To Wrestle or Not to Wrestle
Daily Beast has a little piece on the will he, won’t he back-and-forth going on around Mickey Rourke and Wrestlemania. In reponse to why he wouldn’t just do it, Mike Edison writes, “Perceived wisdom has it that the liberal elite at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are eager to promote acting and filmmaking as some sort of noble profession, and do not want to be cast as an unwitting PR machine for the WWE and its sideshow of monsters and muscle-bound freaks. Doing his best not to piss in the Academy’s punchbowl before the awards ceremony, Rourke has done a quick 180 toward industry respectability.” Who cares if he wrestles? What difference does it make?
Anyway, while I’m on the movie topic, I was out a few weeks ago with some folks and there were some interesting points made about movies and Oscars that I hadn’t thought about before. 1) The Oscars is the opportunity for the industry to present it’s idealized vision of itself. (That was a justification for Benjamin Button getting so many nominations.) 2) Movies that employ lots of folks win Oscars. There was a third point too, but I don’t remember that one.