After seeing Sing Sing early last June I didn’t have the courage to say what I really thought about its Best Picture chances. I said it would “probably end up with a Best Picture nom…maybe.”

Be honest — the words “probably” and “maybe” are sometimes squishy chickebshit terms used by equivocating jellyfish.

What I wrote may have been an accurate assessment of where Oscar pundits and industry voters might be coming from as the second half of 2024 unfolds, but I chickened out by not saying what I really thought, which is that achey-heart, leaky-eyed Colman Domingo delivers a stand-out performance but the movie more or less just lies there. It’s a well-intended shoulder shrugger, and everyone knows this.

9.19 World of Reel comment thread:

HE to Rufus: Maestro is a masterful, one-of-a-kind biopic. Bradley Cooper tried so hard, achieved so much. Portions are dazzling, swoon-worthy, genius-level. Carey Mulligan’s performance is for the ages.There’s something deeply wrong with anyone calling it “a complete dud.” In all honesty, YOU’RE a complete dud in this respect. Throw yourself upon the church steps, weeping, and beg God the Father for forgiveness.

Over the decades many of the Kennedy men (Joe Sr., JFK, Teddy) have been hounds, and RFK Jr. has been no exception.

But nothing apparently “happened” between himself and New York‘s doghouse-dwelling Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi (no hugging, no hand jobs, no lips or tongues). They just…what, text-flirted? This, in any event and in the view of her employers, constitutes a serious breach of journalistic ethics on her part.

There’s more to this than what’s been said. Don’t reporters and profilers routinely try to get famous people to lower their guard by vibe-flirting with them? (Not with any sexual intent but with a charm-school attitude.) Don’t famous people routinely try to get journalists to “fall” for them, so to speak, in order to be more favorably profiled?

New York magazine statement sent late yesterday to THR‘s Carly Thomas and Katie Kilkenny:

“Recently our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures.”

In HE’s book, a “personal” relationship alludes to fluids.

THR: “New York Magazine didn’t name Kennedy, but people familiar with the matter told Status‘ Oliver Darcy that Nuzzi did not proactively disclose her alleged relationship with Kennedy (Darcey clled it “inappropriate”) and that the magazine only recently learned of it. Darcy reported that the alleged relationship started around the new year, after Nuzzi’s November 2023 profile on the former presidential candidate.

In the comment thread that followed yesterday’s piece about Netflix’s official launch of Karla Sofia Gascón’s Best Actress campaign for Emilia Perez, HE reader “NPalma759”, seemingly irked, posted a question:

HE reply: A Best Supporting Actress Oscar is less of a big deal…it’s a little more elastic or experimental or in some cases a “here I am” greeting-card thing. Miyoshi Umeki for Sayonara…Donna Reed for From Here to Eternity…that line of country.

A Best Actress Oscar is or can be monumental, at least in voters’ heads. When a name-brand actress wins one, it can be fairly stated and without hyperbole “now she belongs to the ages.”

Young Jennifer Lawrence entered that hallowed realm when she deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar for her passionate eccentric nutter in Silver Linings Playbook, performed when she was only 21. But Lawrence scored like a champ, and in the same guns-blazing way that young Mikey Madison (25) managed for her lead role in Anora. Madison is fated to win the Best Actress Oscar early next year or I’m a monkey’s uncle.

A Best Supporting Actress Oscar is fine and fully noteworthy, but it’s “not quite Ivy League” in the Richard Masur sense of that term — it’s something else — call it a career launcher (Mercedes McCambridge in All The King’s Men), a respectable milestone, a you-go-girl salute…it can be a tribute to a wowser blast-off performance by a respected veteran (Beatrice Straight in Network) or a passing fancy applause for a newcomer…an eye-opener, a cluck-cluck, an approval-meter surge.

In this sense I would’ve been fine with (or would have at least understood) Lily Gladstone’s Molly Burkhart performance taking the 2023 Best Supporting Actress Oscar. I would have felt badly for the most deserving winner, The Holdovers’ Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who in fact won) but I would’ve gone along with it.

