Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 222

Chris Christie Rides to Trump's Rescue

Governor Chris Christie on Friday endorsed his former rival Donald Trump for the presidency, adding another stunning development to a race for the White House that has surprised at nearly every turn.

The New Jersey governor gave Trump his backing during a press conference before a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, in a joint appearance that was kept secret until Christie appeared before the cameras. “There is no better fighter than Donald Trump, and he’s going to fight for the American people,” Christie said. Trump, he said, was “rewriting the playbook of American politics” and was the strongest Republican candidate “to take on the D.C. establishment.”

For Trump, the endorsement materialized like a life raft on what was arguably the worst day of his campaign for president. Senator Marco Rubio landed numerous rhetorical blows on the front-runner during Thursday night’s debate and followed it up with a bravado performance at a campaign rally Friday, where he assumed Trump’s bullying persona to mock him for misspelling tweets, applying makeup to his sweating upper lip, and for demanding a full-length mirror to, in Rubio’s words, “make sure his pants weren't wet.”

By endorsing Trump, Christie may be angering Republican Party big-wigs who are desperately trying to stop the billionaire’s march to the nomination. But he is undoubtedly Trump’s biggest “establishment” get to date, and as Rubio’s former nemesis on the debate stage, the timing of his endorsement could not be more advantageous. Standing alongside Trump, Christie immediately got to work trying to cut Rubio down once again. “Desperate people do desperate things,” Christie said of the barrage that Rubio hurled at Trump on Thursday and Friday. And he attacked his lack of experience and his frequent absences from the Capitol during his single term as a Florida senator. Rubio, Christie said, “has shown himself over a period of time to be wholly unprepared to be president of the United States.”

Trump laid into Rubio in his own characteristic fashion as well. “I watched a part of his little act, and he’s a desperate guy,” he said. “He is a nervous nelly.”

“I have never seen a human being sweat like this man sweats,” Trump added, saying that Rubio was also applying makeup “with a trowel” backstage at the debate. And he reminded reporters of the “epic meltdown” Rubio suffered at the hands of Christie, when he began repeating talking points during a debate earlier this month in New Hampshire. “Once a choker, always a choker,” Trump said.

As for why he chose Trump to endorse, Christie cited a long friendship between their families and said he would be the strongest Republican to go up against Hillary Clinton in the fall. He made little mention of the many criticisms he leveled at Trump when he was a candidate, such as when he called Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States “ridiculous.” Yet the immediate question is what might he get for his endorsement? Trump was asked whether he’d be a candidate to be his running mate. “I don’t want to discuss that, but he’s certainly got the talent,” the front-runner replied.

Taco ’Bout Breakfast Wars

A few hundred miles northwest of Houston there is a modern-day Châlons being fought that makes Thursday evening’s GOP internecine brawl look like a state dinner. This war isn’t over a petty issue like healthcare, immigration, or the future of the Supreme Court, but rather, one of crucial cultural and culinary vitality: the origin of breakfast tacos.

The rift was loosed last week by a well-meaning New York writer who on a visit to Texas made the grievous error of ever-so-slightly associating the rise of the breakfast staple to the City of Austin. Among its charges: Breakfast tacos are “the city’s beloved morning dish” and “Austin is the birthplace of the phrase breakfast taco.”

Horrible sin? Well, to many in Texas, this is akin to lauding New Jersey for its bagel culture and then in the same breath, crediting Peter Minuit with the discovery of Manhattan.

The truth is that like almost anything culinary, particularly in the United States, its origins are disputed. The glorious enfolding of egg and potato into a flour or corn tortilla was popular elsewhere long before Austin became one of America’s trendiest destinations and fast-growing cities.

Corpus Christi, and more notably, San Antonio, both of which have far more credible claims to the breakfast, grew quickly enraged at the slight. For the writer’s crime of “taco negligence,” a hyperbolic Change.org petition, written from the Alamo City and now signed by more than 1,600 people, demanded his immediate exile from Texas or that he turn himself over for “mandatory reeducation and rehabilitation” in the City of San Antonio.

Here are two less-charged sample paragraphs from the several hundred word screed:

It is laughable to posit that a city whose people are often unaware that Texas was not populated by Anglo Saxons since the dawn of time, and just as often view Mexican Americans as undesirables to be given a wide berth when encountered and/or quietly swept out of sight before the neighbors see, has any claim to authority over the subject of anything taco-related.

More absurd is the notion that “breakfast taco culture” was either codified or normalized by a generation of birkenstock-clad tech-jockeys and university incubatees majoring in Phish and Social Safety Net Surfing, and not by the laborers who spent the last century waking up at 5 a.m., breaking their fast on huevos con papas outside a truck, to build the aforementioned demographic’s luxury condos.

But if you think this controversy didn’t quickly escalate into a full-blown diplomatic crisis, you don’t know Texas well.

The scene made the most inflamed showdowns at Turtle Bay look like Hands Across America. A media delegate from San Antonio wrote “10 reasons to hate Austin beyond their breakfast-taco arrogance,” in which he charged (among many things) that Austin’s claim to Live Music Capital was “a lie.”

A representative from the Austin American-Statesman lobbied for peace, but only after describing San Antonio’s aesthetic as “London circa World War II but with more crumbling buildings.”

Gustavo Arellano, one of America’s foremost taco experts, walked himself into the fray to mediate:

In this case, he’s right to deem Austin a nexus for breakfast taco culture, as is my colleague-mentor-compa Robb Walsh in saying that Austin popularized breakfast tacos in this century thanks to South by Southwest (Sorry, San Anto, but hipsters haven’t descended on ustedes yet, and y’all be happy that hasn’t happened).

He continues, “But the point remains: Breakfast tacos were already a known commodity long before Austin officially decided to go breakfast-taco crazy,” and then ends with a swoosh. “San Antonio never had to brag about its breakfast taco love—folks there just call it ‘breakfast.’”

Arellano was then attacked by a bevy of commenters from across Mexico.

FIFA, Ho-Hum?

FIFA has a new boss.

Soccer’s governing body elected Gianni Infantino as its president to succeed Sepp Blatter, the disgraced chief who was banned for six years for violating the organization’s ethics rules.

“We will restore the image of FIFA,” Infantino said in his first address as president.

Infantino won in the second round of voting, earning 115 votes, defeating Bahrain’s Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa (88), and Jordan’s Prince Ali bin al-Hussein (four votes).

The election of Infantino, who holds Swiss and Italian citizenship, and who runs UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, firmly enshrines soccer’s power in the continent. There had been speculation ahead of the vote that the new FIFA’s chief would be more reflective of soccer’s support base in Asia, the Middle East, or Africa.

Prior to the election, FIFA passed a package at its extraordinary congress, to give the session its official name, meant to overhaul the institution.

The way FIFA is governed will be overhauled: FIFA Council replaces ExCo; standing committees reduced from 26 to 9. pic.twitter.com/6zMm6596uU

— FIFA Media (@fifamedia) February 26, 2016

Key committees to have at least 50% independent members. Plus eligibility checks for all elected officials by independent Review Committee.

— FIFA Media (@fifamedia) February 26, 2016

Separation of power is a crucial part of the reforms. FIFA Council to set strategy, General Secretariat to take everyday business decisions.

— FIFA Media (@fifamedia) February 26, 2016

President & Council members to serve maximum term of 3 x 4 years. Compensation for senior figures to be disclosed. pic.twitter.com/Ltf0hG6VKZ

— FIFA Media (@fifamedia) February 26, 2016

Reforms commit FIFA & its members to do more to promote #womensfootball & improve gender balance in decision-making. pic.twitter.com/GmxFL0QDp1

— FIFA Media (@fifamedia) February 26, 2016

FIFA will further embed human rights components into the organisation’s policies/activities: https://t.co/TWEwKNi3eJ pic.twitter.com/3rXJu5oZ3m

— FIFA Media (@fifamedia) February 26, 2016

There will be greater participation & diversity in decision-making including a new Football Stakeholder’s Committee. pic.twitter.com/Cl275BZZCQ

— FIFA Media (@fifamedia) February 26, 2016

The changes, which will go into effect in 60 days, appear to address some of the concerns about how FIFA was run—and seem to reflect some of the recommendations made by FIFA’s reform committee in December on ways to overhaul how soccer was governed.

