LA's chases 2024 Olympics, your March 7th ballot questions answered, the Oscars and diversity in Hollywood

If you look at what Californians believe about the issues, you know, it's what Republicans believe about the issues. We gotta do more work being able to get our message out and I think we do have a bit of a marketing problem and we need to do a better job. 

For my entire life — I'm 39 years old, soon to be 40 — the Democrats have controlled California. It's an absolute fact that there are many people that are hurting in California. We have the highest poverty rate in the nation. We have the highest housing costs in the nation. Our roads are falling apart, our water infrastructure is falling apart, and our education system is failing our kids. 



When you look at the poverty rate as a measure, it's obvious that the people that have been running the place have been failing and we're working to address it as Republicans. 

I think we still have to wait and see what happens. What's going on back in Washington DC is one thing; I'm focusing on what's going on here in California.



While I'm hopeful that some of those policies that'll be implemented in the next year or two will be positive for California, what I'm thinking about is 'what are we doing in the California legislature to improve people's lives?' 



People in California have been suffering under the rule of Democrats for decades now. We've gotta focus our attention there. 

We know that the Affordable Care Act has incredible problems. I've seen them first-hand myself. My hope is that back in Washington DC they will come up with a replacement that will be better. 

Don't you think that's one of the things that's frustrating? We tend to place fear in people's minds. In fact, both the extremes in both the parties do this. They incite fear when something happens. Let's not focus on the fear; let's focus on the solution. 

I'm hopeful that we will have a gubernatorial candidate that will step-up — that will be able to work toward solving these big problems. I don't know of anyone yet that [has].



I know on the Democratic side there are four or five gubernatorial candidates that are going to be well-funded that are going to push hard. 



I'm still waiting to see who we've got on the Republican side, but I'm hopeful that whoever that is is going to give an aspirational message to California and tell them what California Republicans believe. We'll just wait and see who that's gonna be. 

"It doesn't change our approach. Our approach is to reign focus on our job and talking about merits of our bid in Los Angeles. I guess if you want to be an Olympic voting nerd you would say that maybe the dynamic of two European cities, multiple rounds of voting might change what would happen. But you know with a head to head battle we'll have one round of voting which is unique for the most part in Olympic bidding history..."

"We're in constant communication with the administration and we think ultimately bids are best when they're not political. Our bid is not a political bid, it's a private bid, it has a partnership with both the city of Los Angeles and the state of California. The administration has been positive and supportive to date and we hope to continue that support because they're an important piece of the puzzle, but unlike other bids and other countries we're not a government agency, we're not reliant on the whims of the federal government or city or state governments and I think that's a huge competitive advantage in this really challenging and interesting time we're living in."

"Yeah, what they're worried about is their ability and their member's ability and their athlete's ability to travel and compete around the world freely and fairly. To that end the administration understood that this could create some confusion and was quick to remedy that and has done a really good job of helping facilitate those athlete's entries to the United States."

"We've worked through this issue in terms of our ability to help facilitate a competing teams into the country and again, we're going to be telling the story of Los Angeles, again a non-political bid. We like to remind people that our host city guarantee will be signed by the city of Los Angeles. We have a back up guarantee from the state of California. Obviously there's federal government engagement but we're unique in the Olympic bidding world, it has nothing to do with this administration. It's the way the U.S. has always bid for games..."

"Absolutely not. My view is this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. The U.S. bids are unique in that we are privately funded so we've had to raise a substantial amount of money privately from people in Los Angeles and this is the third consecutive American bid after New York and Chicago and I don't believe that I could or we could raise the money again in Los Angeles to mount a successful bid. And I'm not sure that after the three largest cities in America would've lost on consecutive bids...that maybe we need to take a deep breath and learn our lessons and try to figure out what we'd be doing wrong and take a reset..."

There will be an investigation. Price WaterHouse Coopers issued a statement about three ours after Best Picture, saying that they're going to look into exactly what happened. I can tell you from where I was standing in the stage right wings. As soon as the ‘La La Land’ people started to walk towards to stage, I heard a stage manager next to me say, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god– they've got the wrong envelope.’ And then people backstage quickly went into motion. Then, those folks who were watching saw the exchange where the poor ‘La La Land’ producer had to say, actually, my movie didn't win, ‘Moonlight’ did.



What seems to have happened is that Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty were given two Best Actress envelopes instead of one Best Actress and one Best Picture envelope. And they saw ‘La La Land’ written on it because it was the Emma Stone winning envelope. Obviously, ‘La La Land’ did not win best picture.  



I feel a little empathy for poor Warren Beatty. I was standing there when he immediately walked backstage and he looked horrified. A stage manager went up to him and said, ‘Mr. Beatty, security would like the envelopes.’ And Beatty said, ‘I'm going to hold onto them. I'm going to give them to Barry Jenkins in an appropriate moment.’ (Barry Jenkins is the Writer/Director of ‘Moonlight’.) And that is ultimately, what Beatty did.

It's all anybody was talking about. Speculating about could Beatty and Dunaway handled it differently– what they might have done in the situation. Also some people were talking about how unfortunately for both movies in a sense because ‘Moonlight’ didn't really get its proper moment to bask. There were literally taking the Oscars out of the hands of the other movie. And then, poor ‘La La Land’ had this moment of triumph and then has it wrenched from them. It was definitely a memorable, spontaneous show. We've all been saying, we don't want to Oscars to be so predictable. Well, this surely wasn't predictable!     

That stage position is always a fun one to see moments that tend to be a little bit of a cynicism cure for me. One was when Emma Stone walked back immediately after winning and she walked right into Brie Larson– last year's Best Actress winner. Something about all that adrenaline rushing through Emma's body and then, she saw the face of someone she knows and feels comfortable with, and she just collapsed into Brie Larson's arms and started crying and shaking and they just kind of stood there for a moment. It was quite sweet. 



It was also fun to see Lin-Manuel Miranda watch the monitor while Auli'i Cravalho, the 16-year-old girl who voices ‘Moana’, was singing his song. She'd never been in so much as a school play before. She made her live debut at the Oscars. Lin was watching it from the monitor and he was shaking his head and grinning from ear to ear. He had really pushed for her to be forward in the performance which was sort of a risky thing to do. Obviously, he's the much more seasoned performer of the two of them. 

Because there was so much discussion about that Best Picture debacle, I think there's a little bit of a delayed reaction to just how remarkable it is that ‘Moonlight’ won. This was the first year of Oscar voting since the Academy instituted its new guidelines intended to foster inclusion in the group. So there were 624 new people voting this year. A much more diverse group– many more women and people of color. Many more international people than there had been in the past. Of course, we'll never know because their ballots are secret but it's interesting to contemplate if that made the difference between ‘Moonlight’ and ‘La La Land’ winning. 



Moonlight is the first movie to be financed by A24 which is a teeny-tiny, little Brooklyn based distributer. To win Best Picture on the first film that you finance– they had released some before. ‘Room’, last year which was also a Best Picture nominee. That's really quite remarkable. And at such a low budget. It's just sort of an amazing little-movie-that-could kind of story.   

He was just a really warm, really funny guy. He and Jim Cameron met in the '70s when they were building sets on Roger Corman movies together. And then, Jim would go on to cast him in ‘Terminator’, ‘Alien’, ‘Titanic’, ‘True Lies’. They had a really close friendship. When I emailed Jim yesterday, he said he was reeling from the news and he wrote a really beautiful remembrance of Bill Paxton that you can ready at VanityFair.com