The rumpus started this morning just after the SAG nominations. It began with my being surprised by the fine-but-unexceptional performance by Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out being nominated for a SAG Best Actor award. “For playing cool, anxious and freaked in a horror comedy?,” I wrote. “SAG members honestly believe that Kaluuya’s performance was craftier and more planted or affecting than The Post‘s Tom Hanks, Stronger‘s Jake Gyllenhaal and Phantom Thread‘s Daniel Day Lewis? C’mon!”

The notion of Kaluuya suddenly becoming a Best Actor Oscar nominee and especially Get Out being positioned as a formidable Best Picture contender “makes me feel like I’m drowning, like I’m drowning in jello,” I wrote in a comment thread. “This is staggering…I’m literally wobbling as I walk around.”

About five hours ago Variety‘s Guy Lodge wrote, “It’s not like you need extra reasons to root for Daniel Kaluuya to get an Oscar nomination, but here’s one: it’ll make Jeff Wells actively convulse.”

Melanie Lynskey: “He said that people who voted for Get Out“ are ‘wrong’ and ‘perverse’…it’s hysterical.”

So I tweeted the following: “Guy & Melanie — who had even flirted with the idea of Kaluuya having given an award-worthy performance? Who even fiddled with it? Nobody had picked up this torch before the Boston Society of Film Critics did last weekend, and now all of a sudden you’re both longtime Kaluuya devotees. Bullshit.”

In response to my “who had even flirted?”, Joseph Finn tweeted “Literally 99% of the people who saw it and have been talking about it since spring.” Last February, he meant.

What Finn meant is that for the last nine or ten months in Coffee Bean and Starbucks cafes all over Los Angeles, people have been saying to each other, “Wow, that good-looking chill guy who perspires and opens his mouth in horror in Get Out when the evil whiteys try to hypnotize and lobotomize him? What a performance!”

My reply to Finn: “If you say so, but for months and months the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby spitballers never once mentioned Kaluuya, even as a boredom killer. So I guess the various chapters of the ‘Daniel Kaluuya deserves an Oscar’ fan clubs met in secret dungeon-like bars and cafes during the wee hours.”

Yesterday HE reader Dean Treadway asked me to reevaluate an 8.18.17 comparison piece, posted by Award Watch‘s Erik Anderson, between Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water and Marc S. Nollkaemper‘s The Space Between Us, a 13-minute, English-language short that appeared on 6.29.15.

The basic scheme of both films (erotic sparks fly when a clean-up woman at a research center encounters an aquaman who’s being kept inside a large tank) are obviously similar. The Shape of Water was shot between August and November 2016.

I never suspected for a nano-second that Guillermo would crib from another filmmaker, but I nonetheless asked him about this last night, and we spoke a little while ago today. He was in a rush so I took some hasty notes.

Guillermo said that he and Daniel Kraus (co-author of a forthcoming 2018 book version of The Shape of Water) began work on a The Shape of Water treatment after meeting on 12.17.11. GDT began to develop a script the following year; he also “memorialized” his partnership with Kraus in ’12.

He said that a Fox Searchlight rep would be able to forward docs that would validate this timeline.

Guillermo added that he watched The Space Between Us for the first time this morning.

GDT’s final remark: “What is funny is that I have two movies, Hellboy (’04) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (’08), with an aquatic creature inside a super-secret tank in a large laboratory….so that [general concept] is not exactly in the province of exclusivity.”

Nine months ago an extended trailer for Alex Garland‘s Annihilation (Paramount, 2.23) was shown at Cinemacon ’17. It wowed a lot of journos (myself among them) and exhibs. There was some talk about releasing it in late ’17, but that idea went south. I’ve been reading for months that it has a killer ending.

This morning’s trailer feels like a marginal improvement over the one that popped on 9.27.17.

It costars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, David Gyasi and Sonoya Mizuno.

Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Warner Bros, 2.9.18) is obviously a patriotic tribute piece about the three American guys (Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos) who foiled an Islamic terrorist attack aboard a Brussels-to-Paris train on 8.21.15.

The new trailer tells us the film will mostly be about back-story — childhood, friendship, military service in the Middle East, etc. It feels thin, but Clint has earned our respect and deference.

Pic will costar Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos as themselves. Based on “The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes” by Jeffrey E. Stern, Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos.

From director Clint Eastwood, comes an incredible true story portrayed by the actual heroes who lived it. This February, in the face of fear, ordinary people can do the extraordinary. #1517toParispic.twitter.com/KhrOCHRQPg

— The 15:17 to Paris (@1517toParis) December 13, 2017

As the largest voting bloc within the Motion Picture Academy, members of the Screen Actors Guild have a big influence upon the Oscar race. It is generally presumed, therefore, that nominees for SAG’s Motion Picture Ensemble Award (i.e., “Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture”), which were announced this morning along with other nominees, are indicators of significant strength in the Best Picture competition.

And so today’s Ensemble Award nominees — The Big Sick, Get Out, Lady Bird, Mudbound and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — are sitting pretty. It also means that six other leading Best Picture contenders that weren’t nominated — The Post, Call Me By Your Name, The Shape of Water, The Florida Project, Darkest Hour and Phantom Thread — might have something to worry about.

And I mean especially The Post. This morning’s SAG nominations were like an impact grenade upon that Steven Spielberg film. Smoke, chunks of plaster on the floor, ringing in the ears.

No significant support for a tale of 1970s journalists in Nixon-era Washington, D.C. — too long ago, right? No love or allowances for the exquisite acting delivered by some fine, laid-back people in the sunny, far-away Lombardy region of Italy in the early ’80s. Not enough interest in Londoners facing the threat of Nazi Germany in mid 1940, No particular affection for struggling underclass types in an Orlando hotel. No particular affection for neurotic fashion-world elites in mid ’50s England.

Four of the five ensemble nominees are small-town American stories, self-enclosed and unto themselves, suburban or rural-ish. The only cosmopolitan big-city flick is The Big Sick.

Was identity politics a factor in the decent-but-no-great-shakes Mudbound and the horror genre comedy Get Out making the cut? Of course not. They were selected by merit and merit alone.

SAG nominees for Best Actor: Timothee Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name), James Franco (The Disaster Artist), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel, Esq.). Likeliest winners: Oldman or Chalamet.

HE comment: Kaluuya? For playing cool, anxious and freaked in a horror comedy? SAG members honestly believe that Kaluuya’s performance was craftier and more planted or affecting than The Post‘s Tom Hanks, Stronger‘s Jake Gyllenhaal and Phantom Thread‘s Daniel Day Lewis? They really think that, or they want to think that? C’mon!