Jay P. Greene's Blog

Antonio Salieri says”I am the patron saint of the Tufts RTF Department…”

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

My Austin sources inform me that McConaughey has started the biggest celebration since the 2006 Rose Bowl.  Now that Jay has been justly cowed by the overwhelming might of the UT Austin film brigade (former UT student F. Murray Abraham also won Best Actor by the way- HOLLA!) we can move on to other important business, like this interesting new study by Jason Bedrick about the New Hampshire tax credit program for the Show Me Institute.  Unlike Jay’s Oscar smack, a 97% satisfaction rate is strong.

Matt threw down the gauntlet in his post bragging about UT Austin alum, Matthew McConaughey, winning Best Actor laurels last night: “So Jay and Greg, how long has it been since your eastern seaboard finishing schools for global technocrats graduates won a Best Actor Oscar?”

Well, I went to Tufts and the answer is 1985, when Tufts grad, William Hurt, won the Best Actor Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman.  Yes, that was a little while ago.  But given that UT Austin has 38,463 undergraduates relative to only 5,255 at Tufts, I’d say that each having one alum among the 76 people who have ever won the Best Oscar for Actors is a little more impressive for the much smaller Tufts.

Tufts also has more than its share of well-known actors who haven’t won the Best Actor award, including:

• Hank Azaria, actor and voice actor most famous for his work on The Simpsons and various films
• Jessica Biel (did not finish), prominent film actress
• David Costabile, actor, known for his recurring roles on The Wire, Flight of the Conchords, and Breaking Bad
• Dom DeLuise, actor, most famous for his work in Blazing Saddles and Space Balls and as host of the television show Candid Camera
• Nicole Fiscella, Gossip Girl actress and model
• Peter Gallagher, prominent Golden Globe- and SAG Award-winning actor,best known for his roles in The O.C., American Beauty, and Mr. Deeds
• Dan Hedaya, film actor, best known for Clueless and Blood Simple
• Oliver Platt, Emmy, Golden Globe, and SAG-nominated actor (Huff, Frost/Nixon, 2012)
• Rainn Wilson (did not finish), actor and co-star of The Office

And two Oscar-winning producers:

• David Sonenberg, Academy Award-winning movie producer and founder/head of the music management company DAS Communications Ltd
• Steve Tisch, Academy Award-winning producer and co-owner of the New York Giants with his brother Jonathan Tisch

Rainn Wilson and I went to high school together before both going to Tufts.  In fact, we double-dated to prom, as you can see in the photo above.  Yes, that’s him with the gloves.

And Greg’s doctoral alma mater, Yale, has dominated the Oscars.  Just last night, Yale alum, Lupita Nyong’o, won the Best Supporting Actress Award.  Three-time Best Actress, Meryl Streep, is also a Yale alum.  Other Oscar winners and nominees who attended Yale include: Paul Newman, Sigourney Weaver, Frances McDormand, Paul Giamatti, Elia Kazan, Sam Waterston, Oliver Stone, Jodie Foster, and Edward Norton.

Of course, UT Austin does have Wes Anderson, who is one of my favorite film-makers.  But in general Matt has picked the wrong fight.  There are many things not to like about what Matt calls “eastern seaboard finishing schools for global technocrats,” but failure to produce acclaimed actors is not one of them.

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

What happens when government officials think no one is watching? Sometimes this:

Residents demanded answers at an emergency meeting in Lawndale Tuesdaynight after a series of reports revealed an excessive amount of compensation for the superintendent of the Centinela Valley Union High School District.

KCAL9’s Dave Bryan reports that Jose Fernandez’s total compensation last year was $663,000, all for running a district of three high schools with only about 6,500 students.

The school district also floated a loan of more than $900,000 for Fernandez at 2 percent interest over 40 years at a time when he had already declared bankruptcy, Bryan reported.

Perhaps he’s so well-paid because he runs such an efficient and effective organization?

Hawthorne High School teacher Caryn Charles said the district is giving lavish loans and huge salaries to the superintendent when she has to pay to buy paper for her students.

“It’s really embarrassing as a teacher that we don’t have any paper at our department at our school. With all due respect to all of you, but it’s embarrassing when I have to go to Office Depot and buy paper, and I read that other people don’t have to worry about things like that,” she said.

So how are public officials able to get away with this for so long?

Part of the problem is their timing, explained Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney. Centinela Valley elections are held in November of odd years, which means there are no state or national races on the ballot to attract attention and draw in more voters.

And small districts in large metropolitan areas are further challenged because they get limited media coverage, Pitney said. Residents can’t just turn on the TV or open up the newspaper to regularly find out what is going on.

