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Over the weekend, New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a piece entitled “Crushed Dream Factory,” arguing that people generally weren’t planning to watch the Oscars this year, and it was because the Oscars are out of touch. “Sex, glamour, excitement and mystery are relics of a bygone era,” Dowd wrote. “Hollywood is now focused on worthy, relevant, socially conscious and lugubrious. […] As a Hollywood writer friend of mine said after she watched Nomadland: ‘That was not entertainment. That was Frances McDormand having explosive diarrhea in a plastic bucket on a van.’”

Dowd went on to quote New York Times Hollywood reporter Brook Barnes, who told Dowd, “The Oscars forgot about its primary job — to sell Hollywood to the world, to be a big, fat commercial for the dream factory, the kind that makes financiers open their wallets and wannabe actresses get pinwheels in their eyes about the day they might be able to stand on that stage and give their acceptance speech.”

Writing that the Oscars are hopelessly insular and out of touch with the common man because all the movies are critic-bait downers is an evergreen take you can recycle every few years. It’s almost always sort of true. For every lame, too-broad grandpa pleaser like Green Book, there’s an overly conceptual, extended navel-gaze destined to be hated by “middle America” like The Artist. The cycles simply reverse and repeat every few years, like the cycle of flood and drought in California (full disclosure, I will still defend The Artist to the death).

But after one of the dullest Oscars in recent memory, in which The Frances McDormand Diarrhea Movie won Best Picture, and the touching send-off to posthumous best actor winner Chadwick Boseman was spoiled with an upset victory for Anthony Hopkins, who didn’t even show up to collect his award, we were left to ponder an even more horrifying possibility: had Maureen Dowd actually been right?

The short answer: no, not really. Are New York Times opinion writers ever publishing anything but lazy clickbait these days? It’s easy to say that Hollywood is out of touch, because they are. But even the critics in Dowd’s own article argue that being a “dream factory” is half the point. So wait, do you want movies to reflect the common man or don’t you?

Now, Are they more out of touch than ever? That’s harder to say, but I doubt it. The 2020 movies were probably worse and more depressing than usual. I certainly liked them less than usual (no Palm Springs or Sylvie’s Love?), but that tends to happen at least as often as we get a legitimately great winner like Parasite (partly because, as I’ve written, critical consensus is a myth, and awards are only ever just the lowest-common denominator with a smaller sample size). Moreover, everything was worse and more depressing than usual in 2020. Why would movies be any different?

The easiest answer for why people weren’t as into the 2021 Oscars is the most obvious one: it was a celebration of things that happened in 2020, a historically shitty year that everyone would just as soon forget. This year’s Oscars was our collective COVID hangover, a solemn requiem for a shitty time. With the 93rd Oscars ceremony, 2020 finally died its drawn out and depressing death like Anthony Hopkins’ character in The Father, riding off confusedly into the great beyond. Now we can finally move on.

This year’s ceremony looked different from past ceremonies, and how could it not? It’s hard to work out the logistics of a kids’ soccer game these days, let alone a self-congratulatory extravaganza for the most image-conscious people on Earth. Rather than a massive auditorium full of hired seat fillers for when entertainment royalty have to use the toilet, there was an intimate gathering of nominees, who had been meticulously vax-checked and tested and were wearing masks in between shots. Or so first presenter Regina King took pains to explain to us in the opening two minutes. Because hey, what’s more fun than a dutiful recounting of your company’s HR protocols? Let’s hear it for the company handbook, everyone!

Even with all the logistical constraints, the flaws of this year’s telecast largely seemed like unforced errors. The lack of a host meant the presenters varied widely, with most leaning towards stilted and dull, but with the occasional bright spots like Riz Ahmed, and Steven Yuen telling a story about seeing Terminator 2 with his mother when he was young. “Oh yeah,” we collectively seemed to remember in that moment, “telling stories about movies can be fun.”

