Dream Emmy Ballot 2010: Misc. Observations on Reality

I didn't watch enough reality television in the past season to construct a full ballot of competitive and observational shows, but I thought I'd discuss the genre a bit. The reality categories are some of the most stagnant of the entire Emmy slate - the competitive show category has had the same five nominees for the past three years, and The Amazing Race has won that category in each year since its 2003 inception. I wonder how different voters put together their ballots for reality programs - after a show's first season, its quality is determined more by casting and production than by innovation of premise. Even if a show's structure was novel when it began, should it still be recognized when that format has stagnated?

It would be nice to see the voting members of the academy recognize that the past season's offerings from American Idol and Project Runway were largely considered to be underwhelming (compared with prior glory), and introduce some new blood into the competitive category like RuPaul's Drag Race and criminally under-recognized So You Think You Can Dance. I'll also reiterate my opinion from last year that declining to recognize Cat Deeley in the Best Host category robs said category of any legitimacy.

SYTYCD usually sees its primary recognition in the Best Choreography category. I'd like to see Wade Robson's Top 20 routine from Season 6 get noticed there. It'll be interesting to see how that category plays out with the introduction of Glee, which has some truly innovative numbers ("Jump," "Safety Dance,") but also frequently cribs from familiar dance tropes and music video choreography.

Mood Music XXXI

Part of me is curious to sit down and tally how much music I've bought related to the various media enterprises that use Alexandra Patsavas as a music supervisor - the other part knows that the number is somewhere around "a whole lot" and is content to leave it there.

I liked the Florence + the Machine track on the Eclipse soundtrack so much, I felt compelled to purchase the album Lungs as well. I love an act with a decent flair for melodrama - it's a good thing this wasn't around my sophomore year of college, or I would've driven my roommates crazy using it as a soundtrack for feeling sorry for myself.

Dream Emmy Ballot 2010: The Unsubmitted

Every year, there's a number of actors who I'm sad to exclude from the Dream Emmy Ballot because they never submitted their names for consideration in the first place (at least according to the information presented by the Academy).

Ben Koldyke, "Dale Tomasson," Big Love

Koldyke's pathos-drenched turn on Big Love as Alby's tortured lover was easily the best thing about the show's unfocused fourth season.

Anna Camp, "Sarah Newlin," True Blood

Michael McMillan, "The Rev. Steve Newlin," True Blood

Jim Parrack, "Hoyt Fortenberry," True Blood

Parrack, in many ways, served to ground True Blood's crazy second season. He sells Hoyt as an overgrown puppy of a person without making the innocence of his character feel creepy. Both McMillan and Camp brought exactly the right amount of energy to their roles as the leaders of a Christian fundamentalist anti-vampire church - manic without being over the top in a way where sometimes pure craziness just gleams in their eyes.

Ryan Cutrona, "Gene Hofstadt," Mad Men

Sarah Drew, "Kitty Romano," Mad Men

Sam Page, "Dr. Greg Harris," Mad Men

Mad Men always gets awards love disproportionate to its viewership numbers, but these three did great work alongside the more prominent members of the show's ensemble. Cutrona did affecting work as the man who put the "daddy" in "Betty Draper's Epic Daddy Issues." Drew wasn't a huge presence, but deserves acclaim at least for her work in the scene where Kitty reacts to her husband reenacting the opening number of Bye Bye Birdie (with himself in the Ann-Margret role) in their bedroom. Page plays what is almost certainly the most hated character among Mad Men's ensemble of deeply flawed people, but imbues him with a sense of haplessness that makes it impossible to write him off as just evil.

Jayma Mays, "Emma Pilsbury," Glee

An understated member of an ensemble constructed of big personalities, but Mays manages to sell Emma's OCD quirks without going over the top, offering somewhat of a grounding presence that helps the show stay connected (however tenuously) to the real world.

Enver Gjokaj, "Victor/Tony," Dollhouse

Dichen Lachman, "Sierra/Priya," Dollhouse

I know nobody really watched Dollhouse and it was kind of a miracle of television that Fox aired all the episodes, so it's not really surprising that almost none of the show's actors elected to submit their names for contention. Gjokaj and Lachman often outshone the show's ostensible star, Eliza Dushku, with their flexibility in the "doll" roles. Gjokaj in particular showed a distinct skill for mimicry in his impression of costar Fran Kranz.

Mood Music XXX

As in the not-racy-at-all 30th snapshot of the songs bouncing around in my head.

One of my favorites - I loved how they used it in the Glee finale.

