Every time I consider the Oscar handicapper faves, I’m reminded that I’m constitutionally incapable of standing completely off to the sidelines and trying to guess which films and filmmakers that Academy members are favoring at the moment. I try to ask around and listen and “read the town” as much as the next guy but I can’t keep my own convictions out of it. The mindset of the dispassionate handicapper-statistician is too bloodless and clinical. I don’t know how anyone in this game can go 100% dispassionate and still sleep at night.

You’ve got to go personal these days. Or at least half-personal. Dispassionate reporting and sage analysis are so…print. We are all advocates. A columnist or critic is nothing without convictions and cojones that he/she is willing to lay on the line.

One of the things I love about Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone is that she predicts from two places — an industry-savvy, ear-to-the-rails perspective and from personal passion. She knows whereof she speaks, but at the end of the day she can’t seem to keep her favorites out of the equation. That’s me also, but I’m also listening to the Godz.

When I insist that this or that film or performance or screenwriter deserves award-season acclaim, I’m not just offering opinion; I’m also to some extent channeling. I honestly believe there are ghosts who are looking down upon our culture and doing what they can to nudge us along, and at the risk of sounding like an eccentric I am, I feel, a kind of instrument in their service. Because — this is key — I am willing to be that. Go ahead and chortle, but all creativity is about letting in the spirits.

There’s a basic requirement when it comes to 21st Century monster movies, which is that the latest beast must somehow top the last guy in some respect. He/she/it has to be bigger, meaner, more threatening on top of the usual bad-ass ferocious. Which means, in the case of Ron Howard‘s In The Heart of The Sea (Warner Bros., 3.15), that the strangely aggressive sperm whale which attacked the whaling ship Essex in 1820 and inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick must become a kind of flat-tailed Godzilla. Major dread and CG awe must happen among the Joe Popcorn class. Obviously Howard’s film is trying to satisfy that demand. One hopes that Howard and screenwriter Charles Leavitt also chose to tell the actual story of the last voyage of the Essex, which was passed along in Nathaniel Philbrick’s same-titled novel. Read the Wiki version and tell me it’s not an eye-opener. Shipwrecked, lifeboats, starving…seven sailors were cannibalized. Please don’t reduce this to a man-vs. beast thing. Here’s my previous (10.16.14) post about the initial teaser.

Last night Jett and I watched The Interview via YouTube. It felt a little less problematic than during my initial 12.10 viewing at the Ace Hotel premiere. Then again it’s something else now — no longer a Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy but a metaphor for the chimes of freedom flashing. This is one of those rare moments when I feel a kind of (hideous) kinship with Fox News watchers. The movie slows down for 20 or 30 minutes in the middle section when Franco’s none-too-bright Dave Skylark goes through a bro-bonding thing with Kim Jong-Un and then gradually wakes up to the reality. You’re immediately looking at your watch and going, “Oh, great…dumb-ass Franco doesn’t get it and now we’re stuck with this plot thread.” But again, The Interview is forever linked with red-white-and-blue feelings. As indicated by those outfits worn last night by the Cinefamily guys. The ghost of Thomas Jefferson is comforted and pleased. Well, pleased and a bit mortified.

My enthusiasm for Jake Gyllenhaal‘s grinning, bug-eyed, Oscar-contending performance in Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler led me to fork over $140 for a ticket to Nick Payne‘s much-hailed Constellations, a two-hander in which Jake costars with The Affair‘s Ruth Wilson. It’s a short (70 minutes), head-trippy play about love and physics and endless parallel storylines co-existing in a shifty-eyed universe. And about Jake doing a deliciously spot-on British accent (a friend describes his patois as that of a “British Rastawannabe”) as a bee-keeper named Roland, and the British-born Wilson delivering a kind of sad and vibrant and open to all things routine, even in the face of death.

As Wilson’s Marianne, a Cambridge-based physicist, explains, “In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you’ve ever made and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.” Which is a smarty-pants way of saying that relationships can go any which way depending on any number of variables, and that however you slice it we’re all getting knocked around by random chance.

A New Yorker review of a 2012 London production with Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins described it as “a singular astonishment, at once eloquent and mysterious but which nonetheless articulates within its own idiosyncratic idiom something that touches an audience as real.” It also said it was on the pathfinding level of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, Heathcote Williams‘ AC/DC and Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw.

The Verge‘s Ross Miller is reporting that The Interview will be available online starting today (i.e., 1 pm Eastern) via YouTube Movies, Google Play, Xbox Videos and a dedicated website SeeTheInterview.com. $5.99 to rent, $14.99 to own an HD version. Candy-assed, corporate-minded iTunes is staying on the sidelines for now. Sony’s PlayStation Network is also a non-participant.