“Stories Matter” was the theme for this year’s Steven Soderbergh-produced telecast, which replaced clips from the nominated films with presenters telling stories from each of the nominated artists’ respective formative years. I’m sure the idea was to highlight the intimacy of this year’s ceremony, but personal stories tend to work better when actually told in the first person. Having someone else read it feels like a staged reading of that month’s centerfold’s list of turn-ons. I called this the “who are your guys” Oscars, where instead of clips, we got the nominees’ pre-filled responses to Marc Maron’s infamous opening question on WTF. (“Amanda Seyfried grew up playacting The Sound Of Music for her family before being nominated for Best Supporting Actress in Mank, and her guys are Carey Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, and Sir Laurence Olivier….”)

The show was mostly boring but with isolated moments of greatness, usually occurring when a non-American offered a respite from the preachyness and seemed genuinely excited to be there. Such moments this year included Daniel Kaluuya taking time to appreciate us all being alive in this moment, saying “My mom, my dad, they had sex, it’s amazing!” while the camera was pointed at his embarrassed mom and sister. I laughed at Yuh-jung Youn of South Korea’s adorable acceptance speech for Minari, and nearly cried at Thomas Vinterberg’s tear-jerking tribute to his daughter, who died in 2019 before she could see Another Round, Vinterberg’s winner for best foreign language film. All of which is to say: it mostly kind of sucked but wasn’t all bad. Isn’t that more or less true of the Oscars every year?

If there was a moment of the evening that everyone seemed to be talking about, it was Glenn Close demonstrating her suspiciously vast knowledge of “Da Butt” from Spike Lee’s School Daze, before getting up to perform the dance. It was both pre-scripted and it worked, not to mention that it came during one of the only segments of the show that had a traditional, comedic emcee (Lil’ Rel Howery, who probably should’ve just hosted the whole show) and a pre-written bit. If we were to categorize, the segment was essentially a glammed-up rappin’ granny, an old trope reinvented for a new age. It was illustrative of arguably the night’s great truism: Hollywood is great at producing the illusion of spontaneity, not at being spontaneous.

The final presenter of the night was Joaquin Phoenix, whose turbocharged ambivalence towards awards season pomp is one of the best things about him. Phoenix pointedly declined to read his prompter spiel, something about coming to embody your character, which Phoenix said had never been true for him, and instead explained how inspired he’d been by all this year’s Best Actor nominees. This was the final award of the evening, which was presumably all a build-up to give the last award to the recently departed Chadwick Boseman, a suitably cumulative honor for an actor who managed to play Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and Black Panther all before dying at 43. Who could argue with that?

Only actual Academy voters, it turned out, who gave the award to Anthony Hopkins for The Father (in which he was, admittedly, very good). Hopkins wasn’t even there to collect the award, leaving Phoenix to awkwardly accept the award on the actor’s behalf, in an almost comically anti-climactic and unsatisfying ending. And yet, a perfectly fitting one. How could 2020 end except disappointingly? This was a ceremony that bucked tradition only to remind us how much we actually appreciated those traditions. God willing, 2021 can be the year of appreciating things that we took for granted.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

The NFL Draft will begin on Thursday, April 29 as hundreds of players will see their dreams realized by being drafted into the NFL and beginning their professional careers. For the teams and fans, it brings the hope of landing some key pieces that can help take them to the next level, whatever that is.

Here at the Draft Good Players Scouting Agency, my colleague Bill DiFilippo and I believe it is our jobs to help teams that have gotten lost in the sauce and entered the over-analyzing portion of the Draft process. So often guys who have done nothing but produce at an elite level start to fall or get passed over for reaches on potential, and then a few years later we start looking back and wondering how the hell they went so low. We at the DGPSA are college football fans first and foremost, and we believe this is where our advantage lies. We don’t worry too much about trying to project potential, we just know who has proven to be really good football players because, at the end of the day, that’s often what it comes down to.

In this space, we’re going to take a look at 11 prospects who we feel are going to be those players that get looked back on as part of the “how’d he go so low” group. This is not a Big Board or Mock Draft, so please don’t take this as a Top 11 Players list. There are many good players in this Draft and many of them seem to be properly rated — i.e., Trevor Lawrence, Penei Sewell, Kyle Pitts, Patrick Surtain II, Jaycee Horn, etc. — but these are a few of the guys who we believe any fan base should be happy to see if their team calls their name over the weekend.

