Jeffrey Wells

Money Is Basically Gravy, and Certainly Not The Essence

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But I do get “paid” in at least two senses of the term.

For the daily effort of tapping out this column I derive serious pride as well as abundant spiritual compensation….it makes my day and then some. And I do receive annual monetary payment in the form of round-trip passages to southern France and northern Italy plus a decent place to crash at the Cannes and Venice film festivals plus modest meals and whatnot, courtesy of HE supporters.

That’s not nothing. I actually feel pretty great about this set-up. The generous loyalists, I mean.

If what you’re doing with your life, professionally and/or creatively, feels insufficient or unsatisfying without the boost of lush payment, that’s not exactly a “bad” thing. Then again it suggests that you’re not in a terrific place, job-wise.

I realize that most people do what they do for the money they earn and that’s fine, but the best jobs are “payment” in and of themselves. If you make great money from these gigs or devotions, terrific. If you make mezzo-mezzo or even shitty money from them, that’s still moderately okay or at least tolerable because — hello? — you still have a great job. And that’s a relatively rare thing.

“Very Predictable Partisan Clashes”

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Today the Republicans who constitute a majority on the House Judiciary Committee “claimed that Jack Smith and his team had ‘weaponized’ the criminal justice system on behalf of the Biden administration — an accusation that Mr. Smith repeatedly and adamantly denied.

“Several times, under questioning by Democratic lawmakers, Mr. Smith said that he had never received orders from the attorney general at the time, Merrick B. Garland, or from anyone else in the Biden administration about how to pursue his cases against Donald Trump.

“’I am not a politician and I have no partisan loyalties,’ Mr. Smith said during his opening statement.

“He said that, after three decades as a prosecutor, he had simply followed the facts and the law without ‘fear or favor.’

“’No one should be above the law in this country, and the law required that he be held to account,’ he said of Mr. Trump. ‘So that is what I did.’

“Mr. Smith insisted that he would not be cowed by any of the vitriolic broadsides that Mr. Trump has continued to make against him personally. Those included a message that was posted online in the middle of the hearing by an official White House social media account, saying, “Jack Smith is a deranged animal, who shouldn’t be allowed to practice Law.”

“Mr. Smith acknowledged that he believed that Trump officials would ‘do everything in their power’ to indict him ‘because they’ve been told to do so by the president.’ But he said he would not bend in the face of the threats.

“’I will not be intimidated,’ he declared.” — from reporting by N.Y. Times correspondents Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush.

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Category by Category, Cut The Crap

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1. Best Picture:

I didn’t see an F1 nom in the cards, but congrats to Jerry Bruckheimer, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and the gang for pulling it off regardless.

Bugonia, Frankenstein, The Secret Agent and Train Dreams simply aren’t good enough to warrant a Best Picture nom by any sort of classical standard, and deep down their producers know this. Bugonia really doesn’t belong in this fraternity — at best it’s a minor, mid-level Lanthimos.

The truly serious contenders, of course, are OBAA, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value and Hamnet, and we all know that OBAA‘s win is in the bag, thanks in particular to the current ICE terror in Minnesota.

Which nominee should win on merit alone?: Marty Supreme or Sentimental Value…easily tbe best of the bunch.

Bugonia – Ed Guiney & Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, and Lars Knudsen, producers
F1 – Chad Oman, Brad Pitt, Lewis Hamilton, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Joseph Kosinski, and Jerry Bruckheimer, producers
Frankenstein – Guillermo del Toro, J. Miles Dale, and Scott Stuber, producers
Hamnet – Liza Marshall, Pippa Harris, Nicolas Gonda, Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes, producers
Marty Supreme – Ronald Bronstein, Eli Bush, Josh Safdie, Anthony Katagas and Timothée Chalamet, producers
One Battle After Another – Adam Somner, Sara Murphy and Paul Thomas Anderson, producers
The Secret Agent – Emilie Lesclaux, producer
Sentimental Value – Maria Ekerhovd and Andrea Berentsen Ottmar, producers
Sinners – Zinzi Coogler, Sev Ohanian, and Ryan Coogler, producers
Train Dreams – Marissa McMahon, Teddy Schwarzman, Will Janowitz, Ashley Schlaifer, and Michael Heimler, producers

2. Best Director

The consensus is that Paul Thomas Anderson will not only win for the high craft and political popularity of One Battle After Another (not to mention the heightened topicality), but after plugging away for nearly 30 years and being in his 50s, he also deserves a kind of Life Achievement Oscar. Can’t stop the dam waters.

Which nominees should win on merit alone?: Josh Sadie or Joachim Trier.

Chloé Zhao, Hamnet
Josh Safdie, Marty Supreme
Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another
Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value
Ryan Coogler, Sinners

3. Best Actor

Marty Supreme‘s Timothee Chalamet has this. A combination of hyper pogo-stick Marty plus his brilliant Bob Dylan in last year’s A Complete Unknown…locked.

