Hollywood Elsewhere never once yelped or cried out during this morning’s read-off of the 2018/19 Oscar nominations. I sat at my writing table, sober as a judge and going “hold on, hold on…I’m not seeing any shockers here…was there a shocker? Oh, yes, one…Bradley Cooper getting stiffed.” Nonetheless a few stand-out moments:

(a) I wouldn’t have blinked if Bradley Cooper had been Best Director-nominated for A Star Is Born as he did a first-rate job, but it didn’t happen — what say ye to this development, Kris Tapley? You said ASIB would land ten noms…not quite!;

(b) Three completely deserved nominations for Cold War — Best Foreign Language Feature, Pawel Pawlikowski for Best Director, Lukasz Zal for Best Cinematography;

(c) There’s absolutely no question that Cold War‘s Joanna Kulig deserved to be Best Actress-nominated this morning — I knew it wouldn’t happen but she should have been;

(d) Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma and Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite landed 10 Oscar nominations each (congrats to Lisa Taback and 20th Century Fox publicists!), and A Star Is Born received a totally respectable eight nominations, as did Vice;

(e) Since Telluride I’ve been an advocate of Roma‘s Marina de Tavira landing a Best Supporting Actress nomination, and today it happened!;

(f) All of those Vice nominations tell me Christian Bale is more or less locked for a Best Actor win (40% acting, 30% weight gain, 30% makeup) and…what else?

(g) Black Panther became the first superhero flick to be nominated for Best Picture — expected, appropriate, not exactly a shocker. The real triumph was/is the $1.3 billion worldwide earnings, which completely shattered the notion that predominantly black casts are financially risky propositions by the measures of international audiences.

(h) More snubs: No Best Director nom for Green Book‘s Peter Farrelly, almost certainly due to that hit piece. No Best Musical Score nomination for First Man‘s Justin Hurwitz — incorrect call!; No Best Doc nom for Won’t You Be My Neighbor?; no noms for Mary Poppins Return‘s Emily Blunt or Beautiful Boy‘s Timothee Chalamet; no makeup nomination for turning Nicole Kidman into a zombie/vampire in Destroyer.

The Oscar telecast will happen on Sunday, 2.24 on ABC.

Best Picture:

“Black Panther”
“BlacKkKlansman”
“Bohemian Rhapsody”
“The Favourite”
“Green Book”
“Roma”
“A Star Is Born”
“Vice”

Best Director:

Spike Lee, “BlacKkKlansman”
Pawel Pawlikowski, “Cold War”
Yorgos Lanthimos, “The Favourite”
Alfonso Cuarón, “Roma”
Adam McKay, “Vice”

Best Actor:

Christian Bale, “Vice”
Bradley Cooper, “A Star Is Born”
Willem Dafoe, “At Eternity’s Gate”
Rami Malek, “Bohemian Rhapsody”
Viggo Mortensen, “Green Book”

Best Actress:

Yalitza Aparicio, “Roma”
Glenn Close, “The Wife”
Olivia Colman, “The Favourite”
Lady Gaga, “A Star Is Born”
Melissa McCarthy, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”

Without getting into whys and wherefores I’m temporarily upset and stressed about things, so I’m posting these photos in order to self-anesthetize or otherwise calm myself down. Nothing to it beyond that.

Shot in Manarola in Cinque Terre, on 6.5.17.

Went hiking in the West Hollywood hills yesterday afternoon. From late ’87 to the early fall of ’89 I lived at 8682 Franklin with my then-wife Maggie. The upstairs portion, I mean. Two bedrooms, killer view, tall ceilings, $1400 per month. Our landlord was Mitch Mitchell, drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

You can never trust a trailer about anything, but Elizabeth Vogler‘s Paris Is Us looks pretty good. Why isn’t it playing in the World Cinema section of Sundance ’19? The original French title, Paris es une fete, translates as Paris Is A Feast, which sounds slightly better. Exceptional cinematography, editing. Noemie Schmidt, Gregoire Isvarine, Marie Mottet, Lou Castel. Arriving on Netflix on 2.22.19.

