So according to Esquire‘s Tom Nicholson, a British writer, the top two Best Picture Oscar winners — the most highly placed, best liked and most revered by today’s standards — are Moonlight and Parasite. This is how things are right now.

I’m telling you right now Nicholson needs to be straightened out and maybe even slapped around. This kind of thinking…words fail. I worship Hitchcock’s Rebecca but it can’t be proclaimed as the fourth-best…stop it! Amadeus and The Shape Of Water in the top 20? Get outta here! And Moonlight at #1? This is almost too asinine to take potshots at. Nicholson’s list is beyond ridiculous — an expression of woke mental illness.

Herewith is my own Best Picture Oscar Winner list, and I’m certainly going to use the criteria that most…okay, a significant percentage of winners have fulfilled or satisfied to some degree, at least in an aspirational sense in addition to the usual political motives and moment-in-time considerations…

Not just (a) films that sought to achieve (and in some cases DID achieve) a stand-alone, movie-craft refinement or at least a kind of declarative, honed-down clarity or wholeness on their own terms, or…

(b) Films that captured or reflected something poignant (at least in passages) about the times in which they were made, but most fundamentally…

(c) Political winners-of-the-moment that hit or touched certain emotional G-spots that moved large swaths of the culture (not just the Hollywood community but moviegoers all over), movies that said “this, to some extent, is a concise, respectable and in some cases profound presentation of who and what we are, or at least what we’ve recently been through or would like to be…this Best Picture winner contains pieces of our saga, shards of our collective soul, elements of who we believe we are or would like to be deep down.”

The difference between then and now, of course, is that the “large swaths of nationwide movie culture” aspect has been removed — today’s Oscar nominees are totally about the uncertainties and preferences of a small community of terrified political sidesteppers who don’t know what to say or think but are totally terrified by what might happen if they say (or even think) the wrong thing. The sentiments of the rest of the country has been a side issue for a good 20 to 25 years…be honest.

Reasons to disagree or tell the Esquire guy to go fuck himself…

In some respects Gone With The Wind is a racist relic, obviously, but it still matters and is, in fact, still great because of the last half of Part One (the agony of battered Atlanta to “I’ll never be hungry again!”) and because it is NOT, in a deep-down sense, a saga of the Civil War but a reflection of the deprivations and terrible hardships of the Great Depression. And so I will certainly include Gone With The Wind somewhere in the top 30….you can beat me with bamboo sticks all you want but Hattie McDaniel‘s Mammy, at least, was a vivid and passionate human being who took no shit from anyone, least of all from Scarlett O’Hara.

Some Best Picture winners age well — some don’t. Slumdog Millionaire hasn’t aged well, and don’t even talk about Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Green Book is not a great film, but I will not dismiss or degrade it in any way, shape or form. It also belongs in the top 30.

And I must again remind that the last third of Moonlight (and particularly the casting of Trevante Rhodes) doesn’t work at all (sustained for years by one adolescent handjob on the beach!) and that it won largely if not entirely because of a collective, politically-driven, industry-centric need to refute the #OscarsSoWhite meme.

And I will certainly not give Parasite a high ranking because of the stupidest plot turn in the history of Best Picture winners…because of that drunken family of con artists deciding to admit into the home THE ONE PERSON ON THE FACE OF THE PLANET WHO COULD & ALMOST CERTAINLY WILL BLOW THEIR SCAM OUT OF THE WATER…cut the shit and admit that Parasite won because the industry wanted and needed to celebrate a filmmaker of color as well as a charming genre purveyor (monsters! a giant pig! a runaway train!)…a director who was a much better fit in these times of necessary wokeness than Martin Scorsese and his aging goombahs and his “Wild Strawberrries with handguns”…nope.

Friendo: “I can’t believe how much the political climate described in Albert Marrin‘s “A Time of Fear: America in the Era of Red Scares and Cold War” is like right now.

“The only difference is that it’s all totally flipped. The fear of Communism and Communist association has become the fear of racism or racist taint or anything offensive to the Left, or even that which seems to argue with Critical Race Theory…anything in that realm. But the methods are exactly, and I mean EXACTLY the same. Except for the absence (so far) of a HUAC-like Congressional examination and indictment committee.

“It’s not enough to succeed — one’s friends must fail.” — Somerset Maugham.

By the same token it’s vaguely or mildly satisfying to correctly predict Oscar winners, yes, but the real joy (or my real joy) comes from knowing that certain Oscar prognosticators or advocates got it wrong.

Like when Green Book won the Best Picture Oscar — a nice, emotionally poignant film about a parent-child relationship on the road had triumphed, fine, but the joy was in knowing that the Green Book haters (including Ingkoo Kang and Guy Lodge and the Indiewire wokesters) had been told by an Academy plurality to go fuck themselves.

The only Oscar moment that will deliver any kind of real suspense tonight is the Best Actress face-off between Viola Davis and Carey Mulligan.**

The bottom line is commonly understand all around: this is not a good year to be a white Oscar nominee, and so Viola, whose performance in Ma Rainey was, is and always will be a chore to sit through, probably has it in the bag. Unless Frances McDormand takes it, and that, no offense, will be a totally deflating “oh, God” moment if there ever was one.

But I’m hoping and praying for a Mulligan upset, not just because she and Emerald Fennell caught some kind of bottled lightning with the chilly but hardcore Promising Young Woman, and not just because I’ve been a Mulligan fan since I first saw her in An Education in January ’09, but also because — it almost makes me giddy to think about this — Variety‘s Clayton Davis has totally written Mulligan off.

