This Week:
- My all-time favorite Oscar speeches.
- The best thing on Netflix right now.
- The J.Lo/Shakira argument I'm so tired of.
- A fantastic Joy Behar moment.
- "Foie Gras Outlaws!"
Cry-Watch These Speeches With Me
There are two words that trigger me into a puddle of tears the second I hear them: "Helga B."
OK, the circumstances have to be a bit more curated than that.
It has to be after 1 o'clock in the morning, I have to had at least one bottle of white wine already—that is very important—and I have to be alone in my apartment eating from a box of Wheat Thins when I cue up Sandra Bullock's 2010 Oscar acceptance speech for her The Blind Side Best Actress win on YouTube. (Typically, I'm an hour or so into an award-speech rabbit hole at this point.)
Mid-way through her endearingly gracious and humorous remarks, she says, "I would like to thank what this film was about for me, which are the moms that take care of the babies and the children no matter where they came from." Her voice starts to catch as the audience applauds. "Those moms and parents never get thanked. I in particular failed to thank one." She's silent for several devastating moments as she summons the name of that one: Her mother, you guessed it, "Helga B."
I have watched this video maybe 73 times.
I don't know why it is a thing that gay men love to binge award acceptance speeches over and over again on YouTube, but it is a thing. I don't make the rules, I just embody them.
It is, however, a curious, drunken, late-night passion that makes them/us/me certain connoisseurs on what are the best and most important elements of award shows: the speeches! You know what sucks? Debating who should have won and who was robbed. You know what's usually boring? Hosts. And what is almost never good? Musical performances. But the speeches! That's what we're tuning in for. And when they're very good, so usually is the show.
What have I learned in my Riesling-fueled YouTube adventures? Bullock's, whatever you think of her win for The Blind Side, is an all-time great speech, especially coming after a very emotional tribute to each of the Best Actress nominees that features Oprah Winfrey so lovingly talking about Gabourey Sidibe that the breakout Precious star has to remind herself to breathe through the tears.
I have learned that if you time the ratio of "bleary-eyed late-night hour" to "borderline pathetic amount of wine consumed alone" correctly, you will let out the loud crying sound of a bleating goat at the exact moment Tom Hanks delivers his "the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels" line near the end of his Best Actor speech for Philadelphia, which is the best Oscar speech that has ever been given.
Meryl Streep, unsurprisingly, is great at them. Thanking her husband, Don Gummer, first when she won Best Actress for The Iron Lady, because "when you thank your husband at the end of the speech, they play him out with the music and I want him to know that everything I value most in our lives you've given me," is one of the most casually romantic things any actor has said in one of these.
Those speeches where a quote-unquote "overdue" actor stands up there breathless for a minute are either exhilarating—Julia Roberts for Erin Brockovich—or exhausting, like when Kate Winslet won for The Reader.
Marion Cotillard bellowing "thank you life, thank you love, and it is true there is some angels in this city" is gloriously and adorably bizarre. For me, it's a tie between Julie Andrews' "I know you Americans are famous for your hospitality but this is really ridiculous" and Shirley MacLaine's "I deserve this, thank you" for the best lines.
Louise Fletcher delivering part of her One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest speech in sign language for her deaf parents will always get me. Jack Palance doing one-arm push-ups after winning for City Slickers is iconic. Whatever you think about them now, watching Ben Affleck and Matt Damon win for Good WIll Hunting is still electric, every time.
Frances McDormand's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri call to action is never not rousing. (Inclusion! Rider!) The Sally Field stuff is irresistible. Crying along with Gwyneth Paltrow as she, quite overcome, wins for Shakespeare in Love is a great antidote to being annoyed at her for Goop. Whoopi Goldberg! Cher! Christopher Plummer! Colin Firth! All great!
Anyway, revisiting all of this is why I'm excited for Sunday night. It's a foregone conclusion that Renée Zellweger (Judy), Joaquin Phoenix (Joker), Laura Dern (Marriage Story), and Brad Pitt (Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood) are going to win, and they've been great so far on the award circuit.
Zellweger is list-ier in her thank yous than everyone else, but she's also so visibly grateful to be welcomed back to Hollywood and determined to use her time to say something important about Judy Garland and the people she matters to that it's been mostly very charming. Phoenix has turned the microphone into a soap box—a necessary one—and I'm curious what he'll do at the Oscar stage. Dern has mostly been bumbling with gratitude, which is never not appealing, while Pitt seems to have been honing a "tight five" stand-up routine. Strange, but I'm very much here for it.
