People seem to be positioning wedding movie Bachelorette as a Bridesmaids knockoff, which strikes me as unfortunate, considering the former is supposed to be more acid than the latter, and the emotions in it are oriented in a slightly different direction. While Bridesmaids was about a rivalry between a bride’s oldest friend and a new friend to whom she’s become close, Bachelorette is about what happens when women actively resent a friend who they’re helping prepare for her wedding:

Weddings Make the Ladies Crazy is a cliche that’s made for a lot of deeply awful movies that perpetuate awful stereotypes about catfights and female materialism. I literally could not care less about Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson go to war over which one of them gets to get married at the Plaza. But weddings are an inflection point, one that raises questions about where people in the bridal party think their lives are supposed to be, and how much they give to other people or how poorly they take care of themselves in times of stress, and that can make for interesting stories.

27 Dresses may have been dismissed as yet another Katherine Heigl romcom, but it’s also a movie about a woman who is taking care of other people to avoid pursuing her own dreams or taking stock of her own life. In Her Shoes, which builds towards a wedding, is a sly rebuke to romance dogma, which is that the perfect man will come along and accept you who you are and heal your brokenness. Instead, it’s a story about how if you want to be in a relationship, you have to get yourself to a place where you have things to give as well as missing pieces someone else can turn out to be. And I think Bachelorette could touch the third rail of weddings: the sense by a member of the wedding party that it’s inexplicable that the bride would be getting married before yourself. That’s an ugly emotion, tied up here in ideas about Rebel Wilson’s body and mien, and I’m kind of glad that the movie is taking it on. The relationships between women—and goodness knows, I’ve been a very happy maid of honor to some gorgeous brides—aren’t as vicious and divided as they can be portrayed in popular culture, and the profusion fo fake friendships on something like the Real Housewives doesn’t help. But there are real, painful dynamics there, inflected by societal dynamics on race, and class, and education, and looks. I’d rather movies mine the details of those conflicts thoughtfully and for specific drama, rather than not doing them at all.

I’m still trying to figure out what I think about Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s delightfully weird and very, very female show about a dance school in California. But in Willa Paskin’s long and fantastic interview with Sherman-Palladino, she points out something I’ve found utterly baffling about the entertainment industry:

I always find it funny that people take the wrong message from any success. Like “Bridesmaids” comes out and people go, “Oh, women are funny, they shit in the street. Let’s make sure now everybody shits in the street!” Not like, “OK, but it’s a well-constructed script with very good characters and the core of it is actually about female relationships,” nothing about that. They take the one shitting in the street thing and then for months you’re going to have every actress that you love shitting in the street. Until they realize, “Oh, it doesn’t work that way, I guess, so now women aren’t funny.” No, no, no! It’s not that women aren’t funny, it’s just that all of them don’t have to shit in the street!

I feel the same way with these sitcoms. It felt like dirty girl sitcoms, that’s the way to go, and NBC especially made these giant deals with like Whitney Cummings, and Chelsea Handler, and Sarah Silverman and all these women whose stand-up acts are so filthy they will never translate to television because they can’t! Sarah Silverman cannot do her act on TV, it’s not allowed! I’m not saying that her sitcom won’t be great — or I don’t know if they picked her up or not — but it’s like this trend of like “OK, so that’s how every woman is going to be now.”

I don’t even know that this is a trait that’s specific to women. It’s been fascinating to watch actors like Brandon Routh and James Marsters, who began their careers as pretty faces, score successes by treating their looks as if they’re less important than their acting chops, even by turning their extreme good looks into a joke by playing porn stars and maniacally excited dance show hosts. And I can even see why casting directors would value a surface thing like handsomeness, which is very, very broadly applicable, over a talent for self-parody or silliness, which are narrower skills. But it’s funny to see how an industry can both seize on a single, wildly aberrant scene in a movie instead of its overall themes and tones, or ignore that there’s an intimate connection between a comedian’s filthiness and her impact. Maybe it’s all a matter of wishful thinking, hoping for the thing that’s easiest to replicate, or the possibility of replicating something at all.

Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Scott Feinberg argues that the move to an electronic voting system could allow the Academy Awards to move dramatically earlier in the year, putting pressure on the competing awards shows that have sapped the Oscars’ momentum in the run-up to the big night. I actually wonder if what would help even more than the schedule change would be that electronic voting might make younger Academy voters more likely to participate.

This year’s Academy Awards nominations seemed decidedly creaky in most of the major categories, whether it was the odd nods for War Horse or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or the fact that Jonah Hill was almost bizarrely young in comparison to the other men up for acting awards. A movie like Bridesmaids, which probably resonated much more with younger viewers than with older ones, picked up some smaller nominations but didn’t make the cut for Best Picture — it would also be interesting to see whether comedies in general would do better with younger Academy viewers than older ones. And Shame, which I imagine would have been a hard sell to get the Academy’s most conservative older viewers to even watch, was shut out entirely.

I’m not saying that the Academy should become the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards or anything. And paper ballots should be available to older voters who want to use them. But if you’re worried about declining viewership for the Oscars, it’s not just a matter of timing. It’s a matter of viewers in the demo feeling like they have skin in the game.

1. Most obviously, this is a deeply conventional list of nominees. Shame is a daring movie, but given its critical acclaim, Putting it somewhere in the mix wouldn’t have been so hard. The best director list is all dudes. And seriously, War Horse for best picture?

2. That said, if the Academy was going to take a risk with acting nods, I’m thrilled that it did so with Demian Bichir, whose performance as a immigrant father who risks deportation to get his truck and gardening equipment back after they’re stolen was one of the movies that moved me most deeply last year.

3. I’m glad to see the love for Bridesmaids, but frustrated by the lack of attention for Young Adult, which may lack toilet humor, but pushes into vastly different and more difficult places than the former. It’s very hard to watch Charlize Theron play the wildly selfish Mavis Grady, but she’s a much more daring and challenging so-called difficult woman than Lisbeth Salander or Maggie Thatcher.

4. Margin Call‘s Best Original Screenplay nod is fantastic news. It’s not just that this nervy, restrained financial thriller is a great, timely movie. It’s that the movie scraped forward on a combination of theatrical distribution and VOD, a triumph for a new model that could help more movies get to the audiences they deserve. Next to this, the nods for Ides of March for Adapted Screenplay is a disgrace.

5. Rise of the Planet of the Apes gets nominated in visual effects, rather than acting (not that it doesn’t deserve that nod, too) and Hollywood avoids a pressing question about its future yet again? At this point, I think another actor needs to give an undeniable performance in motion capture before the Hollywood community will come to consensus about how to define this new form.

Bridesmaids succeeded because it took a simple story that a lot of women have experienced — over the course of planning and executing a friend’s wedding, two women grapple with their different priorities and stages in life — and told it well and with a great deal of warmth, pain, and humor. And it told that story to completion. We don’t need a sequel to it because the story is over. Which is why it’s heartening first to hear that Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo are smart enough to have decided that they don’t want to do a sequel, and depressing to hear that Universal might bull ahead without them anyway.

The Hollywood Reporter story that breaks that news contains two interesting, and I think indicative, tidbits. First, that the cast’s bonuses, which while more than I make in a year, were relatively stingy compared to the overall financial success of the movie. And second, that Wiig has a bunch of small, smart projects lined up. Both of those things seem to me to say something about the limited things Bridesmaids will be able to change in Hollywood. One of the reasons Bridesmaids impressed me so much was how deep the cast was: even the characters who got the least screen time had funny, sharp moments and the actresses nailed them. I’d be curious to know what the actors on The Hangover movies got as bonuses, but I’d be willing to bet that they’re more than $100,000, and this is an example of how the Hollywood pay gap is alive and well. If women making successful movies doesn’t get them paid like men, it’s not clear what will.

