Gossip Central

Oscar Nods: Sharing and Sparing the Love

When the category of Best Picture swells to nine, you can be sure that your favorites will be covered. Throughout “the season,” prognosticators haggled --with one another and themselves-- over the supremacy of The Shape of Water over Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Lady Bird over Get Out, Dunkirk over The Darkest Hour. An excellent solution is to award every one of them, and with the lineup announced today, every one of them gets the prize for showing up. But, it is safe to say, as one Academy member has reminded me year after year, this award is like no other. And so, I would like to think there is still mystery afoot for the winner, even though I am pretty sure of which are the real contenders on this awesome list, and which one will get the prize.

Meditating with Naomi Watts at Saks Fifth Avenue

Amidst the racks of multi-colored Missonis on Saks 4^th floor, Shiva Rose led a meditation, a prelude to a panel featuring Naomi Watts, cover girl on the winter issue of Purist, the wellness themed brainchild of Cristina Cuomo. Just sitting with eyes closed, to a guided breathing contrasted with the commerce, bright lights and bustle of the store. And the event, to promote Onda, Watts’ all-natural beauty brand with her Australian friend Sarah Bryden-Brown and New Yorker Larissa Thompson, is also an attempt for Saks to offer something more in the shopping experience, in the age of online expedience.

Michael Moore’s Latest Cause: One of Us: Jews in Revolt

Okay, Michael Moore is not Jewish, but he’s a menschy guy who cannot abide injustice. Co-hosting—with Fran Leibowitz-- a post-screening party for Netflix’s documentary, One of Us, this week at the Waverly Inn, the Oscar winning documentarian and recent Broadway star could not restrain his indignation at the plight of Etty, an Orthodox Jewish woman in her ‘30’s whose children were taken away from her when she left her abusive husband. One of three ostracized by the Hasidic community, featured in this award-winning non-fiction film by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, Etty and her story especially seems to grab everyone by the throat. She is seen to be a loving mother. Clearly it is a crime against all human instinct and decency to take children away from such a mother. Leibowitz, who is Jewish, rightly pointed out that the current wave of extreme Judaism is not the Hasidism she knew growing up, but a more improvised, puzzling and arbitrary variant.

Variety’s Salute to Service: Honoring Those Who Stand Up

Whenever I see Lee and Bob Woodruff, I know the event is going to be serious, and I’m going to laugh. At Variety’s inaugural Salute to Service luncheon this week at Cipriani on Broadway, the brainchild of Gerry Byrne, vice chair of Penske Media and a Vietnam War veteran, Bob Woodruff got up to introduce Caroline Hirsch of Caroline’s, the city’s premier comedy club. Their relationship goes back to when she saw a documentary about him, a correspondent who was severely injured in the Iraq War. She was looking for a way to help those returning from combat and they, with Lee Woodruff and Andrew Fox, began their annual Stand Up for Heroes event. Soon Bruce Springsteen, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, and others, came to deliver the most outrageous monologues to benefit veterans and those who serve. What started at Town Hall, grew to the Beacon Theater, and now takes place at Madison Square Garden. It is a never-to-be-missed evening, with the most important attendees, our military and their families.

Jerry Garcia, American Hero: Long Strange Trip

Weighing in at a cool four hours, Amir Bar-Lev’s epic documentary Long Strange Trip records the artistic journey of an American band over decades of cultural change, but it also illuminates the personality of a kind of American hero only America could produce. The band itself, The Grateful Dead, were sloppy and spontaneous, or blissful and beatific, depending on which concert you attended. In any case, fans were not disappointed. But like Americans before him, helmsman Jerry Garcia was not prepared for the kind of adulatory fame his art would receive. The writer Jack Kerouac was a prototype of achieving huge fame and the destruction it wreaked. Known as the King of the Beats, Kerouac suffered his image. While the connection to the beat literary movement is made in the film, the poignant story of Garcia’s parallel journey to Kerouac’s speaks volumes about a culture and the heroes it creates and consumes.

Lance Armstrong on Doping: Icarus

The evening was not unusual. Just a screening of a documentary, Icarus, for a roomful of leading documentarians: Academy Award winning ones like Alex Gibney and Barbara Kopple among many others, for purposes of Oscar nominations. The unusual part was having Lance Armstrong participate in the post-screening panel at 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge. The movie, Netflix’s powerful expose of doping among Olympian athletes, directed by Bryan Fogel and produced by Dan Cogan shines a light on Lance Armstrong’s scandalous use of drugs during his stellar award-laden cycling career. You would think he would shy away, ashamed. But the film’s main protagonist, a Russian scientist named Grigory Rodchenkov, now in hiding as the Russians have called for his execution, was the real focus of attention. A whistleblower, Rodchenkov created the testing for steroids, as well as a method to defy the testing for them. He was willing to talk to Bryan Fogel about state sponsored doping.

From Saoirse Ronan to Tiffany Haddish: Girl Power at the New York Film Critics Circle Award

No one had to complain about anyone’s misconduct, not sexual anyway, at last night’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards dinner at Tao in the meatpacking. Every honoree, including the great Molly Haskell who picked up the group’s Special Career Achievement Award for her lifetime of serious reviewing, actresses Saoirse Ronan and Tiffany Haddish, and the men, as in Willem Dafoe who was awarded Best Supporting Actor for his motel landlord role in The Florida Project or Timothee Chalamet who got his Best Actor for his star turn in Call Me By Your Name exuded the confidence of a job well done. At 22, Chalamet has three significant roles this season: aside from starring with Armie Hammer in CMBYN, he’s killed off early in Hostiles, and he thanked Greta Gerwig, winner for Best Picture last night, recounting a scene in a bar where someone noticed him, “Hey, isn’t that the douchebag from Lady Bird?” He loved the recognition.

Pick a Card. Any Card. Belinda Sinclair, Magicienne

Do you believe in magic? The first thing magicienne Belinda Sinclair tells you at her Hell’s Kitchen salon where she conjures, misdirects, fans cards and sets fires in her highly entertaining magic show, is that she cheats. Believe her. Even as your eyeballs are a few feet away, she’s able to find your card in a well-thumbed stack, or affix yours to your lover’s to create a unified one. Providing the history of conjurers in this neighborhood now known for Broadway theater, on and off, she tells you about the women who came before her in an industry more showy for the men. And because you are most certainly in a library and period-adorned living room, her formally clad assistant serves tea and home-baked cookies during intermission. Prepare to be thoroughly enchanted.