I’m not sure I agree with everything Russell Simmons has to say about the dullness and whiteness of this year’s Academy Awards, but I think he makes a good point about the fact that in music, singers are judged more by their genre and less by their race:

It’s a telling statistic that this year’s Grammy Awards drew in almost 40 million viewers, eclipsing the Oscar ratings for the first time in history. Why? Because music executives couldn’t segregate artists if they tried! The music industry gets it because they have no choice. My nephew Diggy and Justin Bieber may look different, but they are cut from the same cultural fabric and sell their records to the same fans. Katy Perry and Rihanna may appear dissimilar but have much more similarities than differences in the eyes of pop culture. Between the artists’ friendships/collaborations and basic consumer demand, the music industry has all the research it needs to know that segregating artists is not the way to sell records. Post-racial America has a face in the music of today, and thank God for that.

Obviously this is not entirely true—some genres, like hip-hop, are considered racially bounded, while others, like pop, are more permeable, both in terms of the race of the performers who can succeed within it and their absorption of elements from other genres. And I also think that hip-hop just has more black men in talent development positions, and they’ve been able to bring up a generation of both black and non-black performers behind them. Whether it’s Simmons vouching for Brett Ratner, Diddy’s long record as a producer, or Usher bringing up Justin Bieber, that’s a lot of black executives with greenlight power and undeniable track records. Until those same conditions in Hollywood (preferably in the form of someone other than Tyler Perry, who doesn’t seem interested in bringing up another generation of directors behind him), Hollywood’s unlikely to get more comfortable with people of color, or to start seeing actors in terms of their specialties rather than their race.

Erik Kain flagged this post from Otaku Kun on Brave, Pixar’s upcoming movie that will be its first with a female protagonist. While I don’t agree with his analysis of Disney’s offerings—yes, the company has a strong princess franchise, but Pixar in particular has become acclaimed in part for its sensitive, creative stories about men—I think it’s worth unpacking what lies behind this sentiment: “I’d just like to see a movie from Disney/Pixar for once where the main character is a young boy, who follows his heart and defies his own society and culture, and achieves something more than just mere personal happiness, but actually makes a difference.”

I have nothing against stories where boys get to grow, and be empowered, and slay the dragon, and get the girl. But I don’t exactly think we’re lacking in those kinds of narratives. Across generations and countries, the most popular literary and cinematic phenomenon of the last decade and a half is a nice kid named Harry Potter who achieves both personal happiness and major societal change. Christopher Paolini got to live out that narrative both in real life and on the page when he went from self-publishing homeschooler to best-selling author with his Inheritance series before he was 20. The most kid-friendly superhero in movies and cartoons is Spider-Man.

But I am generally sympathetic to the idea that just as we need more expansive roles for women in pop culture, we need more flexible roles for boys and men that allow for a broader range of emotions. And so I asked Tamora Pierce last year about whether we needed different kinds of boys to act as heroes and role models for male and female readers alike (she is one of the authors I think does best creating fully-realized boys and men). “The majority of boys have male heroes. Even if the characters are animals, they’re male. Girl heroes are by far the minority in children’s literature, which is absolutely infuriating to me, because this was the status quo when I started, and the numbers have not changed that much,” she said, explaining why, though she’s working on her first series with a male main character, she’s more concerned about providing innovative stories about women. “It’s not that I have anything against boys. I just see a need for girl heroes.”

And I wonder if the rise of authors like Pierce, and of a vigorous conversation about roles for women and girls more generally, even if it hasn’t gotten us to character parity or all the depictions we’d like, is something that guys would like a male equivalent of. There’s no question that there are clear archetypes of male characters, from Bad Boys to Nice Guys, and forums for discussion of them ranging from the Good Men Project to lots of good feminist writers. But are there authors or filmmakers who folks think are doing a uniquely good job of building particularly innovative male characters? Clearly there’s some unfulfilled hunger out there for something new. And I’d be curious as to what the men in the audience are feeling most engaged by.

