My All First Weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament Team

My full-time devotion to college basketball has been dwindling for years, but it bottomed out this season. Due to a confluence of the Winter Olympics taking up my attention for two weeks, the ever-lengthening college football season preventing the formerly neat turning of the calendar from one sport to the other at New Year’s, and life and all that it entails, I hardly watched any college basketball in 2025-26. And yet, there is something to be said for coming into the first weekend of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, the best part of America’s best sporting event, with few expectations and little prior knowledge, just ready to be surprised and captivated. And boy, was I. Granted, this first weekend had less upset-laden madness than so many Marches past, a continuation of a new but troubling trend, but to paraphrase noted metaphysicist Stevie Nicks, when it was good, reader, it was very, very good. A few notes by way of a team.

For the fourth time in five NCAA Tournaments, Akron’s Zippy was the best mascot of March.

My All First Weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament Team

 

Rob Martin, High Point / Nick Boyd, Wisconsin. I enjoy the three-point revolution in basketball, and High Point is committed to it, what with a player who essentially only shoots three-pointers. But High Point versus Wisconsin was my favorite kind of basketball, nevertheless, where the playground version merges with the one played inside a gym as two teams space the floor and let their respective point guards try and break down the defense by attacking the rim, again and again. Boyd had 27 points and 6 assists in a magnificent losing effort while Martin put up an equally magnificent 23 points and 10 assists before outdoing himself in his own losing effort against Arkansas in the second round with 30 points and 5 assists. Objectively, he was outplayed by his Razorback counterpart, Darius Acuff Jr., who finished with 36 points and 6 assists. But the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament is not about future NBA lottery picks like Acuff but comets like Martin who invoke fleeting wonder*. And just as Martin’s lilliputian counterpart Max Abmas once momentarily transformed Oral freaking Roberts into a school worth rooting for, so, too, did Martin give what seems to be a furniture empire-infused finishing school for rich kids a glint of the old Cinderella story. That is the magic of March Madness™.

*Honorable Mention: Francis Folefac of Siena, freshman and Kinesiology Major, whose team damn near became only the third sixteenth seed to topple a one, mighty Duke, and who was absolutely fearless in repeatedly going right at Cameron Boozer, widely expected to be the top pick in the NBA Draft. Vaya con Dios. 

Tyler Tanner, Vanderbilt. As good as Wisconsin v High Point was, the best game of the first weekend of the 2026 NCAA Tournament was the second-round tilt between fourth-seeded Nebraska and fifth-seeded Vanderbilt. There was an edge to this one, born, I suspect, of desperation fueled by two teams who rarely find themselves on such a stage. Indeed, Nebraska, having only won its first NCAA Tournament game ever but 48 hours earlier, had literally never been in this position and to win their second game they had to fight off the Commodores’ jitterbugging, pickpocketing, trash-talking point god Tyler Tanner who early in the second half hopscotched past, I think, three defenders in the lane while keeping his dribble to get off a scoop shot that did not go in but still made me think, “Was that that the best missed shot I’ve ever seen?” Little did I know! Trailing 74-72 with 2.2 seconds left, Tanner launched a 60-foot shot that did not just do everything but go in, no, it did go in...and then came back out of the basket, the greatest March Madness™ buzzer beater that was not. If I had not seen it, I might not have believed it, and though I was rooting for Nebraska, and though I was ecstatic that they won, I confess, Tyler Tanner won my heart. You will never convince me that the bad juju incurred from four years of the Scott Frost football era at Nebraska did not cause the hand of fate to intervene in that missed shot. 

Robbie Avila, Saint Louis. Avila was not a surprise, exactly. I have been hearing about this guy for several years now, first at Indiana State and then down the road at Saint Louis University where he transferred when his Indiana State coach took the gig. After all, in his 6'10" height, 240 lbs, and rec specs, he has become folk hero with a multitude of colorful nicknames like Cream Abdul-Jabbar and Milk Chamberlain. It was not, however, until his team’s first round game against Georgia that I finally sat down and watched him play. And though his team was no way, shape, or form just him, he was the spark plug. He knocked down threes and had a soft touch around the rim but as much as anything, it was his passing, out of the high post and all manner of long and short outlet passes to his speedy guards that kept the Billikens’ motors permanently revved en route to a 102-77 eating of Georgia’s lunch. More than that, though he might appear a plodder in his build, he was incredibly nimble on his feet, running up and down in the court all game long in a manner reminiscent of Newman’s unlikely agility in sprinting after Kramer when the latter is hurrying down the street with the Risk board (it’s a long story) in a sixth season episode of “Seinfeld.” Ultimately, Saint Louis could not hang with top-seeded Michigan in the second round but even in losing by almost as many as they beat Georgia by, they put on a rattling good show, and who is the official best team is of no concern to this movie blog writing about basketball anyway. The Saint Louis Billikens win our Rainbow Heart Syrup national championship.  

