From a portion of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” titled “Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President” and excerpted in the current issue of New York. The following comes from former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh:

“As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated.

“Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do.

“It was, said Walsh, ‘like trying to figure out what a child wants.'”

Yesterday afternoon I posted a director-writer’s opinions and preferences about current Oscar contenders, limiting the discussion to the top six categories (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor & Actress). Late yesterday I spoke to a woman producer with many TV and feature credits, and who’s been duking it out in this industry since the mid ’80s. A very sharp, very savvy lady. I’ve re-ordered the sequence of some of her quotes, pruned and condensed some of them, and in some cases run them verbatim.

Best Picture: “Call Me By Your Name is really the best picture of the year. There’s an unreasonable resistance to it among some, that it’s ‘just’ a gay love story set in the lush scenery of Northern Italy…the first Academy screening was only a quarter-full…but coming from a heterosexual woman, it’s the most honest and powerful film of the year. It’s about finding out for the first time what love can be, and how life goes on when your heart is broken. I think people should just GO SEE THE MOVIE. I haven’t met someone yet who wasn’t knocked out.

(l. to r.) Timothee Chalamet, Luca Guadagnino, Armie Hammer.

“Realistically for the Best Picture Oscar, it’s probably between The Post and Dunkirk. Dunkirk is a stunningly well made film, but it lacks that big emotional content. You begin the story with the thread of an average soldier who is just trying to survive, but not ever knowing anything about him handicaps the emotional takeaway at the end. It may win because it’s a great true story, but the heartfelt connections to the characters are impeded by their vague never revealed histories. Tom Hardy and Mark Rylance do very well with little, but could have been so much more. The Post is probably the winner. Streep and Hanks are on the top of their game. And the heroic relevance of the story is inescapable. Spielberg delivers.

“The curious enthusiasm for Get Out is mainly a box-office vote. If it wasn’t a big hit, it probably wouldn’t be as prominent in the Best Picture conversation. Mudbound feels like a smarter, better shot…a more quality-driven picture with a stronger message as well as a strong woman’s voice, although it’s not as edgy or commercial. Either way Get Out, clever and entertaining as it is, does not belong in the same category as Moonlight, Twelve Years A Slave, Hidden Figures and Fences. All of these movies make Get Out look weak. If Get Out had come out last year, it probably wouldn’t have been nominated. These previous nominees are worthy Best Picture contenders; Get Out has skated in during a weak year.”

Best Director: “Luca Guadagnino deserves to win for Call Me By Your Name. His film is so beautifully shot. The actors are terrific, the music perfect. But Chris Nolan will probably win it for the scope and scale of Dunkirk. Guillermo del Toro‘s work on The Shape of Water was wonderful, inspired. Greta Gerwig did a fantastic job on Lady Bird, and I think she deserves to get nominated for telling a small story so incredibly well. Steven Spielberg will get nominated for The Post. Deserves it, quintessential pro. Mudbound‘s Dee Rees is the most deserving underdog this year.”

I haven’t discussed Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water since it opened three and a half weeks ago. I posted my review exactly four months ago during the Telluride Film Festival. A day later I posted a back-and-forth discussion with a film critic friend, called “Shape of Water Pushback.”

Now that everyone’s seen it, I’m re-posting my initial response and asking for comments:

I wouldn’t describe myself as head-over-heels in love with Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water (Fox Searchlight, 12.8), but I certainly approve as far as it goes.

A sweet Guillermo fable through and through, I agree 100% that it’s definitely his best film since Pan’s Labyrinth — one of his smaller-scale creations that aims above and beyond the fanboy realm. Shape is a sci-fi period thing, a trans-species love story, a swoony romantic fantasy and an E.T.-like tale about a merging of disparate hearts and souls.

It also accommodates a darkly paranoid story about the forces of absolute badness looking to dissect and destroy an exotic life form. It’s a little stiff and overbearing at times, but generally mature and tender-hearted and ten times better than Okja, which used a similar storyline.

This is an adult fantasy piece full of heartache and swoony feelings, lusciously and exactingly composed, painted with early ’60s period detail and production design to die for. A movie completely dominated and in fact saturated with its Guillermo-ness.

I saw Shape late last night. The screening began at 11:20 pm and ended two hours later, and I was 100% alert and wide-eyed start to finish. This is what good movies do — they wake you up and keep you in a state of anticipation until the closing credits. Oh, and the headline I went with three days ago after the first Venice showing — Douglas Sirk’s Creature From The Love Lagoon — still stands.