But those changes aside, Infantino’s biggest challenge will be to change the perception of how FIFA works. Transparency has never been big in global sport, nowhere more so than soccer, which, under Blatter, who had served five terms as president since 1998, was tarnished by allegations of corruption, questions about the way in which World Cups were awarded, and criminal inquiries by U.S. and Swiss authorities that resulted in the arrests of several FIFA executives.  

“It is fair to assume that the house of FIFA is polluted, and if you’ve been in the house for a number of years, you’re probably contaminated in one way or another even if you didn’t contribute to the pollution directly,” said Jeff Thinnes, CEO and co-founder of JTI, Inc., and an expert on ethics and sport. “That having been said, I think what really is the important question is what is the scope of the new president’s responsibilities going forward, and I think that scope should be very limited.”

Bigger questions remain about how soccer is run locally, where regional soccer confederations and national associations wield much influence. Their roles, along with a lack of transparency, has sullied perceptions of how the sport is governed.

“The real reforms that need to take place can’t just rest in FIFA headquarters,” Thinnes said. “They really need to be driven through all of the sub-levels of this sport. and that’s just impossible with one person.”

Gods of Egypt: An Absurd CGI Circus

Any review of Gods of Egypt should begin by noting two unrelated facts about the film. The first, as has been widely discussed, is that it dramatizes the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris but features a starring cast of mostly white actors, a move that doomed it to criticism and mockery months before its release, and rightly so. The second is that in the film, directed by the agreeably bonkers Alex Proyas, the god Set (Gerard Butler) rides a chariot pulled by giant green flying beetles, making the case that the movie is more than aware of its own absurdity.

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It’s hard to fathom which Hollywood executive decided that mining Egyptian mythology would produce a box-office bonanza, but the film’s $140 million budget seems a clear indicator of faith that it would. As could only be expected, Proyas—the director of spectacles like The Crow, Dark City, and I, Robot—has harnessed that cash for a mad CGI circus. While the film is far too long (127 minutes) and far too silly to actually qualify as good, viewers willing to accept the story’s inherent stupidity might find some fun in the mayhem. After all, where else could you see Geoffrey Rush, playing the almighty Ra, grow to 50 feet and drag the sun to the other side of a flat earth while shooting solar beams at an advancing chaos serpent bent on consuming him? That alone may not be worth the price of admission, but Gods of Egypt seeks to justify itself by aiming for that kind of theatricality every five minutes.

The plot is fairly simple: The aging god-king of Egypt, Osiris (Bryan Brown), decides to pass the throne to his son Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), but is usurped by his brother Set (Butler), the god of darkness, who immediately begins to sow chaos in the kingdom. A weakened Horus joins forces with a mere mortal named Bek (Brenton Thwaites) to reclaim Egypt, with help from the goddess of love Hathor (Elodie Yung), the god of wisdom Thoth (Chadwick Boseman), and grandpa Ra up in the sky, riding his solar chariot and trying to ignore the squabbling of his godly offspring.

The film conceives of the Egyptian gods as uber-celebrities who stand 10 feet tall but mingle among the humans who worship them. CGI trickery helps Coster-Waldau look considerably bigger than Thwaites every time they share the screen (which is a lot). It never looks natural, but it’s frequently hilarious, especially in a scene where Thoth grabs Bek’s face with a hand big enough to envelop his whole head. The gods are not only tall and beautiful—they also bleed molten gold, and can transform at will into what can only be described as … animal robots. To do battle, Horus sprouts metal wings and turns into a giant robo-falcon, like some ancient Transformer.

Where else could you see Geoffrey Rush grow to 50 feet and drag the sun to the other side of a flat earth while shooting solar beams at an advancing chaos serpent bent on eating him?

The presence of mortals is probably necessary to the overall plot, but it’s a major drag in a film dominated by super-sized, inhuman characters. Bek is boyishly handsome and charming, but any time the Gods of Egypt concerned itself with his pitiful human desires, I yawned. Coster-Waldau, so rakish and dark as Jaime Lannister on Game of Thrones, is stuck in blander territory as Horus, who has to learn to be a little less cocky so that he can save the day. Butler and Rush seem more properly attuned to the film’s crackpot tone, overacting in a way that complements the story’s narrative and visual excesses.

Butler is playing an Egyptian god who takes the form of a giant canine, but he sticks pretty firmly to his natural Scottish accent, perhaps realizing that the film is too far gone to worry about minor details like that. Rush should feel lost beneath the layers of old-man makeup and fiery graphics Proyas cakes him in, but he really sells the grand daily grind of Ra’s celestial busywork. At one point, Set shoots into the sky to visit him, and the film cuts to Ra gingerly working the gears of his solar boat—that sun isn’t going to set itself, after all.

After making sojourns to the desert, an oasis, the land of the dead, and the chamber of a sphinx, Gods of Egypt finally ends in a cacophony of action that’s still practically impossible to comprehend. Like all of Proyas’s blockbuster efforts (including I, Robot and the Nicolas Cage drama Knowing), Gods of Egypt gets lost in its own budget, constantly shooting to outdo its visual grandeur but forgetting to lend it any depth. But there’s a mad ambition at work that’s harder to fault, Scottish Egyptians notwithstanding.

Why Short Films Are Still Thriving

It’s night. The city lights twinkle. A man and woman stand in the middle of an empty road. They’re awkward, but adorably so. He’s about to kiss her until—

“CUT! I don’t like this.” A man explodes out of his stomach—the kisser is revealed to be a puppet, controlled by someone else, who isn’t happy about how the first-kiss scene is proceeding. Another “puppeteer” erupts out of the woman’s body and retorts, “Get back in your people puppet; this is amazing!”

“It’s clichéd, I’ve seen it before!” says the first man, unimpressed.

The two exasperated puppeteers discard their human-sized dolls and begin to fight with fists; in a whirlwind, a sword, a cat, and a jar full of coins materialize as weapons. “This movie could have been awesome!” one exclaims before landing a punch—until it’s revealed that the puppeteers are also puppets themselves. With an irreverent spirit and a pointed twist on the repetitive conventions movies often rely on, the film Puppets, created by the directing team Daniels, manages to set up and invert the viewers’ expectations—all in less than three minutes.

Puppets is one example of how some of the most creative and engaging stories today are being told through short films, even as the genre remains marginalized in the cultural mainstream. Defined by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences as any film under 40 minutes, the medium has never quite established a model for profitability, and only a few shorts attain the hundreds of thousands of views that most Buzzfeed videos gather within a matter of hours. But more recently, the Internet has allowed people outside the studio system to create and distribute their own work, and has helped filmmakers reach viewers around the world with unprecedented ease. As a result, short film is again becoming a vibrant and original medium in a blockbuster-driven, reboot-riddled industry.

Part of the challenge with short films is that there are very few ways for their creators to make money off them, which means often the only people working in the field are students and a handful of auteurs. But the lack of pressure to be profitable also enables short filmmakers to take risks, and the subculture surrounding shorts rewards pioneers in the genre. In order to be successful, a short film has to build up characters and conflict within minutes, if not seconds. It’s what Nicole Grindle, the executive producer of Sanjay’s Super Team, calls “a storytelling puzzle,” but while it’s extremely challenging, she says, it’s also “inspiring and rejuvenating for all involved.”

