I was reading Alex Ben Block’s short Los Angeles hit piece on Netflix and Lisa Taback. As soon as I finished I flashed on a chat I had last night with a knowledgable hotshot — a guy who knows everyone and everything:

HE: “And I really think Rami Malek is going to win Best Actor. Don’t you? I really believe that’s locked at this stage.”
Hotshot: “He’s got it, yes. Ditto Glenn Close.”
HE: “Agreed. And Alfonso [Cuaron], for sure, is winning Best Director.”
Hotshot: “Yep.”
HE: “But I’m not entirely sure Roma will win the Best Picture Oscar. It might win, but I don’t know.”
Hotshot: “It’ll be Roma or Green Book.”
HE: “I suspect voters will probably feel better about themselves the morning after, and certainly six months or a year after, if they give it to Roma. People love Green Book‘s feel-good vibes — I felt them last September in Toronto — but Roma is a higher arthouse achievement, and more of a ‘2018 film’ than Green Book. They both address Trump’s racial ugliness, but Roma addresses the wall thing besides.”

“The Oscar race has become an annual embarrassment. The self-absorption in this half-year spectacle could choke Thanos himself. We need to stop talking about ourselves and start looking for new stories, new ways to entertain the world. Taken properly, the #MeToo and representational questions offer us ways to do that. But they can also become fixations about themselves, a chance for us to squabble endlessly about our own problems and divisions until those squabbles drown out the mission we’re here for.

“Imagine if people turned on the Super Bowl and were told that instead of a football game, we’re going to have a televised debate about kneeling during the national anthem. That’s what the Oscars have become, what Hollywood is becoming.” — also from the latest Ankler edition, written by Richard Rushfield.

From Richard Rushfield‘s latest Ankler edition, “The Showbiz State of the Union”: “Deeper and scarier is the question posed by YouTube, whose viewership dwarfs Netflix, Amazon, and every studio and network in the history of humanity times a million. While box office is roughly steady, there is a generation rolling our way that doesn’t think of Netflix as TV — it thinks of YouTube as all entertainment.

“It’s a very open question whether a generation that has been taught for ten years now to inhale multiple screens at every waking second will have the patience to watch episodes of TV, much less movies.

“The effects of the smartphone on the brain are just beginning to be understood, but there’s every reason to be terrified that after total screen immersion since birth, sitting through a traditional TV show will seem like water torture to [Generation Z]. Which is why this would be a wonderful moment for Hollywood, led by a new generation, to be searching outward into the world, finding new ways to communicate, new formats, new stories that connect with the coming age, instead of…well, that brings us to our problems at home.”

Yesterday, from a friend: “Did you read this? The author Dan Mallory (aka A.J. Finn), author of “The Woman in the Window” (the Joe Wright-directed film version is opening on 10.4.19) has been exposed by Ian Parker as a shameless fantasist and sociopath.

“The 20,000-word article goes on and on, but basically Mallory invented two fake ph’ds, fake executive jobs, fake brain cancer, his parents fake death, his brother’s fake suicide plus he scammed the entire NYC publishing industry into buying his first novel, which they promoted to number one on the bestseller list, only to discover that it might be plagiarized.”

HE to friend, sent this morning: “The article is initially fascinating. Then it gradually starts to feel a bit complex, and then labrynthian and exhausting, and then it continues and continues. I’d love to read the shorter version.

“A talented writer, Mallory is a lying, fabricating, fantasizing bullshitter in his personal and business relationships. He’s a relentless spinner of creative tales — a genetic brethren of former TNR writer Stephen Glass or N.Y. Times reporter Jayson Blair. The bullshit climbs, compounds itself, swirls, reaches for the sky. Mallory is Tom Ripley, a smooth criminal, a sociopath extraordinaire.”

Mallory has admitted to the Telegraph‘s Ben Riley-Smith that he’s been bullshitting for 15 years or so, and that he’s been coping with a severe bipolar disorder and so on.

Hollywood Elsewhere attended and enjoyed last night’s SBIFF Virtuosos event. Quickie interviews with A Star is Born‘s Sam Elliott, Eighth Grade‘s Elsie Fisher. First Man‘s Claire Foy, Can You Ever Forgive Me? costar Richard E. Grant, Leave No Trace‘s Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, BlacKkKlansman‘s John David Washington and Burning‘s Steven Yeun. (Roma‘s Yalitza Aparicio was billed but didn’t attend.) Spirited, amusing…a good time. Dave Karger moderated.

HE impressions: (a) Grant won the competition — he was by far the wittiest and most electric — the most vivid, spritzy and dryly urbane; (b) The laconic, laid-back, deep-voiced Elliott came in second, (and I’m very sorry he didn’t attend the after-party as I wanted to ask him about Lifeguard and his poker-game cameo in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid); (c) Fisher came in third — enthused, bubbly, tingly, “up”; (d) The others — Foy, Washington, McKenzie, Yeun — came off as likable and crackling as far as it went, but basically shared the fourth-place slot.

