George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the most visually arresting, elegantly composed action films ever made and is easily among 2015’s finest, so I have no issue at all with the National Board of Review giving it their Best Film award. And giving Creed‘s Sylvester Stallone their Best Supporting Actor award (and thereby semi-officializing his award-season momentum) is fine by me. And I fully agree with Son of Saul getting their Best Foreign Language Film award. But The Martian‘s Matt Damon winning the Best Actor award instead of Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant? I’m glumly resigned to Room‘s Brie Larson winning several Best Actress awards so fine, whatever, and I haven’t seen The Hateful Eight (the first screening is tonight) so no comment on Jennifer Jason Leigh winning Best Supporting Actress and Quentin Tarantino winning for Best Screenplay. I just don’t like the NBR very much, and I really don’t like the fact that they ignored Spotlight, Joy, Carol, Brooklyn, The Big Short, The Revenant…seriously, why did they go for so many popcorn movies?

The NBR used to be made up of a bunch of crusty old-school Manhattanites — old biddies, jaded alcoholics, etc. Now, to judge by today’s vote, it seems to be ruled by 45-and-under action/genre/sci-fi geeks.

We all know that winning a Best Actor Oscar is not so much about the quality of a performance (although that obviously counts) as a compelling narrative that Academy voters want to cheer or express a kinship with. Two years ago Matthew McConaughey‘s narrative (actor saves career from romcom suffocation by switching to quality-level roles) won over Leonardo DiCaprio‘s (gifted, much-nominated actor delivers bravura, ironically over-the-top performance and scores big-time with legendary quaalude scene). This year DiCaprio, back in the game with his all-in Revenant performance, has a new compelling narrative — he suffered, he froze, he ate animal organs, he gutted a dead horse and crawled inside the carcass, he brilliantly simulated being attacked by a bear, etc.

But the suffering thing needs to be coupled with a supplementary narrative, which is that the Wolf quaalude scene is too good, too classic and too hilarious to have been deemed insufficient for a win. Amends need to be made. This is why Leo must and shall win over Black Mass‘s Johnny Depp. Depp, no question, gives a fascinating performance as a stone-cold sociopath but what’s the narrative? I’ll tell you what the narrative is. Depp was super-rich from the Pirate movies but he needed to expand his repertoire so he manned up and found his groove by wearing a heavily hair-sprayed Whitey Bulger wig and Alaskan-husky contact lenses.

A N.Y. Post description of a passage from Carly Simon‘s “Boys In The Trees,” which popped on 11.24: “About a month into a romance with Warren Beatty, Carly Simon got a call from him saying he was flying to New York from LA and absolutely had to see her. He’d be getting in at around 12:30 a.m. and would have to be gone by 5:30 for an early-morning shoot. He arrived, and the couple ‘made love like in a movie.’

‘“Warren was such a professional…the pressure points he knew about stirred a tremor in me,’ Simon writes. “Warren seemed to have created a brand new manual on how to make love.”

“After he left, Simon slept, then went for an 11 am appointment with her longtime therapist, whom she identifies as ‘Dr. L.’ She was raving to Dr. L about her night and what a ‘superman’ Beatty was in the sack, when she saw ‘Dr. L looked unwell.’ She asked what was wrong, and he told her.

I’m sorry for not posting more quickly about the 11.25 passing of editor Elmo Williams. He was 102 years old. The High Noon tick-tock sequence is the reason Williams won the 1952 Best Editing Oscar, but if you watch it very closely Williams’ metronomic timing is sometimes very slightly off. Watch it again — the one-two-three-four montage was edited to match Dimitri Tiomkin‘s music, Williams wrote in his memoir, so every cut was supposed to happen at the precise instant of the final beat…but it doesn’t quite happen that way. Sometimes a cut will be a millisecond too early or late. I love this sequence but if I allow myself to get too anal about the timing it’s almost infuriating. Almost, I say.

Out of my once-active friendship with Matt Drudge and out of appreciation for his having posted a JEFFREY WELLS link on the Drudge Report for 15 years or so, I sent him the following message this morning: “I’ve seen The Revenant and the bear-attack scene your source has told you about is NOT a bear ‘rape.’ Paul Gleason got raped by a gorilla in Trading Places but this is a different deal. There are two or three bear cubs nearby — the scene is obviously about a mama bear going after Leo to protect her cubs. Terrifying aggression but no rape. Your source is off.”

