Two days ago I had one of those Hollywood Elsewhere this-is-how-things-look-now spitball discussions with Blackfilm.com‘s Wilson Morales. We didn’t digress into personal passions or dig into any subject with any kind of corkscrew device. We just hopped from category to category, assessing and yap-yapping and skimming across the pond. But we didn’t beat around the bush either. Hanks (Best Actor) vs. Hanks (Best Supporting Actor), Nyong’o vs. Winfrey, the Dern calculus, etc. If nothing else our chat reminded me to (a) give serious thought to Captain Phillips costar Barkhad Abdi as a Best Supporting Actor contender and (b) Jennifer Garner as a Best Supporting Actress contender for her performance in Dallas Buyer’s Club. Again, the mp3.

Late Thursday afternoon I spoke to 12 Years A Slave screenwriter John Ridley about…well, everything I could think of. The critical acclaim, Ridley’s expert recreation of formal mid 19th Century dialogue (which I haven’t heard done this well since Ed Zwick‘s Glory), the milqetoast pushback factor (i.e., older industry voices expressing reluctance to sit through Slave’s “tough medicine” scenes), Ridley’s Jimi Hendrix film All Is By My Side. For some inexplicable reason I didn’t ask Ridley about one of Slave‘s most riveting scenes — a wordless, almost agonizing moment between Chiwetel Ejiofor‘s Solomon Northup character and a woman with whom he briefly has sex, both of them desperate to escape their tormented reality as slaves. No love, no familiarity, no intimate connection — their coupling is strictly about “we’ve gotta get ourselves out of this situation for at least a couple of minutes.” In the annals of sex scenes it’s classic stuff, and is one of the reasons Ridley is sure to land a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Again, the mp3.

12 Years A Slave screenwriter John Ridley.

My ten-hour flight from LAX left yesterday at 5:55 pm, touched down at Heathrow today at 12:15 pm. Long overnight flights in coach are never pleasant. Heathrow Express to Paddington Station (20 pounds), Circle Line to Sloane Square. Bought an umbrella. Filing as fast as I can in my Kings Road flat right now before heading over to BFI London Film Festival headquarters to pick up my pass. Galavanting tonight. The press screening of Saving Mr. Banks happens tomorrow morning at 10 am. Variety critic Scott Foundas is travelling from Lyon (where he’s been attending Thierry Fremaux‘s Institut Lumiere Festival) to London tonight or early tomorrow morning to review Banks. As mentioned earlier, the Disney embargo forbids reviews before 11 pm Sunday (or 3 pm L.A. time).

Circle Line platform at Paddington Station — Saturday, 10.19, 1:35 pm.

Near intersection of Kings Road and Edith Grove.

I naturally presumed that John Turtletaub‘s Last Vegas (CBS Films, 11.1) would be just another wank — a slightly tamer Hangover for 60somethings with the usual old-fart, where-did-I-put-my-Viagra? jokes. Well, it’s better than that. I found it mostly likable, amiable, fast on its feet. Michael Douglas and Robert DeNiro do well enough by their roles, but Kevin Kline and Morgan Freeman really kick up their heels. (Costar Mary Steenburgen also comes off nicely.) Dan Fogelman‘s script is up to much more than just a series of crude, low-rent gags. HE regulars might recall guessing which of the four revelers will buy it in the end. I’m not spoiling anything but it’s always pleasant when a film doesn’t do the expected thing. There’s a no-review embargo until late October but I told one of publicists they’re making a mistake with that. The word on this is going to be at least half-decent.

I’m not doing too well here. I have to leave West Hollywood for my LAX-to-London flight in roughly 75 minutes (i.e., by 3:30 pm) and as usual I’m trying to jam in a couple of extra stories before I do that. And of course I haven’t packed yet, much less showered. 5:30 pm update: I made the flight although there’s some official doubt about whether my suitcase will be loaded in time. Heathrow arrival around noon Saturday (4 am L.A. Time). Ten hours of coach-class hell.

The response last month to Dallas Buyer’s Club (Focus Features, 11.1) among Toronto Film Festival journos was that it’s a very good film containing two award-calibre performances — Matthew McConaughey‘s as Ron Woodruff, the real-life Texan who became a renegade supplier of unapproved AIDS-fighting medications after being diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1986, and Jared Leto‘s as Rayon, Woodruff’s drag-queen ally who helps him with distribution among the gay community. But I changed my mind after seeing it again last at the Academy. Because it sank in deeper and I teared up a bit. Jean-Marc Vallee‘s disciplined direction and Craig Borten and Melissa Wallack‘s tightly woven but natural-flowing screenplay deliver a compelling humanist current. I came away thinking that this has to be in the Best Picture arena. I was too whipped to absorb it fully in Toronto. Seeing it fresh and rested last night turned things around.

