February 27, 2007

• Maureen Dowd’s Obama hit piece Dissecting Maureen Dowd’s Obama hit piece Summary: As a campaigner, Sen. Barack Obama is angry and overwhelmed. That was the unflattering takeaway from Maureen Dowd’s catty column (subscription required) last week about the Illinois senator’s foray onto the presidential campaign trail, as Dowd traipsed out to the heartland to watch the Democratic sensation up close. But as is her custom, Dowd fixated on personality and stagecraft, not substance, as the poison-penned, Wednesday/Saturday columnist for The New York Times painted a relentlessly unflattering portrait of the senator. In the eyes of Dowd, Obama was out of his element on the national stage: “testy,” “irritated,” and “conflicted.” Dowd’s attack, hyped on the Drudge Report the night before the column was published and widely seen as the first real Obama hit piece of the season by a major pundit, deserves attention not because of the (largely nonexistent) insight Dowd shed on Obama’s emerging candidacy, but because Dowd included several of her now-trademark — and highly dubious — attacks; attacks that in the past have been embraced by the mainstream press and tripped up Democrats such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry. The truth is, almost nothing about the Obama column rang true. In part, because Dowd provided virtually no evidence to back up her contentious claims that Obama was “testy,” “irritated,” and “conflicted” while campaigning in Iowa. What unleashed Dowd’s wrath? Perhaps a career cynic like Dowd is put off by Obama’s audacity-of-hope message. That, and her contrarian impulse to bash Obama when most others were not. But it appears the senator’s specific sin in Iowa was that he publicly tweaked the press, and particularly the media buzz created when People magazine recently ran a candid, shirtless photo of Obama vacationing on a Hawaii beach. “You’ve been reporting on how I look in a swimsuit,” Obama noted. Rule Number 1: Celebrity Beltway journalists don’t like to be upstaged in public; especially not by newcomers. Just ask Howard Dean, who, when declaring his presidential candidacy on June 23, 2003, asked rhetorically, “Is the media reporting the truth?” Not smart. The press corps quickly labeled Dean an angry kook. (In two profiles of Dean published during the summer of 2003, The Washington Post alternately described Dean as being “abrasive,” “flinty,” “cranky,” “arrogant,” “disrespectful,” “yelling,” “hollering,” “fiery,” “red-faced,” “hothead,” “testy,” “short-fused,” “angry,” and “worked up.”) Although political journalism is broken (its flaws are glaringly obvious), candidates, and especially Democratic candidates, are not allowed to question the competence of pundits and reporters. Dowd in her column sternly rebuked Obama and reminded him who sets the campaign rules — it ain’t the candidates. Here’s a quick dissection of Dowd’s snarky column (headline: “Obama, Legally Blonde?”) that highlights her dubious assertions. “He was a tad testy.” Dowd gave no examples to back up her characterization. “The 45-year-old had moments of looking conflicted.” Dowd offered no clear examples of Obama looking conflicted. “In the lobby of the AmericInn in Iowa Falls on Saturday night, he seemed a bit dazed by his baptism into the big-time. He was left munching trail mix all day while, he said, “the press got fed before me.” Obama’s utterly trivial remark about the press getting fed first in no way suggested that he seemed a bit dazed. “Everything was a revelation for him: The advance team acronym RON, or Rest Overnight. Women squealing. ‘I saw a hat,’ he noted with a grin, ‘that said, ‘Obama, clean and articulate.’ ” Obama’s utterly trivial remark about a woman wearing an Obama hat in no way suggested that everything was a revelation for the senator. “Senator Obama’s body language was loose.” Dowd was reduced to interpreting Obama’s body language for vague insights. “He was eloquent, if not as inspiring as his advance billing had prepared audiences to expect.” Dowd produced no examples of the type of “advance billing” Obama failed to live up to. (And whose advance billing was it, Dowd’s?) “He sounded self-consciously pristine at times, as if he was too refined for the muck of politics.” Dowd offered no examples to bolster either vague claim that Obama was “pristine” or “too refined.” “But his friends say it played into this Harvard grad’s fear of being seen as ‘a dumb blond.’ ” Dowd provided no quotes from any of Obama’s friends to confirm her claim. Also, note “dumb blond” appears in quotes, even though the words are Dowd’s and nobody else’s. “He has been known to privately mock ‘pretty boys’ (read John Edwards, the Breck Girl of 2004).” Dowd provided no information to back up her blind quote that Obama mocks “pretty boys,” and specifically Edwards. “He’s so hung up on being seen as thoughtful that he sometimes comes across as too emotionally detached and cerebral with crowds yearning for an electric, visceral connection.” Dowd offered no examples to bolster her claim about Obama. “When The Times’s Jeff Zeleny asked him on his plane whether he’d had a heater in his podium during his announcement speech in subzero Springfield [Illinois], Mr. Obama hesitated. He shot Jeff a look that said, ‘Are you from People magazine?’ before conceding that, unlike Abe Lincoln, he’d had a heater.” Once again, in order to make her point Dowd opted to interpret Obama’s body language. In this case, what a brief look from the candidate “said.” (Note that the trivial question at hand dealt with stagecraft: Did Obama have a heater? Who cares?) Contrast Dowd’s nitpicking account of Obama’s campaign swing through Iowa with The Washington Post‘s factual report that Obama “calmly” answered questions at his Iowa press conference. And according to a February 11 dispatch from Iowa’s Des Moines Register: After shedding his suit jacket, Obama sat on a stool for a relaxed question-and-answer session that touched on improving education, enlarging federal grants for college students, raising teacher pay, insuring those who have no health care, lowering health care costs for all Americans, ending poverty, dealing with global warming, and ending the country’s dependence on foreign oil through the development of alternative fuels. Dowd though, dismissed Obama’s detailed discussion of the issues. Indeed, Dowd long ago signaled that she had little interest in voter concerns. When candidate Al Gore met with New York Times columnists and editorial writers in June 2000, Dowd complained how boring Gore was as he went on in great detail about federal surpluses (remember those?), Social Security, and global warming. Dowd, a political columnist for the Times, had no interest in any of that. Then again, why would she bother with the details? She’s been professionally rewarded for her decision to do as little legwork as possible for her column. (Watching Oprah now qualifies as research for Dowd.) Dowd is treated with utmost respect within elite media circles specifically because she refuses to take politics seriously. (In late 2005, New York magazine crowned Dowd “the most dangerous columnist in America,” and devoted roughly 6,000 words to profiling her.) With her purposefully casual approach to punditry, Dowd is basically telling readers to trust her: “Obama on the campaign trail was testy and overwhelmed, trust me.” The problem is Dowd has established a record of being untrustworthy, particularly when painting unflattering portraits of prominent Democrats. (I realize Dowd has been quite critical of the Bush White House, but just because she smears Republicans and Democrats alike, that doesn’t mean her approach to journalism is right.) For instance, when the Clintons were leaving the White House in early 2001 Dowd fueled a media frenzy by accusing them of cashing in on their exit by having their wealthy friends lavish them with expensive, last-minute housewarming gifts. (“Tainted loot,” Dowd called it.) It was a gift-giving spree designed specifically to cut ethical corners, according to Dowd, who eviscerated Hillary Clinton over the phony flap: “The junior senator from New York has terribly flawed judgment. And her sense of entitlement knows no bounds.” Actually, what the controversy proved was that Dowd rarely let the facts get in the way of a good smear. Here’s how Dowd framed the case against the Clintons: There were lists of Hillary’s china and silver patterns, available at Borsheim’s in Omaha and other stores. Time was of the essence because Hillary, who had been elected to the Senate, could take expensive gifts only until she was sworn in and the Senate gift ban went into effect. Neither key fact was accurate. Hillary Clinton never listed her china and silver patterns at Borsheim’s (or, registered “like a bride,” as Dowd also claimed in print). Clinton denied the fact and so did Borsheim’s. As for the allegation that Clinton was trying to make an end run around the Senate gift ban (which suggested the Clintons were both greedy and unethical), Dowd had almost none of the facts right. Yes, as the new senator from New York, Clinton would be prohibited from accepting gifts valued at more than $50. But according to the Senate Ethics Manual, “The Gifts Rule contains 23 exceptions: The following gifts are expressly excluded from the Rule’s limitations: … 4) anything … provided by an individual on the basis of a personal friendship.” Most of the controversial gifts given to the Clintons would have fit that “personal friendship” waiver, which meant there was no rush. The Gifts Rule also contained another relevant exception: spouses. In other words, friends would have been free to buy expensive housewarming gifts for Bill Clinton long after Hillary became senator, as long as she asked for waivers based on the spouse exemption. Fast-forward to 2004, when Dowd was busy mocking John Kerry as an overstuffed, phony elitist, which just happened to be the same negative narrative the GOP was peddling at the time. Dowd informed readers that while at a campaign rally in Milwaukee, Kerry, desperate to connect with working class Americans, uncorked this comically overwrought question: “Who among us doesn’t like NASCAR?” According to Dowd, Kerry’s laughable statement came “across like Mr. Collins, Elizabeth Bennet’s pretentious cousin in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ ” (or Gilligan’s Island’s Thurston Howell III), and lots of Times readers likely rolled their eyes in agreement. Dowd later peddled the killer Kerry quote during a television appearance. Dowd was the first journalist to report Kerry’s embarrassing NASCAR gaffe, even though Dowd herself was not at the Milwaukee rally. Instead, she learned about the quote from Times colleague Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who was covering Kerry on the campaign trail. But it turned out that the quote was a fake. According to tape recordings of the Milwaukee speech, Kerry never said, “Who among us doesn’t like NASCAR”? Dowd though, never conceded the fact that she had manufactured an unflattering quote and attributed it to a Democratic presidential candidate. During his recent campaigning in Iowa, Obama gave a concise answer when asked who his most important rival in the campaign is: “I would say it’s cynicism.” According to The Des Moines Register, “That was greeted with loud applause from the overflow crowd.” Dowd never reported that back-and-forth; she was too busy interpreting Obama’s body language. Then again, if cynicism is Obama’s most important rival, then pundits like Dowd now qualify as the competition. — Eric Boehlert Posted to the web on Tuesday February 20, 2007 at 4:02 PM EST

