Groupon, the group discount website, found itself in the unenviable position of Monday morning quarterbacking--trying to explain, one day later, how its Super Bowl ads misfired so badly.

Groupon founder Andrew Mason explained in a post on the website Monday afternoon that the online coupon company had meant to poke fun at itself and at "shameless self promotion" in most ads, not at the downtrodden Tibetan people, threatened Brazilian rain forests or endangered whales.

Many viewers thought the irony misfired and, instead, seemed to make light of causes like freedom for Tibet and the rain forests in Brazil. Several critics rated the ads--in which spokesman quickly jumped from a sociopolitical issue to a bargain available from Groupon--as the worst to air during Sunday's big game.

Mason said in his post that his company's intention had been to raise awareness for Groupon and for the causes, in hopes that people would contribute. "That’s why organizations like Greenpeace, BuildOn, the Tibet Fund and the Rainforest Action Network all decided to throw their support behind the campaign (read Greenpeace’s blog post here)," he wrote.

In fact, the nonprofit organizations approved the scripts for the spots in advance, though they did not see the final editing cuts because of the need to make the deadline for broadcast, a Groupon spokeswoman told the Big Picture.

Groupon's three ads featured celebrity spokespeople--actor Tim Hutton, model Elizabeth Hurley and actor Cuba Gooding Jr.--telling the stories, respectively of Tibet, Brazilian forests and whaling. Mid-ad the celebs then turned to pitches for the online coupon service--noting you could get a big break at a Himalayan restaurant in Chicago, a New York salon offering Brazilian bikini wax and on whale tours.

At that point, particularly in the Tibet ad, you could almost hear the needle screeching across the vinyl album. Non sequitur alert! 

"Our ads highlight the often trivial nature of stuff on Groupon when juxtaposed against bigger world issues, making fun of Groupon," Mason wrote, by way of explanation. "Why make fun of ourselves? Because it’s different -– ads are traditionally about shameless self promotion, and we’ve always strived to have a more honest and respectful conversation with our customers."

When you have to explain a joke that costs you millions to produce, you know something went terribly wrong. The pivot from altruism to commercialism seemed earnest or awkward, at best. It failed to take clear enough aim at crass commercialism.

Mason used his message Monday to try to return the focus to the charitable organizations Groupon said it set out to help. "To that point, if the ads affected you, we hope you’ll head over to SaveTheMoney.org and make a donation (which we’ll match)," Mason wrote, "we’re hoping to raise a lot of money."

He concluded with this: "The last thing we wanted was to offend our customers -– it’s bad business and it’s not where our hearts are."

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Arianna Huffington remade the media landscape this morning when she became content leader for AOL, which purchased her 5-year-old Huffington Post website for $315 million.

That may have been the top news story at Huffington Post. But the other headlines attracting bundles of clicks there Monday were: “Kim Kardashian Loves 'W Magazine' Nude Photos,”  “Christina Aguilera Totally Messes Up National Anthem” and “Jennifer Aniston Wears Bra Vibrator on 'The Ellen DeGeneres Show.' "

Those who know Huffington mostly from television will focus on her liberal politics, support of health care reform and opposition to America’s two wars. Conservative opinion makers quickly slammed AOL, saying its credibility as a news source would slip away thanks to its union with Huffington.

But as the previous headlines demonstrated, government and politics take a backseat at Huffington Post to the real traffic drivers -- features, celebrities, gossip and other "verticals" that are pieced together and presented with brilliant aggregation and search engine optimization (SEO).

As pioneering blogger and web designer Jason Kottke tweeted, "HuffPo sold to AOL for $315 million. Is that the biggest exit ever for an SEO company?"

Others who work in the online news and information space agreed that what AOL got, at a high premium, was an operation brilliant at creating a water hole and drawing the animals in to drink.

Huffington Post has led most other sites by smoothly incorporating social media so that friends can use Facebook and Twitter to find out what friends are reading. It’s not uncommon to find stories replayed on HuffPo getting far more traffic than they did at the originating site, though links connect back to the source.

“I watch the way they put it together and they are just way ahead of the pack,” said an executive at another Web operator, who asked not to be named because his owners prohibit talking about rivals.

It’s not uncommon for posts to draw thousands of comments. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s withering takedown of Sarah Palin (who he dubbed a “phony pioneer girl”) and her TV hunting expedition lured in more than 700,000 readers, was "liked" more than 100,000 times on Facebook and drew 7,800 comments.

Other sites only dream about that kind of traffic. And much of the content comes from friends of Arianna. Like Sorkin, they don’t get paid.

The charming HuffPost doyenne is herself one of the most valuable assets AOL has acquired. At every one of her myriad media appearances, she’ll now be introduced as the guru of content for AOL and all its sites — which include TechCrunch, Engadget and many others.

That sort of buzz and relevance has escaped AOL in recent years. It will be invaluable to an operation that thrived in what now seems like a long-ago time — when most computer users relied on dial-up connection for Internet access.

But what about making money?

Huffington has made only a little so far. Her operation has mostly been propped up by venture capital. It reportedly brought in $30 million in revenue in 2010, breaking into profitability for the first time. In its announcement Monday, the company said it hopes to increase that to $50 million this year and to lure more premium advertising as the AOL-Huffington Post combo expects to attract 117 million unique visitors a month.

That may all happen. But there are many skeptics. Among the questions: Can Huffington, known as a storyteller and promotional whiz, manage a complicated business amalgam? Some of those who have worked for her question her organizational abilities.

Do ad “synergies” really emerge, or is this just another Web deal that is not greater than the sum of its parts? Steve Case, the former AOL chief executive involved in the famously unsuccessful merger with Time Warner, was among the immediate skeptics of the new deal.

 "Tim Armstrong says 1 + 1 will equal 11. Really? That wasn't my experience," Case tweeted.

-- James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: The Huffington Post website draws a lot of traffic with celebrity titillation, such as a headline about nude photos of the pictured Kim Kardashian. AOL bought the website for $315 million, hoping to benefit from its aggregation and search engine optimization. Credit: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images

There was hardly any real mention of it on Fox during the hours and hours of hype that accompanied that national holiday that is Super Bowl Sunday, but the NFL is girding for a horrific labor clash over a new collective bargaining agreement that could put the coming NFL season in jeopardy. So I guess it was no surprise that the NFL, which sees itself as a national institution that's too big to fail, put some serious muscle into presenting itself in the best possible light before the game began, running an astounding faux patriotic ad for itself, narrated by Michael Douglas, that cast the league as a hallmark of American values, second only to, well, maybe Clint Eastwood.

Called "The Journey," the short film put together by Fox Sports was a more effective propaganda vehicle than any of the much heralded car, beer and movie ads that normally grab our attention during the Super Bowl broadcast. It opened with a series of Americana images guaranteed to stir our souls, all symbolizing the perilous odyssey our country has traveled -- immigrants streaming past the Statue of Liberty, soldiers landing on Omaha Beach, the young John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting at his father's funeral, Martin Luther King Jr. orating at the March on Washington and rescue workers raising a flag at Ground Zero.

Then, oh, so gently, aided by a celestial choir, the visual images melted into a series of scenes of football triumphs, as Douglas cannily linked the pride we take in our nation's accomplishments with the rugged glory of the two football teams prepared to do battle. Or as he said: "Tonight, here we are, united, to see their journey. Two storied franchises, one founded by a shipping clerk ... the other named after the proud steel mills that forged this nation. Green Bay and Pittsburgh, where the game of football is in their blood. This is so much bigger than a football game. These two teams have given us the chance, for one night, not only to dream, but to believe."

