HE was recently offered a chance to discuss the top five Oscar categories with an Academy member…a woman. I agreed not to mention which branch she’s from, but I can at least disclose that (a) she’s a 50something progressive wokey and (b) two years ago she voted to give the Best Picture Oscar to the deplorable EEAAO and the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Jamie Lee Curtis, so that in itself should give you pause.

The AMPAS member didn’t want to talk about preferences before the voting deadline but this being the final week and with less than 72 hours before the Oscar telecast she felt free to let it all hang out.

Best Picture: “I enjoyed much of Anora and admired Mikey Madison‘s performance as far as it went, but it didn’t seem to, you know, ‘say’ anything…it was mainly about money and yelling and swearing and a ruthless Russian oligarch and hie bitchy, poisonous wife. I found Conclave much more stirring from a moral or ethical vantage point, and I thought the intersex finale was fascinating, and I adored Ralph Fiennes‘ performance as Cardinal whatsisname…Lawrence. I was thinking about voting for The Brutalist for the distinguished pedigree factor, because it lasts three and a half hours and has an overture and an intermission and because it was shot in VistaVision. But I didn’t want to endorse a film that was directed by a youngish bearded guy with a pot belly so I went with Conclave. I prefer directors who keep themselves in shape.”

HE pick: Anora.

Best Director: “I wasn’t allowed to vote for Conclave‘s Edward Berger so I went with Anora‘s Sean Baker. Everyone seems to believe Sean’s got this Oscar in the bag and I didn’t want to differ so I’m a Baker person also. He’s a nice indie-type guy who’s been talking about the importance of exhibition and movie screens, and I don’t wanna pickle.”

HE pick: Sean Baker.

Best Actor: “I felt conflicted about Adrien Brody‘s Brutalist performance as a suffering Jewish architect, but he won me over. He wore this pained expression throughout plus he shot heroin and smoked cigarettes and was anally raped by Guy Pearce. Plus he got a blowjob in a brothel and a hand job from his wife, plus he befriended that silent black guy. Plus he won 20 years ago for playing another Jewish, artistically gifted WWII victim so I thought “why not go for two?” Ralph Fiennes gave a better performance but he won 30 years ago for playing that German monster in Schindler’s List. [HE explains that Fiennes didn’t win for Schindler’s List.] He didn’t? Oh, well…okay. I was thinking about voting for Timothee Chalamet‘s Bob Dylan but he’s too young. I finally couldn’t not vote for a character who is blown, hand-jobbed, ass-raped, heroin-injected and tobacco-poisoned. It had to be Brody. Okay, I’ll admit it — I like a little anal from time to time. Especially if I’ve been drinking.”

HE pick: Either Timothee Chalamet or Ralph Fiennes…anyone but heroin-shooting handjob Brody!

Best Actress: “Absolutely Demi Moore! She tried so hard to be an award-worthy actress for so many years, but the male-dominated producers wouldn’t let her. Plus we need to celebrate a victim character who is brutally fucked over by the cosmetics industry and the mindset that we’re not allowed to grow old. I mean, we’re all victims here! [HE explains that Moore never tried to be an award-worthy actress in her ’80s and ’90s heyday and that she went for popcorn fame and flush paychecks at every turn.] Well, that’s your opinion. I don’t agree with that. Plus Demi is 62 or 63…that cinched my vote. I liked Mikey but she’s too young.”

HE pick: Mikey Madison.

Best Supporting Actor: “I didn’t even see The Apprentice so I don’t know from Jeremy Strong. I’m following the crowd by having voted for Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain. I actually liked Yura Borisov in Anora the best, but I haven’t the strengh of character to vote for him because he’s too obscure and I’m too much of a go-alonger.”

HE pick: Keiran Culkin.

Best Supporting Actress: “I didn’t want the entire Emilia Perez caravan to be pushed over the cliff because of Karla Sofia Gascon having blown the whole thing up, so I voted for Zoe Saldana out of pity. I actually thought Conclave‘s Isabella Rossellini gave the strongest and most compelling female supporting performance, but again, I lack the character and the backbone to vote for my own personal preference. I want to feel safe by voting with the majority bloc.”

HE pick: Isabella Rossellini, although I know Zoe Saldana will win.

Watching Trump and Vance gang up and bully Zelensky, I have never been so disgusted and ashamed to be an American in my life. pic.twitter.com/EjwPkTPAfW

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) February 28, 2025

20-odd years ago James Toback told me that “almost none of us are going to die as pleasantly as we’d like to…death always happens under circumstances we can’t foresee, much less plan for, and sooner than we’d like.”

Plus, he might have added, the likelihood that we’re going to die while lying comfortably in bed between recently-washed sheets with a fire crackling nearby and your cat or dog lying peacefully next to you is almost nil. The odds are that your final throes are going to either be painful or traumatic or grotesque, and possibly a combination of all three.

Toback could have been talking about the curious, almost certainly traumatic deaths of Gene Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa.

