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Oscars 2008

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from: Dana Stevens
to: Kim Masters and Troy Patterson

Diablo "Pebbles" Cody

Posted Monday, Feb. 25, 2008, at 4:12 PM ET

I was planning to wrap things up after that last post, because everyone knows that the news cycle of the Oscars is shorter than the life span of a gastrotrich. But Troy is right: There are some matters that still need addressing, particularly in the shmatte department.

Daniel Day-Lewis' wife is Rebecca Miller, daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. She's a published fiction writer who's also directed several films (Personal Velocity, The Ballad of Jack and Rose). She's just too smart and cool to be wearing that dress unironically. I honestly suspect that she and DDL were deliberately spoofing the whole who-are-you-wearing red-carpet culture by dressing as they did—note his brown suede clodhoppers poking out from that black tuxedo (which, for all we know, he made himself during his summer interning with a master Florentine cobbler). Rebecca's dress even has a certain Victorian/frontier-brothel vibe that may be a tribute to the period setting of There Will Be Blood. After observing him throughout this awards season, I've decided that Daniel Day-Lewis actually is some sort of hyperevolved exemplar of superior humanity. He's what every doting parent falsely imagines their child to be: more beautiful, gifted, intelligent, and gracious than anyone else alive. Maybe Rebecca's dress is her way of saying, "Fuck you, world. I've landed Daniel Day-Lewis and I can wear anything I want."

Rebecca Miller. Click image to expand.

As for Diablo Cody looking like a grown-up Pebbles Flintstone, I have a feeling she, too, would be delighted at the horror her outfit (a rhinestone-trimmed leopard-print muumuu slit to the hip, with skull-and-crossbones earrings and gold ballet flats) has provoked. I was all prepared to hate on Cody for being overpackaged and overconfident of her win, but she won my heart by showing up in a nutty getup clearly of her own devising and giving a speech that was unrehearsed, warm, and completely free of prefab Juno-esque zingers.

Viewers were so burned out by the time Scott Rudin finally gave his acceptance speech for best picture that you had to TiVo back to notice what Kim points out—that his shout-out to his life partner, John Barlow, was unaccompanied by a cutaway shot to Barlow's face. Defamer even notes that Rudin's mention of his "honey" was absent from the official press transcript and wonders whether the academy was guilty of "pinkwashing." It seems likelier that the transcriber, like me, was just too worn down by four hours of clip montages to get it all. But the producers' failure to allow Barlow his moment to kvell onscreen was less forgivable (if only because he may be the only person in Hollywood who likes Scott Rudin). When Melissa Etheridge won for best song last year, she gave her wife, Tammy Lynn Michaels, an on-camera kiss, but they're women, and attractive blondes to boot. I guess being publicly gay at the Oscars is still no country for old men. But maybe next year.

Until then,
Dana

dialogues
entries
1234567
from: Dana Stevens
to: Kim Masters and Troy Patterson

Diablo "Pebbles" Cody

Posted Monday, Feb. 25, 2008, at 4:12 PM ET
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Kim Masters is an NPR correspondent and the author of The Keys to the Kingdom: The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everyone Else. Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic. Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.
Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer. Entry 5: Photograph of Diablo Cody by Kevin Winter/Getty Images. Photograph of Jon Stewart on Slate's home page by Kevin Winter/Getty Images. Photograph of Rebecca Miller and Daniel Day-Lewis by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images.
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