I'm guessing Jennifer Lawrence will win it. With Bigelow getting snubbed for Best Director (both at the Globes and for the Oscar nomination), as well as Zero Dark Thirty losing out to Argo at the Globes, I think there is a pretty strong backlash brewing against Zero Dark Thirty and anyone associated with it. Chastain defending Bigelow last night might have been the final nail in her Best Actress Oscar chances. Jennifer Lawrence, in contrast, has no controversy brewing and has been previously nominated for Best Actress. And as far as the Oscar chances for Zero Dark Thirty for Best Picture, I would say it is completely sunk. Bigelow is going to have created the highest critically reviewed film of the year but will receive no awards due to its pro-torture message.

All the best actors are/were weirdos. Normies like me don't make good thespians.

Fey and Poehler should be the only ones to ever host any awards show. I don't think I've ever laughed that much at an awards show. That Cameron burn was freaking glorious.

I think Lena Dunham was just suffering from Dyke-In-A-Dress syndrome. I have no idea if she's a lesbian, but the symptoms looked similar.

O my god - I love them both!

I love it how some of the coolest people there are are also hollywood celebrities.

All the cool chicks are showing sideboob this year.

It's weird how many articles there are about Jodie Foster coming out last night, when a quick Google search reveals an article written in 2007 describing how she had just come out.

Do journalists even know how to use Google?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/art…

And an article from last year describing how she is the first gay woman to win the lifetime achievement award:

http://www.yourtango.com/2012164423/jodi…

One does admire Foster for bringing a welcome touch of old school weirdness to the proceedings - everything went so darn glossily other than her prickly-pear speech (and Anne Hathaway's Kanye-ness). Her manifesto was everything one would expect from the kind of person who would, when she gets a table up front because of the lifetime award, put Mel fucking Gibson at her side.

My favorite response to her ramblathon was that of Dave Holmes, who instantly wrote, "You can be honest about your sexual identity and still maintain your privacy. Enough with this goofy false choice."

@7 I think that was kind of the point of her speech. The fact that the expectation of her coming out should have somehow been more of an event and I think she really resents that, given her feeling on privacy.

P.S. I am SO looking forward to reading whatever Rich Juzwiak's thoughts on it may be...

@4 So real het gals flow well in heels and a waist hugger? You're a shallow douche. Go Lena!

I honestly could not tell if Jodie Foster was coming out or just extremely high...

50-year-old lesbians are hot.

I'm beginning to think that this ridiculous controversy falsely suggesting that Zero Dark Thirty somehow endorses torture is nothing more than a very effective campaign launched by its competitors to make sure that it doesn't win all of the awards that it deserves.

Lena Dunham was fantastic, but it does seem weird to me that GIRLS is categorized as a comedy.

@11 Pfft, please. I watched the Golden Globes with a group of dykes who all made the same comment. In fact, I stole their line for my post. Nothing about my comment was in insult to Lena, unless you consider the term dyke offensive, which it isn't.

@14, its premise is that the heroine's faith in a piece of torture-induced information is what leads her to bin Laden, and that if Obama hadn't shut down torture the agency could have more quickly confirmed her theory and got him sooner. If that's not "somehow endorses" I don't know what would fit the bill for you.

It is a little passive aggressive, but she came off as smart and gorgeous and pained and just adorable (minus the Mel Gibson stuff, which tells me she owes him something big, or else why the hell mention him). Also, she is just gorgeous to look at.

Maybe I was just tired and a little brain-dead last night. Jodie's speech was better this morning the second-time-around. Last night, I was just mystified, although her repulsion with phony-baloney Hollywood and its hanger-on-er's was clear.

Jody's stand that everybody who needed to know knew Jodie was a lesbian was at once refreshing but against the whole principle of a wholesome coming out - that being gay was something that needed to be kept private. Is there a heterosexual equivalent? Can a actor say, "It is none of your business whom I am sleeping with."? Yes, but the presumption is that the sleeping partner is of the opposite sex. No one has to come out as straight (not yet anyway).

I think you have to public identify as gay and then you can keep your lover/date/husband/wife/partner and that relationship as private as you see fit. Because if you don't public identify as gay - whether it's the intended consequence or not - you make the statement that it is something that needs to be kept secret. That isn't a healthy attitude. We all have our badges to wear.

Gorgeous speech.

Unfortunate though, that she felt the need to sneer at how others have chosen to handle their coming-out. And if she's so wary of drawing attention to her personal life, why make such a production out of it? She could've done a more classy, Matt Bomer-esque slight of hand and been done with it.

