Dogged Blog

On not watching the Oscars

There's a certain cachet to not watching the Super Bowl, right? It just makes you look incredibly cool, that your life is so full of hip and meaningful pastimes and commitments that a bunch of guys in padded suits ramming into each other for money is just too, too banal for you to care about.

I don't think that's why I don't like watching it, though. Because I feel the same sense of, "Oh, good, I won't have to wait to get seated at a restaurant tonight!" about the Academy Awards as I do about the Super Bowl.

Most years, I've not even seen one of the nominated films. It happens that this year, I have. Like the hopeless geek I am, I saw "The Social Network" the weekend it opened. Of course I did. But that's it. I haven't even heard of most of the others, and the only one I want to see, "The King's Speech," has been playing at a theater within walking distance of my house since December, and I still haven't seen it yet.

But I'm not sure I'd want to watch the Academy Awards even if I'd seen all the films, and even if I cared who won. I didn't watch the Golden Globes, either, and I'm a big fan of "Glee," right?

I just don't seem to like to watch big television events. I like to follow them on Twitter, but not watch them myself. I don't know if this is a sign that I've become hopelessly meta and completely out of touch with real life, or that at least you can Tweet from the dog park instead of being chained to a TV set.

And yes, I do believe this post marks the return of my long-abandoned "Sunday bloviation" series!

Photo: Me holding an Academy Award, just to show that there was a time when I wasn't remotely as disinterested in the Oscars as I am now. That's Rob Epstein with me, and the award was for the 1989 best documentary, for his film "Common Threads," about the AIDS quilt.

Hudson Leick's joke

So, in my liveblogging of the Xena convention, I watched Hudson Leick, who played Callisto, Xena's arch-enemy, do her stage appearance. I liveblogged it for AfterEllen.com, with photos (including this one) by KT Jorgensen.

And Hudson told a joke that was too smutty for AfterEllen and too long for Twitter, but I promised to tell it so here it is.

First, Hudson started out with a long dissertation on French swear words, with a particular focus on her favorite, "Va te faire enculer," which means, "Go get fucked in the ass."

She was joking about a line of Xena-themed vibrators she wanted to create:

She said she and a friend want to create a line of Xena-themed vibrators. "The Gabrielle one that just makes you cry, I love you, I love you.' The Callisto one that goes 'AAAAAAHHHHHHHHRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHAAAAA' all the time. The Xena one that is all stoic, 'I want to, but I won't,' and gazes longingly at Gabrielle the whole time."

Then Adam from Creation Entertainment, which produced the convention, made a comment that there are no vibrators for men.

And of course, an entire auditorium of lesbians knew enough to yell, "Yes, there are!"

"They're for everyone," Hudson told Adam. "You should try it." Then she smiled. "It involves va te faire enculer."

What did liberals do?

Still marathoning West Wing. Still the best. Show. Ever.

What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things, every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.

Battle of the gay twitter titans...

Because I'm easily amused, and also because it's just too damn amusing to let it go by: John Barrowman and Neil Patrick Harris are slugging it out over AfterElton.com's "Man of the Decade" competition. Their field of combat? Twitter.

Now, NPH has been tweeting quite often for a while now, as @ActuallyNPH. He has nearly 200,000 followers. But Barrowman, not so much -- until last night, when he apparently discovered the glory and wonder that is Twitter, and started a barrage of hysterically funny tweets on his @Team_Barrowman account.

NPH threw down first, as recounted by AfterElton's Ed Kennedy last night:

If you're feeling it, throw a vote my way: http://tiny.cc/Do80i Being atop John Barrowman would be a great way to start the decade...

Suddenly, John Barrowman is all over Twitter, shaking his fist and getting out the vote on his own behalf, including linking to Twitpics of him, well... shaking his fist, all designed to prove that yes, it really is the real JB. 

It was all pretty funny, but the funniest thing of all? In my mind, it's this tweet, posted about an hour ago:

I was never against Twitter just didnt get it ..BUT NOW I DO!!!!!!! BARROWMAN FIST!!! And yes its the real JB

Yes, John, that's how it happens. Resistance is futile.

I don't personally have a horse in the race, as I haven't seen either actor in anything at all. They're both out, progressive, and funny. So whoever wins, I'm fine with it... as long as they keep on tweeting. ;)

Coco Before Chanel: Fashion? Design? Clothes? Not so much.

Imagine a film about Albert Einstein that doesn't mention physics, and you pretty much have "Coco Before Chanel," a film about Coco Chanel that barely mentions that oh yeah, she was a designer.

The first woman designer to break into the male-dominated Paris fashion houses, who went on to build an empire in her name, a name that became synonymous with style and elegance right up until today.

But of course, all that pales into meaninglessness in the face of the fact that she fell in love with some guy once.

I understood this film was about her life before she was famous. I simply assumed it would be about the development of her personal sense of style and also, that we'd get some sense of what made her tick. I got none of that. I found her motivations in most of this film incomprehensible, and while Audrey Tautou is beautiful and compelling and charismatic as Chanel, I simply had no freaking clue what I was supposed to think about her character.

And I don't mean that in a mysterious and intriguing sense. I mean it in the "Huh?" sense.

Big disappointment to me.

Dear Adam Lambert fans....

I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but what your guy did? It's been done before, and by someone wearing even more glitter and makeup.

Ten years before Adam was born.

Gives a whole new meaning to "Ziggy played guitar...", no?

