Atheists 52, Moderate Christians 14

If the polls are to be believed, atheists are among the least popular people in the United States. So it's somewhat surprising that two recent atheistic treatises, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, have been so popular, mainstays on Amazon's bestseller list (though maybe the persecution complex is what's driving atheists to pick up these books).

With the exception of a sojourn earlier this year, when I argued in a movie nerd discussion group (don't ask) against Dawkins' thesis that science can theoretically prove that God doesn't exist, I'd been taking a long vacation from these debates. Religion is bad, their foundational myths have been disproven, the probability of God's existence (at least a God who actively interferes with the affairs of people) is close to nil, the moral teachings are suspect and contradictory, etc. -- I've heard it all before. The anti-religion arguments are mostly right, but sometimes the atheists are so frustratingly literal-minded and dogmatically rational that they turn me off. Frequently, atheists too easily dismiss the non-rational -- the spiritual or mystical experiences that often enrich human lives. People end up talking past one another, wasting everyone's time.

After browsing a few book reviews, I had dismissed Sam Harris as one of these literal-minded atheists who's obsessed with using scientific evidence to reject Biblical passages. These guys always miss the point of religion. So when Andrew Sullivan, self-professed "doubting" Catholic (whatever that means), started posting links to an ongoing internet debate on Belief.net with Harris on his blog, I didn't even bother. But yesterday one passage grabbed my attention and so I checked it out: lo and behld, Harris is just dead-on. He doesn't just debunk myths; he gets at the *moral failing* of religion, and does so without dismissing spirituality. Sullivan, professional pundit and a sharp debater, can't so much as muster a whimper in response. It's a wholesale rout. Check it out.

Promises, promises

Believe it or not, there will soon be some serious movie-blogging on this site. Before that commences, though, just a few thoughts on the Oscar noms this morning. Everyone knew Dreamgirls will walk away with Best Picture, right? Isn't that what all the "experts" predicted?
AMPAS not only threw the pundits for a loop, what's shocking is that the "surprises", both moderate and shocking, were actually so damn pleasant. My favorite helming and performance of the year both nominated? Ponies for everyone.

* The best directing job of the year belonged to Paul Greengrass, whose United 93 hovers far above any other American film I've seen all year. After being shut out of the guild awards, everyone kind of wrote off United 93's chances for anything. Nobody wanted to actually sit down and watch this movie, it's been explained. Well, I guess the directing and editing branches did finally pop in the DVD. And perhaps they found themselves enthralled by not only by Greengrass's superior craftsmanship, the detailed recreation of that fateful morning, but also by its artistry. Misunderstood as either well-made atrocity porn or as an indictment of Bushie neglect, United 93 above all captures a change of a collective state of mind -- it depicts, with harrowing intensity, that five hour transition from the pre-9/11 world to the post-9/11 world, when Americans' entitled sense of invulnerability and innocence gave way to a new violent world where there are no safe harbors.

* Half Nelson (about which I hope to post something this week) is much more than just a Ryan Gosling showcase. But I can't complain about this mildly surprising Oscar recognition for Gosling's extraordinary if decidedly un-Oscar performance. At every opportunity Gosling eschews the scene-stealing histrionics that command Oscar attention in favor of portraying something far more unexpected and truthful (see, e.g., the confrontation with Mackie; the scenes in the teachers' lounge; going to his date's pad at 3 a.m. and high). If this nod, for my favorite performance of the year, calls attention to this remarkable movie, cool.

* "Treat FBI officers like mushrooms -- feed'em shit and keep 'em in the dark." Mark Wahlberg, after years of getting treated like an FBI officer, finally gets some much-deserved Oscar attention with the help of The Departed's screenwriter William Monahan, who created the poet laureate of profanity in Dignam. Monahan's nod's not a surprise, but his work better not lose out to that steaming dysentery shit castle Little Children (where the method of the storytellers is tell and show and then tell and then show the same thing again, in case the explanatory voiceover, the Taboo-sketch, and PowerPoint presentation making the same point failed to get through).

