Indeed, Why *Did* A Certain Movie Win So Many Oscars?

“Above them all, at the Oscars at least, came ‘Birdman,’ which has very little to do with the real world, but everything to do with creative egos and hermetic artistic pursuits. This year, that seemed right and preferable to the Oscar voters. It was a movie that believed in actors, and forgave everyone’s flaws, and knew how to put on a show.”

Joan Rivers: An Appreciation, And A Reckoning

“From the nineteen-sixties on, Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh Realpolitik, one based on her experience: looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money — and from men as the route to money — you were dead in the water. Women were one another’s competition, always. For half a century, this dark comedy of scarce resources had been her forte: many hands grasping, but only one golden ring. Rivers herself had fought hard for the token slot allotted to a female comic, yet she seemed thrown by a world in which that might no longer be necessary.”

Looking For The Langston Hughes He Himself Worked Hard To Conceal

Hilton Als: “One of the architects of black political correctness, he saw as threatening any attempt to expose black difference or weakness in front of a white audience. … Hughes’s reluctance to reveal the cracks in the black world – which is to say, his own world – curtailed not only what he was able to achieve as an artist but what he was able to express as a man.”