The Comey Rule: It Is What It Is

 “It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.” —Alex Delarge, A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Got through the two-part, 3.5 hour Showtime miniseries The Comey Rule in one sitting, right after watching the Vice Presidential debates, in fact.

The production is top-notch, shot anamorphic in luscious cool tones by veteran DP Elliot Davis and directed by Billy Ray, who wrote the biopics Captain Phillips and Richard Jewell. Despite  its impressive length the miniseries never flags: it moves from one political dilemma to the next (Clinton’s emails, Russian interference and kompromat, etc.) with nervous energy throughout part 1 and into Part 2, where Trump finally shows up. He’s the ultimate non-moveable object, and every character in the film ends up crashing right into him.

Brandon Gleeson as Trump. He is often
shown in the Oval Office with the sun
shining so bright behind him it flares
across the screen. The symbolism at
work here is self-explanatory.

This is the first big-budget narrative biopic about the Trump administration. (there have been dozens of documentaries.) It features Jeff Daniels as James Comey, delivering one of his trademark “Tom Hanks Light” trustworthy and calm performances. The thing is packed with A-list stars like Holly Hunter and Jonathan Banks and Michael Kelly. (The most fun portrayals: William Sadler as Michael Flynn and Joe Lo Truglio as Jeff Sessions.)

Irish actor Brendon Gleeson plays President Donald Trump, and it is a revelation. He inhabits Trump: his Queens-hatched singsong voice, orange skin, sci-fi hairdo, the sack suits. Every third line is punctuated by the wet rasp of his nostrils taking in a breath. In the universe this film sets up in Part One— munificent, hard-working, sort of WASPy people dressed in plain suits, working hard but important jobs— Trump crashes into Part Two like a space alien. I hope he gets all the Emmys.

FBI brass, watching the 2016 election results.
Michael Kelly plays Andrew McCabe.
None of them at this point know
how doomed they are.

The screenplay was adapted from James Comey’s book “A Higher Loyalty,” and as such it tends to hagiography: Comey, in many places, comes off like a solid, patriotic G-man whose only loyalties were to justice and the FBI. But there is also a counter-theme to the portrayal the miniseries does not shy away from. James Comey is shown as a government official with a fatal flaw: he has no political instincts. No gut instincts at all, really. The whole Clinton email debacle— declaring an investigation less than fortnight before the election, and calling it off three days before— was shown as a result of his self-righteousness, his dogged adherence to procedure, without any thought to political fallout.  When someone as primal and cunning as Trump enters his life the miniseries shows in sickening detail he was utterly unprepared for it. He falls back on his honesty and competence, and in the end it makes no difference at all.

One of the wonderful elements of biopics like this is how they can show the color and detail behind events we have recently seen on television or the internet. Biopics somehow make what is real even more real, just like Alex Delarge told us. Great example: the public introduction of Comey into Trump’s administration, the scene he described in his book where when Trump entered, he subconsciously backed up to the opposite side of the room. Trump calls “his” FBI director over: Comey goes frozen-faced. He gives him the trademark tugging handshake and whispers “let’s get a few pictures together.” Meanwhile Comey’s wife and daughter are watching live at home— and the wife says, “that’s his ‘oh shit’ face."

James Comey (left) and Jim Clapper (right)
riding the elevator in Trump Tower.

Contemporary biopics are usually stories filled with dread. We KNOW what is going to happen to the hapless characters introduced in Act One, so all we can do sit helplessly as history and misfortune overtake them. The list is very long: Flight 93, The Perfect Storm, Too Big to Fail (the HBO biopic about the 2008 crash, this film’s closest cousin), and both of Billy Ray’s aforementioned writing credits.

The Comey Rule is no exception. You get to relive the 2016 election and all the sickening depression that came with it. When Trump starts taking charge, all you can do is watch helplessly as career government employees try to comprehend someone like Trump, who has absolutely no care about the rules and laws and precedents everyone else relies on to keep government running smoothly. The most dread-fulled part of The Comey Rule is this spectacle of slow-motion disaster: The cool, competent bureaucrats and agency employees and lawyers who are are helpless in the face of Trump. They all know something bad is about to happen to the rule of law and the reputation of their agencies, and all they can do is look at each other and shrug.

