The SAG nominations have taken on a more populist cast (i.e., less sophisticated picks, an element of dumbshit-ism) since the SAG-AFTRA merger of 2012. How else to explain The Girl on The Train‘s Emily Blunt being nominated for Best Actress while 20th Century Women‘s Annette Bening and Elle‘s Isabelle Huppert were blown off?

I don’t agree with Sasha Stone‘s suspicion that La La Land‘s failure to snag an ensemble nom means something as Damien Chazelle‘s film is a total two-hander, and I fully expect La La‘s Emma Stone to win the SAG award for Best Actress. Nonetheless, three Stone observations (posted this morning) are worth pondering:

(1) “Perception is still everything. Unfortunately, La La Land missing in ensemble, for whatever reason, is not a good thing. It just isn’t. Can it overcome? Well, sure. Movies have in the past. But that is a big, big, big, big stat. Which would mean, to my thinking, Best Picture is down to Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea and Fences.” Repeating: I don’t agree about any notions about La La Land being on the ropes, but Sasha may be right about perception being more important than the reality. At the very least last weekend’s Natalie Portman BFCA Best Actress win + this morning’s SAG noms suggest that the Emma Stone campaign has some work to do.

SAG Awards nominations popped this morning while Hollywood Elsewhere was in the supine. Manchester By The Sea leads with four nominations — Best Ensemble, Best Actor (Casey Affleck), Best Supporting Actress (Michelle Williams), Best Supporting Actor (Lucas Hedges). Fences and Moonlight (which is throwing a luncheon today at Craig’s on Melrose) got three nommies each.

The snubbing of 20th Century Women‘s Annette Bening, Elle‘s Isabelle Huppert (SAG xenophobes couldn’t at least offer a nomination for the most awarded actress of 2016 thus far?) and Loving‘s Ruth Negga are obviously matters of concern. Negga’s campaign has been on the soft side all along — due respect but she may be finished as far as a Best Actress Oscar nomination is concerned. Ditto Taraji P. Henson for her too-broad, aimed-at-the-cheap-seats Hidden Figures turn — brilliant people don’t wear deer-in-the-headlights expressions as a rule.

What happened to HE’s hoped-for Best Supporting Actor nomination for Hidden Figures‘ Kevin Costner? As Variety notes, “Voters clearly liked Hidden Figures, awarding nods to Octavia Spencer and the ensemble, but it might just be a case of too many good actors to choose from.”

A respectful salute is offered to Captain Fantastic‘s Viggo Mortensen, but why was a nomination handed to besotted, bleary-looking, stumbling-around Emily Blunt in The Girl On The Train? (Plus the movie stinks.)

No offense but the best performance in Lion wasn’t given by Dev Patel but the little kid, Sunny Pawar.

Intriguing, effective trailer for Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk (Warner Bros., 7.21.17). I’ve no clue if Winston Churchill appears in Nolan’s Dunkirk, but between this and Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour, he’s going to be quite the historical fellow in ’17. (Gary Oldman plays the British statesman in Hour.) Wiki boilerplate: Filming took place in the same location as the real historical evacuation. Pic was shot on a combination of IMAX 65mm and 65mm film stock. Nolan reconditioned actual warships for the shoot, and reportedly spent $5 million on a vintage aircraft so as to attach it with IMAX cameras before crashing it on-screen. Avoiding the use of CGI, cardboard cut-out props of soldiers and military vehicles were employed to create the illusion of a large army.” Recorded: 700 private boats sailed from Ramsgate in England to Dunkirk in France between 5.26.40 and 6.4.40, helping to rescue more than 338,000 British and French trapped soldiers.

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The two scariest threats to the American way of life this century? One, domestic terrorism and two, economic instability brought on by the housing crisis and recession of 2009. Which Americans have been hit hardest? Suburban and rural working-class types, for the most part. Right away that raises the notion of red-state regions, which in turn summons the horror of last month’s Presidential election result.

But middle-class people are traumatized these days, or so Michael Moore has observed. Did they create the above-described social plagues? No — they’ve just been trying to grapple with them first-hand while keeping their heads above water. One thing’s for sure — domestic terrorism (Orlando, San Bernardino, Boston) and stagnant wages have been theirs to have and hold. Or so goes the legend.

Hollywood movies aren’t exactly renowned for settling into working-class environments and listening to their denizens and trying to make some sense of their situations. But this year, two award-season films have done exactly that — David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water on the economic end, and Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg‘s Patriots Day on the terrorist-threat side of the scale. And they’re both from CBS Films.