  Breathtakingly superficial David Brooks David Brooks, Deconstructed http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/ Some close reading of the breathtakingly superficial David Brooks column today on hipster parents: Can we finally stop reading about the musical Antoinettes who would get the vapors if their tykes were caught listening to Disney tunes, and who instead force-feed Brian Eno, Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens into their little babies’ iPods? Somehow I get the sneaking suspicion that Brooks has never listened to Sufjan Stevens. Christian orchestral pop about the fifty states — why isn’t that perfect kid music? I mean, the guy recorded an album of Christmas songs for crissakes. I mean, don’t today’s much-discussed hipster parents notice that their claims to rebellious individuality are undercut by the fact that they are fascistically turning their children into miniature reproductions of their hipper-than-thou selves?…  It’s been nearly three years since reporters for sociologically attuned publications like The New York Observer began noticing oversophisticated infants in “Anarchy in the Pre-K” shirts. Since then, the trend has exhausted its life cycle. You have to be seriously tone-deaf as a sociologist if you think that these parents believe they’re fighting the man by putting their kids in “Anarchy in the Pre-K” t-shirts. Obviously, obviously they’re making a joke. A witty essay by Adam Sternbergh announced the phenomenon in an April 2006 New York magazine. Sternbergh described 40-year-old men and women with $200 bedhead haircuts and $600 messenger bags, who “look, talk, act and dress like people who are 22 years old,” and dress their infants as if they’re 16. He called these pseudo-adults “Grups,” observing that they smashed any remaining semblance of a generation gap. A side note: I love how two weeks ago, the very same New York magazine announced that the “myspace generation” gap was the biggest one in fifty years. The gap went from nonexistent to Grand-Canyon-sized in less then a year. Hmmm…. Let me be clear: I’m not against the indie/alternative lifestyle. There is nothing more reassuringly traditionalist than the counterculture. For 30 years, the music, the fashions, the poses and the urban weeklies have all been the same. Everything in this society changes except nonconformity. This is a case of not being able to see the forest for the t-shirts. Brooks seems to genuinely believe that all the counterculture has produced in the past thirty years is fashion trends. But of course that’s nonsense. Think of the environmental movement itself — which runs through a lot of those Urban Baby and Babble conversations about disposable diapers and organic baby food. Maybe David Brooks thinks that environmentalism is just a bunch of t-shirt slogans too? Are some of those folks into the green, Slow Food lifestyle because it’s fashionable? Of course. People are into all sorts of things — neo-conservatism and suburban PTA meetings — because they’re fashionable in their communities. The question is whether the underlying values and consequences of that lifestyle are better or worse than the alternatives. Brooks’ obsession with the surfaces of hipster parenting ends up blinding him to the real trend here, which is central to almost all the examples he cites: young parents choosing to raise their children in the city, not the suburbs. That is a decision with real consequences, not an empty gesture. It has material effects on children and parents — and the cities they live in. It’s a decision with political and environmental implications, and also one with some surprisingly old-time Americana values. (Brooklyn parents can be cloyingly sentimental about the small town friendliness of their neighborhoods.) It has almost nothing to do with non-conformism, and everything to do with the kind of community — diverse, sidewalk-based, public, culturally-rich — we want to raise our children in. It’s striking that Brooks doesn’t even find that trend worth mentioning in the piece — much less taking it seriously.  Perhaps he might have picked up on it if he’d spent a little less time obsessing about what the kids are wearing these days. .. technorati tags –>.. src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/Stevenberlinjohnsoncom?i=http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2007/02/some_close_read.html” type=text/javascript>..> Email this • Save to del.icio.us .. The Basics .. I’m a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of five books. We spend most of the year in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where all writers with young children in NYC are now legally required to live. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbj6668 at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you’re interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

