What the hell has happened to the inevitable Oscar triumph of The Holdovers’ Paul Giamatti? This was Paul’s year, his deserved payback moment for the Sideways snub of ‘05…and the SAG-AFTRA plebes have blown him off? My heart is breaking for the poor guy. Can the sardonically soulful Giamatti pull off an Oscar win regardless? You tell me. I’m really downhearted.

Major acting awards should be about major effing delivery…grand-slamming it…soul, gravity, reaching deep inside. Not this time. Congrats to the architects of Lily Gladstone‘s identity campaign. The Best Actress Oscar is now almost certainly hers, and everyone in the room knows the meaning…the final value of this.

SAG-AFTRA awards voters have been lowering industry property values for years…onward!

So that’s Chaya Raichik, the Libs of TikTok honcho, on the right with the pink hoodie, and masked-up Washington Post social media reporter Taylor Lorenz on the left.

In overly simple terms, we’re talking basic normie values and suspicion of unmitigated immigration of POCs from various cultures vs. unbridled wokeism (“whiteys need to be punished and brought down a peg or two”).

Yesterday HE tried to get the hang of Zoom, as the first “Misfits” Zoomcast is set for Sunday afternoon with a peek-out sometime later that evening or Monday morning.

Alas, HE mostly failed in this effort, and I am therefore grateful to Glenn Kenny for having generously offered to do the Zoom inviting, due to my woeful lack of facility with this extremely user-unfriendly software.

I spent three or four hours yesterday trying to figure out the protocols, and I’m just not smart or patient enough, it seems. And so to protect my sense of self-worth I’ve decided that it’s Zoom’s fault, not mine. As a result I’ve come to despise Zoom with a burning Ahab-like intensity.

Zoom has actually re-awakened long suppressed feelings of stupidity and self-loathing within me…feelings that I experienced when I was 13 or 14 years old and bored to death in history class. I so hated studying mind-numbing textbooks that I would invent my own answers to pop quizzes. When asked who was James Watt, the 18th Century Scottish inventor of the semi-advanced steam engine, I would answer that he was a pioneer in developing and measuring the illumination levels in electric light bulbs, hence the quantifying term “watt” as in 75-watt GE bulbs.

This was my burden, my plight, my anguish. For I was inexplicably hostile to standard terminology and accepted doctrine, and felt stubbornly inspired to defy it any way I could. And now, thanks to Zoom, I am re-living the dull panel-colony horror of being the dumb guy in class. Or, you know, an intellectually rebellious 13 year-old or whatever.

Again — HE’s very first Zoomcast will happen as planned, but only because Kenny has stepped into the breach.

Ray Bolger‘s Scarecrow: “Oh, I’m a failure because I haven’t got a brain.”

The Best Actress category represents the only major-category Oscar cliffhanger, of course — Poor Things‘ Emma Stone vs. Killers of the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone. And it’ll basically be decided during tonight’s SAG Awards telecast on Netflix.

HE is greatly concerned that the woke-minded SAG-AFTRA membership might vote to support Gladstone’s identity campaign (i.e., “put aside any notions of exceptional quality of performance — vote for me because I’m Native American”). Whoever wins tonight will almost certainly take the Best Actress Oscar, and so this is a fairly big deal as all the other Oscar categories have been pretty much decided upon or locked down.

I’ll be in West Orange, New Jersey when the decision comes down. I’m prepared to accept a Gladstone victory as long as everyone understands the woke bullshit dynamic, as a Lily win would have nothing to do with her having given a knockout performance, or one that could be fairly described as fascinating, audacious, richly-written, dig-down-and-touch-our-communal-soul, etc. What can I do if SAG-AFTRA tilts this way? Obviously nothing.

Travis Kelce‘s stunningly awful taste in jackets, shirts and pullovers continues unabated. A day or two ago he wore another sartorial nightmare garment while attending a Taylor Swift concert in Sydney. Couple this shamelessness with Kelce’s troglodyte behavior during the Las Vegas Super Bowl and you’ve got a very difficult package. If I was at a party and spotted some nameless nobody wearing a sweater or pullover like this, I would retreat to the other end of the room or maybe leave altogether.