Saint Louis Center Robbie Avila on the fast break.

Tavion Banks, Iowa. Banks is my preferred college basketball type, an anomaly that makes pedantic NBA scouts cringe, a power forward with a shooting guard/small forward combo’s 6'7" height who might be emblematic of the current nomadic incarnation of college basketball by going from Northwest Florida State College to Drake University to, finally, the University of Iowa but also demonstrates that for many, frankly, the college experience is circuitous, not linear. The whole Hawkeye plane felt like it was made out of Banks-like characters and after cement-mixing Clemson in a first-round game that was fun, really, only if you had a rooting interest in Iowa, they ousted defending champion Florida in a seismic second-round upset by paradoxically pulling the high-flying Gators into the glorious muck of their slow-paced swamp where Banks and his undersized, outgunned mates wrestled them to a one-point defeat and reached the second week of the tournament for the first time since 1999. Former Iowa Hawkeye running back and momentary Heisman Trophy candidate Tavian Banks, still fourth on the school’s all-time rushing list, undoubtedly assumed his place as the foremost Tavian Banks in Hawkeye lore was assured, but as Tavion Banks goes to show, history is always being revised. 

Sixth Man: Dion Brown, Saint Louis. Speaking of 1999... I think the best college basketball regular season game I have watched in the last five years, if not more, was a random mid-February one between two teams with losing records, the Syracuse Orange and the Boston College Eagles, both of whom fired their coach this year, and which I watched only because I sought a college basketball game while My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife did the NYT crossword and she prefers that if I watch a game, it’s one with a good mascot, which Syracuse has in the form of Otto the Orange. He’s an orange! Lo and behold, a triple-overtime spirited rec league-feeling game broke out and reminded me of the January and February Saturdays of my youth when I would get deeply involved in the doubleheaders of old Big 8 and Big 10 games on the central Iowa local affiliates between middle-of-the-pack teams while a syndicated re-run of “The Breakfast Club” on another channel that also seemed to air every weekend underlined these precious reprieves from school. I digress. That Boston College team had this guy who was dead ringer for Prince. And as I watched Saint Louis turn Georgia into gruel, I thought, “Wait, that guy looks a little like Prince.” It was him! Dion Brown, who has trimmed his hair, unfortunately, and does not look quite as much like Prince as he previously did, and who, it turned out, transferred to Saint Louis from Boston College where he had transferred from University of Maryland, Baltimore County, lending an appropriate figurative wail to the last 4 days of basketball, “a wonderful trip through time where laughter is all you pay.”

SID (Sports Information Director): Hailee Steinfeld, State Farm Commercial. It’s just a version of captive consumerism, surely, but I saw that “Livin’ on a Prayer” State Farm commercial about 456 times during the last four days and Steinfeld’s double-take reaction shot to the over-aggressive lunacy of Keegan-Michael Key and Danny McBride really started to feel like an impeccable summation of suffering through the global madness unleashed by one deranged lunatic.  

Some Drivel On...Quantum Hoops

“Quantum Hoops” (2007) does not conclude with a blooper reel, a la so many comedy movies, but begins with one instead, or what might as well pass for one, a montage of the Caltech basketball team failing all over the court. After all, at the time Rick Greenwald’s documentary was shot in the mid-aughts, the woebegone Beavers had not won a game since 1985. (They would eventually end the streak at 310 games on February 22, 2011.) That’s failure on a mathematically improbable scale, as “Quantum Hoops” tells us, and perhaps operating with a mathematician’s mind, it explains the logic behind chronicling such long-running failure while giving a pass to the cosmic absurdity. The whole movie assumes the low-key, even nonchalant, air of its narrator, David Duchovny, a 20-year losing streak treated as something like a passing sun shower. I did not need it to drill all the way down to the very essence of the human condition, necessarily, but when one former Caltech hoopster noted that the 1960s passed on campus with nary a peep of the noise from the outside world, I might have liked at least one follow-up question.

