Oh honey, he's kidding.  You're no one's favorite.

In retrospect, I regret not having been part of either Spiderman commentary - I didn't boycott them or anything, I just wasn't available either time.    As a person who dislikes superhero comics in general, I never particularly cared for Spiderman (although the theme song from the '60's cartoon still rocks) and yet I really enjoyed the first Spiderman, and pretty much the second one as well.   (Sure, the wheels came off the Spiderwagon on the third lap, but they had two good turns before then.)

I don't get the dislike for the Spiderman flicks that my fellow DIF'ers all seem to share (in WILDLY varying degrees).   Those movies were the first to say, hey lookie, costume hero movies don't have to be camp, they can actually be pretty okay, and even have characters in them that you can relate to.   

Obviously you have to accept the goofball idea that being bitten by a radioactive spider makes you into some kinda spider-man instead of a guy with a mildly radioactive bump on his wrist, but okay, one piece of magic, go on.   That ain't nothing compared to what X-Men asks you to buy. 

And there wouldn't have been any X-Men movies anyway - at least not as sophisticated as the ones we got - if Spiderman hadn't already raised the bar for men-in-tights flicks and shown they could have plots and characters just like "real" movies do.

So yeah, putting the inhibitor chip there was a dumb design, but otherwise I thought S2 was pretty good stuff myself.

I dunno, maybe 500 people, I'm bad at estimates.    Look up the size of the Academy screening room and fill it about 3/4ths full, that's the average attendance every year. 

Academy members sit in roped-off sections so they're guaranteed a seat, the rest of the house is first-come first-served.  There's no admission fee, you just stand in line.   They let the regular folks in until the presentations start, or until there are no more seats.

Before each clip the FX Supervisor gives a 5-minute speech about what to look for, then they show the reel.  Then all four potential nominees for each movie go up after their reel, but the Q&A session is only 3 minutes per movie so usually only one or two gets to answer a question.   (And every year, somebody gives a far too detailed answer and uses up all the time on one question.)

But the questions rarely go into much detail anyway - "tell us more about the water sequence" is the kinda thing you hear.  I suspect the real reason for the Q&A is to get a gander at the potential nominees and think "So if these guys win and go on stage at the Oscars, are they gonna act like idiots and make us look bad?"

It may seem weird that so little time is spent talking to the fx team, but do the math and you'll see that seven reels, plus five minutes before plus three minutes after each, plus time getting on and offstage, makes for a pretty long evening.

And there's no publicly-viewable record of the event that I know of, since the bulk of time is spent just watching reels.   And the VFX branch is open to the public, but not all branches are - I know Makeup is members-only, and I honestly don't know about the other branches because I've never tried going to any.

I'm simplifying a bit here, but I think it's because studios are continuing to focus more and more on big-budget spectacles designed to make a lot of money back.    The Transformers movies make tons of money, but very few people would call them "good", except maybe the guys in Accounting.

Some movies manage to be both crowd-pleasing spectacles AND good, I'd put the Potter series on that list myself.    And Chris Nolan manages to bridge that gap - although even he would never have gotten to make a movie as complicated and marketing-unfriendly as Inception if he hadn't broken the bank with a couple of Batman movies first.     Batman was the reason those movies got made, Nolan was the reason they were more than just Batman movies.

Social Network I suspect got the greenlight because "kids like that Face Book, right?"  But Fincher and Sorkin ended up making a fascinating character study that the kids didn't actually go see.    So that one got through because it seemed like a moneymaker, and - unfortunately for the Accounting department - turned out to just be a good flick.

William Goldman has described the Oscars - I'm paraphrasing - as the day each year when Hollywood gets all dressed up and tries to tell themselves they still make worthwhile movies and not just pandering crap.   So when it comes time to vote for Best Picture, it's less likely than it used to be that the Best Picture was also the biggest moneymaker, because that's become two very different kinds of movies.

So I went to the VFX bakeoff this year, like I have for more than a decade, and watched the presentations for the seven potential nominees.   (I'm not an Academy voter, but anyone can actually attend the event.) 

This year was very different than any previous year because of the rules change that allowed for five nominations instead of three.  So instead of "Which three will make the cut?"  the question was "Which two are gonna be not-quite-good-enough?"  And with the votes being split so much finer now, handicapping the final nominees suddenly got much harder.

Coming out the door, I told the friends I was with that Scott Pilgrim was dead.  They didn't believe me, but I was pretty darn sure we'd just seen it lose, judging from the vibe in the room after the clip screening.   

I also said the Scott Pilgrim FX reel had instantly shifted the movie from my "gotta see that soon" list to my "good god, I don't EVER want to see that" list.

I realized too late that I'd said all the above while standing five feet away from the Scott Pilgrim FX team.  Awkward.

Ten, twenty years from now, Scott Pilgrim will maybe be looked back on as a classic and maybe even quaint, like watching the original King Kong or something.    But right now, if you go to the FX bakeoff and look at the roped-off Academy member section, you see a hell of a lot of gray hair.   And I suspect that a significant number of the old fogeys - like me - got about three minutes into the Scott P. fx reel and then just started praying for it to stop hurting us.     Maybe it's a good movie as a whole, but that FX reel was the filmic equivalent of waterboarding.  Sorry Scott.  Next!

Hereafter surprised me, it's not a wall-to-wall fx movie, it basically just has the tidal wave sequence and not much else fx-wise.  But that sequence is perfection.   it does what FX are actually supposed to do - support the story being told.   The tidal wave scene is brutal and horrifying and completely works.   