For his historic performance as the young Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy, HE’s own Paul Dano won the Best Actor award tonight at the 2015 Gotham Awards — champagne cocktails! Spotlight won the Best Feature award (totally expected) and Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer‘s Spotlight screenplay won also. And the Spotlight actors collected a previously announced Special Jury Award for Ensemble Performance. I was kidding when I wrote the headline — the Gotham wins for Spotlight are a good start but only that. I suspect that Spotlight will probably go all the way but who knows? The big thing tonight, in my view, is the Dano win — a compelling and perhaps even decisive argument for the Academy nominating Dano for Best Supporting Actor, at the very least. Gotham for Best Documentary: The Look of Silence; Gotham Independent Film Audience Award: Tangerine; Gotham Best Actress: Bel Powley, The Diary of a Teenage Girl; Gotham Best Screenplay: Spotlight.

Amy Schumer knows what she’s doing with her 2016 Pirelli calendar appearance. She’s saying “most women look like me and I can get all the guys I want anyway so fuck it.” Fine. Earlier today she tweeted the below photo with the following: “Beautiful, gross, strong, thin, fat, pretty, ugly, sexy, disgusting, flawless, woman. Thank you @annieleibovitz.” Lena Dunham has been making the same brash socio-political statement since Girls began. And you know who used to be on that page? Melissa McCarthy (i.e., “Leave me alone, I’m a big girl and that’s that,” etc.) Until she awoke one morning and said, “Okay, did that, next.” Schumer and Dunham will never admit it, but they’ll be doing a McCarthy sooner or later.

It’s vaguely insulting to Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant, I realize, to even mention Richard Sarafian‘s Man in the Wilderness (’71) in the same breath. But they’re more or less based on the same true-life story — same trapper, same bear, same burying alive, same riverboat, same (or similar) Native American animosities, same betrayal, etc. The Inarritu is way better from a visual chops and authenticity-of-milieu standpoint alone, of course, but the bones are the bones.

Jagger & Richards’ “Stray Cat Blues,” the eighth cut on the 1968 Beggar’s Banquet album, is heard during the first act of David O. Russell‘s Joy, and as soon as it began playing I was feeling it down deep. The right song at the right moment. Russell uses it as a childhood link-up as Joy Mangano‘s 12 year-old self is featured in two or three scenes, and that would be around ’68. The song’s about a jaded rock musician about to do the deed with a 15-year-old runaway who misses her mother while Jennifer Lawrence‘s character is nobody’s pushover or victim — no thematic tie-in.

Tonight is quiet but tomorrow evening is the first press screening of The Hateful Eight (in 70mm). Wednesday evening is a second look at Joy (followed by a Michael Keaton Spotlight dinner in Century City). And Thursday evening is a re-encounter with The Revenant. Steady as she goes. The embargo-ending review date for The Revenant is Friday, 12.4. Joy‘s review date is on Monday, 12.7 — the same date as the Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiere in Hollywood (i.e., two theatres, I’m hearing, and possibly even three — El Capitan, Chinese and/or Dolby). The Hateful Eight‘s embargo-release date is Monday, 12.21. And oh, yeah — the National Board of Review votes tomorrow and the New York Film Critics Circle votes on Wednesday. At least one of these groups will probably choose Spotlight as the recipient of their Best Picture award. Guesses?

I stay away from soft drinks as a rule except when I order Diet Coke at parties. The only time I’ll bring some home from Pavilions is when I happen to find supplies of Coca Cola Life — the reduced-calorie green label brand that I’ve told myself is somehow preferable to Diet Coke and certainly less toxic than Coke Zero. The other day I bought a six-pack of small glass bottles of Coca Cola Life. As I was unpacking the bags I put one into the freezer before drinking it 10 or 15 minutes later. Five or six hours later I opened the freezer door and of course the fucking bottle had exploded like a grenade. Gobs and gobs of honey-brown Coke snow splattered all over the inside, covering everything. It took too long to clean it up and it was sticky and messy to boot. It wasn’t a huge deal but on the other hand it was one more thing on top of everything else, and all because I couldn’t repress this thing I have about hanging on to Coca Cola (i.e., a metaphor for my childhood experience) in some fashion.