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Out of 31 Gold Derby experts, only four — Variety‘s Tim Gray, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Decider‘s Chris Rosen and myself — have stood up for Dolomite Is My Name‘s Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Her performance as Lady Reed is arguably the most touching and open-hearted of the year. In any category.

And 27 GD know-it-alls have blown her off. Nice one, guys!

Three other contenders deliver the intrepid beating heart thing. The Farewell‘s Zhao Shuzhen, who plays the ailing grandmother, Nai Nai. Bombshell‘s Margot Robbie, who portrays a fictitious Fox News comployee, Kayla Pospisil**, but in a stunned and shattered victimhood mode. And Richard Jewell‘s Kathy Bates, in her most noteworthy feature film performance since…what, Gertude Stein in Midnight in Paris?

The performances of the other three highly-rated contenders — Marriage Story‘s Laura Dern, Hustlers‘ Jennifer Lopez and Little Women‘s Florence Pugh — are all about spunk and spirit and strutting around. (Pugh delivers all this plus impudence.)

I respected Robbie’s performance and felt sorry for Pospisil (that awful scene in Roger Aisles‘ office), but at no time did I feel any kind of profound or meaningful kinship with her (mainly due to the rightwing thing). The emotional currents that seep out of Randolph’s Lady Reed are far more affecting, and yet Robbie has been included on 25 out of 31 GD lists. She’s obviously a bigger name that Randolph, but her performance isn’t in Randolph’s league. At all. Seriously.

Dern and Lopez are on pretty much everyone’s list. Shuzhen is on 17. Pugh is on 20.

The last time I checked performances that make you feel something deep and poignant are the ones that result in acting nominations…no? I guess gutsy and ballsy have more clout these days.

** Pospisil is a very strange last name. A mixture of a prescription drug and an opossum.

Decent tease. January 17th.

“Trump has never had the cities…right? Now he’s lost the ‘burbs. But he still polls well in the hamlets, whistle stops, one-horse towns, bumfucks and wide areas of the road.” Wait…”bumfucks?”

Yesterday The Atlantic‘s David Sims posted a piece titled “The 10 Best Movie Scenes of the 2010s.”

I agree with two or three of his choices, but it’s astonishing that one of Sims’ picks is the notorious Parasite scene when the fired maid rings the bell during the rainstorm and the drunken family lets her in. This is arguably one of the most confounding and unsatisfying scenes in any major 2019 film bar none, and Sims calls it one of the year’s best?

Consider a Zero Dark Thirty substitute. Actually three scenes that involve the final decision to send Navy Seals to Abbottabad to kill Osama bin Laden. I’m especially taken with the scene in which James Gandolfini‘s Leon Panetta asks his CIA advisors to state unequivocally and without “any fucking bullshit” whether Osama bin Laden “is there or is he not fucking there?”

The 1st runner-up is when Jessica Chastain‘s Maya tells Panetta that she’s “the motherfucker who found” the target, and Panetta, suddenly charmed and obviously amused, says “really?”

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Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron‘s When Harry Met Sally is 30 years old. My view has always been that it’s an agreeable relationship comedy with underpinnings of recognizable emotional realism. It’s occasionally glib and schmaltzy, but what continues to save it are (a) Ephron’s dialogue and (b) Billy Crystal‘s delivery of same. The football-game confession may be the best scene. Mainly because the story of how Crystal’s ex-wife Helen broke up with him feels half-believable. People always lie about their motives for breaking up. They never lay their cards face-up. And movers never say anything to anyone.

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If Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood winds up taking the Best Picture Oscar on 2.9.20, it’ll be for a simple, sensible reason. Everybody likes it. I haven’t spoken to anyone who’s had anything negative to say about it. Not the slightest, most insignificant thing…zip. I shared a few mild gripes after catching it during last May’s Cannes Film Festival, but they’ve all pretty much evaporated. I’ve seen it three or four times since. I’ve become a follower.

To paraphrase the late Samuel Goldwyn, “If people like a movie, you can’t stop ’em.”