And for my very very young readers, that's David Bowie fellating the guitar of Mick Ronson on the Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars tour. In 1972. I'm just saying.

On the red carpet. I mean that literally. In flats.

I'm going to blame jury duty for the fact that I haven't posted here in, ummm... way too long.

Saturday night I was at the 20th Annual GLAAD Media Awards banquet in San Francisco, covering the red carpet for AfterElton.com and AfterEllen.com. My write-up of the event is over at AfterElton.com, and why, yes, I do manage to work dogs into the piece.  Photographer Steven Underhill snapped this image of me interviewing Robert Gant about his film Save Me and his chocolate Lab, Bodhi... thanks, Steven!

I did the red carpet for this event last year, too, and had a lot of fun. I had more fun this year because I didn't have to stand for four hours in high heels. No, this year, I wore flats:

Yes, that's actually me standing on the edge of the red carpet in my assigned spot. And a special spot it was, too, since my press tag said "Special Press" on it. I asked them what made some of us special and some not, but they wouldn't say. I thought it meant "from the LGBT media," but eventually I found some gay media with un-special press passes, so that wasn't it.

Maybe they gave out the "special" tags on the basis of footwear? I know the gal from Curve Magazine had some sizzlin' hot pumps on, although perhaps they were a tad big for her:

Then there were these, worn by a journalist whose name and publication I missed:

And she stood on them all evening, too. Ouch.

Being surprised by "Save Me"

I watched the DVD of the film "Save Me" this weekend. I thought I knew what it was about. I thought it would be decent, basically the quality of a really good TV movie, earnest, sincere, and probably badly written and not very well-acted.

You know, an independent film.

So I'd set the bar fairly low. But "Save Me" sailed over it with a few feet to spare, thanks to a terrific screenplay by Robert Desiderio, some lovely cinematography, and a performance by Judith Light that took my breath away.

Some of what I knew about the film was true. "Save Me, " directed by Robert Cary, is the story of Mark (Chad Allen), a young gay man who bottoms out on drugs and ends up in a Christian ex-gay ministry, courtesy of his brother, who foots the bill. Apparently you really can't pray away the gay, because as soon as he's clean, sober, and getting his life together, what does he do? He realizes that what really matters in life is love, and the person he loves is fellow-ex-gay-wannabe Scott (Robert Gant).

Beyond that, though, I really had no idea. Any film that can make me feel empathy and compassion for the people running an ex-gay ministry should get nominated for a freaking Oscar. Light, who plays Gayle, the woman who founded the ministry after her gay teenaged son died of a drug overdose, and Stephen Lang, who plays her husband, Ted, bring such depth and human feeling... such a compelling sense of love and need... to their roles, that you simply can't hate or demonize them.

This was an unexpectedly fine film with some moments of brilliance, mostly courtesy of Light, and a lot of compassion at its heart. Rent it or something, ok?

Catching up with Design Star's Matt Locke

 As part of my very difficult and important job as a girl reporter, as well as AfterElton.com's go-to-girl (I just typoed that as "go-go-girl" which would be a lot more interesting,wouldn't it?) on all things HGTV, I got a screener for this weekend's upcoming episode of HGTV Showdown, a design competition series.

They sent it to me because, of course, it had the gay. And in this case, the gay it had was last season's Design Star first runner-up Matt Locke, who I'd interviewed a couple of times for AE. I was scheduled to interview him today, and I did, but before that, I put the DVD in and watched it. (See how hard it is to be a girl reporter?)

The announcer introduced the contestants. Team One was Design Star Season Two winner Kim Myles of Myles of Style, paired with Matt, who was the runner-up in Season Three.

Team Two was Design Star Season Three winner Jennifer Bertrand, along with Kim's Season Two runner-up, Todd Davis, a blond surfer dude type.

Just to put what I'm about to say in context, Kim is African-American, Jennifer is, of course, a woman as well as visibly pregnant, and Matt, well... we know about Matt.

So, everyone is chit-chatting and then Todd says that he intends to win because he's not "going to be beaten by a chick."

I thought to myself, Todd, you're going down -- just as Kim was saying the same thing out loud on my teevee.

Oh, and one other thing: you already were "beaten by a chick," Todd dear. That's why you're the sidekick and Kim has her own show.

Journalistic ethics prevent me from telling you how it all turned out, but it will be on this Sunday night at 9 PM ET/PT on HGTV.

Forgive me for bringing the politics to the pop culture, but there's something very, very wrong about the only straight, white man on that stage saying something like that. 

On a happier note, Matt says his career has exploded since his appearance on Design Star. He's been doing design work for clients, pitching a television show to the various networks, and making public appearances all over the country. I asked him what kind of show he wanted to do, and his answer reminded me of the first thing we bonded over when I interviewed him last year: a mutual love of designer Candice Olson, whose Canadian show Divine Design airs on HGTV.

"I tried to pitch something like 'an American version of Candice Olson,'" he told me, "but it will never happen here. The Canadian government subsidizes those shows, and the homeowners pay for at least part of the work she does. We just don't have the budgets here for that kind of work. It will never happen."

Wow, Matt, way to break my heart; I'm sick of all the new "faux drama" reality crap on HGTV, like Property Shop and Buy Me. "That's what viewers like these days," he told me. "That's the direction HGTV is going in more and more."

Then we reminisced about 80s music, but some things are, you know, personal.

Don't forget to watch Showdown, and root for Matt and Kim!

Blogging the Xena convention

I'm blogging the Xena convention over at AfterEllen.com... come on by!