Over the Christmas holidays I rented an Airbnb pad in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. It was actually a very small attic space above a penthouse loft. It had a bed and a desk and a chair and a small table. I couldn’t decide what was more amazing — the fact that the renter, a young woman, had the chtuzpah to charge $150 a night for this little nook or my willingness to pay it. Anyway I stayed there for seven or eight days, but on the fourth day — the night before Christmas Eve — a mishap occured. The desk chair I was sitting in collapsed. I wasn’t doing yoga or handstands or subjecting the chair to any undue strain. I don’t even weigh that much. The chair just said “I quit!” I didn’t tell the young lady immediately because (a) I live in a kind of right-brain dream state and the chair kind of vaporized for a few hours, and (b) I figured nothing could be done repair-wise until after 12.25 anyway.

Better late than never to the Wolf of Wall Street controversy, HuffPost’s Ricky Camilleri kicks it around with RogerEbert.com’s Glenn Kenny, Gawker‘s Rich Juzwiak and comedian Sara Benincasa. Also (after the jump): a discussion of the morning’s Oscar nominations (and yet oddly taped before and the noms were actually announced as well as during) with Out.com’s Michael Musto, film critic Kurt Loder and comedian Amanda Seales. Why not wait and tape a reaction to the nominations an hour or two after they’re been announced?

So American Hustle is going to take the Best Picture Oscar…right? And I’m probably going to win that $50 bucks from Glenn Kenny after all. Or will Gravity take it? I don’t think so. I think the David O. Russell payback factor that I mentioned a long time ago (the quality and popularity of The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook added to Hustle means he’ll be almost unbeatable) was one of the reasons Hustle took ten nominations. How odd that Russell’s biggest-ever Academy contender is a film that I like and respect but don’t really love.

The Movie Gods want 12 years A Slave to win Best Picture, naturally. As I do. As a lot of people do. Can the softies be guilt-tripped into admitting that the film’s moral force plus the stunning cinematic artistry injected by Steve McQueen and John Ridley overwhelms or at least balances out the cruelty and brutality? I’d like to think so but…

At 23, Jennifer Lawrence has now been Oscar-nominated three times — for Best Actress in Winter’s Bone in 2011 and Silver Linings Playbook last year (resulting in a win) and now for Best Supporting Actress in American Hustle. She’s the youngest actress ever to have been so honored. Plus she’s really rich and hot and everything else. I loved her in Hustle also, but the award should go to 12 Years A Slave‘s Lupita Nyong’o.

Congratulations to the films that landed the most Oscar nominations this morning — 10 for Hustle and Gravity, 9 for 12 Years A Slave, 6 for Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club and Nebraska, 5 for He and Wolf of Wall Street. And extra double triple quadruple congrats to Wolf of Wall Street‘s Jonah Hill, who surprised everyone (even me) with a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Only one smarty-pants Oscar prognosticator — The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg — predicted a Jonah nomination.

I’m tapping out a reaction piece to this morning’s Oscar nominations, but let’s take a minute to celebrate HE’s three “yay, team!” cartwheel cheers. One, the five nominations for The Wolf of Wall Street (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay). Two, the highly deserved but left-field surprise nomination that went to Wolf‘s Jonah Hill, whose chances weren’t looking very good this morning by the sheer measure of racetrack odds. And three, the shutout of Saving Mr. Banks across the board — no Best Picture nom, no Emma Thompson nom for Best Actress, no Tom Hanks nom for Best Supporting Actor, no Best Screenplay nom for Kelly Marcel…Banks shovelled the Disney corporate blah-blah, the hit pieces had their cumulative effect and Banks went down. (What say you, Scott Feinberg?) Serious question: Which Oscar advocates and columnist big-mouths can claim to have really beat the drum for Jonah, as I did from the get-go? Which Oscar prediction experts foresaw that he might be nominated this morning? This is a major what-the-eff? for the know-it-alls and a major triumph for Mr. Hill. Here’s a post-announcement chat between myself and Sasha Stone, recorded a little after 6 am this morning.

I landed in Salt Lake City at 6:45 pm, a shuttle dropped me off at the Park City condo around 8:30 pm, I unpacked my stuff and went right over to Fresh Market to stock up. At the checkout counter I ran into Indiewire critic Eric Kohn and five young critics (Carlos Aguilar, Robert Fowler, Mary Sollosi, Emma Myers, Kyle Burton) participating in a Sundance Institute Fellowship for Film Criticism and funded by the Roger Ebert Memorial Scholarship. (A sixth young critic wasn’t there.) The critics, chosen from roughly 400 applicants, are going to be reviewing films under Kohn’s guidance during the Sundance Film Festival as a kind of rough-and-tumble workshop. Tough deadlines, publicists, long ticket lines, party food, not much sleep, long hours…enjoy Sundance, guys!

(l. to r.) Eric Kohn and five of the six participating critics (l. to r.): Carlos Aguilar, Robert Fowler, Mary Sollosi, Emma Myers, and Kyle Burton…although I’m not 100% sure of the sequence of the names because Kohn sent a needlessly complicated email stating that the names should be regarded counterclockwise. Who says “counterclockwise”?? Everybody says “left to right” when they send along captions.