A Once Upon A Time in Hollywood win would also be an historical achievement of sorts. It would be the first time that an amiable, relatively plot-free, character-driven, laid-back attitude flick wins the big prize. Or, to put it more simply and given the fact that Tarantino’s film is about the B-movie realm of 1969 Hollywood, it would be the first “drive-in movie” to win this honor.

SPECIAL HE ADVERTORIAL:

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is not highly poised. It’s not “okay boomer” or high falutin’. It’s not a Stanley Kramer or Tom Hooper or a Baz Luhrman film. It’s a hang movie about nervous cats vs. psycho cats plus one supremely cool cat. It’s almost Cormanesque.

The Academy is a different deliberative body than it was ten or even five years ago. The New Academy Kidz, or the more diverse members who were invited to join the Academy over the last three years and who constitute roughly 20% of the present membership, are much more supportive of genre-type films (Get Out, The Shape of Water). This sensibility is a door-opener in terms of OUATIH‘s Best Picture worthiness.

The other fundamental thing is that Once (as some prefer to call it) probably wouldn’t be a Best Picture contender if it was entirely about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Rick Dalton, an insecure, downswirling TV actor who’s terrified that his career on the verge of flatlining. He’s all nerves and cigarettes and too many slurps of booze.

The joy of this film, in fact, is all about Brad Pitt‘s Cliff Booth, the Zen counterweight who slips the film into cruising gear. Cliff is Mr. Alpha Cool. His mantra is “I got this, don’t sweat it.” Unlike Leo, Pitt doesn’t strenuously “act” all over the place. His is a very settled and relaxing and old-fashioned vibe, and Once is Pitt’s moment…right here, right now, age 55, prime of his life. He’s gone beyond acting at this stage. He’s become a kind of…I don’t know, mystical presence or something. You don’t say “Brad Pitt” — you hum it.

One of the reasons Pitt is going to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar is because the Academy membership understands that it needs to offer a make-up for not giving him the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Moneyball. Pitt’s performance as Billy Beane was easily the best of the five nominated performances from 2011, and…I don’t want to talk about who won. But it was wrong.

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A Reddit guy called “The HeyHey Man” has cracked the “why did Booksmart underperform?” code. He’s explained it clearly and succinctly. He’s gone where various sage industry analysts (such as the Indiewire gang) have feared to tred. And he waited almost eight full months to share.

In a nutshell, Olivia Wilde’s film failed to connect in a Superbad way because it wasn’t relatable enough for average middle-classers who live outside of the flush realms of politically correct, sexually ambiguous Los Angeles-for-teens. The elite high-school world in which Beanie Feldstein‘s Molly and Kaitlyn Dever‘s Amy operated was too tart, too wealthy, too swimming pooled, too Bloomingdaled, too Shangrila’ed, too fantasy’ed, too entitled.

HeyHey: “[After Booksmart opened] critics and film journalists/bloggers were wondering why the movie hadn’t reached a larger audience. I believe it’s the fact that Booksmart may as well be happening on another planet.

“How are we the audience supposed to place ourselves in the shoes of these characters when the vast majority of us have not, for example, frequented a posh house party in a mansion in an upscale LA neighborhood?

“I grew up as an upper middle classer and have never been to a house party like the one depicted in Booksmart. Not once. I’ve never stripped down to my underwear and jumped into a gorgeous backyard pool surrounded by palm trees with a bunch of other beautiful, scantily clad people. My parents never gave me or let me drive a $70k SUV. My high school didn’t look like some sort of modern art institute.

“All power to you if you grew up in this Hollywood fantasy world but I’m fairly certain 99% of us did not. And Hollywood wants to know why these movies aren’t hitting with audiences? Seems fairly obvious to me.

“Why did Superbad succeed when Booksmart did not? Why did it become a cultural phenomenon? Because the characters were relatable, and the situations, although exaggerated, also were.