You can’t just elbow your way into the Best Actress realm as a strategic woke poker player…you have to show a tiny bit of reverence for the heart and soul histories…if you believe in Movie Catholicism and if you’re part of that dwindling fraternity that believes (or once believed) that movie theatres are churches, you really shouldn’t use a Best Actress Oscar campaign as a means to promote or validate or celebrate a formerly marginalized identity. It lowers the property values when you do that. It’s called “gaming the system.”

Variety’s Clayton Davis ran the exclusive at 9:55 am Pacific: Netflix will campaign Emilia Perez’s Karla Sofia Gascon for Best Actress. Because Karla’s titular character is trans, and so is Gascon herself.

Does anyone remember Fred Zinnemann’s Julia (‘77)? Vanessa Redgrave played the titular character, but she was campaigned for Best Suppprting actress because…wait for it…she played a supporting role. And she won.

Steve McQueen‘s Blitz is obviously a curio — McQueen imposing a “presentism” take upon the London blitz — i.e., German bombing between 9.7.40 to 5.11.41. McQueen is too good of a filmmaker for the end result to be mediocre, but given the avoidance of Venice and Telluride one presumes it’ll probably underwhelm on some level. No reviews until the big London Film Festival debut (10.9.24). Limited theatrical bookings on 11.1., followed hy streaming on Apple TV+ on 11.22.24.

HE’s very first thought about this trailer for Bong Joon-ho‘s obviously problematic Mickey 17 (Warner Bros., 1.31.25) was “whoa…RPatz is starting to look 40ish…38 years old, no longer a spring chicken.”

My second thought was “why is Warner Bros. insisting on releasing this weird-ass movie in January?” Answer: They’re not releasing it as much as dumping it. It’s probably too broadly eccentric and cult filmy, and the distribution team is scared. Bong Joon-ho has overplayed his alleged genius hand, and now the chickens have come home to roost.

My own humble opinion: This is karmic payback for that scene in Parasite in which the drunken con artists let that fired maid inside the home during the rainstorm. The Movie Godz said “Bong has to pay for that, and so what’s happened to Mickey 17 is only fair.”

Where exactly is the “universality” in several sad, lonely, frustrated Texans listening to Hank Williams and making do with life in a small, one-horse town that’s on the verge of extinction?

Yes, Peter Bogdanovich conveyed compassion for Cloris Leachman‘s character while Mike Nichols allegedly conveyed a certain contempt for Anne Bancroft Mrs. Robinson, but how or why does that make Bogdanovich’s film better?

I’m thinking of that “let’s talk about art” / “let’s not talk at all” hotel room scene between Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman. Raw, scalding and quite sad.

TLPS is slower, artier and more poignant and windswept, okay, but Nichols’ film connected with tens of millions back in the day. It touched a major nerve — strongly echoing what boomers felt about their materially driven, greatest generation parents and their mid ‘60s values — while TLPS was…I don’t know, more solemn and lethargic.

I adore Ben Johnson’s “old times” soliloquy at the fishing pond. But then, of course, Sam the Lion succumbs to a stroke.

Where are all these residents of Anarene, Texas headed? How much more humdrum and downish can their lives get? What’s life without a dream, right? What are they gonna do, commit mass suicide with grape juice cyanide in paper cups?

Keep your head down, accept the Marvel gay-washing, go along with it. Why fight it?

And because Donald Trump, reprehensible scumbag that he is, isn’t pushing the woke femmebot / Kamalot/ LGBTQ narrative, which is that “young straight guys need to shut up and stay on the margins or, you know, sit in the back of the bus…no offense.”

HE to Hightower: Mike Nichols was a sharp, witty, obviously gifted director. A bit of a snob, perhaps, but the man who helped create that brief Santa Barbara gas station scene was obviously not driven by a “mean” mindset or social callousness.

That guy who played the gas-station attendant was directed in just the right way. A genius-level cameo if I ever saw one. “Do ya need any gas, father?”