This year’s Oscar-nominated animated and live-action short films are a celebration of the medium’s creativity. My colleague David Sims has noted how the animated short World of Tomorrow is one of the most original and thought-provoking films across all categories. Sanjay’s Super Team, Pixar’s first cartoon by a director of Indian origin, is considered one of the studio’s best, and has been lauded for its personal take on immigrant parents and their more assimilated children. The live-action vignettes transport viewers around the world, from Albania to Afghanistan, and tell heart-wrenching stories of friendship, family, and war.

But the Oscar-nominated shorts represent just a fraction of the breadth of stories being told through the format, especially online. Shorts provide a rich training ground for aspiring filmmakers and artists, and some even make it to the big screen: Daniels, the directing duo behind Puppets, just won the Sundance directing award for their first feature, in which Daniel Radcliffe played a farting corpse; the Duplass brothers (Safety Not Guaranteed, Togetherness) began their careers making shorts; and the directors Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air), Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club), and Jason Winer (Modern Family) all used shorts to display their talents before moving toward features and television. Other Hollywood luminaries like Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson have continued to make short films even after achieving box-office success.  

By relegating the medium to second-tier, the film establishment tends to ignore shorts’ stand-alone creative potential.

Short film also has a well-established presence at festivals, and there are now dozens of shorts-specific fests: The Palm Springs International ShortFest is the largest showcase of shorts on the continent, and the Sydney-based TropFest claims to be the largest short-film festival in the world, having gathered an audience of more than 100,000 for its 2016 festival on February 14. This year’s Sundance Film Festival showed a renewed commitment to shorts, adding them to two new categories that previously only screened features.

But according to Cynthia Felando, a film and media studies lecturer at University of California Santa Barbara, Hollywood’s tendency to view shorts as useful only as “calling cards” that demonstrate the talent of a new filmmaker actually marginalizes them further. By relegating the medium to second-tier, the film establishment tends to ignore shorts’ stand-alone creative potential. Some “proof of concept” shorts, like Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash or Ruari Robinson’s mind-boggling The Leviathan, are made specifically to give potential investors a taste of a filmmaker’s vision. “Hollywood seems not to recognize the value of shorts as a unique and worthy production form, in terms of both art and entertainment,” Felando told me in an email.

Beyond being largely discounted by their own industry, short films don’t draw a large audience in the cultural mainstream either. Despite the increasing popularity of the Oscar-nominated shorts’ theatrical screenings in the months leading up to the ceremony, short films aren’t the type of content to frequently pop up in your newsfeed; they can be difficult to find unless you go looking, either at a film festival or online. In a 2014 piece in The New Yorker, Richard Brody points out that there’s no established mainstream showcase for shorts, and that “good short films don’t get the attention they deserve.” However, he argues that short film “can act as the fling of a stake far into uncharted territory ... the short film doesn’t supplant the feature; it nourishes it.” Having a thriving, supportive short-film community enables individual artists to challenge the established conventions of the feature and test out ideas that wouldn’t necessarily bring in studio backers, but are invigorating to watch—a sentiment often associated with independent film in general.

* * *

Shorts didn’t always operate on the cultural periphery. The first films in history would qualify as shorts: The first motion picture, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, made by the Lumiere Brothers in 1895, is only 46 seconds long. Even after the feature took over as the prominent form starting in the 1910s, shorts remained a fixture through the mid-1950s. One of the most famous shorts of all time, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s famous 1929 work of surrealism Un Chien Andalou—remembered in particular for the unsettling scene where a man slits a woman’s eyeball open—had an eight-month run in Paris when it first was released. From the late-’40s to the mid-’50s, all the major film studios actively produced and screened shorts in movie theaters, usually right before the feature started (a practice only Disney and Pixar have continued). But due to commercial pressures in the ’50s and ’60s, theaters shifted toward showing more previews instead of shorts, and by the end of the ’60s, short films had all but disappeared from the mainstream.

However, as the ’90s boom in cheaper technology like camcorders and DSLRs lowered the barrier of entry for filmmakers, short film began to make something of a comeback, albeit on the fringes. The revival was cemented with the founding of YouTube in 2005, which created a widespread platform to both distribute and view short films. Ten years later, the Internet is full of short-form videos, from how-tos to memes to music videos to vlogs. So it might seem like animated and live-action short films, distinct in artistic intent, would be ideally suited for the 21st century. But shorts haven’t regained their former glory.

“You say short film, and people think dark rooms in Polish film festivals where there are dogs being chased through forests.”

Part of the problem lies with the Internet itself. With seemingly endless choices lurking in the vast amounts of online content, the audience for different media has fractured. “The Internet has redefined popularity,” says Jason Squire, an associate professor at USC’s film school and the author of The Movie Business Book. “Because it has no borders, the Internet is a salad bowl of all sorts of expression. This is both good and bad for filmmakers who are serious about building a career.” While it’s easy to put a film up online, it’s even more difficult to stand out—especially because shorts, which tend to favor a slower build up for a bigger pay off, have to catch their viewers’ interest within seconds in order to capture the Internet surfer’s shorter-than-a-goldfish attention span.

On top of that, shorts have a somewhat stuffy reputation. “You say short film, and people think dark rooms in Polish film festivals where there are dogs being chased through forests,” says Fabien Riggall, the founder of U.K.-based short-film festival distributor Future Shorts. “But it’s not. It’s Kanye’s Runaway, it’s Woody Allen. But if you say short films, but it’s a turn off—it’s experimental, it’s beginner.

Nevertheless, short filmmakers and aficionados have made their mark online, especially if you know where to look. The sheer number of shorts (a search for “short film” on YouTube, for example, yields more than 30 million results) has led to the rise of curation sites like Vimeo Staff Picks, Film Shortage, and Short of the Week.

According to Jordan McGarry, the head of curation at Vimeo, the site isn’t focused on unearthing viral videos. “It’s about finding a solid audience of people who really appreciate that kind of work,” she says. “It’s not the same number of people watching a cat video on that other well-known video site, but that doesn’t mean it’s an insignificant number of people.” Other metrics besides view count have become more important—original ideas, high production value, and risk-taking. By decreasing the pressure to appeal to the mainstream, Vimeo Staff Picks has become a leading hub for some of the most innovative work online. For example, the home page this week featured playfully rendered objects dancing along to an electronic beat and a watercolor-esque animation of two elderly swimmers who dive deeper than usual and touch another world at the bottom of the pool.

The web’s short-film guardians will continue to reward the unconventional—regardless of the blockbuster economics of the wider industry.

For Short of the Week’s curators, the focus has shifted from the audience to the creators themselves, and the organization works hard to provide constructive criticism on all films that are submitted to them and support to those they do choose to highlight. “Short film didn’t take over the Internet unfortunately,” says Jason Sondhi, the site’s co-creator. “But we saw that there was a huge audience of filmmakers and creative people who were looking at short film on the Internet as a place to get discovered, as a place to get feedback, look for collaborators, and find people who could help push their career forward.”

The Academy, which still acts as the most prestigious arbiter of mainstream taste in the film industry, is not as open to short films that get their start on the Internet. In order to qualify for a short-film Oscar nomination, shorts must have a 7-day theatrical release in Los Angeles County with paid admission, win a qualifying award at a festival, or win a Student Academy award before they can be distributed by any other means. On top of that, filmmakers who want their work to be considered are only allowed to show up to 10 percent of their film’s running time online, which limits their film’s audience to festival-goers, as very few shorts have qualifying theatrical releases these days.

The rules are more relaxed than before, when just having a short film on the Internet was automatically disqualifying, but the Academy has never been an institution to quickly adapt to changes in the industry. Still, the film establishment’s resistance to shorts online won’t stop filmmakers from taking advantage of the community or convenience of the Internet. The web’s short-film guardians will continue to reward the unconventional—regardless of the blockbuster economics of the wider industry. “We as curators want to reward people who are looking for new ways of telling stories,” says Sondhi. “We tend to be very biased toward innovation.”

