This trailer for the still release-date-less The Legend of Korra looks pretty excellent:

The one real question I have is how the rise of technology’s going to change the Avtar universe. One of the things that I liked best about Avatar: The Last Airbender was how the creative uses of bending effectively took the place of technology—you don’t need schmancy technology to run a huge metropolis like Ba Sing Se when you have earthbending. I’d be sorry if setting this story in what looks like pre-war Shanghai made the world seem more familiar and less independently fascinating.

This is pretty amazing: Idris Elba is going to be playing Nelson Mandela in a new biopic. Normally, I’d say we absolutely don’t need another Mandela biopic. But I think this project is intriguing because it’s meant to focus on Mandela’s on younger years, before he became an icon of non-violent resistance, when he was saying things like this:

Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

It’s easy to forget, and a lot of people do, that Mandela was imprisoned in the first place in part for his involvement in the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which was the armed wing of the African National Congress. If you think about it, casting the guy who played Stringer Bell as a political activist who is trying to organize a unit that was capable of carrying out sabotage and guerilla warfare makes a lot of sense. I’d actually really love to see David Simon, or someone with his sense of organizations, write a big movie about South African anti-apartheid leadership and the apartheid regime.

Yeah, yeah, the ceremony’s over, and there’s not much point wondering what could have gone differently. But given all the moaning about how predictable and moribund this year’s Academy Awards were, here are ten performances and films that, had they been nominated, could have forced members of the Academy to make a clearer choice between nostalgia for movies’ past, and excitement for their vital future.

1. Contagion, for Best Picture and Jennifer Ehle for Best Supporting Actress: Stephen Soderbergh’s near-future nightmare of a world where hundreds of millions are killed by a fast-spreading plague was eerily familiar, a crisis managed and influenced by well-intentioned but limited bureaucrats, bloggers and vaccine deniers, and cured by a serene scientist willing to take an absolutely insane risk. And it was anchored by terrific performances, from Jude Law as a repellent hawker of a miracle cure to Jennifer Ehle as that scientist. Ehle takes a small role and makes it shine, gives us a whole, and highly unique, person out of the few scenes she has.

2. Michael Fassbender, Shame, for Best Actor: I tend to think Shame is somewhat overrated. But if a handsome white dude was going to get nominated for going to an emotionally risky, soul-bearing place, that handsome white dude should have been Fassbender for his portrait of self-loathing, rather than Clooney, composed and noble in grief.

3. Miss Bala, for Best Foreign Language Film: I don’t remotely begrudge A Separation its win, especially given the resulting acceptance speech. But just as I’m glad Demian Bichir’s surprise nomination for Best Actor got more people to see Chris Weitz’s extraordinary immigration movie A Better Life, I’d have liked to see Miss Bala, about why people might want to leave Mexico, get a similar bump.

4. Vanessa Redgrave, Coriolanus, Best Supporting Actress: All words feel too poor to do proper honor to Redgrave’s turn as a war leader’s mother in Ralph Fiennes’ passion-project adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. But in a movie full of strong performances, Redgrave is magnificent. It’s a huge disappointment that this movie’s December qualifying run means it can’t get the consideration it deserves for next year’s awards ceremonies.

5. Andy Serkis, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, For…Something: If the Academy can find a way to give an award to Oprah, who sure needs it as her OWN network struggles, surely they should have found a way to recognize Serkis and the folks he worked with to create one of the most indelible characters of the year. Matt Zoller Seitz even laid out a way they could do it. And having Serkis in the mix would have been a particularly good thing on a night when the Academy seemed to fetishize its past while expressing some real contempt for the consumers and tastes that will shape its future.

6. Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt, Young Adult, for Best Actress and/or Best Supporting Actor: Another pair of extremely un-vain, vulnerable performances that cleverly reveal the rot at the heart of our fantasies. The Academy found Theron’s transgressiveness when she played a lesbian serial killer compelling, but seems to have been discomfited by this movie, a direct attack on a culture of looks.

7. The Trip, Best Picture: I realize this is kind of a wild card, but if the Oscars wanted to go international and to go with movies that reflect on show business, why not take a flyer on this totally charming, cutting British movie about friends in show business and the diminishing rewards of fame? Oh wait: because a true comedy (not counting Crash, people) hasn’t won since Annie Hall.