Though “Quantum Hoops” nominally chronicles the Beavers’ 2005-06 season, Greenwald eschews embedding with the team, so to speak, by recounting each game, checking in with the players before and after, or even, really, seeming to go into the locker room at all. Given the described workload of basketball and academics and barely having time to sleep, maybe that would have been impossible, but it makes the approach feel impersonal despite so many talking head interviews. Instead, Greenwald opts for broad overview of both Caltech as an institution and of the basketball program. But because there seems to be virtually no footage of the hardwood team’s past glories and agonies, this overview essentially just consists of past players and coaches remembering them aloud, which only goes so far. It also underlines the lack of visual flair overall, utilizing clips that do not really enhance what's being said, only occasionally underscoring the action, mostly just coming across like something to fill the screen.

No, Greenwald is content to let talking heads do most of the walk for him. And they are chipper bunch, granted, from the current and former players to current and former coaches to Gregg Popovich, formerly head coach of Pomona-Pitzer, who lost to Caltech in 1980. He mentions a chill that went through his body when he realized he was going to lose to the sport’s most woeful program, yet even by the end of his interview, the famously acerbic Hall of Famer is waxing inspirational in a way that mirrors the Explosions in the Sky-like music. If the Caltech players feel sorrow, they never really express it, hardly show it, and when one-time coach Gene Victor does allow a brief admission that it was “hard” to lose so much, he fails to expound, probably because he wasn’t even asked to. There is no room for wallowing. In accordance with a university like Caltech, everything is framed as a learning experience.  

The Show Goes On: the 98th Academy Awards

The run-up to the 98th Academy Awards was frequently cited by Oscar prognosticators as perhaps the most unpredictable ever, at least among three of the acting categories (Jessie Buckley had Best Actress locked up virtually from the beginning). Yet, the awards season has become so long, that by the time of the actual Oscar ceremony itself, that unpredictability had looped back around, transforming so much surprise into predestination. Not even Sean Penn eschewing showing up at the ceremony to collect his Best Supporting Actor trophy for “One Battle After Another” was all that surprising. “Frankenstein” collected three Oscars, “Sinners” earned four, and “One Battle After Another” won six, including Best Picture, Best Editing (Andy Jurgensen made a two-hour-and-forty-minute feel like one, tops), and the inaugural Oscar for Best Casting. I would have voted for “The Secret Agent” in the latter, but Cassandra Kulukundis was no less deserving. For casting newcomer Chase Infiniti, yes, and for all the impeccably chosen faces comprising The Christmas Adventurers Club, certainly, but also for getting Eric Schweig back into the masterpiece-making business. I hope Schweig was there last night. If there was a true surprise at the 98th Academy Awards, it was Best Live-Action Short ending in a tie between “The Singers” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” It warms my jaded heart that the Olympics still allows ties, and it turns out, the Oscars warms it for allowing them too. 

Unpredictability, however, does not in and of itself make for a good Oscar show and the 98th was plenty good, fun and dumb, heartfelt and affecting in equal measure. Conan O’Brien returned as host after last year and can return next year, as far as I’m concerned, so ably has he filled this role; to paraphrase Sydney Pollack in “Michael Clayton,” he’s found a niche for himself. He’s good at his gig because he excels at taking the piss out of what he has just genuinely exalted and lets us in on the joke without making the whole thing a joke, not least because he really seems to love movies. The best bit of the night was sending up streaming movies that require dialogue to continually restate the plot for so many people listening as much as they are watching by recreating a scene from “Casablanca” as so comical exposition with a game Sterling K. Brown in the Dooley Wilson role. Honestly, he could have turned that into a recurring bit throughout the show. How about Conan and Jennifer Lawrence as “McCabe & Mrs. Miller?” True, the scripted banter between presenters was even worse than usual, which caused so many of those moments to drag, but then again, enlisting Nicole Kidman to present Best Picture was perfection. I know, she was there with Ewan McGregor to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Moulin Rouge,” but I saw it more as Kidman’s Pure Camp as AMC ambassador taken to its apex. She should be grandfathered into the role of Best Picture presenter for life. Kidman is here! Sit up straight!

