“My first viewing of Love & Mercy put my attention more on John Cusack, whom I’ve never seen so vulnerable and exposed as he is here. So to me, on first pass, Cusack was the one I thought had the better chance at a nomination — not for lead, mind you, but for supporting. But then I saw the movie again. The second time through, Paul Dano’s performance emerged much more. So much so that I think he could be a strong contender not just to be nominated for Best Actor but maybe to win. It’s just a masterwork from Dano who tends at times to go a bit over the top. He doesn’t do that here.

Paul Dano, Brian Wilson, John Cusack.

“Both actors capture Brian Wilson’s gentle spirit and inherent sadness. Both actors show in such a subtle way how Brian Wilson tried so hard to beat back the voices and the demons. So while it’s true both actors make one complete performance, if it were me, I’d go for Dano for lead and Cusack for supporting. I’m saying this for two reasons: (1) the Best Actor race is going to be so crowded by Oscar-nomination time and (2) it will be hard to make sure this film is remembered at all because it’s being seen so early.” — from a 6.8 Sasha Stone piece called “The Dilemma of Paul Dano and John Cusack and the Best Actor Race.”

I really enjoyed and admired Listen To Me Marlon — an intimate, fascinating, full-scope portrait that turns rather sad during the final 20 minutes. Fascinating, never-before-seen footage. I’d read Marlon Brando‘s autobiography (“Songs My Mother Taught Me“) but until I saw Stevan Riley‘s doc last January I’d never heard him really open up. His recollections and reflections almost shook my lifelong suspicion that he’d allowed defeatism and bitterness to consume him over the last 30 years of his life. Directed and edited by Riley, produced by John Battsek. A select theatrical release on 7.29 plus some kind of exclusive Showtime airing.

I was complaining the other day about the vogue-ishness of transgender trending. A few hours later I was decisively told “no” (i.e., that shit will not fly, homey, so button it) by a columnist friend, and then another columnist friend replied that while the current era of transgender acceptance and celebration may seem threatening or confusing to some, it is nonetheless valid. My reply: “It’s not in the least bit threatening or confusing to me. Of course it’s valid but let’s keep in mind that the transgender option is a surgical remedy — a procedure that corrects a mistake that nature and biology occasionally perpetrate — and is therefore not quite the same as being a passionate socialist or a campaigner against fossil fuels or an opponent of NSA data gathering.

“Caitlin Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair has opened up the floodgates. Transgender choices have become a ‘thing’ in the p.c. realm — a cool vogue, a fashion statement, a topical celebration…a pride flag to hoist up the pole and cheer. And to judge by its proliferation in the media these days you’d think that transgender surgery is now suddenly being weighed or mulled over or considered by a semi-significant percentage of the population. Please. It’s an option that is now out there for people who want to take the plunge (and good for that) but calm down. What percentage of gender-ambivalent persons are having the procedure these days? More now than ever before, I’m guessing, but the attention being given to transgender stories and the general raising of consciousness is, I strongly suspect, wildly disproportionate to the statistical realities.

The most persistent argument against my Beware of Brownfellas piece is that (a) the 2007 Bluray version of Goodfellas was artificially brightened and (b) the new Goodfellas Bluray is a truer, more film-like rendering of what the original answer print looked like — i.e., nice and dark and murky. My response is simple. The 2007 Bluray version, which I’m completely happy with, contains a good amount of shade, shadows and darkness where appropriate. I saw Goodfellas three times in theatres in 1990, and I’m telling you that the ’07 Bluray is by no means an artificially brightened thing. It looks gritty, unaffected, like reality. How in the name of God can it improve the experience of watching Goodfellas by darkening and brown-tinting the image? How is it better for the viewer to remove details that were visible on the 2007 Bluray and bury them in shadows?

