Oscar Degrees of Separation

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Siedah Sings To Hadley

As far back as the cave humans no doubt took satisfaction in what Samuel Johnson called “imagined connections to celebrity.”  (“By the way, I know the chief’s brother.”)  I am not above this guilty pleasure myself and can tell a “I did cocaine with Tim Robbins at the Howard the Duck cast party and talked about our future writing lives while the two midgets who wore the duck suits ran around and before hitting on Lea Thompson and yelling at her when she turned her nose up on me” story with the best of them.  (True story by the way–for another post.)

And so now, at Oscar time, I will not focus on dull categories like “Best Picture,” but on the much more interesting “People We Want to Win Because They Have a Connection to Dave.”

Obviously Clooney and I go way back and have both faced the burden of being dashing 50 year olds, but George has gotten enough press this week.

Let’s instead start–and why not–with Siedah Garret, who is up for Best Song for “Real in Rio” in the film Rio.  Here are some Bill and Dave reasons we want Siedah to win:

1. Her vastly underrated album, Siedah, was my daughter Hadley’s favorite album, and the only way you could get Hadley to sleep was to walk her up and down while blasting songs like “Get the Hell Out of Here.”

2. At the time the album came out she was going out with my oldest friend Dave, and when I met her she was funny, generous, blunt and dynamic.  I suspect that hasn’t changed.

3. It makes sense for her to win for a song in a kids movie since I know she likes singing to kids.  That’s her in the picture above singing songs from her album to a two month old Hadley.

4. The movie has a lot of birds in it.  Ditto the song.

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As well, as rooting for Siedah we are pulling hard for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Descendants.  Why?  Because it’s a fine movie, well-written and literate?  Well, sure there’s that…..but really it’s because Kimi’s brother wrote it.  That’s Kimi Faxon, writer, teacher, friend.  Her brother Nat Faxon co-wrote the screenplay along with his regular co-writer, Jim Rash, and director Alexander Payne.

We will be rooting hard for Nat tonight. But with no disrepect to Nat, Kimi is still our favorite writer in the Faxon family.  Check out “Personal Belongings, in the anthology Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, & Abortion which according to Eli Hastings, “will rip you asunder and piece you back together.”

Here’s a pdf of the essay: kimi hemingway.