Guy Lodge has called it — gay guys are contemplating (if not giving full consideration to) the muscular erotic allure of Paul Mescal’s Lucius in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II (Paramount, 11.22)

HE has been acknowledging the Gladiator sequel gay subtext for a while now. Last July I tapped out the following:

In elite polls posted by The Gatecrashers (just went up!) and GoldDerby.com, Sean Baker‘s Anora is decisively the most favored Best Picture nominee, if not (go for it!) the most likely winner of the 2025 Best Picture Oscar.

Out of 12 Gate Crashers contributors, Anora has five #1 votes, Conclave has 2 votes in this exalted category, and Dune II and Emilia Perez have one each.

Out of 28 Gold Derby contributors Anora has tallied ten first-place rankings — the highest percentage of all the Best Picture contenders.

The second–place Emilia Perez, favored by trans identity celebrationists, is supported by seven GD contributors. Conclave has four #1 rankings, and The Brutalist (which Oscar-wise you can totally forget about right now) has three.

Anora director Sean Baker is the top contender in the helmer category.

Anora‘s Mikey Madison is the top vote-getter in the Best Actress, maintaining a decisive lead over Emilia Perez‘s Karla Sofia Gascón. Madison has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag. Don’t even think about it. In the woke ballyhoo tradition of Lily Gladstone, Gascon’s campaign is one-third about artistic merit, two-thirds about identity.

Right now Conclave‘s Ralph Fiennes is the leading Best Actor contender on both charts.

Also on both charts, A Real Pain‘s Kieran Culkin is the dominant contender for Best Supporting Actor realm.

Another noteworthy blast (certainly as far as The Gatecrashers is concerned) is the absolute Best Supporting Actress dominance of Zoe Saldana in Emilia Perez. Saldana is slightly ahead of The Piano Lesson‘s Danielle Deadwyler on the GD chart.

Here’s a bare-bones intro penned by Sasha Stone on the Gatecrashers front page:

HE to Friendo: “It pains me to say after catching the first two episodes of Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuaron‘s seven-part miniseries, that it feels underwhelming. Almost in an awful way even, which sounds like a terrible thing to say about a film by the great Alfonso.

”It certainly doesn’t do what most of us want films of this sort (psychologically complex adult soap opera-slash-melodrama) to do. It doesn’t pull you in or energize. The dialogue feels clunky, on-the-nosey.”

Friendo to HE: “It gets maddeningly worse in the final episode. Are you on episode 4 yet?”

HE to Friendo: “Just the first two. I didn’t want to to watch it on the Macbook Pro. I wanted the 65-inch experience.”

Friendo to HE: “Episode 3 is very sexual. The series has its moments, and is beautifully shot, but it mainly feels like trashy TV.”

HE to Friendo: “Beautiful spacious sets. Shot in London, Mexico and Sydney. Under-lighted, bluish-gray, way-too-shadowy cinematography from the great Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel. But the painful dialogue! And puffy-faced, bewhiskered Kevin Kline’s narration!

“What mostly comes through is the lavishly handsome, highly sophisticated design of the sets…no expense spared.

“I don’t know the exact budget but it feels like Alfonso kicking back with a nice, flush paycheck gig. He didn’t have a strong idea or theme so he decided ‘fuck it, I’ll make a blue-chip Gillian Flynn-meets-Nicole Kidman movie, only starring Cate Blanchett.’ And poor de-balled Borat, grim and half-frowning all through it.”

Friendo told me the full Disclaimer story, including the curious ending. I won’t be sharing it, of course, but down the road someone will need to explain a couple of things. Because the final twist doesn’t seem to add up. What is revealed about a certain years-old narrative concerning Blanchett’s character…I can’t say anything but it doesn’t feel right.

Al Pacino is everywhere now, plugging his autobiographical “Sonny Boy” (Penguin Press, 10.15). I have the Kindle version, mainly bought on blind faith.

