I’d love to re-watch mother! within the scheme of this clip — a fast-moving camera following Darren Aronfosky‘s crew as they shoot the action like there’s no tomorrow and no second chance. This way you’re freed from the claustrophobic feeling of being stuck in that big house and inside the heads of Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence, but without sacrificing the story or the intensity. You’d think that being a huge Aronofsky fan and something of a hotshot columnist I’d rate a free Bluray — nope. I just bought a streaming copy.

Various outlets are reporting that ace political reporter Ryan Lizza has lost his New Yorker job over allegations of sexual misconduct. A New Yorker statement says management recently learned that Lizza “engaged in what we believe was improper sexual conduct…we have reviewed the matter and, as a result, have severed ties…due to a request for privacy, we are not commenting further.”

Lizza has disputed the magazine’s description of his firing: “I am dismayed that The New Yorker has decided to characterize a respectful relationship with a woman I dated as somehow inappropriate. The New Yorker was unable to cite a company policy that was violated.

“I am sorry to my friends, workplace colleagues and loved ones for any embarrassment this episode may have caused. I love The New Yorker, my home for the last decade, and I have the highest regard for the people who work there. But this decision, which was made hastily and without a full investigation of the relevant facts, was a terrible mistake.”

The slow-to-arrive second season of HBO and Sharon Horgan‘s Divorce begins on 1.14.18. I watched and mostly enjoyed this good-but-glum dark comedy series a year ago. The formerly married Frances (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Robert (Thomas Hayden Church) negotiating the murky waters of singlehood after finalizing their divorce. Costarring Molly Shannon, Tracy Letts, Talia Balsam.

“But He Still Keeps On Trying,” posted on 12.12.16: Last night I watched the last three episodes of HBO’s Divorce, which I’ve liked enough to stay with but not enough to write about.

“But here I am writing about the music played over the closing credits of episode #10 — the Little River Band‘s “Lonesome Loser.” This was never more than a second-tier song (the lyrics are kind of awful in a self-pitying way) but it got me nonetheless. Because the chorus has a nice hooky harmony thing, and because it’s been 30-plus years since I’ve had a listen. All to say there are some songs out there that you know aren’t very good but you listen to them anyway, especially when you’re driving. I have a place in my head for songs like this, and I’m sorry.”

The world is dead, gone, rotten, ruined. Nothing to do but retreat into VR realms which are much more robust, dimensional and rich with possibility. Better to live in a gleaming digital universe, full of boundless adventure and blah-dee-blah, than to face the dystopian nothingness.

This is how your typical gamer lives today, of course. Reality is for sleeping, working, inhaling junk food, exploring states of sedentary squatfuckitude and avoiding news sites, organic-world relationships and most of all exercise. Because the real “living” is done within.

Steven Spielberg‘s adaptation of Ernest Cline‘s 2011 best-selling sci-fi novel is a fantasy about dying qnd retreating — a futuristic tale about Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a dystopian-era gamer who spends most of his time in the Oasis, which is where he “joins a hunt for valuable easter egg left by the game’s now-deceased creator” — Mark Rylance — “who intends to give away his entire fortune (including the rights to the Oasis) to the first person who can find the hidden object,” blah blah.

Ready Player One opens on 3.30.18. Put a bullet in my head.

Friend: “You didn’t get this invite? They showed it to HFPA around Thanksgiving but for some reason didn’t screen it for general press until yesterday. Great holiday musical . Fantastic Pasek and Paul score. Great Bob Fosse-like opening number. Great choreography too. What Globes comedy or musical category is made for.”

Me: “Nope — they didn’t invite me. Blank, silencio. And I don’t have a problem with musicals per se, and they invited me to the 11.28 ‘listening party’ at the Four Seasons. Which I covered right away.”

This morning’s Golden Globe nominations were mostly about Fox Searchlight and 20th Century Fox. While Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water took seven noms and Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri received six, Big Fox’s The Post and The Greatest Showman tallied 12.

Yeah, I know — The Greatest Showman? Michael Gracey and Hugh Jackman‘s musical about P.T. Barnum hasn’t screened for non-Golden Globe members like myself, and is generally presumed sight unseen to be something of an odd duck — a big-screen musical for musical fans but perhaps not for discriminating types. Who knows?

In my realm there’s only been that March ’17 Cinemacon presentation plus a recent “listening party” at the Four Seasons. The film pops on 12.20 or nine days hence, and I’ve yet to receive a screening invitation. Update: Fox screened it twice yesterday at the AMC Century City, but they didn’t think to invite me. Thanks!

