Harvey Weinstein Expelled From the Academy

By Nathaniel R

It's the end of an era. Harvey Weinstein has been expelled from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences given the avalanche of sexual harassment and rape claims that have hit in the past week. That's quite a downfall for a man once synonomous with Oscar Night. Or as The Los Angeles Times succinctly puts it

The move... in symbolic terms, amounts to a virtual expulsion from Hollywood itself.

The Oscars aren't the house that Harvey built, of course. They have survived many scandals and scandalous members and will survive this. The organization predates his birth by 25 years though how's this for an eery bit of Oscar/Harvey trivia: the very first televised Oscars were held on the night of baby Harvey's first birthday on March 19th, 1953. The producing giant didn't come into prominence until the early 1990s with the rise of Miramax but once he did he changed the way Oscar campaigns ran, was thanked relentlessly in acceptance speeches, and made prestige mini-majors the dominant Oscar players across town. 

Of course one could argue that the Weinstein era had ended years ago. The Weinstein Company has struggled in recent years against the rise of now-powerful awards players like Fox Searchlight, A24, Amazon Studios and more. There isn't even much to say about the way the Weinstein sexual harassment scandals will affect the Oscars this year. TWC only had one release this year that was successful enough to justify a campaign of any kind (Wind River) but that was a long shot at best even before the company was embroiled in this scandal. The period drama The Current War was their Christmas hopeful but its festival response was tepid and with the company falling apart and cries to "dissolve the board" out there it seems unlikely that it will see release any time soon.  

The Academy's Board of Governors (incidentally just one woman shy of being 50% women) was right to get this scandal off their plate immediately given that the Honorary Oscars are just around the corner. Who could be celebratory with anything like this depressing hurtful story on their minds? But on a deeper level they're taking a stand against the way Hollywood has been run for years. They state that they made the move in order to send a message:

The era of willful ignorance and shameful complicity in sexually predatory behavior and workplace harassment in our industry is over.

Well done. 

PSA: Kim Cattrall was famous before "Sex and the City," okay?

by Nathaniel R

Just when you think the world can't get any more sexist, there's always a reminder that it can. One such reminder is the famed existence of Sex and the City, a target in perpetuity. It often brings out the very worst in journalists, critics, famous people, and the public alike (both male and female in all four cases) as people fall over themselves with new ways to hate on, be offended by, or attempt to take down that particularly glitzy femme pleasure.

The brand has beenquiet for some time now until the Daily Mail posted a gross story about Kim Cattrall supposedly stopping production of Sex and the City 3 in its tracks with "outrageous demands". I didn't personally believe this was true, even before the stars started giving quote about it. The more quotes there are the more it's clear that everyone will have a different perception of what happened and that's fine. What was shocking was not the misleading story (my best guess is that the truth is somewhere inbetween all the quotes from the cast and executives because many many people with big egos and lots of millions are involved) but how unbelievably petty and sexist the "sources" were in their quotes about Cattrall...

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This is Link

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The Guardian talks to Armie Hammer about the peach scene in Call Me By Your Name and more - Hammer also recently got in a good dig at conservative asshole James Woods who is upset by the age difference in the film
Awards Daily Joey ranks the 101 greatest Will & Grace guest stars. Yes, 101.
Decider the 24 best episodes of Will & Grace prior to the revival
THR Netflix is losing some very major TV series on Oct 1st so if you always wanted to complete 30 Rock or Friday Night Lights, you'd best be bingeing...

More after the jump including Cher, Jane Fonda, This is Us, and Hugh Hefner's death...

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Race in Lady Macbeth and The Beguiled: Not so black or white?

by Lynn Lee

Florence Pugh in Lady Macbeth / Nicole Kidman in The Beguiled

In a summer filled with movies by or starring women of exceptional talent, The Beguiled and Lady Macbeth make an especially fascinating cinematic pairing.  Both films center on mid-19th century women who appear trapped by their societies’ constricting gender norms.  In both, the women are confined to an isolated, often claustrophobic space, yet nature is a constantly beckoning presence that at once shapes and reflects their desires.  (Both even have plots that turn on poisonous wild mushrooms!)  And in both, the women up-end the patriarchal structure of their circumscribed universe without liberating themselves.  If anything, they reinforce that power structure even as they seize momentary control of it, leaving not a feeling of triumph but a somber queasiness.

For all these thematic similarities, the differences between the two films are even more striking...

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This & That: Silkwood, Stewart, and other things we forgot to talk about

Herewith a random collection of things that have been clogging up The Film Experience pipeline (i.e. my desktop and emails) which I never got around to writing about and no team maker volunteered to cover. In some cases I saved a photo I don't remember from what and for what!

Once you're done reading the post please imitate that "empty trash" desktop noise and feel as uncluttered as I will once I've hit publish.

We'll start with Meryl because that always gets you going...

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