I’m not saying this is 100% true but much of the time I allow myself to believe that award-season blogaroos are the guiding, ever-watchful shepherds (the first-responder brigade at the festivals, and then the word-of-mouth spreaders as this or that film catches on) and the guild and Academy members are the flock. Because it’s statistically undeniable that if the blogaroos — specifically the members of Gold Derby and Gurus of Gold — show respect for a film or a directing job or a performance in the early stages by ranking it among the top five, six or seven contenders, eight times out of ten (notice I didn’t say nine times out of ten) the guilds and Academy members will nominate those films for their top trophies.

The bottom line is that the blogaroos and the Oscar-season strategists (Taback, Swartz, Bush, et, al.) more or less run the prestige stakes in this town (or at least that portion of Hollywood that aspires to quality filmmaking and the winning of award-season honors) like the Earp brothers ran Tombstone.

I’m mentioning this because Hell or High Water‘s David Mackenzie wasn’t named as one of the five nominees for this year’s DGA feature film award, and yet Lion‘s Garth Davis was. I met Davis the other night at a gathering on Sunset and he’s a very nice guy, but Lion is at best 55% or 60% of a good film. 55% covers the mostly dialogue-free beginning with the little lost kid plus Dev Patel reuniting with his mom at the finale, and 45% covers the dead middle section (i.e., the Australian family stuff with Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara).

Hell or High Water, on the other hand, is a flat-out American masterpiece — a dead-bang triumph that gets better and more searing every time you see it, and if you ask me it’s a scandal — a scandal! — that Davis was nominated instead of MacKenzie.

God save her soul but Kellyanne Conway is a pro — a pro doing her job for a kind of monster — i.e., “Il Brutto.” But she really isn’t addressing the specifics here, hence Anderson Cooper‘s quizzical expression. In a ’90s interview Jack Nicholson said something along the lines of “women don’t fight fair,” and don’t I know it. Like the headline says, I’ve been in disputes like this. With girlfriends and my ex-wife, I mean. Nine times out of ten they’ve argued the same way — partially defaulting to basic truths as acknowledged by common observation, partially referencing specifics (i.e., things said or done) but primarily and fundamentally determined to dismiss and disparage by whatever means — you bad, you hurt me, you wrong, you pay.

I suspect that in Kellyanne’s eyes, the fundamental sin that Anderson’s team (i.e., CNN) has committed is reporting a news story that includes (if you follow the links) a tangent about urine. CNN didn’t post the dossier (that was Buzzfeed) but Kellyanne, no doubt reflecting the feelings of her boss and his top goons, doesn’t want to know from specifics. All she knows (i.e., believes) is that CNN was part of the press gang that directly, indirectly or obliquely pushed the golden showers thing into the blogosphere. Deep down at the base of her lizard brain, that’s what this conversation is basically about. All CNN did was report in a prudent and reasonable fashion the facts and what was indicated by same, but Conway has bought into another narrative.

All of a sudden and out of the blue, I found myself today respecting and agreeing with Senator Marco Rubio. I can’t believe it, but there it is. He manned up, stood tall, told it straight, no quarter.

From David E. Sanger and Matt Flegenheimer‘s N.Y. Times story about Rubio’s interrogation of former Exxon CEO and would-be Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: “One especially skeptical Republican was Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, whose vote on the Foreign Relations Committee might well decide the fate of Mr. Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon.

“In one contentious exchange with Mr. Rubio, who ran against President-elect Donald J. Trump last year for the Republican nomination, Mr. Tillerson rebuffed an effort to get him to describe Mr. Putin as a war criminal for ordering the bombing of civilians in Chechnya. ‘I would not use that term,’ he said.

I’ve rsvped to an IMAX Playa Vista screening of La La Land tomorrow evening at 6 pm. Apparently Damien Chazelle‘s award-winning musical has been up-rezzed with a propriety IMAX technology called DMR, and not solely for this event but a forthcoming domestic release (100 IMAX bookings nationwide) plus a China release.

China Film Insider‘s Fergus Ryan reported yesterday that although a specific date has yet to be determined, the Lionsgate film “has been approved for distribution in China and will screen in the China Giant Screen format and possibly IMAX 2D.”

Tomorrow’s IMAX presentation will present the film in the same 2.55:1 aspect ratio that everyone else is seeing in regular theatres. Which means, of course, that while La La Land will look bigger it won’t really look IMAX-y in a super-tall sense, which is what the whole IMAX hoo-hah is more or less about.

The laser version is a 4K DCP and has a custom IMAX Immersive 12.0 channel mix. The theatre with our laser projector in Playa Vista (Theatre 4, David Keighley Theatre) is equipped dual 4K laser projectors, with a 60-foot screen capable of traditional IMAX 1.43:1 content and with an IMAX Immersive 12.0 speaker system.

BBC’s Paul Wood in a BBC broadcast (1.11.17): “The details of what are alleged to have taken place in a Moscow hotel room with a group of prostitutes would certainly damage even someone with Mr. Trump’s sexual history. The claims are in a report commissioned by am opposition research company funded by a Democratic Party donor, but it was actually written by a former MI6 officer. He spoke to members of the Russian security service, the FSB, and they told him there was a blackmail tape.

“Needless to say no one has seen it, but the former MI6 agent is not the only source for the claims about Russian kompromat, or compromising material, on the President elect.

