Wolf of Wall Street was the most daring, most interesting, best acted, movie of 2013. Nothing will deter me from firmly believing that. Catching Fire received marvelous reviews, but as usual crowd pleasing money makers are often ignored. It was second on my list last year.
Third was Gravity, but as I have said, the margin of preference between the three is miniscule.
No doubt that 12 Years A Slave is a good film. Yes slavery, racism, and discrimination, are terrible and I know that as well if not better than any film maker who wants to hammer me over the head with that fact. I crusade against the terrible injustices of this world constantly. But when you get down to it, wasn’t 12 Years really just Roots on Violent Steroids?
How many times do we have to be hit over the head with the fact that slavery is bad, discrimination is bad, and racism is bad at the Oscars? It seems to become an annual event and starting from that premise results in an automatic nomination, whether the quality of the film is deserving or not. And after a while, the constant drumbeat waters down the message.
Conservatives will never be convinced. Red States continue to act like they won the Civil War and Lincoln never existed. Everybody else already gets it and you’re preaching to the choir. But just as they did by proclaiming Crash over Brokeback Mountain as the winner, voters again took the safe easy route and gave the Best Picture not to the best film, but again to what they deem the best film that is most relevant. Don’t go out on a limb, Hollywood.
Sandra Bullock was way better in this film than she was in the one she won for The Blind Side. It doesn't ad up, and for me the whole charade has become a crushing bore if not a yearly joke. Let’s give racism an award so we can ignore it the other 364 days of the year.
And please let Cate Blanchett’s award be the end of Hollywood’s perpetual ass kissing of the pedophile known as Woody Allen. Every defender of this miscreant that says there was no evidence of molestation can only make that statement when they completely ignore the findings at the custody hearing. They conveniently get a memory lapse time after time after time as if the transcript and judge’s decision never existed at all. As I said on my Facebook page, what Blanchett should have said was “I thank Woody Allen on behalf of all pedophiles everywhere that are under represented in Hollywood.”
And on top of that, he’s overrated as a director. His movies are nothing more than a hodgepodge in which he caters to his own inner psychotic neurosis hoping to use Hollywood as his psychiatric treatment instead of paying for an analyst.
These are just a few of the many reasons why the Oscars shouldn't mean diddily squat to you or me. People will still watch to gaze at the hoopla and celebrities, but they have become so stodgy and snobby that the influence they actually have is now minimal despite how many tune into see this mess. I mean, it’s an event. But so was the Super Bowl and it was a crushing bore this year as well.
With very few exceptions (most notably Christoph Waltz, Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Murray, and the duo of Jamie Foxx and Jessica Biel), the presenters seemed zombified, reading their cue cards with an engagement and an enthusiasm compared to which the nightly reports of an average weatherperson seem Brando-esque. And it’s not because they’re bad actors—on the contrary, some of my favorite contemporary performers were onstage distributing statues—but because the tone, set from on high, was petrified, in both senses. I don’t entirely blame Ellen DeGeneres for the course of the evening. I don’t know enough about the parcelling out of power backstage to know how guided or vetted she was by the producers—whether the writers were hers or imposed upon her. But, having accepted the job, she seems, at the very least, to have accepted the regulations, and she toed the line with a dutiful eagerness in a desperate cause; she worked hard to maintain a show of good cheer and good times while being denied the freewheeling disinhibition that goes with real comedy. It was mainly the undue exertions that came through.And if you want a list of the winners, here they are.
The nadir was the pizza; the synthetic spontaneity of the non-event brought to mind Andy Kaufman, whose genius I miss all the time and whose ability to mesh the nostalgic bathos of a pizza party with the edge of chaos would have made him a formidable, historic Oscar host. And to top off the pizza’s unfunniness came DeGeneres’s passing of the hat to pay for it, about which Emily Gould aptly tweeted, “amounts of money that are consequential to most people mean nothing to us, they are literally a joke! ha ha ha.”
In a brief interview in the backstage shadows, after the red carpet and before the main event, one of the two producers of the festivities (I can’t remember whether it was Craig Zadan or Neil Meron) likened the show to tightrope walking and called himself a good tightrope walker. So he may be, but this event was all net; it started in the safety zone and never got aloft……….……………..There are the movies, and that’s where the far end of the bell curve is served. The fact that the best movies went home empty-handed—“The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Nebraska”—is beside the point. If my own internal audio-meter is to be trusted, two of the biggest rounds of applause and cheers of the night went to Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, for their performances in Martin Scorsese’s movie. Taking nothing away from the honorable but conventional performances by McConaughey and Leto, the house of peers seemed to know where the magic lay.
That its magicians were even on hand for the festivities, watching others collect statues, is itself a source of wonder. The movie has already passed into the future history of the cinema, and it will be watched with admiration and astonishment when the petty personality politics of the ceremony have passed into welcome oblivion. In the meantime, bring on the four-hour director’s cut of “Wolf” (and may it have a little theatrical run to coincide with the DVD release).
The ownership of the Motel is a new start for the gruesome twosome after husband and father Sam Bates (David Cubitt) has been mysteriously killed in an accident that is not so accidental. It’s a mystery that is cleared up halfway through the season, and one of the few that is. Bates Motel asks a lot of questions, but like the series it’s modeled after, 
The Sheriff of White Pine, Alex Romero (Nestor Carbonelli), begins nosing around the Bates Motel along with deputy Zack Shelby (Mike Vogel). There’s not much that goes on in Sheriff Alex’s town that he doesn’t know about. And if by chance something escapes his attention, such as why Keith Summers parked his pickup truck in an unlikely place and just left it, Romero will find out why before gracing the windshield with a parking citation. 
Deputy Dawg Zack does his own nosing around in his own special way as well, spending much of his time sniffing around Norma. He’s much much friendlier towards her than Sheriff Romero is. How much friendlier? To put it bluntly, he goes in where Keith Summers has been except he doesn’t have to force entry to do so. But he does have a secret tool that helps pry her pants off. Shelby, just like practically everybody else has secrets of his own.
Norman also meets his first real love interest in episode one, when Cystic Fibrosis stricken Emma Decody (Olivia Cooke) befriends him on his first day of school. It’s pretty much a one way street on her part though as Norman only has eyes for Bradley Martin (Nicola Peltz) whose father is mysteriously murdered. I guess you can just go ahead and attach the word “mysterious” to anything that goes on in this neighborhood. And although Norman is there when Bradley needs a shoulder to cry on, there’s a difference between being a “thing” and “hooking up” as Emma tries to explains to Norman, who isn’t very open to that explanation. At least not until Bradley’s real boyfriend explains it to him in the season finale.
It’s sort of like the whole is there or isn’t there some kind of incestuous relationship between Norma and Norman. It’s never spelled out one way or another. It’s hinted at on more than one occasion, but either it’s a line the network, the producers, and the writers don’t seem to want to cross openly, or it’s left to be resolved for certainty at a later date. It may be the same reason that Mary Kay Letourneau double, Miss Watson, intentions are left for us to decipher because by the season finale, there’s a good possibility we may never know what was up with her and that would not be good. Plot points left hanging are a very bad thing in series television.
Midway through the season, the villainous Jake Abernathy takes up residency in Room 9. He’s looking for something, thinks Norma has it, but she doesn’t. We do find out what he is after, but this too just leads to more and more questions.
