I’m trying to at least post an acknowledgment of the universally expected Best Picture Oscar win for Oppenheimer. Maybe this will post and maybe it won’t. But it was a great show! And I fell over backwards in my chair when the deserving Best Actress winner was announced. Wow…my faith in humanity semi-restored.

10:13 pm: And here we go with the official Lily Gladstone celebration — the Best identity Oscar campaign for Best Actress. And…holy shit, Emma Stone wins for Best Actress! Justice, truth, radiance!! The Movie Godz approve!! The Academy actually voted to support a performance and not a politically woke proclamation!! Merit prevailed over progressive instruction!!

10:07 pm: Chris Nolan wins the Best Director Oscar for Oppenheimer. A locked-down win for months. Congrats to a first-rate filmmaker. I found Oppenheimer a difficult sit and will probably never see it again, but Nolan did a “good” job. He’s a class act, although his version of 2001: A Space Odyssey was not a good thing.

10 pm: The Best Actor moment arrives, and may we please, please see emotional justice done by giving the Oscar to The Holdovers‘ Paul Giamatti? Can we pleaase tell those SAG-AFTRA mouth-breathers to take a hike? Please? No — the Oscar goes to Cillian Murphy, which gives me further trepidation about Gladstone (another SAG-AFTRA favorite) winning in her category. A nice-guy British actor wins for playing a cold-eyed space alien.

9:45 pm: As expected Ludwig Goransson‘s Oppenheimer music takes the Oscar for Best Score. Billie Eilish takes Best Song Oscar for Barbie. Neither creative effort knocked me out. Congrats to all but…

9:33 pm: Great camerawork and dynamic editing on Ryan Gosling‘s Barbie song, “I’m Ken” or “I”m Just Ken” or whatever it’s called. Nice overhead Busby Berkeley shot. Excellent color design, great lighting and choreography. First-rate all the way. Hats off.

9:30 pm: The Zone of Interest wins Best Sound Oscar. That eerie humming sound, right?….subtle design, absolute malevolence.

9:20 pm: The show has been underway for two hours, 25 minutes so far. And Best Actor presentation is just around the corner. And congrats to Wes Anderson winning his very first Oscar for anything. (i.e., Henry Sugar).

9:17 pm: Best Cinematography goes to Oppenheimer and the brilliant Hoyte van Hoytema.

9:03 pm: Best Documentary Short and Feature presentation. I have no passionate dogs in these hunts. The Last Repair Shop…congrats! 20 Days in Mariupol (as expected) wins Best Feature Doc Oscar!

8:50 pm: The low-budgeted Godzilla Minus One wins the Visual Effects Oscar! HE approves!! Wait…clumsy, sloppy acceptance speech…taking too long…get it together! Play them off! And now the Film Editing Oscar…Oppenheimer! Honestly? I didn’t think the editing in that film was knock-out level…did anyone? Another coat-tail thing.

8:37 pm: And now the Best Supporting Actor presentation, obviously going to Oppenheimer‘s Robert Downey, Jr. Nice tributes given to all five nominees. Classy, well-written…perfectly handled. RDJ: “I’d like to thank my terrible childhood and the Academy, in that order. Downey thanking his entertainment lawyer for helping him out during his unfortunate druggy period in the late ’90s (“bailing me out of the hoosegow”) was especially good.

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8:29 pm: Tribute to the stunt community but no specific Oscar handed out. All hail the stunt work of the great Buster keaton!

8:27 pm: To no one’s surprise, The Zone of Interest wins Best Int’l Feature Oscar. Director Jonathan Glazer is calling out the horror of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

8:16 pm: Poor Things wins a third Oscar!! For costumes! Three in a row! Lily Gladstone is sweating bullets right now. John Cena‘s mostly nude walk-on was pretty good.

8:07 pm: Maestro‘s suoerb makeup doesn’t win the Oscar….Poor Things does instead. Willem Dafoe‘s facial prosthetics did the trick. And Poor Things wins the production design Oscar! Is this an indication that Emma Stone might take the Best Actress Oscar? is it possible that the Acadeemy might actually give that Oscar to the giver of the greatest performance? Is there a chance that Lily Gladstone‘s identiity play might not pan out?

8:02 pm: Billie Eilish‘s singing is fragile and breathy. But at least she looks nice for a change.