The Evolution of Judd Apatow’s ‘Nice Guys’

The Judd Apatow canon is, among other things, a repulsive and charming parade of so-called nice guys. These include, to name a few, the actual Nice Guy (Nick Andopolis, played by Jason Segel in Freaks & Geeks), the lazy-stoner Nice Guy (Ben Stone, played by Seth Rogen, in Knocked Up), the stunted-coward Nice Guy (Pete, Paul Rudd’s character This Is 40), and the only-a-nice-guy-can-save-you-from-yourself Nice Guy (Aaron, played by Bill Hader, in Trainwreck).

Then there’s Gus.

Gus is played by Paul Rust in the Apatow-created Netflix original series Love, which was released to the streaming service on February 19. (Rust and Lesley Arfin, who are married, are co-creators.) The show begins with Gus getting his heart broken, and follows him as he picks up the pieces in the weeks and months after his split from a long-time girlfriend. Which sounds like a classic Nice Guy premise (see also: Forgetting Sarah Marshall), especially when Gus is paired with a woman who appears to be the archetypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Mickey, played by Gillian Jacobs.

Except Mickey and Gus aren’t either of these things. Mickey’s not just a stunning beauty with a sailor’s mouth who will cure a stranger’s hangover by hotboxing her car with him: She’s a narcissist struggling with addiction. And Gus is, well, an asshole.

Love’s dismantling of too-familiar tropes—the awkward nice guy, the quirky wild child—is part of what makes the series appealing. It’s engrossing, too, because it’s funny and uncomfortable—though in a sad rather than cringeworthy way, which makes it something of a departure from the Apatow oeuvre. (Any assessment of Love’s merits also requires a mention of the stellar, scene-stealing work by Claudia O’Doherty and Iris Apatow, in particular.)

Apatow has tackled dark subject matter before, and he’s done so successfully. But where he’s faltered, it’s sometimes been because the format he’s working in rewards optimism rather than realism. The Hollywood happy ending. Improbably sunny conclusions that can be either reassuring or maddening, depending on your outlook. Love isn’t like that. Working within the structure of a 10-episode series allows Apatow to explore the real dynamics of a relationship between people who are flawed, and who possibly have no business being together. As it progresses, Gus’s niceness becomes increasingly more questionable. In this, the show’s messiness, its relative non-conformity, doesn’t just make Love interesting—they make the rest of Apatow’s work more interesting, too.

The moments that ring true in Apatow’s writing are often searing, and that’s probably because he frequently tells stories loosely based on his actual relationship with his wife, Leslie Mann, who also stars in several of his films. (Similarly, Arfin says Mickey and Gus are based on versions of her and Rust.) But authentic character development, especially for Apatow’s nice guys, has historically been sacrificed for laughs and happily-ever-afters. How “happy” those afters are, however, is a matter of debate.

By unraveling Gus’s “nice guy” image, Love throws the rest of Apatow’s “nice guys,” and their other-dimensionality, into relief.

“[Apatow’s] movies—and his life—are about more than winning the girl. They’re about how you become a good person,” Amy Nicholson wrote in The Village Voice last May. Apatow has said that he’s interested in exploring the worst sides of people, but, as Nicholson points out, that usually means rooting for the best of them to prevail. “Apatow’s insistence that everyone has feelings and no one is a villain is quietly revolutionary,” she wrote, “especially given that he won’t paste on false happy endings. As [Katherine] Heigl says in Knocked Up, ‘Just because we’re two nice people doesn’t mean we should stay together.’”

Maybe, in that movie, Rogen’s laidback stoner and Heigl’s uptight E! presenter don’t end up happy together. This is closer to the premise of Love, which as a series gives its creators enough creative breathing room to really explore a question that can’t be resolved in two hours. (To a fault, several critics have complained, saying the pace drags, though I disagree.) “I think the basic instinct was, ‘What if Knocked Up was a TV series?’ What if you could just show the next day and the next day and how that relationship played out?” Apatow told Indiewire.

So, instead of following a well-worn narrative trajectory and ending the story, say, when Mickey runs out to kiss Gus after his disastrous date with her roommate, Love’s audience gets to know both characters as they continue to get to know each other. Gus brings to Apatow’s work a level of depth that Apatow has always suggested is there, but isn’t always visible. This is why watching Gus transform, through Mickey’s eyes, from a nice guy to a not-so-nice guy is weirdly a little surprising. By unraveling Gus’s “nice guy” image, Love throws the rest of Apatow’s nice guys, and their other-dimensionality, into relief. Not that we need Love to do this for us. The meaning of the “nice guy” is so culturally loaded and definitionally splintered at this point that calling someone nice is just as often a way of meaning the opposite.

Gus is obsessed with, and he believes victimized by, what he sees as his defining characteristic: niceness.

On the Nice Guy spectrum, Gus probably edges closer to “actually nice” than “sociopath,” but that doesn’t make him a good person. He spends much of the series acting deplorably. He cheats on a test for a child actor, just so he can protect his job. He handles Mickey’s request to borrow his jacket on their date at least as poorly as she handles refusing to give it back. He has an ego-fueled conniption in the writer’s room. And, all the while, he has startlingly little self-awareness about his bad behavior. Instead, Gus is obsessed with, and he believes victimized by, what he sees as his defining characteristic: niceness.

“Maybe I’m not nice, you know,” Gus says at one point, before quickly turning what seems for an instant like genuine reflection into a joke. “Like, sometimes, like if a waiter’s like really bad, I’ll just, like, tip them, like, 30 percent, so they go, like, ‘I didn’t deserve this.’”

Gus’s perception of himself as a nice guy—the sense of entitlement he feels as a result, and his resentment toward others for either seeing him that way or not—all lend his character a degree of authenticity that some of Apatow’s other nice guys have lacked. Gus isn’t just bumbling, or lazy, or clueless, or self-centered, or trying to do his best and failing: He’s manipulative. And he might not be redeemable as a result.

“You know I like you,” Gus tells Mickey halfway through the first season. “I’m not just, like, some nice guy ...” He ends this thought with some swearing and a sense of finality. The message is clear: If he can’t get what he wants from her, romantically, it’s not worth his time. Anything less would be an affront to his dignity.

Later, Gus tries to put an end to an argument by repeatedly urging: “Can you be nice? Can you just be nice?” But Mickey is undeterred.

“You’re mean. Do you know that? You’re actually a really mean person,” she tells him. “You pretend to be nice, and that’s worse.”

My 2016 Oscar Predictions

Having already offered my idiosyncratic take on the movies of 2015, as well as some preliminary thoughts on the Oscars when the nominations came down, I thought I’d get right down to the business of predicting the lucky few who will be toting statuettes as they exit Hollywood’s Dolby Theater late Sunday night.

First, my annual caveat: Several years back, I not only predicted that Avatar would win Best Picture over The Hurt Locker, I wrote an entire piece explaining why it was essentially inconceivable that the latter would prevail. (Rarely, if ever, have I been so happy to be so wrong.) So take these predictions with that rather large helping of salt in mind.

At the same time, over the past two years I’ve gone 12 for 12 in the “major” categories and 17 out of 20 in my overall picks. So perhaps I’ve finally learned something. (You can find those predictions here and here.) As always, I do not encourage readers to wager based on my picks. But if anyone out there should just happen to do well as a result, I’ll gladly make my mailing address available for any gratuity deemed appropriate.

Finally, as before, I’m only going 10 deep among the categories, so those of you seeking picks for foreign language film, docs, and in the technical categories will have to look elsewhere. (Scratch that: Son of Saul is a lock for foreign film; trust me.) Onward …

Best Picture

20th Century Fox

Nominees: The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, Room, Spotlight, The Revenant

This has long looked like a two-picture race between Spotlight and The Revenant, with The Big Short lurking as a prominent dark horse. Initially, it seemed that Spotlight had the upper hand, but ever since the nominations, The Revenant, which is a near-lock in multiple other categories, has seemed to have all the momentum. Both Spotlight and The Big Short still have a shot here—and Mad Max offers a genuinely outside-the-box pick—but The Revenant looks to me like the favorite. Which is a pity, as I think the others are all better films.

