The Pervasive Culture of Sexism Among Hollywood And The Academy

"For so bravely and intelligently distributing the film and to the audiences who went to see it and perhaps those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films with women at the center are niche experiences. They are not. Audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people."

That’s an excerpt from Cate Blanchett’s acceptance speech at the 86th Annual Academy Awards when she won the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. I don’t think there’s a single person who disagrees with Blanchett. Amy Adams and Maggie Gyllenhaal expressed similar sentiments when they gave their Golden Globe speech a few weeks ago. There’s this perceived notion in Hollywood that moviegoers don’t want to see films with females in the lead role or movies with strong, female characters, but that’s all it is- a perceived notion. It seems to me that studio executives think that high school boys are the only ones seeing movies, and the only way they’ll see a movie with a female lead is if she’s hot and she’ll take her top off. Obviously, this is blatantly untrue.

2014, probably more than any other year in recent memory, proves that not only are moviegoers willing and able to see films with female leads, but that the idea of a leading man carrying a film went by the wayside. Scarlett Johansonn had an incredible 2014 at the box office. Not only did she help Captain America: The Winter Soldier became a huge hit, but the bonkers Luc Besson Lucy made over $125,000 domestically. Oscar winner and America’s Sweetheart Jennifer Lawrence starred in two box office smash hits in 2014: The latest Hunger Games film and X-Men: Days of Future Past. Angelina Jolie also had a huge year (and if the Sony hack can bring anything to this discussion, Amy Pascal’s and Scott Rudin’s remarks help further prove the Boy’s Club that is Hollywood) with Maleficent grossing almost $250,000 domestically and Unbroken making a huge dent in The Hobbit’s profits at Christmastime.

How American Sniper and Fury Prove War Movies Are Dead

In 2014 we saw the rise of two "prestige" war flicks: Fury and American Sniper. Fury was released first from David Ayer. Ayer had just come off of End Of Watch and had one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Brad Pitt, in his movie. During the promotion of the film, it seemed like a shoe-in to eventually earn an Oscar nomination. However, as the release date neared and closer and closer and people starting seeing the film, Columbia Pictures switched gears and started to care more about box office success than critical success. As it turns out, that was the smart move. As of the writing of this post, Fury has made a little over $85,000,000 dollars and it was estimated it cost $68,000,000 to film. The film also has a whopping 78% on Rotten Tomatoes and exactly 0 Oscar nominations.

A few months later, Clint Eastwood's American Sniper was released at the tail end of Award Season. It surprised most "experts" by earning six Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor (Bradley Cooper), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Jason Hall). And while the film goes wide today and thus will garner more votes, it only has a 73% on Rotten Tomatoes.

While one film is an Academy player and thus will dominate more conversations within the zeitgeist and both films are set during different wars, I lump Fury and American Sniper together because they both suffer from the same problem: Is there any story left to tell regarding modern war films?

10 "Quick" Reactions to the 2015 Academy Award Nominations

1) The fact that Jake Gyllenhaal wasn't nominated this morning is a damn travesty. He not only gave the best acting performance of the year but he gave the best acting performance ever since Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. He was so freaking good.

What's even worse is that there was a very good chance that he was going to get a Best Actor nomination. According to the statistic expert at the Huffington Post- there was an 87.7% chance Gyllenhaal was going to get a nomination- tied for the third highest chance. Grantland's Oscar Expert Mark Harris stated that there really only seemed like there was enough room for one of two "nutcases" in this category; Gyllenhaal or Steve Carell for his work in Foxcatcher. In turns out the Old Fogie group that is the Academy voting committee went with the movie that fell in their category as opposed to the better film (and one meant for Millennials and Generation X) as Carell earned his first Oscar nomination and Gyllenhaal was left snubbed.

2) Speaking of snubs, The Lego Movie failed to earn a Best Animated Feature nomination- which seems absolutely insane. Almost everybody thought The Lego Movie was the frontrunner to win, so to be completely shut out is mind boggling. However, as a strong proponent that How To Train Your Dragon 2 is infinitely better than The Lego Movie, I'm secretly happy as that means HTTYD2 is now the heavy favorite to win.

3) The last snub that "broke" Twitter was that Jennifer Aniston failed to earn a Best Actress nomination for her work in Cake as her "spot" seemingly went to Marion Cotilliard for her work in Two Days, One Night. Not only was Jennifer Aniston's nomination by far and away the least secured out of the five predicted nominees, but from everything I've heard, Cotilliard actually gave the better performance. I'd bet you that anyone who claims Aniston was snubbed has either a) never seen Cake, b) never seen Two Days, One Night, or both.

The Greatest Show You're Not Watching: Black Mirror

Black Mirror is a television program that originally aired in England. Late in 2011, it aired its first season. Being British, that first season was only three episodes long. In 2013, Black Mirror aired another three episodes. For the longest time, Black Mirror was just this underground greatness that TV critics flew to England in order to get a glimpse of it. Recently, the States have received it as the DirecTV channel aired it. Luckily for us normal television watchers, Black Mirror's six episodes recently came to Netflix. Having just heard of this show on the periphery of the zeitgeist, I wasn't all that thrilled in checking it out. However, after the American fall TV period ended, I needed a show to fill the void. The first show that popped up to me was Netflix's Marco Polo, but after three plus episodes of that pile of garbage, I picked another show. That show just so happened to be Black Mirror. Boy howdy am I glad I stumbled upon this pile of greatness.