I’ve read over Kris Tapley‘s predictions for the 91st Academy Awards, which are more or less the same that everyone else is mentioning. I don’t have any significant disputes — I just want to see my favorites (Roma, Green Book, Cold War, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Vice) do well. If A Star Is Born collects 10 nominations, great — it still won’t win Best Picture.

I’ll have to pack sometime later today or this evening, and then arise at 4:45 am. I’ll have an hour or so (5:45 am to 7 am) to bang out a reaction piece before leaving for Burbank Airport.

Big Sick auteur and Silicon Valley costar Kumail Nanjiani and Black-ish costar Tracee Ellis Ross will announce the nominees. An inner voice is telling me that Ross will pronounce the names of foreign-born nominees better than Tiffany Haddish did last year.

Dear Sundance Press Office (Emily, Chrissy, Jason, Janine & Spencer),

As I prepare to leave for Park City, I’m asking again that you reconsider your decision to deny me press credentials for the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Hollywood Elsewhere is one of the best-known daily columns in the film industry. I’ve been tapping out an online movie column since October 1998 — 20 years plus. Before then I wrote for the L.A. Times Syndicate (’94 to ’99), People, Entertainment Weekly, L.A. Times, N.Y. Times, N.Y, Daily News, etc.

I’ve been a steady Sundance press person for 25 years, going back to ’94. Over the last quarter-century I’ve done a great deal to bring praise and heated attention to dozens upon dozens of Sundance premieres. I would be honored to be able to continue to do that. Everyone else has press-credentialed me for many, many years — Telluride, Toronto, Cannes, Berlin, New York, Santa Barbara, etc.

I’ve tried apologizing for whatever it is that you’ve apparently disapproved of in my recent (the last couple of years) of coverage. I’ve tried asking you and yours to please let bygones be bygones and turn the other cheek. And I’ve written to John Cooper and, more recently, to Robert Redford about this issue.

Whatever your response I’ll be humping it around town and attending whatever I can by the good graces of publicist and filmmaker friends.

But a press pass would make things so much less complicated. Please reconsider your decision.

Regards,

Jeffrey Wells, HE

My Southwest flight to Salt Lake City and the Sundance Film Festival leaves tomorrow morning around 9 am, but due to a longish Las Vegas layover I won’t arrive at the Park Regency condo until 5 pm or so. Like last year, Hollywood Elsewhere is bunking at the Park Regency with World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy and seasoned film journo and festival guy Robert Koehler.

My first Sundance in 25…now 26 years without a press pass! I have a sacred duty to fulfill, of course. A duty to myself, the general “never say die” esprit de journalism and the intrepid tradition of Hollywood Elsewhere to fly my ass up there, put on the overcoat and the black cowboy hat, tromp through the snow (Park City is currently at 27 degrees and besieged by winter storm “Indra”) and see everything I can.

I’ve been asking filmmaker and publicist friends to please help with public-screening tickets, and I know I’ll be getting into a fair number of films. Maybe 15 or so. Gavin Hood‘s Official Secrets. The Steven Soderbergh basketball flick at Slamdance, for sure. (Not to mention other Slamdance films, which I’m credentialed to see.) Dan Gilroy‘s Velvet Buzzsaw. The Harvey Weinstein, Mike Wallace, David Crosby and Roy Cohn docs, certainly. Not to mention the accusatory four-hour Michael Jackson doc and the origins of Ridley Scott‘s Alien doc, MEMORY. Whatever I can see.

Some of the alleged hotties: Shia LaBeouf‘s Honey Boy, Nisha Ganatra‘s Late Night, Scott Z. Burns‘ The Report, JD Dillard‘s Sweetheart (if there’s a way to see it without actually attending a midnight screening), Rashid Johnson‘s Native Son, Tomorrow Man (recently sold to Sony Pictures Classics) costarring John Lithgow and Blythe Danner.

