Less than 90 seconds after the guy dropped off the box I was gobbling one of the chocolates without thinking, like a starved animal. I ate my first Cake cupcake after an 11.23 screening at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center.

If I was playing a Roman soldier in a costume flick I wouldn’t want to walk around with sandals and bare calves, or more precisely sandals and leather calf straps like George Clooney is doing in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Hail, Caesar!, which is now shooting. Exposed calves are fine on the beach or the couch or sitting around an outdoor cafe but in a Roman costume pic they convey vulnerability or weakness if you’re wearing military garb. Bare calves somehow work against that studly Roman general thing that we all want. I for one would demand to wear those leather calf-coverers that Rex Harrison wore in Cleopatra. [Go to jump page.] There’s nothing frail about Clooney’s calves, mind — he obviously doesn’t have Paul Newman legs — but the general look of sandals and leg straps looks too…unfortified? They seem vaguely Greek, which is to say somewhat frolicsome. If I’m not mistaken Sir Laurence Olivier wore leather calf-coverers when he played General Marcus Licinius Crassus in Spartacus (’60).

George Clooney as movie star Baird Whitlock in Hail, Caesar!.

I don’t have any strong arguments against Ramin Setoodeh‘s Variety piece about the apparent likelihood of Boyhood winning the Best Picture Oscar (“12 Reasons ‘Boyhood’ is the Frontrunner for Best Picture“). I would only add another reason why people might want to give Richard Linklater‘s film a double-down vote or, perhaps, vote for a Best Picture contender with a little more sting and snap (Birdman, A Most Violent Year, Gone Girl) or one with a bit more social gravitas (Selma).

That reason is Likely Voter’s Remorse, or the vaguely embarrassed feeling that many Academy members feel today (whether they admit it or not) about having voted for The King’s Speech, The Artist, Chicago or Crash, to name but four. Who out there will admit to being genuinely proud of the Academy’s embrace of these films as Best Picture winners? Just because “it’s a shitty year for the Oscars,” as one Academy member confided to Setoodeh, doesn’t mean that a soft, squishy, not-bad-but-not-great film has to win Best Picture.

Emotional default impulses always age badly, but tough, flinty films only get better with the passing years. Vote accordingly.

No film critic wants to be seen as insensitive or unsympathetic to characters suffering from a disease, especially well-off victims with a restrained and dignified air. And so Still Alice (Sony Pictures Classics, opening today in N.Y. and L.A.), a drama about a brilliant college professor (Julianne Moore) suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, is getting a 71% pass on Metacritic and an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But a few bold fellows have stepped up and called Alice a Lifetime movie — a mediocrity — ennobled by Moore’s touching performance.

We all know this won’t get in the way of Moore’s Best Actress Oscar. She’s due and all that. Plus she doesn’t have a heavy competitor to really worry about. But the reality can’t be waved away. Still Alice is a drag, man. It’s tedious and painful to sit through, and I don’t mean “painful” in an empathizing sense. I mean “oh, shit, I’m stuck here in this seat and I can’t get out until this movie comes to an end.”

But the right guys are standing up and calling a spade a spade, and right now you could almost use the metaphor of a small snowball starting to roll down a steep, snow-covered slope.

Sony Pictures Classics has announced that their Foxcatcher Bluray will pop on 2.17.15 — a little less than ten weeks hence. And yet three weeks after opening limited in New York and LA, rural moviegoers are still waiting for Bennett Miller‘s melodrama to open locally.

“Do you know why Sony is taking forever to release Foxcatcher in the hinterlands?,” writes Nick “Actionman” Clement. “I don’t get it at all. Not one theater in Connecticut is showing it. It’s been out for weeks now in limited release so what could be the delay? I’ve tagged both Sony Classics and Annapurna in a Facebook post, asking them the reason but no response…very irritating!”

My response: “They know it’s a quality film with a morose vibe…they know it’s a downer and that Average Joes probably need the nudge of awards to come out and see it. I’m guessing that they’re waiting for critics groups to chime in this month. That’s my guess.”

The Academy announced today that nine fantasy films about exotic creatures and monsters plus one serious, intensively researched sci-fi film (i.e., Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar) have been short-listed for the Best Visual Effects Oscar. In so doing AMPAS dismissed a pair of super-expensive, high-profile Biblical films, Darren Aronfosky‘s Noah and Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings, by leaving them off the list. Which means what? The Exodus effects are said to be quite impressive (I’m seeing it tonight) and Noah‘s visual treats were generally acknowledged as novel and in some ways genre-expanding. The nine monster flicks are Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Godzilla, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Maleficent, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, Transformers: Age of Extinction and X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Escapism of the calibre of Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (i.e., smart, low-key, character-driven humor delivered by name-brand actors) doesn’t happen very much these days. That aside, this mostly delicious scene has a huge flaw. When “Chicken” (i.e., Ron Leibman in disguise) throws Paul Sand off the platform and into the elevator shaft, we should of course hear an impact sound. This absence almost kills the gag. Why Yates, a first-rate craftsman who had directed Bullitt three years earlier and would pilot The Friends of Eddie Coyle two years hence, would overlook something this basic and obvious is beyond me.

I’ll never stop loving this scene, and not just because it’s fun to watch the sly and sinister Richard Gere taunt the hot-blooded Andy Garcia. It’s because it was, back in 1990, one of the few scenes in a mainstream film to even casually mention the all-too-common dynamics of married sex. It is like that, especially with kids around. It is almost “something you have to put on the schedule.” I’ve been there. I know.