  HELL EXPLAINED In The Most Amazing Way HELL EXPLAINED The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Massachusetts, engineering dept.’s chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so “profound” that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet. Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic(absorbs heat)? Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following: First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities: 1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and the pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose. 2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa, during my Freshman year that, “it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you”, and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct…leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting “Oh my God.” THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY “A” From The Yahoo 360 Page of http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-3bNw7pA2bKO.PNSD.lE-?cq=1

  Why the online encyclopedia won’t let just anyone in. Evicted From Wikipedia Why the online encyclopedia won’t let just anyone in. By Timothy Noah Posted Saturday, Feb. 24, 2007, at 7:02 A.M E.T. ..After Date–>Pass me that whiskey bottle. My Wikipedia bio is about to disappear because I fail to satisfy the “notability guideline.” Wikipedia, as you probably know, is an online, multilingual encyclopedia whose entries are written and edited by readers around the world. What you may not know is that this ongoing experiment in Web-based collaboration maintains volunteer gatekeepers, and one of them has whisked me (or, rather, the entry describing me) under the insulting rubric, “Wikipedia articles with topics of unclear importance.” I share this digital limbo with Anthony Stevens (“internationally respected Jungian analyst, psychiatrist, and author”), Final Approach (“romantic comedy anime series”), Secproof (“well known security consulting company in Finland”), and about 400 other topics tagged during the past calendar month. There we languish, awaiting “deletion review,” which I will surely flunk. Wikipedia’s notability policy resembles U.S. immigration policy before 9/11: stringent rules, spotty enforcement. To be notable, a Wikipedia topic must be “the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other.” Although I have written or been quoted in such works, I can’t say I’ve ever been the subject of any. And wouldn’t you know, some notability cop cruised past my bio and pulled me over. Unless I get notable in a hurry—win the Nobel Peace Prize? Prove I sired Anna Nicole Smith’s baby daughter?—a “sysop” (volunteer techie) will wipe my Wikipedia page clean. It’s straight out of Philip K. Dick. My career as an encyclopedia entry began on Sept. 6, 2005, when (according to Wikipedia’s “history” tab) an anonymous user posted a three-sentence bio noting that I wrote the Chatterbox column in Slate; that previously I’d been a Washington-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal; and that my wife, “fellow journalist Marjorie Williams,” had died the previous January. I’ve since discovered through some Web sleuthing that my Boswell was a student at Reed College named Ethan Epstein. Subsequent reader edits added to Epstein’s original a few more professional and personal items from my résumé that, like the earlier details, were readily available online. I can’t say that I’d ever harbored an ambition to be listed in Wikipedia, but when I tripped over my bio three months after it appeared, I felt mildly flattered. Exercising my Wiki rights, I corrected my city of residence, which was off by a few blocks, and added that I’d published a posthumous anthology of Marjorie’s writing under the title The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Various items got added to and subtracted from my bio over the next year and a half, and every now and then I myself would check for errors (there were surprisingly few). It was on one such foray that I discovered I’d been designated for Wiki oblivion, like a dead tree marked with orange spray paint for the city arborist to uproot. Talk about humiliating! Wikipedia does not, it assures readers, measure notability “by Wikipedia editors’ own subjective judgments.” In other words, it was nothing personal. But to be told one has been found objectively unworthy hardly softens the blow. “Think of all your friends and colleagues who’ve never been listed,” a pal consoled. Cold comfort. If you’ve never been listed in Wikipedia, you can always argue that your omission is an oversight. Not me. I’ve been placed under a microscope and, on the basis of careful and dispassionate analysis, excluded from the most comprehensive encyclopedia ever devised. Ouch! But the terms of eviction from Wikipedia raise a larger issue than the bruised ego of one scribbler (or Jungian analyst or anime artist or Finnish security consultant). Why does Wikipedia have a “notability” standard at all? We know why other encyclopedias need to limit the topics they cover. If they’re on paper, they’re confined by space. If they’re on the Web, they’re confined by staff size. But Wikipedia commands what is, for all practical purposes, infinite space and infinite manpower. The drawback to Wikipedia’s ongoing collaboration with readers is that entries are vulnerable to error, clumsy writing, and sabotage. The advantage is that Wikipedia can draw on the collective interests and knowledge of its hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to cover, well, anything. To limit that scope based on notions of importance and notability seems self-defeating. If Wikipedia publishes a bio of my cleaning lady, that won’t make it any harder to field experts to write and edit Wikipedia’s bio of Albert Einstein. So, why not let her in? Granted, there