Morgan Leigh Davies

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Yeah I absolutely prefer OBAA but thought Sinners was great… I do think OBAA is winning but the idea of Coogler winning director is just nonsense

Like yeah wow what a tragedy that a hugely popular and accessible PTA movie is probably gonna win BP…?????

I’m also kind of like, Sinners is great (though I much prefer OBAA) but Coogler is 39 like… if he doesn’t win BP this year it’s not a travesty. He has time!

Yeah it’s so bad. Obvs not like some years where there is a movie in contention that is truly awful but I definitely am getting the vibes that people are now seeing OBAA as a potentially bad/disappointing winner which is just like… what are we doing here people

I acknowledge a Sinners upset is possible but when I said aloud and therefore realized that OBAA has, again, literally swept BP awards this season, I was kind of like, okay… why are we even having this discussion. Anyway we’ll find out Sunday!

I feel like the number of pundits predicting Sinners to win BP (and I guess director??) at this point despite OBAA winning literally every single best picture prize all season is creating a narrative wherein if OBAA wins best pic something has gone wrong, but… godspeed!

Variety predicting Sinners to sweep the Oscars including Best Director… I think everyone needs to calm down.

Early 1900's photograph of a tabby cat sitting on a granite pedestal on the lawn in front of a white picket fence.

@catsofyore.bsky.social Here's another kitty picture from William Ward Lilley - circa 1910 Simonsville VT

this junkballing Czech electrician is a folk hero in Japan for striking out Ohtani in the last WBC (stopped for photos/autographs etc) but he's retiring after this bc Czech league ball doesn't pay the bills.
I love the way he took in in this one last surreal moment before going back to normalcy

Cool timing, or not, while Times Guild
members are currently bargaining over AI: newsguild.org/inside-ai-ne...

Okay this is absurd

For fuck’s sake

“Overcome chronic illness for an hour and a half by obsessing over your monomaniacal fixation”

Haven’t watched this yet but we recorded for over an hour and a half about the Oscars today…

Author With One New York ‘Times’ Best Seller $49,000 $30,000 from book advance $14,000 from teaching two retreats $5,000 from narrating own audiobook I’m trying to manifest more abundance, but I’m really feeling the income streams have dwindled. I have over 800,000 Instagram followers. Before, if I wanted to do a brand partnership on social media, $10,000 was an easy get. Now it’s, like, $500. I pretty much live from a bucket of savings.

Also: checks out

Screenshot of four different jobs from the NY Mag feature about what people make in NYC: "Home Health Aide $23,000 I've been a home health aide for ten years. My main patient last year was in Brooklyn. I spent most of my time taking care of her. I worked two days a week, and I was being paid for 13 hours of work each day - my agency, Loyal Home Care, budgets eight hours of sleep and three hours for mealtimes into our wages. But I was basically working 24 hours a day. She was active, and I was worried she would fall, so I would watch her all day and night. This is a pretty common experience for health aides. The agency can deny our overtime, but you can't deny a patient. When they say, "Oh, I need a drink of water; I need to use the bathroom," how could you possibly say "no" to them? Bronx Day-Care Worker $31,000 $16,600 from day-care profits $14,400 from trainings and consulting Last year, I lost a lot of kids. I live in the Bronx, and a bunch of families in my neighborhood lost their child-care vouchers. We're talking about people who make as much as I do; most of the moms I work with are home health aides. They can't afford full-time child care. If I have 16 kids, I can pay myself for 40 hours of work. But last year, I didn't, and obviously I'm still doing the same amount of work. I've been running the day care out of my home for more than seven years. It's a profession I entered out of necessity and have stayed in out of passion. I pay for everything - food, cleaning supplies, toys - and we have to meet the same requirements as a large company in terms of paying for liability insurance, which can feel pointless in this industry. I mean, if something happens to one of my children, I lose my license. End of story."

It's all so clear

It was going on one, two in the morning, and we were shooting what I felt was an important scene for me, when he makes an attempt to be quote-unquote straight, in a suit, and at the end of it he gets emotional and locks himself in the other room. And I felt like, I’m not getting what I want—I’m not happy with it. Mike was happy with it. He called me the next day and said, “I know you weren’t happy with the scene last night. Believe me, we wouldn’t have gone home if I had felt we weren’t getting it.” And then he sort of became my psychiatrist and said, “You find it difficult to be happy, don’t you? You find it difficult to enjoy things.” And I said, “Well, sometimes. Last night was about feeling too tired and not feeling I was reaching what I needed to reach for the scene.” He talked to me then about when he was making, I don’t know whether it was Virginia Woolf or The Graduate. He said, “I didn’t enjoy it for a second. I was worried about so many things.” And then he said, “You know, this is never going to happen again quite this way. You should try to allow yourself to enjoy this more. Take a minute a day, and then add a minute the next day, and another minute. Pretty soon, you’ll have hours of happiness.”