Let’s get to it.

Justin Fields, QB (Ohio State)

I really can’t believe we’ve had the discourse we have about Justin Fields over the past few months. He’s really, really good at playing the quarterback position and has done it against great competition. Any questions about work ethic or heart or ability to read a defense or literally anything else should be answered by popping in the Clemson tape [highlight cutup seen below] and watching him shred the Tigers with some busted ribs for much of the game.

I’d take him No. 2 if I were the Jets and that he’s not a lock to go top-3 is everything wrong with the NFL Draft process.

Zaven Collins, LB (Tulsa)

For those of you that follow just about any NFL Draft person on Twitter, you have surely heard about Zaven Collins because any time someone pops in his tape they can’t help but launch into a Twitter thread about how awesome he is. He is, indeed, awesome and shows up on just about every CFB stat leaderboard because he did a little bit of everything at Tulsa. He is a certified Good Football Player and our scouting service would recommend him very highly. I’m not even sure he’s being improperly rated, but given he’s likely to go mid-first round he’ll feel like a steal from that range. His speed and recognition are incredible — the sacks get lots of love, but check out the third play in this highlight reel below where he blows up a screen by himself.

Landon Dickerson, C (Alabama)

It baffles me that we apparently have to say this, but Landon Dickerson is quite good at football. After tearing his ACL in Alabama’s SEC title game win, he got to take the last snaps of the national title game before being helped back off the field in an emotional moment, and the injuries are certainly a concern. But when he’s on the field, he’s been an absolute monster and, I can assure you, is not “just a guy.”

There have been a lot of Alabama offensive linemen that have made the league and Dickerson is the guy Alabama coaches rave about as much as any of them, so, yeah I’ll happily take my chances on him.

Kadarious Toney, WR (Florida)

Toney made SEC defenders look slow regularly, and while Kyle Pitts rightfully gets the love for carrying the Florida offense, Toney is also a flat-out playmaker. He can absolutely fly, is ridiculously hard to bring down, has a lot of versatility with where you can line him up, and, like the next guy on the list, is someone that just makes good things happen when he has the ball in his hands.

Rondale Moore, WR (Purdue)

Step 1: Draft Rondale Moore. Step 2: Put the ball in Rondale Moore’s hands often. Step 3: Profit.

Rondale Moore made Purdue games must-watch when he was healthy, which, with all due respect to the Boilermakers, is an impressive task. He is, as Bill and I like to say, a football player, which is the highest compliment we can pay someone. Don’t worry about positional fit and size and any of that. Just get him on the field, get him the ball, and let him work.

Joseph Ossai, EDGE (Texas)

If you watched a Texas game at any point last season, you heard Ossai’s name. He lives in opposing backfields, using his terrific length and speed to get by opposing tackles and when he gets there, he makes plays (16 TFLs last year). I don’t want to have to find you on film if you’re an EDGE, I better see your presence often, and Ossai is that type of guy. He also has that uncanny ability to get his hands on the football to pry it loose as he brings guys down, whether on sacks or chasing down ball-carriers, and I love those instincts to try and turn a nice play into a massive play with a turnover.

Jamar Johnson, S (Indiana)

I like safeties who can do a little of everything, and Johnson fits the bill. He has that “nose for the ball” scouts always talk about, showed up in big games, isn’t afraid to step down and make a hit but also isn’t completely lost in coverage. The only thing you want Johnson to do sometimes is try to do a little less after interceptions as he is convinced he can house everything, but that is a good problem to have in my opinion. Just a ball player.

Brady Christensen, OT (BYU)

BYU’s offensive line was nasty last year and they’re a big reason Zach Wilson is likely going No. 2. They kept him clean and Christensen did the heavy lifting on the blindside of Wilson all year. Draft folks who watched Wilson regularly pointed out how good that line was and it’s giving the big fella some shine. He also blew BYU’s Pro Day out of the water with a record-setting 10’4 broad jump and answered a lot of questions about his athleticism. He still might end up moving to right tackle wherever he’s drafted but this is a kid who will go Day 2 or early Day 3 and I think make a positive impact on someone’s line.

