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.

You could call The Idea of You (Amazon Prime, 5.2) a May-December romance, but it’s more like a June-September thang.

In actuality Anne Hathaway, a Scorpio born on my birthday (11.12), is now 41 years old. In the film Hathaway’s boy-toy boyfriend, Nicholas Galitzine‘s “Hayes Campbell”, is supposed to be 24 but is actually 29.

Okay, a 12-year age gap but when I was in my early 20s I had a thing for 30something women, as I had this belief they were better in bed. That wasn’t nececssarily true, I discovered, but I still liked older.

We know how these stories always end, but don’t let me spoil it.

Directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) and based on the same-titled novel by Robinne Lee.

A day or two ago I was inquiring about my iPhone 15 at the local Apple store. It was only a couple of minutes after opening, and there were maybe nine or ten store reps in their royal-blue T-shirts, all looking at me and ready to help.

You never know in advance if the person you’re about to speak to is a tip-top brainiac. Most of them are reasonably bright and always generous in spirit but they rarely know everything, and more often than not they’ll pass along information that they “think” is probably correct, often adding “let me check…hold on.” And that’s fine.

But I knew I’d lucked out when I began talking to a 20something store rep with a knitted skull cap. First of all guys who wear skull caps tend to be ultra-focused in a nerdball way. But I knew this dude was a genius because he pointedly didn’t make eye contact. Right away I said to myself “that’s an Asperger’s thing…this guy is Albert Einstein-y.”

And he pretty much was, as it turned out. Not once did this guy even glance in the direction of my pupils. The whole time he was looking at the tabletop or the belt on my jeans or the fringe tip of my wool scarf. And he was fucking brilliant. It was hugely pleasurable to converse with him.

The vast majority of people in customer service focus on smiling and nicey-nice-ing and emotional caressings, and that’s fine. But when a slightly dysfunctional Genius Bar-type guy comes along, I smile inside and say a little prayer of thanks.

I can’t abide people who repeatedly say “uhm” in the middle of long explanations or statements or descriptions.

Once they start doing this I immediately stop listening to the substance of what they’re saying and start waiting for their next “uhm.” I don’t want to hear it but at the same time I do.

When the next “uhm” comes along I roll my eyes and let out a slight cough. The more they say “uhm” the stronger my telepathic message: “Stop doing this…say what you need to say without saying ‘uhm’….you’re killing me and yourself in the bargain…dear God, stop it.”

And then they say it again.

“Uhm” is a filler word — a word that signifies (a) you’re a clod and (b) you’re mulling over and preparing your next phrase or sentence.

Okay, I’ll occasionally use “uhhh” as a pause word, but I decided decades ago to never, ever say “uhm.” Or “like” — only idiots say “like” all the time.

I also say “basically” from time to time, but I never say it like a Millennial or Zoomer — “bayziggly.”

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “Uhm…four score and seven years ago our fathers…uhm…our fathers brought forth on this continent…uhm…a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that…uhm, all men are created equal.”

Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed is now close to 18 years old. Ranking ahead on the Scorsese hot list are Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Last Temptation of Christ.

So The Departed ranks seventh, and that ain’t hay.

A new 4K Bluray of The Departed pops on 4.23.

And I’ll repeat my argument with two Jack Nicholson/”Frank Costello” lines. One, Costello describing Rome as a place with “nicer wops” but “no pizza.” I’ve visited Rome five or six times and pizza joints are everywhere. And two, repeating that cliche about Chinese laundry guys saying “no tickee, no laundry.” Except the line is “no tickee, no washee.”

I was looking at this Gone With The Wind overture clip, and I found myself curiously melting down over Max Steiner‘s music. Because it’s gentle and sad and lamenting, and because it conveys a sentimental longing for things — customs, attitudes, climates, cultural atmospheres — that are gone and never to return.

I’ve written five or six times that GWTW is not a film about slavery or the antebellum South or even, really, the Civil War. If it was just a Civil War epic or a Southern plantation drama or a marital misery piece it would have faded many decades ago.

It’s basically a parable about hard times and terrible deprivations, and most people (apart from the terminal wokeys) understand that today. It’s about (a) a struggle to survive under ghastly conditions and (b) about how those with brass and gumption often get through the rough patches better than those who embrace goodness and generosity and playing by the rules.

Yes, David O. Selznick‘s 1939 film is an icky and offensive thing here and there, but (I’ve said this also a few times) you can’t throw out the second half of part one…the shelling of Atlanta, the struggle, the crowd scenes, the panic, the burning of Atlanta, the anguish, the soldiers groaning and moaning, Scarlett’s drooling horse collapsing from exhaustion, the moonlight breaking through as she approaches Tara, the radish scene plus Ernest Haller‘s cinematography…you just can’t throw all that out.