(l. to. r.) Jennifer Garner, Jared Leto, Mathew McConaughey on stage before last night’s Dallas Buyer’s Club screening at the Academy.

I explained myself a bit more this morning in the discussion thread for yesterday’s riff about what I called the “Guru Consensus Virus.” Here’s what I said: “I’m just talking about conversation drivers and that subtle but very familiar process in which online pundits leave a certain film off their Best Picture contender list (Grantland‘s Mark Harris did this two or three days ago to All Is Lost) and/or put it at the bottom of their list of likelies, and before you know it that very good and deserving film is on the downslide and more or less dead.

“Some of us are covert List Queens and others (like me) are upfront about it. Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby are the two big destination sites for award-season List Queens.

Here’s a brief scene from William and Tana Rose‘s original 500-page script for Stanley Kramer‘s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which will be released in its longest and most complete form ever on a Criterion Bluray that will “street” on 1.21.14. This scene was either never shot or was in an early version that was never screened for audiences. It’s a semi-funny bit that actually has a point, which comedies used to offer from time to time. The fact that “Dingy” Bell (Mickey Rooney) and “Benjy” Benjamin (Buddy Hackett) are oblivious to the allure of a busty lady in a bikini…fill it in.

At this stage MCN’s Gurus of Gold charts are supposed to be predicting likely nominees for the Best Picture Oscar, even though we all know that Guru charts are not only a conversation point but a conversation driver. You know, I know and they know that Guru charts have a way of pushing the notion of this or that Best Picture favorite into people’s heads. And yet The Gurus always pretend they’re sitting in the bleachers and watching the rodeo and predicting which cowboys will be thrown off their horses and which will score the most points when in fact they are the rodeo as much as anything or anyone else. They’re right down there in the dust, riding those broncos and those steers and scraping their shins and knuckles.

Earlier today the London Film Festival and the Disney people laid down an 11 pm embargo for Sunday’s Saving Mr. Banks screening, which will screen at 10 am Sunday at the Odeon Leicester Square. They didn’t say anything about tweeting but formal reviews won’t pop until 6 pm New York time and 3 pm L.A. time. They’re requiring critics to sign an embargo form prior to the screening.

“It’s almost becoming an open secret in Hollywood about how good Banks is,” writes Hitfix‘s Greg Ellwood in a piece called “Will Saving Mr. Banks Crash The Best Picture Race?” Ellwood says he’s “talked to a number of people who’ve seen it (cough, long lead my eye) and it’s continually described as a tearjerker with praise not only for Emma Thompson‘s [lead] performance, but supporting players Tom Hanks (long assumed), Colin Farrell and even Paul Giamatti, who plays Travers’ Hollywood driver. Could Banks split the votes between Gravity and 12 Years A Slave and sneak through for the win? That would certainly be a nice spoonful of sugar in Disney’s cap if it did.”

HE congratulates Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci for going semi-cockatoo (i.e., Weight Watchers) and dropping 50 pounds. The main thing, he says, not to eat “like such a fucking fat pig all the time. It’s as simple as that. I’ve been on Weight Watchers for the last year and a half, and that’s about it. I’m not looking for congratulations. I’m trying to tell you this is something you can do too. I have no willpower. I have bad habits and I’m lazy as hell. My job involves getting out of bed and walking to my computer and sitting in front of that computer all day long. I love lots of bad food. But if a jerk like me can lose 50 pounds (and counting), you should have no problem at all.”

After Five Easy Pieces (’70) it was presumed that director Bob Rafelson held mountains in the palm of his hand. Then he made the moody and meandering (if curiously brilliant) The King of Marvin Gardens (’72) and a lot of people said “uhm, wait…what?” Rafelson never fully recovered, but at least Bruce Dern, 35 at the time, delivered a career-high performance as Jason, a vaguely deranged, self-destructive con man and the brother of Jack Nicholson‘s David, a gloom-head Philadelphia radio talk-show personality, and, in the view of Jason’s abused girlfriend Sally (played by Ellen Burstyn), “full of shit!” In one pithy moment, Scatman Crother‘s Lewis character says, “Jason talks and Lewis knows.” But that seedy, chilly, desaturated Atlantic City delivers a hell of a metaphor (and almost a kind of backstory). Gardens is part of a ongoing Bruce Dern series at BAM.