OMG! If it had been a McDonald's commercial, we'd all be quietly appalled by the shamelessness of it all. If it were an ad for a Disney movie, we'd be insulted by the studio's chutzpah. But because it was the hallowed NFL, and we were all revved up for a brutal football clash, everyone in front of my TV set was raising a beer to the sky in a triumphant salute. I don't know exactly who came up with the brilliant idea for the ad, but I'm guessing that more than one GOP presidential aspirant who was watching turned to an aide and said, "Find out who cut that spot. Let's get them locked up for 2012."

The NBA finds better singers to do the National Anthem, Major League Baseball casts its World Series in a more nostalgic light, but when it comes to making itself feel like an irreplaceable part of the national fabric, no one casts a hypnotic spell like the NFL. Green Bay may have won the game, but it was the NFL, hand in glove with Fox Sports, that did the best job of burnishing its image.

Photo: Super Bowl MVP Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers celebrates after winning Super Bowl XLV 31-25 against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Arlington, Texas. Credit: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images

 Super Bowl ads will be the highlight of choice for millions of viewers Sunday. You’ll see a lot of high production and fevered story-making crammed into 30 or 60 seconds. Some of it’s pretty good, but the one that will really grab you is one of the simplest--a little boy in a Darth Vader costume trying desperately to make the force his own.

Bucking the tradition of trying to wow 'em only on game day, Volkswagen posted the Vader ad on YouTube at mid-week. By Saturday night it had already rung up more than 11 million views, and it seemed to be gaining momentum as kickoff approached.

Several other car makers will also show spots Sunday, but the ad for the 2012 Volkswagen Passat will get inside people’s heads and stay there because it combines the iconic “Star Wars” character and a classic sentiment—a child’s desire to be larger than life. Somehow a simple sedan parked in the family driveway makes his wish come true.

The spot is one of two Volkswagen of America will show during the game. The other features an animated beetle, the creature, to highlight the Beetle, the car. On YouTube, where viewers vote with their clicks, the Beetle ad also drew a crowd, about 1.1 million by Saturday, but not nearly the throngs viewing the Darth Vader ad. The ad agency Deutsch Inc. gets credit for the great spots.

In contrast to the VW ads, other car makers will be laboring profusely to make their point--like summer blockbusters taking on a charming little indie pic. They meet varying degrees of success.

El Segundo-based David & Goliath has come up with a clever take for the Kia, with everyone from a cop to a billionaire, to a sea god to, well, you’ll see, going to extreme length to try to snatch possession of the Kia Optima.

PMK BNC offers an elaborate story to try to burst the bubble of one luxury brand, Mercedes-Benz, in favor of another, Audi. The 60-second spot has a couple of wealthy swells trapped in a prison of convention. When they make their jail break (they take their stuffed Dodo with them) the greatest threat is their starchy old habits.

That sets up a fun little kicker to the spot, involving Kenny G. But good luck getting viewers to pick up all the subtle details (in prison, the rich clink crystal; no tin cups raking across the prison bars) while they're pounding brew and dip at a Super Bowl party.

Kethcum, in contrast, tries to spread it’s message for Hyundai’s Sonata across three 30-second ads. The conceit is that we have been hypnotized into thinking compact cars can’t be special (part 1)  wowed with some graphics that show the unexpected can happen (part 2) and then showing that old, anachronistic  technology (a giant cellphone, a phonograph worn around the neck like an iPod) doesn’t have to be accepted.

All of the efforts are worthy. But the one you’ll actually want to see again is Volkswagen's, powered by the force of a tiny Darth Vader who tells a simple story, with a little body language and nary a word.

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

As my blogmate Jim Rainey has frequently pointed out, Fox News has its own unique view of the world, where the facts rarely get in the way, most recently in the way Fox pollster Frank Luntz used a strange brand of faux science to find a panel of people unimpressed by President Obama's recent State of the Union address. But when it comes to seeing the world through the wrong end of a telescope, no one tops Bill O'Reilly, who has been the butt of a thousand jokes after confronting an atheist on his show with irrefutable evidence of the existence of God--using as his evidence the fact that the tides come in and the tides go out. I mean, O'Reilly said with great certainty, who else could possibly be controlling that?

As any scientist could tell you, it's the moon that controls the tides. So Papa Bear has taken to the airwaves again to pursue a new wrinkle in his faux science agenda. He now acknowledges that the tides might indeed be controlled by the moon. But so what? As he says: "How'd the moon get there? Can you explain that to me? How come we have that? And Mars doesn't have it. Venus doesn't have it. How come?"

Actually, as any amateur astronomer knows, Jupiter has lots of moons, 63 in all, several of which you can see through a good pair of binoculars. One of them, Ganymede, is actually larger than Mercury. Saturn has 62 moons. Uranus has 27 moons. And hey, Bill, Mars actually has two moons of its own, that were discovered in 1877, long before even Roger Ailes was born. As far as I know, there's no evidence that either of them are made of green cheese either. I'm beginning to think that O'Reilly might have slept through quite a few of his fifth-grade science classes. But he sure is certain in his beliefs. Here, watch for yourself:

 --Patrick Goldstein

It seems pretty clear by now that "The Social Network," which was supposed to be a PR disaster for Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, has turned out to be something of a godsend for his media reputation. Like most people in the press, after I saw an early screening of the film, I thought it was curtains for Zuckerberg, who, as portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, came off as an icy, girl-crazed social misfit. Instead, the film has done wonders for his public image, with Zuckerberg appearing hipper than ever, not only turning up on "Saturday Night Live" last weekend but earning the imprimatur of being TIme magazine's Person of the Year, complete with the kind of gushily laudatory profile that's usually reserved for, ahem, hot young movie stars.

What happened? Danielle Berrin offers a shrewd take on Zuckerberg's turnaround in a new blog post at her Hollywood Jew blog in the Jewish Journal, arguing that the change was inspired by our annual outburst of Oscar mania. Here's part of what she has to say:

Oh what a difference an awards season makes. In the five months since opening, the film has lapped up box office success and critical acclaim, and, along the way, Zuckerberg’s image has undergone elaborate transformation. The once Machiavellian Harvard student has become the philanthropic humanitarian.... What began as a negative spin on Zuckerberg and his haughty conquer-the-world attitude had transformed into the most celebratory and useful publicity both Zuckerberg and his company have seen since Facebook’s founding. And to think, all it took was a little Oscar buzz. OK, a lot of Oscar buzz. The past few months of award-winning and Oscar campaigning have done more than cement the genius of the film’s cast and creators. Because of the spotlight cast on Zuckerberg, the young entrepreneur has had a chance to prove he isn’t the socially inept anti-hero portrayed by Eisenberg, but, rather, a benevolent titan of the digital age.

As Berrin also notes, by the time Aaron Sorkin was making his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, the sharp-tongued writer sounded like, well, someone polishing off a showbiz magazine puff job. As Sorkin breathlessly put it: “I want to say to Mark Zuckerberg tonight. Rooney Mara’s character makes a prediction at the beginning of the movie. She was wrong. You turned out to be a great entrepreneur, a visionary and an incredible altruist.”

My theory is that all this kumbaya tub-thumping wasn't just a spontaneous outpouring of awards-season good cheer. It was more likely the product of shrewd Oscar-season strategizing. Sorkin and "Social Network" producer Scott Rudin were forging this rapprochement for one reason and one reason only--they believe that having an appearance of harmony between the film and its subject will help "Social Network's" Oscar chances. If Zuckerberg was still running around, bitching and moaning about his portrayal, as he was doing around the time of the film's release last fall, it would inspire a new round of inflammatory media hit pieces about the film's veracity, stories that could only do damage to the film's Oscar chances.

