WEDNESDAY GIRL

Debbie Harry

BIG STORE

Once upon a time, in the days before the shopping mall, a tremendous amount of care went into the windows displays of men's clothing shops. Leaders in the Ivy League look like Brooks Brothers in New York and J. Press in Connecticut set the tone, but there were similar shops the length and width of the country and during their heyday, those window displays nothing short of meticulously assembled mini-masterpieces.

San Francisco's Financial District is home to one of the survivors of that fine tradition, Cable Car Clothiers at 200 Bush Street, and its windows are just as majestically appointed now as in years past. There are shops in the city selling similar gear – in fact, there's a Brooks Brothers mere blocks away on Post Street – but only the Cable Car window displays offer such splendid little snapshots of sartorial elegance...

LET DOWN

This is truly tasteless: A television advertisement for Citroën using footage from a 1968 John Lennon interview, but using a voice impersonator to put make Lennon say something he never said. Best of all is when "Lennon" asks how taking inspiration from the past is rock and roll. Clearly, whoever produced this atrocity was blissfully unaware of Lennon's own love of '50s rock and roll and R&B, or even the fact he recorded an entire album of covers from the '50s and early '60s called Rock and Roll. Sean Lennon recently defended the ad, saying it was done to keep Lennon in the "public consciousness," but how is distorting his father's views (for profit, no less) a good way of doing that? Incredibly poor decision on the part of Lennon's estate.

GROOVY MOVIES

The Academy Awards are today, and it's still a little shocking that despite expanding the nominations from five to 10, the contest for Best Picture is more or less between two films: Avatar and The Hurt Locker. That's especially a shame because while The Hurt Locker is a worthy of recognition, Avatar really shouldn't be on any list including the word "best," unless it's for the relatively small field of best 3D effects, or maybe there could be a new category: Most Finely Polished Turd.

People say Avatar was an amazing experience. Good films are judged on more than that, though, and ignoring the unique way Avatar was presented, there's really not much to recommend about the film. Even people who like it admit the story wasn't particularly good and there wasn't anything to separate the acting from that of any other big budget action flick. But it raked in pile after giant pile of money and the Hollywood press breathlessly dubbed it a "game changer," so obviously, it deserves an Oscar nomination.

Meanwhile, brilliant pieces of filmmaking like A Serious Man, District Nine, An Education, Inglourious Basterds, Up and Up in the Air and are all considered long shots in the Best Picture category. That's the irony of it all: For once the nominations are packed with genuinely great films, there's a better than good chance the film that didn't even deserve the nomination will win the actual award.

For what it's worth, here are my picks:

Best Picture - Up in the Air

Best Director - Jason Reitman for Up in the Air

Best Actor - Colin Firth for A Single Man

Best Actor in a Supporting Role - Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds

Best Actress - Carey Mulligan for An Education

Best Actress in a Supporting Role - Vera Farmiga for Up in the Air

Best Animated Feature Film - The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Best Adapted Screenplay - An Education, by Nick Hornby

Best Original Screenplay - Inglourious Basterds, by Quentin Tarantino

SOME GIRLS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS

I was a little too young to be aware of the Runaways when they were actually together, but I do remember the huge and sudden impact Joan Jett had on music a few years later. I saw Jett at one of the first live shows I went to in the early ‘80s and she had a truly magnetic stage presence, dangerous as well as transfixing. Her genuine achievements – the Runaways were the first all-girl rock band, Jett’s Blackheart records was the first record label started by a woman, a string of platinum albums and Top 40 singles, including the chart topping “I Love Rock and Roll” – haven’t exactly been celebrated over the years, but I’m guessing the upcoming Runaways film will change that. It could turn out a hot mess, but the casting seems impeccable and there’s an energy to the trailers that suggests Hollywood may gave gotten a rock biopic right for a change. Michael Shannon certainly seems dead-on as creepster Svengali Kim Fowley, and if you compare the trailers to clips of actual Runaways performances from the ‘70s, both Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning seem to be channeling Joan Jett and Cherie Currie amazingly well...