Set in 1962 Baltimore, The Shape of Water is about a current that quickly develops between Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute and lonely but sensually attuned dreamer who works as a cleaning woman inside a government-run scientific laboratory, and a gentle, large-eyed aqua-creature with God-like healing powers (Doug Jones) who’s recently been captured in South America and brought to the lab for study and eventual dissection.

I began explaining my lack of interest in the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival two years ago. I respectfully blew it off again this year, and will most likely do the same again next year. Who cares? It’s just a big glossy event that mainly attracts red-carpet media types. No culture, no intrigue, too many limos, not for me.

“I’ve been attending the Palm Springs Film Festival for the last few years,” I wrote on 1.3.16, “and at the end of every one I’ve asked myself ‘was that really worth it?’ I used to think of the PSFF as a warm-up for Sundance. Now it’s basically a big-media paparazzi pigfuck that every significant Oscar contender is obliged to attend, and all you can do as a columnist is…well, not much. Write observations, attend the events, listen to try-out acceptance speeches, snap a few photos.

“You drive all the way out there and stay in some old-style place for two or three nights for $400 or $450 bucks and for what? It’s a tax write-off and not entirely unpleasant (Variety‘s Sunday brunch party is always agreeable), but I decided to ignore it this year. Too much grief for too little yield.

A 2015 HE headline said it all: “Puttin’ On Ritz in Chilly Corporate Bunker Once Known as Palm Springs.”

I’m not saying the home-invader murderers in Eli Roth and Joe Carnahan‘s remake of Death Wish (MGM/Annapurna, 3.2) should be from this or that tribe, but the U.S. is a multicultural society, after all, and it does seem a tiny bit chickenshit that the bad guys are generic white scumbags, or cut from the same cloth as the three invaders (Jeff Goldblum played one of them) in Michael Winner’s 1974 original. Plus: Paul Kersey was an architect in the original — why is he now a surgeon? Why isn’t he a concert promoter, a car salesman or an owner of a fleet of dump trucks?

You need to look on the bright side of Bright (Netflix, 12.22). That 28% rating it received on Rotten Tomatoes means that a little more than one out of four critics liked it. More importantly, Bright is “the highest viewed Netflix film ever on the service in its first week of release and one of the biggest originals (including sequels/additional seasons) Netflix has ever launched,” according to a release. It’s also “the #1 movie on Netflix in every country (190 or so) since its release with more people viewing the film internationally than domestically.” Which is why Netflix announced today that they’ll be making a Bright sequel. David Ayer will write and direct; Will Smith and Joel Edgerton will also return.

Those Steve Bannon quotes, excerpted from Michael Wolff‘s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” and reported in today’s Guardian, are fairly wonderful.

Serving #1: “The three senior guys in the [Trump] campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Serving #2: “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero. They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

Serving #3: “You realize where this is going. This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first, and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner…it’s as plain as a hair on your face. It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.”

Serving #4 (and my favorite): “[Team Trump is] sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.”

A Machievellian Lucifer and demonic alt-right architect who totally had Donald Trump’s ear and back, a once-lordly, black-hooded figure who graced the cover of Time magazine turns around five months after leaving the White House and calls the Russki meeting “treasonous“?

For decades my sleep pattern was to get about six hours, midnight or 1 am to 6 or 7 am. Over the last couple of years I’ve taken a one-hour nap around 2 or 3 pm on the couch. But every now and then (i.e., usually when I’m really stressed about something) I’ll become a fitful sleeper, and that means a 3 or 3:30 or 4 am wake-up, which always results in (a) moving to the living room couch for a 90-to-120-minute Twitter session. (b) finally returning to sleep around 6 or 6:30 am, and (c) waking again at 9 or even 9:30 am.

Tatyana and Arianna Huffington say it’s better to get at least seven if not eight hours straight. While I recognize the soundness of that advice, I have this nonsensical, deep-down notion that overnight slumber is a little slice of death, and that if I sleep too much I’ll miss stuff, and that too much sleep is for losers — the horizontal equivalent of taking extra-long showers.

Last night was particularly bad. I fell asleep on the couch during the second hour of Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special, and then stumbled into the bedroom and tossed and turned for 90 minutes. And then, Tatyana tells me, I began snoring, which in my book is 100% unforgivable. (I told her this morning that “if this happens again, wake me up and kick me out of the bedroom…seriously.”) And then I woke up at 4 am and did the standard fitful — Twitter, back to sleep at 6:30 or 7 am, wake up at 9 or 9:30 am.

I go through periods, in other words, in which I am almost Al Pacino in Insomnia. But not quite.