Thanks to Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams for posting an Easy Lay, Non-Discretionary List of 2014 Best Actress Contenders…31 in all. Nice effort, a good start. But let’s cut out the chaff and get real. By current HE spitball standards there are seven female performances that may potentially shake out as highly likely or distinctly possible contenders within two or three months. Topping the list are Wild‘s Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Rigby and Miss Julie‘s Jessica Chastain and Gone Girl‘s Rosamund Pike.

I obviously know next to nothing about who’s really hot-tub but (a) I do know which roles appear to be the most substantial and awards-baity on paper, (b) I would be floored if Witherspoon, Chastain and Pike are not part of the Best Actress conversation by mid-October, (c) I do know which actresses have built up good cred and are “owed,” so to speak, and (d) I do have a fairly acute intuition about which performances are almost certain to be ignored. Here’s how it seems right now:

Highly Likely: Reese Witherspoon, Wild; Jessica Chastain, Eleanor Rigby + Miss Julie; Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl.

Distinctly Possible but don’t bet the farm: Felicity Jones, The Theory of Everything; Emma Stone, Birdman (supporting); Michelle Williams, Suite Française; Amy Adams, Big Eyes; Julianne Moore, Maps to the Stars.

This international Birdman trailer is an uptick. Potent emotional currents, casual-natural acting, withering God’s-eye humor as opposed to “laughs”, an apparently noteworthy Emma Stone performance. But what’s with Michael Keaton‘s Tom Waits voice? And what’s with the non-stop running around with Fruit of the Loom underwear, at least as far as this trailer is concerned? Underwear, underwear, genital-revealing underwear under the glare of Times Square….I’ve got it, thank you. Yes, it’s a metaphor but in my eyes Fruit of the Loom is pretty close to gold-toe socks in terms of aesthetic offense. The world of men’s underwear is pretty cool these days. I personally lean toward slim boxer underwear with a button-snap fly. Nobody with a shred of taste or self-respect wears Fruit of the Loom briefs, least of all anyone allowing for the possibility that they might wear them in public.

Last week a staunch Democrat muttered that people shouldn’t even talk about Elizabeth Warren running against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Warren will just fuck things up by weakening support for Clinton and might thereby allow for a possible Republican presidential victory. I only know that a presidential campaign has to be about something more than just “I’ve been biding my time and am pretty much inevitable” and “it’s time for a woman to be in the Oval Office.” I agree with both notions but a presidential campaign has to be about real heart and extra-passionate beliefs, and Clinton seems to barely have either (her main conviction is that she wants very much to win) while Warren has both in spades. You know she does, and you know that Hillary, a corporate center-rightist with nominally “liberal” colors, has never had that fire.

Will Hillary be nominated and elected? Most likely, yes, and that’ll be a lot better than Rand Paul or whomever. And it’ll be good to have Bill Clinton back in the hot seat and co-running the show.

But Clinton can’t just be coronated. She has to lay it on the line and show what she’s philosophically made of and and duke it out on the mat. At the very least a Warren debate will force Clinton to take a more populist tack. It might make real common sense at the end of the day for Democrats to go with a Granny Ticket. Seriously.

Disney marketers are selling the mythical storybook sizzle — witches, spooky woods, maidens, spells, beanstalks, a handsome prince, “I wish…” — and sidestepping the incidental fact that Rob Marshall‘s Into The Woods (Disney, 12.25) is given to song, and more particularly to the unconventional, occasionally quite subtle and sophisticated super-songs of Stephen Sondheim. Hilarious! Disney marketers are essentially declaring that the idiots out there don’t know from Sondheim and are probably going to be turned off by any notion of melodic fancy but the spooky storybook stuff…yes! We’ll eventually let them know it’s a musical down the road, Disney is thinking. Gently, gradually, bit by little bit. Hit them with it too suddenly and they might freak or complain.

Meryl Streep, Anna Kendrick and James Corden can belt out a tune quite robustly and professionally, of course. I’m hoping/presuming/praying that Emily Blunt, Chris Pine, Tracey Ullman, Christine Baranski and Johnny Depp will somehow muddle through. We all know that in terms of his directing style Marshall is a brassy, straight-ahead square who would rather strangle himself than play to the sophistos — he makes movies for popcorn-eaters. Chicago was certainly proof enough of that. But if he just gets out of the way of the material and just captures the play and the music and leaves well enough alone, Into The Woods might work.

After a slow-if-not-difficult day with the column and all kinds of niggly-piggly chickenshit matters that I had to attend to above and beyond, I didn’t feel like submitting to Sharknado 2 last night. Just another cash-in — the original was the charm. I had to hop on the non-hog (i.e., Yamaha 400 cc Majesty) and buzz around town. You don’t go any one special place…that’s cornball style, you just go. Okay, I went to one special place (Amoeba) and then into the hills in order to not feel the glorious sensation of wind blowing through my hair because I’m required to wear a helmet that makes my head feel warm and somewhat damp. I’ll catch the encore showing on Saturday, 8.2. But in the meantime this extra-particular complaint by Vulture‘s John Sellers is 65% hilarious and 35% something else.

