The ten nominees for the Producers Guild of America’s Darryl F. Zanuck Award (equivalent to the Best Picture Oscar) are Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Judas and the Black Messiah, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Mank, Minari, Nomadland, One Night In Miami, Promising Young Woman, Sound Of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7. The shafted include The Father (easily one of the most carefully crafted alternate-reality films I’ve seen this century, one that doesn’t so much flip between reality and fantasy as one that deals old-man fantasy cards off the top and bottom of the deck) and News of the World. The champ will almost certainly be Nomadland. I’d be down with Chicago 7 becoming a surprise winner. The fact that Sound of Metal is the most spiritual film of the bunch…unfortunately that’s neither here nor there. I wish it were otherwise.

Everyone knows what it means to “do a Norbit” — it means possibly ruining your chances of winning an Oscar (as Eddie Murphy arguably did in 2006 and early ‘07) because you’ve given a downmarket, verging-on-hard-to-take performance in a coarse popcorn film released during award season and more precisely in the dumping ground of January and February.

Richard Brody Bulletin: Murphy’s Norbit performance is the 17th finest of the 21st Century.

From Richard Brody‘s “The Best Movie Performances of the Century So Far” (3.6.21), a perfectly written explanation of his #1 pick — Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Brody: “DiCaprio is the most paradoxical of actors. A star since he was a teenager, he built his career around his charisma and his gift for mimicry; in most of his early performances, he seemed to be impersonating a movie star, and slipped frictionlessly into his roles as if they were costumes, regardless of the physical difficulty they involved. With The Wolf of Wall Street, he finally achieved his cinematic apotheosis. In the role of Jordan Belfort, a super-salesman and super-con-man whose hedonistic will to power is one with his consuming fury, DiCaprio seemed to tap deep into himself, even if in the way of mere fantasy and exuberant disinhibition. He so heatedly embraced the role’s excesses that they stuck to him; he flung himself so hard at its artifices that he shattered them and came through as more himself than he had ever been onscreen; he and his art finally met.”

Jordan Ruimy: “Richard Brody is the Armond White of ultra-progressive cinematic Bernie Bros.”

From “Druggy Wolf of Wall Street Is New Scarface,” posted on 12.13.13:

I saw Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount, 12.25) for the second time last night, and it felt just as wild and manic as it did the first time. (And without an ounce of fat — it’s very tightly constructed.) And yet it’s a highly moral film…mostly. Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and all the rest are never really “in the room” with these depraved Stratton Oakmont brokers. They’re obviously juiced with the spirit of play-acting and pumping the film up and revving their engines, but each and every scene has an invisible subtitle that says “do you see get what kind of sick diseased fucks these guys were?…do you understand that Jordan Belfort‘s exploits redefined the term ‘asshole’ for all time?”

Why, then, did I say that Wolf is “mostly” moral? Because there’s a subcurrent that revels in the bacchanalian exploits of Belfort and his homies. It broadly satirizes Roman-orgy behavior while winking at it. (Or half-winking.) Unlike the Queens-residing goombahs in Goodfellas, whom he obviously feels a mixed affection for, Scorsese clearly doesn’t like or relate to the Stratton Oakmont guys. But the 71 year-old director also knows first-hand how enjoyable drug-abuse can be for cocky Type-A personalities in groups, and he conveys this in spades. Wolf is clearly “personal” for Scorsese. Like everyone else who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, he is believed to have “indulged” to some extent. (Whatever the truth of it, 1977’s New York, New York has long been regarded as a huge cocaine movie.) One presumes that Scorsese is living a sensible and relatively healthy life these days, but boy, does he remember!

From an English perspective, the Harry and Meghan story was always a primal one. We’ve all been educated to ignore and/or disdain issues concerning blood, tradition, ethnic heritage and tribal identity, but deep down many focus on these regardless. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex knew they were rattling that cage, and certain odious reactions from Harry’s family and the British tabloid press were enough to persuade the 30something couple to pull up stakes, leave England and set up a new base of operations in Montecito.

If Jackie Gleason‘s Minnesota Fats was watching last night’s Oprah, Meghan and Harry interview from the TV lounge at Ames Billiards, he’d probably say, “Big John? You think these kids are hustlers?” And then he’d smile and chuckle. And Big John would answer, “Yeah, hustlers but the snowflake kind.”

This morning (3.7) producer Robert Weide, Woody Allen‘s most exacting and persuasive defender, posted a fresh essay about Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick‘s strongly condemning, flagrantly unbalanced Allen v. Farrow.

Titled “The Interview That Never Happened“, the article was initially composed for “a major online publication” that wanted some balancing (i.e., mitigating) information and viewpoints as part of a piece on the HBO Max series. But then the publication changed course, Weide reports, and didn’t want to use his balancing info after all.

Weide knows all the ins and outs of the Woody, Mia, Dylan and Soon-Yi history, and the essay provides several sharp retorts to Dick and Zeiring’s assertions about Allen’s behavior and whatnot during the early 1990s.

Weide regards the filmmaking partners as “the winners of the Leni Riefenstahl Lifetime Achievement Award,” and the doc itself as “a one-sided hatchet job.” He’s not wrong about the latter.

