E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

SHOW BIZ SEEMED BIGGER ONCE The Oscars - Academy Awards officially - were once huge cultural events - in 1975, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Shirley MacLaine and Bob Hope co-hosted, for example - and Best Picture noms included The Conversation and Chinatown . Godfather Part 2 won. Last two years, movies titled Birdman and Spotlight won, and the hosts and those films are retrospectively minor, trifling. This year, some important, resonant films are up for consideration - including Hidden Figures and Moonlight , two favourites of this blog. Viola Davis and Denzel Washington will hopefully win for their sterling performances in Fences . However, La La Land - the most superficial and empty Best Picture contender since Gigi in 1959 (which beat Vertigo ) - could smite all comers, and render this year's awards historically trivial, even idiotic. The Oscars often opt for safe, optimistic films, or safe, pessimistic films, that are usually about white men (less often, whit...

TOM FORD FANS On a lighter note - Lord we need one - 2016 was a great year for cinema, popular, commercial, foreign and domestic, art-house and comic-book.  As I was reminded recently, the last time a film took all top 5 Oscars (Best film, director, producer, actor and actress) was 1991 for horror classic  Silence of the Lambs (one would have thought Titanic , but Winslett did not win that year). 26 years later, this could happen again with La La Land - or not, so stiff is the competition.  If they use all ten places, here are the ten films Eyewear thinks the Academy will nominate for Best Picture, based on other prizes, and critical reception. 1. La La Land - the sentimental favourite, and one to beat, for its self-reflexive rescue of the musical; 2. Moonlight - a powerful contender, examining a young boy's life as a black gay person in Miami; 3. Manchester by the Sea - probably shoe in for Affleck as best actor; 4. Jackie - again, Portman would win for...

One of the best films of 2015 is called Concussion , and it stars Will Smith (the famous African-American actor) as a Nigerian (now-American) doctor, Bennet Omalu , who worked as a coroner's assistant doing forensic pathology in America's ageing rustbelt at the start of this century. In a year when the Academy infamously declined to nominate any Black actors in their four categories, it is startling to report that this extraordinary performance from Smith - which sees him barely resemble his usual self - was overlooked in favour of the hammy ham-fisted work in Trumbo , for instance. Concussion , however, is more than an opportunity to observe, yet again, America's ongoing cultural and racial splits and struggles. Instead, it is a film as terrifying in its ways as Invasion of the Body Snatchers , though based in real science this time; and as shocking and revelatory as The Insider , Michael Mann's late 90s story of whistleblowing and Big Tobacco. This time, the ...

EYEWEAR THOUGHT SELMA THE BEST AMERICAN FILM OF 2014 SO WE ASKED THE CRITIC AND WRITER STEVEN TIMBERMAN , AN AMERICAN, TO WRITE ABOUT IT FOR US HERE IS HIS PERSONAL ESSAY, A REVIEW WE ARE GLAD TO SHARE SELMA IS TIMELESS, THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT WILL STALE   I don’t want to write about Hollywood’s problem with fostering, accepting, and recognizing diversity. I don’t want to write about Selma’s status as another javelin to be thrown in our Great Culture Wars. I don’t even want to write   about Selma’s ability to shift historical narratives in order to reach greater emotional truths. Well, much. I want to write about how viewing Selma made me feel. Though I grew up in Southern California, our community had a strong conservative lean. When students tried to organize a “Day of Silence” in support for LGBT rights, parents pulled their students from school in droves. An English teacher had the gall to criticize George W Bush as a “crook” and had to appear on f...

The Oscars feels increasingly like a waste of moral time, even for a pop culture fiend like Eyewear .  What with the Ukraine-Russia standoff, Syrian refugees suffering, and even the rise of UKIP, let alone ecological crisis and capitalist misfiring, not to mention the Nazi-style regime in North Korea, the lie that Hollywood saves the world is now a bit stale.  Still, a good film is a work of art, as well as entertainment, and even entertainment is welcome now and then in tough times; and a great film can be both great art and a serious moral act.  It is for this reason that Eyewear hopes that 12 Years A Slave wins for best film, director, actor and supporting actress.  It probably won't, though it is the finest moral Hollywood film since Schindler's List , and perhaps in some ways the greatest film ever made (despite Brad Pitt's hirsute performance as a too-modern Quaker), if only for how it combines art and a vision of a crime almost too vast to fathom without br...

The 2011 Oscar noms have been read out live on BBC radio.  Good news that we all knew would happen: Gary Oldman for Best Actor; Meryl Streep for Best Actress.  Of the directors, good to see Woody Allen there, and Terence Malick , two geniuses, as well as the brilliant Scorsese and Alexander Payne .  In terms of Best Film, it seems likely a toss up between The Artist, The Help , or Moneyball - though War Horse may slip in by a nose; Midnight In Paris will be a sentimental loser.  Big missing film: Drive , the second-best film of the year after Tree of Life .  Also, nothing much for Tinker, Tailor , given the early hype.  The Best Supporting Actress nod will likely go to The Artist ; Best Suporting Actor perhaps to old-timer Max Von Sydow or Christopher Plummer - what amazing careers these guys have had.  Nothing for the dog.  That's Wuff!

I have a quick question about the bromance at the heart of The King's Speech .  Why did the King not ever grant Lionel Logue the Knighthood within his power to give?  It is true he made Logue a Commander (CVO) - however, the top two rankings include a knighthood of the order.  Perhaps rewarding a friend in this way would have been unseemly - but given that all the failed speech-doctors were knighted (according to the screenplay itself) the dramatic outcome should have been, surely, such public recognition / redemption.  Nor was Logue as poor as in the film (he lived in a large villa with dozens of rooms).  I also have a few continuity questions, particularly relating to chairs/ thrones in the Cathedral scene - at times there is one, at others two, within a few shots.  Finally, is it at all likely that the King would have really kept, for years, the recording of his voice, that finally, in the film, triggers his return to Logue?  And, if he could read ...

Eyewear salutes women this International Women's Day (IWD). Most particularly, Kathryn Bigelow , whose powerful Oscar-winning war film, The Hurt Locker , reconfigures the male-dominated Western genre in such a way that is able to be both existential, pacifist, and true to the actualities of conflict. Her Best Director Oscar is an historical achievement, and much-deserved.

Good news - the Academy has nominated the South African sci-fi instant classic District 9 as well as Avatar for this year's Oscars - first time in decades that ten films will vie for the statue. The big news is the ex-husband and wife head to head, as Avatar and The Hurt Locker both lead in nominations. I predict that the 3-D blockbuster will win, for the obvious reasons. Jeremy Renner is superb as the wild man bomb disposal expert, but will likely not prevail over sentimental favourite Jeff Bridges . Absent is much mention if any of The Road , or for that matter Brothers . Tarantino 's film has done surprisingly well, and hopefully will win best supporting actor.

Notwithstanding the fact it was voted for by a majority of its peers, Crash was the least deserving winner of the annual industrial distraction known as the Academy Awards. The further fact that it was the love-child of a Canadian made good in Los Angeles is beside the point. The film, in effect a series of intense, contrived actorial moments designed for maximum drama-school tension and release, was shallow and had a made-for-TV feel. The set up and pay off involving the dummy bullets and the child was particularly lame, a sort of Mad Magazine send-up avant la lettre . It did have moving elements, admittedly but... Racial tension in Los Angeles is an important navel-gazing issue, and might be one sort of America's fault-line. Brokeback Mountain , Good Night, And Good Luck and Munich were far more profound, and controversial. My own preference was for the deeply-flawed but ultimately daring (in its context) Munich .