Diablo Cody has her Oscar, but all the accolades she got for her Juno script a few months ago seem to be slowly evaporating in a haze of backlash hate. Juno was pretty overrated, and almost certainly didn’t deserve to win Best Picture (and luckily it didn’t), but it also probably doesn’t deserve to be hated. It’s a nice little movie with a script that’s occasionally catchy and cute, if equally often a little too desperate to be cool and hip.
That also makes it a little hard to defend, since even though there’s a lot of good in Cody’s writing, there’s a lot of bad too. She has a tendency to make her characters say things which no real person would ever say, while passing them off as realistic, even though realistically she’s more interested in being cutting edge indie-quirky than real. No real person would say half the stuff in her script, except perhaps Cody herself, who has a tendency to write things like “mega-swish” when describing her apparel. Of course she tempers that way too awesome cool kid wording with the delusion that she’s some sort of downtrodden, every-girl nerd, even when she’s clearly the kind of super-cool, ultra-hip hot chick who likely wouldn’t let a real nerd sit at her table unless he happened to bring with him a lot of free booze. Face it geeks, she’s too metal for you.
Perhaps I should have never read “Candy Girl”. Entertaining though it was, it’s probably given me a bad impression of her. Honestly, she seems an awesome person and when she’s not trying to be tragically hip I really think her writing is pretty damn cool. But maybe you’ll get a taste of what it is about her work that keeps bugging me if you click over to EW and read the little piece she wrote for them about how she spent her Oscar weekend. Heavens to blog that girl likes a drink. Almost as much as she likes tattoos and taking her clothes off for random, paying strangers. It’s worth a read if you’re at all interested in Cody, which you probably are, since everyone has told you over and over again that you’re supposed to be… home skillet. Maybe you’ll buy her whole “I’m a geek” routine. I didn’t. Somehow, I have a hard time seeing her at home on a Friday night dateless and playing a rousing game of Castle Risk.