“It is what it is” is a Trump quote about the Coronavirus, but it shows up in mob movies with regularity. It has a very specific meaning: it says a terrible thing has happened— but it HAD to happen, and there is nothing you or anybody on earth can do about it.

The 2020 election is upon us. Let us hope the outcome is a hopeful one, because The Comey Rule showed us how easy it is to watch everything go to shit and mumble “it is what it is.”

Falling Down: D-Fens Quixote

An image from the incredible opening shot. The camera starts on
Michael Douglas' lips, flies out of his car, allaround it, and settles on
him again. This was before computer graphics made this easy.

A recent re-watching of the 1993 Joel Schumacher film Falling Down (it was a homework assignment) turned up a number of fascinating elements— some of them unadulterated 1990s values, some modern re-evaluations, and at least one new definition. Falling Down, it turns out,  is a lot of different things.

Synopsis. William Foster, recently fired from his aerospace job, walks away from his car in a Los Angeles traffic jam. He embarks on a city-spanning adventure: he is trying to get to Venice for his daughter’s birthday party, despite the fact his ex-wife has a restraining order against him. What follows is a series of obstacles to his goal, all challenges to his worldview, one that is fading away. While he is being pursued by Detective Prendergast (Robert Duvall) the protagonist’s quest becomes a path of increasing violence and destruction across the city.

Parable of White Victimization. Time has not been kind to many of this film’s themes. The most obvious one, the one pursued in the press at the time: D-Fens was a “latter-day prophet, denouncing the hypocrisy of our times.” White men were losing ground in an ever-more-diverse America. At the time, when Hollywood and popular culture was basically white men as well, this crisis was internalized.

The staff of Whammyburger, being told they make a lousy product
by a man waving a TEC-9 around. Dede Pfeiffer (center) is the
completely unflappable counter girl. She's a hoot.

D-Fens establishes his “everyman” credentials by constantly questioning things many people at the time questioned as well. Those questions start out picayune: Why does a can of Coke cost 85 cents? Why doesn’t Whammyburger serve breakfast past 11:30? Why can’t I just sit here and catch my breath?

Vignettes are sprinkled throughout the film that reinforce his “angry white man” perspective. Urban decay. Police harassment. A homeless white guy holding a begging sign, next to industrious Latino men selling goods on the street.

Beth (Barbara Hershey) realizing she may have had a hand
in the victimization of a 1990s American white male--
the least victimized sort of person there is.

Later, his questioning veers into more sweeping social criticism. While cutting across a golf course, D-Fens wonders why the vast green space isn’t open to the public. He later hides in the pool house of an immense mansion, and finds out (via a family of poor tenants) that it is owned by a plastic surgeon. At the time, these observations struck close to home: Was D-Fens a victim?

The film went a bit further than that to indemnify William Foster as a victim of his times. When the police interview his ex-wife Beth (Barbara Hershey) she admits her reasons for placing restraining order on him were spurious. He had a temper, but he didn’t drink and never struck her or her daughter, and the judge who set the order “wanted to make an example of him.” As the interview progresses she looks increasingly distressed and embarrassed.

Joel Shumacher and screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith crafted Falling Down to channel “White Male Paranoia.” The reason the image of Michael Douglas — buzz cut, broken horn rims— made the cover of Newsweek is this film successfully captured a moment in history. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, George Bush scaled back defense spending on a massive scale. Military installations were closed. Aerospace companies like Grumman and Lockheed closed down facilities all over the United States: Southern California was hit hard. William Foster’s job is obviously part of this loss, part of the USA’s military-industrial contraction as the cold-war era was coming to an end. To the people who ran the show back then— middle-class white men— they saw it as something that was happening to them, and they were the victims.

(As an aside, my mom worked for Lockheed for 30+ years, and I was an eyewitness to the post-cold-war wave of defense industry layoffs. It was as bad as it came off in the film, and it didn't just affect white men.)

D-Fens as Anti-Antihero. This is not just wordplay for a villain: it’s the best way to describe him. A character can be categorized by two criteria: deeds and thoughts.

A HERO is a character who does heroic deeds and embodies heroic qualities. Captain America, Indiana Jones, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Joan of Arc, Robin Hood: all embodiments of positive values and behaviors.

