I was walking through an over-lighted CVS around 8:30 pm on New Year’s Eve when the vibe hit me, and it was like I was hearing Dire Straits‘ “So Far Away” for the first time. It’s a bit shocking to realize this song is just about 30 years old now, being a track from the “Brothers in Arms” album which popped in May ’85. I had decided that Mark Knopfler was a major-league guy when I got into his music for Bill Forsyth‘s Local Hero (’83). I was so jazzed when I first saw that film in Manhattan in late ’82. I remember walking uptown after the screening and popping into the old Cafe Central on Amsterdam and 75th (or whatever the address was) and finding Peter Riegert himself there and telling him what a great film it was and what a high I was on, etc. “And that pay phone ringing at the very end…that’s your guy calling!”,” I said after my second Jack Daniels and ginger ale, and Reigert, wondering if I was a little drunk or just a bit slow, smiled and nodded “yeah.” The only disconcerting thing about this Dire Straits video are the terrible ’80s haircuts.

On 12.23 I commented on a day-old documentary short by YouTube hotshot Josh Paler Lin that wound up getting loads of attention. It was about Lin laying $100 on a homeless guy named Thomas, and then following him to see what he’d do, and his camera covertly capturing Thomas hitting a liquor store — uh-oh — but using the $100 to buy food for other homeless people and then passing it around. The video goes on too long, but it had a nice little holiday-spirit vibe, and one result was that a lot of people donated cash to an Indiegogo campaign to help Thomas get a fresh start. (The current total is $135,000.) Except on 12.30 Vocativ‘s Shane Dixon Kavanaugh reported that the liquor-store purchase sequence was by all appearances staged. Taugan Tan Kadalim, a 26 year-old nursing student from Anaheim, tells Kavanaugh there’s “no way Thomas could have been secretly filmed—because he and Lin arrived at the liquor store in the same car. ‘The whole thing is bullshit,’ says Kadalim, who claims that on 12.20 he was outside the Euclid Liquor & Market, where the video’s pivotal scene is set. ‘Thomas knew he was being followed.’ Kadalim states. “[Lin] drove Thomas to the liquor store. While I think the guy is homeless, it is clear that from what I saw every part of that scene was staged.”

I guess I’m not understanding the tie situation that’s resulted in six, not five, American Cinema Editors nominations for a dramatic feature. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m a little fucked up or something. The Best Edited Feature Film noms were snagged by Boyhood, American Sniper, Gone Girl, The Imitation Game, Nightcrawler and Whiplash. So which two films tied for fifth place in terms of ballots, thus necessitating a sixth nomination?

I completely get and approve of nominations for (in this order) Whiplash, Gone Girl, The Imitation Game, Nightcrawler and American Sniper. But, due respect, I honestly don’t get an editing nomination for Boyhood. It’s obviously an assured, smoothly assembled time-passage thing but I didn’t emerge from last January’s big whoop-dee-doo Sundance screening saying, “Whoa, the editing!”

The ACE nominations for Best Edited Comedy or Musical: Birdman (best invisible cutting of the century), Guardians of the Galaxy (what?), Into The Woods (really?), Inherent Vice (forget it) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (yes!).

It takes character to admit you haven’t seen a respected, well-known film. I’d rather not admit to anything that makes me look under-experienced or under-educated. I prefer to fake it until people see through me, and even then I prefer to fake it. All to say I’ve never quite seen Stanley Donen‘s Two For The Road. That’s a way of saying I might have seen it, but if I did I’ve forgotten it. Until this evening I’d also never seen Preston Sturges‘ The Palm Beach Story. I didn’t see the Criterion Bluray — I watched a high-def version on Amazon. I’m asking HE loyalists to stand up and admit that they haven’t seen this or that significant, world-class film. Go on, get it off your chest.

I just want it understood that this Boyhood-over-Birdman thing in the current Best Picture graph is strictly a meditative exercise. My gut tells me it’s almost certainly Birdman but I’ve been saying that all along and…I don’t know but maybe I’m tired of myself and all of my creations. I just wanted to try this out and think it through and see how it feels and so on. Nothing more than that. It’s a dance step, a theory, a posturing, a hypothetical.