Indeed, The Revenant isn’t even my choice for the best 2015 epic about an abandoned explorer’s long struggle against nature to return to civilization. That would be The Martian, which despite getting its share of nominations has nonetheless looked like an Oscar non-starter pretty much from the outset. (This, despite the fact that it is a much better movie than, to cite two obvious comparisons, once-frontrunner Avatar and once-co-frontrunner Gravity.) Why so little love for The Martian? I may have more to say on the subject later, but I think as a culture we’ve come to mistake self-seriousness (which The Revenant has in spades) for seriousness, and to imagine that any hint of humor (which The Martian deploys artfully) is an indicator of unseriousness. This is a foolish idea on too many levels to recount here. But I can come up with no better explanation for the Golden Globes’ flat-out insane decision to place The Martian in its “musical or comedy” category, which was probably a final nail in the coffin of its Oscar chances.

What will win: The Revenant

What ought to win: Spotlight or The Martian

What was nominated but shouldn’t have been: Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn

What wasn’t nominated but should have been: Carol, Straight Outta Compton

Best Director

20th Century Fox

Nominees: Lenny Abrahamson (Room), Alejandro G. Iñárittu (The Revenant), Tom McCarthy (Spotlight), Adam McKay (The Big Short), George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road)

If The Revenant looks like a slight favorite for best picture, its director, Alejandro G. Iñárittu, is a heavy favorite in his own category. If you want to pick a sleeper, go with George Miller, whose magnificent Mad Max was, I suspect, the guilty, secret favorite of a lot of Academy voters. But this is looking like The Revenant’s year, almost across the board.

If Iñárittu wins, it will be his second straight trophy following last year’s Birdman. And while I was all for that award (at least against the Selma-less field), I’m less pleased about this one. Again, yes, it was a beautiful film. (We’ll come to that award soon enough.) But there’s simply too much wrong with it that can be laid at Iñárittu’s feet: its length, its monotony, its excess—and yes, a final violent confrontation so over the top that it becomes unintentionally comic.

No one would be more delighted than I if Miller were to pull off the upset here. (Well, presumably Miller would be.) But if I had a vote it would be for someone not even nominated: The Martian’s Ridley Scott, whom the Academy has perversely gone from overpraising (Gladiator was not the best picture of 2000, nor even close) to underpraising. The Martian got so many things right—the juggling of exceptional performances, the modulations of tone and pace, the interplay of Earth and space and Red Planet—that someone ought to get credit for them. Alas, this year no one will. (Rest assured: Thus concludes my belated pitch for The Martian.)

Who will win: Alejandro G. Iñárittu

Who ought to win: George Miller (or the unnominated Ridley Scott)

Who was nominated but shouldn’t have been: Lenny Abrahamson, Tom McCarthy

Who wasn’t nominated but should have been: Todd Haynes (Carol), Ridley Scott (The Martian)

Best Actor

20th Century Fox

Nominees: Bryan Cranston (Trumbo), Matt Damon (The Martian), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant), Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs), Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl)

From slight favorite to heavy favorite to absolute lock for The Revenant: If DiCaprio leaves the Dolby Theater empty-handed, it will be an upset on the level of … well, I was going to say Donald Trump winning the presidency, but the latter is, alas, considerably more likely at this point. If you want to put some money on Leo getting his first little gold man, see if you can still find anyplace that has the odds at only 1/25; most online sites at this point are somewhere between 1/50 and 1/100. If you must pick a dark horse, go with Redmayne—but only with the understanding that you will almost certainly be wrong.

Is DiCaprio’s performance striking, memorable, and visibly demanding? Beyond doubt. The more complicated question, I think, is whether it really constitutes acting—or at least whether it does so to a degree that merits the craft’s highest award. Most of the actor’s customary tools are left largely on the shelf: DiCaprio barely speaks throughout the course of the film and the emotional range he displays is decidedly limited. Moreover, the extreme conditions the actor famously endured over the course of the film—long stretches in snow and icy water, the consumption of some visibly repulsive substances—somewhat obviate the need for performance: One doesn’t exactly need to act freezing and miserable when one is, in fact, freezing and miserable.

That said, DiCaprio is undeniably powerful in the role, and it’s hard to begrudge him his hard-earned trophy, especially after his many seasons of Oscar disappointment. If it were up to me, I’d give the award to Michael Fassbender’s mesmerizing turn in Steve Jobs, an indisputably elegant example of the craft of acting. But it’s not up to me. Congratulations in advance, Leo. No one can say you didn’t work for it.

Who will win: Leonardo DiCaprio

Who ought to win: Michael Fassbender

Who was nominated but shouldn’t have been: Bryan Cranston, Eddie Redmayne

Who wasn’t nominated but should have been: Johnny Depp (Black Mass), Michael B. Jordan (Creed)

Best Actress

A24

Nominees: Cate Blanchett (Carol), Brie Larson (Room), Jennifer Lawrence (Joy), Charlotte Rampling (45 Years), Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn)

As I noted when the nominations were announced, the actress categories were jumbled by rampant category fraud, with both Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl) and Rooney Mara (Carol) lobbying successfully for nods in the supporting category instead of up here where they belonged. (Something similar took place last year, with Patricia Arquette getting a supporting actress nomination—and win—for what was really a lead performance in Boyhood. Seriously, Academy: Take back control of your categories.) The result is a hollowing out of this category that, among other effects, enabled Jennifer Lawrence to sneak in on reputation alone. (I love the actress, but Joy was a mess.)

The heavy favorite here is Brie Larson, and rightly so. (If you want to go against the grain, Saoirse Ronan is a dark—probably very dark—horse pick here.) Room was a heartbreaking gem of a movie, and Larson was integral to almost every scene. It was a considerable surprise that it was nominated in so many categories, but it’s always nice when the Academy shines light on such a small film. As terrific as Larson is in Room, however, I think she was even better in an even smaller film, 2013’s Short Term 12. Don’t let the inscrutable title put you off: Destin Daniel Cretton’s film about a home for at-risk teens is, as I argued at the time, “a genuine stunner, a work of ardent, life-affirming humanism.” Larson is every bit as good in it as she is in Room—better even. I thought she deserved to win best actress two years ago, and I’m delighted that she seems on the brink of winning now.

Who will win: Brie Larson

Who ought to win: Brie Larson

Who was nominated but shouldn’t have been: Jennifer Lawrence

Who wasn’t nominated but should have been: Daisy Ridley (Star Wars: The Force Awakens)

Best Supporting Actor

Warner Bros. / MGM

Nominees: Christian Bale (The Big Short), Tom Hardy (The Revenant), Mark Ruffalo (Spotlight), Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies), Sylvester Stallone (Creed)

Every year there’s a category—usually one of the male acting categories, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about Hollywood egalitarianism—where there are so many worthy contenders that it seems almost cruel to limit the field to five nominees. Last year, it was best actor. This year, it’s best supporting actor. This is in large part due to the presence of three male-heavy ensemble films in Spotlight, The Big Short, and The Martian. For the first, it was Ruffalo who nabbed a nod, although many—myself included—would have given it to co-star Michael Keaton. (In a weaker year, one might’ve made a case for Liev Schreiber or John Slattery as well.) Bale was nominated for The Big Short, but I would have opted to honor Steve Carell. And Chiwetel Ejiofor was probably the most worthy of several candidates from The Martian. But the one true snub in the category this year—especially given the awards’ second consecutive year of utter whiteness—is Idris Elba, whose indelible warlord was utterly central to Beasts of No Nation.