An ANTIHERO is a character who does heroic deeds but does not embody heroic qualities. Tom Jones, Tristam Shandy, Deadpool, “Mad” Max Rocketanski, Rick Blaine and the nameless protagonists of Sergio Leone’s and Akira Kurosawa’s films fit this description. They do not obey any rules of lawful conduct, are often transgressive or violent, but in the end their acts resolve into a greater good.


A VILLAIN is a character without redeeming qualities, who actively oppose the efforts of heroes and the greater good. Darth Vader, Sauron, Noah Cross, Norman Bates, The Wicked Witch: all are engaged in selfish ends that will cause great harm if they succeed.

But William “D-Fens” Foster is something else. He is a regular man, down on his luck and emotionally unstable, but not extraordinary in any way. Throughout the film he voices reasonable opinions, social commentary about the crumbling world around him. His goals are not intrinsically villainous: he merely wants to go home, and is forced by all manner of extraordinary obstacles to adapt ever more violent methods to achieve his goal.

D-Fens does not aspire to heroic status. He merely wants simple, basic needs filled: change for the phone, breakfast, a moment to rest in a vacant lot. These simple goals are always thwarted— so as the film progresses he cares less and less about behaving in a lawful manner. In his eyes, all he sees are forms of injustice, large and small: overpriced soda, gang territoriality, pointless road closures, obnoxious golfers. In his eyes it’s all injustice against him and the world he comes from.

But in the end, when Prendergast pulls a gun on him on Venice Pier, D-Fens looks at all he has wrought— family running, police clearing the area— and finally comes to the realization that according to the rules of the world he now lives in, he is the bad guy.

"I'm the bad guy?"

He is an ANTI-ANTIHERO: A character who understands morality and justice, but is incapable of any form of heroic action, and in the end acts against the greater good. The anti-antihero is distinct from the antihero by their mindset: they believe their goals are for good and believe are working toward the good, but are blind to the destructive nature of their actions and in the end do no good at all.

Michael Corleone was a decent example of an anti-antihero: he wanted to do good, become legitimate, but in the end (of Godfather 2, at least) was incapable of saving his family or himself.  Perhaps the all-time greatest anti-antihero ever created was Walter White. Every move he made was designed to get himself out of a bad situation (poverty, disease, anonymity, humiliation). By the end he ends up destroying everything he loves. Viewers of “Breaking Bad” rooted for him every week, because he was a likable, normal guy with relatable problems. Every week he slipped further and further away, to a place where there was nothing left but violence and revenge.

The Episodic Journey. Jim Bisso pegged Falling Down precisely: it’s Don Quixote, Western literature first modern novel, and it pulls two elements from Miguel de Cervantes’s 17th-century work. In form, both center on a wandering protagonist in a series of disconnected encounters. Don Quixote also shares an important trait with D-Fens: both are delusional. Quixote overdosed on tales of chivalry from the past and has come to believe they are quite real. D-Fens is also obsessed with a past where he was the hero of the American narrative.

The difference is in the final details: Don Quixote’s quest takes years and in the end he recovers from his delusions. D-Fens's wanderings take place over the span of one day, his violence and delusions only get worse, and in the end is killed via “suicide-by-cop.*”

1993 vs. 2020. D-Fens is not some sort of MAGA prototype: He was a product of mid-century values who is finally being forced to deal head-on with the reality of the post-Cold War world. He looks like the sort of gun-toting bigot we see on the news in 2020, but he isn't.

In one episode D-Fens stops to buy his daughter a gift— and watches black man picketing a bank across the street. His sign says “Not Economically Viable.” The man is shouting that he was denied a loan due to the color of his skin. He is then arrested and taken away. D-Fens sympathizes with him, even going as far as repeating the sign’s slogan.

Later D-Fens is sheltered from the police by Nick (Frederick Forrest), the deeply bigoted, racial-slur-slinging military surplus store owner. Nick admires D-Fens's violent spree and exclaims “I’m with you! we’re the same!” Nick shows D-Fens some Nazi artifacts and gives him a LAW rocket launcher (talk about Chekov’s gun!). But D-Fens is repelled by Nick’s white supremacy. D-Fens ends up stabbing Nick to death to prevent his likely rape— which informs the trope that virulent homophobes are latent homosexuals.

