…in the HE commentariat’s own version of “Box Office Poison,” the Tim Robey book that I just bought this afternoon?

Let’s say there are 20 or 24 chapters highlighting the same number of films. Which cinematic calamities should be fully examined for posterity’s sake? Not the obvious ones (Heaven’s Gate) but the most interesting, the least deserving, the most unfairly dismissed?

All I want from tomorrow morning’s reciting of the 2025 Oscar nominations is a couple of shocking omissions or unexpeceted inclusions…please. At least give me that.

I’d greatly appreciate The Apprentice‘s Sebastian Stan winding up with a Best Actor nomination; ditto Jeremy Strong for Best Supporting Actor.

And Queer‘s Daniel Craig…please! Oh, wait…such an outcome would first require that many if most Academy members have actually sat down and seen Luca Guadagnino‘s trippy period film.

Anora‘s Mikey Madison is in for Best Actress, of course, but how about including Marianne Jean-Baptiste of Hard Truths?

I know Conclave‘s Stanley Tucci won’t make the Best Supporting Actor cut (a shame) but Anora‘s Yura Borisov…well, of course!

Here’s hoping for slightly fewer Emilia Perez and Brutalist nominations than generally anticipated. Too bad the Brutalist AI controversy didn’t break a couple of weeks earlier.

Any serious surprises at all will suffice. Thank you.

Here are the Gatecrashers predictions on a category-by-category basis.

And here are mine, which of course aren’t predictions but personal choices.

Bowen Yang (Saturday Night Live, Wicked) and Rachel Sennott (Saturday Night, The Idol) will announce the nominations live on Thursday at 8:30 am Eastern / 5:30 am Pacific.

[5:30 am NYC update: The Los Angeles-based Yang and Sennott are almost certainly asleep at this moment in separate locations. Their smartphone alarms are most likely set for 3 am, although Sennott’s hair and makeup team are almost certainly up and preparing as we speak.]

Should I post some kind of live-blog reactions? On the fence about this. I don’t think there’s all that much of an edge-of-the-seat vibe out there.

Arguably the greatest sound-stage recreation of hurricane-force seas in motion picture history. The pitching of the ship, the frothy sea waves slamming against the hull, the howling winds, etc.

…create the slightest cultural tremor, I’ll be hugely surprised. Not that I wouldn’t welcome a new Sundance film that’s as good as, say, last year’s A Real Pain, but what are the odds of a myopic, more-or-less moribund festival like Sundance giving birth to a film that anyone’s going to actually care about or stream down the road?

By all outward appearances Sundance has no fresh, socially vital cards to play these days — fringe stuff, this or that gay character, gender fluidity, hip horror, this or that form of progressive perversity.

Example #1: Jimpa, a family “dramedy” about a mom (Olivia Colman) and her non-binary teen (Aud Mason-Hyde) traveling to Amsterdam to visit with the kid’s gay grandfather (John Lithgow). Fucking hell!

Max Walker-Silverman‘s Rebuilding, about the aftermath of a forest fire inside a FEMA camp, might add up to something. It’ll surely be interesting to see Josh O’Connor play a hinterland guy in a cowboy hat (i.e., an actual human being). Meghann Fahy, Kali “cheek stud” Reis and Amy Madigan costar. Caveat emptor: Walker-Silverman is a well-educated rich kid who grew up in Telluride, went to Stanford and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Bill Condon‘s Kiss of the Spider Woman remake….okay, maybe.

Sundance ’25 starts tomorrow (Thursday, 1.23) and wraps 11 days hence (Sunday, 2.2).

Temps below 20 degrees make me miserable. They darken my attitude, lead me into feelings of gloom and nihilism. The blacktop roads turn frosty gray at night, and it just makes you feel godawful.

This is weather that could theoretically kill you. At least it’s not windy…small comfort.

I’d rather be bike riding in Key West or, better yet, Turks and Caicos. Or in Dr. No Jamaica, mon. Or in Montserrat.