Reluctant, equivocating, hesitating Beto O’Rourke is still candy-assing about running for President, but today he promised a final decision later this month. He’d better Gary Cooper up and get on the stick. He needs to sign up the best campaign staffers, raise God knows how many millions, get his drag-ass campaign in gear. America doesn’t want another Adlai Stevenson — it wants a new Bobby Kennedy.

I felt genuine nausea when Republican representatives and senators began chanting “USA! USA! USA!” And when President Trump replied, “That sounded so good.” In fact, to hear it from Aaron Sorkin, “We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories. Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defense spending…”

Six and a half years ago, Business Insider listed 25 other things that the United States isn’t number one in.

At the end of The Grey, Liam Neeson is alone, surrounded, out-fanged. He knows he’s finished. The only thing left is do as much damage as he can to the big black CG wolves before they overwhelm and kill him. In actuality, Neeson doesn’t face career death as much as a likely period of temporary retirement — a Gibson-like shunning. Lasting perhaps a year or two. Probably not longer. The SJWs want Neeson dead, of course, but they’d like to de-employ a lot of people. That’s their ongoing, full-time dream.

This isn’t especially newsworthy or interesting, I’ll admit, but the Santa Barbara Inn (901 East Cabrillo Blvd., Santa Barbara, CA 93103) is about 17 times nicer than the Hilton Santa Barbara Beachfront Resort (633 E. Cabrillo). Make that 18 times. Being a practiced moocher, I immediately wrote the SBIFF staffers and asked if there was any way I could remain at the SBI rather than return to the much-lower-on-the-totem-pole Hilton. I knew what their answer would be — I had to ask anyway.

Hollywood Elsewhere drove back to Santa Barbara this morning. Left around 11 am, arrived at 12:15 pm. The Hilton Santa Barbara Beachfront Resort (formerly Fess Parker) is temporarily booting some of the guests of the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Those affected have to move into the Santa Barbara Inn for a day, and back into the HSBBR tomorrow.

Tonight’s big SBIFF event is the Virtuosos Award. Honorees include Yalitza Aparicio (Roma), Sam Elliott (A Star is Born), Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade), Claire Foy (First Man), Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace),John David Washington (BlacKkKlansman) and Steven Yeun (Burning).

“Ash Is Purest White, Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke’s most serious foray into the gangster genre since A Touch of Sin, is a winding tale of love, disillusionment and survival that again represents his vision of his country’s spiritual trajectory.

“More expository and down-to-earth than usual, Jia delves deep into the protagonists’ most vulnerable feelings as they pay dearly for both sin and honor.

“At 141 minutes, the work has its intellectually ponderous moments but is ultimately saved by Jia’s muse and wife, Zhao Tao, who surpasses herself in a role of mesmerizing complexity.” — from Maggie Lee‘s 5.11.18 Variety review.

Cohen Media Group will open the film in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco on Friday, 3.15, followed by a national roll-out.

Public candor about private failings is not a wise policy in our current situation. You can’t say “I once succumbed to an urge to practice witchcraft back in the ’70s.” To the Cotton Mather crowd that’s like saying you might put a hex on someone tomorrow.

But actors have emotionally expansive, compulsively honest natures, and so poor, impetuous Liam Neeson is going to have to face suspicions and charges of witchcraft for the rest of his life. Hell, they might come for him today and haul his ass over to the nearest lake and dunk him a few times.

Neeson has admitted that 40 years ago, when he was in his mid to late 20s, he experienced an illogical, enraged, tribal reaction to a friend having been raped by a person of color. He told an interviewer that he would have felt the same gut-level animosity “if she had said an Irish or a Scot or a Brit or a Lithuanian [had raped her]…[it] would have had the same effect. I was trying to show honor, to stand up for my dear friend in this terribly medieval fashion.”

Neeson offered the recollection during an interview that was posted yesterday in The Independent. He was promoting Cold Pursuit (Summit, 2.8), his latest revenge thriller. On a certain level Neeson was brave to admit that he was briefly seized by an ugly and bigoted impulse in his presumably intemperate, immoderate youth, but look at what’s happened.

This morning he attempted some damage control in a chat with ABC’s Robin Roberts. “We all pretend we’re all politically correct in this country…in mine, too,” Neeson said. “You sometimes just scratch the surface and you discover this racism and bigotry, and it’s there.”

I’ve mentioned witch-dunking in a satiric vein, but maybe this is actually the best way to handle the Neeson thing. Put him into a burlap bag, drive him out to Malibu pier, dunk him in the Pacific a few times. If he’s still breathing after the fifth or sixth submersion, he’ll be forgiven and allowed to work again. If he doesn’t make it, then at least the world will have one less suspected witch to deal with.