Which nominees should win on merit alone?: Chalamet or Blue Moon‘s Ethan Hawke. Leonardo DiCaprio is excellent in OBAA, but he won ten years ago for The Revenant and he’s not as dynamically wired as Chalamet.

Timothée Chalamet – Marty Supreme as Marty Mauser
Leonardo DiCaprio – One Battle After Another as Bob Ferguson / Pat Calhoun
Ethan Hawke – Blue Moon as Lorenz “Larry” Hart
Michael B. Jordan – Sinners as Elijah “Smoke” Moore / Elias “Stack” Moore
Wagner Moura – The Secret Agent as Armando Solimões / Marcelo Alves / Fernando Solimões

4. Best Actress

Congrats to Song Sung Blue‘s Kate Hudson for landing a coveted nom in this hard-to-crack category. She won’t win, of course — it was decided many weeks ago that Hamnet‘s Jessie Buckley totally has this…stuffed and gleaming in her Elizabethan kit bag. Why was Emma Stone even nomimated for Bugonia? Because she shaved her head? What kind of strangely obsessive Academy cabal is behind this odd, underwhelming film?

Which nominees should win on merit alone?: Buckley or Renate Reinsve.

Jessie Buckley – Hamnet as Agnes Shakespeare
Rose Byrne – If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as Linda
Kate Hudson – Song Sung Blue as Claire Sardina / Thunder
Renate Reinsve – Sentimental Value as Nora Borg
Emma Stone – Bugonia as Michelle Fuller

5. Best Supporting Actor

Sentimental Value‘s Stellan Skarsgard for the win. Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn will split the OBAA vote, of course. Why was Sinners‘ Delroy Lindo even nominated? Just swept along with the Sinners flash flood, I suppose. No one with a smidgen of taste was even thinking about Lindo as an Oscar contender.

Which nominee should win on merit alone?: Skarsgaard, not to mention the notion of this potentially being a special Life Achievement Oscar thang.

Benicio Del Toro – One Battle After Another as Sergio St. Carlos
Jacob Elordi – Frankenstein as the Creature
Delroy Lindo – Sinners as Delta Slim
Sean Penn – One Battle After Another as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw
Stellan Skarsgård – Sentimental Value as Gustav Borg

6. Best Supporting Actress

Special congrats to Sentimental Value‘s highly deserving Elle Fanning for having nudged her way into this very tough category. Wunmi Mosaku (who?) being nominated tells us what a sweeping identity thing Sinners was/is among Academy members. If anyone is going to win for the identity factor, it’ll be OBAA‘s Teyana Taylor, whose Golden Globes acceptance speech emphasized this way of calibrating or judging.

Which nominees should win on merit alone?: Weapons‘ Amy Madigan or the Sentimental duo of Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who will probably lose due to vote-splitting.

Elle Fanning – Sentimental Value as Rachel Kemp
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas – Sentimental Value as Agnes Borg Pettersen
Amy Madigan – Weapons as Aunt Gladys
Wunmi Mosaku – Sinners as Annie
Teyana Taylor – One Battle After Another as Perfidia Beverly Hills

I haven’t time to fully suss out the other categories, but I’ll get there tonight or tomorrow.

HE’s Sinners chorus has been insisting for months that Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners script will take the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. He wins an Oscar for writing an allegorical cheeseball vampire drive-in film about Deep South racism, a film that Samuel Z. Arkoff would have loved to produce in the ’60s or ’70s…really?

I’m presuming that PTA’s One Battle After Another script, which makes no basic sense in terms of Sean Penn‘s wacked-out Colonel Lockjaw character, will win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.

Sinners‘ Autumn Durald Arkapaw being nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar is a complete joke due to the simple fact that the lighting is atrocious during the noctural vampire attack section (i.e., the second half). Many of us (myself included) couldn’t even see what was going on.

Which cinematography nominees should win on merit alone? Marty Supreme‘s Darius Khondji (my personal choice) or OBAA‘s Michael Bauman — even those who have their doubts and complaints about Battle (like me) admire the lensing.

Couldn’t Fall Asleep Last Night Over Concerns That “Sinners” Might Receive Too Many Political-Window-Dressing Oscar Noms

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And then I woke up extra-early over the same, and then, exhausted by all the stress, I sank into a coma at 8 am and only just woke up at 9:30 am. Is Samuel Z. Arkoff celebrating in heaven? Aaaaaggghhh! …Clayton Davis lowers the boom!

Wasn’t it called Judas and the Black Messiah?

Let me get this straight: Ryan Coogler’s popcorn exploitation film (Irish vampires, good cunnilingus, Mississippi Delta blues, yokel racism) has gathered 16 Oscar nominations, the most for any film in history…fine. And yet (here’s the problem) the previous record holders for the most Oscar nominations — All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land, all with 14 — were and are, unlike Sinners, exceptionally good, dynamic, high-pedigree films.

Sentimental Value only received a piddly nine Oscar nominations this morning (kidding…nine noms is a tremendous feat for this Norwegian family drama), but it is surely a far richer, deeper and smarter achievement than Sinners…ten or fifteen times better, don’t get me started.

