HuffPost‘s Ricky Camilleri and Chris Rosen join Vanity Fair‘s Hollywood editor Katey Rich exchange predictions about this Sunday’s (i.e., four days hence) Golden Globe awards. Noteworthy: Rich recounts what she saw and heard at Monday night’s NYFCC award ceremony regarding the behavior of City Arts critic Armond White and his tablemates.

The designers of this poster are, of course, conveying an attitude about the forthcoming Oscar telecast. HE interpretation: “We obviously don’t know what Ellen’s monologue will be like, but trust us — we aren’t doing ANYTHING differently this year. In fact we’re probably going to be even more generically Oscar this year than any generically Oscar show you’ve ever sat through. As far as we’re concerned it’s 1990. Jokes aimed at viewers in Shanghai and other none-too-hips, Las Vegas-styled dance numbers, pomp and circumstance…the whole shot. But at least no sexist songs like ‘We Saw Your Boobs.'”

This is some kind of landmark in the annals of Entertainment Weekly covers, which are always aimed at dumb girls and therefore flat and obvious as shit. This puppy is out there, if nothing else. Context, intrigue, perversity, etc. Some kind of metaphorical necrophiliac attitude mixed with the nervy irreverence of director David Fincher. Not to mention a “come again?” quality. If you’ve read Gillian Flynn‘s “Gone Girl” (or even the Wiki page plot summary), you…aahh, forget it. Then again Fincher isn’t sticking that closely to the book so all bets are off.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted a long quote from City Arts critic Armond White about his reported heckling of 12 Years A Slave direct Steve McQueen two nights ago at the New York Film Critics Circle award ceremony in midtown Manhattan. The quote boils down to White claiming that the remarks attributed to him about McQueen weren’t spoken by him, that Variety‘s Ramin Setoodeh reported “a malicious lie,” and that whatever White did say wasn’t intended for general consumption but for those at his table.

City Arts critic Armond White.

White has also described himself as “the strongest voice that exists in contemporary criticism,” and claimed that a “Communist-style” NYFCC committee is apparently determined to deep-six him, at least as far as his NYFCC membership is concerned.

“The comments that I supposedly made were never uttered by me or anyone within my earshot,” White has told Feinberg. “I have been libeled by publications that recklessly quoted unnamed sources that made up what I said and to whom I was speaking. Someone on the podium talked about critics’ ‘passion.’ Does ‘passion’ only run one-way toward subservience?”

White is saying that what he said came from a passionate place, and that the nature of his remarks weren’t subservient in nature. Do the math.

All acting glory is fleeting. In older cultures (especially France) you can coast on your past accomplishments for years but here it’s “what have you done in the last few weeks or months?” And if you haven’t done anything noteworthy in the last few years, forget it. Especially if you’re a 50-plus female. You’re not just gone but forgotten. And then five or ten years later somebody like me comes along and asks, “Hey, whatever happened to…?” That’s the worst of it, I think. Some actors just blend into the fog.

Andie McDowell at a relatively recent occasion.

So here it is (and believe me when I say I’m trying to avoid sounding dismissive in any way, shape of form): whatever happened to Andie McDowell?

With Sundance ’14 right around the corner I was thinking this morning about McDowell, whom I’ll always recall as the Belle of the Ball at Sundance ’89 when Steven Soderbergh‘s sex, lies & videotape had its big premiere there. I also recall running into her at a Sundance filmmaker’s brunch in ’96, and watching her pow-wow with Robert Redford a few minutes later.

Meryl Streep to Female Academy Members: “Emma Thompson‘s performance in Saving Mr. Banks rang my bell and has my respect, but the real-life Walt Disney was an anti-Semitic, woman-dismissing shit. So do what you want but I’ve though twice about supporting Banks for Best Picture, given the essentially dishonest and fanciful depiction of Disney that it presents.”

Meryl Streep at last night’s National Board Of review awards ceremony in Manhattan. (Photo stolen from Variety.)

This seems like a fair interpretation of what Streep said last night at the National Board of Review award ceremony in Manhattan. Variety‘s Ramin Setoodeh is reporting that while Streep’s “nine-minute tour-de-force” speech was a love sonnet to Thompson, the legendary actress “also made a point of blasting Disney for his sexist and anti-Semitic stances.”

Quoting Disney animator Ward Kimball, Streep said that “some of his associates reported that Walt Disney didn’t really like women” and that he was basically a “gender bigot…he didn’t trust women or cats.” Streep quoted from a letter that his company wrote in 1938 to an aspiring female animator: “Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that task is performed entirely by young men.”