Daviyon Nixon, DT (Iowa)

You know what I love? Defensive tackles who get busy in the backfield. Nixon had 13.5 tackles for loss last season for the Hawkeyes, popping in his junior season and I’m all in. There’s still work to do with him in terms of reaching his full potential, but I’ll take that aggression and power all day and bank on my staff to figure out how to maximize it. Even when he gets stood up, he does a great job of keeping eyes on the quarterback and maintaining control of the front of the pocket, quickly shedding opposing offensive lineman to make a play if the QB steps up to try and run.

Tarron Jackson, EDGE (Coastal Carolina)

The Chanticleers were everyone’s favorite team to watch last year and one of the big reasons why was Tarron Jackson. He’s been big time productive for the last two years and while I get competition questions, he’s a guy that seems likely to go Day 3 and I think he makes someone’s rotation as a rookie and immediately helps a team get in the backfield and disrupt things.

Jermar Jefferson, RB (Oregon St)

Everyone knew what Oregon State wanted to do, which was give the ball to Jermar Jefferson, and he still did his thing. He was 25th in the country in rushing yards and only played 6 games. He lit up Oregon and Cal this past season, and has some tremendous speed to go along with solid power at 5’10, 217. He’s almost assuredly going to end up being a Day 3 pick and whatever team that gets him is going to be delighted by that choice.

If it seemed too good to be true, that’s because it was.

Glenn Close added some much-needed chaos to Sunday’s Oscars when she participated in a bit with comedian Lil Rel Howery, in which attendees were asked if hit songs were Oscar winners, nominees, or snubbed for a nomination. After stumping Andra Day with “Purple Rain” and Daniel Kaluuya with “Last Dance,” the Get Out star turned to Close, who not only correctly guessed that “Da Butt” was not nominated for an Academy Award, but also wowed everyone with her knowledge of funk sub-genres.

“Wait a second. Wait a second. That’s ‘Da Butt.’ It was a classic song by the great Washington, D.C. go-go band E.U. Shout-outs to Sugar Bear and the Backyard Band and the whole DMV. Spike Lee had it written for his brilliant movie School Daze, and my friends at the Oscars missed it and it wasn’t nominated, so it couldn’t have won,” Close said before doing the “Da Butt” dance herself. Here’s that moment of Oscars infamy:

Alas, the Los Angeles Times confirmed that Close dancing was “part of a scripted bit designed for laughs.” It worked.

Later in the evening, the Hillbilly Elegy actress lost Best Actress to Nomadland‘s Frances McDormand, meaning she’s now zero-for-eight in acting categories at the Oscars. But she’s a winner in my book for going along with such an entertainingly silly bit.

(Via the Los Angeles Times)

Things got weird, okay? I think we can all agree that things got weird. Harrison Ford was up there on stage pulling crumpled pieces of papers out of his pockets like someone looking for a coupon at the register in a diner, Daniel Kaluuya congratulated his parents on having sex, beloved Hollywood icon Glenn Close did Da Butt in front of God and Lil Rel Howery and everyone. And that’s before whatever happened at the end. What did happen at the end, exactly? It looked like everyone was banking on a Chadwick Boseman win and then things went sideways and we got a still frame of Anthony Hopkins and then a smash cut to Questlove saying goodnight. It was… weird. The only thing I thing we can agree on about all of it that Joaquin Phoenix is probably the single most perfect person to have up there on stage as things spiral out of control during a live broadcast. I’m not entirely sure he didn’t just say Hopkins’ name for the sole purpose of creating that chaos. Like I said, things got weird.