Earlier: Re/Code‘s Peter Kafka reported this morning that The Interview will be streamable/rentable starting Christmas morning on YouTube, Google’s Google Play store and via Sony’s own site. Kafka adds that Stripe, an online payment site, “will help Sony rent the film on its site.”

I consider it a sacred duty to attend a commercial screening of The Interview sometime on Christmas Day, and I don’t even like the film (which I saw about two weeks ago) all that much. It’s all about (a) celebrating First Amendment freedom and (b) doing my small part to make sure that independent exhibitors showing the Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg film earn as much revenue as possible. I haven’t felt this patriotic in a long time…seriously. On top of which I feel sorry for them having eaten Sony’s reportedly tough terms (exhibitor-unfriendly percentage splits, no theatre security provided).

The curious aspect is that while a fair number of Los Angeles theatres will be playing The Interview, there are apparently only two small Manhattan venues showing it — the Cinema Village and Quad Cinema 4. (Or at least this seems the case as of 10:30 pm on Tuesday, 12.23.) I was going to take a Metro North train up to Yonkers and catch it at an Alamo Drafthouse cinema up there, but the West Village obviously trumps that.

Other New York-area options are the Hudson Mall Cinemas (701 New Jersey 440, Jersey City, NJ 07304) and Big Cinemas Columbia Park 12 (3125 Kennedy Boulevard, North Bergen, NJ 07047).

Some of the Los Angeles-area venues showing the film are the Egyptian, Sundance Cinemas, Los Feliz 3 and Cinefamily plus reportedly 10 Regency cinemas throughout Southern California.

This documentary short by Josh Paler Lin, posted on 12.22, comes to a very affecting conclusion between 2:07 and 2:35. I won’t say how — you’ll see what I mean. A taste of that old-time Charles Dickens holiday spirit with a little touch of O. Henry. But Paler Lin blows it by not ending it at 2:35, which would have been perfect. Instead he keeps rolling for an extra two minutes and seven seconds so he can demonstrate to viewers (a) how emotionally affected he was by the surprise and (b) that he’s very generous when moved. The other wrongo is the pasting of JOSH PALER LIN on the lower right corner of the frame for the entire fucking video. This guy needs to take ego-diminishing meds immediately. Is he Justin Lin‘s kid or nephew or something?

This is a portion of a photo gallery on the wall of an old-style Italian delicatessen in Hoboken. I took the shot yesterday afternoon (Monday, 12.22). I understand that anything from The Godfather is considered highly romantic by Italian Americans. Okay, by everyone. But who frames a still of a guy being garroted in a place where people buy stuff to eat and take home? I’ll tell you who. People who are basically saying to the public and to themselves, “This, in a sense, is who we are. Okay, used to be. Now we just look back on it.”

The last time I wrote about this upcoming Kevin Costner sports drama I called it “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Hoosiers.” I see no reason to change or alter this impression. It is what it is, and that’s probably going to be fine with Whale Rider‘s Niki Caro at the helm. Maybe, I meant.

A lot of people were okay with Interstellar‘s sound mix, but a lot of others weren’t — let’s be honest. People were tweeting from sea to shining sea when Chris Nolan‘s film opened in early November, complaining that much of the dialogue was buried by Hans Zimmer‘s score. It was enough of an issue that Nolan felt obliged to address it in an 11.15 Hollywood Reporter interview with Carolyn Guardiana. In the piece Nolan more or less said, “Yeah, it’s a little bit different and so you can’t hear every single line of dialogue, but that’s how I decided to design the sound….deal with it.”

I was therefore surprised — the actual word is stunned — to see Interstellar‘s sound mix as one of Gold Derby‘s Oscar contenders for Best Sound Mix. An explanation from GD editor Tom O’Neil: “There’s no question that Interstellar had the most widely criticized sound design of all the 2014 films, but the Oscars are never about deciding the best of anything. We’re not suggesting that Academy members are going to vote for it for quality, but they do often vote for the loudest. It should probably not be nominated for sound mix, but there’s this classic Oscar bias for loudness so that’s why it’s listed.”

The following statement was released today (Tuesday, 12.23) by Birdman composer Antonio Sanchez about the decision by the Academy’s music branch to disqualify his undeniably brilliant all-percussion score for a possible Oscar nomination:

“It was an honor to work on this wonderful film and collaborate with a brilliant director like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu on Birdman. I’m deeply disappointed that the music branch of the Academy did not recognize my score as eligible, even after receiving a detailed cue sheet, a letter from the president of music at Fox studios, and a description of the process from both Alejandro and myself.

“The disqualification seems to stem from the perception that my score was diluted by the incidental music on the film. I strongly disagree with this idea. The music that people remember after watching the movie is the sound, originality, character and strength of my score, which seems to be the reason it continues to receive attention, nominations, and awards, which I’m deeply humbled by. Some of the finest composers are members of the Academy and I’m saddened my score didn’t resonate with the decision makers.”