are a few practical limits to covering any and all topics, “important” or not. One is privacy. Assuming that my cleaning lady were neither a public figure nor part of any larger story, it would be difficult to justify posting her bio against her will. Another limit is accuracy. The bio’s assertions about my cleaning lady would have to be independently verifiable from trustworthy sources made available to readers. Otherwise, Wikipedia’s vast army of volunteer fact-checkers would be unable to find out whether the bio was truthful. But Wikipedia already maintains rules concerning verifiability and privacy. Why does it need separate rules governing “notability”? Wikipedia’s attempt to define who or what is notable is so rococo that it even has elaborate notability criteria for porn stars. (A former Playboy Playmate of the Month is notable; a hot girlfriend to a famous rock star is not.) Inside the permanent town meeting that is Wikipedia’s governing structure—a New Yorker article about Wikipedia last year reported that fully 25 percent of Wikipedia is now devoted to governance of the site itself—the notability standard is a topic of constant dispute. When people go to this much trouble to maintain a distinction rendered irrelevant by technological change, the search for an explanation usually leads to Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. (Click here to read it.) This extended sociological essay argues that the pursuit of status based on outmoded social codes takes precedence over, and frequently undermines, the rational pursuit of wealth and, more broadly, common sense. Hierarchical distinctions among people and things remain in force not because they retain practical value, but because they have become pleasurable in themselves. Wikipedia’s stubborn enforcement of its notability standard suggests Veblen was right. We limit entry to the club not because we need to, but because we want to. [Update, Feb. 24, 2007, 11:40 a.m.: I didn't bargain on Wikipedia being such a highly sensitive instrument. Immediately after this article was posted (and therefore well before most people had a chance to read it), a Wikipedia sysop granted my entry a stay of execution with respect to "notability." Delighted as I am to be elevated once again to the company of Nicolaus Copernicus, Igor Stravinsky, and Melvin "Slappy" White, can the dividing line between eminence and obscurity really be the authorship of a single magazine article about Wikipedia? I note with interest that Stacy Schiff, author of the excellent New Yorker article cited above, failed to impress Wikipedia's arbiters of notability by winning the Pulitzer Prize in biography, writing several other well-regarded books, and receiving fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It wasn't until she wrote her Wikipedia piece that she became sufficiently notable to be written up in Wikipedia. I presume the Wikipedia sysops will debate this point and others with respect to my entry, and that I can expect to be re-tagged for removal and un-tagged ad infinitum over the coming days as they hash it out. I'll follow future developments (click here to keep track of them) with interest. In the meantime, I hope it isn't lost on readers that my aim was not to reinstate myself but rather to argue against Wikipedia's "notability" standard itself and to use it as a newfangled illustration of our society's love affair with invidious distinction.] A version of this article also appears in the Outlook section of the Sunday Washington Post. Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

  Academy Awards Monica Almeida/The New York Times Martin Scorsese won Oscars for best director and best picture for “The Departed.” February 26, 2007 ‘The Departed’ Wins Best Picture, Scorsese Best Director By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and SHARON WAXMAN HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 25 —Twenty-six years and seven snubs after his first Oscar nomination, for “Raging Bull,” Martin Scorsese finally felt the warm embrace of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Sunday as he was named best director and his murderous mob thriller “The Departed” was named the best picture of 2006. “Could you double-check the envelope?” Mr. Scorsese quipped after silencing a raucous standing ovation of whistling, whooping academy members. “I’m so moved,” he said, accepting the directing prize. “So many people over the years have been wishing this for me. Strangers — I go into doctors’ offices, elevators, I go for an X-ray — they say, ‘You should win one.’ “ Forest Whitaker won best actor for his performance as the cunning, seductive and savage Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland.” “Receiving this honor tells me that it’s possible,” Mr. Whitaker said. “It is possible, for a kid from East Texas, raised in South Central L.A., and Carson, who believes in dreams, who believes them in his heart, to touch them and have them happen.” Helen Mirren took best actress for her performance as a traditional monarch in a modern world in “The Queen.” “For 50 years or more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle,” Ms. Mirren said. “I salute her courage and her consistency, and I thank her, for if it wasn’t for her, I most certainly would not be here.” Graham King, the only of three credited producers permitted to accept the best-picture award for “The Departed,” said, “To be standing here where Martin Scorsese won his Oscar is such a joy.” