Wide awake again. I think I'll post this video link, then spend some time answering e-mails.
It's been a while since I had a version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on this blog. Here's my pal Jim Meskimen doing about 6% of all the celebrity impressions he does…
We haven't had a variant version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on this blog for a long time. This seems like the perfect one for tonight…
Jen Peikoff wrote to ask, with a note of desperation in every pixel…
Please, please, you must help me understand something. When it comes to understanding Hollywood and show biz, I figure if you can't explain something, no one can. In the Oscar nominations just out, Little Women was nominated for Best Picture but its writer-director Greta Gerwig was not nominated as Best Director. If it wins as the Best Picture, doesn't that mean she was the Best Director? Why wasn't she nominated?
Well, first of all, I doubt it will win for Best Picture. I don't get that there's a lot of "buzz" around it in that direction but that's just a hunch. You're right that it would be an injustice if it did win and she didn't win Best Director right alongside it.
Secondly, there are two very real reasons for the discrepancy here, one being that a different pool of voters vote in each of those categories…
Imagine you go to party one evening and you poll everyone at that party as to what their favorite candy is. There's some debate and a wide range of opinions but at the end of your voting, it's determined that most people at this party like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Okay, fine.
Then the next evening, you go to a different, larger party. Some of the same people who were at last night's party are there but so are a lot of other folks. Again, you poll the assemblage and this time, the clear winner is M&Ms. Would you be stunned and wonder why the two polls yielded different results? Of course not.
But that's how Oscar nominations work. The Best Director nominees are selected by the Directors Branch of the Academy and the Best Picture nominees are selected by the entire voting membership. That's how come there were two different outcomes…that and the fact that the Academy nominates five directors for Best Director and between five and ten movies for Best Picture. There's the other reason.
They nominated nine films this year for Best Picture. That means that at least four of the men and women who directed movies up for Best Picture were not going to be nominated for Best Director. Simple math. The directors of Best Picture nominees Ford v. Ferrari, Jojo Rabbit and Marriage Story also did not make the cut.
It's a basic fact of something like the Oscars that a lot of good work doesn't make the cut. They nominate five men as Best Actor. If there are twelve outstanding performances in a given year, they nominate five of them. If some year the acting is really lousy and there are only three good performances, they will still nominate five.
This kind of thing can never be without its anomalies. Consider the fact that nominations can have less to do with what the person did than something like when the movie was released…which is out of their control. If Bohemian Rhapsody had come out a few months later and been part of this year's Oscars instead of last year's Oscars, Rami Malek probably would have snagged one of the five Best Oscar nominations this time and either Antonio, Leonardo, Adam, Joaquin or Jonathan would not have made the list even though the work they did would have been just as fine.
You can't take this stuff that seriously. If your concern is that women are getting "snubbed" (that's the wrong word but everyone uses it), that's a valid concern but probably more about being hired at all than winning awards. Greta Gerwig helmed a very successful movie that was very well reviewed, there's a good chance she'll take home a Best Screenplay statuette…and she probably already has plenty of offers, as well as a lot more clout than she had before. I would be more concerned for the women who aren't getting the opportunities to direct or write. Or at least the same opportunities they'd have if they were guys.
I've gone way too long on this blog without an unusual rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody." Here's Storm Front, a popular barbershop quartet doing some barbering of Queen's masterpiece…
It's been a while since we've had a bizarre rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on this site. Here it is performed by excerpts from 260 different movies because…well, why not?
Here at newsfromme.com, we'll link to almost any odd interpretation of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and we also love great impressionists. So here's the great impressionist Jim Meskimen doing guess-what-song.
