HE answer: There’s no way SAG/AFTRA and the New Academy Kidz would give a Best Actor Oscar to a white Italian actor playing a brute beast who slaps his wife around.

Two days ago Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted to having read the proverbial writing on the wall and more or less bullhorned the following “whoa, Nellie!” message to Disney wokesters, which I’ve conveyed here in HE-styled rhetoric:

“All right, enough, dammit…we have to face facts…the Critical Drinker has been right all along and we have to acknowledge the state of things, or at least I do…the new Disney law is “no more woke propaganda in our movies”

“We’ve clearly alienated Joe and Jane Popcorn in the parenting community and we really have to get back to being good old family–friendly Disney, and in case you’re not reading me, we’ll henceforth be re-assessing the advisability of using LGBTQIA and maybe even progressive femme-bot material in our animated features. We’ll be taking it one step at a time.”

Sidenote: All hail Le Monde’s Arnaud Leparmentier, whose 11.29 article laid the situation on the line in a way that Variety or The Hollywood Reporter would never do.

From yesterday’s thread in response to yesterday’s HE piece about the mostly bizarre NYFCC awards (i,e., woke lapdogs panting over DEI picks):

I’m not saying that yesterday’s sudden loss of control of the facial muscles on the right side of my face and my mouth in particular…I’m not saying I look like Charles Laughton in The HHunchback of Notre Dame (‘39) but half of my facial features, which were fairly top-of-the-line when I was younger and at least pleasant in recent years…my looks are pretty much gone now, and if I was scheduled to see Sutton today I would be worried about alarming her. In the space of 24 hours I have suddenly become a mildly grotesque figure…I am now Richard III…dogs bark and howl as I pass by.

Before:

After:

Bonus points for anyone who can identify which film the above monster-in-the-mirror images are from. No, it’s not Martin Scorsese’s The Big Shave.

The exact same cosmic or celestial shift in the cathedral of the soul was experienced by Joseph Goebbels, Moses, Mouse (my Siamese cat who died of pancreatic cancer over 20 years ago), Amelia Earhart and Mother Teresa. Ascended or descended…the soup is hot, the soup is cold.

The legendary, less–than–beloved Henry Kissinger has died at age 100.

He was quite the influential diplomatic maestro during the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his bottom-line reputation has been disdained or at least debated for many decades, particularly by aged and post-traumatic residents of Cambodia and Chile and their descendants.

My own brusque opinion is that Kissinger was a brilliant, audacious, cold-blooded chess player whose initiatives and achievements were generally unaffected by humanitarian concerns.

From Sam Wasson’s just-published “The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story”: