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: