The appearance of actors in a movie poster should never, ever argue with how they look in the film itself. Violation #1: Julie Christie‘s wig in Shampoo is straight, thick and frosty blonde — her natural poster hair is blonde-brownish and curly. Violation #2: In the film Goldie Hawn‘s blonde hair is worn with bangs — in the poster it’s oddly parted in a slightly off-center fashion. Violation #3: In the poster Warren Beatty‘s hair is noticably shorter than it is in the film.

This morning I took part in a discussion about a 2.12 Wall Street Journal article titled “How Equality Lost to ‘Equity.’” The subhead reads “Civil-rights advocates abandon the old ideal for the new term, which ‘has no meaning‘ and promises no progress but makes it easy to impute bigotry, says Shelby Steele.”

Steele quote: “[The current meaning of the term] equity has no meaning, but it’s one that gives blacks power and leverage in American life. We can throw it around at any time, and wherever it lands, it carries this stigma that’ somebody’s a bigot.’ Its message is that there’s inequality that needs to be addressed, to be paid off. So if you hear me using the word ‘equity,’ I’m shaking you down.”

Here are some passages from the discussion that touched upon the Oscar race, and upon John McWhorter‘s “The Elect“:

Friendo #1: “The key concept is that ‘equity’ prioritizes equality of outcome over equality of opportunity.

“That’s where Martin Luther King Jr. would have reared up in protest against it. And where any sensible moral person today — e.g. the tiny fraction of those of us in media who actually resist woke mobthink — would stand up against it. Equality of opportunity should be the goal. Not outcome — that’s the social-cultural analogue of giving every kid a trophy.

“Applied to the Oscars, it’s especially ludicrous. Sure, you can have an Oscar slate where half the people are POCs, making up for past sins, etc., and we can all sing ‘Kumbaya’ and pat ourselves on the back when half the winners are black. But if that’s what you do, it’s such a contrivance, and you’re so cheapening what the awards are, that you’ve made it all mean next to nothing. ‘Look, Chadwick Boseman, Viola Davis and Delroy Lindo all won awards at the African-American Oscars! Hurray!! We woke white people really are something, aren’t we?!’

Friendo #2: ” The new enlightened white person religion [is about] atoning for past sins. I have a very privileged friend who lives in Ojai…married, rich, never had to work a day in her life. She’s now on a mission to explain white supremacy to all of her friends who ‘don’t get it.’ What does that do — it redeems and excuses her from accusations. I can’t wait until it all comes crashing down.”

Friendo #1: “If only it were driven by white guilt! The white liberals who Tom Wolfe mocked definitively half a century ago in ‘Radical Chic’ — Leonard Bernstein throwing his posh party for the Black Panthers, etc. — were driven, to a degree, by white guilt.

“The woke mob today is driven by white narcissism. By white vanity. Guilt would be too good for them. They’re adopted virtue-signaling as a lifestyle and as a cult. And as John McWhorter has brilliantly explained, these vanity rituals are so dependent upon reducing black people to a stupid masochistic permanent-victim status that, in fact, there’s no difference at all between white woke-ism and white supremacy.

Woody Allen needs to stop piddling around with relationship trifles like Rifkin’s Festival and make a movie that metaphorically grapples with the one great tragedy of his life — an alleged episode that happened nearly 30 years ago and is still hovering.

He needs to write a Crimes and Misdemeanors-level drama that might resemble David Mamet‘s Oleanna or Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse, or might not resemble either of these. But he has to come to grips with the wokester mob in dramatic terms.

Make it a murder thing perhaps — a possibly innocent middle-aged guy appears to be guilty of murdering an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend. Or maybe an ex-business partner. Circumstantial evidence accumulates and he’s eventually charged and prosecuted. Maybe he goes to jail or maybe he gets off. Or maybe we learn at the last moment that he’s guilty. Something along those lines.

Allen has addressed the Farrow fiction in his autobiography, but it needs to be used for dramatic fodder.

But a two-thirds majority (67 votes) was needed to convict the sociopathic Mar a Lago Beast. And so once again, due to the spineless, soul-less cowardice of red-state Republicans (even those who are planning to retire or aren’t facing re-election for another four to six years), Trump skates. The vote was 57 to 43 to convict.

Trump statement: “It is a sad commentary on our times that one political party in America is given a free pass to denigrate the rule of law, defame law enforcement, cheer mobs, excuse rioters, and transform justice into a tool of political vengeance, and persecute, blacklist, cancel and suppress all people and viewpoints with whom or which they disagree.”

Republican North Carolina Senator Richard Burr voted to convict — a surprise.

The banner headline on the March issue of Empire, which has been on sale for three weeks, teases “The Greatest Cinema Moments Ever.” Which, of course, is bullshit. The actual content (37 pages) could be more accurately described as “Edgar Wright‘s Favorite Mindlowing Holy-Shit Movie Moments Over The Last 20 Years.”

The epic journey of cinema from the dawn of the sound era to New Year’s Eve 1999 is pretty much ignored. But that’s the Empire readership for you — the ’90s are the good old days, memories of the ’80s are fading fast and anything before the Ronald Reagan era is Paleozoic. That’s Wright for you also — a 46 year-old director who knows all about the 20th Century landscape (and all the joy, pain, anxiety, struggle and exhilaration of that convulsive century) but who thinks about movies only in terms of (a) bang-boom-pow-CG-fizz-whizz for movie nerds and more specifically (b) “Jesus, that was so fucking iconic!” and (c) “My God, that was one fucking kewl adrenaline rush!”

The cover faces are said to include Steven Spielberg, Tessa Thompson, Patty Jenkins, Jordan Peele, Taika Waititi, Paul Rudd, Guillermo del Toro, Chris Evans, Simon Pegg, Daniel Kaluuya, M. Night Shyamalan, Kumail Nanjiani, George Miller, Greta Gerwig, Kevin Feige (pronounced FAY–gee), Christopher McQuarrie, Joe Russo, J.J. Abrams, Bong Joon-ho, David Yates, Daisy (“Cary who?”) Ridley, Joe Cornish, Anya Taylor-Joy, James Gunn, Bill Hader, Alfonso Cuarón, Walter Hill, Rian Johnson, Spike Lee, James Cameron, Lily James, Robert Zemeckis, Ang Lee, Jon Hamm, Daniel Craig, Jon Favreau, Sam Mendes and Mark Hamill. But maybe not.

HE takes exception to the notion that Spike Lee, a serious scholastic movie buff, would watch a film within a packed house (remember packed houses?) while eating a greasy pepperoni pizza. Forget the Do The Right Thing reference — is there anything more rancid than stinking up the joint with the steamy smell of heated pepperoni while chewing and slurping and smacking his lips? I’m not kidding — only animals eat pizza during a film.