It may be a 1993 cultural assumption at play here, but William Foster is not a white supremacist, He is not comfortable in multicultural America, and is clearly nostalgic for the days of unquestioned white hegemony before the 1990s, but racism is never his core motive.

We can look at Falling Down in 2020 and see D-Fens as the unsprouted seed of the MAGA mindset. It would take 20 years of union-busting, opioid addiction, corporate offshoring, a drastic loss of economic status and constant watering by conservative news for this seed to bear the fruit we see sprouting everywhere today.

* Japanese literature and cinema feature a “Ronin Character.” This is an antihero protagonist who, when freed of the considerable restraints of society, openly criticizes and challenges the status quo. But the cost for such freedom is always the same: they die by the end. Falling Down fits into this concept well.

(h/t to John for the title.)

Kickstarting Indies To The Curb

This a few days old, but my old writing partner turned a post from Deadline Hollywood, Nikki Finke's website, which was quite an eye-opener. It concerns Kickstarter, a very cool website where people can crowdsource funding for various creative projects.

Charlie Kaufman and his producing partners ― former Community showrunner Dan Harmon and Dino Stamatopoulos ― do not want to deal with Hollywood, and now at least for one project they don’t have to. A stop-motion animation adaptation of the Kaufman-written play Anomalisa raised $406,237 for the film’s production in 60 days via the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. “We want to make Anomalisa without the interference of the typical big-studio process,” according to a pitch video that Harmon and Stamatopoulos’ Starburns Industries put up on the project page. The film raised more than double the money the producers were asking from 5,770 Kickstarter backers.

These guys broke the Kickstarter record for film funding. Surprised? Not me. Is this good news? Not really. I was wondering how long something as wonderful as Kickstarter could last.

Kickstarter was specifically designed to give filmmakers outside the industry access to funding. Don't get me wrong: Kaufman and Harmon and Starburns have every right to use Kickstarter. But they shouldn't. Anyone with CAA-level representation and the ability to take meetings at a studio shouldn't. Basically, anyone with recognizable star power shouldn't.

Why not? Because they have an unfair advantage over the vast majority of other projects seeking funding. If I was some starry-eyed fellow with $1000 to give away on a film project, and I had to choose between giving it to an indie project written by John August with Johnny Depp penciled in for a cameo versus a digital feature written by Elmo Nobodyski from Rustbeltville featuring Jane Nobody, guess who gets my money? Which contribution gives me bragging rights, Hollywood cache and a T-Shirt with a star on it? Pretty obvious choice.

Celebrity--  admiration for sports heroes, movie stars, political heavyweights, what have you-- exists because it's a basic component of human social behavior, a deep part of our collective brain wiring. Throughout history and undeniably before it, people have always created hierarchies-- even when they aren't needed. We seek out great men or great women to personify our values and channel our aspirations.

This is why it is risky to invest millions of dollars in a movie with no recognizable stars. (And yeah, Pixar does this all the time, but they're a solid brand, which is a form of non-individual celebrity.) And this is why, even if an indie film on Kickstarter may be a superior idea to one offered by a Hollywood insider, it'll never outdraw it in terms of funding.

Kickstarter is a zero-sum game. There are only so many investors with so much money they're willing to donate. If the trend continues, and any Industry pro with the itch goes to Kickstarter to raise money for pet projects rather than ask a studio or (God forbid) use their own money, the long shadow their celebrity casts will make all the truly independent film projects offered seem that much dimmer.

The thing that makes Kickstarter wonderful is it's basic attitude of altruism. Donations are made to creative efforts of all kinds where the donor expects nothing in return but the satisfaction of giving a leg up to a project they feel is worthy. The presence of celebrity-driven projects debases this altruism: Even if donors get no return on financial investment, they get something back: the intangible return of celebrity association, a very real claim that some of the fame they contributed to rubbed off on them. This weakens Kickstarter's mission of creative altruism-- a plain example of Gresham's Law, bad money driving out good.