If and when a seriously old person (90-plus) with a moderate interest in living…what generally happens when an 80something or 90-something person is experiencing troubling symptoms? What do they tend to do? I’ll tell you what they tend to do. They tend to say things like “uhm, I don’t feel so good”, which is always followed by a wife or a nurse or a daughter driving the elderly person to a clinic or hospital, or perhaps calling an ambulance. That’s the way it usually goes.

Generally speaking the old ailing person doesn’t fall to the floor (especially in a semi-unsanitary “mud room”) and go “aaaggghhh!” and die right then and there.

And even if this does happen, the much younger, presumably responsible-minded wife (Arakawa was 63)…generally the caregiver doesn’t panic or freak out by swallowing a bunch of pills and then falling on the bathroom floor and dying herself, and at the same time somehow encouraging the family dog to commit suicide with her.

Any way you slice this, Gene and Betsy clearly did not experience peaceful, placid exits from our mortal coil. The odds are that Toback’s scenario — “painful or traumatic or grotesque” — prevailed.

Does anyone reading this article have any stories about parents or great uncles or aunts being found dead on the floor? I didn’t think so.

Generally speaking when you get old life starts telling you in little ways that getting old sucks balls and that, as Bette Davis famously said, “it’s not for sissies”. You are reminded over and over that the quality of life isn’t what it was 10 or 20 years earlier, and a far cry from what it was in middle age. (Don’t even mention your youth.) And then you get even older and it gets a bit worse…the water may be sparkling clean but it’s still swirling downward in the bowl.

Unless, that is, you’ve been blessed with strong German genes (like me) or unless you’re a health food nut and a workout Nazi, in which case the joys of life can continue to be savored.

Norman Lloyd was a happy or at least a moderately contented man when he turned 100, and as far as I know he stayed that way until he died at 106.

I’m guessing that Gene Hackman was going downhill like most 90somethings (he walked with a cane) but it doesn’t figure that he would just keel over and die in a mud room. (He left no suicide note, and I haven’t read that he made an emergency phone call.) And it really, really doesn’t figure that his 32-years-younger wife would, upon finding his body, go “aaaggh, I can’t stand it!” and decide to impulsively kill herself, and not in her bedroom but on the floor of the fucking bathroom.

Oh, and “Fido? You need to swallow these pills, baby…they’ll be good for you.”

Repeating: “Almost none of us are going to die as pleasantly as we’d like to.”

“Serene Acceptance“, posted on 4.4.13:

“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear,” Roger Ebert wrote in a 9.15.11 Salon piece. “I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

“I don’t expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. ‘Ask someone how they feel about death,’ he said, ‘and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you’re really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don’t really exist. I might be gone at any given second.’

“Me too,” Roger answers. “But I hope not. I have plans. [But] I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Walt Whitman:

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

“If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

I don’t want a Toback death…please. No car crashes, no road-rage shootings, no JFK-in-Dealey-Plaza blood spatterings. I want to drowse off in a well-dressed state on top of my well-padded, queen-size bed, and with my hair pleasantly thickened and styled. Slim jeans, light-gray socks, shined Italian loafers, high-thread-count T-shirt, jean jacket. I want to gently go to sleep with my cats lying next to me, and with a Bluray of Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold playing on the 65″ Sony 4K.

Or, failing that, I want to collapse on a side street in Paris, preferably cobblestoned, and die of a heart attack as I gaze up at the clear night sky.

The Demi Moore-Racquel Welch analogy is brillliant, heaven-sent…made my day!

HE to mainstream journalist acquaintance, sent this morning at 10:27 am: “I am preparing to sink into a terrible pit of depression when Adrien Brody and Demi Moore win Best Actor and Best Actress. I’m already feeling the nausea…acidic stomach…and these are early symptoms as there are two, technically two and a half days to go before the Sunday evening Oscarcast.”

Three years ago I recalled how the shooting script of Crimson Tide wasn’t so much structurally influenced or character-enriched as significantly flavored by three celebrated pinch-hitters — Robert Towne, Quentin Tarantino and Steve Zallian.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to name other successful big-budget films whose producers tapped into the talents of prominent screenwriters who were able to inject (take your pick) edgy attitude, thoughtful meditations, humor, personality, cultural hors d’eouvres, etc.

Posted on 5.31.22:

Way back when in Boston there was this tallish, slender brunette of 19 or 20 whom I knew and liked a lot, and vice versa. Her name escaped years ago, but we had this moment on a second-floor landing of a staircase inside a Boston apartment building. I had to leave and we were talking a bit before saying goodbye, and then we held our arms out and just sank into this hungry embrace.

She had these long sinewy arms and strong grippy hands and so did I, and we just got wrapped up in the envelopment of it, holding each other closer and tighter than we probably expected to do at first but holding, holding…as close together as our bodies could have been from a standing-up position, and neither easing up.

I don’t know how long we held the position hut it had to have been a good couple of minutes, maybe three. We hadn’t been on intimate terms before this moment and we somehow never went there in the aftermath, and, as noted, I don’t even recall her name. Lotsa love, passion and perspiration over the decades, but after that Beantown staircase hug I never experienced anything like it ever again. Which is why it’s still in my head.

