ADVENTURES IN DOLLYWOOD

Hey folks, it’s all over but the shouting (and the squeals of gobsmacked surprise) at this year’s Oscars.

Who knew that Parasite would sweep four of the six categories it was nominated in, including Best Director (okay, I knew that one!), Best Picture and Best International Film (quite a double-header), as well as Best Original Screenplay. (It only lost in the Production Design and Editing categories.)

Anyway, I’m awarding myself a half point for suggesting Parasite was the likeliest spoiler in the Original Screenplay category, bringing my total to 7 1/2 correct predictions out of 10.

But even though the hoopla has died down a bit, we all know it wouldn’t be the Oscars without  — The Return of the (Dreaded) Oscar Barbies!

The Best Actress nominees in period costumes are always my favorites, so this year I decided not to even fool around with the nominees in boring modern dress.  Renee Zellweger’s mid-60s Judy (as in Garland) is just retro enough to make the cut. Besides, I knew she was going to win, so I positioned her snuggling up to the man in gold himself.

She’s flanked by Saoirse Ronan, as budding writer, Jo, in Little Women, and Cynthia Erivo as intrepid Civil War slave liberator, Harriet.

And, yes, it’s all about the props!

GOURD VIBRATIONS

Happy Pumpkin Day to all!

James Aschbacher loved Halloween. I could say it brought out the kid in him, but the kid in him was always out! He wasn’t into dressing up himself, but he loved to see little trick-or-treaters in costumes.

We would put together a deli tray of salami, cheese, olives and baguette (and champagne, of course!), and graze standing up at the kitchen counter between trips to answer the doorbell.

And as a lifelong monster-movie fan, he loved all the faux-scary stuff that came with the celebration. We made window displays with skeletons, his Universal Monster movie figurines, and my Barbies. (Bride of Frankenstein Barbie; Headless Barbie; Invisible Woman.)

But best of all, he loved carving pumpkins, a ritual shared with friends Jim and Gail Borkowski for years. Of course, normal jack-o-lanterns were never good enough for us. I love the violin motif on Jim B’s tall pumpkin, here. (Look at those “ears!”) And, since the year was 1989, my Art Boy produced “Quake-Head!” He must have employed toothpicks — very carefully — to fasten the two ruptured halves back together at that angle. Always the innovator! 

Virgo that I am, I also felt compelled to document our pumpkins in a sketchbook/journal for future reference. The shelf-life of a hollowed-out gourd is notoriously short, so the day after Halloween, we’d set them out in the back yard, to watch them slowly melt back into Nature!

It was all part of the same ritual — act of creation, brief blaze of glory, then return to the Earth to start the cycle anew.

It’s very sad for me to face my second Halloween without him. His enthusiasm was so contagious! Last year I went to my friends’ house for the evening, rather than face the night alone. (Just me and the ghost of my Sweetie, his overwhelming absence occupying the house like The Blob.)

Tonight, I’ll be at home, but no decorations in the window, and no candy at the door. I hate to be that curmudgeony old lady who turns off the lights, locks the door, and hunkers down at the back of the house until it’s all over.

It feels like such a betrayal of James; as my Spirit Guide, he would be so disappointed.

But not only do I not have the benefit of his delight to cheer me on, I am no longer physically able to keep schlepping back and forth to the door to hand out goodies to the kids.

And rattling to the door hunched over my walker might scare even the most stalwart trick-or-treater.

(Although, maybe if I dressed up like Quasimodo . . . )

AND THE WINNER WAS . . .

Funny how time flies!

The Academy Awards were two weeks ago, already, and I have yet to inflict upon you . . . oops, I mean, share my annual Oscar Barbies post! You know, my crack-brained tradition of dressing up dolls from my misfit Barbie collection as the Best Actress nominees.

Well, you couldn't expect your luck to hold out forever. So, here she is (ta-da): Olivia Colman in The Favourite!

Okay, I only had the time and energy to do one nominee this year. But I picked the right one, as Colman went on to win the gold. (Beating out poor Glenn Close, in like her 49th nomination. Most movie fans are astonished to learn that Close has never actually won the Oscar!)

But if the highly peculiar The Favourite had to win anything (and that's a debatable point), I'm glad it was for Colman's fearless performance. Of course, Barbie is a lot more glam than Colman's sad-sack Queen Anne — but at least I got the bunnies right!

An old hippie earring of mine, planted upside-down in her copious hair, makes the perfect crown!

Maybe next year, I'll have time to do them all.