This couldn't happen, right? A bunch of Hollywood operators couldn't monopolize something as inherently democratic as Kickstarter, right? If I recall, The Sundance Film Festival was supposed to be a showcase for independent filmmakers. But the Industry discovered it-- and now Park City is not much more than an outlier of the TMZ, so insular that an alternative festival (Slamdance) had to be created to give indie filmmakers any sort of chance. So yeah, it can definitely happen again.

Downton Abbey: What We're All Missing

Here's the picture in early 2012: The presidential race is heating up, and it has been largely informed by the inequalities in the American social fabric-- and inequality that has been brought to light by the efforts of the Occupy movement. It is such an effective area of discourse that the incumbent President is incorporating it into his platform, promising that the very wealthy will start paying their fair share of taxes. This focus on inequality is so prevalent that even Republican candidates-- long the eager sidekicks of the moneyed class-- cannot avoid bringing it up, slinging mud at Mitt Romney's fifteen-percent tax bracket.

So it is quite incredible that in this charged atmosphere of near-class warfare (call it the undeclared hostilities preceding actual class warfare) that the American viewing public would fall so hard for “Downton Abbey,” an ITV melodramatic series about the trials and tribulations of the House of Grantham in early 20^th century Britain. The overarching theme of the series is how absolutely rigid the social classes were in Edwardian England-- There are Earls, Lords, Ladies and gentlemen of bestowed titles enjoying elegant meals prepared by an army of servants toiling in the lower floors of their stately home. Relationships between Upstairs and Downstairs are excessively, ritualistically formal. The middle class is almost invisible in this show: Social mobility has yet to be invented.

In short, the socio-political world of “Downton Abbey” should turn even the most rock-ribbed Republican into a raving anarchist. But it doesn't. It's a hugely popular show on both sides of the Atlantic: It's coming back this fall in a third season, and will be guest-starring Shirley MacLaine as the American mother of the Countess of Grantham. So why has this show captured the public's attention and imagination? A few ideas:

Matthew Crawley and Lady Mary.

• Compelling historical detail. We're moving through a moment in entertainment where the past is examined with clinical fascination. Shows like “Mad Men” and “Boardwalk Empire” are more than just dramas set in the past: they delve into the fashions, attitudes and social mores of their settings. We're fascinated by Don Draper's cavalier womanizing, chain smoking and narrow lapels. 1921 Atlantic City is reproduced right down to the wallpaper patterns and brass-trimmed stick phones. Same with “Downton Abbey,” which was definitely the UK answer to these shows. We get to see the elegant trappings of Manor living, the grinding amount of work it took to make Manor living so elegant, and to hear odd archaic sayings like “she was a guinea a minute” and “ship-shape and Bristol fashion.”

• It's an insane Douglas Sirk-style melodrama. Servant or Swell, Drudge or Toff, everyone falls violently in love, has wrenching personal disclosures, and carry all sorts of secrets. Dalliances and liaisons coalesce, evolve and dissolve like blobs of wax in a lava lamp. Lady Mary, the eldest daughter of the Crawley family, has had so many suitors die on her she is thought by some “Downton” observers to have Black Widow Powers. Some characters--- such as valet Mr. Bates and head housemaid Anna-- are so soulful and appealing I defy anyone watching to deny they had tears in their eyes when they finally wed. Granny-- The Countess Dowager, played by Maggie Smith-- is a grand Victorian Lady who is constantly horrified by both the excessive snogging and Edwardian modernity in general. She gets the best, funniest lines in the show.

The Earl of Grantham.

• Everyone has a place. Sure, England in 1912-1920 was rigidly stratified, but it was also a smoothly functioning society, where both the high and the low had roles to play-- and, most importantly, each protected the other. The servants conduct themselves with a constant awareness of how their actions will affect the prestige and standing of Downton: In particular Carson, the head butler, understands his duty as a retainer to the dynastic estate, rather than as just a manager of servants.

Conversely, we can see that the Crawley family, Lord Grantham in particular, do not just employ their servants, they defend and protect them as well. The writers of "Downton Abbey" to great lengths to show that he Lord Grantham not just another snobby old aristo. He is the one who brought in his former Boer War aide-de-camp as his personal valet, resolves disputes with the help-- and even allows Sybil, his youngest daughter, to marry the family chauffeur. He even steals a few kisses with a comely (and widowed) new maid, but soon comes to his senses and discharges her--but only after setting her son up for life. Regardless of how you may feel about the legitimacy of peerage, he's the ideal boss.