8. Dee Rees, Pariah, and Steve McQueen, Shame, for Original Screenplay or Best Director: Sooo many white dudes in those categories. It would have been interesting to see how the Academy responded to a situation where there were a lot more people of color in the mix. This year, they appear to have picked one, Octavia Spencer.

Jan Berenstain, who co-wrote the Berenstain Bears books with her husband Stan, has died at 88. The books are probably best characterized as a gentler, more lesson-oriented version of The Simpsons with a bumbling dad, an efficient mom, an oldest-child brother and a feisty sister—they can be a bit didactic. But Sister Bear, who Stan and Jan added to the franchise so girls would have a character to relate to, is basically the jock version of Lisa Simpson, whether she’s slugging her brother one shortly after she’s born, infiltrating a dopey boys’ clubhouse, or winning road races and killing it at baseball.

Hilariously, the books drove Charles Krauthammer nuts. In 1989, he described Papa Bear as “post-feminist…The Alan Alda of grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like Batman” and said that Mother Bear was so irritating she was “the one you always dreamt of drowning,” which is a pretty creepy reaction to an organized woman who watches her cholesterol. He acknowledged that the kinds of companies that put out the books “put in question my most basic political principles, since I cannot deny that socialism, whatever its faults, does not permit such things.”

The bridge is yours.

-Drama at the Oscars afterparties!

-And what do we want from the Academy Awards, anyway?

-Is Kickstarter on a path to outpace the National Endowment for the Arts?

-A photoessay on addiction.

-Bill Pullman will be your president again!

Conservatives have loved hitting the Obama family for their lifestyle, whether they’re criticizing the price of Michelle Obama’s or running with phony stories about her lingerie shopping. So there was something entertaining about seeing National Review criticize President Obama for an act of personal frugality—it turns out the President and his family haven’t owned or leased a car since 2007.

That’s an entirely sensible decision: when you’re famous enough to need Secret Service protection, you’re famous enough not to be driving yourself. And given the level of racist insanity Obama’s candidacy and presidency unleashed, Obama needs protection more than most candidates. If you’re not going to be driving yourself, and you don’t particularly like driving, there’s no particular reason to keep a car you’re not going to use. Obama’s decision is actually in line with a broad trend in America—car ownership fell for the first time ever in 2009, mostly because the economy encouraged people to cut down on redundant cars. But as conservatives look for ways to pin rising gas prices on Obama, it’s not particularly surprising that someone would make a weak attempt to paint Obama as out of touch because he’s following security protocol and making a reasonable financial decision.

Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has been emphasizing his bona fides as a car owner as a way of proving he’s something of a regular Joe—or at least committed to the American auto industry—particularly in advance of the Michigan primary. He attended the Daytona 500 on Sunday, where he was photographed with Lenny Kravitz.

On the campaign trail, Romney’s car-related lines have a way of emphasizing just how distant he is from the average American car enthusiast. In December, Reuters noted how Romney tried to back away from his disastrous offer to bet Rick Perry $10,000 in a debate by suggesting that the amount was too much for him to pay for a Nash Metropolitan he saw while on the campaign trail in New Hampshire. And Romney’s talked about wanting to add a Mustang or Corvette to his collection, which already includes a ’62 Rambler, a gift from his son, “some day, when I have time to fuss with it.”

Then, on February 23, Romney said that “I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pick-up truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually. And I used to have a Dodge truck. So I used to have all three covered.” If the sentiment was meant to be a populist one, Romney missed. There’s a difference between supporting local businesses and describing personal car consumption that would be capable of propping up an industry.

Lou Dobbs’ temper tantrum over a slick, corporatized version of Dr. Seuss’s classic environmental children’s book The Lorax and the Studio Ghibli movie The Secret World of Arrietty must be seen to be believed:

Now, let’s be clear about the source material for both of these movies. The Lorax is hardly an anti-business tract: in the picture book, a factory owner called the Once-ler, starts a business that requires him to cut down a certain kind of tree to make a product called a Thneed. The Lorax, who speaks for the animals and plants who are harmed by the Once-ler’s logging activities and his factory’s pollution, warns the Once-ler repeatedly about the impact of his actions, but he ignores them. The ultimate result? An environmental collapse that depopulates the land, and wrecks the Once-ler’s business because he’s run out of trees to support his production and didn’t plant any more. If anything, the book argues that the interests of the environment and industry go hand in hand. That holds true for the movie, too—among the products that are being cross-promoted in connection with it is an SUV.

