Diablo Cody makes me want to lie down in a small dark room and quietly suffocate myself.

I know — it’s probably just someone using “Laura Albert” as an ironic pseudonym.

I doubt that even real teenagers want to hear what they actually sound like. So the choice is to lie to the audience: “See how cool and suave you are!”

So you mean “Wes Anderson’s films after The Royal Tenenbaums (But not including The Life Aquatic)” right?

Otherwise, I may cry.

Without a TV, I missed the Oscar ceremonies, too, and have only read about them.

“Shot down like an old dog.” (?)

Your overstatement always gooses me with a naughty thrill, Ed. Prone to over-the-top statements myself, I naturally marvel that you make them work. The machine-gun criticism I’m forever trying to duck is “hyperbole.” That one word brands me as ridiculous and perpetually unworthy of further consideration. Any tips on how I move from “hyperbole” to “a little much?”

Juno itself was completley mediocre… I definitely enjoyed it for what it was, laughed quite a bit, and recommended it to friends… but was left talking more about its flaws than its merits with everyone afterwards.

It deserved some praise, but the Juno-mania/obsession currently sweeping the nation is not only stupid, but possibly dangerous… for the many reasons cited by the backlash.

I dunno whether she should be ’shot down like an old dog’ though… however ridiculous the world of Juno may be, that kind of criticism is what [i]I[/i] would call piss poor writing.

That said, I don’t think Cody’s script is nearly as bad as you say. The question of whether the dialogue is artificial is irrelevant. Like Brick, the question is whether the film’s artifice is sustained. I don’t think it is, but neither did I find it a complete failure, and the excesses of the dialogue were more than made up for by the film’s compassion towards and insight into every single one of its characters. Juno’s popularity is completely out of proportion to its merits, but those merits are not insignificant.

All of which is to say that we strongly disagree, which is fine and hardly the first time, but this:

despite Cody’s penchant for taking off her clothes

is way out of line.

If awards ceremonies are anything to go by, Hollywood is in trouble.

Awards ceremonies aren’t anything to go by. That’s your mistake right there. They’re popularity contests. No one is entitled to an award. Tamara Jenkins screenplay was produced. If the existence of Juno somehow precluded the existence of Jenkin’s film, you might have a case that some injustice was done. So she didn’t get an award. So what?

I saw “Juno” when it debuted at the Toronto film festival in September last year.

Cody and Reitman spoke after the screening. Reitman recalled when he first came across Cody’s script he read page after page waiting for Cody to make a mistake. But gosh darn it, she never did: she got it right the first time.

At that point, she hadn’t started writing another screenplay; who knows what the Oscar will embolden her to write next.

Don’t worry, Ed, Diablo Cody (still the lamest pseud I have ever heard) will be a “Whatever Happened To…” article in 15 years.

That’s a bit much, Ed.