Fuck the #WhiteOscars: A mash-up of Jill St. John's 1966 Oscar striptease and AlunaGeorge is far more satisfying in its two little minutes than the Oscars will ever be

Somebody who goes by "LOSANGELENA" has combined two of my favorite things: the atrocious, unintentionally funny and long-out-of-print 1966 showbiz melodrama The Oscar and the British R&B duo AlunaGeorge's 2014 joint "Supernatural." Actually, The Oscar isn't exactly one of my favorite things. I wouldn't say I like The Oscar. What I do like is chuckling over almost every inept element of this Harlan Ellison-scripted, MST3K-worthy movie, from Stephen Boyd's overacting and his weird Hayden Christensen-esque voice (while he shrilly plays the part of Frankie Fane, an ambitious Hollywood asshole who ends up becoming an Oscar contender) to the equally shrill Tony Bennett's visible nervousness in his first acting role.

It's no wonder that the singer of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" and "Rags to Riches" never acted again, aside from his cameos during The Simpsons, Muppets Most Wanted and Alec Baldwin's endlessly quotable "Tony Bennett Show" sketch on SNL. The only stars in The Oscar who give what could be considered non-cringeworthy and not-so-clichéd performances are a non-comedic Milton Berle as an oddly principled talent agent and an equally non-comedic Jack Soo as an Asian houseboy who--and this is kind of remarkable because this is a movie from the not-exactly-racially-enlightened '60s--doesn't have an accent. It's funny how the two stand-up comics in the Oscar cast--two guys who weren't known for possessing dramatic chops when they were alive--give the least cringeworthy and most naturalistic performances in the whole movie.

(Photo source: Catfan's Feline Fatale Follies)

The best way to approach this kind of soapy "I don't give a shit who I bang or who I ruin to climb my way to the top" material is to do it as a comedy. That's why I love Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which is so razor-sharp in its humor that it's made it difficult to take any musician biopic seriously anymore. Walk Hard takes musician biopic clichés like any scene where a white musician as a kid appropriates black musicians' sounds, basically says to the audience, "Hasn't this always looked ridiculous and stupid to you?," and then proceeds to make those clichés look even more ridiculous and stupid.

Instead, The Oscar plays it completely dead serious when it should be, oh, I don't know, more like Soapdish or the forgotten WB single-camera sitcom Grosse Pointe, which was basically Soapdish for the 90210/Dawson's Creek crowd--or better yet, more like John Waters. In fact, in an alternate universe far more entertaining than our own, The Oscar was probably directed by John Waters instead of being under the hacky, mid-'60s network TV-ish direction of D.O.A. co-writer Russell Rouse, with Divine in the role of a feminized Frankie Fane. And then in another alternate universe even more entertaining than that one, The Oscar was directed by Russ Meyer. Either of those guys would have transformed The Oscar into a comedic masterpiece.

This 1966 atrocity--which would have swept the Razzies had the Razzies existed in the '60s--is not on DVD. The only place where viewers can catch The Oscar is TCM, which shows a terrible-looking print. That's where I saw The Oscar and realized that as a dramatic actor, Tony Bennett is a decent watercolor painter. The movie features a striptease by future Bond girl Jill St. John that I assume was racy for its pre-Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?/Blow-Up time, and that's the scene from The Oscar that "LOSANGELENA" perfectly mashed up with singer Aluna Francis and producer George Reid's pulsating "Supernatural," along with footage from some late '60s Italian sexploitation flick I'm not familiar with.



I get more enjoyment out of the mash-up of The Oscar and AlunaGeorge than I ever would out of the tedious Oscar telecast--which I haven't watched in eons--and its annual array of frustrating snubs and overall out-of-touchness. Instead of dozing off during the 20,528th Chuck Workman montage of the night or fuming over "Selma is a well-crafted movie, but there’s no art to it" (I'd like to know what drugs that Academy member was on) and the absences of Selma star David Oyelowo and his director Ava DuVernay in the Oscar categories (plus the absences of a few other actors of color who delivered exceptional performances that went unrecognized), I'll be spending time with The Walking Dead, where an Asian American guy gets to be a hero who gets the girl for a change and actors of color like Steven Yeun and Danai Gurira receive far juicier material than the hackneyed kind the Academy would rather pay attention to when one or two actors of color actually do enter their often fucked-up radar.