As long as Zuckerberg looks like he's made his peace with the filmmakers, the media has little cause to churn out more stories wondering why the character in the film bears so little resemblance to the real Zuckerberg. Oscar controversies about Hollywood taking license with its portrayal of real-life characters are always driven by media gadflies. The only reason anyone is buzzing about "The King's Speech" romanticizing its depiction of King George VI is because Christopher Hitchens wrote a barbed piece in Slate slagging the film for airbrushing the royal family's unfortunate fondness for Nazi Germany.

Rudin, who is, next to Harvey Weinstein, the shrewdest of Oscar tummlers, has quieted the "Social Network" media storm by killing Zuckerberg with kindness. If Zuckerberg remains silent, basking in all this acclaim, the media will leave "Social Network" and find a new target to pester. As the old proverb goes, the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.   

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Mark Zuckerberg, left, with Jesse Eisenberg, appearing on "Saturday Night Live."  Credit: Dana Edelson / NBC 

It’s hard to go anywhere these days, especially if you’re a parent with young kids, where the conversation doesn’t eventually turn to Amy Chua’s red-hot childrearing memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” It offers a provocative depiction of Chinese-style extreme parenting -- her daughters are not allowed to watch TV, have playdates or get any grade below an A, all as preparation for success in life, beginning with getting into an Ivy League school, like their Tiger Mom, who went to Harvard and now teaches at Yale Law School.

But of all the heated reaction to Chua's parenting strategy, none was as compelling as what former Harvard president Larry Summers had to say when he discussed parenting with Chua at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Summers made a striking point, arguing that the two Harvard students who’d had the most transformative impact on the world in the past 25 years were Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, yet neither had, ahem, graduated from college. If they had been brought up by a Tiger Mom, Summers imagined, she would've been bitterly disappointed.

I have no beef with Chua's parenting code, which hardly seems any more extreme than the neurotic ambitions of mothers and fathers I'm exposed to living on the Westside of Los Angeles. But if Chua wants a radically different perspective on the relationship between higher education and career achievement, she should spend some time in Hollywood, a place that's been run for nearly a century by men who never made it through or even to college. The original moguls were famously uneducated, often having started as peddlers and furriers before finding their perches atop the studio dream factories. But even today, the industry is still dominated by titanic figures, both on the creative and on the business side, who never got anywhere near Harvard Yard.

A short list of the industry leaders who never finished or even attended college would include Steve Jobs, David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, James Cameron, Clint Eastwood, Barry Diller, Ron Meyer, Peter Jackson, Harvey Weinstein, Scott Rudin and Quentin Tarantino. Some of this is clearly a generational thing, since everyone on that list is over 40. On the other hand, the younger new media icons seem as likely to be degree free as their Hollywood brethren, whether it's Zuckerberg or the founders of Twitter, who didn't graduate from college either. (Though it’s true that Zuckerberg might not have even thought of Facebook if he hadn’t been in the sexually charged freshman swirl at Harvard.)

But in showbiz, you learn by doing. If there is a common denominator to all of those success stories, it's that they were all men in a hurry, impatient with book learning, which could only take them so far in the rough 'n tumble world of Hollywood. Ron Meyer, a founder of Creative Artists Agency and now president of Universal Studios, dropped out of high school, served in the Marines and proudly notes on his resume that his first job was as a messenger boy for the Paul Kohner Agency.

“The truth is that if you have a particular talent and the will to succeed, you don't really need a great education,” Meyer told me this week. “In showbiz, your real college experience is working in a talent agency mailroom. That's the one place where you can get the most complete understanding of the arena you're playing in and how to deal with the complicated situations you'll come across in your career.”

There are plenty of successful lawyers and MBAs in Hollywood, but the raw spirit of can-do invention and inspiration will take people farther than the ability to read a complex profit and loss statement. Years ago, David Geffen, who dropped out of night school at Brooklyn College before eventually landing a job in the William Morris mailroom, once told me that his early success was rooted in the ability to develop relationships. “It's not about where you went to college or how good-looking you are or whether you could play football--it's about whether you can create a relationship.”

To produce a film or create a TV show or found a company requires the same kind of raw entrepreneurial zeal that it must have taken the ‘49ers who came West in search of gold. “You often feel like you’re surrounded by a do-it-yourself ethic, almost a pioneer spirit,” says Michael De Luca, producer of “The Social Network,” who dropped out of NYU four credits short of graduation to take a job at New Line Cinema, where he rose to become head of production. “All those successful guys you're talking about--they had an intense desire to create something big, new and different. They didn't need to wait around for the instruction manual.”

In David Rensin’s wonderful oral history, “The Mailroom: Hollywood History From the Bottom Up,” survivors of the Mike Ovitz-era CAA experience tell war stories about how, as mailroom flunkies, they had to replenish Ovitz's candy dishes, stock his jars with raw cashews and fill his water jar with Evian. It seemed like hellish drudgery, but as the agents recalled, it prepared you for all the craziness of later Hollywood life, where multi-million dollar movie star deals could fall apart if someone's excercise trainer or make-up specialist wasn't provided for.

Even today, people in Hollywood are far more impressed by, say, your knack for finding new talent, than by what your grades were like. “Show business is all about instinct and intuition,” says Sam Gores, head of the Paradigm Agency, who went to acting school, but never to college, having joined a meat-cutter's union by the time he was 18. “To succeed, you need to have a strong point of view and a lot of confidence. Sometimes being the most well-informed person in your circle can almost get in your way.”

In show business, charm, hustle and guile are the aces in the deck. When New York Times columnist David Brooks was dissecting Chua's book recently, he argued that “managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group” imposed the kind of cognitive demands that far exceed what’s required of students in a class at Yale. He probably picked that up reading a fancy sociology text, but it was a letter-perfect description of the skill set for a gifted filmmaker, agent or producer.

In Hollywood, whether you were a C student or Summa Cum Laude, it's a level playing field. “When you're working on a movie set, you've got 50 film professors to learn from, from the sound man to the cinematographer,” says producer David Permut, who dropped out of UCLA to work for Roger Corman. “I've never needed a resume in my whole career. All you need is a 110-page script that someone is dying to make and you're in business.”

--Patrick Goldstein  

Photo: Amy Chua, author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," at a book festival in Austin, Texas.

Credit: Larry D. Moore/Associated Press 

Talk about having mixed emotions: No one's a bigger fan of Robert Rodriguez than me, so I was thrilled to hear that he was doing a lavish, six-minute Nike commercial ... well, until I heard that he was doing it to promote Kobe Bryant's new line of Black Mamba basketball sneakers. Kobe doesn't get a lot of love in my household, especially from my 12-year-old, who felt like Santa brought an extra Christmas present when the Heat demolished the Lakers on Christmas Day and was even happier to see our beloved Celtics thoroughly dominate the lackluster Lakers last weekend.

That said, I like the trailer for Rodriguez's new commercial that's already up on the Web. It's presented like an old grindhouse trailer, with an announcer booming: "He thought he was on a road trip to Dallas, but he was on a freeway to hell!" The footage features Kobe doing his thing on a rooftop basketball court, with cameo appearances from Rodriguez stock company veterans like Danny Trejo and Bruce WIllis, who gets to glower at us in front of a flaming basketball backboard. Rodriguez transforms Kobe into a hoops-style action hero, defying gravity at every turn. He even works in some comic relief -- I'm sure gym rats everywhere will get a laugh at the shot from the pickup game where one of Kobe's opponents tosses the referee off the roof. 

