Hollywood Elsewhere will make its annual visit to the Savannah Film Festival between Friday, 10.21 and Thursday, 10.27. I can’t wait to savor the shady, 19th Century serenity that this beautiful old town owns. SFF films are often award-season favorites, and this year the hotties are Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie, Damien Chazelle‘s La La Land, Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea and Denis Villeneuve‘s Arrival. Other big-draw screenings will include Paterson, Christine, 20th Century Women, American Pastoral, Bleed for This, Moonlight, Lion, Loving and I, Daniel Blake. SFF is sponsored by the Savannah College of Art and Design.

I think the Best Picture Oscar race is going to come down to three films when all is said and done — Damien Chazelle‘s La La Land, Denzel Washington‘s Fences and Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea.

And possibly Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which no one has seen but will debut at the New York Film Festival on the evening of Friday, 10.14 — two weeks hence. Hollywood Elsewhere will be there with bells on.

It’ll be La La Land because of that knockout freeway beginning and that brilliant, transcendent ending and a very good middle portion. It’ll be Fences because it’s a venerated August Wilson classic with killer performances (certainly from Washington and Viola Davis) that will allow everyone to respectably “get their black on” (and because it’ll probably turn out to be better than Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight). And it’ll be Manchester By The Sea because it just reaches in and destroys you — so far it’s the saddest, best acted, most skillfully assembled film of the year, and because — bold as brass — it doesn’t deliver the typical Act Three redemption thing that you always see in sad-white-guy movies.

I really think it’s going to be one of those three, although right now it looks like La La Land has the edge because people simply like it the most. It’s almost The Artist in this sense but is way, way less gimmicky (i.e., not gimmicky at all) and because it excitingly re-vitalizes the big-screen musical in a Jacques Demy way.

For some reason the award-season blogaroonies have tumbled for La La Land in a way that seems almost final and absolute. For some reason they’re not affording Manchester the bow-down respect it absolutely deserves, and for the lamest of reasons — because it leaves them with a feeling of emotional devastation when they’d much rather feel happy.

Chris McQuarrie‘s Jack Reacher was a lean, low-key ’90s action film — realistic chops, no superman moves, no jumping off buildings, no stupid CG bullshit. Ed Zwick‘s Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (10.21) has obviously thrown the lean-and-mean out the window. This time Reacher is a cyborg James Bond. Nobody except for Robert Patrick‘s T-1000 uses their fist to punch through a car window…nobody. Obviously a wash for people like me, but if you ask the average idiot he/she will probably say they prefer the Reacher T-1000 to the guy Cruise played in the 2012 original.

From my 12.18.12 review of Jack Reacher: “I was fairly satisfied but not that blown away by the final 25%, but the first 75% plays very tight and true and together, and Tom Cruise, as the titular character, has the confidence and presence and steady-as-she-goes vibe of a hero who doesn’t have to reach or scream or emphasize anything in order to exude that steely-stud authority that we all like.

“Reacher is just a bang-around Pittsburgh dirty-cop movie with a kind of Samurai-styled outsider (Cruise) working with a sharp-eyed, straight-dope attorney (Rosamund Pike) trying to uncover who stinks and what’s wrong and who needs to be beaten or killed or whatever.

Thousands of hearts broke today over the news that the famed Carnegie Deli (854 Seventh Ave. between 54th and 55th) will close on 12.31.16. Mine included. Not that I’ve frequented the joint during my NYC visits. I honestly don’t think I’ve ordered anything there since ’82 or ’83, partly because it’s too clattery and touristy. But I love the fact that it’s been there since 1937. And I love that description by Ted Merwin, author of “Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli,” about “the Carnegie’s skyscraper sandwiches and obnoxious waiters embodying the ethos of excess that has characterized New York as a whole.” And I love that black-and-white Broadway Danny Rose footage that was shot in and around the place 33 years ago. I’ll be in Manhattan between 10.7 and 10.16 to cover the New York Film Festival, and I will definitely pay a visit. But no pastrami!

Hats off to the art director with Letras Libres, a literary Mexican publication, for this recently posted illustration:

I referenced Nutrogena spray tan because that’s kind I use (#2).

I have an idea that in this, a year in which a sizable percentage of Academy members are committed to expressing anti-OscarsSoWhite sentiments, the Academy’s doc branch might want to give Ava Duvernay‘s 13th their Best Documentary Feature Oscar. I don’t know anything (I won’t see it until next Tuesday) but reviews are through the roof (Rotten Tomatoes 100%, Metacritic 94%) and I can smell it in the wind, not to mention those insect antennae vibrations that I’ve learned to trust over the years.

Duvernay’s doc, which opens the New York Film Festival tonight and will pop on Netflix on 10.7, argues that slavery didn’t actually end with the passage of the 13th Amendment, and that for 150 years since the U.S. penal system has more or less kept slavery going by putting a disproportionate number of black dudes behind bars and reaping the benefits of their prison labor.

This point was made by Michael Moore in Where To Invade Next, and has now been forcefully re-litigated by 13th, which has definitely qualified itself for a Best Feature Doc Oscar. (I checked with Netflix this morning.)

This makes the absence of Duvernay during this year’s Savannah Film Festival “Docs to Watch’ panel (10.23) seems curious.

The panel will be moderated by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, who has fulfilled the same task for the past two years. The classy, award-season-friendly festival will run from 10.22 thru 10.29. Hollywood Elsewhere will be there from 10.21 through 10.26.

For me, today, Gary Johnson is the Libertarian candidate for President who was just endorsed by the Chicago Tribune. Before that he was the guy who (a) didn’t know what Aleppo is, (b) wants to inhabit and colonize other planets, and (c) couldn’t name any world leaders. But before today, his name wouldn’t stick. I knew he’d been polling better than Jill Stein, but all I could muster was “uhm, you know, the Libertarian guy.” He’ll always have a dull-sounding name, but now, thanks to the Chicago Tribune, I’ll probably never forget him.

The second and latest trailer for Warren Beatty‘s Rules Don’t Apply (20th Century Fox, 11.23) is selling a Lily Collins-Alden Ehrenreich late ’50s love story with Beatty’s Howard Hughes character as a distinctive second banana. Remember the days when this thing was known as “Beatty’s Howard Hughes flick”? Well, Matthew Broderick has more screen time in this trailer than Beatty does. Either Rules really is a Lily-and-Alden love story with Beatty’s Hughes relegated to colorful, second-tier status, or a decision has been made to sell it that way, or it’s a combination of the two. Beatty has screened the film for friends, interview press and some Variety guys, but not for online know-it-alls like myself so I don’t know what the shot is.