“People just don’t have the access to information about what their locality is up to,” he said. “They don’t even know there is going to be an election.”

Naturally, in response to the citizens’ outrage upon discovering that the school board they had elected was squandering their hard-earned money, the Centinela Valley school board officials did the only responsible thing: they hired a media-relations consultant.

We’ll give Ron Swanson the last word on this story:

The main appeal of most entertainment is simply to escape from the humdrum of regular life.  High school film students will often make the mistake of driving around town with a camera, filming the people and places they would regularly see, thinking that their regular life would be interesting to others.  It isn’t.  Real life typically lacks the condensed story-telling and dramatic arc that good film-making or theater requires.  Of course, the thing that makes theater and film interesting also make it artificial.  Drama may capture some essential aspect of life, but it is not life itself.  If it were, it would be boring.

House of Cards is about as far from real life as one can imagine.  It’s characters are so sinister, so clever, and so competent in their sinister cleverness that the series bears no resemblance whatsoever to real political life.  Real politics is the dullest thing in the universe.

I have met a great many politicians and no more than a handful could be described as clever and none as sinister.  For the most part, politicians are bland, weak-egoed, moderately bright folks who are eager to do nothing daring, exciting, or controversial in their entire lives.

So, House of Cards is an escapist fantasy of what politics would look like if it weren’t so dull.  The show is so cynical and the characters so diabolical that it is sometimes hard to suspend disblelief.  But like watching Itchy and Scratchy, it is so ridiculously unreal that it is fairly entertaining.  And yes, it is very, very dark.  But again, the darkness is so cartoonish that it is hardly menacing.  The darkness of Breaking Bad was more true to real life, but that is precisely what made it so much harder to stomach.

American movies and TV have had a very hard time making compelling political dramas.  Too often they are either hyper-cynical, like House of Cards, or they’re saccharinely idealistic, like West Wing. The reality of politics is closer to high school kids filming while they drive around town… boring as crap.

Perhaps the best political movies are not dramas, but absurdist comedies.  Notice that of the Washington Post’s list of best political movies, a large number are actually absurdist comedies, including Being There, Bob Roberts, Dr. Strangelove, Duck Soup, Election, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and Thank you for Smoking.

That’s the way you should watch House of Cards.  It’s actually a very dark comedy.

(corrected for typos)

We went to see The Glass Menagerie again last night and it was even better than the night before, if that is possible.  There are two more performances, tonight (Saturday) at 7 pm and tomorrow (Sunday) at 2 pm.  It is at The Black Box Theater at Fayetteville High School.  See it before it closes.

Yesterday’s post on the play generated some interesting discussion in the comments, so you may want to check that out.  I also learned from Twitter that Morgan Polikoff played Laura, the same part as my daughter, in his sophomore English class.  I’m discovering more reasons to like Morgan all the time.  And he says there is a video out there to prove it.  I promise to post the video if it ever surfaces.

I just saw a superb production of The Glass Menagerie at Fayetteville High School last night.  Full disclosure: my daughter plays Laura.  Despite that fact, I don’t think my opinion about the excellence of the show is biased.  Every member of the cast, the set, the lighting, and the projection and sound effects were all the quality of a professional production.  Those who can should come to see it at the FHS Black Box Theater tonight or Saturday at 7 pm or Sunday at 2 pm.  Arrive early to buy tickets because it is an intimate space with limited seating.

Given the shift in education away from the arts toward a narrow focus on math and reading skills, it is wonderful to see how Fayetteville School District is actually expanding its attention to the arts.  The performance was held in the new state of the art theater facility at the high school.  In his directorial debut, Trevor Cooper is a recent addition to an expanded drama faculty at the high school that now includes four teachers, led by the fabulous Warren Rosenaur.  The school’s principal, Steve Jacoby was in the audience last night , as were school board member, Tim Hudson, and several teachers.  They come out to see the arts just like they come out to see the football team — both of which make significant contributions to the education of students.

It’s also wonderful that the AP Literature classes saw in-school performances of the play today and yesterday.  I suspect that if they also have the chance to read the play in class, the benefits would be even stronger.

I’ll be able to test my suspicion more rigorously with an experiment I am conducting on the effects of students seeing quality theater.  With an award-winning local theater company, TheatreSquared, I am conducting a study in which school groups are awarded free tickets by lottery to see A Christmas Carol and Hamlet.  We want to how these theater experiences affect students.  In particular, we are collecting information on whether students are also reading these plays to see if the combination of reading and seeing a play is particularly effective relative to just reading or just seeing the play.

But even if you’ve never read The Glass Menagerie, come see it this weekend at FHS.  And then read it.  It’s a beautiful production of a beautiful play.