Oscar bits and bites

David O. Russell probably didn’t know there was a camera on him when he heard Emmanuelle Riva had just won the BAFTA.

In Contention’s Kris Tapley does his annual Best Shots of the Year post.  

In typically old Hollywood fashion, you can’t have a leading actress race without a feud – but Chastain calls out media instead for needing this narrative.  And it’s true, right? Admit it.

Jeff Wells on the Argo backlash – those mean ol’ directors who “snubbed” him have turned this race into the reality show that it’s now become – we’ll never know how Argo might have fared without it.  Damn that Benh Zeitlin, Steven Spielberg, David O. Russell, Ang Lee and Michael Haneke.  Damn them!

And the Wall Street Journal says what Joe Courtney should remember when he made a last minute bid to do what so many others have done this year that: “Civil War historian Warshauer suggests Courtney’s view is a bit too positive, since both before and throughout the war, Connecticut was virulently racist.”

Connecticut’s State Democratic Convention responded to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 with a resolution saying it “would disgrace our country in the eyes of the civilized world, and carry lust, rapine, and murder into every household of the slaveholding states.” And once the 13^th amendment passed, when Connecticut citizens were asked to remove the word “white” from the state constitution’s description of who could vote, they soundly refused – on two separate occasions.

Congressman Courtney’s point that Connecticut’s votes on the 13^th amendment were misrepresented in “Lincoln” is indisputable. But in tinkering with history, Steven Spielberg may accidentally have more accurately depicted 1865 Connecticans’ complex and conflicted feelings about slavery itself.