However, at the beginning of paragraph #2 Weide states that he told the editor of the “major online publication” that he “wasn’t watching the series, but had heard reports from others who had seen all four episodes via press links.”

Nope — not good enough. The first three episodes of Allen v. Farrow are accessible now. All he has to do is turn on HBO or download the HBO Max app and watch them. As much as Weide knows the case from every conceivable angle, he can’t continue to dispute the content of Allen v. Farrow (which he has an absolute responsibility to do) without watching it.

HE congratulates Max Barbakow‘s Palm Springs, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and opened commercially last July, for winning the Critics Choice award for Best Comedy.

I don’t understand how anyone could’ve voted for this Sundance glee club film over Judd Apatow‘s The King of Staten Island, far and away a much better effort in terms of character, ground-level realism, dramatic construction and ace-level writing, is beyond me. Or Borat 2, for that matter.

It’s an indisputable fact that Palm Springs isn’t particularly good — a labored, haphazardly written, unfunny and occasionally callous thing. Here’s to a truly great time-loop comedy that was released 28 years ago, and to the judgment of today’s Critics Choice members. Here’s HE’s 7.10.20 review.

Some are still antsy or even fearful, but a N.Y. Times projection graph [below] indicates that things are looking up for the 2021 Telluride Film Festival, attendance-wise. Especially with the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine about to kick in.

7:15 pm update: Congrats to all winners of the 2021 Critics Choice Awards, and particularly to Nomadland (Best Picture), Chloe Zhao (Best Director), Chadwick Boseman (Best Actor, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Carey Mulligan (Best Actress, Promising Young Woman). Plus Best Original Screenplay — Promising Young Woman (Focus Features), Best Adapted Screenplay — Nomadland. Best Adapted Screenplay: Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures). Best Foreign Language Film — Minari (A24). Best Visual Effects — Tenet (Warner Bros). Best Visual Effects — Tenet (Warner Bros). Plus whatever & whomever I’ve overlooked.

5:20 pm update: Critics Choice members have handed their Best Comedy trophy to Max Barbakow‘s Palm Springs…God! I found more to like in The Prom than in Palm Springs, and that’s saying something. The finest feature comedy of 2021 was and always will be Judd Apatow‘s The King of Staten Island. followed in this order by Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and On The Rocks — those are the top three. What could have possibly been the motive among CC members in choosing Palm Springs? What is it, some generational thing? Has Scott Mantz been lobbying for it? If they didn’t care for Apatow’s film they could’ve at least gone for Borat 2.

Earlier: I’ve never played the awards-prediction game. I write about the good stuff, period, and couldn’t care less what the majority has gone for, particularly with the progressive woke virus permeating just about everyone and everything. You can always count on Critics Choice members to blow with the wind, and right now the prevailing winds are coming from Vichy.

That said, I voted for Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci in the Best Supporting Actor category — Judas and the Black Messiah‘s Daniel Kaluuya has won instead. For Best Supporting Actress I voted for The Father‘s Olivia Colman; in actuality Borat 2‘s Maria Bakalova has taken it. I voted for News of the World‘s Helena Zengel for Best Young Actor/Actress, but Minari‘s Alan Kim is the victor.

This Best Picture comparative rundown was posted by Sasha Stone. Boldface titles are those that were chosen by CC members and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts.

HE picks (posted a few days ago:

On 11.3, ex-NY Times reporter Alex Berenson tweeted an aghast response to an 11.2 Times piece (written by Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo, Amy Qin and Javier C. Hernández) about WHO Covid responses. “[This article] about how China has blocked the search into the origins of #sarscov2 is bizarre,” Berenson wrote. “It explains how the PRC (People’s Republic of China) won’t allow a real investigation, but DOES NOT EVEN MENTION the possibility of the virus [having] escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

When Nicholson Baker‘s “The Lab Leak Hypothesis” was published on 1.4.21 in New York magazine, I was hesitant. I didn’t exactly wave it away, but I was reluctant to accept the lab-leak notion. I was still clinging to “dirty dead bats in the Wuhan wet market” theory.

“What happened was fairly simple,” Nicholson wrote. “It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed.

“Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally or ‘zoonotically.’ They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.”

A little less than four weeks later, in the.1.29.21 edition of Real Time with Bill Maher, an assertion by biologist and evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein and his wife and colleague Heather Heying, co-authors of “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century”, backed up Nicholson. It made me feel very uncomfortable. Mainly because agreeing or even allowing for this possibility meant giving credence to a suspicion that Donald Trump had voiced for some time, which is that the odds that Covid might have originated with an accident out of a Wuhan lab (specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology). The odds of that having happened, Weinstein saidm, were roughly 90%.

Maher to Weinstein and Heying: “We’ve heard a lot recently about the possibility that the coronavirus did start in a lab. Let’s talk about that. The fact that there is this lab…I think it’s the only one in the world quite like it, [and located] in Wuhan, where the whole thing started. It would almost be a conspiracy theory to think it didn’t start in a lab.