As it is, this looks like a two-man race between Stallone and Rylance, with the former a strong sentimental favorite. It’s hard to feel terribly bad about this. Creed was an unexpectedly good film, and Stallone unexpectedly good in it, and while not quite on the level of Star Wars nostalgia, Rocky nostalgia is nonetheless a powerful Force. Still, Stallone wasn’t that good, and I think a nomination is reward enough for his work, especially in such a strong year. I’m a little underwhelmed by Rylance as a nominee, too, though for very different reasons. He is an immense talent—if you haven’t seen his Cromwell in the BBC’s Wolf Hall adaptation, you should make haste to amend the oversight—and he was by far the best thing in Bridge of Spies. Perhaps even to a fault: At times he seemed to be inhabiting a different movie altogether—an impression that was no doubt reinforced by his long absence from the second half of the film. My choice for the award would be Tom Hardy, who gave what I thought was the most clearly brilliant performance of The Revenant. For all his trials, Leo was always Leo; Hardy, by contrast, vanished so deeply into his role that it took me a few minutes even to be sure that was him.

That said, we come back to the heavyweight favorite, Stallone, and the underdog, Rylance. I know how this would end if this were a Rocky movie …. but it’s probably not.

Who will win: Sylvester Stallone

Who ought to win: Tom Hardy

Who was nominated but shouldn’t have been: Christian Bale, Mark Ruffalo, Mark Rylance

Who wasn’t nominated but should have been: Steve Carell (The Big Short), Idris Elba (Beasts of No Nation), Michael Keaton (Spotlight)

Best Supporting Actress

Focus Features

Nominees:  Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Hateful Eight), Rooney Mara (Carol), Rachel McAdams (Spotlight), Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl), Kate Winslet (Steve Jobs)

It would perhaps be fitting if this came down to a race between Mara and Vikander, the two actresses who chose to demote themselves from competing where they belonged, up in the lead category. Each, after all, is arguably the emotional center of her respective film. Complicating matters, however, is longtime Academy favorite Winslet, who has a decent chance of pulling an upset here for her role in Steve Jobs. (Set aside that this was far, far from her best work. Precedent has shown that she has a better winning record for her so-so performances than for her truly great ones.)

In a world in which the Academy were less amenable to bullying lobbying by the studios, this would all be moot. Vikander and Mara would be up in the big leagues where they belong, rounding out a historically strong best actress category, and leaving space for some genuine supporting performances down here: say, Kristen Stewart for Clouds of Sils Maria, Helen Mirren for Trumbo, and yes, perhaps Vikander herself for her excellent turn in Ex Machina. Instead, we have this frustrating fruit basket of apples and oranges. Vikander is almost certainly the favorite—and deserves to be, if one forgives the category fraud—with Mara and Winslet as roughly equidistant dark horses. What a mess.

Who will win: Alicia Vikander

Who ought to win: Alicia Vikander

Who was nominated but shouldn’t have been: Jennifer Jason Leigh

Who wasn’t nominated but should have been: Kristen Stewart (Clouds of Sils Maria)

Best Original Screenplay

Open Road Films

Nominees: Bridge of Spies (Matt Charman, Ethan Coen, and Joel Coen), Ex Machina (Alex Garland), Inside Out (Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley, and Ronnie del Carmen), Spotlight (Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy), Straight Outta Compton (Jonathan Herman, Andrea Berloff, S. Leigh Savidge, and Alan Wenkus)

This is the weakest I can remember this category being in years. In part that’s because a few customary nominees submitted subpar work this year (David O. Russell with Joy, Quentin Tarantino with The Hateful Eight). In part it’s because most of the year’s best pictures were from adapted material. And in part it’s just pure chance.

In any case, Spotlight is the clear class of the category, and very, very likely to be the winner—not that this will be much consolation if it misses out on its deserved win for best picture. If you must be contrarian, your best bet is probably Inside Out. But it’s still a bad one.

A caveat: I’ve gotten this category wrong the past two years in a row, for two of my three total misses. Those were, I think, much closer calls. But if you want to pick a place to assume I’m just dead wrong, this might be it.

What will win: Spotlight

What ought to win: Spotlight

What was nominated but shouldn’t have been: Bridge of Spies

What wasn’t nominated but should have been: Sicario

Best Adapted Screenplay

Paramount

Nominees: The Big Short (Charles Randolph and Adam McKay), Brooklyn (Nick Hornby), Carol (Phyllis Nagy), The Martian (Drew Goddard), Room (Emma Donoghue)

Now that’s more like it. Adapted screenplay is as strong this year as original screenplay is weak—so much so that complaints about Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs “snub” never got much traction. I need not relitigate my feelings about The Martian, but Drew Goddard’s screenplay was exceptionally good. So, too, with Phyllis Nagy’s script for Carol (one of the films most underrated by the Academy this year) and Emma Donoghue’s for Room. And while I was not terribly fond of Brooklyn, I recognize that I am an outlier in that respect.

The very likely winner here—and, again, consolation-prize recipient if it loses out for best picture—is The Big Short. The script is not without weaknesses: It borrows rather liberally from The Wolf of Wall Street, there are a few too many bells and whistles, and putative protagonist Michael Burry disappears for long stretches. That said, Michael Lewis’s terrific book presented an enormous challenge for adaptation, between its many characters who scarcely intersect and its necessary explanations of complex financial instruments. That Charles Randolph and the director Adam McKay managed to distill—and enliven—this material as well as they did has to be considered a triumph, and surely Oscar-worthy. If you’re looking for an alternative, Room is an option. But The Big Short probably has this one sewn up.

What will win: The Big Short

What ought to win: The Big Short

What was nominated but shouldn’t have been: Nothing

What wasn’t nominated but should have been: Nothing

Best Cinematography

20th Century Fox

Nominees: Roger Deakins (Sicario), Edward Lachman (Carol), Emmanuel Lubezki (The Revenant), Robert Richardson (The Hateful Eight), John Seale (Mad Max: Fury Road)

Another terrifically strong category this year. It’s nice to see Edward Lachman’s lovely lensmanship for Carol celebrated; Robert Richardson’s 70mm artistry was just about the only thing I didn’t hate about The Hateful Eight; and anyone who didn’t get a kick out of then-72-year-old John Seale’s riotously kinetic work on Mad Max probably doesn’t get a kick out of much at all. (If you must pick an upset, I’d go with Seale.)

But finally we come to the award that it is very, very difficult to dispute belongs to The Revenant. Whatever its other shortcomings, the film is a visual masterpiece, bleak and beautiful in equal parts. If he wins—and it’s hard for me to imagine he won’t—this will mark Emmanuel Lubezki’s unprecedented third straight Oscar for cinematography, a record unlikely to be broken in our lifetimes.

The flip side of that coin, alas, is that this marks Roger Deakins’s astonishing 13th nomination in the category, and will in all likelihood result in his shocking 13th straight loss. After a tremendous first hour, Sicario lost its narrative path somewhat. But it was never less than ravishing to look at. Along with Lubezki, Deakins is one of the great cinematographers of our time, and his failure to take home a statuette to date is an ongoing source of amazement and dismay. Never fear, however: He will almost certainly be back next year, and the year after that.

Who will win: Emmanuel Lubezki

Who ought to win: Emmanuel Lubezki

Who was nominated but shouldn’t have been: No one

Who wasn’t nominated but should have been: No one

Best Animated Feature

Dixney / Pixar

Nominees: Anomalisa, Boy & the World, Inside Out, When Marnie Was There, Shaun the Sheep

The Academy went unexpectedly arty this year, passing on two big hits—Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur (rightly so) and 20th Century Fox’s The Peanuts Movie—in favor of the Japanese anime When Marnie Was There, Brazil’s Boy & the World, and Charlie Kaufman’s latest marvelous oddity, Anomalisa. And good for them. I feel a little bad for The Peanuts Movie, but it has $245 million in global box office to console it. And it’s nice to bring attention to a few smaller films.

The upshot of this, of course, is that—as much I’d be tickled by a subversive victory for Anomalisa—Pixar’s other movie this year, Pete Docter’s loving head trip Inside Out, is going to win handily. Take it to the bank.