The other day I described it to a friend as a “lesbian hug.” She called it a “mommy goodbye hug.”

Best finale to a film about a seagoing mutiny drama in cinema history:

…and cheers to the great Gene Hackman for his delivery of it. I own a Bluray of Hoosiers. I’ll be watching it tonight.

Tbe best locker-room speech in cinema history:

Who isn’t jarred and saddened by the idea of suicide (I am anyway), and doubly so by the idea of a possible joint suicide between an older husband and younger wife, and even more so when you throw the couple’s dog into the equation?

The first impulse is to avoid dwelling on this or that death and instead celebrate the glow of life…in particular the admirable, fascinating, glorious life of the departed.

So let’s do that — Gene Hackman was absolutely among the greatest actors of the 20th Century, and this is what needs focusing upon and will be focused upon today, tomorrow and for a long time to come.

And yet this is the apparent truth of it: Sometime yesterday the 95 year-old Hackman, presumably dealing with diminished terms of life and apparently as an act of decisive agency and dignity, decided to go to sleep of his own volition, and his 63 year-old pianist wife, Betsy Arakawa, decided to take the journey with him.

And somehow or in some way their dog also died, the thinking presumably being that love and devotion are more important than the mere fact of aliveness. The dog would have been devastated to have been left alone so Gene and Betsy took him/her along.

A few details are known at this stage, but here’s hoping the final moments were gentle or peaceful or something in that vein.

N.Y. Times: “Before entering the [Hackman] home, the sheriff’s department received confirmation from the fire department and the gas company that it was safe to enter. ‘We’re not going to guess this was an accident or natural causes,” a spokesperson said. ‘It wasn’t typical.’ A previous statement sent out early Thursday by the sheriff’s office said that foul play was not suspected.”

AP: “Hackman, 95, Betsy Arakawa, 63, and their dog were all dead when deputies entered their home to check on their welfare around 1:45 p.m. Wednesday, Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Denise Avila said.”

There will be no end to the negativity if the Academy Award telecast producers fail to insert Hackman into the death reel, and I mean at the very end of it.

“Stoplight with Hackman,” posted on 1.28.21: Sometime in the summer or early fall of ’94 (can’t remember which) I visited the Culver Studios set of Crimson Tide. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer had invited me. I hung around in a low-key way for two or three hours. No chit-chats with “talent” or anyone except Jerry — basically an opportunity to see the nuclear submarine set, which was built to tilt and lean and shake around. I watched Tony Scott guide Gene Hackman through a confrontation scene over and over. I was maybe 100 feet away.

When you first arrive on a big movie set there’s nothing more exciting. And then you hang around for a while, doing nothing but watching and maybe shooting the shit with whomever and taking notes and sipping soft drinks and nibbling bagels, and you’re eventually bored stiff.

Eventually it was time to leave. I took a last look at the set, thanked Jerry, shook hands and briskly walked off the sound stage and back to my black 240SX Nissan. I eased out of the parking lot and drove north on Ince Blvd. I stopped at a red light at the corner of Ince and Culver Blvd.

Just to my left was a large black limo, idling like me. I looked over and damned if it wasn’t Hackman in the back seat, just sitting there, three or four feet away.

“And so what?” you might ask. I’d just been watching him play the tough submarine captain, saying the same lines over and over. But I was nonetheless fascinated by my close-up view of the guy, and immediately I was telling myself “Jesus, don’t look…don’t be an asshole! They can feel it when fans are staring at them, even if it’s through glass.”

So I snuck a quick peek and turned away. And then another quickie. And then another. Not once did Hackman look in my direction. Maybe he knew I was sneaking peeks but decided not to confront me because I had the decency not to stare. I know that if I’d quickly turned and found him staring right at me it would have been mortifying. Thank God he didn’t.

Several months later I schmoozed with the whole Crimson Tide crew (Hackman, Denzel, Scott, Don and Jerry) at a Marina del Rey junket. A lot of fun, lots of food…a splendid time was had by all.

I remember asking Denzel about the Silver Surfer scene and asking if he had a preference for the Jack Kirby or Moebius version, or whether it had been discussed between takes or whatever. He looked at me, smirked, shook his head and opened his hands, palms up. He was basically saying “I didn’t ask, and I didn’t care.”

“I’m taking a lot of flack, and getting a lot of death threats, by the way. [But] if we don’t do this, America will go bankrupt. That’s why it has to be done.”

The last year in which Nicole Kidman‘s AMC Theatres turned a profit was 2018 — $110M in the black. They lost $4.56B in 2020, $1.27B in ’21…pandemic. They lost nearly a billion in ’22 ($974M), a mere $397M in ’23 and $352M in ’24…closer and closer to breaking even! AMC’s total 2024 revenue was $4.6B.

Every time I go into an AMC theatre, it’s between 15% to 20% filled….if that. Then again I avoid idiot-level movies.