This morning I asked restoration guru Robert Harris about the why and wherefores, and his response was that the 2007 Bluray is “totally irrelevant.” What matters is the Scorsese-approved answer print that was supplied for the 2015 Bluray transfer. The 2007 Bluray, he says, “didn’t have stable reds, didn’t have proper black levels, didn’t have proper shadow detail.” The guys who mastered it, he says, “were using a more primitive technology.” And yet 2007 was ironically the first year “in which we had the ability to recreate film on Bluray.” It just wasn’t part of the ’07 Goodfellas. So, boiled down, the new Bluray is a welcome thing because it’s giving us a version that really looks like film, or so Harris and his brethren are saying.

Nancy Wells, my dear mom, passed Sunday night. She gave me everything — life, love, love of the arts (she turned me on to Peter Tchaikovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, John Updike, Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin…the list is infinite) and particularly love of theatre. She was the beating heart and balm of our family — 90% of the joy and spunk and laughter came from her, and she basically saved me and my brother and sister from my father’s alcoholic moodiness when we were young. (Not to diminish my dad’s influence too much — he gave me the writerly urge along with the barbed attitude, such as it is. But I would have been dead without my mom’s emotional radiance and buoyancy.) My mom loved show business, plays, films, music. She worked for NBC and BBC in the old days, acted in several plays in New Jersey (including Somserset Vaughn‘s The Constant Wife) and directed two or three plays at the Wilton Playshop. She was partnered in her own real-estate business in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

She had been gradually slipping away for a couple of years (during my last visit in early May she didn’t even open her eyes), and now, at last, her peace is absolute.

The corporates at the Watermark called and left a message about “an update on your mother’s situation” around midnight on Sunday. I called back and left a message…nothing. They called again this morning to say she’d “expired” at 8:55 pm Sunday night. Isn’t that what driver’s licenses and AAA memberships do — expire? I’m presuming that the Watermark, a perfunctorily compassionate if corporate-minded concern, learned from focus testing that the word “died” or “passed” is upsetting for immediate family members. 

I’m flying back to New York this weekend for a gathering of some kind.

I wasn’t much of a visitor but every so often I’d fall by Jan’s, an unpretentious, down-at-the-heels diner on Beverly Blvd. It closed last March. This morning I noticed that it’s been half-destroyed. Something else is being built there. I shed a little tear. I wasn’t that attached and it didn’t have a lot of architectural flavor, but I liked that Jan’s was there. They served very generous fruit bowls. Thank God that Norm’s of La Cienega, which is about two blocks west and two blocks north of where Jan’s used to be, has been saved. On 5.20.15 the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to designate Norms La Cienega as an Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM). Councilmember Paul Koretz has called Norm’s “a home away from home for many people” and the kind of place that “isn’t just culturally significant, but culturally uniting.”

That’ll be enough in the way of tantalizing come-ons for season #2 of HBO’s True Detective (debuts on 6.21). I’m expecting a DVD screener in the mail before long and then we’ll see what’s what. The only concern is that Fast and Furious franchise helmer Justin Lin, who literally sold his soul to the devil years ago, has directed the first two episodes. Lin has always impressed me as one of the most brazenly shallow, corporate-kowtowing filmmakers working today, but maybe he managed to suppress that side of himself while shooting. Here’s hoping.

The first trailer for John Eric Dowdle‘s No Escape (Weinstein Co., 9.2.15) popped early last March, and it’s not opening for another four months. I can’t believe I’m going to be watching trailers for this exploitation flick over the entire summer. Here’s what I said on 3.6.15: “I always feel suspicion and hostility toward films in which an Average-Joe father is desperately trying to protect his family from (a) intruders, (b) kidnappers or (c) anti-American revolutionaries and terrorists. The Taken films have really poisoned this particular well. Nor do I like films about average American families having to deal with bad people in a foreign country. The underlying message is “you don’t want to venture outside the safety of your American shopping-mall lifestyle…you’re just asking for trouble if you go overseas and particularly to unstable Asian or third-world countries…stay home, go to the mall, enjoy a backyard barbecue or watch an old movie on Netflix or Vudu from the safety of your basement den.”