What will win: Inside Out



What should win: Inside Out



What was nominated but shouldn’t have been: None



What wasn’t nominated but should have been: None

Will Republicans Target Trump in Texas?

Day by day, week by week, and debate by debate, the chances for Republican presidential contenders to stop Donald Trump’s march to the nomination are slipping away. One of their final opportunities could be Thursday night, when the five remaining GOP candidates face off in Texas in the last debate before voters in 12 states cast their ballots on Super Tuesday.

Conventional wisdom would hold that both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz should have their rhetorical knives out for Trump during Thursday’s debate, which CNN is televising beginning at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Rubio and Cruz have been locked in a tight battle for second place in each of the last two contests, and both need to knock Trump off-kilter to have a chance. Yet when has conventional wisdom actually carried the day in 2016? If past debates are any indication, Rubio and Cruz will expend more energy going after each other than taking on Trump. And to the consternation of the established Republicans who have been so frequently humiliated during this election season, that is precisely what has allowed Trump to pull away from the field.

For those party bosses, what’s most frightening about the current state of the race is not merely that Trump has won three of the first four states in commanding fashion. His delegate lead—81 compared to 17 each for Cruz and Rubio—is significant but not insurmountable. It’s that Trump  is also leading in a majority of the states that vote on Super Tuesday and many that hold their primaries and caucuses after that. While there has been scant recent polling in a few of the March 1 states, like for the Alaska and Colorado caucuses, the only state where Trump is clearly an underdog is Cruz’s home state of Texas (which is probably a win-or-stay-home state for the senator). Republicans opposed to Trump’s nomination are waiting for Cruz or Rubio to take him on, but they are busy trying to torch each other instead.

The one Republican who has gotten under The Donald’s skin in recent days is none other than Mitt Romney, who has suggested there’s a “bombshell” in Trump’s tax returns—an odd version of the gambit Harry Reid pulled on Romney in 2012. Trump has responded in his typical style, unleashing a string of tweets attacking Romney as a weak nominee four years ago, and “a dope.”

John Kasich and Ben Carson are both wild cards on the debate stage. Neither candidate fared well in Nevada or South Carolina, but nor have they made a habit of going after their rivals much so far. Will that change on Thursday? Carson will likely be pressed on why exactly he is remaining in the race, given his disappointing finishes and reported money problems. Kasich is trying to hang on until Michigan, Ohio, and other Midwest states vote later in March, but he could face attacks from Rubio, who wants him gone so he can consolidate both the money and support of the GOP establishment. As the governor of a crucial swing state, however, Kasich is also a potential running mate for any of the front-runners, and that could mean they more or less ignore him in Houston.

The last GOP debate in South Carolina was a slugfest, with Trump making a risky bet by going hard after George W. Bush on 9/11 and Iraq. Like so many of his previous scuffles, it had no discernible effect on his standing, and he won South Carolina and Nevada easily. Cruz and Rubio have at least one more shot at him on Thursday—if they choose to take it.

Jason Pierre-Paul and the $60 Million Firework

Around this time last year, the New York Giants expressed a sentiment rarely heard in the NFL, a league whose acronym the former coach Jerry Glanville once quipped stands for Not For Long.

Remarking on the prospects of resigning the star defensive lineman Jason Pierre-Paul, then-coach Tom Coughlin said, “The goal is for him to be a Giant and play as a Giant forever, and retire as a Giant. How that works out is another issue.”

In the winter of 2015, Pierre-Paul was a 26-year-old free agent coming off a season—12.5 sacks, 77 tackles, three forced fumbles—that reinforced his status as an elite pass rusher and defensive player. Rather than let him test the market, the team voided his contract in February and placed its franchise tag on him in March, ensuring that he would make $14.8 million the following season while the two parties hashed out a long-term deal.

“Like I said, it is going to be a business situation,” said Pierre-Paul at time. “It’s going to be about my family, and what I want to pursue. At the end of the day, I’m here. Like I said earlier in the season, if I am a Giant, then I will be a Giant for my whole life. I don’t know what is going to happen.”

This was the beginning of a common NFL saga that would quickly veer into uncharted territory. First, there was intrigue in June when Pierre-Paul did not show up to the Giants mandatory training camp as an expression of his displeasure with how the contract talks were going; he also refused to sign his $14.8 million tender. The two parties had until July 15 to sign an extension.

According to reports, Pierre-Paul had also balked at the $60 million contract offer that the Giants had placed on the table before he blew off parts of his right hand lighting a firework on the Fourth of July last year.

News of the incident and conjecture about its severity quickly spread and the Giants pulled the contract offer on July 6. Days later, the ESPN reporter Adam Schefter controversially tweeted out the news (along with medical records) showing that Pierre-Paul had his index finger removed.

ESPN obtained medical charts that show Giants DE Jason Pierre-Paul had right index finger amputated today. pic.twitter.com/VI5cbS1uCw

— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) July 8, 2015

(On Wednesday, it was reported that Pierre-Paul is suing Schefter for violating his privacy.)

After signing an adjusted contract for $7 million, Pierre-Paul did eventually come back midway through the Giants dismal season, where he played an effective, but statistically lackluster eight games with a club around his right hand. Last month, he underwent surgery in the hopes of increasing flexibility in his damaged middle finger.

Pierre-Paul is now entering free agency and, according to reports on Thursday, the Giants appear interested in re-signing him.

“It was obvious when Jason came back last year how disruptive he was,” said the new Giants coach Ben McAdoo. “When you look at him, his ability to get off the ball and get after the quarterback is easy to see. That’s something that comes naturally to him, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”

Others are less sanguine about his ability to command a long-term, top-level contract. “Nobody can realistically know what to expect with Pierre-Paul,” wrote one beat writer last week. “There are no comps for defensive ends without a full set of fingers.”

Our Swag Bags, Ourselves

Was it the Vampire Breast Lift? Or maybe the Haze Dual Vaporizer? Or maybe the Nuelle Fiera vibrator? Whatever it was (it was probably the vibrator), 2016 has proved to be the year that a longstanding Oscar tradition—the absurdly expensive and also just absurd gift bags handed out to losing nominees—seems, officially, to have Gone Too Far: Last week, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sued Distinctive Assets, the marketing firm that has long provided the sassy swag, for trademark infringement.

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Ending the Internet Outrage Cycle

The lawsuit contended, essentially, that the party favors to end all party favors—and, more specifically, their vampy/vapey/vibey contents, this year said to be worth $232,000 in all—were giving the awards show a bad name. The so-called “Everybody Wins” bags were dirty alloys, basically, to Oscar’s gold.

So it’s both ironic and fitting that the Academy’s complaint has had the effect of bringing even more attention than usual to the existence and the excesses of the gift bags. And also to the role the bags have played in the strange sub-economies of the ultimate American awards show. “The Oscar Gift Bags Are So Lavish That Even the Academy Is Embarrassed,” New York magazine declared. “Oscar sues over unauthorized (and unsavory) swag bags,” USA Today had it. Those came on top of the many, many articles that had simply catalogued the contents of the bags. Yahoo made a video “Dissecting the Outrageously Valuable, Not to Mention Ridiculous, Oscars Gift Bags.” GOOD offered its own look, “Inside the $200,000 ‘Unofficial’ 2016 Oscars Gift Bag”—under the ambiguous rubric of “poptimism.” Blasting News took things to their logically Marxist conclusion: “THE RICH AND OSCAR-FAMOUS ARE SPOILED WHILE THOUSANDS GO WITHOUT.”

Did you know about Vampire Breast Lifts before this year’s cycle of Oscar Bag Articles mocked their existence? I really, really hope not.