Herewith is a spirited chat I had with the cooking-with-gas, bell-bottom-wearing, hippie-haired John Carpenter in either late 1979 or very early ‘80 to promote The Fog (Avco Embassy), which opened on 2.1.80.

It should be noted for posterity’s sake that when I recorded this interview at the Sherry Netherland (I’m fairly certain it wasn’t the Carlyle or Waldorf Astoria) that IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, then a PMK publicist, monitored the conversation.

Sometime in late ’79 I did a sit-down with a youngish Paul Schrader, director-writer of the yet-to-open American Gigolo (Paramount, 2.1.80). It happened in some kind of office or cafe space right next to the old Paramount building, adjacent to Columbus Circle.

We kicked it around for 45 or 50 minutes. A week or so later I transcribed the discussion on my humming IBM Selectric in my West Village apartment. The final, pared-down version didn’t appear in the glossy, compact pages of Films in Review until sometime in the late winter or early spring.

Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively were obviously feeling relaxed and settled into each other’s romantic vibes or whatever.

All I know is that I’m tired of their lawsuits. (Everyone is.) And that if I was a big-shot film financier, I would never want to work with either of them. Ever.

Legendary cartoonist, satirist, screenwriter and children’s book author Jules Feiffer (Carnal Knowledge, Little Murders) has passed at age 95 — five days short of his 96th birthday.

Born in early ’29, it took him a long while to find his own voice and style but he had things well in hand by his early 30s, which is when most creators tend to find their strength.

Carnal Knowledge (’71) was “the best collaborative work I’ve ever done with anybody,” Feiffer has said a few times.

For me Donald Sutherland‘s marriage ceremony sermon from Little Murders (also ’71, adapted from Feiffer’s play) is the absolute greatest.

The exceptionally bright and incisive Feiffer kept the engine humming for many decades and never seemed to slow down, but the fact is that while he began to gain creative power in the late ’50s and the Kennedy era, he peaked in the counter-cultural ’60s and ’70s, or during his 30s ands 40s…go ahead and complain all you want but that’s how it shook out. He peaked during the LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations.

Stanley Kubrick to Jules Feiffer: “The comic themes you weave are very close to my heart … I must express unqualified admiration for the scenic structure of your “strips” and the eminently speakable and funny dialog … I should be most interested in furthering our contact with an eye toward doing a film along the moods and themes you have so brilliantly accomplished.”

Inspired by my “Oh, My Beloved” riff about Donald Trump summoning the spirit of Laurence Olivier’s “Mahdi”, I watched the generally tolerable, flirting-with-mediocre, Ultra Panavision 70 Khartoum last night.

Basil Dearden’s 1966 film ends with Olivier reacting with anguished disapproval when his triumphant followers, exuberant after the fall of Khartoum and the death of Charlton Heston’s General George “Chinese” Gordon, arrive at his tent with Gordon’s head on a tall pole.

Brief footage of Heston’s head was reportedly shot and included in the film, but an extremely negative audience response reportedly led Khartoum producers to axe the footage in favor of a quick fade-to-black.

It struck me this morning that the head-on-a-spike fate of Thomas More’s (i.e., Paul Scofield’s) severed eyes, ears, mouth, nose and throat in A Man For All Seasons was also a thing that year.

At no other time and in no other films was the fate of a lead character’s head a topic of interest, but it happened twice in ‘66.

Fred Zinnemann’s film ends with narration that says More’s head sat atop a spike on London bridge before his daughter retrieved and buried it. It would have been vulgar for Zinnemann to show a replica of Scofield’s head in any context, of course, but…well, nuff said.

Khartoum premiered on 6.6.66; AMFAS opened on 12.12.66.

Average Joes and Janes hate you for ushering in an age of progressive ideology in movies (now rapidly drawing to a close, thank God)…a social-cultural spasm that destroyed the mystique of transportational cinema, which had sporadically been in relatively good health until ‘17 or thereabouts.

