Oscar Bits and Bites

A few happenings on the web related to the sleeping dog that is the Oscar race.  We wait, we wait, we wait.

In Contention reports that Hans Zimmer has bowed out of the Oscar race this year and will not submit to it.  Who can blame him by this point?

So, why is Zimmer choosing to pass on a potential tenth trip to the ball (and second Oscar statuette)? Well, as he tells the Reporter, he simply doesn’t feel up to it:

As soon as you get nominated, and I don’t care who you are — there are certainly people of better character than me — it all goes crazy… You get the phone call at five o’clock and after that you have to do the interviews and then do the parties and meet all these people and do all these things. It’s disruptive, and I think it would be more interesting to observe it for a year. It does worry me that we have to stay relevant. Times are changing, very rapidly. Usually what I do when things are changing rapidly is stand still and observe.

Woody Allen talks to the Paris review.  It is a wonderfully illuminating interview, and naturally he uses the opportunity to explain why he’s a lesser artist compared to those he admires.  Remember in Husband and Wives when Mia Farrow wants to be a poet and he says something like “I love ee cummings” and she says back, “well I’m not quite that good yet.”  Woody Allen’s reverence for the greatest among us will always prevent him from appreciating his own genius.  Not that anyone should ever sit around appreciating their own genius…

A word about this interview. It was hard for me because I don’t like to aggrandize my work by discussing its influences or my themes or that kind of thing. That kind of talk is more applicable to works of greater stature. I say this with no false modesty—that I feel I have done no really significant work, whatsoever, in any medium. I feel that unequivocally. I feel that what I have done so far in my life is sort of the ballast that is waiting to be uplifted by two or three really fine works that may hopefully come. We’ve been sitting and talking about Faulkner, say, and Updike and Bergman—I mean, I obviously can’t talk about myself in the same way at all. I feel that what I’ve done so far is the . . . the bed of lettuce the hamburger must rest on. I feel that if I could do, in the rest of my life, two or three really fine works—perhaps make a terrific film or write a fine play or something—then everything prior to that point would be interesting as developmental works. I feel that’s the status of my works—they’re a setting waiting for a jewel. But there’s no jewel there at the moment. So I’m starting to feel my interview is pompous. I need some heavy gems in there somewhere. But I hope I’ve come to a point in my life where within the next ten or fifteen years I can do two or three things that lend credence to all the stuff I’ve done already . . . Let’s hope.

Jeff Wells, myself and Tom O’Neil chat about the Oscar race in our 53rd episode of Oscar Poker – on the slate is Steven Spielberg and the hopes for War Horse, the date change of the NYFCC and various other sorts of things.  Jeff Wells calls it the “Oscar Poker ramble,” and I think that described it perfectly.

Oscar Poker Episode 53