In years past a good percentage of that gang of smoothies known as the Movie City News’ Gurus of Gold have voiced mainstream Oscar sentiments. Many seem to have a liking for those stodgy, politically-correct, right-down-the-middle, conventional-sentiment choices of your average 63-year-old Academy member. And so it’s significant, I think, that when recently asked to pick the top 15 most likely Best Picture contenders, the groovy Gurus put Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (Fox Searchlight, 10.18) right at the top — i.e., tied for first place with David O. Russell‘s American Hustle and Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

So this is it, fellas — the Gurus are making room for the McQueen because it’s the “right” movie, the politically noble film to get behind this year…c’mon. That’s the early sentiment, at least. There’s a readiness to accept that, to let it in. The upcoming Toronto Film festival showings will provide a significant reading, needless to say.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted a piece that supports my 8.21 view that Bruce Dern‘s “Woody” role in Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska screams “snarly eccentricity for its own sake”, and that the smartest strategy on Paramount’s part would be to campaign Dern not as Best Actor but as a Best Supporting Actor contender. I laid out my case in a piece called “Can Dern’s Woody Get Traction As Best Actor?”. Hitfix/In Contention’s Kris Tapley and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone disagreed and sent along their arguments, which I posted with their permission.

As I’ve said for many, many years, the inspiration, tenacity and toil that go into winning any Oscar will always warrant honor and admiration, but it’s not the win-or-lose aspects of the Oscar race but the award-season arguments that provide the real pleasure and uplift. Community-wise, I mean. Because these arguments serve as a kind of communal therapy session or Socratic dialogue about who and what we are — as individuals, as a culture — and why. It was certainly a form of self-expression to say that you were a fan of The King’s Speech or even to predict in a wink-winking Dave Karger sort of way that it would win the Best Picture Oscar. If you went for The Kings Speech you were with the Soviets in an August 1968 kind of way, and if you stood with The Social Network guys you were more of a Prague Spring kind of guy.

So with award season about to commence with the start of the Telluride Film Festival six days hence, what will this year’s arguments be about?

I spent an hour this morning putting up a metal hanging bar between a living-room doorframe. Some call it a chinning bar, but it’s for my lower back. The idea is to hang from it for 45 or 60 seconds with no support from my legs. It’s a horizontal black cylinder thing encased in a rubber pad and held up by two round, hard-plastic anchor cups. The first thing was to make sure that I screwed in the cups in precisely the same spot on the opposite sides of the frame, and just getting that part right was a bitch, let me tell you. I drove nails into the spots where the Phillips-head screws would go to pave the way, but three of these little guys refused to screw all the way in. I tried and tried and started quietly swearing after a while. I finally took a chisel and tried to just hammer them in, which I sorta kinda succeeded at. I’m not too bad at carpentry but I’m impatient. I get mad at things. But it’s up now, thank God, and it really does make my lower back feel pretty great after hanging from it.

In my 8.21 riff about James DiEugenio‘s “Reclaiming Parkland,” I asked for “some decisive piece of smoking-gun evidence” that disproves the Warren Report. This morning Joe McBride, the longtime film writer and author of the recently released “Into The Nightmare,” sent me an image of an 11.22.63 internal FBI memo sent by Alan H. Belmont to Clyde Tolson, special assistant to J. Edgar Hoover.

“Okay, so Belmont is reporting that they found two bullets,” I replied to McBride. “The pristine magic bullet, presumably, and another lodged in Kennedy’s head ‘behind his ear,’ right? No conspiracy whacko or official agency has ever asserted or even denied to my knowledge that a bullet was found lodged in JFK’s head so this was…what? An indication of a conspiracy to keep the truth from coming out? Or a wrongo due to the heat of the moment and the human capacity to misread or mishear or otherwise screw up, right? Or am I missing something?”

“Inside Llewyn Davis is a sardonically funny American art film about frustration and wintry despair and the Sisyphusian struggle of a folk singer who’s talented and cares about his art but isn’t good or lucky enough to make it to the next level, and the week-long journey he goes through that takes him from a kind of semi-resigned ‘fuck me’ slumber mentality to an ‘oh, to hell with it…this shit is infuriating…I hate folk music!’ feeling. Bob Dylan, trust me, is going to love this thing. He’s going to effing swear by it.” — posted from Cannes on Sunday, 5.19.