Entry 1:

Dear Geoffrey,

Oscar night approaches. Are you excited? A part of me is, just as I can't seem to shed the childish excitement of going to a movie after all these years. Movies continue to fill me up; I'm not disappointed in them because even the disappointing ones seem to leave me with enough visual/emotional residue of landscapes and cities or erotic longing for the beautiful people on-screen, and there are always at least a dozen or two actually quite novel, brilliant, and artistically satisfying films every year. I don't believe at all in that notion of "the death of cinema"; it's actually quite robust, except that now I have to trawl for my pleasures in a much wider arc, following the careers of Iranian and Chinese filmmakers whose difficult-to-pronounce names I might have previously found enough reason to dismiss them.

There is a widening gulf between so-called esoteric, marginal, festival cinema and the stuff that goes into mainstream distribution. For instance, just last week I saw two terrific films at a French series at Lincoln Center: Esther Kahn, by Arnaud Desplechin (it's actually in English, starring Summer Phoenix), and Chantal Akerman's adaptation of Proust's La Captive. I could say much more about what makes both these films exceptional, but it'll be a minor miracle if either finds a distributor or an audience. I'm beginning to feel like a dirty old man who frequents weird places for my movie kicks (museums, art houses like Film Forum, tapes and DVDs loaned like samizdat, hand to hand). On the other hand, I continue to check out the big releases that everyone is talking about that have $10-, $20-, $30-million budgets just for promotion and that end up being featured for the Academy Awards. ("Academy" is an interesting word in this context because there is something academic and very studied about big hits like Gladiator or Erin Brokovich; they seem like the fruit of graduate film studies programs.)

Oscar Night has become for me something like a cross between New Year's Eve and presidential Election Night: I start out ever hopeful, and then I usually get dragged down by my alienation from the popular vote. (I'm still trying to process the Gore-Bush election, where I sided with the popular vote and still lost.) There's often the depressing momentum of a landslide, the big picture unfairly scooping up the little awards as well as the major ones. And by the time the Best Editing award is announced (almost always it's linked to Best Picture), the suspense is all over. I fear that happening this year with Gladiator, my least favorite of the five finalists.

Usually I watch the Oscars at home, but there have been years past when I went to a friend's house and score sheets were handed out and prizes given to the one who came closest to picking the winners. It's always an odd, torn experience, trying to watch the screen while drinking and chatting with people around you. I just got an invite to a film-critic friend's house for this year's event, and he writes, somewhat defensively, "not to honor the Oscars, which I find terminally silly, but just as an excuse to get some good people together for some drinks and fun." I myself don't find the Oscars terminally silly; I'm afraid I still watch them like some German émigré sociologist, hoping for clues to the American temperament. That is, when I'm not trying to stare down the cleavage of some presenter. I have practically banged my head against the screen and given myself a black eye, getting so close to some of those gowns. Perhaps the television set of the future will be like an X-ray machine, giving us glimpses of the bodies underneath the clothes. But I digress. One time I invited this woman I was having an affair with to attend a speech I was giving, which happened to be on Oscar night. She swore she would come, then blew me off, of course, and when I went around to her house afterwards, full of reproach, she answered, "How could you expect me to skip Oscar Night? I always watch the Oscars!" At the time I thought her shallow and unloving, but now I see her point. Lovers come and go, but these rituals give us the through-lines of our lives.

I promise to tell you in a later message which are my personal favorites up for Oscars and which films I've liked the best this past year or so (most of which were not nominated for anything). But let this be a start for now.

As ever,
Phillip