When Michael Keaton‘s Ray Kroc tells Nick Offerman‘s Rick McDonald that he’s no longer interested in maintaining a cordial partnership (“I’m through taking marching orders from you and your endless parade of no’s, constantly cowering in the face of progress”), a little man inside me went “yes!” The Founder is easily one of the most fascinating ethical dramas of this or any other season, and a brilliant character study of a guy who’s far from “good” but whose motives and actions are understandable and hard to wholly condemn. Here’s the mp3.

The hastening of ecological ruination is no longer a threat — it’s now a plan, a coming policy, a nightmare waiting to happen. Donald Trump‘s decision to nominate Scott Pruitt, a climate-change-denying animal, to head the Environmental Protection Agency, all but ensures this.

The construction of this 12.7 N.Y. Times story about Pruitt’s selection, written by Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton, is immaculate and horrifying. It doesn’t contain a single wasted word, and is basically a kind of projection of a death sentence. And it’s not a dream.

Remember that third-act scene in David Cronenberg‘s The Dead Zone when Christopher Walken realizes what Martin Sheen will eventually do as President, and what…I shouldn’t complete this sentence.

Chapter and verse: “President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the E.P.A. itself.

“Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to ‘cancel’ the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a ‘war on coal.’

Earlier today Variety‘s 12.7 Tim Gray posted a piece called “After a Tough 2016, Is Oscar Ready for an Upbeat Winner?” The gist is that things are so dark and gloomy now that Academy and guild members will be more inclined to vote for smart mood elevators like Hidden Figures, La La Land, Lion and Sully than more solemn, sad-hearted films like Fences and Manchester By The Sea. (Gray tries to spread the blame around but we all know that the primary reason for blue-state despair and depression is the imminent authoritarian robber-baron regime of Donald J. Trump.) When I hear people say that they want to see something happy because current events are so dark, I want to throw up. This is what the lightweights were saying in the early to mid ’70s in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Nixon resignation — “Ohh, we feel so gloomy! The movies need to save us by making us laugh and cheer again!” One of the most deplorable ad slogans in this vein (and actually one of the most repellent slogans of all time) was the one for That’s Entertainment!, to wit: “Boy, do we need it now!”

Incidentally: La La Land is not an upbeat thing, per se — it’s a musical love story, yes, but it’s mostly about struggle, rejection, creative frustration, feelings of futility, etc. It has some gloriously happy moments and one of the greatest endings of any musical ever, but it’s mainly about things being damn hard for striving artists and about how love doesn’t necessarily work out, even between a guy and a girl who are seemingly made for each other. 

And Fences isn’t much of an upper either. It’s basically about a family living in a kind of prison, and about the terms of that sentence along with certain protests and negotiations.

Dear Mashable editors & management (founder & CEO Pete Cashmore, chief content officer Gregory Gittrich, executive editor Jessica Coen),

I’m Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere, and I’m doing a story about last week’s Jeff Sneider #OscarsSoWhiteIsCancelled situation, which resulted in Sneider’s termination last Thursday morning.

My understanding, to cut to the chase, is that you disciplined the wrong guy.  The idea of OscarsSoWhite being “cancelled”, as represented by the headline and the rewritten lede, was the work of Sneider’s editor Josh Dickey. Dickey decided to emphasize the “cancelled” thing when he edited Sneider’s initial copy, which hadn’t raised the OscarsSoWhite angle until the third or fourth paragraph.

I also understand that Sneider was whacked last Thursday morning without so much as a discussion or a review of the situation.  New York-based management was pissed and scared and wanted the problem ended. Dickey wanted to discuss the decision to run an inflammatory headline (which he immediately recognized as a mistake), but he wasn’t allowed to get into it. Repeating — the inflammatory headline and lede were totally Dickey’s idea, and yet you threw Sneider under the bus, more or less because Jeff was relatively new to the team (he was hired last August) and because Josh has three kids at home.

I gather that the decision to fire Sneider was primarily over his tweets in response to the “OscarsSoWhite is cancelled” story, which went up last Wednesday afternoon.  But again, this was on Dickey. With the Twitter dogs fuming last Wednesday evening, Sneider asked Dickey to review his tweets with an offer to delete any which seemed too tart or adversarial, and he was told they hadn’t crossed the line and were not a problem as far as Dickey could see. (Dickey soon after copped to the mistake on Twitter and Facebook.)