Theatrically speaking and for the most part, the 2017-18 Golden Globe Award nominations delivered the expected.

The five Best Picture, Drama nominees — Call Me by Your Name, Dunkirk, The Post, The Shape of Water, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — fell right into place, and four out of the five nominees for Best Picture, Comedy or Musical — The Disaster Artist, Get Out, I, Tonya, Lady Bird — made basic sense.

Lady Bird‘s Greta Gerwig and Call Me By Your Name‘s Luca Guadagnino got shafted in the Best Director category. While Guadagnino and Gerwig arguably deserved more Best Director recognition this year than their competitors as their films were the most buoyant and self-owned and fully felt, the HFPA snubbed them. Brilliant!

Get Out‘s Jordan Peele didn’t make it either, but I’m okay with that.

The five Golden Globe nominees for Best Director are Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk), Steven Spielberg (The Post) and…wait, Ridley Scott for All The Money in the World?

Scott’s period kidnapping drama won’t begin screening for regular press until this Friday, but the HFPA was shown a close-to-finalized version last Monday (12.4). It seems as if the HFPA wanted to do Sony Pictures a solid for this special access, and to tribute Scott for his ultra-fast work in recently re-shooting Kevin Spacey‘s scenes as J. Paul Getty with Christopher Plummer.

Plummer, by the way, nabbed a Best Supporting Actor nom for this last-minute performance. The other four nominees are Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project), Armie Hammer (Call Me by Your Name), Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water) and Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri).

The race is between Dafoe and Rockwell, with Dafoe favored.

For some perspective on the wisdom of the HFPA, consider that the unquestionably brilliant Call My By Your Name nabbed three nominations, and that this was the same tally for the unseen and probably negligible The Greatest Showman. All the Money in the World, another unseen which may turn out to be quite good, also managed three noms.

Roy Moore: “The hand of God…providence…put Trump into the White House.” [Few seconds later] “You could say that America is the focus of evil in the world.’ Guardian: “For example?” Moore: “Same-sex marriage.” Guardian: “That’s what Putin would say.” Moore: “Maybe Putin is right.”

Make no mistake about Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread being a very good film. But not by the measuring stick of Joe and Jane Popcorn. It’s a high falutin’ critics’ film, and the other day a critic friend mentioned that Phantom Thread is “the kind of film that makes people hate the critics whose reviews convince them to see it.”

By that standard the Boston Society of Film Critics is about to earn a fair amount of enmity for naming Phantom Thread as 2017’s Best Picture.

Even by an elite-quill-pen perspective giving the year’s top prize to Phantom Thread strikes me as very peculiar. It assembles its own meticulous realm with deft and intelligent brush strokes and delivers superb performances, for sure, but it’s no one’s idea of a satisfying film that really pays off. To call it a better film (more moving or satisfying, more cannily reflective of real-life) than Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name or Dunkirk is just perverse. What is the BSFC trying to do, get attention for themselves? Demonstrate that no one can be weirder or more anal?

Other BSFC winners:

Best Actor: Daniel Kaluuya for Get Out. Wells reaction: Seriously? A good-looking guy who gave an okay performance in a clever social-metaphor horror flick. Nobody at Gold Derby has listed Kaluuya as a Best Actor contender. Nobody at all. Gary Oldman, Timothee Chalamet, Daniel Day-Lewis, James Franco and Tom Hanks — get with the program, Beantowners!

Best Actress: Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water. Wells reaction: Not Saoirse Ronan…seriously? Okay, your call.

Best Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project. Wells reaction: Fine.

Best Supporting Actress: Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird. Wells reaction: Fine.

Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread. Wells reaction: Again, a very perverse call.

Best Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird. Wells reaction: Agreed.

Best Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema for Dunkirk. Wells reaction: Good call.

Best Foreign Language Film: Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, which won everything at the European Film Awards the other night.

Who would want to bang out predictions for a bunch of Golden Globe nominations? The winners are of some interest, but the nominees? We all know the films and performances that will probably make the cut, and if this or that favored contender doesn’t make it then the Golden Globe nominators will have caused a stir and maybe a few gasps.

The 75th annual Golden Globe Awards are slated for 1.7.18, or a week and a half before everyone leaves for Park City (and thank God for that spiritual vacation from the hammer blows of the Oscar game). Oscar nominations will close voting on Friday, 1.13.17. Oscar noms will be announced on Wednesday, 1.24, or during the final third of Sundance ’18.

