As someone who literally stood in front of that huge oil painting of Tony Montana and Elvira in the spring of ‘83, having snuck onto the Universal sound stage where a large portion of Tony’s gaudy Miami mansion had been built…it only just hit me today that the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip of the painting in Scarface is not quite the same as the bullet-strafed photo of same that we’re all familiar with…compare Michelle Pfeiffer’s eyes…they’re gazing in different directions plus her top expression conveys an air of contentment while she looks vaguely sullen and frosty in the alternate. Al Pacino looks chillier also in the below photo.

…and it doesn’t specifically matter anyway as we know who’s going to win the Best Actress Oscar, but if we could somehow know what we will never in fact know, who would be in second place, Maestro’s Carey Mulligan or Poor Things Emma Stone?

How great would it be if the actress who could arguably be said to have delivered the finest (deepest, strongest, most fully penetrating) lead performance actually won? Yeah, I know…dream on.

It’s hard not to associate Zelda Williams and Diablo Cody’s Lisa Frankenstein (Focus, 2.9.24) with Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, which is based on Alisdair Gray 1992 novel but has been more commonly referred to over the last few months as Barbie Meets Frankenstein. Lisa began shooting in August ‘22, or roughly 13 years after the development of Poor Things had begun.