Second, I think there’s something feminist in Wiig’s decision to walk away from a potential franchise for which she was likely offered way more than her bonus. Bridesmaids would lose, just as Sex and the City and Nancy Meyers’ movies are to a certain extent a loss, if the lesson that studio executives take away from it is that this is the girl movie, or the kind of girl movie, they’ll make. We don’t need 47 Sex and the City movies. We don’t need 50 movies where the jokes is that Melissa McCarthy is fat and crude and sexually aggressive in exactly the same way. What we need is for Kristen Wiig to go off and become the kind of star who can turn a bunch of different movies into hits. And we need the same thing for Melissa McCarthy and Maya Rudolph and Alison Brie and a bunch of other insanely talented, gorgeous women. Franchises are a good thing, they provide reliable paychecks to working actors, but they’re also a way of sticking people in silos.

Sady Doyle points out something critical in her latest In These Times column on the power of Bridesmaids and the greatness of Melissa McCarthy:

Critiques of this development are worthwhile. In her Bridesmaids review, critic Michelle Dean points out that “almost every joke was designed to rest on [McCarthy’s] presumed hideousness, and her ribald but unmistakably ‘butch’ sexuality was grounded primarily in her body type.” That’s fair. But it reminded me, in a comparison that would horrify Dean, of Christopher Hitchens’ infamous 2007 essay in Vanity Fair on women and humor, which concluded that men are funny because humor makes them attractive, whereas funny women are… well, read for yourself: “There are some impressive [funny] ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three.” Obviously, this is offensive. But it left me wondering whether Hitchens had ever actually seen a photo of Rodney Dangerfield, John Belushi, Woody Allen or Patton Oswalt, or, or…
…
McCarthy is hefty, and yes, part of her performance is a certain blunt pragmatism that could be read as “butch.” She’s also playing a key Apatovian role – Jonah Hill’s role, in fact. She’s a twin sister to Hill’s characters in Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall: aggressive, hypersexual, crude and given the broadest, most popular bits. Hill’s not conventionally sexy, or conventionally well behaved. Neither is McCarthy. They’re comedians; being pretty and nice is not their job.

What makes comedians transgressive, from Lucille Ball to Ken Jeong, is their willingness to look bad in public. Women have never been encouraged to cultivate this fearlessness. There are exceptions – Ball or Joan Rivers come to mind – but they tend to prove the rule. Lady Loser Comedy opens up the game. Women who have the profane deadpan of McCarthy, or the cool prickliness of Fey or the off-rhythm intensity of Wiig: They’re not excluded any more. They embarrass themselves, they’re completely inappropriate, and that’s fine; it’s comedy.

The interesting question, though, is whether comedians like McCarthy and Fey can get entire careers at the level they’d like to have out of playing obscene, or sloppy, or unapproachable, or emotionally unstable. Fey, after all, went through a very deliberate transformation, involving losing a bunch of weight and rebranding herself as glamorous, as part of her move in front of the camera, and her movie career’s involved playing her sex appeal to the edge of its capacity. McCarthy won her Emmy for a role that posited her as conventional-but-heavy object of romantic attention, and the branding around her since has played her up as an unconventional beauty queen. Sarah Silverman is an interesting counterpoint: she’s built her brand on a combination of immaturity and sexual unease, but she’s pitching a network show based on her breakup with Jimmy Kimmel that will have her in a more conventional role.

When Seth Rogen started losing weight and taking on different kinds of roles, the sense seemed to be that it wasn’t actually a necessary transition, that he could carry the amiable schlub thing as far as he cared to. Could a woman do the same thing? Or is this just another realm where women have a sense that they have to try to have it all, and as a result, aren’t quite as good at either plumbing disgust and embarrassment or embodying the highest standards of glamour?