The Secret World of Arrietty is based on Mary Norton’s fantasy series about tiny people who live in the houses of ordinary humans, which starts with the book, The Borrowers, which since it was first published in 1952 is probably not a direct agent of the Occupy movement, unless Ms. Norton had a crystal ball working for her or something. It is true, though, that the book is based on the idea that “human beans” have more than enough to satisfy them and can spare the occasional piece of doll furniture or fibers from a door mat that the Borrowers can repurpose to make their own lives better. But the book suggests a model that looks a lot more like voluntary charitable giving than forced distribution or an endorsement of theft by the underprivilged.

But the lesson here is less that Dobbs is reaching to make his case in this particular instance. It’s how desperate conservatives are to marginalize some totally reasonable ideas. You can see this sort of thinking in the paranoid argument that bike lanes are part of a United Nations plot to control American communities or the extreme reaction to taxation. These are the sorts of arguments people turn to when they’re out of good, rational ideas to put up against something they just don’t want to happen, because it makes them angry or uncomfortable.

Even before Meryl Streep, playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, beat Viola Davis, in a performance as a Mississippi domestic even The Help‘s detractors couldn’t help admire, for Best Actress, it was a racially awkward night at the Oscars.

The off notes began when Billy Crystal resurrected his Sammy Davis, Jr. impersonation for a Midnight in Paris sketch at the beginning of the show. The bit is just fine, but on a night that featured Octavia Spencer and Davis as acting nominees for The Help, and Gabourey Sidibe reflecting on how few women like herself she sees on-screen, it was an unfortunate reminder of how few parts are available for actual African-American actors. It didn’t help when, later in the telecast, Crystal joked that after seeing The Help “I wanted to hug the first black woman that I saw, which from Beverly Hills is about a 45-minute drive.” It might have been a crack on white, wealthy Los Angeles residents, but the joke didn’t have quite enough self-awareness about the persistence of segregation.

That same unease showed up in an otherwise very funny sketch about Hollywood focus groups that featured a group of cranky moviegoers dissecting The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know that it was unintentional, but an attendee played by Fred Willard kept talking about how he’d love a movie with more monkeys in it—and suggested the upcoming Gone With the Wind would benefit from the same additions. It was an unfortunate choice, pairing up that particular animal with the movie for which Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American actress to win an Academy Award. As Chris Rock reminded us, “If you’re a black man, you can play a donkey or a zebra.”

And the awkwardness wasn’t all black and white. Daniel Junge, who won an Academy Award for Feature Documentary for Saving Face, announced that as a white guy, he really ought to get out of the way for his Pakistani collaborator, journalist and documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy—and then kept talking, though he did let her have the majority of the time. The biggest missed opportunity of the night was the Academy’s chance to recognize Demian Bichir’s marvelous performance as an undocumented immigrant in Chris Weitz’s A Better Life, a profoundly personal issue movie that went underwatched this year. I don’t begrudge Jean Dujardin his Best Actor win, but it’s much more interesting to confound the Academy’s preconceptions about the people who are still acting as the help than it is to cater to their nostalgic self-conception.

To my mind, it’s Asghar Farhadi, who won the Best Foreign Language Film award for A Separation, and marked the occasion with by far the classiest, most meaningful speech of the evening, one that far surpassed much of the foreign policy discussions on how to approach the relationship between his country, Iran, and the United States. He told the audience:

At this time, many Iranian all over the world are watching us and I imagine them to be very happy. They are happy not just because of an important award or a film or filmmaker, but because at the time when talk of war, intimidation and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country Iran is spoken here through her glorious culture. A rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country. A people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.

One of the best things art can do is expose who we are, in all our beauty and ugliness, and remind us of what we’re capable of being. And in this case, it was also a brave act. Farhadi’s been wearing a necktie most of this awards season in a subtle rebuke to the Iranian regime’s suggestion that it’s a decadent Western accessory, and tonight, some commentators suggest that his speech could prevent him from returning to Iran or make life uncomfortable for him when he got back there. That’s a real risk for an award that carries less benefit than a Best Actor or Best Director statuette. Farhadi should be an example to politically engaged artists—and to politicians—everywhere.