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Oscars Live Blog 2024

2:22 AM Oppenheimer.  And I am going to cut out pretty quickly because it almost 2:30 in the morning, and I have to get some sleep, and be at Hachette HQ for my first meeting of London Book Fair week in not much more than eight hours.  This winner is deserving enough.  I did see it twice. I didn’t like it more the second time, but I liked it well enough. 2:13 AM This was a tough category to predict, but no complaints about Emma Stone who gives a fearless performance that is sui generis in Poor Things. Look at that list of nominees, and this is the toughest category full of brilliant performances.  But Emma’s - it’s the sui generis part that makes it worthwhile of winning over the others IMHO. 2:11 AM The whole dessert thing is challenged when I am in a temporary borrowed hotel room.  However, Bryce, outside King Cross/St Pancras on Tue-Fri afternoon are some food stalls, and on Friday I went and got some brownies from the stall that has a dozen brownies all of which are tempting. Also
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Oscars Live Blog 2023

11:39 pm - only three hours and thirty nine minutes, about how long it takes to read a Bookstore Care or Aurora Teagarden or Ground Rules mystery.  And about half as long as sitting thru All Quiet.  11:32 pm - Everything Everywhere All at Oscar. 11:23 pm -  Encino Man and George of the Jungle are the big winners tonight.  I’m very happy for Brendan Fraser.  I would have first seen Fraser in Nancy Savoca’s Dogfight in 1991. As a hunk in School Ties. Over thirty years later… 11:16 pm - The ads have been disappointing.  I’m yearning for Ellen DeGeneris ads for regular low pricing at J C Penney. Ads for a plan that was a great and also utterly ruinous idea simultaneously. For something, though, that feels fresh and distinct and creative.  Not Rolex ads that are like Rolex ads in the Wimbledon final. 11:12 pm - Two more prizes, editing and Director, for Everything Everywhere All at Once.  This seems like a good occasion to post a link to an LA Times article about the laundromat where the mo
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Oscars Preview 2023

 Sigh. This isn't going to be a great year for hate watching the Oscars. Before I get deep into, you can see my Top Ten of 2022 here . There is one and only one Best Picture nominee that I disliked intensely, which is All Quiet on the Western Front. If it wins, I'll be too frozen to deal from hell freezing over to car.  If it wins something else, I'm not going to spend the emotional energy.  And part of me admires Netflix's ability year after year to take some piece of claptrap artsy filmmaking and invest millions of dollars and get it into the completion. I wish every of my clients' books would be published with similar investment and enthusiasm. I don't even know what movie I'm rooting for.  I saw The Fabelmans twice, it held up well, and it's a great movie. I've seen Top Gun: Maverick a handful of times, and could watch it over and over and over again. Tar has kept its pull on me four months after, and I might just see it again this weekend.  I di
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movie review - Operation Fortune: ruse de guerre

  A perfectly fine way to spend a couple hours.  There isn’t a plot per se. The movie is so disinterested in plot that we don’t even know until well into the movie what our competing bands of thieves are vying for.  But the string of incidents is acted by an excellent cast, all of whom seem to be enjoying the,eves.  Hugh Grant is especially enjoying, channeling Michael Caine, portraying a James Bond villain with the megalomania dialed down to around a 1 on the scale,. You really have to see the performance, as well as Josh Hartnett’s, to understand them.I don’t want to try. The flaw of the movie is that there are too many characters in that in between place of needing either to do more or to br consolidated. Like, what if the Cary Elwes character were a little more Peter Graves in Mission: Impossible and actually part of it, rather than being an M in a movie that already has an M. And that would free up Aubrey Plaza to be the sniper\sharpshooter, which would be a nice gender twist in a
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Boskone 60 Schedule

COME ONE, COME ALL - I'm delighted to be on programming at Boskone in 2023.  It's one of my favorite conventions to go to, in part because it's proven to be one of the best places for me to discover new clients.  It also has one of the best proportion of pro attendees of pretty much any convention outside of a WorldCon or a World Fantasy. My panels and panel times are all below.  In addition to three panels, I also have a Kaffeeklatsch, which is a good chance to have questions answered in a small group setting.  Because it's limited seating you need to check the convention website  for information on signing up. A lot of other agency clients are going to be at the convention, many on programming, including Dan Moren, Suzanne Palmer, Auston Habershaw, Walter Jon Williams, Toni L. P. Kelner aka Leigh Perry, Zac Topping, Randee Dawn, and Steve Kelner.   The convention and all programming takes place at the Westin Boston Seaport District, just up Summer St. from South Stati
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Joshua and the Query Manager

I decided to change my process for getting queries as I prepared for heading from 2022 into 2023.  And here's an updated/revised version of my earlier blog post about querying. THE GUIDELINES: 1.  If you don’t follow the guidelines, your query will be deleted, unread and without a response. 2.  I'm now using Query Manager, a system that's generally been proven helpful to both agents and authors, and all queries should be submitted via https://querymanager.com/JoshuaBilmes. 3.  Once upon a time, I asked only for the query letter, but it's been a long time since queries were sent in #10 business envelopes with an SASE. At this point, I'm not longer accepting paper queries, and I'm asking you to send ten sample pages with your Query Manager query.  This will help speed things along, since I can more easily give a "yes" or "no" on borderline queries where the pages themselves are serving as tie-breaker, and I'm less likely to ask for a full m
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Oscars Live Blog 2022

11:55 PM Poor Netflix. Poor, poor Netflix. It can put all the money it wants into movies that are like the Wonder Twins, movies which have the form of Oscar winners but which really aren’t. It can spend its riches and get award nominations aplenty.  But then the actual voting begins, and more and more people come into the process, and then the hollowness of things starts to show. The Irishman isn’t Goodfellas. Roma isn’t The Prisoner of Azkaban. The Power of the Dog isn’t Unforgiven. And when the time comes for the awards to get announced, Netflix doesn’t have the top prize.  Poor poor poor poor Netflix.  But that said, Netflix did give us Tick Tick…Boom this year. Also, Netflix isn’t poor. But there’s a rich irony to having Apple TV+ get a Best Picture for CODA while Netflix is still waiting. And as to the show, it’s an Oscar ceremony. It is what it is.  Embrace what it is. Present the awards on the air, please.  Don’t farm out production to Eon Productions, which is what happened acc
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