This, ultimately, is the core of what makes “Downton Abbey” connect with viewers: Noblesse Oblige. The concept that the wealthy have an obligation to respect and care for those below them in class and status. Tune in and you get to see this concept elaborately enacted in every episode. Read the news, watch the presidential race or follow Wall Street and you will see how noticeably absent it is in 21^st century life-- and the social decoherence that it's absence is inflicting. Of all the period details on lavish display in the halls of Downton, this abstract concept is likely the only one we wish we could pull forward into our troubled times.

American Politics Isn't So Bad

"Vice speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Adam Martynyuk, on the right, throttles deputy Oleg Lyashko during a session in the chamber of the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev on Wednesday, May 18, 2011. According to reports, Lyashko had just asked Martynyuk to let him make a speech, which Martinyuk refused to do on procedural grounds. Lyashko then apparently called his interlocutor a Pharisee, at which point it was on."


- h/t bOING bOING

Or, You Could Get 2000 People To Pay You $10 Apiece

How much do you dislike crowds? Do you really hate driving 5 miles to the mall to see a first run movie? Good news!

A proposed service aims to bring movies to homes the same day they hit theaters, a milestone that Hollywood has long anticipated with a mixture of fear and fascination.

But there's a catch: At the prices currently being discussed by Prima Cinema Inc., the start-up that is touting the service, those movies will reach only world's the best-appointed living rooms.

Prima plans to charge customers a one-time fee of about $20,000 for a digital-delivery system and an additional $500 per film. The Los Angeles-based company has around $5 million in backing from the venture arm of Best Buy Co. and General Electric Co.'s Universal Pictures, and hopes to start delivering movies to customers as soon as a year from now.

Ironically the only people who could afford this service would be studio executives, who can write it off as a business expense. Hard as it is to believe, people believe this is a workable business model.

The steep price has been met with mixed reactions in Hollywood. Some executives question whether it will be possible to build a market beyond a few thousand users. (Prima says it plans to install its systems in 250,000 homes within five years.) Others say the high price would create an exclusive, super-premium niche market without cutting into existing sources of revenue.

"While this is a niche market, there is a chance for significant upside," says Adam Fogelson, chairman of Universal Pictures, which holds a minority stake in Prima. "And precisely because it is a niche market, that upside should come without harming any of our existing partners or revenue streams."

...The president of the National Association of Theatre Owners John Fithian, who was briefed on Prima, says the exhibitors reaction to Prima's model would "be decided on an individual company basis." Still, he says, most exhibitors aren't in favor of systems that impinge on movie-going.

The Prima model "makes very little sense as it risks millions to make pennies" by exposing movies to the possibility of piracy early on, Mr. Fithian says. "There is no such thing as a secure distribution to the home," he adds, noting, "This proposal will give pirates a pristine digital copy early, resulting in millions of lost revenue to piracy, while at the same time selling a very limited number of units. Only billionaires can afford $500 per movie."

..."It's clear that there is a big white space between the theatrical and DVD releases of movies that content companies can fill without cannibalizing folks on either side of the spectrum," Sony Corp. of America Chief Financial Officer Robert Wiesenthal said at a media-business conference in New York Tuesday. "There's a real consumer desire for an early, premium offering in the home."

A big white space! I see an increase in home-invasion incidents from people who can't get into a sold-out theatre but CAN break a few windows. And on their way out, they'll steal bread to feed their starving children.

New Category: Best Actor-Type-Person

Last month I was joshing about increasing the Academy Award's Best Picture nominations next year to 25, because it would be fun to have the Oscars grind out for five hours. But I just read a proposal which, if implemented, would lop off ten nominations in one fell swoop. But the reasons are far from fun-- and are as poorly thought out as my idea.

Kim Elsesser, titled a research scholar (i.e. grad student) in Women's Studies at UCLA, has proposed in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times that the acting categories go unisex. On one hand this is an intriguing idea, and would cut a big chunk off the broadcast: Supporting Actor, Director, Actor, Best Picture, boom, done, goodnight!