Dream Emmy Ballot 2010

This is probably just indicative of what a nerd I am, but I love this project. It's like the TV obsessive's equivalent of a fantasy sport. I've decided to spread things out a bit more than last year - one category at a time rather than separated out by genre so it's not so crazily text-heavy. The rules (such as they are, being entirely self-imposed): Only those performers and shows that appear on the official ballots are eligible and only in the categories in which they were submitted; I only include those shows that I watched during the eligibility period.

I don't know whether I'll ultimately try to do a predictive ballot as well. It can be hard to gauge how the Academy's thinking will shift from one year to the next - Glee is almost certainly too big to ignore, but how will other new comedies fare? Who (if anyone) will come out on top of Modern Family's "everyone submit in supporting actor" strategy? Will the nominations reflect growing critical and fan disenchantment with shows like The Office, 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother? Will the basic cable original programming explosion manifest anywhere besides the yearly nominations for Tony Shalhoub, Kyra Sedgwick and Holly Hunter? Lost will likely see a final season nomination shower, but will Law and Order get any extra love? (For that matter - 24? Nip/Tuck? Ugly Betty?) Further thoughts as each category merits them.

Baking: Birthday Cake

A few weeks ago, I decided to make a birthday cake for myself as a personal indulgence. (I'm 24!) I love to bake, and I figured that a birthday was a good excuse - once the school year is over, it's hard to justify baking a full recipe of anything without an affiliated group of people to then eat it. I decided on chocolate cake with a raspberry frosting - I always loved putting berry frosting on the cupcakes I brought to class in for birthdays when I was a kid.

I. Cake: I decided to use a recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Cake Bible - All American Chocolate Butter Cake.

I'm really proud of how legit this parchment paper/butter/flour job looks on this pan. It's difficult to distribute the flour with any sort of finesse.

Cocoa, water, eggs and vanilla. The nice thing about Beranbaum is that she takes the time to explain why certain ingredients work for some cakes and not others. Why you use whole eggs for some cakes and just the yolks or whites for others, why water works better for chocolate cakes than milk. "Educational baking" sounds lame when I say that just now, but I guess I'm just the kind of nerd who digs that sort of thing.

Mmmm...butter.

The awesome thing about this batter was that there was a sort of intermediary step where it was flour, sugar, butter and chocolate without any eggs - that is, a delicious batter snack with minimal rationalization regarding salmonella and whatnot.

One layer after it came out of the oven. The cake ended up a little dry (I blame my terrible oven), but the chocolate flavor was really rich.

II. Raspberry Puree: An under-chronicled step, as it ended up taking most of the day and nearly all of my sanity. The process involves thawing and straining frozen raspberries to remove the liquid, and then the seeds. The hypothetically easy thawing step turned into a kitchen disaster when my spatula's handle snapped in half as I attempted to squeeze as much liquid as possible out of the berries. (You may or may not be able to see said broken spatula in the photo below.) The force of the tool breaking rocked the bowl the syrup was collecting in, sending it splattering on seemingly every surface in my kitchen. As if that wasn't enough, the seed-straining process was also a giant pain in the ass - Beranbaum recommends using a fine-setting food mill or a special Cuisanart attachment, but all I had was a fine-mesh strainer. I couldn't exert enough force with a spatula on its own, so I ended up largely using my hands to continuously push as much seedless pulp as possible through the strainer.

The measuring cup I used to reduce the juice in the microwave. Literally, a hot mess.

The aftermath. It was a trying evening. It's a good thing this stuff freezes for a year, because such a process should not be attempted with any frequency unless you have the patience of a saint.

III. Buttercream Frosting: I like to use the frosting recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. It's essentially just butter, confectioner's sugar, and cream and I don't yet have the confidence to attempt recipes that use hot corn syrup or eggs. (The whole "mix without getting the syrup on the beaters" thing really psychs me out. Maybe once I've got a stand mixer.)

Frosting with the raspberry puree added. It turned out nicely smooth and flavorful.

I tried some different photos to attempt to really capture how bright the pink is in the frosting, but I think this is the best I could do. All in all, a much better frosting job than I've done previously. I think the frosting job benefitted from the cake sitting in the fridge for a day or two after I baked it. Originally I planned to try and do something tricked-out with fresh raspberries and whipped cream accents, but the raspberry puree process was so exhausting that I just decided to leave it as is.

A slice of cake, enjoyed with a scoop of ice cream. This slice ended up being totally enormous, but really good.

Resolutions

I realized recently that June is a much better time than January for making behavior-altering resolutions, at least for those who schedule their year around an academic calendar. Right now, I actually have time to devote to things like getting more exercise or fixing my sleep schedule, whereas January always seems to flash by in a haze of new-semester madness. This applies here: the paltry post count for the past few months is depressing me, so in addition to "cook more vegetable dishes" and "stop falling asleep with the lights on," we have "write 30 posts for June." Whether this will actually translate to a post a day remains to be seen.