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo Del Toro‘s magical-realist fantasy set in 1944 Fascist Spain, received Oscars for cinematography, art direction and makeup at the 79th Academy Awards ceremony, but fell short of its ultimate prize, best foreign-language film, which went to “The Lives of Others,” from Germany. Jennifer Hudson, the “American Idol” reject-turned-star of “Dreamgirls,” was named best supporting actress, giving two of the four acting awards to African-Americans. And Alan Arkin, the cranky, heroin-snorting grandfather in the bittersweet family comedy “Little Miss Sunshine,” won best supporting actor. “Little Miss Sunshine” also won for its original screenplay by Michael Arndt, a former assistant to Matthew Broderick who had to wait seven years for his script to be produced. “When I was a kid my family drove 500 miles in a van with a broken clutch,” he said, explaining the source of his inspiration. “It ended up being one of the funnest things we did together.” On a night in which several top awards came as no surprise, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary featuring Al Gore on global warming, won best documentary feature. “I made this movie for my children,” said the director, Davis Guggenheim, his arm on Mr. Gore’s shoulder. “We were moved to act by this man.” Mr. Gore took his moment in the worldwide spotlight to underline the film’s message. “My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis,” he said, adding that the “will to act” was a renewable resource. “Let’s renew it,” he said. That film also won best original song, for “I Need to Wake Up,” by Melissa Etheridge, upsetting “Dreamgirls,” which had three songs in contention. Holding her Oscar aloft backstage, Ms. Etheridge quipped that it would be “the only naked man who will ever be in my bedroom.” In a twist, “The Lives of Others,” which examined the Orwellian police state that was East Germany, won in something of an upset. The German director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, thanked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California “for teaching me that the words ‘I can’t’ should be stricken from my vocabulary.” The awards for Mr. Del Toro’s movie came on a night in which his and two other films by Mexican directors were up for a total of 16 honors. One of them, “Babel,” won for its original score by Gustavo Santaolalla, who also won last year for “Brokeback Mountain.” “Happy Feet” was named the year’s best animated feature. Accepting for best supporting actor, Mr. Arkin said that “Little Miss Sunshine” was about “innocence, growth and connection.” His voice cracking, he praised his fellow actors, saying that acting was a “team sport.” He added, “I can’t work at all unless I feel the spirit of unity around me.” William Monahan won best adapted screenplay for “The Departed,” his transplantation of the movie “Infernal Affairs” from Hong Kong to South Boston. An Oscar also went to Thelma Schoonmaker, the longtime editor to Mr. Scorsese. She saluted Mr. Scorsese for being “tumultuous, passionate, funny” as a collaborator. “It’s like being in the best film school in the world,” she said. “Dreamgirls,” nominated for eight awards, the most of any film, also won for sound mixing. But Mel Gibson‘s “Apocalypto,” whose three nominations were caught up in the tempest caused by the director’s drunken, anti-Semitic rant last summer, was shut out. Ellen DeGeneres made her first appearance as the host of the movie industry’s annual celebration of itself, on a night expected to have its share of pregnant moments. Three filmmaking titans — Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola — presentedthe award for best director. Ms. DeGeneres said it had been a lifelong dream of hers to be host for the Oscars, rather than to win one. “Let that be a lesson to you kids out there: Aim lower,” she said, sounding a theme for the evening’s opening, which was designed to honor the many nominees, 177 in all, rather than focusing on the winners. Ms. DeGeneres repeatedly ventured into the audience, at one point getting Mr. Spielberg to take a picture of her with Clint Eastwood, “for MySpace.” And in a choice full of irony for industry insiders, Tom Cruise, who was thrown off the Paramount lot last summer by Viacom’s chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, gave the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award to Sherry Lansing, the former Paramount chairwoman who retired during a shake-up by Mr. Redstone two years earlier. Backstage, Ms. Lansing said she had not known that Mr. Cruise was going to give her the award. “I saw him at an Oscar party a few days before, and he was sort of cold to me,” she said. Onstage, she said, he had whispered in her ear: “This is an honor. I really wanted to do this, you know how much I love you.” Ms. Lansing said she believed Mr. Cruise, who had a rough year before taking over management of United Artists, would be back to pick up an Oscar for directing or producing within five years. Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer, received an honorary Oscar from Mr. Eastwood, who starred in the spaghetti westerns for which Mr. Morricone provided the unmistakable music. The program began with a bouncy montage, directed by Errol Morris, of interview snippets with nominees reciting, among other things, the number of times they had come close to winning an Oscar. “Zilch,” said Peter O’Toole, of the number of times he had won. Will Ferrell and Jack Black, leading members of Hollywood’s comedy rat pack, did a song-and-dance number bemoaning the paucity of comedic talent among the Oscar nominees. “I guess you don’t like laughter,” Mr. Ferrell sang. “A comedian at the Oscars is the saddest, bitterest, alcoholic clown.” John C. Reilly, a past Oscar nominee, then stood up in the audience to remind them — in song — that he had been in both “Boogie and Talladega Nights.” All three then crooned that they hoped to go home with Helen Mirren, a best-actress nominee, who is in her 60s. Breaking with tradition, the show’s producer, Laura Ziskin, best known for the “Spider-Man” franchise, rejiggered the lineup of awards to leave the marquee categories — best actor, actress, director and picture — for the end of the night. The first half of the show was front-loaded with technical and craft categories: art direction, makeup, sound editing and mixing, costume design and visual effects. “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” won for visual effects; “Letters From Iwo Jima” took sound editing; “Marie Antoinette” picked up costume design. The director Ari Sandel won best live-action short film for “West Bank Story,” a spoof on “West Side Story” with feuding Palestinian and Israeli falafel stands. “This is a movie about peace and about hope,” Mr. Sandel said. “To get this award shows that there are so many out there who also support that notion.” The award for animated short went to “The Danish Poet,” written and directed by Torill Kove. Mr. Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio, a nominee for best actor (“Blood Diamond”), announced in the middle of the telecast that the program had offset its carbon emissions by buying energy credits. “This show has officially gone green,” Mr. DiCaprio said. The Oscars adopted other conservation measures this year, such as using recycled paper for the Oscar ballots. “We have a long way to go, but all of us, in our lives, can do something to make a difference,” Mr. Gore said. But Mr. Gore did not throw his hat in the ring, as the producers of his film, among others in Hollywood, had hoped he might. Asked if he had a major announcement to make, Mr. Gore said: “With a billion people watching, it’s as good a time as any. So my fellow Americans, I’m going to take this opportunity, here and now, to formally announce” — and the Oscars orchestra, right on cue, drowned him out as if he had droned on a second too long. The Academy Awards capped a season in which the conventional wisdom has often been wrong, and actual wisdom has been in short supply. The big question before the nominations was how many Oscars “Dreamgirls” might win, and what film could compete with it for best picture. The only question after the nominations was, What happened to “Dreamgirls”? Many theories were advanced, including misguided marketing and an abundance of hype, but the film’s director, Bill Condon, cut to the chase: “Maybe the Academy saw five films they liked better.” Whatever the reason, the film’s elimination left the race wide open to an array of films that took very different routes to the nomination. “The Departed” rode a wave of box-office success and a plan to keep Oscar hype on the down-low, partly because many in the industry felt it was time to recognize the director Martin Scorsese’s lifetime of excellence. “Little Miss Sunshine,” a new take on the family road-trip movie, which won four Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday, was a film that no one in Hollywood seemed to want to make, but it connected with audiences to the tune of more than $94 million in worldwide box-office receipts. “Babel,” by contrast, left United States audiences cold while doing good business abroad, but connected with critics and was rewarded for a global, ambitious story by winning best dramatic feature at the Golden Globes. “The Queen,” a small movie that managed to do everything right, managed to ride one of the year’s more remarkable performances — Ms. Mirren as a traditional monarch in a very modern world — to broad critical recognition. And after “Flags of Our Fathers,” another would-be Oscar hopeful, met with indifference, Mr. Eastwood and his studio, Warner Brothers, decided to release the film’s twin, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” before year’s end — and were rewarded with a best-picture nomination. This appeared to be the most ethnically and linguistically diverse batch of film nominees yet, appropriate enough given that Hollywood’s foreign revenues now eclipse the domestic take by a significant margin. The Oscar slate included several films shot largely in languages other than English, most notably Mr. Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” in Japanese, and Mr. Gibson’s “Apocalypto,” in Maya dialects. “Babel,” from the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, spanned three continents and five languages — Japanese, Berber, Spanish, English and sign — and two of its actresses, Rinko Kikuchi of Japan and Adriana Barraza of Mexico, received nominations. (Three films by Mexican directors were up for a total of 16 honors.) David Carr contributed reporting. 2:59 PM – 0 Comments – 0 Kudos – Add Comment – Edit - Remove