I’ll have much more detailed write-ups of each of these shows as they air, but as I wrote in The Atlantic today, looking at the Bridesmaids-inspired female-centric comedies, the big trends for fall seem to be women competing against each other, particularly along Betty-and-Vernonica-like blonde and brunette lines and the Bernie Madoff’s influence on New York:

There’s something odd and unfortunate about the tendency of sitcoms to pitch women against each other—even when there aren’t the affections of a boy like Archie Andrews at stake. In CBS’s 2 Broke Girls, which premieres tonight at 9:30, brunette Max (a tart and wonderful Kat Dennings) is immediately suspicious of Caroline (Beth Behrs), a former socialite who lost her fortune when her father’s Ponzi scheme collapsed and takes a job at the same Brooklyn diner where Max works. A gentler version of that dynamic is at work in NBC’s family comedy Up All Night, where new mother Reagan (Christina Applegate) tries to defend her right to family time against the demands of her boss and friend, talk show host Ava (Maya Rudolph, the only woman of color in a leading role in any of these shows). And in Apartment 23, which will debut on ABC later this fall, June (Dreama Walker), who moves to New York only to have her job vanish in yet another Madoff-like collapse, ends up rooming with the cartoonishly manipulative Chloe (the always wonderful Krysten Ritter).

In each case, some of the tension between each pair dissipates by the end of the first episode. But it remains frustrating that the most common way to generate dynamic friction between women in pop culture is to start with a win-lose scenario, where only one woman can end up in control of her time, a choice New York apartment, or a deeply scuzzy diner in an up-and-coming neighborhood. If the stakes were higher, the competitions might seem justified, but there’s something depressingly recession-sized about these conflicts, and the faster these shows move on to interesting and fraught collaborations rather than battles over scraps, the better.

I’m really curious to see how these shows evolve beyond their early episodes — there’s a lot of potential in the set-ups for all of these shows to say something interesting about the desirability of marriage, about friendships between men and women, and about a reduced, recession-era New York. Whether they capitalize remains an open question.

When I walked out of a screening of A Good Old Fashioned Orgy a couple of weeks ago, I was convinced I didn’t like the movie. The story about a group of friends who decide to hold an orgy to celebrate the end of their run of summers at a house in the Hamptons that’s being sold out from under them initially struck me as overly crude, yet another entry in Jason Sudeikis’ torpedoing of his own likability. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since, and I think I’ve decided there’s something refreshing and vulnerable about this crude, funny little movie that’s continued my thinking about male fantasies.

There’s no question that A Good Old Fashioned Orgy is vulgar and sometimes bro-ish in a way that can be off-putting. It’s not really much fun to watch a grown man speculate about what it might be like to receive oral sex from a high school girl wearing what he assumes are snap game bracelets, musing that “I bet she unhinges her jaw like a python.” Similarly, treating a guy who worries about HPV as if he’s stupid to worry about cervical cancer because “you don’t have a cervix” or mocking a man who doesn’t mind a girlfriend with pubic hair as some kind of hippie seem like unfortunate instances of beating up on men for acting like decent human beings. And when one character tells the core cast at a “White Trash Party” they’re hosting “I don’t find the notion of mocking the American underclass as amusing as you and your friends do,” I was pretty much in agreement.

But there’s something intriguing about the central insecurity that drives the characters to the idea that an orgy is a good idea: a sense that folks in their late twenties and early thirties lost some of their sexual self-confidence to the AIDS crisis. “It scared the shit out of all of us,” Sudeikis’ character Eric explains, making the pitch for the orgy to his friends. “Kids these days are freaks. This is our chance to take back what’s been taken from us.” I don’t think that the advent of an age of safe sex and realistic concerns about sexually transmitted diseases is a tragedy—it’s precisely the opposite, of course. But an ideal world is one where people can balance responsibility with the ability to ask for what they want. I was talking to Jaime Weinman, the television critic at Maclean’s about this over the weekend, and he pointed out there’s a definitive decline in the number of lotharios on television in the late eighties and early nineties that’s been followed by a resurgence of the type in recent years. The characters in A Good Old Fashioned Orgy aren’t all men, and they’re not necessarily aspiring to be Sam Malone, but despite the crudeness of the movie’s first half, the second is actually reasonably sensitive and thoughtful about exploring the characters’ desires.
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I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the way pop culture in the recession, rather than defining what our aspirations should be, is helping reconcile us to our compromises. So it was with that in mind that I absorbed the news that Bridesmaids has finally beat out Sex and the City at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing R-rated comedy starring women ever made.

