For a last and final time HE strongly objects to a suspected Academy preference for the Best Actor Oscar to be handed to Cillian Murphy.

Murphy gives a far more persuasive performance as an oddball alien from the planet Tralfamadore than as super-physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

I’ve read “American Prometheus” and seen a great deal of footage of the actual Oppie, and there’s no question that this brilliant fellow was semi-human — that he radiated somewhat human qualities, mannerisms, characteristics. This is the one central thing that Murphy doesn’t convey.

Even with his dual head antennas, My Favorite Martian star Ray Walston was more relatably human than Murphy’s Oppie.

If Murphy wins it’ll strictly be an Oppenheimer coat-tails thing, and I really hate that Academy voters (particularly the SAG-AFTRA knuckle-draggers) are apparently unwilling to show a little mental discipline and differentiate and be fair about this, for God’s sake.

Because it’s wrong, wrong, terribly wrong to blow off Paul Giamatti’s obviously superior, more fickle and flavorful and far more human performance as Barton Academy’s curmudgeonly classics professor Paul Hunham, the lead in Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.

Plus Giamatti gave one of the 21st Century’s greatest and most cherished performances as aspiring novelist and wine connoisseur Miles Raymond in Payne’s Sideways (‘04). And he wasn’t even nominated for this! Are you kidding me?

Giamatti obviously owns the winning narrative. They blew him off 19 years ago but they can’t do it twice…c’mon! He’s owed big-time, and the refusal of the Oppenheimer sweep lemmings to step back and acknowledge this is truly, deeply offensive.