Black Mirror is an anthology series that shows the dark side of technology. Charlie Booker, the show's creator, stated, "If technology is a drug- and it does feel like a drug- then what, precisely, are the side-effects?" The elevator pitch you hear about this show is that it's the modern day Twilight Zone. While that's a pretty good comparison, it's somewhat of a misnomer. The Twilight Zone was genuinely freaky and scary and when you think of The Twilight Zone you think horror and suspense. That's the wrong way to think about Black Mirror. While both are works of science fiction, Black Mirror steers very much towards drama and many of its stories seem like they could happen in the very near future, There's no flying cars or hover boards, but Black Mirror is science fiction in the truest sense of the genre- it shines a mirror on society and shows us the ugly sides to life.

Every single episode of Black Mirror is its own isolated story. There's nothing that connects the characters in episode 1 to the characters in episode 6. This allows for each individual episode to tell a brilliant 45 minute story about one particular topic. In an era where mini-series are becoming the new king of television; where programs like Fargo and True Detective dominate Best Of lists, Black Mirror's finite-ness is the perfect treat to modern day television watchers.

At the end of the day, whether I'm watching a TV show or a film, all I want is a good and compelling story. I know that seems really dumb and obvious for me to say, but so many filmmakers seem to stray from this course. It's why shows like Mad Men can fall down the drain into oblivion and why we allow films like Foxcatcher to exist. Black Mirror gives me a new story every episode that leaves me both satisfied and makes me think. It's a series that I cannot recommend enough.

Despite how awesome Black Mirror is, I can't fully describe it without going into detail about each particular episode. So that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to describe in detail the entire series episode by episode. It's OK, You can go watch the entire series. I'll wait. You watched it? All of it? Good. Let's begin. Spoilers ahead (duh!).

From Birdman to Boyhood: The Huge Risks Directors Took This Year

There are two films that I have constantly seen at the top of many critics Best Of lists in 2014: Birdman and Boyhood, with the latter earning almost the consensus top spot on every list I've seen. It's no coincidence that both those films are huge risks and passion projects from their respected directors. Both filmmakers, Richard Linklater for Boyhood and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for Birdman, have a few movies under their belt (obviously Linklater has a tad more than Inarritu) and decided to release their passion project to the world this year; to release a project that many would consider on the riskier side. Last year's big passion project, Gravity, worked out pretty well for its director Alfonso Cuaron both critically and financially, and now Linklater and Inarritu hope for the same. For the time being, both directors have that whole "critical acclaim" down pat and both look like the two huge players as award season has just started to heat up. As we go down the rabbit hole for the next couple of months and more and more people start talking about these film, the real question is: Should you go out and see them? I'm sure the people, like professional critics, who watch five movies a day appreciated the work these directors did and that paid off in terms of ending up on Year End lists, but should you, the average movie goer go see them? Just because Linklater and Inarritu took risks, doesn't mean they paid off.

7 Days Later: An Honest Discussion About The Chicago Bears Firings and Jay Cutler

Irwin Weiner, a frequent Cover 3 contributor, and myself are huge Chicago Bears fans. With what has happened to this organization over the recent days and weeks, we felt we needed to discuss the topic. However, there are so many talking points and things to discuss, we couldn't just write one blog post or have just one podcast. Instead, we needed to have lengthy email chains over the course of several days. This is our discussion about everything from former head coach Marc Trestman and former GM Phil Emery to our thoughts on Jay Cutler and his contract.

IRWIN: Today on Monday December 29th, 2014 the Chicago Bears were one of a few teams to take part in the day known as "Black Monday" in the NFL.  The day after the regular season ends is known as "Black Monday" because that's the day that many teams will fire their coach after disappointing seasons.

This was not a surprise to you or me.  We both have discussed this for weeks and knew changes were coming at Halas Hall.  It was about time that George McCaskey, current Chairman of the Chicago Bears made a change.  We were hoping for smaller changes to come weeks ago in the likes of coordinator changes such as firing Mel Tucker, Aaron Kromer, and Joe Decamillis.  That never came, but today we got which was one of the worse kept secrets in Chicago, Marc Trestman was fired.  Everyone knew he was fired weeks.  This was reported weeks ago by multiple news outlets, and the way the team has been playing it was about time.  You just wonder if they ever thought about doing it before the season ended?

The one thing we didn't know was who else was going to be fired today.  It turned out General Manager Phil Emery (the man who hired Marc Trestman) was also shown the door, and offensive coordinator Aaron Kromer.  There is a lot on these three men and there performance in their respected time as a Chicago Bear.

Before we dive into each specific firing what do you think about the Chicago Bears cleaning house today and saying their tandem wasn't working? 

Where The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything Falls on The King's Speech Spectrum

Grantland’s Academy Award writer Mark Harris (who is superb; I may not always agree with what he’s saying, but his pieces are always interesting) wrote a piece for the site a few months ago to discuss the upcoming narratives that surround potential Oscar nominees (and winners). The basic thesis of his post, although I highly recommend you read everything for yourself, is that, generally speaking, there are “X movies” and “Y movies”, Basically, “X movies” are bold, daring films, and for the most part, are films that we view as Oscar snubs. Recent examples of X movies are Pulp Fiction, The Social Network, and Goodfellas. These are films that the Academy "didn’t have the balls" to give the Best Picture Oscar to. On the flip side, we have “Y movies”. In laments terms, Y movies are films that are Oscar bait and films that seemingly are enjoyed by an older skewing audience. The film Harris sites to most of as a Y movie is The King’s Speech, especially considering it beat out an X movie- The Social Network (and I would argue Inception as well).

Throughout Harris’ piece, when talking about upcoming narratives for potential Oscar contenders, he compares The King’s Speech to The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. Harris is not the first person I’ve seen make this comparison. It’s a really easy comparison to make. All three are British films and all three go down nice and smooth upon viewing. But really, that’s where the comparisons end. I think it’s wholly unfair to compare The Imitation Game (and to a lesser extent The Theory of Everything) to The King’s Speech, mainly because The King’s Speech is boring as balls and I would never recommend anyone under 55 to watch it.