Rex Navarrete's Badly Browned: The first Filipino American stand-up album

"You're gonna piss me out!"
--one of many Rex Navarrete character malapropisms during Badly Browned

While watching a back-to-back KQED evening marathon of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month-themed documentary programming (Arthur Dong's Hollywood Chinese and Jeff Adachi's The Slanted Screen, a doc that both PBS and TCM seem to air a million times), I thought to myself, "These APAHM nights on KQED could really use a doc about Asian American comedians like Adachi's other doc, You Don't Know Jack. Why are minority history months always so damn reverent and serious?"

I wonder when You Don't Know Jack--the doc about comedian and Barney Miller scene-stealer Jack Soo, not the recently greenlit Pacino-as-Jack Kevorkian biopic of the same title--will show up on KQED and add some much-needed humor to their often stuffy APAHM programming.

(Somebody ought to make a doc about present-day Asian American stand-ups, and it better not be in the style of annoying and vapid reality shows about stand-ups like Last Comic Standing or any other show that's not the short-lived Comedians of Comedy, still the only reality show about stand-ups that's worth a damn. The doc ought to be more like Comedian, the smart 2002 doc about Jerry Seinfeld, Orny Adams and the difficulties of the craft of stand-up. The Asian American stand-up scene has enough fascinating stories, interesting ideological disagreements and juicy rivalries to fill an entire edition of Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America.)

Comedians of color don't get enough praise or props during minority history months, which is why I'm devoting this post to the first Filipino American live stand-up comedy album, a 1998 CD that's a solid knee-slapper for almost all of its 65 minutes. It's even got kickass scratch instrumental interludes provided by DJ Qbert too.

I used to play Rex Navarrete's Badly Browned CD all the time on my university radio station. Navarrete is the first Filipino American stand-up I've seen who's represented us--a certain generation of Empire Strikes Back-watching, Skratch Piklz alumni album-buying Filipinos who grew up on Pryor, Mooney, Cosby and Murphy instead of Dolphy. For a while, I used to be able to recite huge chunks of Badly Browned tracks like the Star Wars bit, the ad-libbed "KBOY with Mr. Bolisario" skit ("Long time ago, when I was a childrens, uh, the, uh, Aquaman, uh, Sunday afternoon, used to cook me chee-ken!"), "Maritess vs. the Superfriends" and "Mrs. Scott's ESL Class," about a rambling Pinay ESL teacher named Mrs. Scott who makes hilariously ditzy statements like "the Philippines is the southernmost island of Spain" (I love hearing the mostly Fil-Am San Francisco State audience boo after that line).

On his site, Navarrete recalled the recording of Badly Browned:

Kormann Roque of Classified Records and I came up with the same idea, why don't we experiment and record a live show of mine and see how it sounds? So we did. My buddy, Elrik Jundis, produced a venue and a show for me at UC Berkeley's International House on November 1st, 1997. A one-night only, two show evening. This was where "Maritess" was taped. The best thing about accomplishing that feat was helping one of my best friends give birth to her son, Lakas, earlier that afternoon. I became an instant godfather. I named one of Q-bert's tracks after him on BADLY BROWNED. I'd say that that day had to be one of the most blessed days of my life and my career.

On April 20th, 1998, the same production team, now with full support from Classified Records, came together to bring to SF State's McKenna Theater the live taping of BADLY BROWNED in a packed, standing room only house of 700 plus fans. This was so awesome, I never thought so many Filipinos would dig Flip comedy this much and this intensely. Nevertheless, we finished that night exhausted and a couple months later came our with that first live comedy CD. It featured scratch tracks from DJ Q-bert from the Invisibl Skratch Piklz which gave it a Def Comedy Jam kind of feel to it. It still remains to be a great seller online and at my gigs, thanks to your support. I think BADLY BROWNED contains some of my most favorite material to that point in my career.

I wish I had more to say about this milestone CD that had me rolling during much of my senior year, other than I'm looking forward to Navarrete's fourth stand-up album, and I could never view Starship Troopers the same way again after Navarrete squashed the movie version with his big tsinelas.