The good thing about this particular resolution is that I already have a lot of posts percolating, including but not limited to: the end of the TV season; Dream Emmy Ballots; long-postponed conclusions to Favorite Adaptations and Best of the 00s; the introduction of my personal year-by-year slog through the major Oscar nominees; Books Read and its new film companion; [belated] birthday baking; and thoughts on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Bill Condon: Future Twilight Director. I think it'll be a good month.

Books Read: May 2010

May 15: Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

The latest in the series from which True Blood derives its inspiration. The series tends to divide into books where momentous things happen, and books where characters are largely reacting to previous momentous events. This book seems to fall into the latter category, but was still solid. I think the continuing storyline of the impact of Katrina on Louisiana's vampire hierarchy was a shot in the arm for the series that continues to deliver for Harris. (It seems like their runs will only overlap for a couple of weeks, but I'm really intrigued to see how True Blood and Treme play back-to-back. At the very least, it will be accent-tastic.) I also like that Harris revisited the concept of having a famous dead person appear as a vampire (this time with a less litigious estate than that of "Bubba").

May 18: Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin

Her work may be branded with the condescending "chick-lit" label, but I really enjoy Giffin's work. Her characters always feel like adults, whereas other books lumped together under that umbrella can often come across as adults acting like teenagers. Heart of the Matter was heavier and darker than Giffin's previous books, but it never shied away from the resultant complexity. I feel like I'm going to be musing on this one for a while.

May 19: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Someday I'll have to tally all the books I end up reading either in anticipation of seeing a film adaptation or after seeing a film adaptation. This falls in the former category - I'm interested to see how the book's very interior narrative will translate to the screen, particularly in the way that its guiding concept informs the story's progression.

May 20: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

No matter how deeply I recognize, at least on an intellectual level, the pull of a popular young-adult book, somehow I still seem to find myself in circumstances where I'm totally drawn into a book and find myself finishing it at some ungodly hour of the morning. Collins takes a fascinating concept - an authoritarian government demands tribute from its citizens in the form of teenagers who fight to the death in a televised competition - and milks it brilliantly for all its tension and drama. Believe the hype.

May 24: What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

Another film-inspired choice...about which I apparently don't have much to say.

May 25: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Again, another late night. What can I say, they're addictive. A solid middle book to a trilogy - it made me look forward to the last installment coming out later this summer, and drew upon the world Collins established in The Hunger Games without being too repetitive.

May 28: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

The most recent Newbery winner (sometime I'll devote a full post to how I was Newbery-obsessed as a kid) and a very good one, at that. I liked the way that Stead drew upon A Wrinkle in Time not only to frame the narrative of When You Reach Me, but also to evoke a sense of the way a particular book can impact you when you're young. A worthy addition to the pantheon.

Maybe I'm Crazy

...but I'm pretty sure this song deserves a one-off character and storyline on Glee to truly capitalize on its super-creepy weirdness.

I honestly can't decide whether this is more disturbing sung to a rat or a human being.

P.S. If Ryan Murphy is going to keep recycling Popular storylines with the whole Kurt's dad/Finn's mom thing, can we also have Colfer and Monteith do the riff on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Please?

Books Read: April 2010

April 23 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

I read this one for a class. It's interesting to see how frequently the Pulitzer committee has chosen these sort of multi-layered histories for their fiction prize in recent years. They may feature different protagonists and narrators, themes and tones, but there's still a lot in common between Oscar Wao and, say, Kavalier and Clay, Middlesex and The Known World. I dug Diaz's take on Oscar's epic nerdiness - it kind of makes me want to create an "Oscar Wao Sci-Fi/Fantasy Reference" tumblr.

April 30 - North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

The first book I've read using the Kindle for Mac application. I tend to not be a huge fan of reading on the computer, but it wasn't too bad. I think my biggest problem was the progress bar at the bottom of the window, which allowed me to rationalize spending time reading when I should have been doing other things. (75% read? I could probably finish in a few hours!) I was prompted to start reading North and South after I watched the BBC miniseries adaptation from 2004. I don't do too much nineteenth-century reading outside of Austen and the Brontes - Gaskell's take on labor conflict, as well as the relative agency she bestows upon her heroine, was truly unlike anything else I've read from the era.

Mood Music XXIX: Retro Saturday Night

As I noted a couple weeks ago, I spent some time reminiscing about "Retro Saturday Night," a radio show I used to listen to when I was in high school. The show was a fun, dance-y mix of R&B, pop and disco from the 70s. I thought I'd put together a mini-playlist sampling a few of the songs featured on Retro Saturday Night.

