Word: smugness
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...first WASP to chair the event since David Letterman in 1995 (bad omen) and the first white-haired guy since Johnny Carson (1979-82 and 1984). Indeed, Martin's persona is a gloss on the old "Tonight Show" star; for 30 years he's played a doofus Carson, a smug buffoon. "Please," he said during his nine-minute opening monologue, "hold your applause until it's for me." Now, we know that the real Steve Martin, whoever that may be, is an art collector and New Yorker humorist. So after Billy Crystal's wisenheimer tumling and Whoopi Goldberg's japes...
...Christians needn't be entirely smug on the subject of destroying holy images. Iconoclasm (literally, the breaking of images) was the name of an eighth- and ninth-century movement in the Eastern church against the worship of holy pictures. In 753, the Emperor Constantine summoned a great synod to forbid image-worship forever. The synod declared it blasphemous to represent, by the dead materials of paint and carved stone, those who live with Christ. The bishops damned image-worshipers as idolators (and there is a commandment about that, is there not?). Pictures of the saints in churches were replaced...
Chocolat is the story of a smug, sleepy town invaded by a charismatic outsider who feeds the villagers sweets and makes them do crazy things. To speak metaphorically, the town is Los Angeles; the outsider is Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein; and what could be nuttier than voting Chocolat a nomination for the year's best film? The movie is at best a trifle, and at most a tribute to Weinstein, a man who knows that Hollywood is the art of the sell. He can feed the Academy voters anything and have them say Mmm-mmm, good...
...other?or reinforce it. The betting is that Traffic, as the more recent film, and far more ambitious, has a swell shot at the top spot. What's guaranteed is that Erin will get at least one award: a Best Actress statuette for Julia Roberts' showy, blowsy, smug, applause-truckling, wildly self-aggrandizing performance (which, by the way, we didn't much care for). Roberts will beat out the estimable Laura Linney, who won critics' prizes as the single mom in the indie drama You Can Count...
...will probably be Ben Stein, sitting and looking smug," Takao said...