“Last year’s woke Soderbergh Oscar telecast was the nadir…we realize that. The Oscars had been losing steam anyway, but the Union Station awards put a fork in it. In one fell swoop we destroyed whatever allure the Oscars once had.

“But this year will be different. We recognize it’s a live event television show and we must prioritize the television audience to increase viewer engagement and keep the show vital, kinetic, and relevant.” – A half-imagined quote from AMPAS honcho David Rubin.

John Mulaney’s SNL standup last night was excellent stuff. Delivered in his usual dry, ironic fashion, it was mostly about a drug dependency intervention that happened in late ‘20. It reminded me of my own ridiculous adventures in depravity, which I recalled four years ago in a piece called “Clam Chowder Sunday.”

From Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (‘69) — written by William Goldman, performed by Strother Martin.

At the 34th annual USC Scripter awards, which honor scriptwriters and original source material authors as a tag team, The Lost Daughter‘s Maggie Gyllenhaal and novelist Elena Ferrante shared the top prize.

Which struck some of us as mildly surprising. It had been presumed in some quarters that Jane Campion‘s screenplay for The Power of the Dog, based on the same-titled 1967 Thomas Savage novel, would win instead, given Campion’s expected Best Director Oscar win plus Dog being well positioned to snag the Best Picture Oscar.

So does it mean anything that the Dog team fell short? Probably not but…

The other three film nominees were Passing, by Rebecca Hall and based on the book by Nella Larsen; Eric Roth, Jon Spaiths and Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune screenplay, based on Frank Herbert’s novel; and Joel Coen’s adaptation of William Shakespeare‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Last night (Friday, 2.25) Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke at the third annual America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, organized by white nationalist figurehead Nick Fuentes.

As Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep. Paul Gosar speak at this white supremacist, anti-Semitic, pro-Putin event, silence by Republican Party leaders is deafening and enabling.

All Americans should renounce this garbage and reject the Putin wing of the GOP now. pic.twitter.com/6fgpV6ohZ8

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) February 26, 2022

“In Ohio, Senate candidate and Trump loyalist J.D. Vance said on a podcast that ‘I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,’ and tweeted that ‘our leaders care more about Ukraine’s border than they do our own.’

“Fox’s most popular host, Tucker Carlson, pooh-poohed the idea that Putin is an enemy: ‘Why do I hate Putin so much?’ he said. ‘Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?'” — from Marc Fisher‘s 1.25 Washington Post story “How Republicans moved from Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ to Trump’s praise for Putin”

Donald Trump is a traitor and a national security threat. https://t.co/ymkBH4BdRO

— VoteVets (@votevets) February 27, 2022

In the same way that I re-watched Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion when the pandemic began in March 2020, I feel like re-watching Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, a 2017 doc about the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine from 11.21.13 to 2.23.14.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review:

Regional friendo: “I finally got around to watching CODA. Maybe I missed something?  It plays like a randy after-school special with fart jokes and broad sitcom sex jokes.  The rising above one’s station in life is nothing new.  It’s all played very safe.  More cloying than moving.  I’m probably in the minority. It’s one of those films that is nearly critic-proof. If you knock it, then you probably hate kittens, puppies, Santa, and kids. It reeks of ‘TV movie’. Nothing worse than calculated sentimentality and cheap emotional scenes. I’d rather spend more time with the Guccis than this crowd.”

HE comment: I was irked by the beginning of the Berklee School of Music audition scene, when it initially appears as if Emilia Jones‘ character is choking (i.e., lack of confidence). This is a cheap device that some directors resort to — the big moment arrives and our lead protagonist has to deliver or die, and it seems as if he/she is going to drop the ball but then…recovery! Mimi Leder‘s On The Basis of Sex pulled the same crap when Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) is about to deliver a big argument before the Court of Appeals, and seems to hesitate and stammer before getting it together.

Bill Maher: “Republicans don’t see Russia meddling in our elections as a bad thing…they see it as white people helping white people.”

Bret Stephens: “You talk about Joe Biden’s opportunity to turn around his Presidency…to remind us that he is the leader of the free world, and [that] the free world means something, and one of the things it means it that we’re an open society…open to people of every background and skin color and ethnicity and religion, and he is going to [channel his authority] against all enemies, foreign and domestic, but the greatest enemy is foreign, being Xi Jinping of China of Vladimir Putin of Russia, and domestic enemies who want to tear the country apart…by turning it into a facsimile of what they imagine Russia to be.”

HE to Friendo: “Do you really believe that the best response is to prattle on about sanctions and post condemning tweets about Putin’s cruelty and moral depravity? To basically just watch this carnage while saying ‘oh, nom this is so horrible?’ The moment seemingly requires a more forceful and engaged response than talking about sanctions and seizing Putin’s assets.

“How many hundeds or thousands of innocent people are about to suffer violent death because of this maniac? Is it really that crazy to talk about doing something to save Ukrainians from the horror at their doorstep?

“In all seriousness, a concerted effort should be made to kill Putin. Slit his throat, cut him to ribbons, blow him into pieces. Seriously. He’s a madman, a bringer of death, a killer of innocent sheep. What he’s doing now is no better than Hitler invading Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Send in MI6 or Ethan Hunt and the Mission Impossible team or some kind of Day of the Jackal stealth assassin (Edward Fox) and end his life. Tom Cruse joined a Herman high command plot to kill Hitler in ‘43 — this is the same kind of thing. We approved of what Cruise tried to do. How can we not approve of a Putin hit?

I’m perfectly serious. If Hitler and his fellow high-command fanatics had been iced in ‘42, Rommel and other sensible Germans could have taken charge and wound things down. How many imprisoned Jews could have been saved if Hitler had been disposed of?

Friendo to HE: “You’ve officially watched too many movies, Jeff. Or, at least, believed too many of them. You think this is going to be solved by Ethan Hunt killing Putin? If it were that easy, we would do it. But it’s fantasy.”

HE to Friendo: “If this was 1941 or ’42, you would have written the same. ‘You’ve officially watched too many movies, Jeff. Or, at least, believed too many of them. You think this is going to be solved by Walter Pidgeon killing Hitler in Fritz Lang’s Manhunt? If it were that easy, we would do it. It’s fantasy.”