“Back in August a retired spy told me he’d been informed of its existence by the head of an East European intelligence agency. Later I used an intermediary to pass some questions to active duty CIA officers dealing with the case file. They would’t speak to me directly. I got a message back that there was more than one tape, audio and video, on more than one date and [in] more than one place — in the Ritz Carlton in Moscow and also in St. Petersburg.

“The compramat claims were credible, the CIA believed. That’s why they ended up on President Obama‘s desk last week, and [were sent also to] Congressional leaders and to Mr. Trump himself.”

Woods’ report begins around the 5:00 mark.

Poor Silence, Martin Scorsese‘s spiritual epic that has received no award-season action since opening last month, has finally been nominated by a Hollywood-based org. The American Society of Cinematographers has nominated Rodrigo Prieto‘s cinematography on Silence for its top honor at the 31st annual ASC Awards, which will happen on 2.4.17.

The ASC has also nominated Lion (dp Greig Fraser), Moonlight (dp James Laxton), La La Land (dp Linus Sandgren) and Arrival (dp Bradford Young).

Prieto has been ASC-nominated twice before, for Frida (’02) and Brokeback Mountain (’05). If he wins, great. His Silence capturings are magnificent. But I’m not expecting that. Sandgren or Laxton, I’m thinking, will take the prize.

In the view of Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich, Emiliano Rocha Minter’s We Are The Flesh (Arrow, 1.13 in LA, 1.209 in NY) is some kind of ultra-grotesque ode to cruelty and perversion in the vein of Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom. He describes Amat Escalante‘s Heli, which I described three and a half years ago as a fairly gruesome experience (“a starkly drawn, no-frills, deeply ugly Mexican art film about the ravaging of Mexican society by drug traffickers and how poor people always take it in the neck”), as a relatively palatable thing compared to We Are The Flesh. Minter, says Ehrlich, “takes the defining tropes of his country’s contemporary filmmaking, liberates them from the burden of narrative logic, and stretches them across the screen like Hannibal Lecter hanging a victim by the flaps of his skin.” No thanks.

“CNN’s decision to publish carefully sourced reporting about the operations of our government is vastly different than BuzzFeed’s decision to publish unsubstantiated memos. The Trump team knows this. They are using BuzzFeed’s decision to deflect from CNN’s reporting, which has been matched by the other major news organizations. We are fully confident in our reporting. It represents the core of what the First Amendment protects, informing the people of the inner workings of their government; in this case, briefing materials prepared for President Obama and President-elect Trump last week. We made it clear that we were not publishing any of the details of the 35-page document because we have not corroborated the report’s allegations. Given that members of the Trump transition team have so vocally criticized our reporting, we encourage them to identify, specifically, what they believe to be inaccurate.” — CNN statement about yesterday’s reporting about an unsubstantiated dossier that included salacious allegations about Trump’s behavior in Russia during a visit in 2013 (i.e., “Goldwater Republican”).

Speaking as a longtime admirer of refined, upscale horror cinema (Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Witch, The Invitation), the idea of four women having directed an omnibus horror film sounds and looks intriguing. Because the instincts of females in this realm, I believe, are likely to be less coarse and exploitive than your garden-variety horror directed by guys. The helmers and their shorts are Karyn Kusama (“The Invitation”), Annie Clark (“The Birthday Party”), Roxanne Benjamin (“Southbound”) and Jovanka Vuckovic (“The Captured Bird”). Sofia Carillo is also listed as a kind of animator, coordinator or showrunner of some kind. XX will open in select theaters and on VOD on 2.17.

Donald Trump news conference comment on last night’s unsubstantiated Moscow golden showers report: “It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen. It was gotten by opponents of ours. It was a group of opponents who got together…sick people, and they put that crap together. I’m also very much a germaphobe by the way.”

1.10, 6:34 pm: I really wish that the unverified secret dossier that was passed along last week to President Obama and President-Elect Trump by American intelligence agencies and which contained “compromising and salacious personal information about Mr. Trump,” according to a N.Y. Times story, could be satisfactorily vetted. But apparently that’s not in the cards. I’m very, very sorry about that.

It nonetheless feels awfully good to be one of thousands (tens of thousands?) of outlets currently passing along the portion of the dossier that says that during a trip to Moscow Trump ordered sex workers to perform a “golden showers” show in his presence — i.e., a term that means being pissed on or watching girls piss directly in front of you. The scenario in question appears to allude to the latter but you never know.

Excerpt: “Trump‘s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. Obama (who he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him,” the report read. “The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.”

If it weren’t for the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, Hollywood Elsewhere would be flying east on the day of Orange Orangutan’s inauguration to take part in the Women’s March on Washington (Saturday, 1.21). The fallback is a Sundance Women’s March that Chelsea Handler is beating the drum for. The Facebook page makes it clear that dudes are totally welcome so I’ll be there with bells on. Marchers will congregate behind the Wasatch Brew Pub (220 Main St. Park City) at 9 am and march down Main. A couple of thousand people may show up — possibly more. The event is expected to end by 11 am.

Suggestion to organizers: If the march is confined just to downtown Park City, it’ll be over within 15 or 20 minutes. That’s all it takes to walk from the top of Main to the bottom. It would be cooler and more of a “thing” if the march hangs a left on 9th Street and just keeps going down Park Avenue, past the Park City Library and all the way to the Doubletree (formerly the Yarrow) parking lot. Question: What’s the anti-Trump chant or slogan? Another suggestion: Find some drummers, make some banners and placards. Aural/visual impact counts.