Even if the outcomes skewed inevitable, how can you be bored when history is made? Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and, by extension, the first woman of the color to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography for “Sinners.” Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for the same movie and referenced the five Black men that won Best Actor before him, as well as Halle Berry, the only Black woman to win Best Actress, placing his victory in a historical context. No-show Penn joined the three-timers club, going to show once again that even if nobody seems to like him, everybody seems to like his acting. If Paul Thomas Anderson earning Best Director for “One Battle After Another” was not historical, it was momentous, one of our foremost modern auteurs finally, deservedly winning an Oscar. And when he mentioned his fellow nominees, I took heart in knowing that even if Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay for “Sinners,” that someday he will win for Best Director too. Nothing filled my heart with joy as much as Amy Madigan winning Best Supporting Actress for “Weapons.” At first, I really thought hers was just a happy-to-be-nominated deal, but somewhere along the way, momentum built, maybe because 40 years between nominations in a business where for women it can feel like it’s getting late early, as the sage Yogi Berra once said, she demonstrated that no, nuh uh, it’s never too late. Plus, it was an important, oft-forgotten reminder that she and Ed Harris are one of our Top 5 Celebrity Couples: not quite an indie Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, but something in that vein. 

As if taking presenter Jimmy Kimmel’s words to heart about documentary filmmakers being the truth-tellers, the winners for both documentary short and feature were the ones who most openly acknowledged the current political realities of our tumultuous world. Well, them and Javier Bardem who in presenting Best International Feature with Priyanka Chopra literally said “No to war and free Palestine” with what appeared to be a smile on his face. He wasn’t making light of anything, of course, but to my eye, appeared to be demonstrating how easy it is to simply say something while cheerfully communicating to multitudinous bad faith actors he knew were lying in wait: Come at me, bro. Whining about people being woke is just another way to bury your head in the sand. 

The one detail that even good iterations of the show have gotten wrong in the past, this version got right - the in-memoriam segment. Maybe losing so many vital names of the industry snapped the producers into focus, but for once they forewent yoking some other performer or performance to the segment and just let the segment speak for itself, buttressing it with brief commentary on some of the biggest names: so many tear-filled faces for Rob Reiner, Rachel McAdams testifying to Diane Keaton and her fellow Canadian Catherine O’Hara, and Babs on Bob (Barbra Streisand’s ode to Robert Redford). It was the first in-memoriam I can recall that truly let us linger on the names and faces and think about what they meant. It was heartrending, and wonderful, and in a way, made me even madder that the Honorary Academy Awards are shunted to their own ceremony months earlier. Why on earth would the Oscars not want Tom Cruise receiving his first Academy Award at the actual ceremony? That is to take nothing away from his fellow honorary award recipients Debbie Allen and Wynn Thomas, but my God, this is Tom Cruise; he was literally name-checked in this year’s Best Picture!  

Cruise has left significant footprints on the history of cinema and so, too, has Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s why it was so moving to see him finally be recognized by the Academy. Is “One Battle After Another” really his best movie? God, I don’t know and I don’t know that I can think of a more boring question today. In speaking after winning Best Picture, in fact, Anderson sort of summarized that point and the point I was trying to make on Friday by literally naming all five Best Picture nominees from 1975. “There is no best among them,” he said. “There is just what the mood might be that day.” I don’t know how my mood is going to be tomorrow, or the next day, or next month, or Oscar Sunday next year, but after that show last night, I gotta tell you, in a way I did not see coming, it’s pretty good. I guess there was some sort of surprise after all. 

(Big) Best Picture Questions

“Time doesn’t exist, yet it controls us anyway.” – Comrade Josh, One Battle After Another

What, exactly, do we want from the Academy Award for Best Picture? Should it be the movie that most captures the public’s imagination? Should it be the movie that makes the most money? Are those two things interchangeable or are they incompatible or are they somewhere in-between? Should it be a movie that says something? If so, what should it say, and how should it say it? Subtly or with great force? Should it take sides, or should it take no sides at all? Should it be topical, or should it be more universal? Should it be, simply, the best movie of the year? But how on earth do you quantify the best movie of the year? You think it’s “Oppenheimer,” but I think it’s “Barbie,” and it was “Barbie,” you’re wrong, sorry, but where does that get us? Do we really want art to be an ice dancing competition? But then, I’m not voting and you’re not voting; the Academy is voting. What does any of it have to do with us? Maybe they just want to reward the movie that gave the most people jobs.