Word around the campfire is that Rhys Ernst‘s Adam, Chewitel Ejiofor‘s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and Pippa Bianco‘s Share are a tad underwhelming, at least according to one Boy Scout. Joe Berlinger‘s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, the Zac Efron-as-Ted Bundy pic, is said to be strikingly performed but “dramatically flat.”

Sonya — The White Swan, a Sonja Henie biopic, has been screened in Los Angeles but I’ve heard nothing. Ditto Bart Freundlich‘s After The Wedding, which is opening the festival on Thursday night.

Will audiences be treated to another Manchester By The Sea, a Call me By Your Name, a Big Sick? I would deeply love to experience this kind of thing but I’m not hearing about films of this calibre in the wings. Is anyone?

A typical Sundance-credentialed journo sees 20 to 25 films over this ten-day gathering. But outside the documentaries Sundance ’19 is looking (and it breaks my heart to say this) like it might be just as meh-level “woke” as last year — alternate lifestyles, afflictions, LGBTQ and POC agenda sagas, women in transition, this or that personal issue, healings, buried pain, social maladies, etc.

We all know what Aaron Sorkin meant three days ago when he said (a) he really likes “the new crop of young people who were just elected to Congress”, but (b) “they now need to stop acting like young people, okay? It’s time to do that.” We know what he meant.

Sorkin meant that Democrats have to start conveying to Middle American bumblefucks that they’re not entirely about advancing the agendas of POCs, LGBTQs and Twitter lefties, and that they don’t necessarily believe that “white person” is an epithet, and that whiteys are not necessarily evil on a genetic basis.

We’re living in such an insane, loop-dee-loop world right now that the previous half-sentence (beginning with “they” and ending with “basis”) will, in the minds of some, be taken as proof that I’m a bad person. In fact I just don’t believe in necessarily demonizing Anglo Saxons as Satan’s emissaries on earth, which is pretty much what the SJW twitter wing of the Democratic party has come to accept as a given.

“I think there’s a great opportunity here, now more than ever, for Dems to be the non-stupid party, to point out the difference,” Sorkin said. “”We [have to convey that we] haven’t forgotten the economic anxiety of the middle class, but we’re going to be smart about this. We’re not going to be mean about it.”

From “Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture,” an October 2018 Atlantic article by the Harvard-affiliated Yascha Mounk: “On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful.

“Team Resentment is manned — pun very much intended — by people who are predominantly older and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white ‘allies’ do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.

“Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, ‘Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,’ most Americans don’t fit into either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest — including a general aversion to PC culture.”

Kamala Harris‘s presidential candidacy was announced today. I have admired her for a long, long time, principally for her confirmation hearing grillings, which have been second only to former Sen. Al Franken‘s. Harris is a tough, principled Bay Area liberal who doesn’t take any shit, and I would vote for her in a second. She’s going to make the most of her 2020 Presidential run (certainly in the primaries) and generally kick ass, and all power to her.

Harris is heavily favored by women of color, and “it’s hard to find a more important primary group than [these],” says CNN’s Harry Enten. “They are by far the most Democratic-aligned major demographic group. Women of color powered Hillary Clinton‘s sweep of the Southeast in the 2016 primary. Just last year, they were the base for Democrat Doug Jones‘s shocking victory in the Alabama special Senate election.”

But we all know the odds are against Harris. Not in the primaries, but in the general election. The bottom-line opposition portrayal will be “too flinty, too strident, too prosecutorial, too lefty California.” This impression alone will scare the living shit out of white Middle American pudgebods. Most Americans despise President Trump, but they’ll probably feel better about handing the White House over to a warmer, less p.c., more alpha-vibey candidate (Uncle Joe, Beto O’Rourke).

Harris is a clear and profound expression of where Democrats are at right now — mixed ethnic, female, humanist progressive. But she doesn’t have the organic “feelies” that O’Rourke has.