“And that theory was demonized at first — ‘Oh, come on, that’s conspiracy thinking, that it started in the lab.’ But it’s certainly a 50-50…would you say that?”

Weinstein: “Oh, it’s far more likely than that. I think I said last June that the chances it came from a lab were about 90%. This was never a conspiracy theory. In fact that term was used to simply make it go away. It’s an obvious hypothesis that is in need of testing, and we are only now, a year [into the pandemic], getting to the point where we can discuss it out loud without being stigmatized.”

This morning I watched a two-month-old “Joe Rogan Experience” with Berenson, and again I was thinking that it felt real. No proof and no smoking gun, but the fact that the mainstream liberal media won’t even touch this because they feel it would make them sound racist…I’m feeling more and more suspicious about this whole thing. It makes me sick to be anywhere close to the same side of this issue as Trump, but I can’t let my anti-Trump revulsion be the end-all and be-all.

When the facts come out from the New York Attorney General’s report on allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviors concerning Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the general conclusion will be the same: However anyone slices it, Cuomo appears to have behaved in an astonishingly clueless way with…what is it, four or five accusers?

The #MeToo movement has been up and rolling for three years and change, and somehow Cuomo, a high-profile politician constantly under media glare, thought he could be casually handsy and familiar and whatnot? How hard could it have been for Cuomo to understand that shit doesn’t work any more?

There’s one thing that nobody’s mentioned, partly because it would sound cruel or below-the-belt to do so. But here goes anyway: Gov. Andrew Cuomo doesn’t look like Brad Pitt, George Clooney or Cary Grant in their respective heydays. Nor does he look like Chris Cuomo.

Another way to put it is that Gov. Cuomo is somewhat homely. I think it’s fair to say that, and I think most of us understand two things: (1) Because of their looks and magnetism and ease with women throughout their lives, Pitt, Clooney and Grant put out vibes that most women regard as alluring, cool, gentle and for the most part good to be around. Generally speaking it’s very hard (but not impossible) for guys in Pitt, Clooney and Grant’s league to offend women by showing interest or in some instances even coming on to them. It’s also relatively easy for a homely man to generate a stand-offish or negative reaction from same.

An hour ago I felt a spark of humor in a familiar notion — i.e., derogatory nicknames of failed movies and Broadway shows. And then it died.

I’ve never been much for laughing out loud (I’m basically an LQTM-er) so it means something when I blurt out a chuckle while experiencing a mild chest spasm, and that’s what happened at 6:10 am when I was reading a Wiki bio of lyricist Alan Jay Lerner (My Fair Lady, Brigadoon, Camelot). In May ‘83 a Lerner-directed B’way musical (co-created with Charles Strouse) called Dance A Little Closer opened and closed the same night. Wags called it Close A Little Faster.

I was immediately reminded of a John Travolta-Scarlet Johansson relationship film called A Love Song for Bobby Long (Lionsgate, 1.21.05). Directed by Shainee Gabel and set in New Orleans, the 120-minute film, which tanked after earning a 43% RT rating, was dubbed Bobby Way Too Long.

Now I can’t think of any others. C’mon! I did a Google search…zip. I know they’re out there. Please.

One more Alan Jay Lerner-ism. The famed lyricist and librettist was married eight times. Quote from one of Lerner’s ex-wives: “Marriage is Alan’s way of saying goodbye.” That’s funny! I’m sorry but it is.

“Near the conclusion of North by Northwest, Cary Grant finds himself in something of a pickle.

“His true love, Eva Marie Saint, is dangling helplessly in space on the face of Mount Rushmore. If she falls, splat. The reason she has not fallen is that Grant is holding her with one hand while with the other he grabs a rock ledge. Not easy. Watching all this is Martin Landau, the subvillain, who stands a few feet away, holding the precious statuette that contains valuable microfilm inside, said microfilm being of great danger to America should it fall into enemy hands. Grant, desperate, looks up at Landau and asks for help.

“Landau walks over to Grant and, instead of bending down and aiding him, puts his foot on Grant’s fingers and begins pressing down. He grinds his shoe down as hard as he can.

“That’s the pickle.

“Now, between that moment and the end to of this superb Ernest Lehman-Alfred Hitchcock collaboration, the following occurs:

a) Martin Landau is made to cease and desist.
b) Grant saves himself.
c) Grant also saves Eva Marie Saint.
d) The two of them get married.
e) The microfilm is saved for America.
f) James Mason, the chief villain, is captured and handed over to the authorities.
g) Grant and Saint take a train ride back east.

“That’s a lot of narrative to be successfully tied up. And I would like you to guess how long it takes in terms of screen time for it to be accomplished. Got your guess? Here’s the answer…

“Forty-three seconds.

“I don’t know of a more adroit ending to a film.” — from a passage in William Goldman‘s “Adventures in the Screen Trade.”

I’m sorry to argue with Bill, but check the time code. If you start exactly at the moment when Landau puts his foot on top of Grant’s hand (1:20) and end exactly at the moment when the film goes to black as Bernard Herrmann‘s music crashes to a finish and the train surges through the tunnel (2:20), the elapsed time is 60 seconds.