I’m not going to try and quantify exactly what creative buttons were pushed by CBS Films president Terry Press or what this CBS-owned division, founded nine years ago by Leslie Moonvies, did to specifically enable the Hell or High Water and Patriots Day capturings, but these films are brandishing the CBS label and that, for now, makes CBS Films seem a bit like Warner Bros. of the 1930s, the studio that specialized in rugged social dramas and gangster films.

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming and Pert Bart discuss The Godfather and particularly Francis Coppola‘s soon-to-publish “Godfather Notebook” (Regan Arts, 12.20) which is selling for $50 bills or thereabouts.

Among the new Black List scripts, I’m mainly interested in reading Elyse Hollander‘s Blonde Ambition, which is about Madonna‘s personal struggles in New York City in the early ’80s and the burning hoops she had to jump through in order to record her first album, Madonna, which popped in July ’83 and included “Borderline”, “Burning Up” and “Lucky Star.”  I’d also like to read Dan Gilroy‘s Inner City, his Denzel movie (Michael Clayton meets The Verdict) about a Los Angeles attorney facing an ethical crisis. Can someone send me PDFs of these plus whatever other scripts they think are worth reading? Update: A good fellow has sent me the whole 2016 Black List library — thanks!

“The first Star Wars trilogy had a fresh, insurgent energy, and learning the names of all those planets and galactic adventurers has seemed, to generations of fans, like a new and special kind of fun. Now, though, it is starting to feel like drudgery, a schoolbook exercise in a course of study that has no useful application and that will never end.

“Masquerading as a heroic tale of rebellion, Rogue One‘s true spirit is Empire all the way down. Like the fighters on the planet Scarif, which is surrounded by an all-but-impenetrable atmospheric shield, you are trapped inside this world, subjected to its whims and laws. You can’t escape, because it is the supposed desire to escape that brought you here in the first place.

“Rogue One has no will to persuade the audience of anything other than the continued strength of the brand. It doesn’t so much preach to the choir as propagandize to the captives, telling us that we’re free spirits and partners on the journey. The only force at work here is the force of habit.” — from A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review.

And yet 128 critics have had enough supportive things to say for Rogue One to have an 82% Rotten Tomatoes rating. And yet it’s only managed a 66% rating on Metacritic.

A little more than a half-century ago we had a rich-guy president, well-educated and eloquent on the stump, not without his shortcomings (i.e., girls, a strain of recklessness) but inspirational and focused and responsible as far as that went, plagued with a bad back and Addison’s disease but otherwise slender and attractive. By today’s standards he’d be a moderate Republican. Today we have a rich guy President-elect who’s a defiantly ignorant authoritarian and a sociopath in the tradition of Putin and Berlusconi — the only temperamentally unbalanced chief executive in U.S. history, determined to undermine civilized discourse and sensible government as most of us have known it for decades, and a fat ass on top of everything else — the most grotesquely proportioned U.S. president since William Howard Taft. And you know what? If JFK had been born in 1965 and run as the Democratic candidate instead of Hillary Clinton a sizable percentage of the red-state idiots would’ve voted for him instead of Trump, and we wouldn’t be facing a four-year nightmare. God help us.

Fresh from treatment in a Los Angeles psychiatric hospital, Kanye West spoke this morning with President-Elect Donald Trump, which naturally fueled speculation that West may perform at Trump’s inauguration next month. Trump and West posed for photos in the lobby afterwards. Trump said they talked about “life…we discussed life.” Trump said he and West are “friends, just friends. He’s a good man. Long time. Friends for a long time.” Deranged and delusional, both of them.

Speaking three or four days ago at the Dubai Film festival (and quoted in a 12.10 Wrap piece by Matt Pressberg), Samuel L. Jackson derided Oscar-bait movies as films that people don’t really want to see but have to put up with during award season. Well, they don’t have to put up with them but, to go by Jackson’s interpretation, they’d rather not even consider them as an option.

The blazingly shallow Samuel L. Jackson, snapped last weekend in Dubai.

What a Shallow Hal Jackson is. An empty Coke bottle looking to do paycheck movies for the rest of his life, and polluting the common spiritual pool a bit more with every self-regarding performance. 

If it weren’t for award season Hollywood would be all empty escape, bullshit fantasy, CG-driven slop, comic-book pulp, gross-out comedies, empty diversion — it would die and shrivel from a lack of soul.

Jackson is probably correct when he derides sensitive slogs like Collateral Beauty, at least to go by Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review. Nobody with a lick of sense is looking forward to that Warner Bros. release.

But Jackson is dead wrong and broadcasting from the Planet Uranus when he says that Manchester By The Sea is “not an inclusive film.”