Month: January 2022

Sutton has a lot of feeling and joy and excitement on her mind, and is trying to express it. But so far, the words have yet to formulate.

Not only was Penelope Cruz‘s Parallel Mothers performance ignored in the SAG nominations for Best Actress, but also by the BAFTA’s longlist of Best Actress contenders.

In BAFTA’s view, the following 15 actresses gave more arresting or compelling performances than Cruz — Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye; Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter; Lady Gaga, House of Gucci; Alana Haim, Licorice Pizza (WHAT?); Jennifer Hudson, Respect; Emilia Jones, CODA (due respect but NO), Nicole Kidman, Being The Ricardos; Jennifer Lawrence, Don’t Look Up (c’mon); Frances McDormand, The Tragedy of Macbeth; Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World; Claire Rushbrook, Ali & Ava (WHO?); Joanna Scanlan, After Love (WHO?), Kristen Stewart, Spencer; Tessa Thompson, Passing (NOPE, not better than Cruz); Rachel Zegler, West Side Story. Five strong challenges.

Now that Kristen Stewart‘s Best Actress campaign is all but toast after being excluded from the 2022 SAG Award nominations, and since no one explored the whys and wherefores in this morning’s initial reaction thread (“That’s It For KStew“), I’m asking again: why was her Lady Diana snubbed?

HE theory #1: It wasn’t the quality of Stewart’s performance, but the psychotic dreamscape “Diary of a Mad Princess” vibe of Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer. I never argued that Stewart didn’t give her all — she obviously dove into Larrrain’s vision hook, line and sinker. But the movie was agony to sit through.

HE theory #2: Ever since SAG merged with AFTRA ten years ago, the annual nominations have adopted a downmarket character and, especially since ’16 or thereabouts, focused on representation as much as quality of performance. Stewart might have been edged out, I suspect, by votes for Respect‘s Jennifer Hudson — never a truly serious candidate due to the film’s mediocre reputation, but popular with the SAG-AFTRA rank and file.

HE theory #3: On 11.18.21, Variety‘s Clayton Davis posted a Stewart interview in which she said “I don’t give a shit” about winning an Oscar for Spencer. This might have been a factor.

I’m sorry…okay, not that sorry but the heavily-funded, once-seemingly-favored Best Actress campaign behind Kristen Stewart’s performance in Pablo Larrain’s Spencer collapsed this morning.

KStew was killed by SAG members who failed to nominate her, and at the same time nominated Respect’s Jennifer Hudson, probably due to identity politics as no one was predicting she’d be among the top five. She’s fine but the movie isn’t.

The SAG nominators, by the way, were completely clueless and dead wrong to ignore Parallel Mothers’ Penelope Cruz, who gave 2021’s best female lead performance — hands down, no debate.

Trans fanatics are already hating on this but that in itself tells you that Paul Schrader’s suggestion has struck a nerve. Seriously, no fooling around…this is a good idea. It’s not easy to make this sort of thing work, but if the right kind of Sydney Pollack-level hyphenate were to come along and assemble the elements just so, it could really connect with Joe & Jane Popcorn.

Last night HE’s “Knox Bronson” lamented the theatrical absence or elimination, really, of the peak Tony Gilroy and Alexander Payne big-screen aesthetic, certainly as it existed 15 or 20 years ago. To which I responded…

“This is the death-pill essence of the current cultural depression. Theatrical audiences will almost certainly never again savor adult dramas as whipsmart and meditative and emotionally satisfying as Sideways or Michael Clayton. They weren’t arthouse profound in an Ozu or Bresson or Hitchcock or Bergman-esque sort of way but they were SO DAMN SATISFYING in their jaded, well-ordered, ‘somewhat older guy who’s been around and suffered a few bruises’ fashion, and now, as Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill says at the ending of Goodfellas, ‘It’s over…last night I ordered pasta and they gave me egg noodles and ketchup.’

“The industry currently trying to make product that will fill the 2022 gladiator megaplex arenas…the film industry as we know it has completely thrown in the towel as far as that sort of theatrical film is concerned. It’s over and done with and will never, EVER return. Millennial and Zoomer taste buds + the Marvel scourge + streaming + 80-inch UHD home theatre systems + wokester intimidation & terror + a two-year Covid suffocation have killed this sort of theatrical climate forever.

“Film festivals and streaming are where the action is. Theatrical is a mosh pit these days — purely about satisfying movie fans who’ve been raised and conditioned to expect and accept genre crap and cinematic degradation and the superhero tentpole zone–out syndrome. It’s a whole different realm out there now — the last five or six years have delivered the death blows, shattering those of us who knew the mid-to-late 20th Century film-church realm and occasionally felt the nutrition and the nurturing.”

Gal Gadot as a facsimile of Grace Kelly? Or will she play Cary Grant‘s John Robie?

HE follower “Jeff” suggested listening to a Big Picture podcast about Licorice Pizza. The hosts are Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins; the guests are Chris Ryan and Wosny Lambre.

Naturally they focus on the age-inappropriate relationship between Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim (respectively playing an ambitious 15 year-old actor and a floundering, ambivalent 25 year-old woman who lives with her parents) and the John Michael Higgins racial insensitivity thing blah blah.

“Jeff” thought I might enjoy a brief passage around the 49-minute mark in which Wosny shrugs at the age-inappropriate thing. I rolled my eyes, couldn’t have cared less.

