Reading time: Just over 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about some amusing metaphors from Anthony Lane…
I read The New Yorker magazine every week and, from time to time, I read the missives they send me by email. The most recent one — a dissection of the 2017 Academy Awards ceremony — grabbed my attention and was so funny it soon had me spewing tea out of my nose. The credit goes to Anthony Lane who filed his piece under the headline: “A shambolic, kind of fabulous Oscars ceremony.”
Just in case you don’t have time to read it (although I suggest you make the time) let me share my favourite lines here:
- The only guest not having a fine time, by my calculation, was the person who couldn’t see a damn thing, having been placed directly behind Halle Berry—or, to be accurate, behind Halle Berry’s hair [pictured above], the shape of which suggested that her seat was connected to a car battery.
- All of which left Mr. Gummer [Meryl Streep’s husband], who stood there with his hands behind his back and a look of serene approval, like someone admiring a Matisse.
- …the Alberta Ferretti creation in dark-blue velvet that fit Taraji P. Henson so well, and so unremovably, that she may still be wearing it at breakfast.
- He gazed at Ryan Gosling, who had plumped for the sort of ruffled frontage that Joe Pesci used to wear when he was about to kill someone in a Scorsese movie….
- The Academy Awards, by definition, require a touch of salt in the caramel.
- [In describing the kerfuffle over the wrong movie being named as Best Picture winner:] As the President would say: Fake Prize!
- It felt as if the stage had become a wedding feast, shambolic but benign, probably directed by Robert Altman, with the bride’s family and the groom’s old pals laying down their golden weapons of war and deciding to savor the chaos.