But opaque? Yes. I still need a translation, please (for instance, how did she handle her ex?)

@16, Maybe I need to watch Zero Dark Thirty again, but found it much murkier. I don't remember any useful information coming from the torture scenes, which were uniformly depicted as horrific and futile. I feel like it's disingenuous to say that the filmmakers "endorse" torture simply because they included its shameful existence in their film.

@16: I wasn't taking notes, but I seem to recall (spoiler, I guess) that the information in Zero Dark Thirty was initially gathered by Maya tricking the prisoner, not the torture itself. The implication for me was that if we were smarter about it, we could probably have collected better information faster than by torturing suspects.

@21, yes. If anything I guess that I'm surprised that the angle being used against ZDT is that it's "pro-torture" and not "too anti-American".

To my (likely biased) eyes, it [SPOILER, MAYBE?] showed: the ineffectiveness of inhumane torturous treatment of prisoners; an understaffed / underfunded / often disorganized team responsible for tracking bin Laden (the key detail was lost due to misfiling for years); many terrorist incidents that were not foiled by our intelligence agencies; and a raid that, while cinematic and well executed leaves no doubt about the interest in "capturing" vs. killing their target; and a finale that's anything but celebratory.

Josh and Paul, here's something that might be helpful, the transcript of a discussion on this between the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and the Atlantic's Mark Bowden. I land on the Greenwald side of the fence. Here's a bit of it:

But the real problem is that the film shows that the key piece of information that led to the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden was extracted from a detainee who, for the first 45 minutes of the film, was brutally tortured. He then gave off the key bit of information, which was the identity of Osama bin Laden’s courier, which led the CIA to be able to find bin Laden when he was sitting at a table eating with two CIA agents who had spent the first 45 minutes of the film torturing him, and they then threatened to return him to torture.

The line right before he gives up the key piece of information is “you can tell me what I want to know, or I can hang you back up to the ceiling.” And he then immediately coughs up the name of the courier that led them to bin Laden. So the key message that huge numbers of people—writers, journalists, politicians—who’ve seen this film received, and was intended to be conveyed, is that torture played a critical role in enabling the finding of bin Laden. That would be bothersome even if it were true; the fact that it’s a complete fabrication is what makes this film so reckless and disturbing.

http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2013/01/11…

I guess I can see where he's coming from, I just don't agree with his interpretation. Although I (also) disagree that the film created a "strong impression", I do mostly think that this statement from the acting CIA director is much closer to the truth than what Glenn Greenwald would like to believe.

Second, the film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Ladin. That impression is false. As we have said before, the truth is that multiple streams of intelligence led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was hiding in Abbottabad. Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well. And, importantly, whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved. [CIA.gov]

In any case, I just feel like "endorse" is really the wrong word to use w/r/t Bigelow and Boal's presentation of the torturous "enhanced interrogation" program. The film is far too nuanced for that level of agenda-serving simplification.

Jodie Foster gets paid to be an actor, a career at which she excels. We (her public) purchase tickets to see her act. That is all we should expect or ask for. The podium at the Golden Globes (or the Oscars, et.al.) is not a public confessional.

@15 It's offensive that you would streotypically accuse Dunham of being some thing that she is not because of perceived discomfort wearing more stereotypically Glam/fem clothes. Str8 women can be appealing and feminine in any fashion, as can dyke chicks. Hottest dyke n a dress ever is Jane Lynch, and she walks just fine.

@24, thanks for the thoughtful response. Your quote is interesting, especially the last sentence.

The head of the CIA says the question is whether "enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees." He says "the film suggests" they were indeed.

For all your surmises about secret agendas being pursued by her film's detractors, the only agenda that interests me is Bigelow's - why did she choose to tell what the CIA director points out was a one-sided story? In discussions of the film early on she touted how drawn-from-facts her story was, and when questioned about the torture presentation she fell back on "it's a work of fiction".

I don't mind a person trying to have their cake and eat it too - I've tried it often enough myself - but nobody is above being called out on it.

oh, here's the full link from the acting director:

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/pre…

Of course I found the middle sentence ("Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well.") to be the most relevant and the closest to my impression of the film's content. Still ... I was only joking about the torture thing being a campaign by the other production companies, but who really knows when the Weinsteins are involved?!

@28, no kidding about the Weinsteins, I hear ya. We'll have to agree to disagree about whether Bigelow's storytelling choice was intended to portray torture as necessary.