Maybe what the collective “we” wants more than anything, though, is a Best Picture winner that stands the test of time. That is what so many lists sprouting up this time of year would seem to suggest, anyway, the ones counting all times the Oscars got it wrong, and the people telling you for the millionth time that “Goodfellas” should have won Best Picture over “Dances with Wolves” in 1990 would seem to suggest it too. But expecting 11,000 people to predict by majority what movie will measure up three or four decades from now is asking a lot. “The Last Emperor” swept the Academy Awards in 1987, winning all 9 categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director, and yet, who remembers it, who talks about it? There was a whole “Frasier” episode about this phenomenon with the eponymous psychiatrist repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to watch and enjoy “How Green Was My Valley”: “It won five Academy Awards!” he bellows to the indifferent teenage clerk at the video rental store. “It’s a classic!” Twenty years later, that is how I feel about “Million Dollar Baby,” a movie that the culture at large discarded. Would I have told people in 2005 that “Million Dollar Baby” would last forever? I did tell people that! But whether something is timeless can only be measured with, well, obviously. “They come where they come from,” the esteemed Roger Ebert said in 2003 regarding this very subject. “You never know until they arrive.” To paraphrase Brad Pitt in “Moneyball,” I’ve heard people say for years about certain movies that this one will endure, “trust me, when I know, I know, and when it comes to this movie, I know,” and they don’t.

If aging has taught me anything, it’s that for all their pomp and circumstance, the Oscars are as ephemeral as they are everlasting, and that they tend to capture fleeting moments in time more than they portend the future. “The Silence of the Lambs” became an unexpected pop culture juggernaut and lightning rod in 1991; “The English Patient” put an exclamation point on the 90s indie revolution in 1996; like Kevin Costner and “Dances with Wolves” before him, Ben Affleck and “Argo” were carried away on a sudden wave of goodwill in 2012. On a recent episode of The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, Michael Schulman noted that generally the Best Picture nominees of any given year indirectly evoke a larger cultural feeling reflective of their respective moment. Mark Harris’s book Pictures at a Revolution captured one of these moments in full detail, an awards season pitched between the last vespers of the Golden Age and New Hollywood. I will not launch into yet another impassioned defense of “Titanic,” but at the time of its Oscar triumph in 1997, William Goldman, a fervent admirer of it, was also foreseeing a future in which people wondered what the fuss had been all about. In the moment, everybody knows everything, but in the end, as Goldman said, [say it with me] nobody knows anything. 

Ah, and yet, during this very awards season, Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times has notified us that “Hamnet” will stand the test of time, and Matt Neal of ABC Radio in Australia has advised us that “Sinners” will stand the test of time. All this talk of time is funny because it was a central subject of several Best Picture nominees. “Train Dreams” advances the idea that we can only understand our existence through the rearview mirror; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s superb “The Secret Agent” demonstrates how history can become buried beneath the sands of time while “Sentimental Value” illustrates that time alone does not necessarily heal all wounds; in one breathtaking sequence, “Sinners” draws past, present, and future all together at once in the same room. “One Battle After Another” draws all those concepts together too. Rather than having a character say, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us,” as he did in his own “Magnolia,” writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson creates a vibe, to use the parlance of our times, that improbably blends the 1960s/70s and the present-day. And in adapting and remodeling Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland as the story of a burned out revolutionary and his burgeoning revolutionary daughter, PTA embodies the endless tide of the 250-year battle over America’s soul going in and out.

Whether “One Battle After Another” is better than “Sinners,” or whether it deserves Best Picture more, honestly, means less to me than how both movies suggest a way forward in an industry that has been stuck at a crossroads doubling as a cul-de-sac for years now. Both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” are event films with a pulse, pop moviemaking with a distinct auteurist bent, supreme craft and relentless energy intertwined with a deeper meaning. Of course, both movies were produced by Warner Bros., which is merging with Paramount, run by one our most prominent uncaring idiot sons, and the code that was just cracked might intentionally be lost forever, one more moment in time destined to slip through our fingers.