You've been warned!

THEY'RE B-A-A-CK AGAIN!

Well, friends, the Academy Awards will be handed out tonight.


And you know what that means:


 Oh no! Oh yes! It's the Return of the Oscar Barbies!


There are no Best Actress nominees from historical films this year — unless you count movies set in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

No Judi Dench flouncing around in crinolines as Queen Victoria; no new Jane Austen adaptations. Those are always the most fun to do.

Still, there's room for creativity in this year's nominees.



First up: Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding in I, Tonya.

Okay, yes, she's got roller skates, but I grew up in SoCal so I didn't have Barbie's ice-skating outfit! I made this outfit from bits and pieces — just like Tonya had to do — and the doll's exaggerated hair and makeup are (for once) perfect!


Next up, Saorise Ronan in Lady Bird! Nothing too distinctive, costume-wise — except the slightly pink hair.


I really had a hard time coming up with props for this one.

So I finally resorted to a prom dress from Barbie's closet to reference the scene when Lady Bird and her mom go shopping, and quit their petty bickering the instant they both fall in love with the same dress!


Our third nominee is Meryl Streep, playing publisher Katherine Graham in The Post.

 

Fortunately, I have a tweed suit, string of pearls, and a vintage short-haired Barbie for — well, basically, any time Meryl Streep gets nominated. (Which is every year.)

All I needed to do this year was Google The Washington Post and print out a mini version of the front page.


Next up, my favorite challenge of the year, for my favorite movie — Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water!


There's not much to her outfit‚ a blue dress and a blue sweater, like all the cleaning staff wear at the secret government lab in the movie. (Also, those shiny black shoes.)

Of course, I had to make the mop, not an item typically fond in Barbie's wardrobe.


But the main event here is her "prop" — the Amphibian Man himself! Yes, it's The Creature From the Black Lagoon, from the classic 1950s sci-fi movie that director Guillermo del Toro cheerfully admits inspired his own character.


This image is on the lid of the box containing the Creature model kit. (Art Boy never built the model, so I had to use the lid.) I found the perfect industrial-green construction paper to frame it in, and Art Boy cleverly constructed the rest of the "tank" around it.


But, as much fun as they were to make, these nominees are the also-rans this year.

And the winner is: Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri!
 

Definitely the toughest challenge of the year. She spends the entire movie in the same blue-denim jumpsuit, most of which I had to make — the top half, anyway. She has basically no hair, what there is of it wrapped in a bandana. (I had to use a twisty piece of wire ribbon.)


And while I was able to paint out some of her eye makeup, I couldn't do anything about her girly grin.


Still, it all came together when, searching for some kind of prop, we found a Barbie-sized Coke bottle squirreled away somewhere. Art Boy made it into the Molotov cocktail McDormand's character throws in a key scene in the movie — one way for this doll to express McDormand's rage, despite that wimpy grin!


That's it for this year. Click here for a peek at Oscar Barbies Past!

HOORAY for DOLLYWOOD!

Just when you thought it was safe to open your browser . . .

It's all over but the shouting — and the blaming — after this year's Academy Awards kerfuffle over the wrong Best Picture envelope.  If it had been up to me after such a gauche faux pas, I'd have awarded co-Oscars to both Moonlight and La La Land.

Fortunately both movies won big in other categories. Damien Chazelle took the Best Director prize for La La Land, but writer-director Barry Jenkins also took home Oscar gold for the screenplay to Moonlight. And each movie picked up one of the four acting prizes. So all in all, a pretty even match-up (if you don't count all the production  and music awards La La Land racked up).

But even as confusion reigned at the podium on Oscar Night, there's one thing you can always count on at this time of year: I mean, of course, the Return of the Oscar Barbies — 2017 edition!

It was not a very inspiring group this year, but I did have fun making Emma Stone's tap shoes. And of course, vintage Barbie already looks like Jackie Kennedy with no help at all from me! She also comes complete with Jackie's wardrobe, right down to  the pillbox hat.

If only I'd seen Florence Foster Jenkins (I think I was in Sweden when it opened), I'd have known that the character — a would-be opera diva with a notoriously tin ear — dresses up like a Valkyrie and attempts to sing Wagner. Now THAT would have been a fun costume to make!

Meanewhile, visit  the full rogue's gallery of Oscar Barbies through the years!

RETURN of the OSCAR BARBIES

They're ba-ack!

In response to extreme public demand (okay, three people), I present the 2012 Academy Award Best Actress nominees, Barbie-style.