But let’s put that aside for now. Let’s focus on the parts that went well. Let’s focus on the Oscars at least trying something new and cool, moving away from the same old stuffy ballroom and orchestra spectacle we’ve seen for quite literally our entire lives. Let’s focus, specifically, on the opening few minutes, in which Regina King strutted into the ceremony with an Oscar in her hand while producer Steven Soderbergh gave the long single shot the full-on Ocean’s Eleven funky credits treatment. That was cool. That was so cool. A reasonable argument could be made — by me, among others — that it was the coolest thing that has ever happened in an Oscars ceremony. I mean, watch it again now.

Can you ever, at any point in your stupid life, even in your wildest Benadryl-addled dreams, picture yourself looking half as cool as Regina King looked in that opening? The whole thing gave the first half-hour or so of the show a fun little vibe, like maybe we were watching a heist movie instead of an awards show, like maybe Regina King was the main character of the festivities and we were supposed to keep an eye on her for the big twist that was coming later.

Case in point: It is my position that the funniest possible thing would have been if that Phoenix-Hopkins chaos at the end happened and then, while everyone in the room and watching at home was all scattered and trying to figure out what was going on, they cut to another long single shot of Regina King strutting out of the theater, but now while pushing an entire wheelbarrow full of stolen Oscars, like she set it all up to pull off Hollywood’s biggest heist. Cut it up with little shots of her laying the groundwork throughout the ceremony, bounce around in the timeline to show us how she did it, maybe a shot of her paying off the kitchen staff to sneak backstage or one of her winking at Glenn Close in a way that reveals the whole Da Butt fiasco was staged misdirection so she could swipe the trophies. It would have been, if nothing else, classic Soderbergh.

Even the way the credits appeared on the screen was cool, mostly because the style of the whole thing made me start to picture what an actual heist movie featuring each set of names on the screen would look like. Look at some of these combinations.

We deserve this one. A heist movie starring Angela Bassett and Bong Joon Ho, also directed by Bong Joon Ho. I had no clue prior to last night that this is something I could want at all, and now I might die if I don’t have it in 12-18 months. Please hurry. But not until you look at this one, too.

I have this theory I’m working on that Don Cheadle makes everything better. I haven’t baked it all the way through yet, but I’m close and I’ve yet to run into anything that disproves it. I bring this up now for two reasons: One, I got very excited when I saw his name pop up here because I was kind of hoping he’d show up in character as Basher from the Ocean’s movies to help Regina King steal the Oscars; and two, a heist movie starring Don Cheadle and Halle Berry would be an absolute blast.

Two options here:

• Brad Pitt is a career thief who is fresh out of the slammer and itching to pull one big score and get out of the game, and he has his sights set on the crooked billionaire private prison magnate Nelson Hoosegow, played by Cranston
• Pitt and Cranston play dads who steal the Super Bowl trophy and hold it for ransom to get money to send their kids to college

Either or both are fine.

I’m not sure if this movie would be any good but I think we should make it anyway and keep the camera rolling between takes just to capture whatever stilted and awkward conversations these two have on set. Something to consider, really.

Hell yes.

HELL YES.

In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I had mostly been joking throughout this “let’s do a heist movie with these people” bit, but now I am serious. These last two screencaps settled it. I cannot think of any movie I could possibly want more than a heist flick starring Riz Ahmed and Rita Moreno, except maybe a Fast & Furious movie where Riz Ahmed and Rita Moreno star as the villains that Dominic Toretto and crew heist something from. I am not a complicated man. Give me this and a pizza and I will be happy for hours.

Now, again, things went sideways in places after all of this happened. It was bound to happen, in hindsight. There were so many moving pieces, so many new things being flung against the wall, so many people and institutions that were rusty at all of this business after a year of sitting inside in sweatpants and slippers. I did appreciate the ambition of it all, though. Sometimes chaos breeds invention, and some of the moves Soderbergh and company tried are worth revisiting down the line somewhere, maybe. I liked the cocktail lounge set-up of it all, and I liked that the nominees were all paired off and seated at tables instead of crammed into a fancy high school assembly for three hours, if only because it looked like everyone was having fun little conversations all night and I like to picture my stars as charming and relaxed instead of crammed into crappy padded fold-down seats in rows of 40.

