows us a woman who can abandon herself.