The 2018 Golden Globes nominations will be announced tomorrow morning at (choke) 5 am Pacific.

Likely noms in Best Picture – Drama category: Call Me by Your Name, The Post, The Shape of Water, Dunkirk, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Florida Project, Darkest Hour. 50/50 prognosis on Mudbound. Question: Given the HFPA’s absurdly loose definition of “comedy or musical”, why isn’t the sometimes darkly humorous Three Billboards expected to compete in that category? I don’t consider Three Billboards to be a comedy, but it’s certainly funnier than I, Tonya, which the HFPA will apparently place in the hah-hah category.

Likely noms in Best Picture – Comedy or Musical category: The Big Sick, I, Tonya, Lady Bird, The Disaster Artist, Get Out. Has anyone seen The Greatest Showman? I could see the HFPA nominating it in order to get Hugh Jackman and company to occupy a table, but given the presumptions about this film it would be highly cynical to nominate it just to nominate it.

I don’t see the point in predicting acting, directing or screenwriting nominations. Okay, Call me By Your Name‘s Luca Guadagnino should be nominated for Best Director. I just don’t feel like expending the energy. I’ll jump into everything tomorrow. At a decent hour.

In an 11.27 post called “2018 Hotties Prioritized,” I listed 40 noteworthy 2018 films that will probably generate excitement and perhaps even award-season followings — The Irishman, Roma, Back Seat, First Man, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Wife, Radegund, Widows, If Beale Street Could Talk, Mary Queen of Scots, On The Basis of Sex, Suspiria, Wendy, Sunset, Chappaquiddick, Soldado, Loro, The Nightingale, etc.

29 decent-sounding titles have since been added — Unsane, The Widow, Ad Astra, E-Book, Kursk, Cold War, Can You Ever Forgive Me — for a total of 69. Please tell me what I’m forgetting.

Yes, I’m also looking forward to Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther, Peyton Reed‘s Ant Man and the Wasp and Ron Howard‘s Solo.

Here’s the whole thing again plus the 29 newbies:

Topliners: 1. Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano); 2. Adam McKay‘s Back Seat (Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell); 3. Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, a space drama about NASA’s Duke of Dullness, Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke); 4. Saoirse Ronan in Mary, Queen of Scots (w/ Margot Robbie, David Tennant, Jack Lowden, Guy Pearce); 5. Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Jenna Fischer, Judy Greer, Bryce Gheisar, Alek Skarlatos, Thomas Lennon, Jaleel White, Tony Hale, P.J. Byrne).

6. Steve McQueen‘s Widows (Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Andre Holland, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell); 7. Terrence Malick‘s Radegund (August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Michael Nyqvist, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jürgen Prochnow, Bruno Ganz; 8. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma (Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Yalitza Aparicio, Daniela Demesa, Enoc Leaño, Daniel Valtierra); 9. Jacques Audiard‘s The Sisters Brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, Rutger Hauer, Riz Ahmed, John C. Reilly); 10. Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk (Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Teyonah Parris, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Brian Tyree Henry, Diego Luna, Dave Franco).

11. Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody (15-year period from the formation of Queen and lead singer Freddie Mercury up to their performance at Live Aid in 1985) w/ Rami Malek, Ben Hardy, Gwilym Lee, Joseph Mazzello, Allen Leech, Lucy Boynton. 20th Century Fox, 12.25.18; 12. Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife (Glenn Close‘s Best Actress campaign + Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Annie Starke. Max Irons); 13. Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On The Basis of Sex; 14. Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (costarring Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, Mark Webber); 15. Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy with Steve Carell and Timothy Chalamet.

16. Xavier Dolan‘s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates); 17. Asghar Farhadi‘s Todos lo saben (Spanish-language drama w/ Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Barbara Lennie, Ricardo Darin, Inma Cuesta, Eduard Fernandez Javier Camara); 18. Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman (John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Corey Hawkins — Focus Features); 19. Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York (Timothee Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Diego Luna, Liev Schreiber); 20. Stefano Sollima‘s Soldado (Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Catherine Keener — Columbia, 6.29.18).

The Last Jedi loving cup runneth over. Which is precisely why the only tweets I half-trust are from Scott Mantz and Kyle Buchanan. Believers are too vested, too eager to celebrate. I only want to read reactions from scoffers, smartasses, doubters, dissenters, dickheads, grizzled veterans, cynics, skeptics, people who carry wounds, all-seeing mystics, non-believers, agnostics, atheists, frowners. If only Paul Schrader had attended! HE’s big Jedi moment happens on Monday evening. Until then…