So if Mulligan wins, great. But the real ecstasy will come from imagining the look on Clayton Davis’s face when and if Mulligan’s name is announced. I know it probably won’t happen, but a little voice in my chest is going “please please please please please.”

** Yes, I 100% concur that Andra Day gave the richest, most-lived-in lead-actress performance but it’s not in the cards for her, largely because The United States vs, Billie Holiday is no one’s idea of a good film.

Approximately 25% of “Crushed Dream Factory,” a 4.24 N.Y. Times column by Maureen Dowd:

“People are talking about the Oscars this year.

“Namely, how they won’t be watching. A lot of people don’t even realize the show, once an edge-of-your-seat American institution, is Sunday.

“Movie stars don’t exist anymore. Movies have been swallowed by TV and streaming. The theaters are on life support; even the ArcLight on Sunset Boulevard, one of the most beloved movie palaces in a town full of cinephiles, could not be saved.

“Norma Desmond’s everlasting declaration — ‘It’s the pictures that got small!’ — has never seemed more true.

“Sex, glamour, excitement and mystery are relics of a bygone era. Hollywood is now focused on worthy, relevant, socially conscious and lugubrious” — i.e., woke stuff.

“As a Hollywood writer friend of mine said after she watched Nomadland: ‘That was not entertainment. That was Frances McDormand having explosive diarrhea in a plastic bucket on a van.'”

I have to be honest: I didn’t love Thomas Vinterberg‘s Another Round.

I actually found it a tad boring. All those 40ish Danish guys sitting around getting gently bombed by candlelight. Yes, life can feel looser and “happier” and goofier when you’re drinking over dinner and in the evenings. I did that for decades, and I know all about rollicking good times followed by morning hangovers. But from a cinematic perspective I was quickly fed up by all those shots of guys raising their glasses, raising their glasses, etc. There’s more to life than sipping fucking alcohol all the time.

And the story….what was that? Better to be a jovial drinker like Roosevelt and Churchill, says Mads Mikkelsen‘s “Martin”, than a non-drinking mass murderer like Adolf Hitler. So he decides that living a life half-buzzed or seriously buzzed is a very pleasurable way to go. Until he descends into sloppy, bleary-eyed alcoholism, etc. Speaking as a nine-years-sober person, I just couldn’t sink into it.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman is another naysayer.

I’ve yet to sit down and settle in with Barry Jenkins‘ Underground Railroad, a ten-part limited series that will debut on 5.14. 12 Years A Slave, Antebellum, Harriet…is it fair to call 19th Century escape-from-slavery films a genre? It’s certainly fair to say that Jenkins is primarily respected as a visualist.

Posted yesterday (4.23) by VulcanReporter: Warner Bros. plans to gradually shut down its physical media production department. [An assortment of] Warner Bros-produced films and TV series will still receive Bluray and DVD releases, although they won’t be produced by WB itself.

The Warner Archive Collection brand, which focuses on classic titles, is heretofore on a death watch.

Any way you slice it physical media is getting the heave-ho in favor of HBO Max.

For their failure to publicly trash producer Scott Rudin and wash their hands of him a la Michael Chabon, N.Y. Times reporters Michael Paulson and Cara Buckley have outed several name-brand creators and performers who’ve worked with the notorious producer.

They are Denzel Washington, Laurie Metcalf and Jennifer Lawrence; directors Wes Anderson, the Coen brothers, Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig and Alex Garland; writers Aaron Sorkin and Lucas Hnath; and producer Amy Pascal.

The implication (and please correct me if I’m reading this wrong) is that the Times disapproves of their silence. (The boldfaced subhead reads “In an era of outspokenness, many artists remain silent.”) Another interpretation is that these artists believe that despite their presumed disapproval of Rudin’s behavior with subordinates, they feel it’s bad form to stick the knife in or otherwise dismiss a creatively respected collaborator.

They’re all probably on the same page as billionaire Broadway financiers Barry Diller and David Geffen, both of whom spoke to the Times.

Diller: “I don’t condone, nor am I an apologist for, actions relating to his work in his personal office, [although] separate and special consideration” should be given “to his work outside of that office.”

Geffen: Rudin has “a psychological problem that he needs to deal with if he’s going to work in the future. If his behavior doesn’t change [then working with him in the future] would be an easy no, [although] I don’t think a death sentence is called for if he gets the help he needs and his behavior changes.”

Maher: “A funny thing happened on the way to the old-age home. Biden slayed the Orange Dragon, and is now spearheading the most transformative administration since FDR. With an approval rating of 59%. Biden upped his game. He got better at age 78. What a mind-blowing concept [to] the younger generation for whom writing someone off because of their age is the last acceptable prejudice. They hate every -ism except ageism. It’s completely forbidden to tell any joke about race, gender, religion, weight…but age? Have at it.”

“What a steaming cauldron of New Jersey-ness…a stew of delusion, bad taste, poor behavior, deception, pretentiousness, hunger, greed, longing, love, desire, hoped-for identity, community…what a ’70s thrash-around!” — from a piece I wrote within the last decade.

Conjuring paycheck whores, back for more.

Time to re-invest in the ongoing saga of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who have both passed away in actuality. The Nun, Annabelle: Creation, Annabelle, The Conjuring, Annabelle Comes Home, The Curse of La Llorona, The Conjuring 2, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It…people keep paying and paying, the Conjuring players keep investing their money wisely, etc.

Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga show up, hit their marks, say their lines and people pay. So they do another one and people pay, etc.

The Conjuring Universe franchise “has grossed a combined $1.9 billion against a combined budget of $139.5 million, becoming the second highest-grossing horror franchise ever behind Godzilla.” I’m presuming that Wilson and Farmiga have serious points.

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It pops on 6.4.21.