I think it's good for the Academy Awards that Quentin Jerome Tarantino won for best original screenplay — unlike the usual fare of a technically bright Lincoln script, fixed in a history lesson, we get the Tarantino modernized version of reviewing slavery. It may be a mess, a joke, and it may bubble up or shock open the realest answers. Sometimes a winner is what it can produce elsewhere, more than what it is. I see Tarantino as a derivative auteur with just the right amount of originality and just the right amount of bullshit. He fits exactly into this New World Order of things. Right, he's the joker. He couldn't balance a smooth portrait like John Ford (whom he hates) or the wise puzzlement of Jean-Luc Godard if his life depended on it. He's a channel ghost of a million films, a collagist, who then inspires original thought elsewhere, or even breaks some sound barriers. His choice of actors and assemblages is often wiser than his films.