Sneider had merely disputed the judgment of Twitter hounds who were after his head because of Dickey’s edit. He didn’t use hostile or perjorative terms in his tweets, and yet he was firm and non-apologetic.  It was apparently decided that Sneider should have been apologetic in a groveling sort of way. Mashable’s New York management wanted the issue to be immediately erased, and arguing would only prolong it.

All Sneider essentially said in that story, even with Dickey’s clickbait re-edit, was the exact same thing that Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson wrote on 9.26 with a story that was headlined “RIP #OscarsSoWhite:  Why 2017 Will Be The Most Diverse Awards Season In Decades.”  The same observation published several weeks earlier with “RIP” used instead of “cancelled.”

On Friday, 12.2, or the day after Sneider was canned, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond wrote a story called “Is OscarsSoWhite Sooo Last Year?”  It quoted AAFCA president Gil Robertson saying that “the coming award nominations are going to definitely put a pause on #OscarsSoWhite this year, but we wonder for how long.” Again — same conclusion, slightly different terminology

What is the precise difference between the use of “RIP” (i.e., dead) and “cancelled”?  They seem to mean pretty much the same thing to me, but Thompson’s 9.26 piece didn’t elicit so much as a peep from the Twitter dogs while Sneider’s (or more accurately Dickey’s) headline and lede resulted in a tough, attuned and highly respected industry reporter (who has, yes, a rep of being hot-headed) getting whacked like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.

Mashable’s social transgression, in short, was using the term “cancelled” instead of “on pause.”  Had Dickey decided on the latter instead of the former, Sneider would be working for Mashable right now and all would be hunky-dory.  But you guys couldn’t stand the heat and so you acted hysterically and deep-sixed a good reporter because of something his editor did.

You guys got scared. You were concerned about being painted with a bad brush. Twitter, you had decided, was on the verge of deciding that the word Mashable was synonymous with the embracing of smug, dismissive attitudes about institutional racism, and so you quickly killed the guy who was perceived to be at the root of this image problem.

You could’ve manned up, looked into the particulars, apologized but at the same time protected the reporter. But you went the scared-rabbit route and cut Sneider loose.

Publishers with a semblance of backbone know that while you have to be flexible and open to acknowledging mistakes and if necessary apologizing for them, you never kowtow to Twitter dogs.  Twitter is a hotbed of daily, shoot-from-the-hip outrage and hysteria.  It’s a demon pit.  Look at that idiotic, very recent Last Tango in Paris thing by angry, misinformed, hair-trigger actresses (i.e., Jessica Chastain) and various five-alarm types. 

By the same token Owen Gleiberman should have been whacked over that Rene Zellweger riff about how she and more particularly Bridget Jones looked different due to facial surgery, but Variety just dug in, stood by their man and rode it out.

And guess what?  OscarsSoWhite has been more or less cancelled, at least for the time being and certainly in a moving-train symbolic sense, as this year’s nominees are clearly more ethnic (i.e., blacker, browner, more Asian) and varied in terms of the finalists than the year before.

This plus the institutional changes brought about by the Academy last January in terms of diminishing the influence of at least a portion of the old-fart contingent translates into serious, noticeable change compared to the attitudes that triggered OscarsSoWhite in the first place.

Am I missing something?  If what I’ve described is more or less what happened then this is really and truly an act of editorial cowardice on your part, and beyond disgusting.  But maybe I’m missing something. If I am, please fill me in.

Jeffrey Wells, HE

Hillary Clinton‘s popular vote tally is now at 65,525,364 vs. 62,850,329 for Donald Trump — a lead of 2,675,000 votes or two full percentage points. Hillary won 48.2% of the popular vote while Trump got 46.2%. If the situations were reversed and Trump had lost the 11.8 election despite being 2 percentage points or 2,675,000 votes ahead of Clinton, he’d be calling for a march on Washington, a rightwing revolution, a people’s revolt, NRA gunfire in the streets, etc. The Democrats are like “well, the people and more particularly the hinterland Bumblefucks have spoken so that’s the system.” But right now Hillary’s popular vote tally is only 390,431 votes behind President Obama’s winning tally of 65,915,795 in 2012, and that’s with her trust and dislikability issues. Trump “won”, yes, but he has a minus mandate.

