Jeffrey Wells

I’m assembling a little assessment piece about the Best Picture showdown between The Revenant and Spotlight (don’t kid yourself — The Big Short is in third place), and a few minutes ago I asked several industry friends for any input they could offer — qualifications, agreements, arguments. Voting isn’t over, remember, until tomorrow afternoon at 5 pm, and I’m betting that a lot of people are on the fence about this. It’s been that kind of year, as we all know.

The pro-Spotlight argument is that the old white lefty contingent (60-plus actors, slightly doddering, somewhat resentful if not seething about the Academy’s rule change, inclined to push back…Ed Asner, Diane Ladd, Connie Stevens, Marty Landau…that crowd) are, I’m hearing, squarely in Spotlight‘s corner.

And most of their voices haven’t been heard, really, except by way of SAG’s ensemble award, which of course went to Spotlight.

The rallying cry is “those of you who are pissed about the new Academy rules, have your voice heard by voting for Spotlight.”

I am nothing if not a staunch Revenant guy. I’ve seen it five times, and I worship Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s score. I’ve heard that The Revenant needs to make $425 to $450 million to break even, and yet it seems to be safely on the way to that. It’s been doing so well all over — it’s the risk-and-success story of the year. All those awards (Golden Globes, BAFTA, DGA) and all that dough.

But my journalist heart-of-hearts belongs to Spotlight. And you know that the classic surprise happy ending on 2.28 would be if Spotlight takes the prize.

If Spotlight doesn’t win…well, okay. At least the Open Road team gave it the old college try, everyone gave it a good run, and the film is certain to double up on that revenue on home video. Everyone involved can be proud of Spotlight being at least the #2 choice among the three Best Picture finalists at this stage in the game.

“The Revenant has it in the bag” narrative stems from three things, I’m told — the industry consensus awards (DGA and BAFTA awards for Revenant/Inarritu, the PGA not being a Revenant win, the SAG ensemble being for Spotlight), the blogaroonie narrative & the massive ad buys by the Fox/Revenant team.

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Last night John Oliver‘s Last Week Tonight ran a satirical video essay on the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. Clever and funny (“This guy is The Last Samurai?”), but it still sidesteps Ridley Scott‘s excerpted rationale about financing big-budget movies, to wit: “It’s hard to raise financing when my lead actor is Mohammed so-and-so from such-and-such.” The audience groaned at the Scott quote, but it is hard to raise financing without strong marquee names. The first difficulty with Exodus: Gods and Kings was the fact that it wasn’t very good, but it would have been far less annoying if a charismatic Middle-Eastern actor had played Ramses instead of Joel bane-of-my-existence Edgerton. And yet financiers would have certainly said “no” if Scott had insisted on casting a charismatic Middle-Eastern actor as Moses instead of Christian Bale.

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Last week I was interviewed about the Oscars by Kirill Zhurenkov, reporter for the Russian daily Kommersant. The piece was posted today. The digital English translation is crude. For those who reference that version there’s a quote attributed to me about the OscarsSoWhite brouhaha that needs clarifying. Here’s what I actually said: “The Academy’s decision to take away voting priveleges from older, less active members in order to gradually assure a more diverse membership resulted in a lot of anger amongst the 60-and-over crowd, who felt they were being tarnished as racists because of their age. But let’s be honest — older people are always less receptive to new social currents and developments.”

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Sasha Stone and I…what can I say? Among our topics: (a) What it’s like to attend the Oscars with the wrong kind of dress and unnecessary heels, (b) How it isn’t necessarily a Revenant slamdunk for Best Picture — The Big Short or Spotlight could still eek out a win, (c) The end of Bernie & the triumph of Hillary, (c) What Oscar parties have we been invited to? Just a nice Sunday morning chat. Again, the mp3.

Remember M.C. Hammer? Does M.C. Hammer remember M.C. Hammer? On 11.22.16 Barry Sonnenfeld‘s The Addams Family will celebrate its 25th anniversary. A sizable hit by any yardstick (it cost $30 million, made $191 million) but I can’t remember anything about it. No lines or bits…nothing. (Here are some reviews.) And yet I can remember loads of material from Beetlejuice. All I can summon are images of Chris Lloyd‘s Uncle Fester — his expressions, brown monk cloak, bald head, etc.

I would love it if Saturday Night Live would bring back a version of David Spade‘s “Hollywood Minute”, which I used to live for in the early to mid ’90s. So snide, fearless, smug…I would have this attitude again. No sanding down the edges…zap ’em.

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For three years now Buzzfeed‘s Kate Aurthur has been posting and refining a 2014 piece that ranks the Best Picture Oscar winners, in order of her preference. Here’s my somewhat shorter list of Best Picture winners that I’ll sometimes re-watch for fun or nourishment or both. It goes without saying that most Best Picture winners (the first was William Wellman‘s Wings) are not all that re-watchable, and that some (i.e, Peter Jackson‘s The Return of the King) are quite difficult to get through.

If I’ve failed to list certain well-regarded winners, it’s not because I don’t respect or admire them. It’s because I just can’t seem to goad myself into watching them again. I think ’em over, consider their merits, recall how I felt the last time I re-watched them…and I put them aside.