7:51 pm: Time for the Best Screenplay Oscars, Original and Adapted! And the winner of the Original category is Anatomy of a Fall. A political gender thing. The Holdovers should have won. Please give the Adapted Sceenplay Oscar to American Fiction….yes! As expected. Cord Jefferson! The first 45 to 50 minutes of this film are really satisfying. Excellent speech by Jefferson….”this has changed my life!”

7:40 pm: How many have seen War Is Over, winner of the Best Animated Short film? Will The Boy and the Heron win the Best Animated Feature Oscar? Yes!

7:25 pm: The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine joy Randolph is about th win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and good for her. Each nominee is receiving a special tribute from a past BSA winner….nice touch. All hail Rita Moreno, America Ferrara, Danielle Brooks, Jamie Lee Curtis/strong>! Da’Vine supreme!! All hail Alexander Payne for casting her. Da’Vine gives a tearful and passionate shout-out to her publicist, but doesn’t mention the publicist’s name. Paul Giamatti crying for her.

7:17 pm: I’m sorry but Cillian Murphy is a rather odd-looking person. For a change, Robert Downey, Jr.‘s evening apparel isn’t offensive. All hail Kimmel’s Killers of the Flower Moon-is-too-effing-long jokes. Kimmel’s simple black tux is very attractive, but the tie is too big. Dwayne Johnson‘s gray metallic tux is fairly awful. I love the below-the-line crew people taking a bow…”a ton of of overtime”!!

7:12 pm: Margot Robbie to Jimmy Kimmel on a bench: “You’re so beautiful.” Kimmel to Robbie: “I know. I haven’t eaten in three weeks. I’m so hungry.”

6:58 pm: The red carpet fashion show is too fast, fizzy and frothy…all hail the gray-haired, well-dressed Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things)! HE is the opposite of fast, frizzy and frothy…and that, for better or worse, is the brand.
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6:47 pm Brendan Fraser looks good, considering that he’s well past his glammy peak. All hail Sterling K. Brown! All hail Holdovers hotshot great PauL Giamatti, whose Best Actor chances are under threat by Oppie‘s Cillian Murphy, whose prpminence is entirely due to the SAG-AFTRa community coasting along on the Oppie bandwagon….those reliable Chris Nolan coat-tails…Eugene Lee Yang appears in a stunning red ball gown…reminding us all that asserting one’s sexuality is extremely important in the overall scheme of things.

6:33 pm: Why did Billie Eilish decide to switcch strategy by trying to look attractive tonight?? She looked like a dressed-down dishrag at the Globe and SAG awards. Caitlin Wells reply: “To keep you on your toes.”

Friendo: “I think the alleged “line-by-line” Holdovers/Frisco plagiarism claim really needs to be seriously questioned.

“Is there a single line that has been cited?

“The Holdovers is a movie defined by its dialogue. The writing is fantastic. The voice of the Giamatti character. The words of…everybody.

“The accuser (i.e., Frisco author Simon Stephenson) said that The Holdovers ripped his script off ‘line-by-line.’ And Variety included this angle without questioning it.

“But is there even a whisper of truth to this charge? That, I think, is the point that needs to be made.

“Because if it’s just the plot, it came from that 1935 French movie, Marcel Pagnol‘s Merlusse. (It really did.) If it’s just other elements of the “concept”…well, Hollywood movies lift stuff like that from other movies every fucking day.”

Nothing to do with Barbie will ever be funny…ever. Certainly not in terms of Jimmy Kimmel‘s opening monologue this evening. What abotu this movie is the least bity amusing or laugh-worthy? Nothing. All I can think of is that famous shot of that reprehensible pink lampshade guy. Talk about depressing.

Barbie is not funny, and it never will be.

Problematic Bill McCuddy Barbie joke, written for Kimmel:

Kimmel: This year I’m on a first-name basis with every woman in the audience. I’ll prove it.
(CUT TO Margot Robbie) Hi Barbie.
(CUT TO Meryl Streep) Hi Barbie.
(CUT TO Octavia Spencer) Hi Barbie.
(CUT BACK TO KIMMEL, HE’S NOW JUST RANDOMLY POINTING AROUND THE ROOM)
Hi Barbie, Hi Barbie, Hi Barbie.
I also know some of the men. (sheepishly) Hi Ken. (CUT TO Ryan Gosling)
I also know Alan. Where’s he?
(CUT TO THIRD KODAK BALCONY)
(Michael Cera is waving his hands)
Cera: “I’m up here!!!! Jimmy! Jimmy?”
Kimmel: (IGNORING) I guess he couldn’t make it.