Mr. Hightower knows full well that most upper middle class teens and twentysomethings lived in their own membranes in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Kids who hail from relative comfort and affluence have always thought and lived this way. Benjamin Braddock and Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodson are two peas in a pod.

Mr. Hightower also knows that if The Graduate had focused more on caring and social activism or if Ben had mentioned an interest in civil rights or a Bob Dylan song or getting stoned or the Vietnam War the film would have been saddled with dated views and attitudes, and would mean a lot less to 21st Century viewers.

I obviously don’t mean Anne Bancroft Jr. but, you know, present-tense film buffs with at least a faint awareness of what happened in movies starting in the mid to late ‘60s until the early ‘80s tits-and-zits genre. Cinema fans who might have at least glanced at a review of Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution.”

The Graduate wasn’t just a smart, popular social satire that popped in late ‘67. It tapped into a tsunami of generation–gap feelings (plastics vs. rebellion, rebirth vs. tired cynicism) and constituted as much of a social earthquake flick as Easy Rider or Jaws or Star Wars or any other landmark social zeitgeist film from the last half-century or so.

It’s one thing for yesterday’s Zoomer girl (aka “Anne Bancroft, Jr.”) to have never sat down and watched The Graduate but to have never even fecking heard of it? C’mon, man. We’re all obliged to have at least a passing acquaintance with how things were in our grandparents’ heyday. When I was 15 I had at least heard of D.W. Griffith and Buster Keaton and The Shiek and Theda Bara and the 1926 death of Rudolph Valentino and King Vidor’s The Big Parade, etc.

There is no wokeness in The Graduate, granted. It’s basically about a young guy coming to find his own path and values instead of performing for his parents and satisfying their expectations.

Every generation goes through this.

If there’s a perception problem among Zoomer and Millennial women it’s that Katharine Ross’s Elaine seems, by today’s standards, to be a little bit of a hip kewpie doll or even a college-educated airhead. A daughter of wealth and privilege, she doesn’t seem to examine things all that deeply. She seems way too casual-minded about getting married to this or that guy.

But before feminism came along in the late ‘60s and ‘70s Elaine represented a fairly common mindset among younger, middle-class women.

I fell into a yeah-whatever, low-energy chat with a couple of Zoomer women (early to mid 20s) earlier today. We mainly discussed 2024 NYFF flicks vs. recent Cannes and Telluride headliners.

One of them resembled the young Anne Bancroft, except her hair was longish (close to the length of Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson) and blonde instead of gray-streaked. She didn’t have Bancroft’s Bronx accent but kind of a tough-but-bruised Italian-girl vibe. I was struck by her penetrating, drill-bit eyes and a slightly arched Bancroft-y nose. She wasn’t a dead ringer for Mel Brooks’ wife of 41 years, but the resemblance was certainly there.

I wasn’t going to say anything but then I blurted it out. Does she get the Bancroft resemblance thing now and then?

She didn’t know who Bancroft was. She’d never heard the name. I mentioned The Graduate, and she’d never heard of that either. Her friend chimed in — “Wait, I know The Graduate…I think.” I recited the basic plot — college grad falls into a lackluster affair with wife of his father’s business partner, and then falls seriously in love with their college-aged daughter.

“So you’re kind of a movie buff, buying film festival tickets,” I started to say.

“I’m a fake movie person,” she replied.

“Okay but you should probably watch The Graduate some day…you’ll see what I mean.”

“Thanks for telling me,” she said.

I asked them both if they’re planning to see the Bob Dylan movie with Timothee Chalamet. They hadn’t heard of A Complete Unknown but know who Chalamet is and had possibly heard of Dylan, but I didn’t want to grill them.

I’d overheard Bancroft Jr. mentioning Lady Gaga to her friend, so I asked if she was looking forward to Joker: Folie a Deux. She hadn’t heard of it.

It’s one thing if a 20something who’s vaguely into movies hasn’t seen The Graduate, but to have never even heard of it?