This would be the case with or without swag bags; still, of course, the reality is more complicated than the-rich-getting-richer-and-also-firmer-of-skin. Many celebrities, after all, end up giving their gift bags away to charity. Some others auction them off. (George Clooney’s bag recently fetched $45,000.) One—Sandra Oh—has outright refused to accept the bag. And many other bag recipients do use their contents, or at least select parts of them. (Gwyneth Paltrow reportedly used a gift certificate for a stay in a Mexican resort, part of her 2004 Oscar presenter bag, for her honeymoon with Chris Martin.) But while, from his perspective, celebrities pampering themselves with the products he assembles is a nice thing, Lash Fary, the owner of Distinctive Assets and the assembler of the bags in question, told me, it’s not really the thing. Instead, as he puts it: “This is just straight-up marketing.”

It’s also marketing that goes beyond the typical, IRL product placement. “Unless the givers are permitted to promote and market the fact that their products or services are in the gift bag or they are allowed to photograph the recipient using the gift, I think that this is not a good use of the givers’ money,” Michael Stone, the chair and co-founder of Beanstalk, told Forbes. So while marketers may well give products away in the vague hope that celebrities might use them—and, more specifically, that celebrities might be photographed using them—they’re also banking on a more guaranteed return. They’re calculating that news outlets, indignant about and inspired by the bags’ contents, will write about them. They’re calculating, essentially, that the media will do their promotion for them.

It’s a calculation that, this year, led to headlines like “HERE’S EVERYTHING INSIDE THE $232,000 OSCARS GIFT BAG” (Harper’s Bazaar) and “Oscar Gift Bag Swag: $200K Worth of Luxury Toilet Paper, Sex Toys, and Armpit Mops” (Breitbart) and “Inside the Absurd $200K Oscar Gift Bag: Vapes, a Trip to Israel, and a ‘Vampire Breast Lift’” (The Daily Beast). It led to stories like GQ’s write-up of this year’s bags, which not only listed, but taxonomized, the bags’ contents—from the “Basic AF” (a $12 lint remover) to the “Trashy, but We’ll Take It” (personalized M&Ms for $300) to the “From The Price is Right School of Trashy” (a $54,000 private walking tour of Japan) to the “Lawsuit-Inspiring Trashy” ($5,530 worth of plastic surgery) to the “Actual Trash” (a $134 Caolion Ultimate Pore Care gift set) to, finally, a single “Respectable” entry: a 10,000-meal donation made in the nominee’s name to an animal shelter or rescue of his or her choice.

GQ’s thing on the bags—though it could have been most anyone’s thing on the bags—is good Internet #content. It is amusing. It speaks to the zeitgeist. It inspires indignation on the part of the reader. And, in all that, it convenes human attention so that commercial messages might be sold on its platform. At the same time, though—and just as readily—the detailed list GQ has provided functions as free publicity for the brands and products included in Fary’s 2016 gift bag. So do the lists GQ’s many fellow outlets provided. Did you know about Vampire Breast Lifts before this year’s cycle of Oscar Bag Articles mocked their existence? I really, really hope not.

The bags are press releases in the form of party favors.

Which is to say that the gift bags are not really bags. (They’re not, strictly, “bags” to begin with: They’re a collection of small items and gift certificates collected in roller duffel bags, Fary told me. They’re sometimes given out on-site, but more often couriered, this being Hollywood, from assistant to assistant.) The bags are, basically, press releases in the form of party favors. They are fodder for discussion and storytelling. Fary calls himself the “Sultan of Swag.” Others call him a “guerrilla marketer.” What he is more accurately, though, is a pitchman whose medium is objects rather than words.

And that might offer an answer for why 2016’s “bag” proved to be the final straw for the Oscars: The bags became a little too good at doing their jobs. The Oscars have long given out gift bags—in this case, starting in 2001, as “sort of a children’s party favor for the nominees and presenters.” When the Academy ended its official swag-giving practice in 2006, the move was based not on inequality grounds, it seems, but on the fact that the IRS decided that the bags should be taxed. And, by extension, on the fact that people have a funny way of being less grateful for free stuff when the stuff comes wrapped in several thousand dollars’ worth of tax burdens.

Distinctive Assets stepped in with its “unofficial” bags. And while those every-year-more-excessive bags might not have offered Vampire Breast Lifts, they did offer tote-able absurdities like condoms, Lasik eye surgery, mink eyelashes, high-def televisions, and $120 maple syrup. Last year’s bags included a vibrator.

So, yes, this year’s version of the bags may have been extra-objectionable because they were worth more—according to Distinctive Assets’s math, anyway, which seems to take an extremely liberal approach to cost estimation—than ever before. But what was even more objectionable, at least as far as the Academy is concerned, was the way the media played its annual role. The Academy’s complaint suggests that headlines like “HERE’S EVERYTHING INSIDE THE $232,000 OSCARS GIFT BAG” and “Oscar Gift Bag Swag: $200K Worth of Luxury Toilet Paper, Sex Toys, and Armpit Mops” and “Inside the Absurd $200K Oscar Gift Bag: Vapes, a Trip to Israel, and a ‘Vampire Breast Lift’” all contributed to “trademark infringement, false advertising, and trademark dilution.” They emphasized the aggressive luxury and absurdity of the bags, but de-emphasized the fact that the bags are, technically, assembled for the Oscars rather than by them.

You could call all that, as Fary does, “lazy reporting.” And Distinctive Assets’s press release, to be sure, notes that the bags in question have been “independently produced for over a decade by the founders of swag at Distinctive Assets.” Media outlets, many of them, did ignore that nuance. They focused, instead, on the thing that will get clicks: the outrage. The indignation. The words “Vampire breast lift.” The Oscar bags: You will not believe what is in them this year! The Oscar bags: Watch them extend a diamond-swathed middle finger to Bernie Sanders!

The Oscar Bag Outrage Story reads like what might have resulted had Marx been able to read SkyMall.

But the outlets, of course, were also doing exactly what they were supposed to in all this: getting angry, and turning their anger into #content. Just as they do every year. They were creating their own entries into an annual mini-genre: the Oscar Bag Outrage Story, which delights in the gross excesses of Hollywood and those of the awards-show industrial complex. So opulent! So sexist! So weird! The genre reads, overall, a little like what might happen if Karl Marx had lived long enough to read through a SkyMall.

And it’s a genre that exists at all, of course, for the same reason any genre will: There’s a market for it, year after year. (The bags are “fit for Hollywood royalty and coveted by the hoi polloi,” a 2005 Bloomberg article noted.) The bags are perfect fodder for a media system that increasingly treats outrage as a kind of currency: Here is a bag of stuff—listable, illustratable, thinkpiece-able—that raises all manner of hackle. Write about the bag, and the media get free clicks, and the brands get free media. Everybody Wins, as it were.

The bags are perfect fodder for a media system that increasingly treats outrage as a kind of currency.

If it’s a strategy, it’s not a new one. PR that does its work by causing indignation—madvertising, you could call it—has long been part of the marketer’s quiver. The Bloomingdale’s ad that made light of sex and consent. The Budweiser ad that did the same. The GoDaddy Super Bowl ads that treated women like inconveniently animate blow-up dolls. The #branded tweets reacting to current events in unsavorily self-promotional ways. The off-color jokes and the #toomuches and the #toosoons: They take advantage, ultimately, of the vast supply of free media that comes from think pieces and hot takes and, in general, outrage.

Some of them do that, of course, in spite of themselves. Some of these spots are mistakes, pure and simple, the result of marketers failing to understand their customers or, perhaps, understanding them a little too well. Many of them, though—most of them, to be both generous and cynical about it—are the result of a very contemporary take on the old adage that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”: They figure that, in this age of pessimism and irony and knee-jerk indignation—in this age of media that so deeply incentivizes the hot take—pissing people off is a really, really good way to get people to talk about you.

The Oscar bags’ marketers have made a similar gamble. And it has so far, whatever the future of those bags may be, paid off. Outrage sells. Especially when it’s given away for free.