| Do Actor Awards voters have a problem with subtitles? |
| It would seem so, though I think motion picture academy members will offer a much-needed corrective when Oscar nominations are announced in a couple of weeks. If not, I'm going to have to dust off my Neil Diamond playlist and start singing along with Kate Hudson. |
| I'm Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. Looking for a good sushi recommendation? Read on. George Clooney has got you covered. |
You can take the actor out of L.A. ... |
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| (Jennifer McCord / For The Times) |
| I sat down with Clooney a couple of months ago for an Envelope cover story that just published this week. Sometimes that's how these things work. I don't schedule the pieces; I just write them. |
| In the intervening time, it came out that Clooney and his wife, Amal, with whom he has never argued (we got into this, stopping just short of our own squabble), have been granted French citizenship. This after the couple recently sold their estate in Studio City, a home Clooney bought in 1995. |
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| What gives? I ask him. You abandoning L.A.? |
| "No!" Clooney answers quickly, saying the family, which includes 8-year-old twins Alexander and Ella, still has an apartment here, a "big apartment." |
| "I've been there in that house for 30 years, and it was time to move," Clooney says. "We got a place about four years ago in France, and we spent a good amount of time there, enjoying it. There's an anonymity living there. That's good for the kids. But L.A.'s still a big part of home for me too because it's where I found success. It's where I made all my friends. I know every back street. I know all the shortcuts." |
| Shortcuts? Clooney isn't spilling any secrets. But he will declare his love for Studio City on the record. |
| "When I first moved there in 1990 from Hollywood, the big knock was, 'Oh, s—, you moved to the Valley. You sold out.' And now the Valley's really happening. I loved being in Studio City. They're two or three of the best sushi bars in the world — literally, the world." |
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| Names, please. |
| "Asanebo and Katsu are spectacular," Clooney says. "And I could almost walk there from my house. Irresistible." |
| "I liked Studio City a lot, but listen, I liked Hollywood too," Clooney continues. "I lived there in the '80s when it was gritty, but it was fun. Melrose Avenue was crazy. It was all punk rockers. It's changed, but there's still a little energy to it." |
| Talking shortly after the Dodgers won a second consecutive World Series, I wonder if all these years in Los Angeles had converted Clooney, a Kentucky native who grew up rooting for the Cincinnati Reds during the Big Red Machine era, into being a Dodgers fan. |
| "I'm a National League guy, so I rooted for the Dodgers over the Blue Jays and I was happy they won," Clooney says. "Having gone to that '75 World Series — my dad took me to a couple of games — I was excited to see a World Series as exciting as that one." |
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| We get to talking about Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Dodgers starting pitcher who won three games, including a complete-game victory, and came back on no days rest to finish Game 7. |
| "Nobody throws a complete game these days," Clooney says. "I blame [Reds manager] Sparky Anderson for that." |
| "Captain Hook," I interject, a nickname Anderson earned for pulling pitchers early. "He'd bring in Rawly Eastwick and Will McEnaney." |
| I stop, dumbfounded how I just conjured the names of two Cincinnati Reds relief pitchers from a half-century ago. How do I remember those names and not what I ate for breakfast yesterday? |
| "Think about this way," Clooney says. "It's like music and films, too. I will be sitting with my wife watching a film that I haven't seen in 40 years and go, 'Oh, he's about to say this.' There's something funny about those things imprinting your mind. It'd be easier to learn a language if you learned it as a song. 'Michelle, ma belle.' We all remember that." |