So given this lingering loathing and a belief that H’wood is a crawling hive of woke wackazoids, do you really want to re-enforce that notion by giving the Best Picture Oscar to a mostly mediocre trans musical in order to send a “blow it out your ass” message to Donald Trump? Do you really want to dig into that hole all the deeper?

Remember when ideology wasn’t the Academy’s ne plus ultra…remember when certain movies and performances delivered profoundly or at least assuredly on their own terms (i.e., Gene Hackman’s bravura inhabiting of a racist New York detective in The French Connection, a performance that would be shouted down today by the wokeys)…do you want to continue living in that woke ditch or do you want to move on?

I’m bringing this up because yesterday the HE community didn’t say jack squat about the final paragraph in “Oh, My Beloved,” my response to Donald Trump’s holy-roller inaugural address.

I lied about not planning to watch or listen to the Trump inauguration. I listened to the swearing in and to much of Trump’s speech while driving back to Wilton from West Orange, New Jersey. And then I heard portions of the speech again inside my local Starbucks.

The swearing-in itself seemed lame. Like a ten-year-old, Chief Justice Roberts had to read the words from a print-out — he couldn’t memorize it like Chief Justice Earl Warren did 60 years ago? And also like a ten-year-old, he restricted the pledge to almost comically short bursts. Back in ’61 Warren said to JFK “and [you] will, to the best of your ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”….good heavens, 17 words in a single breath!

Trump basically struck me as being outside of his mind, and certainly lacking any semblance of humility. He apparently thinks he’s Alexander the Great mixed with Laurence Olivier‘s Mahdi in Khartoum…a holy, nation-correcting deliverer on some kind of anti-progressive, anti-woke cleansing crusade.

Melodramatic and grandiose, Trump’s speech lied about a lot of stuff, and he certainly exaggerated his ass off. But he’s been doing that all along.

“We will move with purpose and speed to bring back hope, prosperity, safety and peace for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed” — he was primarily referring to whiteys, trust me.

“For American citizens, Jan. 20, 2025 is Liberation Day,” Trump said. Translation: The party’s over, wokeys!

“Let mountain and desert tremble…let cities shudder…and let the corrupt in far places mark this moment and turn in fear of all the miracles to come…and let none in this great country in this victorious hour…let no one believe I am anyone other than The Expected One.”

Trump didn’t say this — Olivier did — but he was coming from a similar emotional place.

Trump proclaimed that he was really and truly spared by God when McLovin fired that would-be assassin’s bullet in rural Pennsylvania on 7.13.24. “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason,” Trump said. “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

This is crazy madman stuff…casting himself as a chosen one, the fulfiller of a divine plan.

“Under my leadership, we will restore fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law, and we are going to bring law and order back to our cities.” By setting free the animals who were sentenced to prison for attacking the Capitol on 1.6.21? That‘s “fair, equal and impartial justice”?

In an apparent allusion to the L.A. firestorm, Trump lambasted a government “that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home…without even a token of defense.” Tell that to the L.A. fire fighters (including the lesbian division) who’ve been struggling and sweating their way through that godawful maelstrom.

The U.S. is going to “take back” the Panama Canal? Trump can’t be so asinine as to believe this can actually happen.

“To restore competence and effectiveness to our federal government, my administration will establish the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency.” Okay, but what just happened to Vivek Ramaswany, who was supposed to co-manage DOGE with Elon? All of a sudden he was toast.

Truth be told, I didn’t entirely mind some of the anti-woke stuff. Trump said that “we have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves in many cases”…a reference to little white kids being taught that they’re the spawn of vicious racists and are basically the seed of primal evil. That’s not inaccurate.

And I kinda went “uh-huh” when he said he would “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life…we will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based” — i.e., equity can take a hike.

But I don’t feel it’s right or fair to put transgender people through the bureaucratic ringer by insisting that their passports designate them as a bio-male or bio-female. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” he said.

A friend believes that this latter passage will all but lock in Emilia Perez as the Best Picture Oscar-winner, which everyone will process as a thundering fuck you to Trump by the Hollywood community.