* Cinematography, Children of Men. Of course. In last year's The New World, Emmanuel Lubezski's delighted the senses with shafts of light illuminating untouched earth. In stark contrast to Malick's lush pastoralism, here Lubezski creates an equally vivid world, but one that's been utterly corrupted by the creations of men. Lubezki's jittery compositions and desaturated greys brilliantly imposes a kind of Holocaust-doc grimness and determinism onto the Big Brother dystopia envisioned by Cuaron and his art director (where's the art direction nod, dammit?). The result is a crackerjack concept, sci-fi realism, flawlessly executed. And yes, those trick shots -- esp. in the car with Julianne Moore and in the war zone -- were fucking awesome. But one gripe: While I'm sure not enough voters ended up seeing Agnes Godard's characteristically amazing work in The Intruder, did the cinematography branch also skip the shimmering nightscape of Miami Vice, easily the most beautifully shot movie of the year? And pity poor Steven Soderbergh, whose unfairly maligned The Good German was, if nothing else, a technical marvel.

* Unfortunately, the underrated Prestige didn't get recognized by the writers for the year's most profound screenplay. To my shock the Academy didn't overlook the dueling magician movie's art direction and cinematography, which had been undervalued even among movie nerds. Our focus on Nolan's narrative and thematic hocus-pocus mostly blinded us to the care with which Nolan constructs the visual design. Good job Academy actually paying attention to the cinematic properties.

* Other hits: Penelope Cruz in Volver. Not a surprise, but given Volver's rather stunning omission in Foreign Language, I'm glad she was able to hang on. And this just in: the Iwo Jima diptych is pretty damn good.

* Other misses: Sasha Baron Cohen. Come on. Ken Watanabe, I suppose. Haven't really caught up with the big Oscar-baits (still on tap: Pan's Labyrinth, The Queen, Dreamgirls, Babel, Notes on a Scandal, possibly Little Miss Sunshine), so kinda hard to gripe just yet.

the end of high fidelity

Towards the end of this piece detailing Apple's irritating (and shortsighted) "crippleware" practice (rigging iPods to play only songs purchased from iTunes and vice versa), we're offered a vision of the near-future:

" Eventually, perhaps in 5 or 10 years, he predicts, all portable players will have wireless broadband capability and will provide direct access, anytime, anywhere, to every song ever released for a low monthly subscription fee. It’s a prediction that has a high probability of realization because such a system is already found in South Korea, where three million subscribers enjoy direct, wireless access to a virtually limitless music catalog for only $5 a month."

Is another music revolution in the works? It sure looks like a good bet, doesn't it? The technology is already here, and we're basically just short on the wi-fi infrastructure. Sadly, once this last technology leap takes place, that comforting world of proprietary music collecting will vanish. Today's children may never know the pleasures of rifling through a record bin, or scanning through a dorm-mate's CD collection for musical affinity. (Though admittedly, college students have MySpace and last.fm to scope out a new acquaintance's taste, which is both more effective and creepier, since you can do it surreptitiously.) Physical music collecting was already on the wane in the age of the iPod, of course, but what happens when music becomes a collective good, when any song ever recorded can be called up anywhere and at anytime with a click or a voice command? It would be, well, awesome -- that's undeniable. But where does this leave my wideranging, erudite collection of recorded music, ranging from Bach's Cello Suites to J-Dilla's last album, goddammit? Are my years -- nay, decades -- of careful, tasteful acquisitions, my entire music library that serves as a monument to my tremendously cultivated taste and fine breeding...can that now be rendered obsolete?!? Oh, please kill me now.