Producer Andy Vajna, the very model of a swaggering, cigar-smoking, Rolls Royce-owning, high-falutin’ producer during his ’80s and ’90s heyday, has passed at age 74. That’s kinda young to check out (was it the cigars?), but you can’t say the Hungarian-born Vajna didn’t live a full and robust life.

In a certain sense I “worked” for Vajna in ’85 as an employee of partnered publicists Bobby Zarem and Dick Delson. (We also worked for Sylvester Stallone). I was a bit surprised to learn that year that the bearded, barrel-chested Vajna, who looked like a guy in his early ’50s, was just shy of 40. He was nothing if not decisive, charming, tough, pugnacious. He was no pushover, and he never let you forget that he was Mr. King Shit.

As a distributor, producer or financier, Vajna (allied for a long period with Carolco partner Mario Kassar before starting Cinergi) enjoyed a 14-year flush period that began with First Blood in ’82 and ended with Evita in ’96. Vajna mostly made loud, high-impact audience movies, although he backed four prestige films — Evita, Jacob’s Ladder, Angel Heart and Nixon.

During the heyday Vajna produced or exec produced Rambo: First Blood Part II, Extreme Prejudice, Rambo III, Red Heat, Music Box, Total Recall, Air America,, Medicine Man, Tombstone, Renaissance Man, Color of Night, Die Hard with a Vengeance and Judge Dredd.

Here’s a tough article about Vajna and Kassar on Hungarian Spectrum.

Vajna quit Hollywood in 2010 to move back to Hungary, where “he took over the country’s moribund film industry and made Budapest a destination for international film crews.”

A 2016 USA Today story (“Big Hollywood producer reaches for the stars in Hungary”) reported that “much of the action in Hungary’s movie industry can be traced to Vajna’s influence. Vajna was claimed that “foreign film expenditures in Hungary grew from $5 million five years ago to $280 million now.” Which wasn’t an empty boast — Hungary really did bloom as a production center due to his stewardship.

Vajna and Kassar in ’82 or thereabouts, in the wake of the huge success of First Blood

Courtesy of CinnaJon, myself, Patrick Murtha, Spaceshiek, Jordan Ruimy and The Cinemaholic:

Cinnajon: “I had assumed Green Book was destined to be a Shawshank-like Best Picture also-ran, with middling box office, that takes on a second life when it hits cable. Now it sounds like the smear campaign may have provided an unexpected sympathy boost, which may buoy it to a much healthier first run than expected, if it remains in the driver’s seat. Wildly up-and-down trajectory to the finish line if this is how it actually plays out.

Jeffrey Wells: “Last night’s win was at least partly a sympathy vote after the vicious SJW attacks. I suggested a few weeks back that the industry should vote for Green Book in order to tell those odious lefty Stalinist bullies to go fuck themselves, and by golly that’s what partly happened! The p.c.-MOTIVATED haters started all the trouble, all the hate. Their post-GG takedown attempts amounted to pure viciousness and ugliness. Last night the PGA told them ‘nice try, assholes, but no sale.’ Thank you, Inkoo Kang! Thank you, David Ehrlich! Thank you, Indiewire p.c. comintern!

Patrick Murtha: “Not only is this exactly right, Jeff, but I also suspect that 2019 is going to be a year of MAJOR backlash against the PC / SJW / woke crowd. Are you sensing this also? People are just getting fed up. It is perfectly possible to continue loathing Trump & Co. while also rejecting the wokesters.”

Spacesheik: “I loved Green Book — screw the haters. The audience I saw it with loved it as well (this was in November in an AMC theater at Tysons Mall, before all the hype). They enthusiastically clapped at the end. The film is highly entertaining, with some great performances all around. I’d watch it again. I was shocked when Peter Farrelly‘s name came onscreen, its the complete antithesis of everything he’s done before – and for that he deserves credit. You can dismiss whatever you want, but you can see the film was made with a lot of love and compassion towards that era and history.”

Wells response: “Check but Green Book wasn’t made with love and compassion ‘towards’ that era as much as with a frank attitude and acknowledgment that this was what the realm of 1962 was unfortunately like.”

Jordan Ruimy: “The fact of the matter is that Green Book is a crowd-pleaser like no other. All three times I saw it the audience applauded during the credits, which almost never happens. It has an 8.3 IMDB score, by far the highest of 2018 contenders and a much-coveted A CinemaScore. It has struck a chord with Joe and Jane Popcorn. The fact that it’ll spread into an additional 1000 theatres next week could make the case for it louder and clearer.”

The Cinemaholic: “I love Green Book but the PGA win is actually going to do more harm to film’s chances than good. The woke crowd is going to tear the film to pieces. I am waiting for Oscar nominations to see how it does there. If Farrelly and Vallelonga get nominated, you know that all the p.c. journalists will have a big meltdown again. Anyway, all this is so much fun. And yes, A Star Is Born is over. Roma will win Best Picture (as I have been maintaining since September).”

CinnaJon: “It seems like it’s already run the gauntlet of being torn to pieces, and is now emerging on the other side stronger and more embraceable than when it first entered the fray. The film could be the beneficiary of people reaching an exhaustion point with outrage culture. Voting GB is a pushback to all that.”

HE commenters “RossoVeneziano” and “Mr. F.,” myself, Mark David Chapman and Variety editor Steven Gaydos on the crash-and-burn scenario of Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born, a justly admired and relentlessly promoted Warner Bros. release film that is now completely finished as a Best Picture contender, and the key role that Variety‘s Kris Tapley may have arguably played in helping to bring about its demise (i.e., in a water-poisoning, long-game sense).

RossoVeneziano: “ASIB officially being out of the BP race even before nominations are announced is something no one saw coming. Whatever you think of the movie I feel sorry for Cooper — biggest loser of the season.”

Mr. F.: “Warners is now frantically working through the weekend to finish drawing up their ‘DO IT FOR BRADLEY’ campaign.”

Jeffrey Wells: “A Star Is Born’s loss is Hollywood Elsewhere’s joy, partly because many in the industry listened to (or agreed with) my sensible advice that you can’t hand a Best Picture Oscar to a well-handled but formulaic remake of a remake of a remake. Good film, made lots of money, and that was enough.

“If you ask me the other big loser in this morning-after realm is Variety’s Kris Tapley, whose ‘stand back because here comes a big multi-Oscar nominee!’ drumbeat article that ran before Toronto…if you ask me that piece poisoned the water with an aura of arrogance and entitlement — a Tapley trumpeting (WB publicists have shown me this knockout film early and I’ve been given permission to pass along the wonderful news) that proclaimed Bradley Cooper as the new king.

“Not so fast, Kris!

“HE was the only site anywhere that stood up to the WB hype machine with a piece that was bluntly headlined ‘Due Respect But ASIB Must Be Stopped.” Bobby Peru huffed and puffed, but thank God the industry mostly agreed with my view of things. Sometimes (not often but sometimes) things work out for the better.”

Steven Gaydos: “OK, let’s put this one to rest once for all. (I know, I know, in the obsessive-compulsive world of Jeff ‘Roma Man’ Wells, that never happens, but I’ll forge on anyway.) Here’s what my Variety colleague Kris Tapley ACTUALLY wrote a month before A Star is Born opened in theaters:

“‘Including best picture and director, where are we now? Nine nominations? A Star Is Born is an across-the-board Oscar contender. More than that, and assuming this is even still possible in the modern era, it has the muscle to achieve what only three films in movie history ever have: Win all five major Academy Awards (picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay.’

“If you read his observations on Awards Season, which you, like Mark Chapman studying ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and winding up in front of the Dakota, you clearly do, Kris clearly loves Roma as much as you do and he also loves Star is Born and he loves First Man and he loves Minding the Gap, etc.

“So he does what you’ve said a thousand times here that you believe should be done: he doesn’t mask his enthusiasm for the films he’s passionate about. But he also does something you should consider matching: he generally checks that passion at the door when it comes time for wisely, fairly and accurately surveying the Awards Season scene.