Harrison Ford: an Appreciation

A few months ago, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I started watching “Shrinking,” the Apple TV show in which Harrison Ford plays Dr. Paul Rhoades, the unlikely patriarch of a makeshift family of therapists in his practice and all the people in their lives. It is firmly in the “Ted Lasso” dramedy vein, one where the comedy can sometimes hinder the drama, and vice-versa, allowing difficult ideas to go down a little too easy, though such sentimentality is counterbalanced by Ford’s irascible vulnerability. Everything that Ford is blossoms in the role of Paul, so much so that the character’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s forcing him to confront his mortality feels on some level like it is preparing us all for the eventuality of Ford’s death. I don’t mean to be dark. There is something refreshing about such honesty in our age of longevity-obsessed bros and Ford, after all, is the one who thought Han Solo should be killed off all the way back in “Return of the Jedi,” demonstrating that he already knew in a way that so many do not that not everything is meant to last forever. What’s more, in recently accepting the SAG-AFTRA Lifetime Achievement Award, Ford nodded at that reality too. “I am in a room of actors,” he began his acceptance speech by saying, “many of whom are here because they have been nominated to receive a prize for their amazing work while I’m here to receive a prize for being alive.” In that moment, taking a beat after the self-deprecating punchline for a deadpan stare, it was hard not to think: the old guy’s still got it. 

To a person of my generation, Ford is a big deal, having starred in touchstones whose names do not even need mentioning. Roles like Han Solo and Indiana Jones are iconic, but they became iconic later. He made them what they were, and he was virtually inextricable from them, and it’s why I’m almost positive that he was the first actor, nay, movie star whose name I really, truly knew. Now, the line on movie stars is that their persona tends to overwhelm the role, and while Ford’s characters almost always have that same gruff, laconic exterior, he creates interiors, too, as he did in the (more than middling) thriller masterpiece “The Fugitive.” He spends so much of that movie alone, and yet we also not only always know what his character is thinking but who he is. Ford’s pause before his character leaps off the dam turns a stunt set piece into an emotional leap of faith, the nexus of movie star acting. His craft tends to disappear before your eyes, which is why, I suspect, he never won an Oscar and was only nominated once; those fellow Academy actors like to see the acting. 

There was no bigger box office star in the 80s, and there were only a handful of box office stars in the 90s who were bigger, but as the industry changed in the new millennium, turning its attention to superheroes and more youth-oriented franchises, it was hard not to feel Ford’s star dim. He spent a couple decades starring in vanishing middle-class movies that felt like they were transplanted from the 80s and 90s (“Firewall,” “Morning Glory,”) and hawking bottled nostalgia in the new Indiana Jones movie and the new “Star Wars” trilogy. Where once he helped to create something new and invigorating, now he seemed to struggle from lack of a better idea. In 2010, one line in the “Extraordinary Measures” trailer turned him into a meme, and it felt like a demarcation between generations, one that remembered who he had been and one that wasn’t sure what to make of this curmudgeonly old coot. He finally conceded in 2025 and appeared in “Captain America: Brave New World,” the fourth movie in the “Captain America” series. Reviews were mixed.

That movie was an extension of a TV series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” evoking the blurring lines between the big screen and the small screen in our current entertainment landscape, a reality that Ford seemed to acknowledge by returning to scripted television for the first time since his big break. I don’t want to turn this into another movies versus TV debate, but I had always hoped that Hollywood could mount one more movie project worthy of Ford to give him a proper send-off. Yet, appropriately for someone essentially self-taught as an actor, he manifested that send-off for himself in his SAG-AFTRA Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech. In briefly remembering his own career while noting the whole purpose of SAG in the first place as protection and fellowship, he gave something that sounded a lot like a Hollywood farewell address. Even more than that, it was how he gave it. We live in an era of attention-seeking bluster and noise and yet, here was Ford with an innate master class in acting on camera, effortlessly drawing and holding the attention of everyone watching without raising his voice or over-exaggerating, epitomizing a movie star’s sense of presence. The pictures have gotten smaller, that’s indisputable, and Ford is living proof, but in that moment, he still felt larger than life. 