Time to Jump Off the Al Gore Bandwagon

No one would make a better Prez than Al Gore. He is wise like Solomon and strong like Samson. At night I dream of living in an Al Gore administration, where my 80-inch super-magnetic-polymer-TV will be powered by a touch of golden Sun, and where Arab children will play hopscotch with Jewish children in peace and harmony. Al Gore was right about Iraq, and he'll be right about Iran too. Al Gore, after all, is the best.

Sadly, Al Gore will now never be elected president. All because of that skank Lindsay Lohan. You suck, Lindsay!

Update: After reading the full text of Miss Lohan's manifesto, I retract all of the above. She's been tragically misunderstood. In fact, Lindsay Lohan is perhaps our best hope of directing the world's attention to the right priorities. She wants to help. Why won't Al Gore help her?

The Horse-Race that Matters Least

Recently, my Wednesday papers have come bundled with a "special section" called The Envelope. In this special weekly fold-out section, we're treated to a blow-by-blow account of the "Oscar season" as it's now known. Urgent questions are raised: Would the voters penalize Leo for his Costneresque accent? Or will the boy wonder finally get his shot with The Departed? Can you hear that deafening industry buzz on Dreamgirls? No? Do you live east of La Cienega, you loser? Is Letters of Iwo Jima a late arriving dark horse, a la Million Dollar Baby? Will Peter O'Toole's refusal to cross the Atlantic cost him his last shot at the elusive award?

Eager for answers? Me neither. Until I started perusing this section one idle morning, I hadn't given these questions a second thought. And considering that I'm a movie geek who can name every Oscar Best Picture winner from 1927 on, I started to wonder: does the general reader actually care about this crap? If so, why?

Since the Los Angeles Times caters to the entertainment industry, you can argue that maybe this section is a local thing. But how to explain the editorial decision of the Paper of Record, which deemed the Oscar horse-race so vital to its readership that it has been hosting a frequently-updated blog called "The CarpetBagger" for over a year? And the hundreds of Oscar sites that obsessively detail the studios' every move? Besides the actual industry insiders, why are there so many people eager to play-act being an insider on one of blogs now tracking the Oscar race? In fact, why "track" the Oscar race at all?

It's one thing to be disappointed at the Oscar party when your favorite loses out to some piece of shit. But if you can't get over Brokeback Mountain's loss last year in a couple of hours -- unless your name is James Schamus or Ang Lee -- you're in need of some serious medical attention. The Oscar results, in the grand scheme of things, mean next to nothing. I know, we care about all kinds of trivialities. How is following the Oscars any different than following sports, for example? First of all, allegiances to sports teams have been formed over years; there's a longstanding emotional attachment, not to mention civic or national pride that you feel about the team from your city or country. Can someone really be that attached to Capote? And so what if a bunch of strangers prefer Crash to your favorite? A more important distinction is that the point of sports is winning. You follow sports to find out who wins and loses, which is settled on the field. The point of movie-watching isn't, or shouldn't be, following "winners and losers". If O'Toole wins his Oscar, does it actually enhance your enjoyment of the movie? Would it make Venus any better, more worthwhile as art or entertainment?

Why not devote that wasted ink to something important, like when we'll be getting out of Iraq, or when Britney will finally start donning knickers again? Vexed as I may be, it's apparent that throngs of people care about the Oscar race as a kind of sport, keeping horse-race sites like Movie City News thriving. Scott Tobias and Noel Murray share my befuddlement, and in their Onionavclub exchange, offer up some terrific points. Noel is on to something when he links the rise of Oscar prognostication to a decline in the esteem of movie criticism. Oscar prognostication/tracking satisfies the reader's temptation to see what's up and down, but does so in a putatively "objective" fashion. Oscar stories end up flattering the reader by offering up buzz instead of expertise, and they provide the reader with handy movie-ranking shorthand. Why bother discussing the merits of a movie when you can now argue about the more "objective" Oscar-worthiness of the movie? "You liked The Good German? Well, I see no nominations besides at best cinematography. Oscar voters would never go for something that dark."