There’s no question that Chadwick Boseman‘s performance as James Brown is the best thing about Tate Taylor‘s Get On Up. The film has other pleasures but Boseman matters most. He was naturally obliged to play it solemn and reserved as Jackie Robinson in 42, but not as the late soul-funk legend, who was nothing if not irascible in a gifted sort of way. This is a snappy, raspy, rapscallion submission that never softpedals or seems to be the least bit concerned about whether whitebread types will “like” the character or not. Honestly? Boseman’s Brown is not 100% likable…and that, for me, is where the integrity comes in. Boseman has absolutely earned himself an armchair at the 2014 Best Actor table. By giving himself, monk-like, to Brown’s spirit, history and rambunctious energy, he’s gotten up offa that thing and lit some kind of fuse.

On top of HE’s 26 “hard” picks for the Toronto Film Festival (or 30 if you want to be liberal about it) I’ll probably be adding one more — Ted Melfi and Bill Murray‘s St. Vincent (formerly St. Vincent de Van Nuys), which the Weinstein Co,. is opening on 10.24. The idea is to give the New York-based attitude comedy, which costars Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd and Naomi Watts, a gala screening during the festival’s first weekend. Earlier today Deadline‘s Michael Fleming wrote that the Weinsteiners were having trouble getting Murray to commit to the Toronto thing, presumably because Harvey sees real potential in a Best Actor campaign for Murray, who was totally shat upon 15 and 1/2 years ago when the Academy didn’t even nominate him for his legendary performance in Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore. And then he lost his expected Lost in Translation Best Actor Oscar to Sean Penn in Mystic River.

Interstellar‘s trippy space-travel, visiting-Iceland footage is well and good, but, as previously noted, the cloying emotionalism in the scenes between Matthew McConaughey (whom I’ve suddenly tired of) and his teary-eyed kids as they discuss his pending voyage is really starting to grate. And I really don’t think it’s possible to roll with Michael Caine as someone else any more — he’s been imitated to death and every time he opens his mouth you can’t help but think about Rob Brydon. The key image in this brand-new trailer, which was shown for the first time three or four days ago at ComicCon, is what I’m presuming is some kind of visualization of a wormhole. It looks to me like an overhead shot of a looping Santa Monica Freeway off-ramp covered in glowing butterscotch sauce and transposed to space.

This time Ben Stiller gets to play a double role (amiable Larry Daley plus an animal-skin-wearing cro-magnon guy) and there’s a trip to London. All that’s going on here is that everyone has been well compensated…that’s it, that’s the whole deal. The original Night at the Museum (’06) pulled down $250 million domestic and $320 million foreign for a grand tally of $571 million and change. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (’09) earned $177.1 million domestic and $236 million foreign for a total of $411,755,284. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (12.19.14) will probably make…what, $300 million worldwide? The best thing in this whole trailer is teensy-sized Owen Wilson and some other guy getting splashed with monkey urine. “C’mon…that wasn’t necessary!”

Stiller really, really needs to do another dryly humorous, low-key, low-grossing film like Greenberg again. Please.

In a 6.28 piece about the arrival of Zak, an 11 week-old ragdoll kitten, I wrote that occasionally foul-tempered Mouse (a.k.a., “Fatty”) and even good-natured Aura were hissing and very pissed off about this. Well, a month has passed and two things have happened. Aura has calmed down and is more or less okay with Zak, but Mouse has turned foul. He’s impossible. He won’t stop with the growling and the hissing and has more or less turned into a complete asshole. When he’s inside, I mean. He’s warm and friendly when I see him outside but his personality flips over when we’re in the pad because of Zak’s proximity. Mouse won’t sleep or hang out here — he only comes in for food and then growls and hisses and won’t stop kvetching until I let him out. He really hates me for bringing Zak into his realm, and he absolutely refuses to chill about it. But that’s what life asks of us now and then. Bend with the wind, go with the flow. I feel badly that Mouse has become an outside cat — pretty close to feral. No comforts of home, no TV-watching, no lolling around, no purring. I’m thinking of buying him a cat igloo so he can at least sleep in it from time to time. It’s rough. I figured he’d eventually adapt but he just won’t.

Mutt-and-Jeff comedies are always a little funnier, I think, when the characters are older than usual unless, of course, they’re playing serious dumbasses, in which case it’s not as funny as it could or should be. But what works, I think, is when one of the characters is in the grip of genuine self-loathing, and yet the kind of self-loathing that’s been pushed so far down that he’s not even aware that it’s there. Jason Bateman and Billy Crudup appear to be in their mid 40s or thereabouts. In ten years we’re going to see comedies about guys in their 50s still trying to grow up and act like adults.

An excerpt from Glenn Kenny‘s Phaidon/Cahiers Du Cinema’s “Anatomy of an Actor” book about Robert De Niro. Except that…well, the portion I’m interested in is lifted from the N.Y. Times. No biggie. Just saying.

“It was understood [during the shooting of Midnight Run] that Charles Grodin might have some opportunity to improvise. The ‘night boxcar scene,’ as Grodin calls it, was, he said, improvised entirely. The situation begins with Grodin shutting a boxcar door on De Niro’s face in an effort to escape him. De Niro, in the role of Jack Walsh, promptly boards the car from the other side — enraged.

“But, Grodin said of the scene, ‘We knew it had to end with De Niro revealing something personal about himself’ — the history of a wristwatch that has sentimental value. ‘How do you get to that point in a couple of minutes where he’s going to reveal himself? What do you say?’