Not everything worked, of course, some things more hilariously so than others, but there were some keepers in there, to be sure. Mostly that opening. It would be perfectly fine with me if every Oscars telecast for the next 10 years opens with Regina King gliding through the lobby and up to the stage with a trophy in her hand. It would also be okay with me if she did make off with that wheelbarrow full of Oscars I was joking about earlier. Maybe that’s the big takeaway here. Let’s go ahead and trim the fat. Let’s just make an actual heist movie where Regina King plays a character who steals a wheelbarrow full of Oscars.

It’s the perfect crime.

How much would you spend for a copy of a hip-hop classic? For Eminem, the going rate is somewhere between $500 and $600, as he revealed during a discussion on the popular voice chat app, Clubhouse. While the burgeoning community on Clubhouse has been known for causing controversy in the past, this past weekend, fans of the Detroit rapper held a celebratory “Shady Con” in his honor, with guests including his manager Paul Rosenberg and DJ Whoo Kid. Em himself stopped by to share some stories as well, telling fans about the time he just had to spend a little extra on his hero Nas’ seminal debut Illmatic to feed his collection habit.

As Em explained, I’ve been collecting since I was a kid, everything from comic books to baseball cards to toys, as well as every rap album on cassette I could get my hands on. Not much has changed for me as an adult.” When he found an unsealed cassette copy of Nas’ game-changing classic, his mind was blown. “I think it’s backstock from what records stores had in the back storage,” he said. “The tapes that never sold and they just kept them. That’s the only thing I can think of. Cause nobody’s going to have a f*cking Illmatic tape and not open it.” He also good-naturedly compared the value of his own debut The Slim Shady LP — which was a culture shifter in the vein of Illmatic, for sure — under similar conditions, saying it’d draw a tidy sum of “twelve cents.”

For what it’s worth, it’s not the worst way to spend money — which Em has more than enough of. An unsealed copy of a classic album on a discontinued format is exactly the sort of ultra-rare find that has wannabe collectors including Eminem going NFT crazy these days — and it also sort of shows the difference between a physical piece of owned art and the idea of owning a certificate of a jpeg or whatever.

Listen to Eminem’s amusing anecdote above.

Rick Santorum, a politician-turned-cable news commentator most famous for having the same last name as a disgusting sex act, was a featured guest at Young America’s Foundation’s Standing Up for Faith & Freedom seminar over the weekend. The program aims to assist “students at Catholic schools advance conservative ideas, with an understanding that young people encounter unique challenges and opportunities at modern Catholic institutions.” It also teaches them to ignore genocide, apparently.

While giving a speech about fighting for “religious freedom,” Santorum made some boneheaded comments about Native Americans. “If you think about this country, I don’t know of any other country in the world that was settled predominately by people who were coming to practice their faith. They came here because they were not allowed to practice their particular faith in their own country,” he said. Santorum later added, “We came here and created a blank slate. We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes, we have Native Americans but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” Gee, I wonder why.

Santorum is being widely criticized for his willfully ignorant comments, including by assembly-member Yuh-Line Niou (D-NY), who tweeted, “He needs to full stop stfu. Our tribes are alive and thriving. Everything we know day to day has our native cultures embedded. We are on their land. We eat their food. Use their words. Drink their water.”

Here’s more:

Go back to Urban Dictionary, Rick.

(Via Media Matters)

The streaming wars will never truly end as the landscape continues to shift and seeming alliances can fall by the wayside. Such is the case with Roku users, who probably feel like they’re never quite sure what they can watch with their devices. For several months, Roku fans felt left out of the HBO Max launch party until both services finally struck a deal. Now, the Roku bunch might lose access to YouTube TV, and this could apparently happen within a matter of days. To that effect, Roku issued is asking subscribers to contact Google to “urge them” to end a standoff.

