Some of the comments last night suggested that I should bring on a columnist who focuses entirely on TV and cable fare. And another who would post two or three times weekly on superhero-fanboy ComicCon cultural-genocide crap. I would do that in a heartbeat as that would broaden the readership, but finding somebody good enough to cover either of those realms means paying them a decent salary and I’m already splitting HE’s ad revenue with my ad guy as it is. And if they’re really good they always move on to the next gig within a year or so and then you have to find someone to take their place. And hardly anyone would be willing to keep up with the day-to-day like I do. It’s a huge pain in the ass. If someone just wanted to post on their own — frequently, I mean — and manage to generate ad revenue on their own, fine…but finding that person would be a needle-in-a-haystack procedure. I tried working with other columnists seven or eight years ago and it just didn’t seem worth it in the end. For better or worse HE is a one-man-band operation, I’m afraid. It’s not like I ignore TV-cable fare. I pay attention with some degree of regularity (The Leftovers, The Affair, House of Cards, Mad Men, etc.) Plus I write about other stuff in life (sobriety, women, travel, party elephants, shrieking girls in cafes). Plus I’ll be running GoPro footage in a month or two. I cover a wide swath.

I’m thinking in particular of Emmanuel Lubezski‘s hand-held photography in Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life…photography that swoops and glides and swirls and float-pans in dizzy circles and basically goes “oooh, wow…the wonder of nature and life and the whole quiet, gobsmacking symphony of it all!” Well, the GoPro footage in this 18 month old promotional video beats Lubezski’s stuff all to hell because it can get into and top of more places and POVs. The result, I think, of GoPro‘s constantly expanding visual realm is that Lubezki-like nature-encountering photography will lose (or has already lost) its lustre because no director of photography can beat the GoPro stuff — the “wow” element is totally unchallengable. Which leaves the aesthetic of the cinematographer as the only distinguishing characteristic that can possibly matter at the end of the day — restraint, particularity, focus, stillness, this or that form of transcendence, etc. Or good old, straight-on cinematography that tells a story without getting in the way.

The big surprise of the Golden Globe awards, of course, was Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel taking the Best Motion Picture, Comedy/Musical award. Some had claimed it was surging; others sensed that it was. Bad for Birdman, you say? I don’t think so. I’ve always loved Budapest Hotel but I think the Hollywood Foreign Press just likes to go quirky and regional every so often and spread it around. A filmmaker friend, however, thinks that Budapest might be bouncing out of the GG awards and surging bigtime in the Oscar race, and that it might elbow Birdman aside.

(l. to .r) Grand Budapest Hotel guys Adrien Brody, Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson at the Fox Searchlight after-party.

Birdman director Alejandro G. Inarritu, director Rodrigo Garcia in the Birdman corner of the Fox Searchlight party.

8:00 pm: Boyhood wins Best Motion Picture, Drama. IFC Films’ Jonathan Sehring on the mike. Gang’s all up there. All in. All over.

7:56 pm: Theory of Everything‘s Eddie Redmayne wins Best Actor, Drama. Also expected. So who wins the Best Actor Oscar, Keaton or Redmayne? I’m just shutting the MacBook Air off now…battery down to 14%! Game over, man.

7:52 pm: Julianne Moore wins Best Actress GG award for Still Alice. Not a shocker, totally expected, etc.

7:46 pm: Shocker win for Grand Budapest Hotel…but very cool at the same time. Hooray for Wes Anderson and the gang. Easily the biggest upset of the night.

7:33 pm: Birdman‘s Michael Keaton wins for Best Actor, Comedy/Musical. “I’m extremely grateful.” I hate tapping this out on the damn phone. MacBook Air battery down to 23%.

7:28 pm: Ruth Wilson wins Best TV Actress award for The Affair. HE-approved.

7:24 pm: Boyhood‘s Richard Linklater wins for Best Director. That settles it — Boyhood wins for Best Motion Picture, Drama.

7:19 pm: George Clooney‘s acceptance speech for Cecil B. DeMille award will be…well-written. It was well-written! And well delivered. We all forgive him for Monuments Men. “Thanks for helping to keep small films alive.” “If you’re in this room, you’ve won the brass ring.” “We will not walk in fear…we won’t do it…je suis Charlie.” Hey, he didn’t pronounce it “SharLEE”!

The Golden Globe party tents (including the 20th Century Fox viewing tent, where I’m typing this from) are surrounded by a sea of mud. A couple of hundred yards from the main ballroom, if that, and it’s all gooey, sloshy, slithery muck. It’s warm and dry inside the Fox party…elegant design, not too crowded, only the coolest…uhm, the most aggressively cool people. Smiling waiters darting around with all kinds of hors d’oeuvres. Wait…the show is starting.

Red Army, BRAND: The Second Coming dp Svetlana Cvetko.

Hollywood Elsewhere is leaving for the heavily-fortified garrison state known as the Beverly Hilton complex about 65 minutes from now. I’ll be live-blogging the Golden Globe awards starting at 5 pm, or as best I can from a viewing-party cocktail table What are the biggest possible upsets? I would be totally on-the-floor flabbergasted if Wes Anderson‘s Grand Budapest Hotel takes the Best Motion Picture, Comedy/Musical award away from Birdman, which some are suggesting could happen. I don’t expect that Cake‘s Jennifer Aniston will abscond with Julianne Moore‘s Best Actress, Drama award for her performance in Still Alice, but if this happens people will scream and howl and break champagne glasses. Selma‘s fate is, of course, already set in stone as far as the Oscar nominations are concerned, but if it wins the Best Motion Picture, Drama award tonight (which I believe is unlikely) and if it lucks out with a Best Picture Oscar nomination next Thursday morning (and the signs are not good for that either), people will start saying that Selma‘s shadow-over-LBJ stigma (i.e., having screwed the 36th President out of his proudest accomplishment in the eyes of impressionable none-too-brights who wouldn’t open a history book or consult a Wikipedia summary if their lives depended on it) has been lifted.