The Sex Education Bus Scene That's Making Everyone Cry
I've been binge-watching the new season of Sex Education on Netflix at night after my boyfriend's gone to bed—truly curious what has been going through his mind when, seconds after he shuts the bedroom door, he hears loud sex noises coming from the TV in the living room—which means that I'm a few weeks behind fans who sped through the new episodes of the remarkably smart and heartfelt series when they came out last month.
It also means a few weeks behind openly weeping at a scene in which six girls ride a bus.
If you're unfamiliar, Sex Education stars Gillian Anderson and Asa Butterfield as a sex therapist and her awkward son, who discovers crucial social capital by doling out sex advice to classmates that he gleans from her work, despite his own sexual inexperience.
The show takes place in a bucolic English countryside town where it is somehow both 1994 and 2020. Episodes cover consent and contraception and agency and queerness and pleasure, but also puppy love and crushes and teen drama and hormones and adolescent pressure and insecurity.
It is somehow utopian and glaringly reflective of modern teen life. The best example of that is the way season two handled a delicate plot line about sexual assault, trauma, female rage...and a bus. (Light spoilers ahead.)
Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood) is eternally sunny and maybe a little daft, a disposition she is wearing when she boards the bus to school one day, smiles at the nice-looking man next to her, and then discovers that he was masturbating to her, finishing on her jeans. She initially brushes it off, annoyed that her friend Maeve (Emma Mackey, who is Margot Robbie's doppelganger) is telling her that she's been assaulted and needs to go to the police.
But despite her own attempts to shrug off what happened, Aimee starts seeing visions of the man from the bus everywhere she goes. Her body physically stops her from boarding the bus, meaning she starts walking miles to school, to her boyfriend's house...everywhere.
During a plot device that plays like a mash-up of Mean Girls and The Breakfast Club that has six of the school's girls being forced to figure out something that bonds them together so that they stop tearing each other down, Aimee interrupts the arguing by breaking down in tears, finally ready to admit to how affected she's been by the bus incident. One by one, the other girls share their own experiences with assault and harassment. Each one has a story. That, of all things, is what bonds them.
The next morning, despite not all being friends or particularly liking each other, they rally together to take the bus with Aimee, so that she can reclaim her agency and triumph over the fear. It is incredibly moving, and one of the more powerful depictions of a #MeToo storyline I've seen on a teen drama, which so often tend to sensationalize or exploit graphic violence in order to make a statement. (Ahem, 13 Reasons Why.)
Anyway, I cried. If you read this newsletter, you'll gather that I do that a lot.
J. Lo Poledanced and the Lindas Couldn't Handle It
In the Year of Our Lord 2020, we are still having this debate over female pop stars' sexuality—and having it a year after Adam Levine came out on the Super Bowl stage completely topless and none of these morality policemen and (mostly) women blinked an eye. (Most were too busy drooling and—oh, hey there!—objectifying him.)
I said this already on social media, but I'll say it again here: I PERSONALLY THINK CHEERING ON MEN TO VIOLENTLY INFLICT LIFE-ALTERING BRAIN TRAUMA ON EACH OTHER IS INAPPROPRIATE FOR A 'FAMILY-FRIENDLY' EVENT, BUT GO OFF ON TWO SEXUALLY EMPOWERED GROWN WOMEN DANCING IN BATHING SUITS, LINDAS OF THE WORLD.
This The View Exchange Made My Day
Alec Baldwin was on The View this week and briefly talked about when he co-hosted the Oscars in 2010 in this exchange flagged by writer Evan Ross Katz on Twitter. "When I did the show 10 years ago with Steve…" he begins, when Joy Behar interrupts to clarify for the audience that he is referring to Steve Martin.
Baldwin goes into aggro smug mode—shocking, I know!—and snides, "I think my audience knows when I say Steve, they know who I mean." Behar's perfect response: "My husband's name is Steve. Maybe they think it's him."
Game. Set. Match.
So Did These Town & Country Cover Lines
Marveling at the wildly one-percent-skewing—or perhaps escapist fantasy—of the Town & Country cover lines is one of the Media Twitter's favorite monthly traditions. This month's version is truly something.
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