Just as diamonds are created under high temperatures and great pressure, grade-A or award-quality movies have never been gently sculpted into existence. They’ve always been produced under stressful, contentious, argumentative or even arduous conditions.

Hollywood has always been a rough-and-tumble industry. Over the last century the toughest wolves in the forest, attracted by the money and artistic acclaim and access to romantic opportunities, have come to Hollywood to compete and struggle and scrap their way to the top of the heap.

Or at least, that’s how things were until progressive aspirational purity became the industry watchword and Hollywood became a town run…intimidated, I should say…by a combination of fanatical wokesters and mainstream industry players who are terrified of being accused of harboring the wrong attitudes or beliefs.

Deadline‘s Michael Cieply explained the situation brilliantly this morning. He basically said that in terms of Academy membership, meritocracy is being phased out while equity is the new mandate.

“For the last few years**, AMPAS has been behaving less like an industry adjunct and more like a contemporary, socially conscious university.

“Admission [to the Academy], once based on merit and a semi-corrupt buddy system (akin to old-school ‘legacy’ enrollments), is now openly grounded in a college-like holistic approach that weighs achievement alongside identity factors.

“The mix is supposed to yield a membership, a movie community, and film content, that are somehow more diverse than in the past.

“Thus industry standing is no longer something you grab by the throat [or otherwise] achieved through wit, wile, connections, unfettered ambition, and, sometimes, talent.

“Rather, one is [now] granted status, based partly on identity, by the Academy and its outreach programs, and by associated and similarly oriented mechanisms at companies, guilds, film schools, festivals and so on.

“Achievement [still] matters,” Cieply notes. “But, as in many contemporary college admissions, it is just one in a basket of considerations.”

** since wokesters began to take over in ’18, he means.

Hats off to the NASS techies. The only thing wrong with this is that infuriating violet tint on the autos and buses. Otherwise it’s amazing. As one of the YouTube commenters has pointed out, the past has never looked or sounded this sharp or clear or life-like. Who cares if it’s colorized or if the street sounds are generic?

Someday a filmmaker will figure a way to integrate a higher rendering of historical footage with newly shot footage of name-brand actors.

For decades I tried to catch the most highly-regarded Manhattan plays, and I’m very grateful that I made the effort. We all realize that the last Broadway era for great playwriting ended between 20 or 25 years ago. (It’s all musicals now, and damn the sappy tourists for making this happen.) For me the mid ’70s to mid ’80s was close to a golden stage era. Which isn’t to say it was the greatest by the measure of any Broadway-veteran perspective, but simply a time when I was living near or in Manhattan, or often flying there from Los Angeles. Things were happening and I knew I had to get what I could.

It was a time in which certain well-reviewed plays (and one glorious musical, Sunday in the Park With George) seemed to speak directly to me and my experience…written by the youngish lions of that era (David Mamet, Simon Gray, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer) and focused on anxious, unsatisfied white guys whose situations seemed to echo my own…taunted by various urban anxieties, ambitions…by aloneness, sex/love, existential voids, “who am I?”, “what’s it all about?” and “will my life always seem this much of an uphill thing?”

It almost makes me weep to reflect on that period, which for me began in ’76 and started to wind down in ’85. (I lived in Manhattan for a bit more than five years — ‘early ’78 to ‘mid ’83.) Film-wise and quite sadly for many of us, the last third of the ’70s marked the beginning of the end of the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” period, and the early ’80s would became known as an era in which “the bottom [had] fallen out of badness in movies,” to borrow from Andrew Sarris.

But the quality of the plays seemed wonderful; ditto the culture (mostly pre-AIDS) itself. Life was hard, of course (my finances were mostly a shambles until ’87) and the wrong people were in power and writers were stuck with typewriters and white-out, but compared to today it almost seems as if I was living a kind of half-charmed life. I could live and work and run around (my batting average was around .400, give or take**) and write without fear of wokester death squads, for one thing.

I wouldn’t say that my future seemed especially rosey or brilliant back then, but it certainly lay ahead. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

The Reagan-era play that lifted me up and melted me down like none before or since was Tom Stoppard‘s The Real Thing (’84). Sappy as this sounds, it made me swoon. Okay, not “swoon” but it struck some kind of deep, profound chord. Partly because I saw it at a time when I believed that the right relationship with the right woman could really make a difference. That was then and this is now, but I was in the tank for this stuff in ’84. The play used the Monkees’ “I’m A Believer” as mood music, and I pretty much was one at the time.

I’m speaking of the original B’way production, of course, directed by Mike Nichols and costarring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. My admiration for Irons’ performance as Henry, a witty London playwright who resembled Stoppard in various ways, was boundless. Close, whom I was just getting to know back then, was truly magnificent as Annie. N.Y. Times critic Frank Rich called it “not only Mr. Stoppard’s most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years.”

(I went to see the 2000 B’way revival and was bitterly disappointed by Stephen Dillane‘s uncharismatic lead performance, which wasn’t even close to what Irons had brought.)

I was also floored that same year by James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim‘s Sunday in the Park With George, which opened at the Booth theatre on 5.2.84. It was one of the few B’way musicals that really reached inside, and it still makes me choke up when I watch it on YouTube.