My Salt Lake City flight leaves in about three hours. No significant snow is expected in Park City for the next five days, which is disappointing. Maybe the lack of snow will cut down on the presence of skiiers on the city buses. Skiiing is great in and of itself but during the Sundance Film Festival there is nothing lower on the Park City social scale than skiiers. They sit on the buses like zombies, their eyes devoid of any apparent feeling or spark, and I sit across from them, not exactly filled with contempt but regarding them askance and muttering “one of the world’s greatest film festivals is going on right now and you’re here to ski?” Oh, and one other thing that I should have reported earlier but I only just read the report myself: Carol Rixey, the elderly proprietor of Park City’s Star Hotel who five years ago refused to honor my sentimental room reservation by leaving my cowboy hat at her establishment, passed away last May. She fell through a ceiling while repairing a floorboard in the attic of the hotel. Carol was 86. Condolences to her family and friends. I never blamed Carol for not only dismissing my cowboy-hat gesture but for becoming so alarmed by my articles about this misunderstanding that she gave my hat to the Park City police. Before this happened Carol treated me like family when I stayed at the Star in ’07 and ’08. She was kind and tough and never minced words.

Hat-tip to the Warner Home Video marketing guys for creating an original cover design for the forthcoming Bluray of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer (4.22.14) rather than use the old 1977 one-sheet concepts. Original art is S.O.P. with Criterion Blurays, of course, but corporate marketers tend to succumb to boilerplate instincts. That awful jacket design for the recently released Bluray of Shane, for instance.

I’m supposed to know my old movies, and yet the instant I saw this photo I realized that not only had I never seen The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947) but until last night I’d never even heard of it. There are always good reasons why movies disappear and never return. I’m presuming that however pleasing it might have seemed to moviegoers in late 1947 and ’48, Senator probably plays like a creaky comedy of manners. Forget about today — it probably had no social resonance five or ten years after it opened. It is one of thousands of respected studio-era films that nobody (not even classic film buffs) gives a damn about today. History is always a merciless critic. Only the truly world-class, creme de la creme efforts are remembered a half-century later. Ask yourselves — among the nine or ten Best Picture contenders vying right now, which will be remembered in 2065? Trust me, only The Wolf of Wall Street, Inside Llewyn Davis and 12 Years A Slave.

Presumably taken sometime in late December of 1947, or just after The Senator Was Indiscreet opened. George Sidney’s Cass Timberlane, another completely forgotten film that costarred Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner, was playing at Leows State.

Scott Feinberg‘s 1.15 Hollywood Reporter piece about recent anti-Walt Disney Facebook postings by Abigail Disney (grandniece of Walt, grandaughter of Roy Disney) is moot as far as the Oscar fortunes of Saving Mr. Banks are concerned. The case has been made over and over that Banks is a corporate whitewash that pampers Disney’s reputation and cheers his decision to ignore the complaints of the joyless, brillo-haired scold P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) in the creation of Mary Poppins (’64). The views of Academy members who’ve paid attention to these complaints and those who are committed to ignoring them in perpetuity are set in stone. Banks will probably be Best Picture-nominated and Thompson is a lock for Best Actress, but that’ll be the end of it.

The Razzies were a moderately amusing concept in the ’80s and ’90s, but the world has moved on. One reason they’re barely paid attention to is that worst of the year lists are ubiquitous online during December and early January, and whatever limited interest might exist in this post-relevant annual event (which attracted moderate attention when good sport Sandra Bullock accepted her Worst Actress award in person in 2010) has all but dissipated by the time of the presentation, which is always right before the Oscars per the scheduling of founder John J.B. Wilson. But the main reason the Razzies are roadkill is that they only go after easy prey. Where is the pizazz in announcing that Grown Ups 2, a piece of Adam Sandler sequel sausage that no one cared about to begin with, has acquired eight Razzies noms? The other worst picture nominations were won by The Lone Ranger, A Madea Christmas, After Earth and Movie 43.

Jimmy Fallon‘s Bruce Springsteen is really first-rate; arguably as good The Boss himself. This reminded me of the Joe Cocker-John Belushi SNL duet from…when was that, ’76 or thereabouts?

I trust I’ve made myself clear over the past several years. I love writing this column 24/7 but “the season” — the six-month period between Telluride/Toronto/Venice and the Oscars — is where the real fun and thrills lie. And yet the idea of this same period consuming huge amounts of time and energy and incalculable brain-wave activity in order to predict which films and filmmakers that members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will choose to give Oscars…what is that? I need to put this carefully. Covering the Oscar race pays pretty well, and for that I’m grateful. And I respect the fact that it’s a very, very difficult thing for a film to find sufficient acclaim to even get into the award-season conversation, much less become a finalist. There is real value in this, and each year serious payoffs are at stake. I don’t belittle this effort or the Oscar economy for a second.

But I do belittle the taste of those Academy members (i.e., not all) who have proven year after year that they have very little belief in serious Movie Catholicism, and that they basically regard the Oscars as a kind of high-school popularity contest. Yes, it’s always been this way but I think it might be getting worse. The King’s Speech and especially The Artist winning Best Picture took something out of me, and then the likable, perfectly efficient Argo after that…c’mon! And now the idea of an indisputable masterpiece like 12 Years A Slave possibly losing the Best Picture Oscar to a technically astounding, eye-popping thrill ride like Gravity plus the idea of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio having to do interview after interview to try and persuade the Hope Holiday contingent that The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t a celebration of vile behavior…I swear to God the doors of perception are narrowing.

Too many Academy members seem to favor films that provide an older person’s idea of emotional comfort (tearful sentiment, delivering some echo from their youth, resuscitating some facsimile of something well remembered) more than anything fresh or unusual or even semi-challenging. Not always but a lot of the time. This is partly if not largely due to the “deadwood” contingent — too many Academy members haven’t worked in the industry for too long, and their tastes are just too conservative and mildewed and doddering. Every year they bring everyone down.