If this was a bit earlier in the season and my own passionate preferences had something to do with these charts, I would have Snowpiercer‘s Tilda Swinton in slot #5 for Best Supporting Actress…hands down, no question. Laura Dern has it now because she’s been campaigning and out there and pushing the ball along. What am I saying? I don’t know what I’m talking about. I couldn’t suss the fifth slot so I went to Tom O’Neil‘s Gold Derby chart and decided to follow suit. I actually didn’t like her character very much in Wild. I hate people who insist on unhappiness-suppressing cheerfulness all the time. As for the fifth slot in the Supporting Actor chart, I completely agree with handing it to The Gambler‘s John Goodman. I think he was better in his way than The Judge‘s Robert Duvall was in his.

Birdman‘s Michael Keaton isn’t exactly a great, screeching, large-winged bird (I know — a lazy analogy), but he’s been at the top of the Best Actor list so long he may as well be. The Theory of Everything‘s Eddie Redmayne is the puppy everyone wants to pat and hug and nominate for transforming himself into a contorted, bespectacled, wheelchair-bound guy we’ve all been reading and thinking about for decades. Selma‘s David Oyelowo is a kind of oratorical stallion — an avatar or carrier of a spirit that has been in the air for 50-odd years. The Imitation Game‘s Benedict Cumberbatch is a kind of distingushed genius otter, as Cumberbatch himself with tell you, with a special sway over the ladies. Nightcrawler‘s Jake Gyllenhaal is a kind of grinning nocturnal lizard, claws out, tongue flicking. Foxcatcher‘s Steve Carell is an exhausted wildebeest who’s falling behind in the herd and terrified of approaching predators. Bird, puppy, stallion, otter, lizard, wildebeest…check.

Has there ever been less of a pulse in the Best Actress race? The passion out there is nonexistent. Nobody is saying anything about Julianne Moore except that she’s got it in the bag, and nobody has said a damn thing about that dutifully morose film she’s the star of, Still Alice. If another lead actress performance had any kind of serious competitive heat I would launch a “STOP JULIANNE MOORE” campaign just to take this race off life support…but nobody has the narrative to challenge Moore except, possibly, Cake‘s Jennifer Aniston, who delivered the goods and has campaigned her way into serious contention. Moore’s narrative is “Still Alice might be a Lifetime movie but she’s due” while the Aniston narrative is “Cake might not be a great drama but Jennifer’s fighting to get out of the light comedy/tabloid-queen straightjacket, and you have to hand it to her for giving it hell.” All I know is that every year you hear passionate feelings about this or that Best Actress contender…”Wow, that performance was her best, it got to me, it touched me deep down, I’m telling my friends” and so on. But there’s been absolutely no discussion out there about Moore’s Still Alice performance…no passion, no talk, no arguments, NOTHING.

Ava DuVernay‘s Selma will open wide on Friday, January 9th, but in Selma, Alabama — the smallish “Black Belt” city where the “Bloody Sunday” beatings happened on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday, 3.7.65, and where a portion of the film was shot last summer — the film will play for free at the Selma Walton theatre for the entire month, day and night, for roughly three weeks straight.

Paramount is picking up the tab in apparent gratitude to the city for hosting the Selma production and, I gather, to give it a little boost in terms of attracting tourism.

Located on the banks of the Alabama river and known as “the Queen City,” Selma sounds statistically like a fairly poor town. It’s in a fairly remote area, about 50 miles from any major interstate highway. The Wiki page says the citizenry was 80% black as of 2010 census, and the population hasn’t risen above 20,000 in well over a decade. 14 years ago the median household income for a family was $28,345. About 26.9% of families and 31.7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 41.8% of those under age 18 and 28.0% of those age 65 or over.

Yesterday’s general response to Mark Schultz‘s Twitter and Facebook tirades against Foxcatcher and particularly director Bennett Miller was that (a) it was late arriving, given that Schultz hadn’t said a thing before, (b) he seemed awfully angry and (c) he may have downed a few brewskis before tapping out his thoughts. Today he offered an apology for the anger levels but didn’t back away from his resentment of Miller for having indicated in the film that Schultz and the late John duPont (i.e., Steve Carell‘s character) may have had some kind of homoerotic connection. Schultz is “under contact to support the movie until the Oscars” (hah!) but post-Oscars he’ll unload with Katie Couric, he said.