Is there any Academy member out there who would be gauche enough to speak of Sinners and the whipsmart, ultra-sophisticated Eve in the same breath? Titanic didn’t just make a ton of money, but hit the emotional jackpot across the board — obviously the highly profitable Sinners, a crude political allegory, never even tried to melt hearts. The closest analogy, I suppose, would be La-La Land, which was propelled by music as much as Sinners (although, due respect to Jack O’Connell‘s Irish soft shoe, only Damien Chazelle‘s film invested in knockout dance sequences).

I won’t argue that Ben-Hur (12 nominations) is a much better film than Sinners, but it’s certainly a “bigger” show…classier, costlier, more big-canvas-y, more breathtaking here and there, more grandiose. Plus Sinners doesn’t have anything close to a big, wowser, super-thrilling chariot race-type sequence…nothing that even begins to compete on that level. And there’s certainly no scene in Ben-Hur in which Charlton Heston‘s Judah Ben-Hur drops to his knees in order to give great head to Haya Hayareet‘s Esther.

How Can The Likely Response to “Melania” Not Bring Humiliation?

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It’s certainly fair to analogize the imminent opening of Brett Ratner‘s Melania with Susan Alexander Kane‘s anguished debut at the Chicago Opera House. No matter how anyone tries to spin it, the response will be humiliating. Amazon paid $40 million to license the film and produce a follow-up docuseries on the first lady…whore money…obeisance before power.

Economic Times, 1.18.26: “Despite President Trump’s recent statements that tickets to the debut at the freshly renamed Trump-Kennedy Center are a ‘very hard get,’ industry tracking cites a different story. Tracking models are now featuring a domestic opening in the low single-digit millions, a fraction of the $40 million Amazon invested.

“One source told Rob Shuter that in New York ‘only a handful of seats have been booked…the studio was expecting a big turnout, but so far it’s not materializing.'”

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Happy Haight-Ashbury Days

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This is far and away my favorite snap of the recently passed Bob Weir. Look at him…20 years old but could easily pass for 15 or 16. And that beaming Peter Pan expression…a tripped-out, light-as-a-feather vibe that says “toodle-fucking-whoo-hoo!”

By all accounts Weir was a happy, easygoing, spiritually nourished fellow who lived an active, buoyant life, and as recently as 20 years ago he half-resembled the guy he was on those Haight-Ashbury steps. But upon hitting his early to mid 70s Weir morphed into a grizzled mountain goat…a weathered, silver-haired, Gabby Hayes-like gold prospector, making camp in the Klondike. Weir passed a week and a half ago (cancer) at age 78.

Pic was taken on the steps of the famed Grateful Dead house (710 Ashbury Street) sometime in the summer or early fall of ’67. (l. to r.) Phil Lesh (25), Weir, some Russian-beaver hat-wearing guy who doesn’t look to me like Mickey Hart, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (22 but looking closer to 38…died at age 27 from too much booze) and Bill Kreutzmann (21).

Playboy After Dark, 1.18.69. Look at those tuxedo’ed, evening-wear phonies pretending to groove and bop to “St. Stephen” before it even begins.

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Towering “Supreme” Chalamet Sculpture in Turin Cinéma Museum

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…vaguely resembles Timothee Chalamet, granted, but my immediate response was that it looks more like late ‘80s or early ‘90s Eric Stoltz. (Two months younger than Barack Obama, Stoltz is now 64 — a jarring realization.) Plus the orange ping-pong ball is the size of a tangerine.

This sculpture indicates something, methinks. It suggests that the worldwide federation of hipster cineastes has planted a flag on the lunar Marty Supreme surface while the hermetic Academy is living on its own planet while doggedly embracing the OBAA Paul Thomas Anderson theology, blah blah.

I realize, of course, that the ICE terror in Minnesota has triple-cinched an OBAA Best Picture win along with PTA nabbing the Best Director trophy. No arguing this. But the international cool cats are almost certainly more into Marty.

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Each Dawn I Die

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Each and every HE day begins with pre-dawn doomscrolling, and it mostly feels like a losing battle…a kind of slow suffocation of the spirit, and it’s all the fault of…okay, it’s mostly my fault for reading this crap, but AI–generated copy is truly the malicious element here.

I despise AI prose with every fibre of my being. It’s inhuman, it’s sickening, and it makes me want to throw up. The same bland but odious voice in every social-media article. It’s truly a poisonous scourge.

Wikipedia prose can also be a bit rote and deflating at times, but it’s far more precise and pared down (i.e., referenced and relatable) than AI slop. It mostly, imperfectly deals in straight facts and historical rat-a-tat-tat.

The only semi-positive bounce is that numbing AI prose inspires me to write in a way that sounds like something else — a recognizable human, let’s say…anxious, fallible, quirky, impulsive, disorderly, occasionally sentimental or irreverent, emotional, searching, imbued, somewhat erratic, peculiar, driven. So there’s that at least.

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