But Elsesser isn't interested in making a short night of it: her bent, as you can guess from her academic credentials, is that the whole notion of Actor and Actress Oscars is deeply sexist. What can I say-- aside from the fact she is wrong, and she uses some shaky logic to prop up her ideas. Out of the gate, she kicks her argument off with a vivid example:

Suppose... [the Academy] presented separate honors for best white actor and best non-white actor, and that Mr. Freeman was prohibited from competing against the likes of Mr. Clooney and Mr. Bridges. Surely, the academy would be derided as intolerant and out of touch; public outcry would swiftly ensure that Oscar nominations never again fell along racial lines.

She goes on to say gendered awards are just as discriminatory. This argument is pure equivocation: Racism does not equal sexism, and gendered categories don't equal sexism either.

Her topper occurs a few paragraphs later:

But separate is not equal. While it is certainly acceptable for sports competitions like the Olympics to have separate events for male and female athletes, the biological differences do not affect acting performances. The divided Oscar categories merely insult women, because they suggest that women would not be victorious if the categories were combined. In addition, this segregation helps perpetuate the stereotype that the differences between men and women are so great that the two sexes cannot be evaluated as equals in their professions. [italics mine]

This is a classic example of argumentum ad ignorantiam. It's an argument from personal belief, that belief being that western culture can and will instantly slip back to Jim Crow, pre-suffrage times if not for constant vigilance. So in Ms. Elsesser's mind, the Academy ballot-holding members are saying: "Oh sure, Sandra Bullock is great and all, but Matt Damon would have been so much better." Her argument also flattens the definition of acting from a whole-body, presence-based performance to a simple profession, no different than being a plumber or Speaker of the House. (oh, and BTW: does saying that the Actress categories are some kind of set-aside program for women seem a bit like self-loathing? Couldn't the opposite be true?)

There are plenty of non-gender professions with singular award categories: director, cinematographer, art direction, etc. They are singular because they are judged by output: the director's finished film, the costume designer's visual style, etc. Acting is about producing a version of one's own self. To judge a performance, you have to consider gender first, because really that's the first thing you see (this ain't radio, after all).

Having worked with actors quite often, I can say there is a big difference between the performances of male and female actors. Sure, it all comes from conceptual frameworks that are universal (Stanislavski, Method acting, etc.), but most actors build their acting instrumentation starting from the most basic framework: their own gender. And because the differences between the genders can be profound, the elements that comprise a strong performance can be as equally disparate. it's not a "stereotype" that men and women are different: they really are. Just ask any man or woman: they'll tell you.

(I'll admit this isn't always true: I just re-watched Alien (d. Ridley Scott, 1979) last night. The actors could have chosen their roles randomly, and the film would have played out pretty much the same.)

Acting is very much like a sports category, in fact, but far more egalitarian in it's division. Like curling or billiards, all about skill and prowess, not brute strength. A good performance is a good performance, and judging a performance against others in their most obvious and primary peer group is purely logical, and makes evaluation easier, more meaningful, and nuanced. It also better reflects the actor's role as an artistic interpreter of the intrinsic reality of the human condition, which, for any good actor or Academy that hands out vaguely male statues, should be job one.

A Medal-Of-Freedom-Shaped Scar On Her Forehead

Look, none of this stuff matters, but did you ever notice that JK Rowling hasn't received a presidential medal of freedom for encouraging millions of young people to read, you know, books? No? Well, if you had, would you have wondered why? Yes? Good.

Harry Potter author JK Rowling missed out on a top honour because some US politicians believed she "encouraged witchcraft", it has been claimed.

Matt Latimer, former speech writer for President George W Bush, said that some members of his administration believed her books promoted sorcery.

As a result, she was never presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The claims appear in Latimer's new book called Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor.

He wrote that "narrow thinking" led White House officials to object to giving Rowling the civilian honour.

This story is mostly notable because it comes from the BBC, which explains why it's so prominently placed there - famous local girl denied award because of crazy American religious beliefs. It's a perfect storm to those guys. Still, considering this was the last time in history that kids will read books (now they're reading text messages) it seems a shame to have let the opportunity pass.