Thursday News: Insight into Oscar voting, trigger warnings, posthumous Dr. Seuss book, and Game of thrones Monopoly
Publishing Newsawards / childrens-books / Dr. Seuss / Game of Thrones / games / Kameron Hurley / Neil Gaiman / trigger warnings9 Comments
Oscar Voter Reveals Brutally Honest Ballot: “There’s No Art to ‘Selma,'” ‘Boyhood’ “Uneven” – The Hollywood Reporter is posting daily interviews with Academy Award voters, and if you want a glimpse into the voting process of Academy members, you may want to check these interviews out. This one has garnered some well-earned controversy over questionable remarks about race and Selma (the usual, ‘just because it didn’t get nominated doesn’t mean people are racist’ lament), but it also made me wonder about how universal some of the other sentiments are – namely the broader considerations that go into picking a winner for each category. Michael Keaton, for example, gets a vote in part because he seems like a decent guy, and Patricia Arquette because she was brave in letting herself be filmed over a 12 year period with no plastic surgery in between. Are these the kinds of things that RITA judges consider, even if they’re kept private?
American Sniper is the winner of the year, whether or not it gets a single statuette, because for all of us in the movie industry — I don’t care what your politics are — it is literally the answer to a prayer for a midrange budget movie directed by an 84-year-old guy [Clint Eastwood] to do this kind of business. It shows that a movie can galvanize America and shows that people will go if you put something out that they want to see. With regard to what it did or didn’t leave out, it’s a movie, not a documentary. I enjoyed it, I thought it was well done, and I can separate out the politics from the filmmaking. –Hollywood Reporter
KAMERON HURLEY ON TRIGGER WARNINGS AND NEIL GAIMAN – An interesting interview with Kameron Hurley on Neil Gaiman’s new book, Trigger Warning, which Hurley finds problematic, both to the viability of actual trigger warnings, and to the spaces in which they have been used to create a sense of safety around potentially triggering or traumatizing material. Hurley references a recent article in the Washington Post about how content warnings can be used in a way that actually encourage discussion and engagement, and notes that an author of Gaiman’s stature has “the power to shift an entire conversation,” which should make him even more conscientious in his approach to a subject of this importance. I personally dislike the term “trigger warning,” and think it can be stigmatizing. I wonder if there would be so much controversy if we engaged more neutral language to describe and provide information about content.
The problem with mainstreaming this kind of use of the term is that instead of saying, “Yes, trigger warnings are useful so let’s not continue to water it down” what you do when you title a rather typical short story collection “Trigger Warning” is that your work becomes part of the problem of breaking it down into meaninglessness and slapping it on any old thing as a marketing gimmick. You co-opt a term used in feminist spaces, and you use it for shock value, to be edgy and subversive, instead of acting like an ally who has empathy and understanding of the term for its intended use.
Gaiman, in his introduction, goes immediately from saying “Yes, I understand its intended use” to “I decided to use it in this work in a way in which it’s not intended.” A little whiplash, there. –SciFiNow
Take a Look – Dr. Seuss Has a New Book – At least three previously undiscovered and unpublished books by Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, were uncovered in his home and will now be published. Almost 25 years after the author’s death, the first book of the three will make an appearance at the end of July, and it’s called What Pet Should I Get:
Random House associate publishing director Cathy Goldsmith says “What Pet Should I Get?” was likely written between 1958 and 1962. The book features the same brother and sister seen in Dr. Seuss’ 1960 classic “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.” –ABC News
‘Game of Thrones’ Monopoly will make you want to kill your family – Sometime this year, Hasbro will be releasing a Game of Thrones Monopoly game, complete with appropriately themed playing pieces:
Playable pieces include a direwolf, a dragon egg, a three-eyed raven, a White Walker, a crown and an Iron Throne. Houses and hotels will be replaced with keeps and villages. –Mashable
All of that news is comment-worthy, wow, and I don’t even read/watch GoT!
It’s interesting that Gaiman made that short story collection. I would agree with you, though, that neutral language would be better. I also have a general dislike of the idea of making an ‘ingredients label’ for books that is often times used in reviews. Not because I don’t think people should be warned, but because I think it would automatically ATTRACT a certain type of reader, similar to the “contains partial nudity” that makes a movie an auto-see for some teens.
Of course, if I had to choose between trigger warnings or a book rating, I might go the way of the rating. There were a few books my father gave me when I was about 11 that contained pretty graphic rape (that was my reading level) and they were a bit traumatizing. :/
Everything I’ve read about American Sniper sounds like a nightmare, not an answer to a prayer. Matt Taibi says in the Rolling Stone
“Even by the low low standards of this business, it still manages to sink to a new depth or two.
The problem of course is that there’s no such thing as “winning” the War on Terror militarily. In fact the occupation led to mass destruction, hundreds of thousands of deaths, a choleric lack of real sanitation, epidemic unemployment and political radicalization that continues to this day to spread beyond Iraq’s borders.
Yet the movie glosses over all of this, and makes us think that killing Mustafa (the bad guy) was some kind of decisive accomplishment – the single shot that kept terrorists out of the coffee shops of San Francisco or whatever. It’s a scene that ratified every idiot fantasy of every yahoo with a target rifle from Seattle to Savannah.”
I’d be okay with a Hollywood good guys vs bad guys film if our politicians and voters didn’t keep thinking this is the way the real world works. In Syria, it’s been almost amusing to watch the efforts of commentators to push the lesser of evils into the role of Clint Eastwood-worthy heros. The Taliban were “Freedom Fighters” when we were supporting them against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
@SAO: It’s such a disservice to everyone, military personnel and civilians both, to continue to insist that sending troops for such limited time–and purpose–to other countries, and then withdrawing them as the political winds change, defends the freedom of citizens here.
It not only does not ‘defend’ anyone’s freedom, here or there; it engenders animosity and contempt, and breeds despair and hatred.
This is the second year in a row The Hollywood Reporter has done their anonymous Oscar ballot, Entertainment Weekly has been doing it for several years, but to a lesser extent. I remember one particular balloteer from last year saying he was voting for Lupita Nyong’o because she was pretty and had conducted herself gracefully during the campaign season. Which sounded EXTREMELY reductive to me, but there you go. Never worry when your favorite doesn’t win, just remember comments like these and all the folks who never won an Oscar but deserved one.
@AztecLady
Amen. I’m an expat American and since Bush invaded Iraq, the global opinion of America has gone from high to down the toilet. Having so many people in the world think badly of us has made the world a lot more dangerous for Americans, not safer.
I admit it, I love trigger warnings. Especially in this current culture of “dark and gritty.” I’ve been reading both Fantasy and Romance for the majority of my life and I’ve never seen so much rape and torture and horrible people doing horrible things to other people. And that’s both the Romance and the Fantasy.
I read to escape the daily drudge not to wallow in it. But now my “heroes” are rapists, murderers and pimps. How can we NOT need trigger warnings. I appreciate with my whole heart when I read reviews with trigger warnings.
To be fair, what NG wrote in introduction is this:
“There are things that upset us. That’s not quite what we’re talking about here, though. I’m thinking rather about those images or words or ideas that drop like trapdoors beneath us, throwing us out of our safe, sane world into a place much more dark and less welcoming. “
@Alex Hurst: What’s wrong with attracting a “certain kind of reader”? Matching the reader to the books they want seems like the goal.
I’ll bet you anything the person who said that about American Sniper was one of the same ones last year who couldn’t be bothered to watch 12 Years A Slave but voted for it for Best Picture anyway because s/he didn’t want to be accused of being “un-PC.” George C. Scott was right all along.