Via The Verge, a Roku statement accuse Google of playing favorites with its own products (in this case, Google’s separate YouTube app), and negotiations between the two companies appear to be coming to no happy agreement. Here’s more:

“Google is attempting to use its YouTube monopoly position to force Roku into accepting predatory, anti-competitive and discriminatory terms that will directly harm Roku and our users. It should come as no surprise that Google is now demanding unfair and anti-competitive terms that harm Roku’s users.”

Roku is further alleging in its statement that Google might (via Deadline) require (as a condition for Roku to continue hosting the YouTube app) Roku to invest in upgrading equipment. And Roku claims that Google has demanded that Roku provide a search row that’s dedicated to YouTube within the Roku platform interface; additionally, Roku says that Google is allegedly asking for access to customer data. The Verge notes that Google has not responded (as of yet) to these accusations.

Deadline says that Roku has worded their call to action to recognize how the disappearance of an app can adversely affect users. “We believe consumers stand to benefit from Google and Roku reaching a fair agreement that preserves consumers access to YouTube TV, protects user data and promotes a competitive, free and open marketplace.” Roku declared. “We are committed to trying to achieve that goal.”

(Via The Verge & Deadline)

In his return to Tiny Desk Concerts, the newly rechristened and slimmed-down Shelley invites viewers into a softly-lit study for a simmering performance of songs from his upcoming album, Shelley FKA DRAM. Thanks to Tiny Desk’s “(At-Home)” designation, the Virginia native gets extra comfy, donning a set of food-patterned PJs that works just as well as an eye-popping suit, packing his band into the smaller confines, and delivering soulful renditions of songs like “Exposure,” “The Lay Down,” “Cooking With Grease,” and the debut of “Rich & Famous.”

The last time Shelley played Tiny Desk — way back in 2017 — he was promoting the lighthearted, melodic hip-hop debut album Big Baby DRAM. He makes note of the change during his return performance, reintroducing himself as Shelley — his government name — and calls the moment “a new beginning. Full circle.”

Shelley first showed glimpses of the shift in 2018 with his That’s A Girl’s Name EP, shifting to groovy but still swaggering R&B. Then, in 2019, he shared “The Lay Down” with HER (who’s now an Oscar and Grammy winner), presaging the new, grown-and-sexy direction he’s adopted for his next project, which releases April 29 in honor of his mom’s birthday.

Watch Shelley’s smooth NPR Tiny Desk return performance above.

Shelley is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The members of Mannequin Pussy spent much of 2020 apart thanks to the pandemic, but after their forced hiatus, they booked some studio time to work together again. The result of those sessions was the band’s Perfect EP, which is set for release in May. They announced the project and shared “Control” last month, and now they’re back with the title track.

They’ve shared a video for the song as well, which is a tribute to Romy And Michele’s High School Reunion. Therefore, the clip is all about a high school reunion, and it features mischievous drag queens making a scene.

The band’s Marisa Dabice (aka Missy) says of the song:

“Last year, I found myself spending more time on my phone than I ever had in my life. Physically separate from other people, I spent hours of time watching other humans perform on my rectangle. I realized that through years of social media training, many of us have grown this deep desire to manicure our lives to look as perfect, as aspirational as possible. We want to put ourselves out there, share our lives, our stories, our day to day – and these images and videos all shout the same thing: ‘Please look at me, please tell me I’m so perfect.’ It’s simultaneously a declaration of our confidence but edged with the desperation that seeks validation from others.”

Listen to “Perfect” above.

Perfect is out 5/21 via Epitaph Records. Pre-order it here.

At Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony there was a great moment when Daniel Kaluuya, accepting his Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, made a reference to his parents having sex. Then the camera cut to Kaluuya’s mom who was making the perfect, “What on Earth?” face. It’s just one of those moments that can’t be planned and is a big reason, over the years, that people like watching the Oscars. Hey, anything can happen! But, unfortunately, there was, again, no host at this year’s ceremony so it was left up to Twitter to make the jokes. This is because, without a trained and skilled host, we are left with presenters who are reading from a script they’ve already rehearsed. There’s no room for them to come on screen and even make a reference to what we, the audience, just saw. (And the truth is we probably don’t want presenters going off script because if they don’t know what they’re doing, well that could be its own disaster.) I kept imagining a world where, I dunno, Chris Rock comes back on stage with a big smile and starts bantering with Kaluuya’s mom about what happened. To really memorialize this great thing that just happened. Instead, the show stuck to the script like it never happened. And then there’s that ending … oof. We’ll get to that.