Vats of ink have been spilled condemning the consumerist ethos of Sex and the City and of fans who aspire to relive the show in every last detail, fetishizing the mediocre cupcakes of the Magnolia Bakery, ponying up for Sex and the City tours and experiences. I do think that the first Sex and the City movie is better than it’s given credit, both as a portrait of friendships and as a rejection of the series finale’s awkward embrace of monogamy for all. But the movie’s consumerism hit new heights, with all couture dresses, overreaching on real estate and abandoned hideously expensive pairs of shoes, and a subplot that treated one character’s obsession with expensive clothes and public displays of wealth as the cause of the downfall of her relationship acting more as a minor moral correction than a permanent adjustment. Yes, it might be a cute gesture to get married at the courthouse in a vintage store suit, but it’s not meaningful if you’re going home to that hedge fund penthouse.

Bridesmaids isn’t exactly where I’d like lady comedies to be either, in that at the end of the movie, the main character’s capacity for romantic connection is revitalized, while the question of whether she’ll revive her small business and her professional ambitions is essentially unaddressed. Maybe having Annie give running her bakery another try and getting the guy would have been too much. And maybe having her get the bakery and not the adorable Canadian-accented cop would have confirmed stereotypes about career women and their inability to get dudes. But I think it’s as much of a fairy tale to suggest that ending up with the right dude will resolve everything as either of those two options are. Bridesmaids could have resurrected Annie’s professional confidence tentatively, perhaps via a loan from Megan, with the affirmation that it’s going to be very hard, but that it’s worth persisting. As we figure out what’s going to happen to us in which I’m increasingly sure is going to be a permanent period of economic readjustment, we’re going to have to balance between pop culture that encourages us to want too much, and pop culture that suggests we’d be better off not hoping for anything at all, even through hard work.

I saw The Trip this weekend, which for reasons very particular to me, may be the movie I’ve enjoyed most so far this year. I liked Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop just fine, but The Trip is an even better movie about the craft of comedy. Much of the movie is Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon doing things like this:

The combination of the appeal of American popular culture filtered through the refinement and intelligence of English humor is sort of irresistible to me. But the movie also hit the sweet spot of something I’ve been thinking about a lot: the treatment of friendships as secondary to romances in most movies and television shows. It’s so rare that the relationship between friends is the most important thing in a movie. Friends are usually a facilitator to the traditional end of a comedy, a marriage (or at least permanent-seeming partnership) rather than the main event. I think that’s one of the reasons Bridesmaids has been so successful: it’s the friendship that matters, and the romantic and sexual relationships that are at the periphery. The groom in the titular wedding doesn’t even have a line.

In The Trip, there’s a pair of interesting imbalances between Coogan and Brydon. Coogan is more successful professionally, but he’s dissatisfied with his failure to make the leap into the first tier of actors alongside people like Michael Sheen, and he’s divorced and in the process of being left by his current girlfriend. Brydon, by contrast, is less famous, but he’s reconciled to it, making money off an iPhone app based on one of his characters, and incredibly happy with his wife and new baby. So even though Coogan has more material resources, he needs Brydon more than Brydon needs him, and he’s obviously deeply uncomfortable with that, and expresses that discomfort by being something of a jerk. But the malleability of friendship means that they can deal with it, that they can work through Coogan’s behavior to get to the root of his sadness, even if that means dealing with it obliquely by singing ABBA and testing their octave ranges. Anyway, it’s a warm, terrific movie, the cure for the common action movie.