I still am not particularly interested in the rest of the movie - apparently it's about ghosts or something - but that first seven minutes is a work of art.  Even so, I didn't think there'd be enough support in the room to have Hereafter make the cut, and I'm extremely pleased that it did.   For once, "best fx" didn't just mean "most fx".

Inception - a movie I'm completely impressed by on all levels.  I'm just not sure I like it.   I saw it when it came out and then promptly mostly forgot everything about it.   But in the FX reel, when the kid from 3rd Rock From the Sun started running around the spinny corridor, that was a guaranteed nomination right there, the rest of the reel was almost unnecessary.

Iron Man 2 - sequels are tough, often they don't make the cut if they're just repeating fx from the first one without bringing anything new to the party.  Iron Man 2 was looking a little repetitive at first, but when that suit-in-a-suitcase popped open, an entire audience of jaded fx people audibly went "ooooo" in unison.      Bing.  Nomination.  Done.

Alice in Wonderland - a movie I had zero interest in seeing going in, now I'm kinda interested.  Tim Burton doing what Tim Burton does, so I dunno if the story is any good, but those were some pretty pictures.

Alice was of the two movies presented in 3-D (Tron being the other), and there couldn't be more difference between them as far as the 3D effects.    Both got questions about the 3D, for Tron the questioner said essentially, So how come your 3D effects weren't painful and bad?  And the answer was "because we designed the 3D from the start to not call too much attention to itself."   

Alice got a similar question, except it was "so did you do anything different fx-wise once the film became a retro-active 3d movie?"  And Ken Ralston said - as accurately as I can quote him -  "We had nothing to do with that grr em hmmm rmmm grr any other questions?"   

Me, I liked Alice a lot better after the first minute of the reel, when I closed one eye so the 3D went away.

Harry Potter Whichever One It Is - the perennial bridesmaid of the FX Oscar.   Every single one has been in the bakeoff, and almost none of them got nominated.    The fx have never been any less than great (assuming we nobly avert our eyes from the Quidditch match in the first movie and speak no more of it), and yet every year Harry never seems to make the final cut.  I half-assumed this year would be the same, since everybody knows there's one more coming and they could just wait and give that one the "Return of the King Award For Doing Lots of Stuff" in 2012.   

The Potter fx were just as good as ever this year, but I suspect it's mostly just the shift from three to five nominees that got Harry through the gate.  So congrats Harry, but don't write a speech yet.  You won't need it until next year.

And finally - Tron.  A movie I had no desire to see.  A movie whose very existence I bemoan and shake my fists at the gods for allowing to happen.   Until I saw the FX reel.  Jeezus.   Sure, it's all just eye candy, but more delicious candy my eyes have ne'er consumed. 

Crap.  Now I gotta watch that thing.   Tron is the yin to Scott Pilgrim's yang.

And the FX supervisor did exactly the right thing in his Tron introduction - he reminded the audience that the original Tron was excluded from FX consideration because computers were "cheating".   And all those gray heads laughed and nodded at the memory of the shortsighted gray heads who ran things back then.   

And then the reel, which was so incredible that even a hater like me wanted to see that movie.  And the question after about how even the 3D was so nicely done... and so on.  Add it up and no way, no day does Tron not get nominated.  Locked, done, moving on.

And somehow... it didn't.  I have no way, no way at all to explain how that could possibly have happened.    Honestly, I am at a loss.   Not since Revenge of the Sith NOT getting a nomination have I been this surprised.

So anyway, with Tron shockingly out of the running Inception is gonna win the VFX award in a walk.     Because the final winners are voted upon by all members of the Academy, regardless of their branch, so the techie awards invariably go to the hit movies because everybody saw them. 

And because the 3rd Rock Kid in the spinny corridor was cool.

There is a cure available.   If you like The Cowboys, I'm gonna take a guess you might like that one too.   

Report back when you're done - if you didn't like Unforgiven I'll give you a Wint-O-Green Lifesaver.  (They make sparks when you bite them!)

Then run, don't walk.   It's a '70's revisionist western that overturns every John-Wayne-movie western cliche... and John Wayne is the star of the damn thing.  Saw it recently and it totally held up, at least I thought it did.

Bruce Dern was never Dern-ier than in that flick, which he did back-to-back with Silent Running and thus became the typecast "crazy guy" for years.

I saw an online article recently that basically dismissed Bruce Dern as Laura's dad who also did some acting himself.  Ptui.  Laura's the daughter of BRUCE FRICKIN' DERN and DIANE GODDAM LADD, and get off my lawn if you don't know that.

Anyhoo.  Silent Running I've been trying to get my fellow Beatles interested in covering someday, with mixed success.     And Family Plot is a curiosity, but mostly a sad one - Hitchcock's last film, and in my opinion he made one film too many.

But no Dern series would be complete without The Cowboys, a movie that I love for many reasons and Dern is only one of them.

They even stole it before you had it.   

That shows just how deep the rabbit hole goes... wake up sheeple!

I can't take credit for that one myself - as I recall, I saw it as somebody's sig on theforce.net.   

But yeah, it does make one realize the importance of perspective, don't it?

I've seen Birth of a Nation exactly once, in film school.  (Every semester BOAN alternated with Intolerance as the "required viewing DW Griffith classic", and thus I've never seen Intolerance.)

It was impressive on the groundbreaking first-time-anybody-ever-did-that level, but yeah, it's a bit of a grind to sit through.  And certainly gets uncomfortable at the finale, when you find yourself thinking "Gee, I hope the noble Klansmen get there before those evil darkies rape the white women".

So for me, the best commentary there could ever be for BOAN has already been done - when the lights went up after that one viewing, the instructor got up in front of the class and said, "And now you have watched Birth of a Nation, which means you never have to watch it again."

I had pancakes.  To each their own, I guess.