Day: February 14, 2022

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone is actually predicting (or half-predicting by way of an intuitive feeling) that Spencer‘s Kristen Stewart might be…well, a slightly more likely winner of the Best Actress Oscar race than some of us are supposing. Or so she suspects. Nobody knows anything, of course.

HE reaction: Olivia Colman won’t happen because (a) she recently won and (b) the stolen doll. Nobody’s really knocked out by Nicole Kidman’s decent performance as Lucille Ball — she’s fine but calm down. Jessica Chastain‘s Tammy Faye Bakker is…I actually don’t have any particular feeling for this good-enough performance, one way or the other. But I’m sensing meh. As for Stewart, she does a good job of playing a mad, haunted princess but Spencer itself is AWFUL.

That leaves Penelope Cruz and ONLY Penelope Cruz as the winner.

The Stewart comeback narrative (snubbed by SAG) is, I’ll admit, a narrative that the others don’t have. Also she’s youngish, hottish and gay. If she wins this would be stunning, staggering, unprecedented.

Friendo to HE: “Cruz is not winning. Zero shot. It’s between Kidman, Chastain and Stewart.”

HE to friendo: “If Cruz doesn’t win it’ll be because of sheer sloth of the part of Academy members. Too fucking lazy to pop the screener in and simply watch Parallel Mothers. Dilletantes!”

The jokes, material and general pizazz factor may be engaging and even hilarious come March 27th, but we all understand the reasons why Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes have been hired to co-host this year’s Academy Awards ceremony.

One, the wokeness factor — three women, two BIPOCS, the right kind of progressive attitude. (Don”t even dispute this.). And two, Film Twitter will leave them alone while any dude (or dudes) who might have been chosen would have been picked apart and savaged for this or that past misdeed, one way or the other.

“Every choice Hollywood makes, whether it’s hosting a show or casting a movie, is done out of fear — fear of bad headlines, fear of Twitter, fear of that wave of hysteria that made them get rid of their host in the first place.” — Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, just a few minutes ago.

After the surprise Best Picture victory by 2016’s Moonlight (an identity-politics win that suffered from an inconclusive and strangely cast third act), progressive Academy members told themselves “no more Best Picture wins by white-guy directors!….the worm has turned!”

The following year Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water took the prize…a sexy monster flick about a homely and isolated woman’s sexuality, and created by the Mexican Orson Welles, an enormously well-liked fellow.

Eureka! We’re on a whole new path! The world transformed!

And then Green Book won the following year, and your extreme wokesters and BIPOCs totally freaked out…”Eeeeee!” A period flick (1962) about racial rapprochment between a thuggish Italian racist and an elegant gay pianist (essentially a parent-child road movie) was adored by Hollywood Elsewhere and tens of thousands of average sane people throughout the industry and the country but widely condemned by Film Twitter. To Spike Lee and many others on his side of the divide, the Green Book white-guy factor was intolerable…and yet it won! Wheeeeee! Wokesters can go fuck themselves!

But that was it. Older white guy movies were henceforth unofficially banned from serious consideration. Hence the dismissal of Martin Scorsese‘s brilliant The Irishman and the triumph of Parasite, despite the drunken scammers nonsensically letting the fired maid into the house during a rainstorm.

This was followed by last year’s triumph of Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland — proper gender focus, ethnically correct, white guy characters strictly marginalized.

It follows that Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog, a movie that average viewers are mostly (almost entirely?) dismissive of, will win for Best Picture and Best Director. Not because anyone “out there” cares about this grim, tortured, glacially-paced melodrama about closeted gayness on the open range, but because of the “Campion rules!” factor.

From Sasha Stone‘s recent Awards Daily assessment…

Adrien Lyne’s Deep Water (Hulu, 3.18) may be an intriguing sexual thriller, but it seems like an odd yesteryear thing — filmed before almost anyone on the planet had even heard of Covid ‘19, and a full year before Donald Trump decisively lost to Joe Biden in the election of early November 2020. And of course, the Ben Affleck-Ana de Armas affair was just kicking into gear, and Bennifer II was far beyond the horizon.