Sometime this morning LexG was talking about Deepwater Horizon and how the oil-spill aspect didn’t seem like a big-enough deal. (Or something like that.) LexG quote: “Then someone tried to make me understand the tragedy by asking, ‘What if Dakota Fanning was walking down a beach and got oil on her feet?'” To which I contemptuously replied, “That was your way into it?” And then I saw this Michael Gebert illustration a few hours later. Funny, but there’s no way LexG could reflect even a shard of Montgomery Clift.

Donald Trump said yesterday or the day before that a reason why a lot of veterans are besieged by PTSD is that “they can’t handle it.” He seemed to be saying they aren’t tough enough to absorb their wartime experiences like men. Remember Dana Andrews shrieking and waking up in a sweat in The Best Years Of Our Lives? That’s one kind of veteran, Trump is saying, and then there’s the tough-hide John Wayne kind who mans up and tells those wimpy PTSD feelings to shove off. It’s a variation on that John McCain comment he made last May about how he prefers “soldiers who don’t get captured.” Hillary has been doing a lot better in the polls, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from digging a deeper hole. He’s the gift who keeps on giving.

Neil Blomkamp‘s The Escape, an 11-minute riff or…whatever, revival of that 15 year-old, BMW-sponsored web series called The Hire, will pop on Sunday, 10.23, on www.bmwfilms.com. Clive Owen at the wheel, Dakota Fanning freaking + Vera Farmiga, Jon Bernthal.

A 10.4 “In Contention” column by Variety‘s Kris Tapley recalls how Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed (Warner Bros., 10.6.06) punched through and became an Oscar favorite with almost no social campaigning and a late commitment to phase-one ad buys.

Scorsese was all campaigned out after Gangs of New York (’02) and The Aviator (’04), and yet it was clear by Thanksgiving of ’06 that he wouldn’t have to sweat it. He was all but locked to win the Best Director trophy and everyone knew that The Departed was the Best Picture pony to beat. It was up to the Academy mooks to recognize that fact or not. They did.

Only Tapley and Robert Osborne (or so Tapley recalls) predicted that Clint Eastwood‘s Letters From Iwo Jima would win.

I said over and over that I liked The Departed the best, but my realpolitik assessment was that Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Babel might win. What did I know?

If you ask me the bigger no-campaign triumph belonged to Roman Polanski four years earlier. His direction of The Pianist was obviously masterful, but he’d refused to push his candidacy all through the season, partly because the pitchforkers were doing what they could to tarnish his reputation over the Samantha Geimer thing and he wasn’t about to fan those embers.

So it was a huge, historic “holy shit!” moment when Polanski not only won for Best Director but Ronald Harwood won for Best Adapted Screenplay and Adrien Brody won for Best Actor.

Inverse‘s James Grebey is reporting that last night, during a White House gathering and with President Obama listening, Leonardo DiCaprio announced that he’s signed up for a proposed 2026 round-trip to Mars on one of Elon Musk‘s not-yet-constructed SpaceX vehicles.

In so doing DiCaprio essentially declared that he’s ready to risk death, which Musk acknowledged a few days ago could very well happen. After DiCaprio’s announcement, Obama reportedly joked “I think he’ll acknowledge he’s crazy.”

Musk announced on 9.27 that “the risk of fatality would be very high for the first [Mars] mission, so one of the criteria for going is ‘are you prepared to die,'” according to this CNBC report.

Leo might not be “crazy”, but he’s clearly so in love with the thrill of an historic adventure, which will initially cost around $500K per traveller, that he’s apparently ready to buy it.

This is no dream, no game. Leo could die from suffocation a la Gary Lockwood in 2001: A Space Odyssey or end up stranded like Matt Damon in The Martian or become an instant corpse like Tim Robbins in Mission to Mars.

Musk said that the first Mars flight, which he expects will hold around 100 passengers, may launch in the vicinity of 2026, by which time Leo would be 51 or 52.

Brett Ratner‘s Ratpac Entertainment is headquartered in building #95 on the Warner Bros. lot — a swanky, history-haunted bungalow that Joel Silver and Frank Sinatra once occupied. A good place for a hotshot producer to make deals, but creative types need spartan simplicity. A little style and a feeling of comfort is fine, but you can’t overdo it. And definitely no bar. A sense of hunger and yearning is essential. A vibe that says “relax, baby…you’re at the top of the heap!” is the worst thing imaginable.

Sinatra’s company began doing business here in 1963, which was precisely when his cinematic peak period came to an end. Frank had 17 good years — Anchors Aweigh (’45) to The Manchurian Candidate (’62). The peak was probably From Here To Eternity (’53), closely followed by The Man With The Golden Arm and (I’m serious) Johnny Concho (’56), which you can’t even see now — no DVD, no streaming, no nuthin’.

The Ratner video was posted on Vanity Fair‘s website in mid September. The essay by Margaret Heidenry contains a major wrongo, to wit: “Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh lived together in a bungalow while filming the epic love story Gone With the Wind.”

This German poster for Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson, which will open in Berlin on 11.17 or roughly 40 days before debuting stateside, is perfect — damn near good enough to hang on your living-room wall. The only thing wrong is that it lies about the relationship between Adam Driver‘s Paterson, a bus-driving poet, and Marvin the bulldog. They hate each other in the film, but Marvin is the problem. I tweeted during last May’s Cannes Film Festival that “if Todd Solondz had been around Marvin would’ve been flattened by a truck.” Have I ever met a dog this hateful in real life? No, never. It’s one of the things I couldn’t buy in Paterson — no dog has ever been this evil. I knew a male cat (belonged to girlfriend I was living with) who disliked me so much that he once pissed on my pillow, but he sealed his fate when he did that.