Word comes from the New York Times that, a year after Iran won its first Academy Award for Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, Iran will boycott the Academy Awards in protest of “Innocence of Muslims,” a crude film about the prophet Muhammad that may not even exist as a feature film:

The boycott appears straightforward: Mohammad Hosseini, Iran’s culture minister, on Tuesday confirmed that his country would not submit a film for consideration at next year’s Oscars in protest of “Innocence of Muslims,” the anti-Islam YouTube video that has sparked deadly riots. He specifically cited the “failure” of Oscar organizers to take an official position on the incendiary “film.”

But Iran’s move left Hollywood scratching its head. Iran, which won the Academy Award for best foreign language film earlier this year, was seriously going to boycott moviedom’s biggest prize because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hadn’t denounced a crude YouTube video made by a former gas station owner? (The academy had no comment.)

It’s hard to know what Iran thinks it will accomplish with this move. Is it to shame an industry that, by all accounts, is deeply embarrassed by the incident? It’s not as if Paramount, which built the old JAG set Innocence of Muslims was shot on, needs Iran’s boycot to think more carefully about where its sets end up and what that means for their brand. It’s not as if the actors involved in the movie, one of whom has already sued over the deceptive use of her image and work, aren’t horrified by how their performances were dubbed and distorted to produce a crude project that didn’t resemble what they’d signed on for. It’s not as if the highest authorities in the United States haven’t condemned the man who made it for his provocations, while still defending his right to free speech. And if Iran thinks it’s going to challenge the American focus on free speech, muzzling itself and its own filmmakers seems like a poor way of making that argument, one that perhaps overestimates Iran’s influence on the Academy and American consumers.

But this actually strikes me as a move that’s aimed more internally than externally. Farhadi and the members of his crew who accompanied him to the Academy Awards, wore neckties, which were banned as a symbol of Western decadence after the Iranian Revolution, to the ceremony. He used his acceptance speech to draw a rather careful distinction between the Iranian people and their government, saying that he knew Iranians would celebrate his win “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.” Iran may not have been particularly eager to have another director take the stage again, perhaps emboldened by Farhadi’s reception.
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There are conflicting reports about whether a deal to end the National Football League’s lockout of its professional referees is in place. ESPN reported that a deal was “at hand” an hour after reporting that the two sides weren’t close, while NFL.com has reported that the officials union and league have reached minor agreements but are still stuck on the biggest point of contention: the referees’ pension benefits.

Regardless, I wanted to address one thing that keeps coming up when the lockout is discussed: whether the NFL players, who are also unionized, could end the lockout by showing solidarity through a walkout or other means. The short answer to that will disappoint many of you, because it is almost undoubtedly, “No.”

The NFL Players Association stood with the officials from the start, promising to consider all options and refusing to take a strike or walkout off the table. After the egregious mistake at the end of the Monday Night Football game this week, Green Bay Packers offensive lineman TJ Lang said players debated walking off the field or taking a knee on every play this week to show how disgruntled they are with the replacement officials.

The reality is, though, even in the absence of a deal, none of that is likely to happen. The “take a knee on every play” strategy would certainly cause a public relations nightmare for the league, but it would be nearly impossible to organize league-wide. Plus, with paying fans in the seats and at home, there’s a better-than-solid chance that it would backfire, making the players villains when they are currently on the right side of this debacle.

The other option, a general walkout by the entire NFLPA, is even less likely. The collective bargaining agreement players and owners reached last year contains a no strike clause that prevents players from walking off the job unless they feel their jobs or their union is at stake. Walking out, then, would require making the legal argument that use of scab officials is negligent and creates an overly hazardous work environment, which would allow the players to void the entire CBA. That would almost certainly lead to protracted and costly legal battle that I suspect the union doesn’t want. And while it would certainly show solidarity, it too would turn at least some fans against the players and officials at a time when the NFLRA has all the leverage in this fight.

Outside the players, others are taking action too. The president of the New Jersey state senate introduced legislation yesterday that would ban professional sporting events played in the state from using replacement labor, a noble cause but one that isn’t likely to go anywhere (the NFL quickly dismissed it as a stunt).

It’s good that people are taking notice (even if it’s often for the wrong reasons), and it’s good that players like Lang are discussing ways to throw their muscle around to help the officials. But the players have long argued that there isn’t much they can do — that this is a mess created by the league and, as such, will have to be solved by the league — and I tend to agree with them. It would be great, as someone who is sympathetic to the NFLRA’s cause, to see the players walk off the field in solidarity Thursday in Baltimore and Sunday across the country. The reality, though, is that there just isn’t much the players can do.

The bridge is yours.

-Thomas Edison will be the star of an NBC show. I hope Tesla gets to be a Big Bad!

-Darren Aronofsky sure likes his snakes.

-Playing cooperative video games, even violent ones, apparently makes players more cooperative.

-Stop torturing us with promises of Ghostbuster 3!

Nikki Finke, the secretive and mercurial editor of Deadline Hollywood, usually sticks to reporting the news about casting, box office, or personnel movies in the entertainment industry. But ever so often, as she did while liveblogging the Emmys this weekend, she ventures into criticism. The results are…mixed. Her latest opinion? Beautiful women (and men) can’t possibly be funny. She wrote:

Listen-up, Hollywood: Beautiful actresses are not funny. They don’t know how to do comedy. (As Bowen demonstrated with her acceptance speech that repeated the phrase ‘nipple covers’ 3 dozen times. To zero laughter.) Only women who grew up ugly and stayed ugly, or through plastic surgery became beautiful, can pull off sitcoms or standups. Bowen isn’t a comedienne just like Brooke Shields wasn’t and a zillion more. Because it’s all about emotional pain and humiliation and rising above both by making people laugh with you instead of at you. So stop casting beautiful actresses when you should be giving ugly women a chance. (Tina Fey always points out she looked like a troglodyte when she was younger.) This also applies to handsome men, by the way. Now argue amongst yourselves.