This was a challenging year. Among the five nominees are a middle-aged woman passing as a man (Albert Nobbs), a severely pierced and tattooed Goth (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and Margaret Thatcher (The Iron Lady).

One of the self-imposed rules of Oscar Barbies is I never permanently alter or deface any of my dolls for their one night of glory on the Red Carpet. Another rule is, I never go out and buy clothes or accouterments; I either Frankenstein together what I have on hand, or make new stuff.

So let's start with the easy ones. Dress a Barbie to look like Marilyn Monroe; ie: Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn? No problem! I have plenty of blonde Barbies, the doll is anatomically correct for the part (for once), and this vintage dress and accessories from my childhood collection are exactly the right period.

(I did break down and cut her hair, however. But I do have a surplus of long-haired blonde dolls that have been donated to me over the years, so I figured I could give this one a trim. Besides, willowy, long-haired blondes rarely become Best Actress nominees.)

And dressing a doll to look like a middle-aged Southern maid, the Viola Davis character in The Help, wasn't impossible. I have a black Barbie, and I even found a blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar, and an apron, in my collection, although I had to frump it up a bit with a sweater.

Of course, the hair is ridiculous. Barbie dolls have more hair than Rapunzel, but I like this doll's long hair most of the time, so I gave her a ponytail and a Trump-worthy comb-over in front for the look of a black woman in the early '60s who has to straighten her hair into a bouffant for work. Not entirely successful, but you get the general idea.

 For Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, the hair was the easiest part.  This vintage doll comes with short, painted-on hair and three wigs, so I put her red wig on sideways to get that extreme, Thatcher-esque sweep off to the side. I also had this tweed business suit and pearls on hand. Couldn't do anything to de-glamorize her face, though.

As for Glenn Close as Albert Nobbs, I totally lucked out finding this male doll's dress suit and black jacket  stuffed in one of my doll trunks. (The character is a mature woman passing as a male waiter in an Irish hotel, ca. 1900.) I taped up the pants cuffs, made a tea towel out of an old T-shirt scrap, and gave her a pair of vintage white gloves.


 But the piece de resistance  is the bowler hat.  Kudos to Art Boy for suggesting the pliable lead sheath that covers the top of a champagne bottle for the crown. I cut off  some of the the selvage and rolled what was left up into the brim, Art Boy spray-painted it black, and voila! Of course, in "real" life, a waiter would never wear a bowler hat while serving, but in Oscar Barbie World, it's all about the props.

(I'm also fortunate to have this doll head with the short-short hair that my friend Faye Augustine found for me years ago in some hidden cranny of her assemblage art studio. Then I needed it to dress up a doll like cross-dressing Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry, and it's come in handy many times since then. Last year, this doll was Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right.)

At last, we come to Rooney Mara in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. For this one, I broke my "no shopping" rule & went hunting for a cheap, used doll I could mess up.  I found a large bin of discarded Barbies and Bratz dolls way in the back of that junk store on Front street, next to the New Leaf parking lot, but, typically, dark-haired dolls were in short supply. (I found one Bratz doll whose black hair was already mostly chopped off, but she wouldn't have fit in any of my Barbie clothes.)


 Finally I chose this one. Her expression is more serious, her lips are less red, and she doesn't have that mindless, toothy Barbie grin. She already had dangly faux-metal earrings, and some child had already cut severely short bangs above her forehead. All I'd have to do was give her an asymmetrical haircut (long in front on one side; boyishly short on the other), and put her in the "leather" jacket and black boots I have on hand

She is also, as you'll notice, a doll of color—not quite black, but the "silver" earrings suggest some sort of Native American. But because so much of her hair had already been lopped of, I thought it would be easier to repaint her complexion to emulate a fair-skinned Swede than buy a Caucasian doll and try to color her (almost always) blonde hair. At least her eyes are brown, not typical Barbie blue.

But once I paid my buck-sixty-two, got her home, and cut her hair, I liked her too much to alter her skin. I took an eyebrow pencil to give her the giant Goth raccoon eyes, and added a few facial "studs" and "rings" with a silver gel pen. Then I gave her neck chains and a razor blade pendant I cut out of a tea light candle holder.  The finishing touch: a black laptop under her arm,  for any hacking emergency that might arise.

Okay, so she's not strictly the right color. (Although I could argue that Lisabeth Salander would be black if she could!) But she's definitely true to the spirit of the character—and that what Oscar Barbies are all about.

(For a peek at some Oscar Barbies from years past, click here and here.)

