This week's New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt
"Ready for His Closeup"
Who cares if Oscar has had work done? He's still a beauty.
I love the cover but Blitt's take, not so much (no surprise but I loathe the smugness people who don't watch the Oscars sometimes have about it... as if watching sports is some kind of civil disobedience. Ha! Sports... very inconoclastic, that. You've really shown society!) but I like Anthony Lane's column. He gets dinged by critics for valuing his wit above the cinema but he's still a good read.
Oscar night is anxiety central: TV needs the stars to light up the ratings, and the stars, for their part, use TV to stage what is, in essence, a communal bath of self-love. “Just a small group getting together for a pat on the back,” in the words of Janet Gaynor, who won the first Oscar for Best Actress, in 1929. Since then, the pat has become a caress, and the caress has grown into the kind of activity that in “The Wolf of Wall Street” is reserved for yachts and jets.
Are you excited for the big night? I suddenly am after a week of the blahs. After the jump my two favorite New Yorker Oscar covers ever and they're both by the same artist.
"The Moment of Truth"
This was Carter Goodrich's cover for the '95 Oscars (March 96). If you need a memory jog that's when Susan Sarandon won Best Actress. I love this cover so much, especially how the sunglasses are just basically eyes.
You can see a gallery of all the Oscar covers at the New York but this is my favorite ever, all time, also by Carter Goodrich.
"The Natives Are Getting Restless"
Hee! This cover for the 2001 Oscar Ceremony and it envisions our favorite statue just as we see him: A Golden Idol. Moses would be pissed, and not just because The Ten Commandments lost Best Picture in 1956.