As for it improving Kobe's image, all I can say is that in the trailer that's up now, we see Kobe stealing the ball, making a nice spin move and going up for a ferocious dunk, but as in most real Lakers games, we still don't see him actually passing the ball. I guess if Rodriguez could do a 90-minute feature, there'd be time to fit in one assist. If you're interested in the backstory about how Kobe and Rodriguez got together to make the commercial, check out this post over at our Lakers blog. The ad is scheduled to surface sometime during the NBA all-star game weekend. Here's the trailer:

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Kobe Bryant being fouled while shooting by Boston Celtics center Shaquille O'Neal in a game at Staples Center where the Celtics defeated the Lakers, 109-96. Credit: Jeff Gross / AFP/Getty Images

I had lost track of Joe Frank, the groundbreaking storyteller who created dozens of riveting radio dramas for KCRW-FM (89.9) in the 1980s and '90s. That changed when I got an invitation from the station to see Frank perform at the Village, the  legendary West L.A. recording studio.

Although no one announced that the show would be a departure, it was. Never before had the mysterious performer so directly addressed his family life, particularly his relationship with a difficult mother, who died some years ago.

The crowd seemed to lap up the performance, which centered partly on how people disintegrate with age. But when I met him this week, Frank surprised me with his take on the show. He said he had been persuaded by a couple of friends to deal with the more personal material, but he ended up hating the piece.

“In live performance you always make mistakes. What you do is imperfect," he said. "Usually I wear shades and a hat. But that seemed entirely inappropriate given the kind of material I was doing, which was very honest, very open. Which I also hated. What I do is usually surreal.

“I like going further out, expanding the imaginations of people. There are lots of people who tell stories about themselves.”

Although he intends to keep his own story out of future performances, Frank had decided he would share more about himself in our interview, which I also detailed in my On the Media column. He talked at length about his own aging.

“Suddenly I find myself an old man with a cane,” said Frank, 72, who has struggled through a series of illnesses and recently recovered from pneumonia.  “And in my interior life I feel so much younger. There seems to be a real disconnect with this old, deteriorating, decrepit body ... which is carrying my brain and heart around in it.”

Franks said he hates when people defer to him, offering an arm or holding open a door, even if he knows they mean well. His hands shake as a result of medication he takes. The need to hold a glass aloft for a toast at a party, or to eat with people he doesn't know well, can cause a moment of panic.

But then Frank wonders if he simply needs to embrace the changes.

“Maybe I can transcend it by taking advantage of it, by making it into a persona,” he said. He muses about chucking the cane he bought for $8 at CVS. “I could have a cane with a wolf’s head and ruby eyes. I could wear a white suit or some bizarre getup, a hip-hop kind of hat and always a pair of sunglasses. And then instead of me being invisible maybe they would see this old man and I would, as you say, own it.”

In some of his old radio pieces that conveyed a good dose of anxiety and despair, Frank would edit in a teacher speaking about equanimity, a respite from the prevailing darkness. I wondered if he had ever tried meditation, a break from “the monkey mind.”

“I once had a friend come over to my house and urged me to meditate with him,” Frank said. “He kneeled down on the floor of my house and I kneeled down beside him and focused my mind on a word or something. And I was there for maybe 30 seconds when I felt so ridiculous and so stupid and thought it was so absurd that I got up.”

I couldn’t resist: “So you gave him a full 30 seconds?”

“I did,” Frank said, laughing. “I might have even given him a minute or a minute and a half. But certainly not more than that.”

I told Frank he sounded a little like Woody Allen’s character in “Annie Hall.” Alvy Singer memorably celebrated the fact that most people are only “miserable,” knowing they could be among the “horrible,” those who are crippled or dying.

But Frank told me he really does have a little more perspective than that. “I can’t say I am miserable because I have a body of work behind me. I have a considerable following,” he said, adding: “You can’t be unhappy. It’s not fair under these circumstances. So even though I may be depressed a fair amount of the time I am still grateful for what I’ve got.”

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: Joe Frank made more than 200 radio dramas over a couple of decades at KCRW-FM. He recently has expanded to Facebook and done a limited number of live performances. Credit: joefrank.com

I guess it's no surprise that the New York Post is eagerly dumping on Keith Olbermann in the wake of his messy departure from MSNBC. But leave it to columnist Andrea Peyser (whom New York magazine once dubbed "the Madame DeFarge of the New York Post") to blame Olbermann's flame out on -- are you sitting down? -- Ben Affleck.

In a lengthy column that is almost entirely populated with anonymous sources, Peyser claims that the beginning of the end for Olbermann was in 2009, when MSNBC's Rachel Maddow booked Affleck to appear on her show. Peyser quotes a former MSNBC colleague as saying that Olbermann was so unhappy that "in protest, he refused to go on the air." She adds that Olbermann staged a three-day sickout after the episode, claiming that Olbermann's stated reason for missing airtime--he was mourning the death of his mother--was a lot of hooey. Who knows what really happened, but the alleged Affleck booking dispute gave the Post a convenient hook to run the headline "Why Olbermann's Gone Baby Gone," a reference to Affleck's critically praised 2007 film.  

The rest of the piece is loaded with anonymous sniping about Olbermann's supposed prima donna antics, including the time he supposedly had a meltdown when he discovered that his new office door had a built-in window. Peyser is so determined to bash Olbermann that she quotes anonymous ESPN sources about Olbermann's behavior there way, way back in the 1990s when he was a "Sports Center" anchor. I gather this is typical spiteful behavior from Peyser, who once famously described Christiane Amanpour as the "CNN war slut," which caused such an uproar that her boss of bosses, Rupert Murdoch, was forced to issue an apology.

Peyser has hardly cleaned up her act. No Olbermann misstep is too petty for her not to describe dismissively in the column. She even attempts to dig into Olbermann's personal life, getting huffy when a former girlfriend of his, whom Peyser describes as a "newsblonde," doesn't respond to an e-mail request for a comment. Peyser harrumphs: "One diva deserves another." As for Olbermann, he tweeted his own response to the piece, saying that it "rehashes old lie about shows I didn't do after my mother's death... Andrea Peyser is a swine."

I don't know about swine, but if you ever saw Olbermann and Peyser under the same roof, you'd have to say there was more than one diva in the room.

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Keith Olbermann on his final appearance on "Countdown" on Jan. 21, 2011.

Credit: Associated Press/MSNBC

Whenever a film gets snubbed at Oscar time, the conspiracy theorists come out of the woodwork with madcap theories about what dark, mysterious forces were responsible for its disappointing showing. Hence the arrival of this Oliver Stone-style opinion piece from the New York Post's Kyle Smith, who claims that Davis Guggenheim's "Waiting for Superman," despite being easily the most celebrated documentary of the year, failed to get a best documentary Oscar nomination because the film endorses a conservative cause -- allowing the proliferation of charter schools as a means of saving our battered public school system. 

As Smith put it: "Welcome to reverse McCarthyism. Not only are conservatives unwelcome (bordering on unemployable) in Hollywood, but even fully paid-up and lionized liberals like Guggenheim must be shunned for making a case that conservatives agree with." He added in a blog post that the film's snub was "an excellent example of what happens when the Party Line of liberalism comes head to head with the supposed reason for existence of the Democratic Party -- concern for the downtrodden, particularly black and brown people."

I happen to be a fan of Smith's writing, but in this case, he seems unaware of the fact that when it comes to the arcane realm of Oscar voting, politics is about 14th on the list of truly dark and mysterious forces at work. It is especially hard to make the case that liberals had it in for "Waiting for Superman," since the film critics of America --w ho are probably even more overwhelmingly liberal than the Academy -- were the first to champion the "Waiting For Superman," giving it almost unanimously rave reviews.

So if liberal film critics were willing to put aside their supposed ideological blinders and praise the film, why wouldn't the Academy's documentary film branch do the same? If Smith had delved just a little into Oscar history, he would have realized what a creaky limb he'd crawled out on. As it turns out, the Academy has given the cold shoulder to all sorts of wildly popular documentaries in the past, including "Hoop Dreams," "The Thin Blue Line," "Grizzly Man," "Roger & Me" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," which was declared ineligible because of an obscure technicality. The fact that the Academy has snubbed films made by all sorts of liberal filmmakers, most notably the famously left-wing Michael Moore, makes it hard to cite politics as a key rationale for the omission.