Jerry Seinfeld‘s comments during an ESPN interview about how politically correct agendas are stifling stand-up comedy (particularly on college campuses) feeds right into A.O. Scott‘s 6.5 N.Y. Times piece, titled “Adjusting To A World That Won’t laugh With You.” “We’re…in the midst of a humor crisis,” Scott writes. “The world is full of jokes and also of people who can’t take them. It can seem, if you dip into social media or peruse the weekly harvest of Internet think pieces, that comedy swings on a fast-moving pendulum between amusement and outrage. We love jokes that find the far edge of the permissible, but we also love to turn against the joker who violates our own closely held taboos. In the blink of an eye, social media lights up not with twinkles of collective liking but with flames of righteous mob fury. We demand fresh material, and then we demand apologies.”

Out of boredom or restlessness I’ve asked some of the Oscar whisperers to share what they’re sensing or smelling about the likeliest Best Picture contenders. But they couldn’t be roused from their early June, waiting-to-see-Jurassic World, pre-Los Angeles Film Festival slumbers. Of course it’s too early but it’s not crazy early. The programs for the Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York Film Festivals are currently starting to take shape as we speak and will be all but firmed less than two months hence. And the publicists repping the likeliest contenders definitely know what they have or don’t have (hence the recently announced London Film Festival premiere of Suffragette and the N.Y. Film Festival debut of Robert Zemeckis‘s The Walk) so don’t tell me.

The game is on right now whether the Oscar blogaroonies want to acknowledge it or not. So here, right now, are nine films that seem to have the best credentials and tastiest aromas, and in this order. Spitballing these is nothing brilliant or even audacious– it’s just something to do on a warm June day:

* Danny Boyle‘s Steve Jobs (Universal, 10.9), which I’ve read and believe to be quite brilliant, not in spite of the dialogue-driven, stage-play feeling but oddly because of it. I won’t elaborate any further but it’s another “drilling into a prick genius” piece, revealed layer by layer via the old Aaron Sorkin rat-a-tat-tat.

* Tom Hooper‘s The Danish Girl (Focus Features, 11.27) — Flagrantly baity. Director Tom Hooper and Oscar party-circuit charmer Eddie Redmayne ride again. Everybody on the Danish Girl team will be riding the wave of the current p.c. transgender sensitivity vogue du jour (i.e., if you don’t celebrate it you’ll be hammered on Twitter as a transgender bigot), etc.

* Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant (20th Century Fox, 12.25) — Inarritu and dp Emmanuel Lubezski are on a roll. Blast-off reactions to Chivo’s natural light cinematography at Cinemacon. It seems unlikely that Fox would open both The Revenant and Joy on Christmas day. Probable adjustments forthcoming.

* Todd Haynes‘ Carol (Weinstein Co., 12.18) — the toast of Cannes, an all-but-certain Best Picture contender, Rooney Mara or Cate Blanchett for Best Actress?, Best Director, Best Cinematography (Ed Lachman), Best Adapted Screenplay (Phyllis Nagy).

* John Crowley‘s Brooklyn (Fox Searchlight, no date yet) — Across-the-board Sundance raves made this seem like the year’s first Best Picture contender. “Despite its familiar structure it’s a thing of beauty, a delicate, tender period piece about nice people trying to do their best.” — N.Y. Post‘s Kyle Smith.

I said a long time ago that I want to see tourists eaten in this thing. The more tourists with their heads and limbs and torsos bitten off, the better. Bonus points for fat tourists. But if the movie cops out and doesn’t show anyone screaming for mercy just before being chomped to death and turned into blood-and-bone mulch, I’ll have no choice but to render an unfavorable judgment. And if this happens, in the words of Vito Corleone, “I’m going to blame some of the people in this room” — director Colin Trevorrow, producer Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley, exec producer Steven Spielberg, etc.