The Birdcage opened thirty years ago today, so in its honor, I want to share one of my favorite stories about Mike Nichols that didn't make it into my biography. This is from an interview I did with Nathan Lane.

I mean beyond all of the loathsome obvious shit about allllll of this, the director of the fucking INSIDE fucking OUT movies saying “We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy" is a level of self-unawareness I can only marvel at

MeToo pushed a few big-name bad actors out of their positions, but it did very little to grapple with the systems and the cultures and the people that empowered those bad actors and allowed them to operate with impunity.

Really good article, also brings to mind the recent Muriel Spark biography which describes her turning on her own selected biographer (in a much more antagonistic fashion). It’s no fun to be the subject of one of these books!

This is a feeble excuse. Pixar films prompt much harder conversations about death, grief, anxiety, environmental disaster, betrayal, jealousy, friendships, class, animal rights, etc, etc

The covers of three books. Left to right: Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the life of a legend, about the late Sopranos actor. The cover shows Gandolfini looking shy, peering offscreen with one unobstructed eye and another that peeks out between the fingers of his right hand. CENTER: The cover of Cinema Her Way, a coffee table book by Marya E. Gates about female directors. On the cover is actress Michelle Rodriguez as the boxer heroine of Karyn Kusama's sports drama Girlfight, about a woman boxer. RIGHT David Hockney's painting collection The Arrival of Spring in Normandy, showing a painting of a verdant field. In the background of the field is green grass. in the upper foreground are the branches of a tree sprouting white, cottony buds.

A screenshot of the pre-orders section at mzs.press. Three screenshots of books that have not yet been released. I Am The Night, Daniel Dockery's book about Batman the Brave and the Bold, has a silhouette of Batman stretching from the top to the bottom of the cover, with the title of the book and a nighttime Gotham skyline circumscribed by the borders of the Batman silhouette. CENTER The cover of The Ring Cycle, Matt Zoller Seitz and Odie Henderson's book on the Rocky and Creed films. The cover is white except for a pair of black boxing gloves floating there RIGHT The cover of Documentary Now!, the 600-page, 7-pound coffee table book celebrating the aforementioned IFC Channel series parodying classic documentaries.

Screenshot of three books carried at mzs.press arts bookstore: LEFT: Cover of Lead Sister, a biography of Karen Carpenter, featuring a closeup of Carpenter playing and singing with The Carpenters. CENTER: The cover of Anthony Hopkins' We Did OK, Kid, a memoir of his life and career. On the cover is Hopkins in closeup as he looks presently, narrowed blue eyes looking directly at the spectator. RIGHT: Cover of Louis Armstrong In His Own Words, a collection of the bandleader's correspondence. The cover image is a photograph of a probably fortysomething Armstrong seated at the wooden desk in his office where he often wrote letters.

Screenshot of the covers of 3 books carried at mzs.press Arts Bookstore. LEFT: The cover of Gotham City Cocktails, a book of mixed drink recipes inspired by Batman. Art deco-style flowing border lines flow around and around the interior of the dust jacket. At the center are drawings of two tall cocktail glasses and between them, a shot glass and a tumbler with a sword-pierced cherry in it. CENTER: The cover of Downton Abbey Afternoon Tea Cookbook. Green cover, white writing and graphics. The central image is a teapot with stem lines coming out of it, and at the pot's base, a teacup and saucer and a separate plate of biscuits. RIGHT: Bob's Burgers "The Re-Recipe Box," a set of recipe cards inspired by the joke hamburger names featured on the small board at the front of Bob's joint. Red sides with small graphics, cover image of the restaurant.

Greetings, new friends! You may know me as an author, a prolific Bluesky poster and 4th place finisher on So You Call That Dancing? But you might not know that my partner Judith (@mzpress) and I have an online arts bookstore that's growing every day. Full inventory here: mzs.press/EVERYTHING-W...

Absolutely criminal and shameful from NYMag. If you’re looking for books on film etc., go here:

The only relevant take on this nonsense

I mean one slightly less dark thing is: as it stands it is an act of defiance to seriously engage with the arts and criticism, which should inspire us all to do it more and even more seriously.

Literally do not even know what to say about the state of arts journalism in this country at this point. Anything I could write would probably too dark for public consumption.

Absolutely criminal and shameful from NYMag. If you’re looking for books on film etc., go here:

I’m so sorry Matt. You have done such extraordinary work for that publication for so long, this is just criminal. Hoping the bookstore flourishes hugely and I’ll be looking forward to reading whatever you do next.

PS quite funny they tried to make a sensational headline out of this when it just… isn’t.

Like obvs there are dumbasses who watch five movies all year, only vote for their friends, and/are horrible bigots, but I do think they mostly make an effort. This shows her doing that and also that the personal stuff does affect decision making (as it inevitably would)