“Ever been underage at a party in a strange house with older people you didn’t really know, and found yourself in an awkward situation? Oh, yeah. Tried to score booze with a fake ID? I never had one but a buddy did and it was always nerve wracking. Played videogames with friends in a basement and drinking the parents’ booze. Raises hand again. The things in that movie also all happened in relatively average middle class environments. Boom, people relate, and word of mouth is strong.

“Booksmart was fine but it wasn’t the comedic masterpiece I was led to believe it was by critics and journalists. The girls were great and the best moments in the movie were the intimate and honest moments between them but I couldn’t place myself really in any of the situations they found themselves in. It’s time for Hollywood to realize there is a whole lot of country, culture, and class out there. They need to figure this shit out.”

HE postscript: Of all the relatable elements that Superbad had and Booksmart lacked, “The HeyHey Man” didn’t mention one particular thing that he probably didn’t feel a profound kinship with or understanding of. You know what I mean. I’m reluctant to say it because the Stalinist commissars will raise their eyebrows if I do. Okay, I’ll spit it out. HeyHey didn’t relate to the sappho.

Every second represents a small explosion, a slight turn of the wheel, a possible change of direction. Ditto every minute, hour, day, week and month. The sun rises and falls each day, and the earth continues to spin while the train clatters along the track. There are more cosmic truths contained on the sharp tip of a sewing needle than anything Anderson Cooper could possibly dispense as he hosts the New Year’s Eve celebration telecast. The only people who genuinely believe that New Year’s Eve is some kind of meaningful hoo-hah that’s worthy of contemplation or celebration or anything along those lines are…I’m very sorry but I’m forced to say these folks are on the shallow, less thoughtful side of the equation. They’re celebrating with each other because they’re scared of the onrush of time. If there’s one international celebration that’s worth ignoring in this or that creative way (meditating, lighting an aroma candle, strolling along a Mulholland bike path, watching a restored ’50s film on 4K, crashing early), it’s New Year’s Eve.

Twitter has permanently darkened our understanding of ourselves. At no time in history have the witch-hunt instincts and predatory wolf-pack tendencies of nominally civilized human beings been so evident. For centuries people expressed, conversed and communicated in the usual pre-21st Century ways, but then…well, I’ve said it. What a wonderful party Twitter is. The coming 2020 elections are going to be brutal, bruising. (Especially within Camp Woke, and doubly so among the Pete haters.) And Twitter convos are going to win the Congressional Medal of Ugly. What’s the point of kidding ourselves?

I wish there could be a site that that specializes in compressing features into five-minute featurettes. Gene Fowler, Jr.’s I Married A Monster From Outer Space is probably a tedious sit (I’ve only seen portions), but I found this version engrossing as far as it went. Wiki anecdote: Principal photography began on April 21 and ended in early May 1958.” In other words, principal lasted for two weeks, three at the outside.) “The film premiered in Los Angeles on 9.10.58, followed by a U. S. and Canadian theatrical release in October.

Hollywood Elsewhere is anticipating a different kind of New Year’s Eve celebration. It’s basically a Parasite thang at Mama Lion (601 So. Western). It’ll be hosted by Miky Lee, exec producer of Bong Joon-ho‘s Oscar contender as well as vice chairwoman of CJ Group. (Lee is in charge of the overall strategic direction and management of CJ Group’s entertainment and media division.)

The gathering will be co-hosted by actress, producer and social queen bee Colleen Camp, who threw the greatest award-season party of 2018/’19 Oscar season for Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War. (It happened on 1.12.19.)

Tatyana and I are going to politely sidestep an 8pm Parasite screening (I’ve seen it twice) and just hit the party.

The evening will include a musical performance by A.C.E., a South Korean boy band. K-pop and J-pop (as in Japanese synth pop) are pretty much indistinguishable. The last time I was in Hanoi there was a V-pop band (Vietnamese) playing at an outdoor venue. Due respect but anything “pop” isn’t my cup. When it comes to New Year’s Eve sounds, I’m more of a boogie jazz cat Mose Allison type.

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