manohla, i really do love you for your mind.

I'm smiling so hard after reading this Q&A with Manohla Dargis, NY Times film critic and my personal hero. And it's no secret that I fucking love the stupid Oscars, and the fact that Jon Stewart is hosting them is almost too much for me to handle. Some choice excerpts:

-- As to “Mrs. Henderson Presents” – yeah, well, I like British accents, too. But isn’t it time Dame Judi started working for a living?

-- Q. Why do you think Bill Murray's performance in “Broken Flowers” was overlooked this award season?
A. Maybe because the various organizations realized that it wasn’t any good.

-- About why Crash was nominated for Best Picture:
What could better soothe the troubled brow of the Academy’s collective white conscious than a movie that says sometimes black men really are muggers (so don’t worry if you engage in racial profiling); your Latina maid really, really loves you (so don’t worry about paying her less than minimum wage); even white racists (even white racist cops) can love their black brothers or at least their hot black sisters; and all answers are basically simple, so don’t even think about politics, policy, the lingering effects of Proposition 13 and Governor Arnold. This is a consummate Hollywood fantasy, no matter how nominally independent the financing and release.

-- There is only one possible explanation for why Terrence Malick’s glorious film [The New World], one of the most aesthetically and intellectually ambitious, emotionally devastating and politically resonant works of American art in recent memory, was overlooked by the Academy: with the exception of my few dear friends in that august body, they are idiots.