Obviously the film’s unfortunate racial attitudes, which were lamentably par for the course 85 years ago, are now socially obsolete. And I wouldn’t argue with anyone who feels that portions of it are too distasteful to celebrate, but it just doesn’t seem right to lock all of that richness inside some ignoble closet and say “no more, forget about it, put it out of your minds.”

Legendary filmmaking is legendary filmmaking, and Steiner’s music is just too affecting, too transporting.

Steiner’s greatest scores: King Kong, The Informer, Slim, Jezebel, Gone with the Wind, Sergeant York, Casablanca, Since You Went Away, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, White Heat.

There are three things that a film has to do in order to qualify for eternal blue-ribbon, Mount Olympus status and the simultaneous allegiance of Joe and Jane Popcorn along with your elitist, dweeb-level, ivory-tower elites.

One, it has to deliver the plain, honest truth (or undercurrent of truth) about a given world or situation — along with a little entertainment value, okay, but without undue exaggeration, no shallow exploitation, not too much sugar or vinegar, and no blatant bullshit of any kind. (This requirement in itself leaves out at least 80% of commercial cinema.)

Two, it has to persuade audiences to emotionally invest in it — to trust what it’s doing and where it seems to be going.

Three and most importantly, it has to put you into a kind of alternate-reality mescaline dream state…a place that you want to stay in and never leave, or at least make you want to return to frequently — a realm that feels so inviting or stylistically transporting that you want to live in it, even if it seems a bit dangerous.

Yes, of course — all movies are dream states in a way. The better ones always lead to a certain primal feeling of alteration or discovery (the film has taken you to an entirely new but seemingly straightforward place) or emotional comfort and reassurance. But the ones that hit the jackpot are the ones that tell you what this or that slice of life on planet earth (or life aboard an intergalactic space cruiser) is basically like …how it really is…the full, honest, non-delusional truth of things.

Which of the 2024 Best Picture nominees did you want to literally move into and live in, or at least visit for a few weeks?

I hated the claustrophobic world of Oppenheimer…university classrooms, government inquisition rooms, meeting rooms, Los Alamos residential shacks. If a magical bearded wizard came up to me last summer and said “I can fix it so you can literally time-travel back to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s world…back to 1930s England, 1940s bomb-blast Los Alamos and 1950s paranoid America….would you like to go?”….I would scrunch my face up and say to that fucking wizard “are you fucking kidding me?”

I was mildly intrigued by the Oklahoma world of Killers of the Flower Moon during my first viewing, but the second viewing was hell…I was stuck in that godawful fucking world, watching and listening to those 1920s roadsters chugging along those muddy streets…those awful damp ditches where the bodies were dumped…studying Leonardo DiCaprio‘s dumbfuck facial expressions, stuck with Lily Gladstone‘s dreary, Native American passivity and Robert De Niro‘s pinched expressions and midwestern drawl…hate it, hate it…escape!

I loved visiting the trippy, furious-jumping, sound-stage world of Poor Things. but I didn’t want to actually live in it. Because it’s skewed and unreal and more than a bit arch — no offense.

I’m too much of an average, well-educated, moderate-minded white dude to want to live in the satirical, male-despising, super-feminized world of Barbie….sorry.

I felt completely comfortable with the 1970 realm of The Holdovers. If that same wizard offered me a chance to time-trip back to ’70, I would go if I could journey there as a young lad with twenty grand in my wallet…cool. I would love that.

The realm of American Fiction is a wise and intelligent one…my kind of place except all the whiteys are woke moron suck-ups. Not my cave, bruh.

I loved certain aspects of the dream-world of Maestro, but I hated the casual cruelties forced upon poor Carey Mulligan.

Past Lives was an under-energized drag, and it always will be — I would never want to hang with those three dull people.

Anatomy of a Fall? No thanks. I now associate Grenoble with stifling vibes and constipation

Would I want to live in the nicely tended home in The Zone of Interest, right next to the walls of Auschwitz? I need to answer this?

I will forgive a film for not being an inviting place to hang in or visit if it’s being relentlessly honest about itself and the world it’s depicting. But the best kind of film tells the truth and offers an extra-cool hang in terms of environment, style, vibes.

There is no bullshit and nothing but truth in The Bicycle Thief (notice that I didn’t call it The Bicycle Thieves), North by Northwest, East of Eden, Mean Streets, Repo Man, Election, The Hospital, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, David Fincher‘s Mindhunter series, Gunga Din, Some Like It Hot, Two Women, La Strada, Zero Dark Thirty, Vertigo, Fellini Satyricon, Manchester By The Sea, Paths of Glory, Vertigo, Nomadland, Only Angels Have Wings, Collateral and 12 Years A Slave.