1995 Oscar Best Original Song: Revisited

The 90s were a boom time for movie soundtrack compilations and 1995 was the peak. The #1 selling single on the Billboard Hot 100 was Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” culled from the “Dangerous Minds” soundtrack, while the #4 selling single, Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose,” was included on the “Batman Forever” soundtrack. Other big Billboard hits of the year like Diana King’s “Shy Guy” and Dr. Dre’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” came from the “Bad Boys” and “Friday” soundtracks, respectively. The “Friday” soundtrack spent two weeks as the top-selling album in America and the “Dangerous Minds” soundtrack was the top-selling record for all of September. Oh, but there was so much more.

There were soundtracks with contemporary appeal, like those for “Empire Records” and “Mallrats” reflecting the era of alternative rock, and soundtracks with a historical pull, like “Dead Presidents” collecting so many great old R&B and Soul tunes that it released a Part One and Part Two. The Parker Posey-fronted cult classic “Party Girl” would have been unthinkable without its club-ready soundtrack while the “Boys on the Side” soundtrack was like proto-Lilith Fair. I requested for the latter for Christmas in 1995 and though Bonnie Raitt’s “You Got It” was the big single, as a Sheryl Crow stan, I most enjoyed her giving the Derek and the Dominos slice of blues-rock “Keep on Growing” a pop bent. (Wait, I have to stop and listen again right now. We continue.) Raitt’s song was a cover too, of Roy Orbison, and that brings me to my point: virtually none of the music I have mentioned was eligible to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Covers are disqualified. That’s why Whitney Houston could not be nominated, never mind win, for her globe-conquering “I Will Always Love You” from “The Bodyguard” in 1992, remember. Songs not written specifically for the movie itself are ineligible too, which disqualified “Kiss from a Rose,” plucked from Seal’s eponymous album released a year earlier. Songs that include samples are also ineligible which is why “Gangsta’s Paradise” in addition to “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” and “Shy Guy” could not make the cut. In a year where so much current pop music bled over into the movies, so much of it could not be recognized, leaving a Best Song category that looked like so many Best Song categories before it, not quite five unsalted crackers lined up in a row but close. And that is why I am here to reimagine this category if I, and I alone, were the judge and jury. Because what a category it could have been. 

1995 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees (winner in bold):

Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas - Music by Alan Menken and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Dead Man Walkin’ from Dead Man Walking - Music & Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen

Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? from Don Juan DeMarco - Music & Lyrics by Bryan Adams, Michael Kamen & Mutt Lange

Moonlight from Sabrina - Music by John Williams and Lyrics by Marilyn Bergman

You’ve Got a Friend in Me from Toy Story - Music & Lyrics by Randy Newman

Of course, we are required to remember right up front that Best Original Song is strictly limited to original songs in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means that “God Moving Over the Face of The Waters” by Moby in “Heat and “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley in “Strange Days” are ineligible. Add, say, “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia in “Casino,” “Come Here” by Kath Bloom in “Before Sunrise,” and, of course, “Techno Syndrome” by The Immortals in “Mortal Kombat” and, my God, what a category. Alas.

In researching this post, I was shocked to learn that the “Don Juan DeMarco” soundtrack was initially slated to include a duet recorded by, get this, Tori Amos and Michael Stipe. That song, “It Might Hurt a Bit,” was not included and never released, shunted for a Bryan Adams ballad that despite featuring preeminent flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia still, in the end, feels like a Bryan Adams ballad. And arriving as it did on the heels of both “Robin Hood” and “The Three Musketeers,” this one was like the dishwater left in the sink after all the dishes have been cleaned. Enough was enough, alright, Academy. It was time to move on to other things. Like Salt-N-Pepa’s body-positive “I Am the Body Beautiful” off the “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar” soundtrack that as best I can tell, deployed a wholly original beat which would have made it eligible. 

Ok. Time to address the elephant in the room – my main man, Bruce Springsteen. His theme for “Dead Man Walking” is solid. His musical spareness in this era could sometimes get the best of him, but it works well for this one, and though he cribs one lyric from his own songbook, he splits the difference with one that is just classic Bruce: “Sister, I won’t ask forgiveness. My sins are all I have.” But the truth is, Springsteen wrote a similarly themed sort of song the same year, “Highway 29,” that is vastly superior, as was his Oscar-winning Best Song two years prior, “Streets of Philadelphia.” And anyway, while “Dead Man Walking” is a very good movie, “Clueless,” strange as it might sound to compare them was better and deserved a Best Picture nod and the principal song of the “Clueless” soundtrack, Jill Sobule’s “Supermodel,” which was, in fact, written for the movie and therefore eligible under the Oscar’s rules, deserved a Best Song nod too. Springsteen is out and Sobule is in.

