Day: September 14, 2025

Okay, so Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet, having slain in Telluride and now having won the TIFF People’s Choice Award, is the frontrunner to win the 2025 Best Picture Oscar early next year. No argument, no quibbles….it’s a pretty clear=cut scenario.

The other big contenders are Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another, which I’m hoping to see in Manhattan on Tuesday morning (pretty please?), Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value (which I loved after catching in in Cannes) and — to hear it from the Ryan Coogler-deserves-this-because he’s-Ryan Coogler identity mob — Sinners. If Hamnet has it in the bag, fine. If PTA comes close to winning, great — excellent for his career, no longer the red-ink guy.

Either way Sinners hasn’t a chance, and thank the Lord God for that fact.

…I’ll be fairly content. Who wouldn’t be? Last night a N.Y. Times podcast contributor called Severance “exahusting”…agreed. The last White Lotus (Thailand) was regarded almost worldwide as profoundly disappointing. And everyone is sick of The Bear winning stuff…enough!

I listened to David Marchese’s N.Y. Times interview with Cameron Crowe (“What Happened to Cameron Crowe? He Has Answers”) last night while i was driving on the 95. Crowe’s responses to the delicately phrased questions struck me as highly articulate, affecting, transporting, enobling….all in all a totally relaxing pleasure to wade into.

Wait…I thought the Anya Taylor Joy and Meryl Streep castings for Crowe’s Joni Mitchell film, which begins shooting next year, were more or less confirmed?

We all know how to pronounced the word “cause” — the cause we believe in, the apparent cause of something that’s happened, the causeway we drive upon, etc.

It’s pronounced “cawz” — everyone agrees with this. But when people say “because”, younger people especially, they say “beCUZZ.”

I first noticed this seven or eight years ago when listening to Kris Tapley, a Millennial, say the word. Me: “The fuck?”

Jo Van Fleet in East of Eden: “Becawz, BECAWZ he wanted to own me and bring me up like some little snot-nosed kid!”

The Beatles were totally cawz when they sang the Abbey Road track “Because”.

I swear to God that JFK never once said “beCUZZ.” He was a cawz guy all the way.

HE stands foursquare with the cawz community and against the cuzz brigade. Who’s with me?

Interview with neighbor of Tyler Robinson and Lance Twiggs saying they acted like a gay couple by holding hands and kissing with Lance visibly transitioning to a trans woman. pic.twitter.com/YgzPiXbbTP

— All is One and One is All (@vrajadev) September 13, 2025

The New York Post’s Josh Christendon and Georgia Worrell are reporting similarly, citing a “law enforcement source.”

1:55 p.m.: This morning the N.Y. Times finally threw in the towel by reporting that Tyler Robinson has “been in a romantic relationship with a partner who was in the process of transitioning from male to female.”

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