This wouldn't be the first time the documentary branch has punished a documentary for being hugely popular or for benefiting from the kind of ostentatious Oscar campaign "Superman" had. There are enough examples of liberal documentaries losing out to less partisan efforts -- such as when Moore's 2007 film "Sicko" and that year's "No End in Sight" lost to "Taxi to the Dark Side" -- that it seems plausible that bias against conservatism seems hardly a major force at work here. Smith and I agree that "Superman" deserved an Oscar nod, but it's a huge stretch to blame the snub on a liberal plot. The only politics at work here were the usual kind -- office politics. 

-- Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Davis Guggenheim accepts the award for best documentary feature at the Critic's Choice Movie Awards in Hollywood. Credit: Mario Anzuoni / Reuters

Gimme a break, ABC. 

Just as Sunday's Lakers-Celtics showdown at Staples Center was getting to the nitty-gritty, ABC tossed the game into a split screen so we could get a court-side interview with a critical participant.

Or, wait, was that just Adam Sandler, one of the covey of court-side celebrities at Staples Center who help make the Lakers the team a lot of America loves to hate?

Not content with the typical wink-and-wave shot of Sandler, though, ABC sent its court-side reporter in for a couple of minutes of Q & A, right in the middle of the action. It threw the game into a side picture so we could hear all about Sandler's fab new movie with Jennifer Aniston, "Just Go With It."

I can't think of any better way for Columbia Pictures to alienate basketball fans than to make them sit through some inane repartee with Sandler. Especially as the game already had Lakers fans in a foul mood, with their team struggling with the hated Celtics. And would any of the Boston faithful really want a cutaway from their glory? Not a chance.  (The Lakers ended up losing 109-96.)

Since "Just Go With It" ads already filled up much of the break time during the game, you had to wonder what kind of deal the producers had cut to have Sandler miraculously appear for a promotional spot right in the middle of one of the biggest regular season games of the year.

Next time ABC, spare us the advertorial. Just give us the game. And if you must linger for a second on one of the sideline stars, give us Sandler co-star and movie rookie Brooklyn Decker, who was also at the game. That would be cheap and cheesy, sure. But at least it would be quick and much nicer to look at than Sandler.

In the end, we really tuned in to watch the game.

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston and Brooklyn Decker star in "Just Go With It." Credit: Columbia Pictures

I've been deluged with mail taking issue with the story I wrote after Tuesday's Oscar nominations decrying the fact that, once again, the Oscars were an all-white affair, leaving African American and Latino actors and filmmakers in the lurch. Put simply, the fault lies not with the Oscars, but with the Hollywood studio elite who don't have any people of color in their ranks, which clearly has a bearing on why they rarely greenlight Oscar-friendly dramas with any substantial roles for blacks or Latinos.

As for the reaction from readers, let's just say that I suspect Christopher Hitchens must've gotten the same kind of mail after he mocked Mother Teresa. Although I've received some warm letters of support, by and large the response from readers has been blunt, dismissive, vituperative and, well, unfriendly. A fair example would be this note from D. Whitehead in Chicago, who said:

I would just like to know what was the reason behind you writing this Minority Report of Hollywood? Aren't there enough black civil rights leaders to handle this without you sticking your nose where it doesn't belong? What about the dominance in the sports by African Americans? You ever watch basketball, football and baseball? Who are you? Jesse Jackson Goldstein?

Actually, baseball has fewer African Americans that at any time since the 1970s. And I'm not sure why a heavy presence of blacks in one field would justify turning a blind eye to the absence of blacks in another. But I'm not going to pick a fight with D. Whitehead.  Some of the questions that readers raised, however, were more thoughtful and provocative. Here's a few -- rephrased and condensed -- that deserved an answer. And if you have any more thoughts on the subject, feel free to chime in:

Q: You didn't say African Americans were discriminated against in Hollywood, just that they didn't hold any high-profile jobs. Did you ever consider that blacks just don't gravitate toward working in show business?

The Big Picture earlier told you about the focus group Fox News has been relying on to assess President Obama's performance in Tuesday's State of the Union Address--a speech the panel mostly rated as abysmal.

That seemed surprising, given that Obama's approval rating has been rising in recent weeks and that he made no stunning new proposals in the speech, while pledging to work to find common ground with Republicans.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who led the panel of 29 people in Atlanta, responded via e-mail that the focus group's negative reaction was not as surprising as I might think it was. He said that people who use computer "dials" to instantly record their impressions of a speech or debate are responding to something specific and express different views than the public at large.

"I have found that when people dial a speech, they pay closer attention to everything said," Luntz wrote. "When I did this for Fox in 2008, Obama WON all three debates for the same reason. A casual observer will have a different reaction (like being impacted by applause and standing ovations) than someone listening closely."

"And that accounts for why Obama can have a 50% job approval, a 60% favorability, and an 80% likeability rating all at the same time," Luntz continued. "The questions measure different aspects of a person's image. People who are dialing the speech focus much more on the substance than the style."

[Updated at 9:40 a.m., Jan. 27 Luntz offered a final word on his focus group via e-mail Wednesday night: "And as the guy whose focus groups gave obama wins in three out of three debates live on fox news, you can't say I have an anti-obama track record."] 

Still, I wondered about the composition of the panel, since Luntz said almost nothing about that when he appeared on Sean Hannity's show Tuesday, except that 13 of the 29 voted for Obama in 2008. In our extended e-mail exchange, Luntz responded: "I didn't ask party affiliation or ideology."

That seemed odd, since I had seen a Luntz Twitter message from earlier in January in which he directed prospective focus group members (who would be paid $100 each) to a questionnaire. That survey explicitly asked two dozen questions related to the subjects' demographic, ideological and political views, including opinions on Obama.

When I asked Luntz about the questionnaire, he acknowledged: "Yes, I asked those questions when people initially applied to participate, along with education, income, occupation, ethnicity and lots of other questions.  I ask a lot.  I do everything I can to have these groups reflect the voting pool from wherever I am.  But I didn't ask party ID or ideology again that night."

Maybe something was lost in translation again because, a bit later, I got another e-mail in which the pollster informed me that he did know the party affiliation of those on his Tuesday panel, after all. There were 8 Democrats, 10 Republicans and 11 independents, he said.

Luntz had earlier told me that "four invited Obama participants still didn't show," which I took as an acknowledgment the panel was not as balanced as it might have been.

In any event, it would have been nice if Luntz had taken some time on the air to explain who was on this panel and what it was supposed to represent. Given that the group's views went out to a national television audience, a viewer would suspect it reflected a cross-section of the entire electorate. Or was it likely voters? Something else? The partisan mix suggested something closer, I'm guessing, to party makeup in the Republican-leaning state of Georgia.

Luntz's initial survey of prospective panelists also asked them overall to rate Obama and give him a letter grade. Again, it would have been nice to know how those we saw on national TV had responded to those questions. But TV apparently doesn't have time for such details.

As the Big Pic previously noted, Luntz asked the focus group how they felt about President Obama saying the recession was over. That seemed particularly leading and unfair, because Obama never declared an end to the recession. Instead, he said, in the State of the Union, that the "worst" of the recession had ended. He stressed that more jobs are badly needed.

Luntz said he asked the question that way because the panel "dialed downward" at the moment Obama spoke about the worst being over. "It's what they heard," Luntz said. "I realize Obama said the worst of the recession is over, but they heard the recession is over." The pollster said he would show the panel's reaction on the air in a future Fox program.

After about half a dozen e-mails, Luntz seemed to have had his fill of my second-guessing. He told me he was struggling to get home in a snow storm.

"Geez, give me a break," he protested. "You try running one of these sessions live with all the technical, audio and video challenges.  How about giving me credit for telling viewers who these people voted for in 2008, or keeping them respectful to each other when they're ready to attack. This stuff is tough."

--James Rainey
Twitter: latimesrainey

Image: Republican pollster Frank Luntz used his Twitter account earlier this month to find participants for a focus group on the State of the Union speech. Most members of the Luntz panel, aired on Fox News' Sean Hannity program, slammed President Obama.

Opinions of President Obama's State of the Union address will naturally vary. But we now should be able to reach a national consensus on one putrid post-address tradition: instant polling and focus groups.

At the end of the 62-minute address Tuesday night, Fox News aired what can only be called public opinion "show-data" -- faux science not worth the micro video-bytes it was embedded on. CNN committed a lesser, but still unnecessary offense: introducing a "flash" poll overweighted with Democrats.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that more rigorous national surveys have found something much more equivocal: After a long swoon, the president's approval rating has begun to recover in recent weeks. A composite of surveys at Pollster.com shows 49.8% of Americans approving of Obama's performance and 45.1% disapproving.

You wouldn't have gotten a hint that the nation is that closely divided from cable TV's noise makers.

Over at CNN, senior correspondent Joe Johns appeared not long after the House chamber emptied to tell us that, per expectations, television viewers of presidential addresses tend to be from the president's own party. Of the 475 questioned by CNN in its instant survey, "the vast majority" were Democrats.

Among that self-selecting group, Johns told us, 52% had a "very positive" impression of Obama's speech and 32% a "somewhat positive" impression. Just 15% reacted negatively. Further, 61% of those it surveyed "thought positively about the President's policies" before the speech, a figure that jumped up to 77% after watching the address.

It seemed barely illuminating that a group heavily tilted toward Obama stalwarts liked him even more after they heard him speak for an hour. At least CNN gave us enough information to know their poll came from anything other than a representative sample of Americans.

The group presented by Frank Luntz, not surprisingly, had even bigger problems. I say not surprisingly because the pollster has long been closely tied to the Republican Party and rigorous partisanship. Luntz is a master of wordplay who, among other things, helped Republicans devise their attacks on the healthcare reform legislation. Don't talk about a public option, he said. Call it a "government takeover."

As the nonpartisan Politifact.com reported, Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo to reform foes: "Takeovers are like coups. They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom."

That gives you an idea where the Fox favorite comes from. Given his inherent credibility gap, Luntz might have begun his segment with Sean Hannity on Tuesday night by explaining a little bit about the 29 people he assembled in Atlanta. 

Where did they come from? What was their party affiliation? How did they feel about Obama before the State of the Union? He did none of that.

Instead, the segment began with Hannity launching into his complaints about Obama, calling his speech  "flat," uninspiring and disingenuous -- because Obama talked about cutting spending after the federal government ran up a huge debt fighting the recession.

Being a man of precision and science, Luntz moved to make sure that statement didn't taint his impartial panel. "I don't want you to feel under pressure because of what Sean Hannity just said," he told the group.

Thus put at ease, the panel was asked for one word to sum up Obama's performance. In a nation we know to be about evenly divided in its feelings about the president, these are the first seven answers Luntz got: "optimism, platitudes," followed by "empty ... redundant ... political ... not connected with America ... hyperbole ... Obama conflicting..."

Hmm. Must be a real pocket of Obama opposition in heavily Democratic Atlanta. And that pocket just happened to find its way into the front row seats on the set where Luntz staged this little tea party.

It went on in that vein: The bulk of panelists suggesting the lack of bipartisanship was clearly, unquestionably the fault of Obama, not the Republicans. One man even rated the president's promises as about as  trustworthy as "romantic talk from Tiger Woods." (It had to be a coincidence that this fellow's two paragons of mendacity were two prominent African Americans.)

In case the anti-Obama feeding frenzy might stall, Luntz chummed the waters a little. He did it by misconstruing what the president said about the economy. While Obama stated that the "worst" of the recession had passed, Luntz asked the panel to respond to Obama's notion that "the recession is over."

Lo and behold, the vast majority of the panelists disagreed with something the president never said.

Toward the end of the segment, Luntz let viewers know that 13 of the 29 people he brought together had voted for Obama in 2008. As I recall, Obama won the last presidential election. But why start with a more closely balanced panel when you can present one that's so much more, more ... outspoken?

(Luntz told me via e-mail that the other 16 on his panel had voted for John McCain. Apparently explaining the imbalance, he added that "four invited Obama participants still didn't show." He did not immediately answer about the panelists' party affiliation or pre-speech sentiments about Obama.)

It was a bit anticlimactic when only seven of the onetime Obama supporters raised their hands when Luntz asked who was still "pretty well" behind the president.

Luntz had done his work by doing Hannity's work -- offering his faux science as proof that Obama is in  political straits. "If I were Barack Obama watching this tonight," Luntz said, "I would be a little bit nervous."

The sequels could be coming up for days on Fox. It began Wednesday morning on "Fox & Friends," where Luntz used the same panel and similar tactics to prove that Obama wasn't even the real focus for most Americans on Tuesday night.

Instead, Luntz assured us that the man who really made the winning impression was Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who gave the official Republican response. "Barack Obama was the focus," Luntz said, "but Paul Ryan seems to be the star."

-- James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted Republican pollster Frank Luntz on Tuesday night. Luntz used a focus group to suggest that President Obama is in political straits. Mainstream polling suggests a more divided view of the president. Credit: KABC-AM radio

OK, I confess. I thought I was made of sterner stuff, but I'm starting to officially miss "Countdown With Keith Olbermann." Rachel Maddow is just fine. Lawrence O'Donnell has potential. And Chris Matthews, well, has he ever gone 20 seconds without interrupting a guest?

Since Olbermann signed off Friday night, I've been having withdrawal pangs, missing his hilarious "Oddball" segments, longing for his eloquent rants, pining for his wryly comic Friday readings of James Thurber. Even if I didn't always agree with his politics, I thought Olbermann was an amazingly compelling on-air presence. Often unpredictable, almost always crackling with a kind of neurotic electricity, he was the closest thing on TV to a real-life Aaron Sorkin character, with a love of language, a barbed sense of humor and a passionate, occasionally self-destructive commitment to causes and personal ideals that sometimes only he seemed to understand.

Even though he's gone from MSNBC, thanks to Twitter we can still get a condensed version of what's on Olbermann's mind. He was in rare form during Rep. Michele Bachmann's "tea party" truly "oddball" response to the president's State of the Union address Tuesday night, offering zinger after zinger about the fact that Bachmann inexplicably seemed to be staring off camera during her entire speech. In other words, even though Olbermann wasn't on TV, he was focused on the TV-ness of it all, as if he were dreaming up a "Larry Sanders Show" sketch as he was watching.

Here's a few of his best bits:

"MICHELE! Hey! Yoo-hoo! CONGRESSWOMAN! We're the ones in the MIDDLE."

"Did the Tea Party not spring either for a Camera Red Light or a combined camera-teleprompter? It costs $3 extry."

"Seriously, somebody at the Tea Party needs to run on the stage, grab her, and POINT TO WHERE THE CAMERA IS."

"I haven't seen anything like that since Alan Keyes' old TV show where he would look left and right, even though there was no audience."

"Tonight's Final Score: Obama 22 Ryan 1 Bachmann -11,746."

Think Olbermann should have scored the speech differently? See it for yourself below.

-- Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Keith Olbermann speaking to the Television Critics Association press tour at the Beverly Hilton in 2008.