Ten Most Easily Re-Watchable Best Picture Winners (in this order): Francis Coppola‘s The Godfather (’72), The Godfather, Part II (’74), Elia Kazan‘s On The Waterfront (’54), Jonathan Demme‘s The Silence of the Lambs (’91), William Wyler‘s The Best Years of Our Lives (’46), William Friedkin‘s The French Connection (’71), Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment (’60), Fred Zinneman‘s A Man For All Seasons (’66), David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia (’62); Franklin Schaffner‘s Patton (’70).

First Runners-Up (11 through 20): Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven (’92), Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed (’06), Joel & Ethan Coen‘s No Country For Old Men (’07), David Lean‘s The Bridge on the River Kwai (’57), Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker (’09), James L. Brooks‘ Terms of Endearment (’83), Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s All About Eve (’50), Michael Curtiz‘s Casablanca (’42), Robert Redford‘s Ordinary People (’80), George Roy Hill‘s The Sting (’73).

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Did you know there’s something basically buoyant and charmed and perhaps even a little bit holy about being a non-white person these days? Did you know there’s something fundamentally corrupt, ass-draggy, wrong-minded, retrograde and dark-souled about being a white person, and particularly a white male? You didn’t? Well, then you need to pay attention because as perverse as this may sound, both generalizations are more or less true in our current conversations.

It’s certainly time for the 20th Century American white-guy dynasty to give way to multicultural plurality and a fairer, less elitist way of figuring out incomes and disparities — no one’s disputing that. But it’s also permissible, I think, for urbane, educated, well-dressed, high-information white guys to say, “Look, I am who I am…I was born like this and my family is my family and there are shards of honor in our history, and I’m not going to whine and whimper and apologize for being who and what I am.”

This is where we are, oh ye motherfuckers. This is what things have come to in this age of politically correct, finger-pointing, banshee-wailing stormtroopers kicking down doors at 4 am and dragging politically incorrect miscreants into the street and throwing them into the back of Army trucks. White guys have to stand up and plead for understanding…”We aren’t all bad, really…there are a few good things about being white, and we demand a certain measure of respect,” etc.

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“Before sitting down to interview Bernie Sanders [last October], Bill Maher polled his studio audience to see how many of them supported Sanders and how many preferred Hillary Clinton. Not surprisingly, Maher’s progressive audience members were feeling the Bern. Far more of them cheered when asked if they were backing Sanders than when asked if they were supporting Clinton.

“’But if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination, who will stay home and not vote for Hillary?’ Maher asked. Only one person clapped faintly.

“See? Exactly,” Maher exclaimed. “We have two good candidates. It’s like on the airlines: Sometimes you don’t get the fish, you have the chicken. ‘I’ll eat the chicken if I have to!’” — from a 10.17.15 HuffPost riff by Daniel Marans.

Gus Van Sant‘s The Sea of Trees, a morose suicide drama with Matthew McConaughey, Ken Watanabe and Naomi Watts, was spat and shat upon when it played the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. Lionsgate/Roadside has the U.S. distribution rights but they haven’t announced a date — will they ever? The IMDB has it opening in Italy on 4.14 and in Japan on 4.29.

In the view of Variety‘s Justin Chang, Trees is “almost impressive in the way it shifts from dreary two-hander to so-so survival thriller to terminal-illness weepie to M. Night Shyamalan/Nicholas Sparks-level spiritual hokum…this risibly long-winded drama is perhaps above all a profound cultural insult, milking the lush green scenery of Japan’s famous Aokigahara forest for all it’s worth, while giving co-lead Ken Watanabe little to do other than moan in agony, mutter cryptically, and generally try to act as though McConaughey’s every word isn’t boring him (pardon the expression) to death.”

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I’ve always adored the guitar work in the Rolling Stones’ Star Star (i.e., Starfucker)…those driving, layered Chuck Berry-like chords…that tasty, licky attitude. But until this morning I’d honestly never read the lyrics, much less contemplated them. I knew they were bawdy but I never gave a shit. I never did the math and wondered if it might be about Mick Jagger‘s relationship with sexual adventuress and “You’re So Vain” writer-singer Carly Simon. (In “Backstage Passes” Angie Bowie wrote that Jagger had been obsessed with Simon.) I’d never really considered the “tricks with fruit” line or that reference to Simon (or whomever the song is about) giving head to Steve McQueen. God knows how or why John Wayne flew into Jagger’s mind.

The first trailer for Glenn Ficarra and John Requa‘s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Paramount, 3.4) filled me with dread. It told me that while the film is based on Kim Barker‘s “The Taliban Shuffle,” the intent was to make a Tina Fey movie, and that the themes were therefore as follows: (a) “Quippy Tina needs to be quippy Tina, so wherever she goes her 30 Rock sensibility will always be intact and never modified”, (b) “You’re more attractive in Afghanistan than you are in the States so enjoy the man-meat, girl,” (c) “Girls need to be girls, which means when they need to pee armed soldiers will form a perimeter to make sure the peeing girl is safe,” etc. In other words this is not a Tina-goes-to-Afghanistan movie as much as an Afghanistan-adapts-to-Tina’s-visit film. The second trailer [below] is still on the low and coarse side, but Tina’s character seems a bit less self-absorbed. The initial trailer is after the jump.

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