Gen Z slang for awesome style / THU 4-30-26 / Former carrier over Mauna Kea / Chess-playing Mechanical Turk of 1770, for one / Holder of a large bed / Mocking name for failed businesses of the early 2000s / Seafood dish known as the King of Salads / Tour guide's admonition

Constructor: Lance Enfinger and John Kugelman

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: OSCAR BAIT (59A: Film angling for awards ... or what's depicted three times in this puzzle?) — Best Picture Oscar winners, appearing in circled-square formations shaped like hooks, drop down and snag three different fish, which are lurking in the shaded squares inside longer answers:

Theme answers:

• EXIT ROUTE (17A: Part of an evacuation plan) — the TROUT is hooked by PATTON
• PSALM ONE (21A: It ends "But the way of the ungodly shall perish") — the SALMON is hooked by RAIN MAN
• POP CHART (50A: Hit list) — the CHAR is hooked by BEN-HUR

Word of the Day: Mechanical Turk (31A: Chess-playing Mechanical Turk of 1770, for one = HOAX) —

The Mechanical Turk (German: Schachtürke, lit. 'chess Turk'), also known as the Automaton Chess Player or simply the Turk (Hungarian: A Török), was a chess-playing machine first displayed in 1770, which appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess autonomously, but whose pieces were in reality moved via levers and magnets by a chess master hidden in its lower cavity. The machine was toured and exhibited for 84 years as an automaton, and continued giving occasional exhibitions until 1854, when it was destroyed in a fire. In 1857, an article published by the owner's son provided the first full explanation of the mechanism, which had been widely suspected to be a hoax but never accurately described while the machine still existed.

Constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen to impress Empress Maria Theresa, the Turk won most games, including those against statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. It was purchased in 1804 by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, who continued to exhibit it. Chess masters who operated it over this later period included Johann Allgaier, Boncourt, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis, Jacques Mouret and William Schlumberger, but its operators during Kempelen's original tour remain unknown. The device could also perform the knight's tour, a puzzle that required the player to move a knight to visit every square of a chessboard exactly once. (wikipedia)

• • •

[Oscars won: 0
Ships destroyed: many]

This puzzle won me over with its ridiculousness. The concept here works because the puzzle really commits to the bit, elaborately literalizing a common phrase to the point of extreme silliness. A deconstructed, reconstructed metaphor, with the movie titles "fishing" not for Oscars, but for literal fish. Does it make any sense for Patton to catch a TROUT? No! But who cares. It's the arbitrariness of the fish that makes it truly loopy. So much crossword "wackiness" is lukewarm at best—subdadjoke, barely chuckleworthy. But this one? This one follows the golden wackiness rule, which is Go Big or Go Home. Also, Go Fish! Are there some problems with the theme execution? Yeah, a few. First of all, there's some visual ambiguity—the movies are supposed to be OSCAR BAIT, but they look more like hooks. Maybe they've been threaded onto their hooks so perfectly that they just *look* like hooks. Or maybe those shapes aren't hooks but worms. They look like inverted candy canes to me. But I think you could argue that the circled squares are the hooks and then you "bait" those hooks with movie titles. That's how I'm choosing to see it. I don't love the CHAR answer for a couple of reasons: one, the CHAR is a much much less familiar fish than the other two, but two, and more importantly, the CHAR does not break across the two words in its theme answer. SALMON touches both words in its answer, TROUT touches both words in its answer, but CHAR belongs only to CHART, so POP's just hanging out there doing nothing. The ideal embedded-word scenario has that word involved with every element in its host answer. It's clear Shortz doesn't care about this, given how often this weakness occurs—but I learned from the great constructor/editor Patrick Berry, so I will cling to my belief that this is how embedded words should work! But it's an admittedly minor point, esp. when there's so much entertaining visual chaos going on. I don't love PSALM ONE, written out like that, but as with POP CHART's failure to properly embed CHAR, sometimes you have to do what you have to do to make a worthily wacky theme work out.