What really happened is that I got hung up on the voices. Not Fennessey — a stable, sensible-sounding guy — but Dobbins and her uptalky, vocal-fry, Valley Girl-ish (I hate it when people say “becuzz” rather than “because”), and Wosny pronouncing absurd as “ubbsurd” and saying “bayzigally”…stuff like that. And too often my two least favorite words in the dictionary — “incredible” and “amazing” — are used to convey enthusiasm.

Some Millennials, man. Chalk on the blackboard.

Herewith some HE reactions to “Hollywood’s New Rules,” a just-posted article by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, and excerpted in a 1.11.22 HE article titled “Hollywood Is a Woke Prison Colony“:

It’s “interesting” and approvable that Keifer and Savodnik have managed to cobble together a portrait of totalitarian woke terror in Hollywood (inclusive hiring mandates, BIPOCS are saintly and sainted, cultural shifts, only white guys get punched down upon, the Academy’s “woke house” museum).

But of course, this is nothing that hasn’t been noted or noticed or mentioned in a hundred different ways by Awards Daily or Hollywood Elsewhere or George Orwell or, in their private, never-to-be-publicly-acknowledged realms of inward meditation, any number of industry veterans with half-honest inclinations, at least with themselves.

Keifer and Savodnik have based this article upon traditional shoe-leather and notepad reporting (including actual on-the-record sources like Howard Koch, Jr. and Sam Wasson), and that is commendable.

But you can also sense or sniff out the presence of scores of creatives and producers and screenwriters and peripheral, lower-level sources who were too terrified to even answer K & S’s emails, texts and phone calls.

This is a good article but the notion of a massive class-action, anti-discrimination suit by Hollywood white guys? That’ll NEVER happen…please.

I’m assuming that the unnamed editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter, referenced in the opening paragraph, is Matt Belloni, whose precise title between ‘17 and ‘20 was “editorial director”. The source of this story was a THR employee who heard Belloni’s pitch and noted the derisive responses of THR staffers. It certainly wasn’t Belloni himself.

The piece is primarily composed of scraps and inferences and tidbits. Yes, Keifer and Savodnik have only scratched the surface. They certainly haven’t found a Hollywood equivalent of a Howard Beale or a Jay Bulworth who doesn’t give a damn and is just coughing up the real truth and let the chips fall where they may. But it’s a good honest stab at “the terror.”

From “Hollywood’s New Rules,” a just-posted article by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, available via Bari Weiss‘s “Common Sense” Substack:

“Hollywood, like many industries, does have a clubbiness about it. And pretty much everyone on the inside insists it should open up to those who had, for decades, been kept out. But the heavy-handed mandates, the databases, the shifting culture — in which pretty much all white men were assumed to have gotten their jobs because they had the right tennis buddies or ZIP code or skin color — raised the possibility of a new kind of clubbiness.

“The result has not just been a demographic change. It has been an ideological and cultural transformation. We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers — all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. This was the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, but at every level of production.

“How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. ‘Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,’ one writer said. Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?

“Maybe it’s 15 percent about the belief that it will bring more people into viewing content, and 85 percent about the fear of being attacked on social media or in places like the Hollywood press or The New York Times,” a writer and producer said.

“You’ve got to be insane not to have at the forefront of your mind all of these racial and gender and trans issues when you’re writing something. You have to worry about the impact that everything you do will have on your career. And that has an obvious chilling effect on creativity.”

“There was a feeling, among those who didn’t hew to the new orthodoxy, that it was becoming harder not only for certain people to find work but for a certain kind of content — ballsier, more provocative — to get made.

“They were scared of what was happening. The fear, one prominent director said in an email, is ‘the audience stops trusting us. They begin to see us as a community twisting ourselves into a pretzel to make every movie as woke as possible, every relationship mixed racially, every character sexually fluid, and they decide that we are telling stories set in a fantasyland instead of a world they know and live in. If that happens, and they decide to throw themselves instead into video games 24/7, we will lose them.'”

The audience will stop trusting us? Baby, that train left the station four or five years ago, minimum, if not earlier.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg is reporting that the 94th Academy Awards, slated to air on 3.27.22, will have a host — the first since the 90th Oscars aired in 2017.

And if the Academy honchos understand anything about the culture and how sick people are of Hollywood’s woke bullshit, they’ll go to Dave Chappelle on their knees and beg him to accept the gig. Please, bruh…we’ve gone insane over the last four or five years and have fucked ourselves royally…we’ve isolated ourselves from most of the ticket-buying public, and we need you to save us from our own viral insanity.

The trans community will scream in protest if the Academy taps Chappelle, and that’s fine because Joe and Jane Popcorn don’t give a shit. Nobody wants to give trans people any kind of hard time, but their banshee shrieking and howling is not a popular tune on the hit parade.

Feinberg reminds that Spider-Man: No Way Home star Tom Holland “has expressed interest in hosting the Oscars, and “that the Academy did reach out to him to explore that possibility.” Please, dear God…no!

Whoever is chosen to host the 94th Academy Awards will be investigated by Woke Twitter, and if the prospective host has ever said one “wrong” thing in an interview or tweeted one “incorrect” thing they’ll be killed…dragged and eviscerated and disemboweled by wild dogs. Which is another reason why Chappelle is such a great choice. The twitter wolves have already gone after him and done everything they can to take him down, and he’s still standing.