Jim also lends his gifted vocal cords to animated cartoons. After years of trying to get him — and finding out he was working or otherwise unavailable that weekend — we have him on one of this year's Cartoon Voices Panels at Comic-Con. He'll be on the one that commences at 1 PM on Saturday in Room 6BCF, along with Gregg Berger, Phil LaMarr, George Kidder, Julianne Buescher and Brian T. Delaney. Oughta be a good one. And now, here's Jim as a whole buncha people…
Well, it's been a while since I had a real odd rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on this site. Here it is as refried by the Maniacal 4 Trombone Quartet. Thanks to Phil Pollard for telling me about this…
There is no form of music — no style, no instrument — which has not been or will not be used to perform "Bohemian Rhapsody." Here it is on a fairground "player" organ that is more than 100 years old — or about the same age as the guys in Queen…
There is perhaps someone somewhere on the Internet who is capable of producing musical notes and hasn't uploaded their interpretation of "Bohemian Rhapsody." Here is Surrey Harmony's Barbershop version. Don't miss the part where they smash their guitars. (I'm not kidding. They actually smash their guitars…)
The Star Wars version of "Bohemian Rhapsody." You might want to take this full-screen and turn on the closed captions so you can read the lyrics…
This is the Mnozil Brass with their version of "Bohemian Rhapsody." Andy Warhol once said that in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. I believe that in the future, everyone will have their own interpretation of "Bohemian Rhapsody." Thanks to Phillip Pollard for telling me about this one.
Here's the amazing a cappella musical group Pentatonix with a four-minute history of American music. Like all YouTube musical videos, it adheres to the current requirement of a minimum of ten seconds of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and there's a lot of other good stuff in there as well…
Oh, no! Not another video where someone plays Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" on a ukulele! Very, very frightening.
Impressionist Rick Miller has a go at "Bohemian Rhapsody." Thanks to Dave Cook for suggesting this linkage…
They're losing the narrative thread. Top of Hour 9, Tom Bergeron engages in banter with two Muppet-style puppets, then the latter perform their version of "Bohemian Rhapsody." It's a nice act but I went back and forth on the TiVo and couldn't find any mention of who the puppets were or where they appear or anything of the sort.
They're followed by Barry Manilow singing "I Write the Songs" with voiceover intro by Jerry and cutaways to him waving one of those glowing wands that Manilow audiences wave. It's a clip from a previous telethon but you have to figure that out. Then, fifteen minutes into Hour 9, Ed McMahon announces they're live from Las Vegas…and there's Jerry. Is he back from his nap? No, this is what I saw earlier, when I was up in the middle of the night. They're rerunning material from earlier in the telethon. Interestingly, I don't see any shots of the tote board and I think they've edited out the moments when Jerry and Ed go to check how much they've collected so far.
Shortly after the top of Hour 10, Jerry mysteriously disappears and we're back with Tom Bergeron, Kelly Monaco and Bob Zany…and I guess it's live because we're again seeing the tote board, which is up over 15 million. Still, it must be a snooze for the live audience in Vegas. Half the acts being shown are pre-tapes and between them, there are long stretches of pitches for MDA that are also pre-taped. Bergeron finally brings on Teri Ralston, a wonderful Broadway performer who was in the original production of Company. She offers up a nice preview of a new Broadway-bound show she's doing, Hats. Good performance, terrible time slot.
She's followed (after some plugs) by the ladies of "Fantasy," a show at the Luxor. Usually, I think they have their tops off when they do this number.
If you're going to record any part of this show next year, try to snag the wee small hours of the morning. It's an odd lineup of acts, mostly from Vegas, some of them quite good. I'm watching the performers who drew that coveted 4 AM time slot. Their intro was a bit fuzzy but I think it's the show from the big room at the Sahara in Las Vegas, which is called "The Platters, Beary Hobb's Drifters and Cornell Gunter's Coasters." I'm guessing lawyers worked that out because none of these folks were in the original Drifters or Coasters, and maybe one sang at one time with the Platters. By any name, it's a band of very talented black singers who get the crowd up and dancing to hits of the fifties…
…or at least, the crowd that's there. The audience is pretty enthusiastic — what there is of one. The performers sing "Shout" and try to get everyone up and dancing…but there's only so much you can do with empty seats.
Tom Bergeron is showing us scenes from Las Vegas, explaining how many streets are named for the great entertainers who've played the town. One throughfare was recently named (or maybe renamed) Jerry Lewis Way and the nice thing, he notes, is that it intersects with Dean Martin Boulevard. There's gotta be a joke there: Yeah, and then they split off and don't come together for the next thirty-five years. By the way, Dean Martin Boulevard is the only street in the world where you can get arrested for not driving drunk.
More reruns from earlier in the evening when Jerry was there live. I have to go do stuff so I may not get back to the Love Network for a while. I hope it doesn't read like I'm putting the telethon down because I'm really enjoying it, especially with fast-forwarding. I'll write more about it later.