On the Value of Primers

That is, of the "See Spot Run" variety, rather than paint or makeup. I just finished watching Visions of Light, a documentary about the history of film cinematography. I was alerted to the film by Roger Ebert's blog post regarding Variety's dismissal of film critic Todd McCarthy, who wrote and co-directed Visions of Light. Ebert's brief description spoke to the film nerd within me, so I added it to my Netflix queue.

Working on finishing my thesis and looking ahead to putting together reading lists for my comps has pushed me to think a lot about gaps in my knowledge of fields I'd like to work in, and how best to fill them. I'm interested in popular culture and media (that much is obvious), but from more of a cultural history standpoint than an aesthetic one; I've never done much literary analysis, art history or visual culture work, and while it won't be a major field of study for me, I don't want to neglect it either. A film like Visions of Light, which clocks in at a little over ninety minutes, is an ideal primer text for me, anchoring a discussion of an aesthetic history of film in a wide selection of clips that directly illustrate each point. If only every area of academic study could have such a painless, jargon-light breakdown.

I thought I'd also include my favorite primer clip - TCM's explanation of why they show films in the letterbox format. The clips they use to illustrate how pan-and-scan cropping alters movies will make you never want to watch one in fullscreen format ever again.

I recently watched Grease in widescreen for the first time after I saw this piece, and it was sort of astonishing to feel myself noticing new things in a film I've seen dozens of times in the cropped format.

Music Monday

Remnant of a weekend dive into 70s r&b/soul/disco I used to listen to on the radio. Maybe someday when I'm really in the mood to stall instead of doing work, I'll do a full-tilt playlist. I forgot how much I like this song, especially the spoken part at the beginning. It would probably be too pretentious to introduce "dig" into my vocabulary, seventies-style, right?

Retraction!

As Jerry Orbach says at the end of Dirty Dancing, "When I'm wrong, I say I'm wrong." You guys, I was wrong. 10 Things I Hate About You the TV show is not a pop culture travesty. It is a charming, delightful high school comedy.

From the pilot on, the show has really used the movie on which its based to provide little more than sketchy character guidelines. The actors don't really invite comparison with their earlier counterparts, because they're not really playing the same people. ABC Family has managed to carve out a decent niche for itself by presenting original material that's a step more mature than the offerings of, say, Disney Channel or Nickelodeon, which has the added bonus of making its characters seem more like actual teenagers. When 10 Things is at its best it's hilariously witty, and the show manages to feel simultaneously familiar and fresh. I also have to give it up to 10 Things for having a smart outspoken progressive teen feminist as its heroine - Kat Stratford remains the kind of character who is all too rare in popular media today.

Flashback: Totally Minnie

So recently the commercial I've been getting more than any other on Hulu is Verizon's new takeoff on Big Red's 80s ads.

It seems like kind of a genius campaign to me - it plays on the familiar while acknowledging the cheesy, and the jingle remains unbelievably catchy. It took me back to the video tapes of late-80s TV specials I used to watch ad nauseam as a kid. It's a means of media consumption that I assume would be totally foreign to kids today, who can get their made-for-TV movies on DVD weeks later or keep them stashed on DVRs. On those tapes, the commercials became part of the viewing experience; I was too young to be annoyed by them, so it never occurred to me to fast forward through them. Frankly, The Wizard of Oz still feels kind of incomplete when I watch it without the commercials touting McDonalds' employment of a young man with Down's Syndrome or an episode of 48 Hours featuring a story about a lifeguard trapped at the bottom of a pool. It's a fascinating glimpse into the world of whatever week the special aired and a mini-tour through a moment in history of advertising.

I thought it might be fun to write about some of the things I watched over and over as a kid. Several are really strange to watch again now, recognizing people who I didn't realize were celebrities at the time or noticing holes in plot logic that I once accepted at face value. The one the Big Red ads immediately brought to mind: Totally Minnie, starring Suzanne Somers and Robert Carradine.

To summarize: Somers is Carradine's guide at the "Minnie Mouse Center for the Totally Unhip." That's right, Somers is the "hip" one in this scenario. Oh, the "rapping." The special, which aired as part of the Wonderful World of Disney (or whatever its equivalent was at the time), is an impressive bit of Disney branding from the time right before they would recapture the hearts of America's children with The Little Mermaid, mashing up clips from old shorts and features with pop songs from the 70s and 80s. Bizarrely, this was my first encounter with the phrase "Miss Jackson if you're nasty":

I think repeated viewings of the following clip made me A) love "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" forever (I was really excited when I got older and realized that this was actually a real song and not just some random Disney thing) and B) buy heart-shaped sunglasses last year.

Every once in a while when I'm getting ready to go shopping, this ode to unrepentant materialism pops into my head. Oh, the tragic, tragic 80s fashion.

Walt Disney says Be Yourself! (Unless yourself is a cartoonist who wants to unionize!)