Which, though Finke styles herself a Hollywood feminist, actually sounds a lot like Adam Carolla’s declaration earlier this year that women are, on the aggregate, not as funny as men, and those rare few who he judges to be actually amusing are some kind of Aberration From Nature. They’re both totalizing statements that make the people in question sound parochial. And they’re both based on the idea that there is one essential way to be funny.

This is the problem about almost all of our conversations about comedy: they keep devolving into always and never statements. Rape is inherently funny. Rape is never funny. Men are funnier than women because they’re more willing to go for the gut, because they’re more willing to be gross, because they’re less sensitive, because it’s always funnier to be insensitive, because dominance is funny, because the differences between people are inherent and it’s inherently funny to point them out, because the most important thing humor can do is puncture political correctness. It goes on and on. But these discussions always blow up when someone tries to divine a hierarchy of comedy, a platonic form of it, something that suggests that some kinds of humor are better than others and ends up implying that there’s little or no value to be found beyond a narrow bit of spectrum.

And I also think that these conversations go wrong in part because they come from some places of real anxiety, be they realistic or not. Men like Carolla, who have some of the more marginal jobs available to comedians, start feeling pressure from the success of women. Chris Rock feels that recording at shows and distribution platforms like YouTube have made it nigh-impossible for stand-ups to work out their material in front of crowds in the recognition that it’s flawed and may improve. And…well, I’m not going to even try to speculate about what Nikki Finke’s motivations are, though as Glamour accurately points out, there are basically no women working in television comedy who are not, by any standards, quite pretty. But a point at which people feel that they have something to lose can be a bad basis for important conversations, or for welcoming innovation and innovators rather than pushing them out. And while I don’t have the answers for Chris Rock, I mostly feel bad for anyone who’s shutting themselves off from kinds of funny and different kinds of purveyors of it.

Man, I love me some Madonna, but her endorsement of President Obama in Washington, DC is half an illustration of why celebrities can make powerful spokesmen and half an illustration of why they are at risk of going terrifyingly off-message:

There’s the narrative she gives of of American evolution on race, which, if presented with some poetic license, fit nicely together with the on-message idea that “we are still a work in progress.” There’s her reminder of Obama’s personal evolution on gay rights, a well-tailored shout-out to the target audience they care.

And then, there’s the cheery reminder that it’s awesome that Obama is black…and Muslim. Which she means in a completely enthusiastic, affirming way. And to a certain extent, I’m with FX late-night host W. Kamau Bell: if the United States was in a place where we could elect a Muslim person president, no matter their race, it would be a sign of our improved national mental health. But Madonna’s apparently in enough of a bubble to not be aware that President Obama is not Muslim, and the accusation that he is secretly Muslim has been one of the most pernicious lies told about him in an attempt to emphasize his foreignness. It’s a striking reminder of how isolated the most famous people in the world are from the news cycle and from the rest of us, and of how their celebrity can ricochet off in directions they don’t intend, like light off a mirror that can blind and confound as easily as it can illuminate.

This post contains spoilers through the third episode of the fifth season of Sons of Anarchy.*

I’m not sure I buy all the complicated mechanics that brought Opie to this particular death, but sure as Jimmy Darmody, who walked to his murder in the last episode of Boardwalk Empire last year knowing full well his life had ended in Europe, Opie’s been gone since his father’s killing, since his brokenness ruined his marriage to sweet porn star Lyla, maybe even since Tig Traeger shot Opie’s first wife Donna with a bullet that was meant for Opie, a piece of metal that’s been chasing him ever since. “I don’t know if I love anything,” Opie told Lyla last week, giving her the money to care for his children while he went back to prison with the Sons. “It just ain’t fun anymore,” he told Jax in the prison yard. “Chasing cash we don’t need and spending every dime trying to stay alive.” “American dream,” Jax replied, not quite agreeing with him.

Jax is a prince by blood, and Opie’s membership in SAMCRO has been sealed by spilling it, over and over again. Where Jimmy represented an underlooked historical phenomenon, the men who failed to successfully reintegrate into society after the First World War, Opie is terrible lesson about a particular kind of membership in a downwardly mobile white underclass. Jax’s pride may shame him about the prospect of living off his wife, but Opie never had a wife he could live off of. His association with criminality has meant that Opie has always been at risk of running up the kind of debts and obligations that he can’t pay off through honest labor and still provide a stable environment for his family. And perhaps most importantly, the Sons have always given him his most powerful sense of identity and social standing, even as the men who gave him that status were an inevitably fatal cancer on his family. Opie has always returned to the Sons, and why wouldn’t he? Even family that eats away at your soul is better than the prospect of becoming a hollow man.

And in the end, Opie’s love for Jax, and his inability to part from the remaining source of his identity, turns into a kind of suicidal impulse. When he finds a way to join the Sons in prison, “staying close,” as Gemma puts it, he does so with an act of violence. When Jax starts a scrap, loyal Opie follows him into it. And when Jax, cornered by Pope’s ultimatum, his seemingly limitless power over the imprisoned Sons, Opie does the inevitable: he fights, and in fighting goes to his death. “Keep it interesting, shithead,” the warden doing Pope’s bidding tells him. He means to shame him, to turn Opie into an animal fighting for his life in the dark. But in Kurt Sutter’s Hamlet, Opie is Horatio following through on his offer to his prince to quaff the poison. “Now cracks a noble heart,” indeed.
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