Also, check out my Oscar predictions in this week's Good Times, or online.

IN STITCHES

In Oscar season, it's all about the clothes

Look at this cool website I just discovered! For the last 17 years, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) in Los Angeles has hosted an annual exhibit of the year's best movie costumes during Oscar season (February-April). The exhibit is not limited to the year's Best Costume nominees (although they are included), but covers films of all genres and budgets for an annual look at the most interesting onscreen clothes. (That's Arwen's coronation gown, designed by Oscar winner Ngila Dickson, and worn by Liv Tyler in The Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King, in situ at the FIDM exhibit from 2004.)

This years exhibit (costumes from 20+ movies from 2010, including all five Oscar nominees, up close and personal) runs through April 30. But for those of us not heading south anytime soon, the FIDM website provides a virtual online archive of its movie costume exhibitions. Not all of them; this year's and last year's exhibits are not yet online. Exhibits from 1997 and 1998 are represented only by a few fuzzy still photos. But from 1999 through 2009, the online collections expand to numerous photos images (many in drool-worthy detail) of an astonishing variety of films—the Elizabeth movies; the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean trilogies; Julie Taymor movies (Titus and Frida); Tim Burton movies; Austin Powers movies; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Moulin Rouge; The Girl With the Pearl Earring; Chicago; Shakespeare In Love, and, well, the list goes on and on.

My only complaint is the lack of consistency on the site. In some featured years, only costumes from the five nominated films are online, while another year might feature costumes from 20 films or more. And no two of these online exhibits are organized exactly the same way; you have to do a lot of scrolling around and searching for appropriate buttons to access all the displays. Some have drop-down menus, others pop-up windows (the 2008 exhibit is only represented by a video featurette, where you can hardly see the clothes at all), but in most cases, if you can find and follow the prompt arrows, or the words "Enter" or "View," you'll probably see it all eventually. And it's worth seeing, especially the 2000 gallery, which features a side exhibit of costumes and accessories from the previous 100 years of film, from Fred Astaire's elegant dancing shoes to Sharon Stone's rude little white dress from Basic Instinct.

And let's face it, at Oscar time, it's all about the clothes. Me, I'm as much a sucker for the clothes worn to the ceremony as the clothes worn onscreen, so at this Sunday's Oscarcast (ABC, 5 p.m.), I'll brave the inevitable blithering of the TV interviewers to catch the red carpet fashion parade during the pre-game show. After all, by the time the actual ceremony rolls around, there aren't going to be that many surprises onstage, so we depend on the red carpet to deliver the drama.

My all-time favorite Oscar dress? Probably that luscious, faux-Edwardian teal green number that Kate Winslet wore the year she didn't win the Oscar for Titanic. To my amazement, this dress churned up a lot of controversy; self-appointed fashion Nazis lambasted it as too weird or matronly or something (this no doubt from the same pundits who used to complain that Kate Winslet—Kate Winslet, fer crying out loud!— was fat). But I just thought it was stunning, in a funky-chic retro way. After all, it's not like she showed up with a dead swan draped around her neck. (Which reminds me: I wonder what Natalie Portman will wear this year?)

You want to know how demented I am about the Oscars? For years, I've paid my own homage to the art of movie costuming by dressing up my vintage Barbie dolls as the Best Actress nominees. It began as something I did as a lark to spruce up the place back when Art Boy and I used to throw lavish Oscar Night parties, but then I started getting into the challenge of the thing. (You try transforming a Barbie doll into Kathy Bates in Misery. I dare you!) We don't throw those big parties any more, but I still find it therapeutic now and then, in a non-verbal, Zen sort of way, to costume the occasional doll.

Nominees in big, juicy, historical epics are the most fun to dress, of course; I was delirious the year both Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love, and Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth were in the running.

Not that the 20th Century can't be interesting too. This was my tribute to the nominees from the lurid '50s melodrama of Far From Heaven, the sassy, Depression-era '30s of Chicago, and the bohemian '20s and '30s of Frida.

And sometimes, it's all about the props, like the year Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis were both nominated for Thelma and Louise.

The Best Actor costumes are rarely as much fun, but I made an exception for Captain Jack Sparrow. I had to go to Goodwill and pop two bucks for a recycled Ken doll, but seriously, Ken never looked better.

So kids, in the spirit of this year's Best Picture nominee, Toy Story 3, the moral is, never throw your toys away. Recycle them to the Goodwill instead. You never know what sort of swashbuckling afterlife is waiting for them there!