I’ve read a few sample pages on the Amazon site, and it’s an easy, soothing soul cruise that doesn’t feel “written” — it reads like a transcription of Pacino talking it through. Which feels right for what it is. One of those “this is what happened, and how it felt then and how it feels now” books.

But this morning I had a glorious time re-reading John Lahr’s decade-old Pacino profile in The New Yorker, and man, it’s one of the most fulfilling, perceptive and elegantly written profiles of the now 84-year-old actor…really wonderful.

Consider two excerpts:

Here, by the way, is a re-posting of a Hollywood Elsewhere Pacino phoner, recorded just before the 1.23.15 opening of Barry Levinson‘s The Humbling.

Please listen to a two-and-a-half-minute excerpt in which Al recalls the relatively recent “would you please take our picture?” episode. Starting at the 15-minute mark and ending around 17:25.

Two days ago I was frowned upon for not conveying empathy in the case of that bear-like, ponytailed guy who was belching and “urp”-ing like Mighty Joe Young in the Wilton Library.

Today another bear-body issue surfaced [see below], and I wanted to react in a slightly nicer way. It’s obviously vulgar of me to mention this, but real life is real life. Imagine the discomfort among the library staffers, not to mention the women using the room. This guy was flashing everyone.

My first thought was that it would be embarassing for the guy if I was to lean over and whisper, “Hey, man…you’ve got a bit of an issue going on.” I figured it would be even more embarassing to ask the library clerk if she would mind speaking to him. The best response, I finally decided, would be to slip him a yellow Post-It note. But a library staffer I spoke to was unable to find any Post-It paper.

So the hell with it, I told myself. I would have appreciated a word of concern if I’d been the ass-crack guy, but that’s me. The photo is after the jump. Not for sensitive eyes.

Kamala Harris made a huge blunder on The View last week when she couldn’t or wouldn’t distance herself, proposed-policy-wise, from the Biden administration. Tens of millions of Average Joes and Janes are apparently convinced that Biden is a bad guy, and Kamala couldn’t come up with anything other than “uhhm, Joe did fine and so will I”?

All U.S. vice-presidents are obliged to show allegiance and respect to the Oval Office occupant, but she had to know that “in what way will you act differently than Biden as president?” would be asked here and there.

Dick Cheney excluded, the vice-presidency is largely a ceremonial position…no independent agency, a warm pitcher of spit, etc. But as Hubert Humphrey learned during the ’68 campaign against Richard Nixon, separating one’s self from the boss is a good thing — it indicates character, strength, resolve.

Basic political protocol says that vice-presidents need to express loyalty and show deference to the president. But they also have to hit the reset button when they succeed. Very quickly after 11.22.63, Lyndon Johnson, who was miserable while serving as JFK’s vp, became his own man despite having committed himself to fulfilling Kennedy‘s administrative agenda. Harry Truman embarked upon his own program within a year (or less) of FDR’s death.

If I’d been in Harris’s shoes, I would have told my View questioner, “I don’t intend my presidency to be a rubber-stamp presidency. I am my own person. I am very strong on fair-minded domestic policies and women’s rights, of course. Did Joe Biden and I err a couple of times? Were we a tad over-liberal about Mexican border immigration? Could the Afghanistan withdrawal have been handled better? Were we imperfect? You can argue that and we could kick it around, but I’ve learned some things over the past three and two-thirds years. Wiser for these difficult episodes.”

Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi‘s Beatles ’64, a newish doc that Disney+ will release on Friday, 11.29, will feature (a) never-before-seen footage of the lads and their howling, shrieking fans during the height of Beatlemania in February ’64, and (b) new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

But the main selling point, it seems, will be up-rezzed, digitally-enhanced footage from Alfred and David Maysles‘ “What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.“, a 16mm documentary that originally aired on 11.13.64 on CBS.

