I’m sorry but “I’m not a biologist” was definitely the wrong answer.

Last night Showbiz 411 reported that Oscar Isaac, the long-rumored lead in Francis Coppola‘s still-in-the-works Megalopolis, has “passed” on the role.

No one (myself included) is allowed to speculate negatively on this long-gestating project. We all want Coppola to hit Megalopolis out of the park, but we’re also speculating right now about what might have prompted Isaac’s departure.

I’ll tell you this much — Coppola needs to come up with a logline that won’t scare the shit out of prospective viewers. Because “a love story that’s also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man”…I intend to see Megalopolis no matter what, but that description does kinda scare me a bit. It would scare anyone.

Posted on 2.23.22: “I think Francis Coppola (whom I had the pleasure of doing a two-hour phone interview with 41 years ago) was one guy when he made The Godfather, The Conversation and The Godfather, Part II. He was a slightly different guy when he made Apocalypse Now, and a faintly altered version of the Apocalypse Now guy when he made One From The Heart. He was a whole different dude when he made Jack — that’s for damn sure. And a much different guy when he made Tetro and Twixt.”

I don’t want an Honest Trailers take on the Best Picture nominees — anyone can do that. I want an Honest Trailers take on the collapsing shit show that the Oscar brand has become over the last four or five years. Particularly the expertly-managed shrinking of the viewing audience, the mass indifference on the part of Millennials and Zoomers, the narrowing field (i.e., woke-icizing) of the nominees, the Oscars becoming the Left Coast Tony Awards, Film Twitter destroying prospective hosts like Kevin Hart, Academy members blowing off the most transportational fantasy film of 2021 as a Best Picture nominee, and the way last April’s Soderbergh show suffocated the Oscar glamour thing and did a brilliant job of channelling…never mind.

For six months Gold Derby’s weather-vane, damp-finger-to-the-wind reactives we’re ALL IN on The Power of the Dog winning the Best Picture Oscar, and then they all flipped around to CODA within the last 72 hours.

Friendo: “A good Oscar watcher doesn’t advocate or otherwise try to influence the race. You disagree with that, I realize. Right now awards season, writhing in the shadow of the massive awards machine that is Penske, is a hot bloated mess.”

Today is the last day of Oscar voting. HE hereby pleads with all last-minute procrastinators to please open your hearts and cast your all-important votes for Penelope Cruz’s straight-up soul serving in Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers. Many wise and good people (LAFCA, Venice Film Festival jury, other significant critics groups) stand with you.

From yesterday’s review of The Lost City: “One earmark of a sucky movie is that the bad guys have no personalities — no wit or flavor or stand-out attitude of any kind. The Lost City bad guys are the same exact stooges you’ve seen in a hundred other action films. Remember Richard Masur, Ray Sharkey and Anthony Zerbe‘s bad guys in Who’ll Stop The Rain (’78)? It never got any better than that. They were darkly funny, eccentric, deranged, vulnerable, and they never once winked.”