The short stuff is kind of a drag today—a real onslaught of repeaters. So many crossword names (OGDEN IHOP RUBE AYN OATES CHER etc.) and then ENTS OSHA ICAN SYNE AETNA LODE, the always ugly SNES. It's a good thing the theme is so shiny and loud, and that the longer non-theme answers are admirably strong. EMBALMER and RAINMAKER really hold down the fort in the NW, and STAY CLOSE and BEN HOGAN do the same in the SE, those "STAY CLOSE!" is not an "admonition" I've heard on tours before (34D: Tour guide's admonition). Anyway, it's more a request or instruction. "Admonition" would be more like "Don't touch that Monet!" Because the instruction was unexpected, if not entirely unfamiliar to me, that SE corner was by far the hardest part of the puzzle for me. I got quadruple stymied heading into that corner. The quadfecta! I blanked on BEN ___, POP ___, "STAY ___," and CRAB ___. My favorite ("favorite") part was that I kept wanting 58A: Seafood dish known as the King of Salads to be CRAB ... SALAD. Should've remembered BEN HOGAN but kept getting interference from his main rival, Crossworld's own Sammy SNEAD. Knowing the theme actually helped me get into that corner (another thing in this theme's favor), as I was able to infer BEN-HUR from BEN and then got the CHART part of POP CHART from there, which got me RIALS, which was wrong (it's RIELS), but it was right enough to get me traction. Outside of that patch, the puzzle seemed quite easy.

[BEN HOGAN not pictured]

Mistakes? Not many. The RIALS/RIELS thing, and then CRUDE for CRASS (1D: Vulgar). Had one of those "malapops" where you want a word that's wrong, but then that word actually appears elsewhere later in the solve. Today, I wanted TADA for VOILA (obviously impossible given the word length, but that's what popped into my head first) (55A: "There it is!"). And then later ... TADA! There's TADA (26A: Revealing statement?). I'd never heard of the Chess-playing Mechanical Turk of 1770 and assumed that that was its (his?) full name. Kind of disappointing to discover it's just called "the Mechanical Turk" and the other bits in the clue are just descriptors. I was like "The Chess-Playing Mechanical Turk of 1770, what a badass name. If that were my name, I'd insist on being called by my full name at all times. I might have to become a pro wrestler with that name. Anyway, HOAX took some crosses, is what I'm saying. 

Bullets:

• 19D: ___ good turn (DO A) — it's funny to me that there are non-Oscar winning movie titles trying to catch the fish as well. D.O.A. is probably the best of them—a classic 1950 film noir in which Edmond O'Brien has to solve his own murder! (dum dum dum!). But there's also the '90s legal drama The RAINMAKER out there trying to catch a fish. And then there's the Jaws ripoff ORCA! Very sad when an ORCA can't catch a fish. Can't believe ORCA lost out to PATTON today. Real upset, fishing-wise. 

• 18A: Former carrier over Mauna Kea (ISLAND AIR) — boo to "former carriers." Luckily, the answer is very inferable with a few crosses. The clue mentions something Hawaiian, so there's your "ISLAND" part, and then ... well yeah, "carrier," there's your AIR part. VOILA! TADA! VOILDA!
• 5D: Holder of a large bed (OCEAN) — "Holder" is weird, but I guess defensible. I wanted this to be PAPA, as in PAPA Bear, but I think his bed was defined by firmness, not bigness. Wait, do we ever learn which bed belongs to which bear? English professor can't remember plot of Goldilocks and the Three Bears! Shameful.
• 11A: What am I, chopped liver? (PATÉ) — still laughing at this one. Again, like the theme, so stupid it's genius. I read the clue as if it were in quotation marks so I tried to make the four-letter answer mean something equivalent to "What am I, chopped liver?" Not easy. "I'M ME!" "UH, ME?" "IT ME!" But no, it's literally chopped liver. Better, it's the existential musing of chopped liver. "I'm chopped liver, therefore I am ... PATÉ!" Unlike PATTON, PATÉ won no Oscars because it is a film that does not exist.
• 13D: Gen Z slang for awesome style (DRIP) — pretty sure it was part of hip-hop vernacular before it was "Gen Z slang" but whatever. 

• 22A: Toys for tots, perhaps (TYPO) — you'd've gotten it quickly if they'd put "toys" and "tots" in quotation marks like they should be, but where's the fun in that?
• 41A: What "R" might stand for on an envelope (RHODE) — as in "RHODE Island," commonly abbreviated "RI." Too deep for me. I kept wanting ROUTE and then remembering that ROUTE was already in the grid.
• 38A: Mocking name for failed businesses of the early 2000s (DOT BOMB) — nice to follow up yesterday's tepid (DOT) COM puzzle with this colorful (if dated) zinger.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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