I fell hard for Cameron Crowe‘s Almost Famous nine or ten months before it opened in September 2000, or when I came across a 1998 draft of the script (called “Untitled”, 168 pages). I didn’t just like or admire it — I was blown away, head over heels.

I was generally delighted with the film but it didn’t get me off like the script did because it felt a little too compressed here and there. It ran 122 minutes, in part because Dreamworks producer Walter Parkes kept insisting on “shorter, shorter, shorter.” Plus the film didn’t include a “Russell Hammond confesses all to Rolling Stone editors” scene that I thought was perfect.

I’ve had Almost Famous on my best of the 21st Century list for two decades now as it’s 90% of a great film, but I didn’t completely tumble until the 162-minute “director’s cut” bootleg Bluray came out in 2011.

I attended a big Almost Famous press shebang during the 2000 Toronto Film Festival, and a moment from that event is burned into my memory. I was shuffling into the main restaurant where the party was taking place, and in a center booth I saw L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan chatting with Crowe and then-wife Nancy Wilson. And I was almost startled by a look in Turan’s eyes — a look of absolute rapture that reminded me of a ninth-grader swooning over his prom date and dreaming about some act of exquisite erotic kindness that might be in the offing later that evening.

Turan, in short, was making goo-goo eyes at Crowe…talking to the man of the moment was filling him with awe and joy and ecstasy, and his eyes…his eyes were doing ring-a-ding-ding backflips. Turan was in love…completely fluttering with feeling.

And at that very moment I made a mental note to myself, to wit: “Don’t ever give anyone slavish goo-goo eyes for any reason or under any circumstance…show respect and admiration but keep your cool…hold on to your dignity. Because if you don’t show a modicum of restraint the filmmaker will remember those goo-goo eyes, and if you don’t goo-goo him the next time he’ll know you don’t like the new film as much as the older one, or he’ll conclude that you were being a phony the first time.”

Let this be a lesson to us all. The next time you find yourself chatting with someone you genuinely admire, don’t flash the goo-goo eyes!

Remember that climactic boardroom scene in The Social Network when Mark Zuckerberg says to Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (aka “the Winkelvi”) — “If you could’ve invented Facebook, you would’ve invented Faceook“?

Yesterday Tatiana Siegel’s shocking 3.9.24 Variety story explored a claim by Frisco author Simon Stephenson that The Holdovers director Alexander Payne and/or the film’s screenwriter, David Hemingson, plagiarized portions of Frisco almost on a scene-by-scene, line-by-line basis.

Hollywood Elsewhere’s response to Stephenson: “If you could’ve written The Holdovers, you would’ve written The Holdovers.”

HE read a 2013 draft of Frisco this morning, and I’m not claiming that Stephenson is totally out to lunch on this matter. Yes, there’s a cetain thematic similarity and similar story strands shared by Frisco and The Holdovers.

Frisco is essentially a spiritual rebirth story in which Jeff Willis, a morose 50something Seattle pediatrician, is reawakened by Amy Morrison, a 15 year old terminal cancer sufferer, and how it all comes together during a brief shared trip to San Francisco.

In certain ways The Holdovers tells the same kind of story — Paul Giamatti‘s Paul Hunham, an ascerbic classics professor at a private Massachusetts boys school, experiences a spiritual reawakening while looking after a bright but contentious senior, Dominic Sessa‘s Angus Tully, and how it all comes together during a late-second-act trip to Boston over the Christmas holidays.

And yet Frisco and The Holdovers are also strikingly similar to (a) Johanna Spyri‘s Heidi (i.e., young girl reawakens the humanity of her grumpy grandfather), (b) Gus Van Sant and Mike Rich‘s Finding Forrester (’00 — a talented young writer of color reawakens a hermit-like, J.D. Salinger-like writer, and (c) Martin Brest and Bo Goldman‘s Scent of a Woman (’92 — private-school kid reawakens the heart and soul of a bitter retired military man).

Another similarity that hit me this morning was (d) Morton DaCosta, Betty Comden and Adolph Green‘s Auntie Mame (“Live a little!”) except this time the Rosalind Russell role is handled by Amy, the cancer kid. But the mission is basically the same.

