David Carr and Michael Shannon, photo credit: Hollywood-Elsewhere
Variety’s Anne Thompson chats with David Carr about getting back into the Oscar game (his site will launch December 1). For his part, Carr says he won’t be doing a lot of reading:
While Carr installed his Google Reader last week so he can check out other Oscar blogs, he wants to avoid falling into group-think because, he finds, “often it’s wrong. It’s like an echo chamber. I’ll be doing less reading and more phone calling.”
It’s true that it becomes like an echo chamber. This, because, deep down, everyone is afraid of being wrong. We’re so afraid of being wrong that we look around to see what everyone else is doing in order to avoid the humiliation of twisting in the wind; being one of fifty is better than being alone and twisting in the wind. Anne likes The Bagger (who doesn’t?):
I dig what Carr is doing because he’s a student of the form. He doesn’t rest on his superior knowledge and writing chops. (He also published a well-reviewed memoir this year, The Night of the Gun.) He’s humble. He gets out and pounds the pavement, notebook, tape recorder and videocam in hand. While he has backup help, if he wants to post a blog item swiftly, he will do it himself. (Most of the time he files to a desk where editors make sure he doesn’t make any hideous typos or grammatical errors that would embarrass the Times.) The pace of a blog is fierce. “If I know it, other people do too,” he says. “Sooner is almost always better than later.”