The source of HE’s strength has always been the quality of the eyeballs (industry, media, ubers, early adopters) and not the general across-the-board numbers. But of course that’s all the ad-agency crunchers pay attention to and so they give HE arguments about this from time to time in terms of ad rates. It’s been suggested that I should dumb things down a little bit in order to punch up the page views. One of my proudest distinctions is having never once run one of those number-driven stories in which the headline says “10 Movies That You Probably Won’t Want To See in 2015” or something along those lines, so I guess I could start, you know, running those two or three times a week. If Hitfix can run these kind of stories why can’t I? I’m kidding. Seriously, what can I do to appeal to the Walmart-level ADD crowd?

Poor Anita Ekberg reportedly had a rough financial time during her last few years, and now she’s passed at age 83. Kindness and respect. But honestly? If it hadn’t been for that thigh-deep wading scene at Rome’s Trevi Fountain in Federico Fellini‘s La Dolce Vita (’60) her life probably would have been a bit more difficult as almost everything else she acted in was either negligible or embarassing. Ekberg enjoyed a four or five-year buildup to this career-peak moment, landing a Hollywood contract when she was 23 or 24 and snagging parts in Blood Alley (’55), Artists and Models (’55), Hollywood or Bust (’56) and War and Peace (’56). Post-La Dolce Vita she costarred in Boccaccio ’70 (’62) and then almost got Ursula Andress‘s role in Dr. No. Next she did the dispensible Rat Pack comedy 4 for Texas, and then gradually descended into European exploitation. Her last two noteworthy films were Fellini’s I Clowns (’72), and Intervista (’87) — she and Marcello Mastroianni played themselves in the latter.

Point #1: A majority of U.S. publications have decided against re-publishing the satiric illustration of Prophet Muhammad that led to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and the reason for this timidity was indicated by today’s attack upon Hamburger Morgenpost, a tabloid daily in Hamburg that ran it. Honestly? I wouldn’t have if I was an editor of a daily or weekly dead-tree publication. Why taunt the nutters? R. Crumb‘s half-ass, kinda-sorta-kidding solidarity with fellow cartoonists illustration is probably more reflective of what most editors are thinking. Point #2: I hate the way Amurricans always manage to mispronounce the French language in little ways. It’s not Charlie as in Charlie Kaufman and it’s not Hebdo as in hedge row — it’s SharLEE HebDOH.

Last night on Real Time with Bill Maher Jay Leno told Democratic strategist Paul Begala that he’s feeling all kinds of fire and energy from Elizabeth Warren and almost none of that from Hillary Clinton. And then today chief Washington Post correspondent Dan Balz reported that when a small group of Democrats, Republicans and Independents discussed the political landscape last Thursday night in Aurora, Colorado, the only person they really liked across the board was Warren.

Balz writes that the focus group was “dismissive, sometimes harshly” in their assessments of former Florida governor Jeb Bush and was “chilly” about Clinton.

The group was basically uninterested and resistant, in short, to the idea of Bush vs. Clinton again and the general return of their dynasties.

“[But] when Warren was introduced into the conversation, however, many of those around the table, regardless of party affiliation, responded positively,” Balz reports. “To this group, who spoke in stark terms throughout the evening about the economic challenges of working Americans, Warren has struck a chord.

“Quick impressions voiced about [Warren] were highly positive: ‘Passionate.’ ‘Smart.’ ‘Sincere.’ ‘Knowledgeable.’ ‘Intelligent.’ ‘Capable.’ One person said ‘questionable.’ That was as close to a negative reaction as she got in that round.

“There were other signs that Warren, who has said repeatedly that she is not running for president in 2016, had caught the eyes and ears of people in the room. She was the popular choice as a next-door neighbor, seen as genuine and personable. Even one of the most conservative members of the group said this.

The general drift of David Ehrlich‘s 1.7 Slate article about Jennifer Aniston‘s Cake is that it’s a “terrible movie” and therefore the Best Actress conversation about Aniston is unwarranted. First of all it’s not terrible — it’s underwhelming. I know what “terrible” tends to feel and taste like and Cake doesn’t qualify. I think it’s roughly in the same realm as Still Alice, and nobody’s calling that one “terrible” so…you know, c’mon. Second of all Aniston’s performance as a wealthy, scarred-up woman dealing with constant pain delivers, I feel, roughly the same degree of conviction and finesse as Julianne Moore delivers in Still Alice. You can disagree with me and that’s fine, but I really don’t think there’s a great deal of difference. So why, boiled down, is Ehrlich beating up on Aniston? Partly because he didn’t like Cake but also — let’s be honest — because (a) he doesn’t like the general idea of Aniston being in the Best Actress conversation, probably because he regards her as a lightweight interloper plus (b) he resents the aggressively funded campaign that has put her within striking distance of a Best Actress nomination. A female performance can win a New York Film Critics Award for meritorious reasons alone but to win an Oscar you’ve got to play ball. We all realize that, don’t we? Aniston is just playing her cards according to house rules. My 11.23 opinion: “At least Aniston really gives it hell. She can be quite deft and subtle when she wants to be, always letting you know what’s happening inside with just the right amount of emphasis.”

Can you imagine the response to an opening credit sequence like this today? Can you imagine the sea of iPhone and Android screens that would start lighting up after the first minute or so? Absolutely no sound for two minutes and 43 seconds (an eternity by today’s standards) except for a single barking dog somewhere in the distance.