168 film critics have voted for what they consider to be the year’s finest film achievements in the 2015 Sight & Sound/BFI poll, and the results are about what you might expect. I partly admire this crew and am partly shaking my head at the ivory-tower-ishness of their choices. No Spotlight, Revenant, Love & Mercy, Brooklyn? The Assassin is their top dog followed by Carol (HE-approved), Mad Max: Fury Road (HE approved), Arabian Nights (what?), Cemetery of Splendor (come again?), No Home Movie (haven’t seen it), 45 Years (HE approved), Son of Saul (totally HE approved), Amy (entirely decent but calm down), Inherent Vice (absolutely not HE approved…hated it), Anomalisa (fine), It Follows (HE approved), Phoenix (still haven’t seen it), Girlhood (haven’t seen it), Hard to Be a God (come again?), Inside Out (good film but calm down), Tangerine (included mostly because it was shot on an iPhone 5), Taxi Tehran (seeing it soon), Horse Money, The Look of Silence, et. al.

Sasha Stone and I recorded an Oscar Poker chat three or four hours ago. We began by discussing the big, ridiculous Twitter blow-up over my posting of those four horrible words (“Forget women seeing this”) at the end of an otherwise laudatory tweet about The Revenant. I let go with a fair amount of anger about this episode, but at least it’s real. After hashing this out we began discussing Best Picture contenders with a special focus on Creed, Joy and The Hateful Eight. The general assumption is that if the Joy consensus is exuberant seven days hence then the Best Picture Oscar contest will basically be a Joy vs. Spotlight thing with Creed and The Martian duking it out as the populist popcorn favorites. Again, the mp3.

I for one have never seen an Ultra Panavision 70 film projected correctly (i.e., 2.76:1) inside a theatre in my entire life. I saw a restored version of Ben-Hur (which was shot in Camera 65, the exact same process) at the 2011 New York Film Festival, but they showed it within a 2.55:1 aspect ratio. I’m not persuaded that Ultra Panavision 70/Camera 65 flicks that played in the ’50s and ’60s (Raintree County, Ben-Hur, How the West Was Won, Mutiny on the Bounty, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Fall of the Roman Empire, etc.) were shown in 2.76:1. I suspect that they were mostly projected at 2.55:1 except at the Cinerama Dome, which of course was built to project extra-wide Cinerama films. 2.76:1 is really, really wide. I’m familiar with the full-width Ben-Hur and Mutiny on the Bounty only from looking at the DVD/Blurays. So when I see an Ultra-Panavision 70 version of The Hateful Eight early next week, it’ll be my first encounter with this process on a big screen.

Nobody deserves the Best Supporting Actor Oscar more than Love & Mercy‘s Paul Dano…nobody. I’m sorry but that’s how it is. At the same time no one is disagreeing that Creed‘s Sylvester Stallone, a late arrival, is all but locked for a BSA nom. Which leaves three slots. By my yardstick they belong to Bridge of Spies‘ Mark Rylance, either Mark Ruffalo or Michael Keaton in Spotlight (does the fact that Emma Stone is hosting a dinner for Keaton on 12.2…does this mean voters will end up voting for him over Ruffalo?), and Michael Shannon in 99 Homes/Freeheld. I agree that Sicario‘s Benicio Del Toro and Beasts of No Nation‘s Idris Elba should be in there, but there are only so many hands in a deck of cards.

A couple of days ago Jennifer Lawrence told EW‘s Sara Vilkomerson that she plans to start directing before long, and that the first project will be “about mental warfare in the ’60s, like an acid experiment gone terribly wrong.” The pic will be based on a 2012 New Yorker article by Raffi Khatchadourian called “Project Delirium.” Lawrence adds that she’d “also like to direct a comedy.” Wells to Lawrence: Do the comedy and shelve the Delirium. Nobody wants to see another government-funded-behavioral-experiment-gone-wrong movie in the wake of Kyle Patrick Alvarez‘s The Stanford Prison Experiment and Michael Almereyda‘s Experimenter. The string is played out.

Last night I came upon a link for an L.A. Times Calendar piece that I wrote 22 years ago about Dan Richter, the ’60-era mime who played the bone-tossing Moonwatcher in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The last time I linked to this piece was in July ’08. Here are three scans of the original article — #1, #2 and #3.

My father met Dan at a Connecticut AA meeting in ’92 or thereabouts, and at my dad’s suggestion I called a while later and visited Dan at this home in Sierra Madre for an interview. I remember he was dealing with chemotherapy at the time and not walking all that well, but he’s still here and doing okay as far as I know. I didn’t know until this morning that Richter published a 2012 memoir — “The Dream Is Over” — that’s mainly about a four-year period that he spent with John Lennon and Yoko One (’69 to ’73).

The best thing about this photo, which was shot somewhere on the Lower West Side during the spring of ’77, are the folds in the woman’s stockings. That and the eye contact between us and my no-worries expression. And the cigarette. I wasn’t a constant smoker (I would guiltily indulge from time to time and then quit again) but I was definitely stinking of tobacco and nicotine when this shot was taken, and it didn’t seem like a problem. I was half-miserable at the time, but I was approaching an even more miserable chapter, which was my first three years in NYC (’78, ’79 and ’80) — restaurant jobs, freelance assignments for next to no money, a cockroach-infested apartment on Sullivan Street and then a one-room misery studio on West 4th Street near Jane, bad food (next to no vegetables, tons of sugar), getting half-bombed every other night, typewriter ribbons and white-out, a ghetto blaster and a couple of dozen cassettes for music. And yet for all the fretting and struggling and my particular form of weltschmerz, I was batting somewhere between .333 and .400 with the ladies.