The footage, restored in 4K by Park Road Post. will look much, much better than ever before. But the restoration aspect aside, Beatles ’64 sounds like a nice Disney + gimmee for Marty, David and friends….paychecks all around.

Marty’s co-producers are Margaret Bodde, McCartney, Starr, Olivia Harrison, Sean Ono Lennon, Jonathan Clyde and Mikaela Beardsley, with Jeff Jones and Rick Yorn executive producing.

Eight months ago I lamented that footage of the Beatles first U.S. press conference, which happened inside the Pan Am terminal at JFK airport on Friday, 2.7.64 or 60-plus years ago, still looks shitty. The Park Road guys will presumably make it look brand new.

Posted on 2.3.24: Earlier today I was looking for some restored news footage — HD, 4K, perhaps even a 60 fps makeover or at least deliciously restored with enhanced sound — that I was sure someone had created. To my gradual surprise I was surprised to discover that except for some cruddy-looking colorized footage nobody has done squat. The same footage that was broadcast later that day on local news channels is all you can find. Strange. You’d think someone along the way would have done something to intensify those iconic sounds and images, but no.

But five or so years ago I started to think like a sensible left-centrist. And yet two and a half years ago I registered in Wilton as a straight Democrat. Old habits die hard. I grew up with suburban liberal attitudes in the house, and it just stuck to me. My parents were Democrats. Well, my father was.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has been working slavishly to structurally create and finesse the first installment of the brand-new GATE CRASHERS award-season forum, but the whole kit and kaboodle won’t be ready until tomorrow morning (Tuesday, 10.15).

The current plan is for Jeff Sneider to be leaking the across-the-board Best Picture consensus…first out of the gate.

But in the meantime, here are my own preferences…subject to change, of course, due to shifting instincts and mood swings.

Hence the bizarre popularity of a racist, sociopathic felon, conman and sexual assaulter among just over 45% of the voting population. They don’t care about his criminality — they just want those damn Venezuelan gang members cuffed and booted.

There’s a very real possiBility (although not a genuine likelihood) that Kamala Harris might get edged out in the battleground states on 11.5. She actually might not squeak through. There are simply too many millions of none-too-bright voters (including significant swaths of POCs) who don’t wanna know what they don’t wanna know.

From “A Political Misdiagnosis,” posted this morning by N.Y. Times reporter David Leonhardt:

It’s not a rumor — last weekend Trump pugnaciously asserted that if elected he’ll use the military to get tough over immigrant-related issues.

PBS.org: “Speaking in Colorado on Friday, Trump described the city of Aurora as a ‘war zone’ controlled by Venezuelan gangs, even though authorities say that was a single block of the Denver suburb, and the area is safe again.”

For what it’s worth, HE believes that Jeremy Strong’s haunting performance as Roy Cohn in The Apprentice is 2024’s most impressive performance in the Best Supporting Actor realm, and obviously deserving of rank-and-file Academy acclaim.

I was driving along and thinking about Timothee Chalamet‘s Bob Dylan in James Mangold‘s A Complete Unknown, and right on cue my random-ass iTunes library started playing “She Belongs To Me.” And I began singing along and it felt really great, but when it came to the third stanza a certain memory kicked in.

The lyrics go as follows: “She never stumbles, she’s got no place to fall / She never stumbles, she got no place to fall / She’s nobody’s child, the law can’t touch her at all.”

All my life I’ve been of the firm opinion that the last line should read as follows: “She’s nobody’s child, ma can’t touch her at all.”

We all know what and who “Ma” is. She’s the enforcer, the sheriff, the take-no-shit Ma Barker…a ramrod authority figure from way back…the “Egyptian ring” woman’s mother, a voice of bluster, a proverbial butch boss, Cody Jarret’s doting and devotional “ma!”, etc.

The law may wag its finger and say this or that, but “ma” is the matronly dictator whom people fear the most. (I certainly feared my own whip-cracking mom, Nancy.) And yet “ma” can’t touch this woman at all. Talk about formidable.