Just as Mame eventually saves Patrick Dennis (author of the original 1955 book, and played by Roger Smith) from a life of conservative suffocation, Amy the cancer victim saves the morose and timid Willis from a life of terminal resignation and boredom.

For me, the key difference between Frisco and The Holdovers is that the latter is wise and well written and recognizably human and specific in dozens of different ways while Frisco is somewhat generic and plodding, not to mention awkwardly written here and there and occasionally speechy in a way that almost makes you groan.

I was a script reader in the mid to late ’80s, and I’ve read hundreds of interesting but not-quite there scripts in my time. Frisco is definitely one of these.

It’s not awful but it is, I feel, on the mediocre side. It needs a major rewrite or whatever. And it’s really whorish, I feel, to use a terminally ill teenager as the driving spiritual engine of the piece. And to throw in the lore of San Francisco beat generation mythology (City Lights bookstore, Jack Kerouac, Neal Casady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Howl”) as icing on the spiritual cake….well, okay, but it struck me as a bit precious.

Frisco is primarily composed of a series of vaguely awkward, on-the-nose, “this is who I am and what I want or need” scenes…essentially a lot of cliched material about a midlife crisis of the spirit (including an impending divorce) and how a 50ish guy is gradually rescued.

The on-the-nose theme of Frisco is “stop being morose, celebrate your time here on earth, we’ll all be dead soon enough.”

I’ve just finished reading a mind-blowing Variety article by Tatiana Siegel (posted on 3.9 at 10:13 am) that contains chapter-and-verse charges of plagiarism against either Holdovers director Alexander Payne or Holdovers screenwriter David Hemingson, or both.

The complaining, allegedly plagiarized screenwriter is Simon Stephenson, who has a “story by” credit on Pixar’s Luca (’21), an “additional material” credit on StudioCanal’s Paddington 2 (’17), and a “screenplay and story by” credit on an Amazon original feature titled The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (’21).

The particulars are too voluminous to be recounted or even compressed here, but the basic allegation is that Payne read a very similar 2013 script by Stephenson called Frisco, which was on the 2013 Black List roster, and that (this is directly from the Siegel article) “Payne had [read] the Frisco script in both 2013 and again in late 2019, right before Payne approached Hemingson about collaborating on [The Holdovers]. That contention seems to be backed up by emails involving several Hollywood agencies and producers.”

The Siegel article contains a 33-page “Introductory Document” titled “FRISCO and THE HOLDOVERS,” and it pains me to admit that it seems — emphasis on the “s” word — fairly damning in its particulars.

I can only urge HE readers to go over the Siegel article with a fine tooth comb and try to assess the evidence as best they can.

Speaking for myself I find the mere suspicion of the great Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska, Downsizing, The Holdovers) having deliberately engaged in out-and-out plagiarism just inconceivable. It can’t be what it seems. It just can’t be.

First-rate auteurs and their collaborators simply don’t behave this recklessly and foolishly, especially when there’s a paper trail and chapter-and-verse evidence this vivid and specific. Stealing from a 2013 Black List script is just insanity…self-destructive insanity.

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Showbiz 411’s Roger Friedman is “hearing rumors” that Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry, Stop/Loss) is either hoping or planning to direct a remake of Lawrence Kasdan‘s Body Heat, the 43 year-old, sexually charged, Floridian film noir that existed in a world that didn’t have air conditioners.

Heat costarred William Hurt and Kathleen Turner as thirtysomething lovers Ned Racine, a not-smart-enough attorney, and Matty Walker, a married, heavy-breathing sociopath who’s breathtaking in bed. Ted Danson, J. A. Preston, Mickey Rourke and Richard Crenna (as Matty’s rich husband) costarred.

Friedman speculates that Racine and Walker could be played by some hot hetero twosome. Perhaps Matthew McConaughey and Florence Pugh, he imagines.

But of course, if and when Peirce, a queer filmmaker, manages to arrange funding for a Body Heat remake, the extra-marital lovers would be women…certainly. Given the same-sex storylines being favored in elite film circles these days (Love Lies Bleeding, Drive Away Dolls), there’s no way the new Body Heat lovers would be straight.

Friendo: “First they did the ‘remake every movie with a black person’ and now they’re doing ‘remake every movie with a gay person’ You know what would be good with four gay people? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

But not in theatres, unfortunately. Reactions from last night’s SXSW debut screening assert that it’s emphatically a film to see half-drunk from an eighth-row seat, sprawled.