Credit: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

If you were reading a lot of media coverage of Tuesday's Oscar nominations, you'd think it was a glorious day for "True Grit" and its chances to win the best picture award. After all, the film landed 10 nominations, second only to the 12 for "The King's Speech," prompting Variety to say that "True Grit" "emerged as a strong contender" for best picture. But if you talk to Oscar insiders, you'd know that Variety's upbeat assessment is, well, a lot of hooey.

If there is one key indicator that provides the most accurate prediction of a film's best picture chances, it is not how many nominations the film received, but whether it earned an all-important nomination for best editing. In fact, not since "Ordinary People" way, way back in 1980 has a film won best picture without also being nominated for the best editing award. And sadly for directors Joel and Ethan Coen, "True Grit" did not score a best editing nomination, which pretty much puts a big damper on its best picture chances.

Of course, that means there are a host of other films that are already out of the best picture race too. If you believe in the predictive power of the best editing category, "Inception" is also dead in the water, since it didn't score an editing nomination or even a directing nod for Christopher Nolan. That leaves "The King's Speech," which did land an editing nomination, along with four possible rivals: "The Social Network," "The Fighter," "127 Hours" and "The Black Swan."

While some of those films, especially "The Fighter," are popular with a broad swath of the academy, I'm guessing right now that the Oscar horse race remains the same two-film derby it looked like two months ago, a showdown between "The King's Speech" and "The Social Network," which got eight nominations Tuesday and has racked up a host of critics' awards. They are both richly deserving of all their honors, but only one will emerge a winner. Will it be the vibrant, old-fashioned storytelling of "The King's Speech," which appeals to the older members of the academy, or the sharp-tongued cultural observations of "The Social Network," which has captured the imagination of a younger generation?

If I had to place a bet, I'd bet on the old trumping the new, since that's exactly what happened at the Oscars last year, when the gripping war-movie narrative of "The Hurt Locker" won out over the edgier, video-game style innovation of "Avatar." By that logic, the prize goes to "The King's Speech." But since when were the Oscars ever logical? I guess I'm saying that for now, this race is a lot like the Super Bowl match-up between the Packers and the Steelers. It's way too close to call.

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Jeff Bridges in a scene from the Oscar-nominated film "True Grit." Credit: Lorey Sebastian / Paramount Pictures

The case of Jay Cutler, the injured and viciously maligned quarterback of the Chicago Bears, renews the furor over injuries in pro football. It should cause sports journalists to rethink how they talk about players who decide they can no longer play.

The NFL, its players and its fans say they just hate the way their game maims and cripples the men who play it. They would do anything to prevent pro football from disabling  their Sunday heroes. Anything, that is, except forgiving a player who dares to admit he's too hurt to stay on the field.

Witness the vicious, immediate and relentless flogging that Cutler took over the weekend when a knee injury sent him out of the NFC championship game.

NFL veteran Derrick Brooks tweeted: “There is no medicine for a guy with no guts and no heart.” Jacksonville Jaguars running back Maurice Jones Drew accused Cutler of quitting and added, also via Twitter: "He can finish the game on a hurt knee. I played the whole season on one."

The former players who are regular NFL commentators might have a little more perspective, having seen the dark side of retirements marred by rubber knees and missing memories. Instead, the veterans piled on, preceded by disingenuous disclaimers about how they would never judge the severity of Cutler's injury.

Mike Golic of ESPN radio's "Mike and Mike in the Morning": "I would be screaming and scratching to get back on the field.” Former Bears' coach Mike Ditka, on the same program, said he “would have to be completely knocked out to come out of that football game."

But, oops, then came the news that Cutler had torn his medial collateral ligament or MCL. Considerably more than a boo boo. That's also an injury that no one, outside the injured player or a doctor, can assess with any certainty.

But "apologies" for the instant condemnation of Cutler were muted at best. Jones Drew tried to claim he had "never attacked him, called him soft or a sore loser. I never questioned his toughness. I think people took my joke out of context."

Sure. A lack of context--the refuge of many a scoundrel trying to duck responsibility for exactly what they said.

The irony is that sports journalists, led by ESPN, have done considerable reporting on the dangers of football injuries, particularly concussions. We now clearly understand that football veterans lose their memory, suffer seizures, and worse, from too many shots to the head.

At least a word of sanity on the issue came from former quarterback Ron Jaworski, another commentator who appeared on the "Mike and Mike" show, who said he had injured the same knee ligament as Cutler. "I sprained my MCL once," Jaworski told Golic and his sidekick. "I was the holder for a field goal and almost fainted from the sharp pain that went through my knee."

Where Cutler really failed was not hollering and preening about how much he wanted to play. Another ESPNer and former QB, Trent Dilfer, questioned Cutler's "mentality in this football game." What this meant, Dilfer explained, was: "The fact he didn’t show the fight to re-enter the game. The fact he didn’t show the demonstrative behavior that most players put in this situation would show if told they couldn’t go in the game.”

It wouldn't have hurt if someone in the booth, on the sidelines, or on Twitter had reminded everyone  about the long line of heroes who dragged themselves back into the game, only to hurt their teams with poor play and hurt themselves, worsening already serious injuries.

It turns out doctors and sports ethicists have a lot to say about how all this tough talk brings us to a place where 50-year-old men, their short NFL careers over, can barely walk or remember what they had for breakfast.

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler on the sidelines during the fourth quarter of the 2011 NFC championship game against the Green Bay Packers at Soldier Field. Credit: Jeff Hanisch / US PRESSWIRE

It's a wonder that the security guards at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn’t stop Mo’nique and make her show ID when she arrived to help announce the Oscar nominations early Tuesday at the organization’s Beverly Hills headquarters. After all, she was the only person of color involved with the extravaganza, since the 83rd annual Oscar nominations have the dubious distinction of being an all-white affair.

Setting aside the more obscure, technical categories, when it comes to the best picture award along with the major nominations for acting, writing and directing, there are, ahem, zero people of color in the Oscar race this year.

There are so few significant African American characters in any of the 10 films nominated for best picture that comedian Aziz Ansari did a bit about it at the Producer’s Guild Awards on Saturday night, wondering why there couldn’t have been at least one black kid checking his Facebook account in “The Social Network,” adding that things were so white that in “127 Hours,” when James Franco’s hiker character cuts off his arm, it doesn't even turn black.

It's hard not to notice how few minorities had any visible roles in this year’s most lauded films. “The Social Network” offers us a virtually lilywhite Harvard; “The Fighter” is set in a oh-so-white, blue-collar Boston neighborhood; “The King’s Speech” depicts an all-white, upper-crust, 1930s-era London; “Toy Story 3,” like most Pixar films, is set in a fantasy suburbia without any obvious references to minorities; while “True Grit” takes us back to the Old West, where the only black faces I can remember seeing are that of a manservant and a stable boy.

And if you’re wondering about lead actor nominee Javier Bardem, he’s from Spain.

The fault lies not with the academy, which has in recent years happily given out the occasional statuette to a black actor or actress lucky enough to get a big part in a serious film. Mo’Nique was on hand Tuesday morning because she won for supporting actress last year for her role in “Precious,” a film made by Lee Daniels, an African American filmmaker. Forest Whitaker won a lead actor Oscar in 2007 for “The Last King of Scotland,” and Halle Berry won a lead actress Oscar in 2002 for “Monster’s Ball” on the same night Denzel Washington won lead actor for “Training Day.”

You can argue that some minorities have been snubbed, starting with Spike Lee, who’s never been nominated for a directing award, not even for landmark films like “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X.” But the Oscars reflect what’s happening in the marketplace. And the cold truth is that black talent rarely receives Oscar opportunities because it works in one of the most minority-free industries in America.

