Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has launched the 2015 Oscar season speculation with a poll of “experts” (which I contributed to last night) along with a user/reader poll. The users poll is mostly bullshit, of course, but it gives you a rough idea about which films and actors have the heat among the pseudo-informed, industry-watching outliers. I don’t know much more but I can offer some strong positive or negative suspicions here and there, particularly in the Best Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress categories.

Best Picture: The Revenant will most likely emerge as the industry front-runner before long, and it has the vague advantage of being an unknown until it starts screening around, I’m guessing, 11.20 or thereabouts. Having read the script and seen a live reading of The Hateful Eight, I have very little belief in its Best Picture chances. Joy and The Danish Girl are inevitable; ditto Carol and Steve Jobs. If you ask me the first-rate Brooklyn is also a fairly strong contender, but not so fast when it comes to Bridge of Spies and Suffragette. Forget Inside Out — it’s relegated to Best Feature Animation and that’s that. Nobody in my realm knows squat about Spotlight and Black Mass. I agree with Kyle Buchanan that Mad Max: Fury Road deserves a Best Picture nomination but who knows who that’ll play? Beasts of No Nation, an allegedly strong entry, will probably never snag a Best Picture nomination, given the gruesome subject matter.

One noteworthy thing about Michael Caine‘s icy performance in Get Carter is that he always looks stern, steady and focused. But by his own admission Caine was half in the bag while filming this Mike Hodges classic. During the ’60s and early ’70s he was smoking at least 80 cigarettes and “drinking two to three bottles of vodka” a day, Caine was once quoted as saying. He reportedly quit cigarettes “following a stern lecture from Tony Curtis at a party in 1971,” and he has credited his wife Shakira, whom he married in ’73, for steering him away from vodka.

I’m not saying that dislikable but tolerable Hillary Clinton won’t muddle through, land the Democratic nomination for President and beat whomever the Republicans nominate, but I’m not the only one who’s feeling more and more concerned that the email thing (i.e., “Eghazi”) is going to hang around forever, and that her negatives are going to keep climbing and that she’s going to gradually sink further in the polls, and that somebody like Marco Rubio or Donald Trump might actually win the general election, and then we’d have a climate-change denier in the White House.

I realize that the odds still favor Hillary because of her support from women, educated male liberals, Hispanics and African Americans. But the situation still feels dicey and I for one am very, very scared. There’s certainly no basis for unshakable confidence in Clinton. Nobody loves or even likes her very much in my realm. She obviously lacks that natural rock-star thing that her husband had and still does. She’s smart and scrappy but a shitty candidate with a curiously suspicious nature and the wrong kind of vibes, not to mention a flat, brittle voice and a cackly laugh.

But there’s a solution, and its name is Biden-Warren. If Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren would announce they intend to run as a pair, as President and Vice-president respectively, the Hillary bandwagon would run out of gas very quickly. Imagine! Warren alone would scoop up a lot of Hillary’s female supporters in a heartbeat, and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders would just as quickly lose the dynamism because Warren’s beliefs about income inequality are seen as more or less synonymous with his.

Yesterday a tally of the best (i.e., most popular, significant, important or essential) films by women directors surfaced on Cinemafanatic.com, a blog by movie-worshipper and journalistic pinch-hitter Marya Gates. The list came from a poll that Gates conducted of “over 500 critics, filmmakers, bloggers, historians, professors and casual film viewers.” I agree with nearly every film that made it. Not with the rankings in some cases, but the list is a reasonable one. Except, that is, for Amy Heckerling‘s Clueless being the #1 film of them all.

True, Clueless has 142 votes compared to the 144 votes cast for Sofia Coppola‘s Lost in Translation so maybe Gates just forget to switch them out, but even Clueless in second place is pretty weird. Clueless above Zero Dark Thirty, The Piano, The Hurt Locker, Orlando, Winter’s Bone, et. al.?

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a piece about the poll earlier today and had this to say:

“Again, not criticizing Clueless but to me when you’re talking about ‘best’ you’re not talking about ‘favorite.’ You’re talking about incomparable works of art that are unequivocal. The Coen brothers, Scorsese, Hitchcock, Fincher, Coppola, Welles…on the female side, Campion, Bigelow, Wertmuller, Kent, Coppola, Ramsay, DuVernay, etc. I’m going to say it because probably no one else will. No one wants to be the one who is the asshole in the room shitting all over something as beautiful as this poll. And I’m not shitting on it. I’m not even shitting on Clueless.

“I’m just saying that if women want to really compete, if they want to really be taken seriously as artists on par with their male counterparts, we have to up the game a little here.”