Happy Friday!
You may have expected Jenni Avins, but someone mixed up the envelopes backstage, so you got me instead: I’m Adam Epstein, Quartz’s entertainment reporter, filling in for Jenni while she’s away this week. Let’s explore some of the cool stuff going on in TV and film, shall we?
The Oscars aired on Sunday, and if you weren’t one of the 33 million people who watched it live, you’ve surely heard by now about the historic snafu that occurred at the end of the telecast. La La Land was erroneously named the Best Picture winner. Then, after three heartfelt victory speeches, one of the film’s producers, Jordan Horowitz, interrupted to reveal that Moonlight had actually won.
But what could have been a colossal train wreck turned into an oddly touching moment between two young and talent-filled productions. Horowitz was incredibly gracious, calling up the Moonlight cast and crew himself to accept their award. “I’m going to be really proud to hand this to my friends from Moonlight,” he said, clutching the golden statuette that never really belonged to him. There on the stage, he and Moonlight writer/director Barry Jenkins shared a long hug.
The end of an unfortunate narrative. As uncomfortable as the moment was, the confusion deflated the rhetoric that had pitted the two great films against each other in the run-up to the Oscars. That these competitors could literally share the stage, as equals and as friends, proves that there is no better place to see our shared humanity than in film. “It’s messy, but it’s kind of gorgeous,” Jenkins himself said of the moment, in a joint Variety interview with La La Land director Damien Chazelle the next morning.
“The messiness of the finale,” New York Times film critic A.O. Scott wrote, “makes vivid what turned out to be the theme and the true political message of the night, which was inclusiveness.”
It’s not Best Picture, but… In other Oscars news, I was thrilled that Arrival, my favorite movie of the year, won the award for Best Sound Editing. That win only deepened my disappointment that the film’s enchanting original score by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was disqualified from competition for featuring some borrowed music.
If you want a bizarrely amazing soundtrack to your commute home tonight, check out Arrival‘s, on Spotify.
The backlot of Hawaii. Who knew that one of the most prolific bit players in Hollywood was a mountain ridge in the Oahu countryside? Kualoa Ranch, a privately owned nature reserve about 25 miles from Honolulu, has appeared in more than 60 TV shows and films. And one of Kualoa’s mountains in particular has served as the backdrop for dozens of iconic scenes, from the Gallimimus chase in Jurassic Park to the climactic battle in Windtalkers. Talk about range!
If you’ve seen the ABC series Lost, you know this ridge in Ka’a’awa Valley well. The sci-fi adventure show was filmed almost entirely on Oahu, which provided the soaring vistas of the mysterious island on which the show’s survivors are stranded.
As an obsessed fan of Lost, when I found myself on vacation in Hawaii in 2014, I had to see Kualoa for myself. I went on an epic guided Hummer tour of the valley’s familiar film spots by KOS Tours. Here’s a photo I took.
Look familiar? After that, of course, I started seeing that ridge wherever I looked, in TV shows and films. (Most recently, it cameoed in the new trailer for Kong: Skull Island.)
Lightning in a bottle. Sunday’s episode of HBO’s Girls was probably the best piece of TV I’ve seen so far this year. In the industry, it’s called a “bottle episode” because it takes place exclusively in one location, and is filmed almost entirely on a single set.
In this case, Girls creator Lena Dunham delivered a hilarious, disturbing, provocative two-person play. Hannah (played by Dunham), gets invited to the swanky Upper West Side apartment of a famous novelist (played by Matthew Rhys of FX’s The Americans) after she blogged about accusations that he has sexually preyed upon college-aged women.
The episode approaches the thorny issues of sexual assault and consent in ways that I’ve never seen done on television before. Without giving anything away, the ending is note-perfect in how it manages to feel at once absurd and expected. Emily Nussbaum’s review for the New Yorker made me appreciate the episode even more.
Finding healing at Sacred Heart. I’m currently binge-watching Scrubs, the early-2000s dramedy about young doctors at the fictional Sacred Heart hospital in “San DiFrangeles,” California. In this chaotic world we live in, Scrubs has been a gentle, familiar, comforting presence in my life for the past month, and I’m already dreading the moment that I have no more episodes to devour.
Scrubs has an uncanny ability to be hysterical one minute and heartbreaking the next. In some ways, it was a precursor to the phenomenon of “genreless TV” that we’re seeing today with shows like Atlanta, Louie, and Transparent.
Like those shows, Scrubs can’t be pigeonholed or neatly packed into some all-encompassing word or phrase. It’s just Scrubs, and it’s great. All nine seasons are on Netflix. That sounds like a lot, but the 20-minute episodes really fly by.
The horror! It’s pretty good to be in the scary movie business right now. Comedian Jordan Peele’s “social thriller” Get Out—which is just a total blast—is dominating the US box office and boasts a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Quartz’s Ashley Rodriguez wrote about the phenomenal success of the nimble production house behind the film, Blumhouse Productions.
The company keeps budgets low and gives talent a larger share of the profits, and its low-risk, high-reward model works out more often than it doesn’t: In addition to Get Out, the studio is responsible for the mega-hits Paranormal Activity, The Purge, and most recently, M. Night Shyamalan’s glorious comeback Split.
The eye-popping return on investment of films from Blumhouse and other horror-centric studios have made the genre one of Hollywood’s best bets.
On that note, I’m going to go watch some Scrubs. Jenni will be back next week. Have a great weekend!
The Americans returns on Tuesday. Speaking of Matthew Rhys, the fifth season of the acclaimed spy drama will debut March 7 on FX. The show, about Russian spies posing as a suburban American family during the height of the Cold War, is suddenly the most topical thing on TV—given, you know, stuff. I’ve seen the first three episodes of the new season, and I can promise you it’s every bit as good as the previous seasons.