Two African American coaches have faced off in the Super Bowl. Black coaches have won NBA championships. A black man has served on the Supreme Court, been a senator, an astronaut, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, won a Pulitzer Prize and — oh, yes — is currently serving as president of the United States. But if you look at the people who make the decisions about what movies are made in Hollywood, you’d have to look far and wide to find any prominent AfricanAmerican or Latino executives.

There are no studio chairmen or heads of production who are black or Latino. In fact, there are barely any people of color in any high-level positions at any major studio, talent agency or management firm. When I asked a couple of reporter pals to name the most powerful black executive in town, a lot of head-scratching ensued before we decided that the person with the most clout was probably James Lassiter, Will Smith’s longtime business partner and production company chief.

Smith has plenty of juice in town, with every studio salivating at the chance to make his next project. But he’s an anomaly and largely more interested in making commercial movies than Oscar-oriented fare (although he has twice been nominated for an acting Oscar).

Of last year’s top-grossing films, only one in the top 40 was directed by anyone of color, “The Book of Eli,” which starred Washington and was directed by the Hughes Brothers. Tyler Perry had two films in the Top 100 box-office grossers domestically, but like most films with African American casts, they made virtually no money overseas, which is where Hollywood increasingly looks for its profits.

What does this have to do with the Oscars? The films that end up being Academy Award nominees are usually labors of love and rarely feature the kind of easily accessible action heroes or broadly comic characters that suit a studio’s bottom-line sensibility. If you don’t have a person of color in the room where the decision-making happens, fervently arguing why a film should be brought into the world, it’s awfully hard for a project revolving around African American characters to emerge with a greenlight or any substantial financial backing.

Black and Latino actors can get parts as soldiers in an action film or comic sidekicks in a comedy, but when it comes to the kind of dramatic roles that attract Oscar attention, they need a lucky break, like the one Mo’Nique got from having a black filmmaker making the casting choices. Or the one Jennifer Hudson got, with her role in “Dreamgirls” established on the stage. Or the one Morgan Freeman got, landing a Oscar nomination last year as Nelson Mandela in “Invictus,” because he has a long track record of working with Clint Eastwood, and well, who else could play Mandela?

Hollywood is usually impervious to embarrassment, but perhaps this is one of those signal moments when the industry should engage in a little soul-searching about the image it projects to the outside world. At Oscar time, the spotlight is on show business, which in an increasingly multicultural country turns out to be a business that is just as white on the outside as it is on the inside.

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Mo'Nique at the 83rd Academy Awards nominations announcement in Beverly Hills,

Credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

As Thomas Friedman famously put it in his 2005 bestseller, the world is flat. With the arrival of outsourcing, open-source software and Google-style search engine technology, great ideas, brainpower and money fly around the planet faster than ever, making historical and geographical divisions increasingly irrelevant in the global marketplace.

Except when it comes to Hollywood, where the world is hardly flat at all. In other arenas, quality is king, which is why we don't see millions of Americans driving Yugos rather than Toyotas or millions of Japanese listening to music on Microsoft's Zune instead of Apple's iPod. But in the movie business, the world has a strange tilt on its axis. Each year there are a surprising number of movies that are thoroughly rejected by American consumers that go on to enormous success around the rest of the globe.

"Gulliver's Travels" is a bomb in the U.S., struggling to reach the $40-million mark. But overseas, the 20th Century Fox film is a hit, on its way to grossing $170 million, four times what it's done in the states. Sony has similarly high hopes for "The Tourist," which has made a little more than $65 million here. The studio projects that the film will eventually make another $160 million around the world. The same goes for last summer's "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time," which was written off as a costly flop after it made only $90 million in the U.S. But the film has gone on to make an amazing $244 million in the international marketplace.

What's going on here? How is it possible that an American-made product can be rejected by its home-grown consumers, yet embraced by moviegoers elsewhere? Everyone has a theory about what's going on, but it turns out that most of the films that adult moviegoers and critics in the U.S. view as depressing examples of the decline of American filmmaking--big 3-D action-adventure spectacles and clunky movie-star thrillers--are the very films that do best in the overseas market.

It turns out that Hollywood is taking advantage of its most compelling competitive advantage in world cinema. The epic scope of its Big Event movies can't be achieved in other countries, which is why some of the most striking overseas box-office successes have been achieved by 3-D movies or special-effects driven animated films. When it comes to the riches available in the ever-expanding global market, there is no better example than the box-office trajectory of the "Ice Age" series. The franchise has largely remained constant in the U.S.--with each of the three films making between $176 and $197 million--while the films have exploded around the globe, with the first film making $207 million overseas, the second one $457 million and the third one a whopping $690 million. 

The potential for overseas box-office bullion is also driving the explosion in 3-D releases. 3-D movies have two distinct advantages overseas--they can't be duplicated by local productions and, even better, they have a built-in safeguard against piracy, since the 3-D ingredient can be seen only in a theater. The real payoff came for horror films like the "Resident Evil" series. When the franchise's third installment was released, it did $50 million in the U.S., $96 million overseas. But the fourth film, "Resident Evil: Afterlife," released in 3-D, exploded when it was released last fall, making $60 million in the U.S. but an astounding $236 million overseas. 

As Jeff Blake, Sony's chairman of worldwide marketing and distribution, explains: "We're increasingly having to compete with local product in each marketplace, so to get people's attention away from the local product, you need something special. 3-D is the element that really makes the film stick."

In fact, it's because of the booming market overseas that studios have largely abandoned making dramas, since that's exactly the kind of genre that has the most difficult time competing with locally produced product. It's why even after two leading actors and an acclaimed filmmaker signed on to make "The Fighter," Paramount didn't give the film the green light until it had outside financing--there's no bonanza for such a uniquely American story overseas.

This phenomenon isn't limited to the movie business. According to Andrew Kronfeld, the executive vice president of international marketing at Universal Music, some pop stars find little success outside of the U.S. while others are huge all around the globe. Before his death, Michael Jackson was virtually a pariah in the U.S., yet he continued to sell enormous amounts of records overseas. Pink sells far more records overseas than in the U.S. On the other hand, Jay-Z is far bigger star in the U.S. than elsewhere.

Some music genres, like frothy pop and dance music, translate globally just as well as special-effects studded action films. "The pop-leaning hip-hop artists with Top 40 radio acceptance do really well internationally, while hip-hop artists with a mix tape street vibe have a harder time getting acceptance," Kronfeld says. "In general, pop love songs and dance beat songs translate a lot better than singer-songwriters or hip-hop artists with a real street vibe. Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas work everywhere, but artists like John Mayer and Dave Matthews just don't sell that well overseas."     

Making movies or music that can sell everywhere is good news for media conglomerates that are eager to grow, since overseas markets are expanding much faster around the world than in the U.S., where movie attendance is flat and record sales are in steep decline. But it's less of a boon for artists who value putting a strong sense of place into their stories. As former Universal Pictures co-chairman David Linde put it: "Movies that are strongly culturally rooted just don't travel as well, and a reason why few American comedies are big hits overseas. What's funny in France isn't necessarily what's funny in the U.S., and vice  versa, because comedy is so often rooted within your own culture and its personality."

Of course, for the past 100 years, America's movies have been deeply rooted in our fabled land of cultural opportunity. So the global applause for cultural exports that weren't even successful in America could well be a troubling sign of the beginning of the end of our cultural hegemony. No one makes more popular movies than the ones made in America, but it can't be great artistic news when it turns out that the movies that have the biggest global reach are the ones that are the least distinctively American.  

-- Patrick Goldstein

Photo: A poster of Jack Black's "Gulliver's Travels" on display before the opening of the Cannes Film Festival last May in Cannes. Credit: Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP/Getty Images