I know Kyle Buchanan is being sort of snarky in this post about why Mars movies have such a dismal track record at the box office, but I think there’s a tie between this sort of sentiment and our conversation from earlier in the week about the need for thoughtful science fiction. He writes:

Why are audiences so turned off by our planetary neighbor? They don’t seem to have the same hang-ups about the moon, which has factored into big hits like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Apollo 13 (as well as critically acclaimed movies like Moon), but that rock is movie-ready: Stories set there simply have to be told in romantic black-and-white. Meanwhile, setting your movie on red, red Mars is like staring into a Virtual Boy for two hours, and who wants that? (Evidently not John Carter director Andrew Stanton, whose Mars is more tan than red.) It helps, too, that the moon is such an ever-present presence in our lives, as well as a place that Americans have actually been. If NASA can’t motivate an administration to send a man to Mars, why should the average moviegoer get worked up about it?

Why should the average moviegoer get worked up over Mars movies if there’s absolutely no rationale for a movie to be set there? I have a fuller review of Disney’s sci-fi blockbuster John Carter coming tomorrow, but there is zero reason the events of that movie need to take place on Mars, which I assume is only the setting because Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote the books on which the movie is based thought it was cool. Ditto on pretty much every other movie with a tie to Mars—it’s a little further away from the Moon, and we haven’t had human contact with it, so it’s easy to project ideas of wacky things onto it. But that doesn’t mean those wacky aliens or evil forces derive anything interesting or significant from the fact that they come from or are based on Mars.

By contrast, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy works because there are very specific reasons for the characters to be going to Mars—an international consortium has decided it can viably made habitable (as a way to make it potentially mineable and a population escape hatch for Earth)—and a great deal of the novel’s plot is drawn from Mars-specific forces. The amount of radiation the characters are getting both drives them close together in protected habitats and encourages the experimentation that leads to a treatment to reverse aging. The religion that develops on Mars, the areophany, is specific to the planet. The political and philosophical debates are directly tied to how people feel about Mars’ geography and geological history. It’s really a shame that we can get an infinite number of failed and hugely spectacles set on Mars, but we can’t make a series or a television show out of a fully-realized, very smart Martian adventure that (other than some special effects work to show the Martian gravity) could be made pretty darn cheap.

Reality television’s always a risky proposition: no matter what participants on reality shows might think, it’s essentially impossible to control your image once the cameras start rolling and producers start shooting footage. And it’s even riskier for an institution to agree to participate wholesale. But the early news about a reality show about unions A&E’s just ordered from Mark Wahlberg and his production company that will start in Boston with the Teamsters Local 25 and potentially move to other cities sounds like it’s coming from the right place:

Teamsters – produced by Wahlberg’s Closest to the Hole, Levinson’s Leverage and Harrison’s Transition Prods — provide a first-hand glimpse of the legendary union in the most aggressive and territorial city in America: Boston. Here, the Teamsters Local 25 battle for the rights of their 11,000 members. “We believe A&E is the perfect venue to create a cutting-edge show that promises to be like nothing else on television,” Levinson said.

Thompson first started exploring the idea for a show about Teamsters after watching the dramatic events in Wisconsin last summer, when local union members invaded the statehouse to protest anti-union legislation. WME introduced him to Boston born-and-bred Wahlberg, who was instrumental in locking in Teamsters Local 25 in his hometown. Wahlberg has an extra personal connection to the project — his dad was a Teamster truck driver in Boston. Teamsters is envisioned as a reality franchise that would showcase unions in different cities, starting with Boston.

Just as Islamophobes will insist that All-American Muslim was just a tool for hiding the “truth” about Islam, anti-union folks will probably look at a show like this and insist that it’s some sort of sinister whitewash. But I think there’s value in telling a story that’s rooted in the inherent drama of union organizing, and that opens up a union office and reveals that there’s nothing awful and sinister going on there. In addition, the fact that A&E executives got interested in doing a union story after the Wisconsin protests suggests to me they’ve got a sense of what makes unions interesting other than charges of cronyism or conspiracy. The struggle of working people against the corporations who want them as vulnerable as possible is inherently dramatic, and I’m glad some network recognized the potential in it.

I’m off this morning to SXSW, coming back on Wednesday. The plan is for blogging to continue apace, but I will be running around to movies and panels and things so if I slow down a bit or am pokey on responding to email, forgive me.

If you’re going to be in Austin, two things. First, you should come to my panel on Monday. I’ll be moderating a conversation about Islam, popular culture, and whether it makes sense for minority groups to use character tropes as a wedge to force open a larger conversation. And afterwards, I’m up for coffee, or a late lunch, or anything else folks want to do. If there are going to be enough of you in town to meet up, leave comments here or email me and we’ll plan something for this weekend.

