Rushfield Babylon
Month
Precisely. We warned about this. Issues are almost exactly the same as with Mars, but because that was a beloved cult favorite, any success was applauded. (Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell could have written million dollar checks each, same as people are saying Braff could. Yes, it would be money gone and they would get no piece of the Warners project…but wasn’t this their dream?)
Ultimately, funding a for-profit venture as a charity is weird and is a niche that has opened up thanks to a generation of useful idiots in the YAY! ERA who live to mindlessly cheer on their team - so long as their team comes in some sort of token indie garb, be they politicians or late night tv stars. The same mentality that was outraged for poor Conan not getting his talk show even as he pocketed a $40 million pay off; or who thinks sitcom stars are “on their side”…Or who supports a politician because they make slightly more than the usual nods to social media or pop stars or what have you.
Generation YAY! get ahold of yourself! You have Braff on your hands!
On the one hand, by even contemplating this step, Disney has now become a war criminal and becomes the duty of every lover of film or even humanity to do all they can to stop them and bring this company to its knees until they renounce this evil.
On the other hand, you can’t really blame them. When one looks at the trailers this week for the Zack Snyder Superman, the Verbinski Lone Ranger, hoopla for the Iron Man 3 upcoming release…how can we expect that audiences raised with the notion that tired, inert dreck like this is the pinnacle of Hollywood storytelling should be able to keep their devices off during them.
These films make the action spectacles of the 80’s and 90’s like Lethal Weapon 2 and Twister seem full of humanity and life. So it is very difficult on the one hand to deaden the audience’s senses with a genre that has become about nothing more than cranking up the volume and layering it over with a full-of-itself, portentous pomposity, and on the other hand tell them: no you’re not allowed to play with your toys here. You have to focus and pay attention.
Which is to say, with this generation raised on these films and glued to their devices since birth coming of age we are all doomed. Congratulations to Disney for realizing it. And for the rest of us, the best we can hope is that we can go down sword in our hand fighting them with our last breath, and die an honorable entertainment martyr’s death.
(Source)
THR: You co-hosted the Oscars in 2010 with Steve Martin. What did you think of the reaction to Seth MacFarlane’s performance?
Baldwin: The Oscars is a completely thankless job. It’s really tough.
THR: So you wouldn’t do it again?
Baldwin: No. Never, never, never. And I enjoyed doing it. What the Oscars absolutely, unequivocally should be is a show with a little bit of entertainment and a very reverential overview of movies of that year. And that show would last about two hours, and it would be a very tight show with a lot of serious, cineastic appreciation. But the Oscars is also a television program that raises 90 percent of the Academy’s budget for the year in a single night. When the Oscars is three hours — when they bullshit you and say that the Oscars is running long, and that’s a problem — that’s not a problem. They’re making more money. So ABC and the Academy, they have no interest in doing a tight, better-produced show. They are forced, because of economic constraints, to have a flabby, tired show.
THR: And everyone who does it gets raked over the coals.
Baldwin: They need to gamble on the show, and they’re not gambling. I am a member of the Academy, but everyone who has done it lately has been crucified. So they’re not going to get anybody who is reasonably talented or special to take that chance anymore. They don’t pay you any money; the Oscars pay you like chicken feed. It’s all about the honor of helping to extol film achievement. But they’re going to have a tough time. I’m dying to see who they get to do it next year. They’re going to have to go dig someone up from a cemetery. They’re going to have to go dig up Bob Hope.
”—Alec Baldwin on hosting the Oscars to THR.