I am tempted to include “Ask for You” from the “Higher Learning” soundtrack, Raphael Saddiq’s bop that got all the way to #19 on the Billboard Hot 100, but I can’t bring myself to leave off “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” the foundational linchpin of “Toy Story” and the whole subsequent series. Of the actual nominees, that probably should have won, and it will be the only song to retain its nomination, even if I suspect that Randy Newman would tell me to keep it if he’s not getting the retroactive win. 

The easy listening of “Moonlight,” meanwhile, is barely worth a mention, reminding me of a line from Public Enemy’s “How to Kill a Radio Consultant”: “When ‘A Quiet Storm’ comes on I fall asleep.” The winning “Colors of the Wind,” meanwhile, is fine, I guess, but mostly just riding the coattails of the Disney songs that won this same award three of the four years preceding it. Because there is one soundtrack that some astute readers may have noticed I had not yet mentioned: “Waiting to Exhale,” a Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds-produced record so good that it was #1 on the charts for five weeks in early 1996, earned 11 Grammy nominations, and even forced self-proclaimed dean of the rock critics Robert Christgau to grudgingly grade it an A-. That none of its songs were nominated speaks to the 68th Academy Awards nominating but a single black nominee in all categories, leading to natural backlash, fury, and protest, much of it spurred by the recently deceased Jesse Jackson a couple decades before #OscarsSoWhite. I mean, no one could even mount a bad-faith argument about the American cultural meritocracy when it came to the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack because if that were true, the album would have had two nominations in this category, at least. 

The lead single was Whitney Houston’s “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” which was nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys and was #14 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for 1996. It was a quality song, you don’t need me to tell you that, but remember, I’m judge and jury here and I’m giving the first spot to TLC’s “This Is How It Works.” Because I love the song, of course, and also because I like imagining a bunch of white septuagenarian and octogenarians watching a performance of a song by three black women coaching their men through sex while a person in the production room sits there the whole time on panicked edge like Beaker with his finger hovering over the broadcast delay button. It might have been the greatest five minutes in Oscar history. Alas. 

But. In the end, the faux retroactive Oscar can only go to one song off the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack, and it goes to Toni Braxton’s. If you ask me now, 30 years later, to explain what 1995-96 sounded like, well, I might just play you Toni Braxton’s “Let It Flow.” 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Nowhere to Hide (1987)

“Nowhere to Hide” ends with a car chase in which a helicopter is chasing a car, which is just how you want a mid-80s conspiracy thriller to conclude, but what stuck with me more was when in the middle of an earlier car chase, ex-Marine Barbara Cutter (Amy Madigan) is forced to change a tire when one goes flat. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen that before: a mid-car chase tire change. And whether a spare could hold up under car chase conditions when the pursuit continues, well, I was less concerned with that than how the episode demonstrated Barbara’s cool resourcefulness. It’s one element that did not feel straight off the shelf, as so much of “Nowhere to Hide” does, one part “Commando,” one part “Hard to Kill,” one part “Rambo.” Why there is even a macabre nod to the space shuttle Challenger in so much as this conspiracy thriller turns on a defective military helicopter C-ring. 

The last one is being investigated by Barbara’s husband (Daniel Hugh Kelly), promptly killed when he gets close to the truth, and right in front of his and Barbara’s young son, Johnny (Robin MacEachern). That distinguishes “Nowhere to Hide” as an 80s movie, alright, quite happy to blend gruesome violence with a tender mother/son relationship. Granted, the son is often treated less as a character than a plot device, unwittingly toting around both the C-ring waiting to expose the truth and the homing beacon that ensures he and his mom can never get too far away from the bad guys, but Madigan’s emotional ferocity makes you believe all this is happening, nevertheless. It’s why even if one part of me thinks “Nowhere to Hide” could have used more Michael Ironside as Barbara’s survivalist Vietnam-vet brother, another part of me knows nothing would surpass Madigan embodying Barbara’s maternal hysterical strength, changing a car tire in lieu of lifting a car.