I think I can safely say that Xiu Xiu’s new track “I Luv Abortion” is probably not going to be a chart-topper, and not just because of the discordance of the synths and brass:

First, there’s the fact that Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart says of the song:

A young friend of mine, who had gone through period of cutting herself eventually mailing me the knife which now sits on my recording desk, found herself still a teenager and pregnant. She knew that it was not time for her to be a parent to her future child but she could love him or her when it good for them both…It was so striking to me that she could have an abortion out of love. The song is also a big FUCK YOU to the Right wing in America.

I’m not that sympathetic to people who just want to tell other people to fuck off because it makes them feel bold. I’m also not that sympathetic to men who take women’s stories about their health, their bodies, and their lives, and presume to speak for them, even when they’re presenting themselves as pro-choice.* Appropriating a woman’s words and experiences, particularly a woman whose emotional distress you appear to be turning into some sort of proof of how cool and dark you are, so you can tell the “Right wing in America” to fuck off feels like you’re using her, rather than writing some sort of tribute to her.

And the lyrics themselves are not exactly what even the most pro-choice of us would call on-message. I was really struck—and turned off by—the lines: “You are too good for this life / a hyena infected with rabies would give birth to you / there are too many important things i can’t be for yooooou.” Now, I am all for people being able to control their reproductive health so they don’t get pregnant when they don’t want to be, and for them being able to have abortions or give children up for adoption if they feel they can’t raise children. Kids should be wanted. But comparing girls who do give birth to “a hyena infected with rabies”? That’s ludicrous and disgusting. I may worry for teenagers who have babies. But the only right thing to hope for them and their children is that they get the support they need so their kids grow up healthy and they can become self-sustaining. Treating them like they’re animals, or pretending you’re superior for getting a medical procedure that is not always easily available, is no way to start that conversation.

*All of which is a reminder that you should check out the awesome Men Who Trust Women tumblr on the subject.

Apparently, David Fincher is telling Netflix that $100 million isn’t enough for him to produce 26 episodes of his remake of the British masterpiece House of Cards. It’s not entirely clear yet whether MRC, the company that is producing the show for Netflix, will ante up or whether the project will collapse. But either way, the debate over that project–and the news that Netflix is considering picking up another expensive project, Fox castoff Terra Nova, illustrate the challenges of original content upstarts like Netflix, Hulu, Yahoo and Amazon as they seek to create hit shows.

The logic of the House of Cards remake is more in its constituent parts than as a whole. Fincher is an immensely talented and acclaimed director with fans who will follow any project he’s involved with, and he is very buzzy after the success of his Facebook origin story The Social Network. House of Cards is a venerable project with a pedigree that could appeal to fans of British-inflected drama, particularly riding the coattails of the Downton Abbey craze. I get why Netflix would want that prestige. Like Lillyhammer, the House of Cards project has names attached that make people sit up and think, and production values that are frankly much better than Hulu’s Battleground.

But taken together, I’m not sure the project ever made sense. There’s no particular creative mandate for the remake, no equivalent to the Afghanistan war that makes Sherlock feel like a fresh update on Arthur Conan Doyle’s character. The original show was 12 hour-long episodes, and the American order would more than double it, for no particularly discernible reason other than Netflix’s desire to have a show as long as a standard American television order. Fincher has a well-established reputation for being prickly and not particularly cost-conscious, which may not be great qualities for a company that, as it gets into the business, wants a hitch-free success.

Then, there’s Terra Nova, which has approximately nothing in common with the other shows in Netflix original content pool. It isn’t a resurrection of a show with huge cultural cachet that was killed before its time and could bring in a rabid pool of long-time fans, like Arrested Development. It doesn’t have a hook with an actor or a director, like Steven Van Zandt in Lillyhammer or Fincher with House of Cards. America’s basically just indicated that it doesn’t much want an incoherent and dull science fiction show decked out with the occasional dinosaur, and Fox has indicated it doesn’t think it can make money off the concept. So the appeal for Terra Nova is nigh-unfathomable, unless it wants a reputation as a company that dats off network castoffs.

All in all, these are weird investments for Netflix when it could be spending some money, say, following Game of Thrones‘ success and adapting a popular book series, or buying a show from a beloved auteur like Dan Harmon, or any one of a number of options. I get that Netflix is reaching for everything at once. But there’s nothing wrong with spending less and being slightly less grand if the project the company ends up funding is actually the sum of its parts.