Last night’s Oscars looked pretty enough under the circumstances and some of the speeches were good. But everything in between the speeches seemed robotic. Too planned. There was not a sense that anything could happen, which kind of goes against the reason why people like watching live television in the first place. And, look, we’ve all been sitting around the last year trying to avoid the plague, would it have been the worst thing to have someone who is a trained host to come on and do what the best hosts do: guide the audience through and be the cipher for the audience. That’s why people liked Billy Crystal, he somehow seemed both excited to be there but also wasn’t opposed to taking the proceedings down a couple of pegs when it got too stuffy. So, yeah, it would have been nice just to have a constant person there to say, “Yeah, this has been a tough year, but maybe let’s try to have a little fun tonight, what do you say?” Instead, between the speeches, we got more speeches. These host-less Oscars just have no personality. And it stood out even more this year because the production desperately wanted us to think that it did have a personality.

(Also, as an aside, with getting people together being limited, wouldn’t this have been the year to do a grand death montage? With a bunch of great clips of all these people in their primes? This should have been a 10-minute segment! Instead, it was presented as if someone hit fast forward on the old VHS tape.)

So, here’s one big problem: No one wants to host the Oscars. I did a little snooping around about why this is and the consensus seems to be it’s a no-win situation. Anyone who hosts now knows in the weeks leading up to the show people will be looking through their history. It’s a pretty heavy layer of scrutiny. And even for people who have not made any serious mistakes in the past don’t seem to like the idea of going through a public background check. And, from what I heard, the salary for the host is surprisingly low. (I want to be clear, it’s a decent amount of money for you or me, but for a famous person who will be subjected to weeks of scorn, it seems low.) So the Academy is still trying to hire a host pretty much based on “prestige” alone, even though there’s not much prestige left with this gig. Any comedian at that level (in normal times) could do a two-week stand in Vegas and make a lot more money. So what’s the incentive? “Hey what if you made a lot less money for doing a lot of work and, oh, most likely everyone will hate you. So, what do you say?”

Obviously, the Academy has to come to the realization that its prime gig doesn’t have the cache that it used to. Which means they can’t continue to pay hosts on mostly prestige alone. They are going to have to actually pay people who are good a lot of money to make this thing work again.

Also, about that ending last night. What a mess. Look, this has nothing to do with Anthony Hopkins winning and, actually, what the Oscars did kind of screwed him over. A few hours before the show when it was announced Best Actor would be the last award given out, I just assumed, since it’s a weird year anyway, maybe the secretive protocols were dropped at the powers that be were tipped off that Chadwick Boseman had won. Because the production really went “all in” on Boseman winning and the show ending on a touching and well-deserved tribute to his life. And the thing is, maybe the thought was also, even if Boseman didn’t win, well, whoever wins will obviously say some nice words about Boseman.

Instead, Joaquin Phoenix read Anthony Hopkins’s name, who wasn’t there to accept, then Phoenix skedaddled off stage as quickly as possible. Guess what … there’s no host, so there’s no one to run up to the microphone to say anything. It just ended on a thud. Imagine if the La La Land, Moonlight year didn’t have a host. We at home would have seen a huddle, then a quick announcement that Moonlight had won and that would have been it, with no one to explain what just happened.

I always love Jimmy Kimmel’s retelling of that story, as he’s in the audience to do a bit with Matt Damon to close the show and Damon says to him, “someone should go up there and explain what’s happening,” and it hit Kimmel, “Oh, I guess that’s me.” But, last night there wasn’t anyone to say “I guess that’s me.” No one to say, “Hey, before we go, he may not have won, but let me say a few words about Chadwick Boseman.” Instead, we just got the thud.

Anyway, enough of this: bring back the Oscar host and also make it worth their while to do it.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.