Having won three Best Supporting Actor awards (New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association) over the last week or so, Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali clearly has the heat. Manchester By The Sea‘s Lucas Hedges and Hidden Figures‘ Kevin Costner are vying for the runner-up slot, but the real comer is Silence‘s Issey Ogata — the twitchy interrogator who all but steals Martin Scorsese‘s film from Andrew Garfield. (I’ve got Ogata in fifth place because he’s only just become a contender within the last couple of days — his candidacy needs time to build steam.) Hell or High Water‘s Jeff Bridges and Nocturnal Animals‘ Michael Shannon are also respectably contending.

John Lee Hancock‘s The Founder (a.k.a. “It Takes A Bit Of A Hard-Driving Shit To Build An Empire”) has suddenly decided to open tomorrow (Wednesday, 12.7) for a week in order to qualify for awards. But only, I gather, in New York and Los Angeles. Definitely worth seeing. My first assessment (basically an ethical riff) popped on 11.14; my second (“Ballsy Founder Treads Ethical Line With Skill Of A Mountain Goat“) appeared on 12.2.

Excerpt #1: “The Founder is basically the story of how the legendary Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) persuaded the earnest, slightly doltish, small-time-thinking McDonald brothers (Dick and Mick, respectively played by Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) to let him franchise their small fast-food business and turn it into a super-sized empire. But more generally it’s a nuts-and-bolts story about what a scramble it is to grow a business and then stay afloat with all the serpents snapping at your heels.”

As much as I consider Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich to be one of the most irritating, obnoxiously self-regarding and fundamentally untrustworthy critics around, I have to give him credit for this year-end summary of 2016 films + his own favorite 25. It feels more thoughtful and is much better constructed than any number of run-of-the-mill flash-cut year-end wankathons that surface every December on YouTube and Vimeo. This is the first time I’ve considered the idea that there might be a emotional, flesh-and-blood person behind Ehrlich’s fickle, ivory-tower spewings. Which reminds me: I’ll have to soon rethink and re-order my top 26 films of 2016 list, now that I’ve seen Silence but without having seen Passengers, Collateral Beauty and the almost certainly dismissable Rogue One, which I won’t see until Monday.

THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2016: A VIDEO COUNTDOWN from David Ehrlich on Vimeo.

I’ve been wondering if I should remove The Founder‘s Michael Keaton, whose performance I admire but who hasn’t been gaining any Gold Derby or Gurus of Gold traction, and replace him with Paterson‘s Adam Driver, whose bus-driver poet is noteworthy in a quiet, meditative way. All I needed was a little push, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the critics org that loves to eat as much as vote, gave me one when they handed Driver their 2016 Best Actor trophy. Everybody has Manchester By The Sea‘s Casey Affleck and Fences‘ Denzel Washington in the top two slots. Tom Hanks and Ryan Gosling are in there just to round things out.

If my thought dreams could be seen, they wouldn’t put my head in a guillotine. They would go “oh…glad you think so…fine!” But not until the embargo lifts.

Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America, the ESPN doc that award-givers have celebrating as if it’s a regular theatrical feature, is almost certainly going to win the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary. I think that needs to be understood and accepted. The Academy’s doc shortlist of 15 was announced today:

Cameraperson, Big Mouth Productions
Command and Control, American Experience Films/PBS
The Eagle Huntress, Stacey Reiss Productions, Kissiki Films and 19340 Productions
Fire at Sea, Stemal Entertainment
Gleason, Dear Rivers Productions, Exhibit A and IMG Films
Hooligan Sparrow, Little Horse Crossing the River
I Am Not Your Negro, Velvet Film
The Ivory Game, Terra Mater Film Studios and Vulcan Productions
Life, Animated, Motto Pictures and A&E IndieFilms
O.J.: Made in America, Laylow Films and ESPN Films
13th, Forward Movement
Tower, Go-Valley
Weiner, Edgeline Films
The Witness, The Witnesses Film
Zero Days, Jigsaw Productions