At one time, the Oscar race was interesting as a parlor game. But now it's been inflated to such a degree that the Oscar campaign itself is worthy of extensive news coverage. We now have innumerable weirdos, folks who aren't even film aficionados, now versed in the Best Supporting Actress race, which means being experts in predicting how a bunch of old farts will feel about unseen female supporting performances. The end is nigh, I say.

Hail to the Baby Bears + BCS

Congrats to the LA satellite campus for pulling off one of the more satisfying upsets of the college football season, using an unpredictable blitzing scheme that knocked the $C quarterback on his booty time and time again. By outwitting a physically superior team, the Powdered Blues bought beleaguered coach Kevin Dorrell more time and put UCLA football back on the radar. Oh, and they knocked the Spoiled Children out of the national championship race. Ha ha.

SC will play in the BCS consolation game, aka The Granddaddy of Them All, against the Wolverines, who were sorta jobbed out of the championship game by the shameless lobbying of Florida head coach Urban "Mack" Meyer. Few believe that the SEC champ is a better team than Michigan -- rumors on message boards suggest that Vegas would make Big Blue six point favorites against the Gators on a neutral field. From parts of four Gator games I've seen, Florida is a fast, athletic team that relies too much on trickery and played to their opponent's level (South Carolina, Florida St.). I think the Buckeyes will destroy them. And the custom in determining who's the more deserving one-loss team, absent games vs. common opponents, is to see who had the better loss: Michigan fell to the #1 team in the country on the road in a competitive game; Florida fell to the #8 team on the road, in an equally competitive game. Advantage Michigan. But I can't deny that the Gators prevailed in the toughest conference, had a tougher schedule, and that, all things being equal, you'd knock out the team that "already had its shot".

In the end, it's probably better for the overall BCS championship game that Florida got in. If the Buckeyes were to prevail a second time over the Wolverines, and Florida routs its opponent (as would have been likely if its opponent were the Foldin' Irish) in the Sugar Bowl, we'd never hear the end of it. (Though imagine what would happen if Florida ekes out a sloppy win against an uninspired OSU, and Michigan destroys the Trojans?)

Is this controversy yet another reason to scrap the BCS system and go to a sixteen team playoff? Let me defend the BCS for a sec. The college football season is the most exciting in American sports because regular season games take on immense stakes. Each game becomes a kind of playoff, as one stumble may torpedo your chances for a national championship/conference championship. With a playoff system, would Texas-Ohio St. in September be so crucial? Or Louisville-Rutgers? The NBA doesn't really start until the playoffs. The NFL doesn't start until the 14th week. Whatever its flaws, the bowl system eliminates the "meaningless game" for contending teams. And it keeps people debating well into the night.

That said, my preferred approach is the oft-proposed BCS+ system. Either a 4-team or 8-team playoff, rotating existing bowls, makes a whole lot of sense. The 8-team playoff works like this: you play 4 bowl games in late December featuring 8 qualified BCS teams (6 major conferences and two at-large bids) using the present system. The four winners square off in the 2 bowl games in early January, leading to a championship game on January 9 or 10th. By adopting this approach, you'd be sacrificing some of the drama of the regular season. But the bowl games would be much more meaningful -- they won't be a bunch of exhibition games. And it'd cut down on the annual BCS controversy (nobody would really argue that Notre Dame or Arkansas "deserves" a shot to be the national champ).

The other way to do it is to keep the present system, but have a four-team playoff. If this format had been enacted for this year, you'd have Ohio St. v. LSU in the Rose Bowl and Michigan v. Florida in the Sugar Bowl. The winners of each game will play in the BCS championship game. The benefit would be to keep the intrigue of the BCS and the excitement of regular season games, but avoid the main problem we see every two years: screwing over an equally deserving third team or fourth team. I think this makes the most sense, being the least disruptive and radical way of addressing the #2 vs. #3 problem. Why not do this?

r.i.p. Robert Altman