  Today’s Papers Connected at Birth By Daniel Politi Posted Monday, Feb. 26, 2007, at 5:53 A.M. E.T. The New York Times leads with word from senior administration officials that President Bush has decided to send “an unusually tough message” to the president of Pakistan. Bush will warn Gen. Pervez Musharraf that Congress could cut aid if Pakistan doesn’t start to pursue al-Qaida operatives more aggressively. The Washington Post leads with a look at the difficulties that confront troops in Baghdad as they try to carry out the new security crackdown. “The plan is hampered because security forces cannot identify, let alone apprehend, the elusive perpetrators of the violence,” says the WP. (Note: The washingtonpost.com editors apparently got too excited about the Oscars and forgot to post the A section print edition last night, so TP was unable to see most of the articles inside the paper.) The Los Angeles Times leads and the WSJ tops its world-wide newsbox with yesterday’s suicide bombing at a university in Baghdad that killed at least 40 people. It was the second time this year that the predominantly Shiite university was targeted. Most of those killed were female students who were waiting in line to take midterm exams. USA Today leads with a look at how members of Congress have continued to take trips sponsored by interest groups, including those that hire lobbyists, even after members passed a ban on these types of trips. The ban goes into effect Thursday, and most of the trips taken by the 19 members since Jan. 5 would be exempted from the new rule because groups that don’t lobby paid for them (as the paper details inside, there are lots of exemptions in the new rules). The administration decided a tough warning to Pakistan’s president is in order because previous promises to get tough on terrorists have not materialized and al-Qaida continues to get stronger and more prominent in the country. But as the NYT makes clear, despite any tough words, the administration knows it can’t push its luck with Musharraf because it can’t risk seeing his government fail. It is this concern for the stability of Musharraf’s government that has led officials to decide that unilaterally striking the training camps in Pakistan would not be a good idea. Congressional Democrats had previously urged Bush to put pressure on Pakistan’s government. The increased military presence in Baghdad is evident, but that doesn’t mean progress is being made, particularly because residents appear to be skeptical and mostly refuse to cooperate with security forces. Adding to the problem is that insurgents always seem to be two steps ahead and are adept at shifting their strategy. For example, U.S. commanders are concerned that just as they begin to focus more heavily on policing the capital, insurgents appear to be concentrating outside Baghdad. The suicide bombing at the university in Baghdad illustrates how insurgents are adapting to the security crackdown as well. Troops are focusing on trying to stop car bombs, but there seems to be little they can do to prevent people from strapping explosives to their bodies. The LAT also mentions in its lead, and the rest of the papers go inside with, news that after the university bombing, powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr denounced the new security plan. In a statement, Sadr said Iraqi security forces should take control of security because “there is no good that comes from a security plan controlled by our enemies, the occupiers.” He once again called on U.S. troops to leave Iraq. Although no one is quite sure why Sadr would speak up against the plan now, it seems to be a sign that he’s growing impatient. Everyone mentions Iraqi President Jalal Talabani was taken to Jordan for medical tests. Aides denied Talabani had a heart attack and said he was suffering from exhaustion. The NYT fronts word from U.S. officials who say that a raid on a Shiite weapons supply in southern Iraq last week further proves claims that the deadliest bombs being used against U.S. troops come from Iran. Critics say that despite what U.S. officials might claim, there is still no clear evidence all of the bomb components found were produced in Iran. The WP fronts, while the LAT and NYT go inside with, a genealogical study released yesterday by the New York Daily News that revealed Rev. Al Sharpton is a descendant of a slave owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond. Sharpton called a news conference and said the revelation “was probably the most shocking thing of my life.” Although he had often suspected his ancestors were slaves, Sharpton says he never knew for sure. And, of course, the fact that he’s connected to one of the most famous segregationists made the finding even more incredible for the civil rights leader. The NYT‘s Adam Cohen writes an editorial observer looking into the recent firings of seven U.S. attorneys and says, “It is hard to call what’s happening anything other than a political purge.” It is extremely rare for U.S. attorneys to be removed from office once they’re confirmed, and seven in the space of a few months is quite unprecedented. Cohen says it’s another example of an administration that “has made partisanship its lodestar.” Everybody fronts above-the-fold pictures and/or stories on the Academy Awards, where the big news of the night was that Martin Scorsese finally won a best director Oscar. His movie The Departed also won best picture and got four out of the five awards that it was nominated for. The LAT goes high with a look at the way The Departed took an understated approach in marketing itself for Oscar glory. Mixed in with old-school Scorsese, there was also Jennifer Hudson, who lost on American Idol but got the last laugh last night as she expectedly won the best supporting actress award. Other winners included Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, and Alan Arkin. Proving his status as possibly “America’s coolest ex-vice president ever” (as the WP detailed on Sunday), Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth won for best documentary. Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.

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