For years former Chicago Tribune entertainment reporter Mark Caro posted a more-than-a-little-difficult Oscar quiz during Oscar week. Then he took a buyout. Now the quiz has landed at the New York Times. Who is honest enough to take Caro’s quiz without the aid of online research? Not I. Okay, I answered two questions without checking– I got only one right.

Q: In the wake of Sylvester Stallone‘s second acting nomination for playing Rocky Balboa, who of the following has not received two Oscar nominations for playing the same character in different movies? A: Despite the facts I couldn’t force myself to acknowledge that Cate Blanchett was Best Actress nominated for playing Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth (’98) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (’07). Because the latter film is atrocious — I wanted to jump off a building after seeing it. And yet people said, “Cate was so good in it!” How could they do that?

Among Gold Derby’s 27 Oscar-predicting “experts” (of which I am one), 18 are choosing The Revenant, 4 are sticking with Spotlight and 5 are picking The Big Short. Among the 13 Gurus of Gold, The Revenant has been favorited by 9, Spotlight by 2 and The Big Short by 2. A 2.24 USA Today poll of 1000 ticket buyers reports that The Revenant is preferred by 33%, The Big Short by 6% and Spotlight by 2%. And you know what? None of this matters in the end. What matters is what those less-than-consistently-insightful Academy members interviewed by Scott Feinberg think. Along with their friends, I mean.

Almost every public activity is about confirming or asserting status, even if you raise pigs on a ranch in Bumblefuck, Montana. This being Los Angeles and Oscar week in particular, status is an unfortunate agenda amongst even X-factor types like myself. Parties, I mean. The cool part is being invited to this or that party and then getting through security, etc.. The draggy part is hanging out and talking to the same people you’ve seen at 37 previous parties about the same blah-dee-blah-blah-blah.

That aside, I would have liked to attend last night’s Spotlight dinner at the Chateau Marmont, but the invite list was owned by Vanity Fair and Barney’s New York so my friends at Open Road couldn’t help, or so they said.

I’ll be attending tonight’s J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot Oscar Wilde party, which is mainly about celebrating Irish talent and the usual hub-bub-bee-dop-a-lop-ah-loopah. Daisy Ridley will be there, but I’ve been told in so many words to steer clear of the Cary Grant issue.

I’d like to also drop by tonight’s A24 pre-Oscar party at the Sunset Tower hotel, but (a) I’m not a fan of Room and the A24 guys know that, and (b) I’ve already chatted with Ex Machina‘s Alex Garland and Amy‘s Asif Kapadia.

“If you wanted to get serious about My Big Night, you’d say that it was a 60s-inspired, Fellini-esque record of the night that old-style variety performance, swollen by its own audience-seeking successes, finally blew up. But My Big Night doesn’t want you to get serious. It wants you to sit back and enjoy the ride, and mostly you will, if overblown kitsch, hammerhead subtlety and gags are your thing. What’s frustrating is not the film itself, but [that] director Alex de la Iglesia seems permanently blighted by a boyish restlessness which so far has prevented him from slowing down and taking stock to make the special film he’s capable of.” — from Jonathan Holland‘s 9.19.15 Hollywood Reporter review, filed from tyeh San Sebastian Film Festival.

The basic goal of Scott Feinberg‘s “Brutally Honest Oscar Ballot” series is to infuriate seasoned movie hounds — to goad them into saying “this is a typical Academy member?…where does Feinberg find these idiots?” By this standard today’s voter (from the “member-at-large branch”) doesn’t quite cut it — dim but not epically dumb, sufficiently lazy (he couldn’t manage to see Trumbo and The Hateful Eight) and lazy-brained, and yet he never quite nails it with a truly appalling, forehead-slapping opinion.

Choice quote #1: “I was bored to tears by Brooklyn…this immigrant girl comes [from Ireland to Brooklyn] and everything wonderful happens to her and so what?” This guy wanted Saoirse Ronan to fall for a cute mafia guy, get fired from her job, thrown out of her rooming house, attacked by a mugger, hit by a bus. Plenty of stuff happened to her. No shortage of intrigues and decisions were required. They just didn’t happen to be the usual cliches.

Choice quote #2: “The Martian was entertaining enough and I loved Matt Damon, but it was basically Cast Away on Mars, and you knew where it was heading from the very start.” This is actually dead-on. There’s nothing wrong with The Martian being a smart, formulaic popcorn movie, but there was something very, very wrong with certain blogarooonies saying “it’s so well done, so satisfying, so lovable…nominate this Jerry Bruckheimer film for Best Picture!”

Criterion’s Bluray of Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate popped yesterday. I’ve seen it a thousand times and I already own the MGM Bluray that came out in 2011, but I bought the damn Criterion anyway because of the Howard Suber commentary track, which is one of the best I’ve ever heard on any Bluray or DVD of any film. Seriously — it’s really worth watching this film with Suber on the couch, chatting away. Just do it and you’ll thank me.

Taken today at northwest corner of Sunset and Cahuenga, just after buying the Criterion Graduate Bluray at Amoeba across the street.

“Yes, Suber’s commentary is an academic analysis, a bit dry and professorial, a formal instruction,” I wrote two or three years ago, “but it’s very wise and knowledgable, and ripe with all kinds of allusions, insights, asides and connections. Suber gently explains how there’s a lot more to this 1967 classic than just story, dialogue and performances. It’s really quite the integrated audio-visual tour de force.”