I’m just going to list some of the plays that really hit the sweet spot between ’76 and ’85…I’m bypassing a few but here we go regardless:

Peter Shaffer‘s Equus, which I saw in London in the early summer of ’76. The great Colin Blakely was magnificent in the lead role of psychiatrist Martin Dysart (and better, I have to say, than Richard Burton was in the Sidney Lumet film version). I saw Anthony Perkins play the role in a B’way production of Equus in ’77, and I’m sorry to say that he underwhelmed.

A Broadway production of David Mamet‘s American Buffalo in early ’77. Directed by Ulu Grosbard with Robert Duvall, Kenneth McMillan and John Savage costarring. Four years later I saw it again (twice) at the Circle in the Square with Al Pacino as Teach. Pacino wasn’t a robot — he played certain lines and scenes a bit differently at times…experimentally, if you will. I was in heaven.

[Starting at 4:15]: “Let me try to translate — not endorse but translate — to liberal America why [so many Republican candidates are submental animals]. Part of the appeal of a Herschel Walker or a Donald Trump or any number of egregious assholes [whom] Republicans have backed is, in their minds, the worse a candidate is, the more it says to Democrats ‘do you see how much we don’t like what you’re selling?

“All that socialism and identity politics and victimhood and over-sensitivity and cancel culture and white self-loathing and forcing complicated ideas about race and sex on kids too young to understand [them]? Literally anything would be better than that,’ they’re saying.

“That’s their view. That’s why you can be a really bad dude in Republican politics, and it’s not a deal-breaker.

“This is a clear difference between the parties. Democrats also think the other side is an existential threat, but their response is not to nominate sickos to make a point.”

[Updated]. I don’t have time or the energy to write something deeply felt about each and every Scott film, but there’s absolutely no question in my mind the The Counselor deserves its #4 slot, that the first half of Matchstick Men is dead brilliant, and that A Good Year (ranked at #8) is a much better film that many people realize.

In this order…

1. Alien

2. The Duellists

3. Thelma and Louise

4.  The Counselor

5.  Blade Runner

6.  American Gangster

7.  Matchstick Men

8.   Gladiator  

9.   Kingdom of Heaven (extended version)

10. A Good Year

11.  Black Hawk Down

12. Black Rain

13. The Martian

I don’t feel that strongly care about the rest. Okay, I hate Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Ditto Legend. Someone to Watch Over Me is piffle. I found House of Gucci half-tolerable, but I’m not sure I’d want to watch it again.

The Last Duel was better than half-decent. I don’t even remember 1492: Conquest of Paradise or Body Of Lies. Scott’s Robin Hood was half-watchable, G.I. Jane is negligible; ditto Exodus: Gods and Kings, White Squall, Hannibal.

I was actually okay with All The Money In The World.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced last Wednesday that the org will follow the lead of the Spirit and Gotham Awards by abandoning gender-based acting awards. When LAFCA members vote in December they’ll hand out two Best Lead Performance trophies (either gender or gender-neutral) and two awards for Best Supporting Performance (ditto).

But the vote, I’ve been told, was far from  unanimous. In fact, it was damn near evenly split. It can be reported, in short, that nearly half of LAFCA doesn’t agree with the hardcore LGBTQ-supporting woke apparatchiks within the organization.

I’m told there’s a certain Stalinist fervor within this gender-neutral cabal — a belief that they’re doing God’s revolutionary work by dissolving gender and opening things up to all sorts of wrinkles, attitudes and permutations.

There’s also a conviction that anyone who doesn’t agree 100% on this issue is a naysayer or a foot-dragger, and that the apparatchicks therefore need to band together to make sure that the other side (i.e., those who believe that gender-based acting awards should be kept and that this will benefit actresses) is out-maneuvered or otherwise marginalized.

The LAFCA gang met last Saturday (10.8) in West Los Angeles, and the gender-neutral acting awards vote was 27 in favor, 22 against and with four abstentions. I’m told that the historical tendency has been for abstentions to translate into negative votes (i.e., voters who don’t necessarily agree but don’t want to argue or alienate), so let’s presume that the vote came down to 27 for, 26 against.

And that’s not counting the members who decided to vote in favor of the gender-neutral thing because they’re mice, and that it seemed safer to go along than to face challenges.

It was announced at the meeting that LAFCA had 60 members before the vote, and that a new admission made the tally 61.

I’m told that even discussing the gender-neutral vote appeared to alarm the apparatchiks. The topic of “nonbinary”-identified people is considered part and parcel of the larger discussion of LGBTQ rights — a zero-sum discussion.

Not incompatible: (a) gay couples and their families being entitled to equal protection under the law and (b) women being entitled to the dignity of acting categories which recognize that sex is an essential component of performance, and are therefore worthy of separate recognition.

Let’s imagine that a LAFCA member who doesn’t favor gender-neutral acting awards had spelled out his/her reasons for being against it. What would they say? How would they make their case?

The main argument, I would think, is that gender-neutral awards are arguably anti-woman.

Boiled down, the LAFCA system wasn’t broke so why the hell did the apparatchicks insist on “fixing” it? I’ll tell you why. Because wokeism is a cult and a newfound religion, and it’s believed that people who don’t parrot and follow the wokester line are on the wrong side of history. Kind of the same philosophy shared by Tom Courtenay‘s “Strelnikov”, the supporting character in David Lean‘s Dr. Zhivago.

A LAFCA member with senior standing: “I didn’t attend the meeting because I completely disagreed about their decision to revamp the acting awards by doing away with gender distinctions.”