From Frank Rich’s essay in the Criterion liner notes: “The major studios all turned down The Graduate. The film was financed instead by an independent producer, Joseph Levine, who grew impatient as the shooting ran over schedule, into a fourth month. Levine exhibited scant optimism about the movie’s prospects, and some of the most influential critics, including Pauline Kael and John Simon, dismissed it, as later would a writer at the New Yorker, Jacob Brackman, whose screed went on for some twenty pages.

Before I got going in journalism I worked as a tree surgeon, in both Los Angeles and Fairfield County, Connecticut. Ropes, saddles, spikes, pole clippers, pole saws, chain saws, cables, etc. I was in my early-mid 20s and in the best shape of my life. I wasn’t a party animal but I smoked off and on, threw down a fair amount of Heineken or Coors every night and occasionally with chaser shots of Jack Daniels. And I felt great the whole time. My spiritual state was another matter.

In Los Angeles I worked for Bob, the owner of a small tree outfit. He spent most of his time meeting prospective clients and selling the work, and I was a kind of informal foreman of a three-man crew. Bob would calculate the cost of a job by estimating how much time it would take. Sometimes the job would take less time than he figured and sometimes a little more. Either way he knew we’d get the job done within a reasonable time frame.

Not long after I was hired Bob showed us a job that he figured would take a full eight hours and maybe closer to nine. “You’ve got all day,” he told me as we arrived in the early morning. “I’ll be gone until the late afternoon but if you can finish by 5 or 6 pm we’ll be in good shape.”

As soon as he left I told the other two guys, “Let’s finish this sucker as fast as we can — five or six hours — and then we’ll have a couple of hours of lying around time in the late afternoon.” We did that — busted ass, had a short lunch, managed to finish by 3 pm. We were raking up, folding the tarps and putting away the equipment around 3:15 pm when Bob returned. “Whoa…you’ve finished! Good work!” He was so pleased with our professional dispatch that he decided to take us over to another job.

“Whoa, wait…you told us this was it for the day,” I said. “Well, yeah but we can make it an even better day if we finish this other job,” Bob answered with a grin and a comradely poke. “It’ll only take an hour, 90 minutes at most…won’t be that hard.”

“Rebecca Miller’s consistently interesting films have always mixed sharp observation with a resistance to narrative formula that can sometimes feel like quirky mannerism, and that element is present in Maggie’s Plan (Sony Classics, 5.20). After moving toward romantic comedy with The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (’09). Maggie’s Plan inhabits that terrain even more assertively, albeit retaining enough offbeat qualities to avoid genre conventionality. This pleasing triangle embroils Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore in two overlapping relationships involving three children over three-plus years. The general lightness [of tone] lets it get away with content more clever and ingratiating than fully depthed.” — from Dennis Harvey‘s 9.12.15 Variety review, filed during the Toronto Film Festival.

The only weak aspect of Oliver’s rant is that precedents and history have nothing, repeat, nothing to do with the refusal of the Republican loons to consider any forthcoming Supreme Court nominee from President Obama. It also strikes me as wimpish that Obama is reportedly vetting Nevada’s allegedly “centrist” Republican governor Brian Sandoval as a possible nominee, presumably because it would be difficult for Republicans to dismiss him. I thought Obama was in a “fuck it, this is who I am and what I believe” mode. If it were my call I’d nominate a tough, flaming, fuck-you liberal — a Bernie Sanders or William O. Douglas type. Judiciary committee Republicans aren’t going to approve anyone he submits anyway so why try to placate them?

Disney’s decision to open Derek Cianfrance‘s The Light Between Oceans on September 2nd, or on the opening day of the 2016 Telluride Film Festival, speaks volumes. Cianfrance is a gifted and ambitious director, and it may be that Oceans will be seen down the road as a review-driven, adult-must-see — but if Disney had any faith in its award-season potential they would open it after Telluride/Toronto.

On top of which the motivation behind Alicia Vikander‘s Isabel character seems a bit daffy, as I explained in 1 12.21.15 riff.

Pic is an adaptation of M.L. Stedman‘s “The Light Between Oceans,” a 1920s period drama about Tom (Michael Fassbender), a World War I veteran and lighthouse keeper, and his wife Isabel who live on an isolated island off the west coast of Australia.

The inciting incident is the discovery of a dead man and a live baby in a boat that’s washed onto shore. Having suffered through two miscarriages and a stillbirth, Isabel decides that the baby is a “gift from God” (baby Moses found in the Nile reeds) and ignores her husband’s natural impulse to report the discovery. Reality eventually intrudes.

Scott Feinberg‘s Brutally Honest Oscar Ballot series began today in the Hollywood Reporter. I had a vague recollection that last year’s brutal ballots were posted during balloting instead of after — but I was wrong. But they should be posted during balloting as they would reflect prevailing attitudes and potentially influence voting patterns.

Here’s the assessment of the Best Actor race by today’s moron (probably a geezer, apparently a writer, cranky, short attention span, Jewish, couldn’t be bothered to see Mad Max: Fury Road):

“I rule out Leonardo [DiCaprio] immediately because it’s a ridiculous performance. What was that saliva-drool thing he was doing when his son was being killed by Tom Hardy? They are running his campaign based on how hard it was to make the movie, right? I’m tired of hearing about it — that’s what he gets paid for! I mean, this was not Nanook of the North [a 1922 docudrama shot in the Arctic], for Christ’s sake. Give me a break. He’s got tens of millions of dollars and I would assume they had heaters. The fact that he’s never won before? He’s a young man, he still has time. Plus he’s always with some supermodel…no offense but to hell with a guy who’s got everything but also wants to be awarded for being mauled by a bear and freezing in the cold and eating a buffalo liver.