I’ve said many times on this site over the last 14 years that there’s no organized community that’s more foul or diseased or deserving of being eaten by lions than rightwing Christians, and so any time I read anything that more or less agrees with this basic view, I tend to re-post it.

“I have attended dozens of Christian nationalist conferences and events over the past two years. And while I have heard plenty of comments casting doubt on the more questionable aspects of Donald Trump’s character, the gist of the proceedings almost always comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord.

“I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.

“This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.

“They want it all. And in Mr. Trump, they have found a man who does not merely serve their cause, but also satisfies their craving for a certain kind of political leadership.” — from “Why Trump Reigns as King Cyrus,” a 12.31 N.Y. Times piece by Katherine Stewart.

Why would any self-respecting 40-plus male have the slightest interest in watching Matt Walsh, of all people, try to find romantic salvation with some poor woman in Europe? Look at him and the guy he’s playing — not my idea of handsome or even moderately appealing, red-haired, pale complexion, freckle monster, seriously balding, emotionally unstable (proposing on his knees to a 26 year old?), nobody you’d want to hang out with and certainly no one I could even remotely identify with.

I wouldn’t watch Under The Eiffel Tower (The Orchard, 2.8) on a bet.

You can be aloof or snide and dismiss the views of regional film critics. Who, be honest, will sometimes choose oddball award winners for eccentric outlier reasons, or to otherwise get themselves some big-city attention.

But you can’t dismiss a fact that Variety‘s Kris Tapley reported earlier today, which is that Ethan Hawke‘s performance in First Reformed has won Best Actor trophies from no less than 22 regional critics groups. Not to mention having already won Best Actor awards from the Gothams, LAFCA and NYFCC.

I’m starting to ask myself why Hawke isn’t the most likely Best Actor Oscar winner at this stage. Well, why isn’t he? Are you going to sit there and tell me with a straight face that Bradley Cooper‘s drawlin’, laid-back, booze-sippin’ Kris Kirstofferson impersonation was more emotionally affecting or galvanizing than Hawke’s spiritually bothered, booze-sipping small-town minister?

Tapley also reports that Vice‘s Christian Bale has won four regional Best Actor award, and Cooper and Bohemian Rhapsody‘s Rami Malek have won three each.

Hollywood Elsewhere approves of anything that might hinder the Golden Globe or Oscar prospects of A Star Is Born. In a 12.26 piece titled “Due Respect, But A Star Is Born Must Be Stopped,” I asked “Is this who we are? Are we really going to give a Best Picture Oscar to the fifth version of a showbiz saga that dates back 85 years?”

And so HE heartily approves of 13 out of 20 Gold Derby spitballers (myself included) having predicted that Bohemian Rhapsody‘s Rami Malek will snatch the Best Actor in a Drama Golden Globe trophy, and in so doing slow or perhaps even stall the Oscar momentum of competing nominee Bradley Cooper, the director-star in A Star Is Born.

This is exactly and precisely what the doctor ordered. Stop Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga and A Star Is Born…stop Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga and A Star Is Born…jump in, the water’s fine…stop Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga and A Star Is Born, stop Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga and A Star Is Born, etc.

Walk over to their Golden Globes table, give them the biggest and warmest hug in the universe and say “guys, you delivered a very good remake and earned a shit-ton of money but we can’t give you Oscars, and we’re saying this with love and respect. We can’t shower the fourth remake of a 1932 inside-baseball melodrama with Little Gold Men…we just can’t.”

Perspective: Golden Globe and Oscar predictions are two different realms. Out of 30 Gold Derby predictions for the Best Actor Oscar race, Malek is sitting at the top of exactly two lists — that of Fox TV’s Tariq Khan and TCM’s Alicia Malone. Two out of 30, and yet 13 out of 20 are going with Malek for the Golden Globe Best Actor Drama award. Not Comedy or Musical but Drama. How to explain? The Golden Globe awards are about champagne highs and goofing off but the Oscars are sober and serious…something like that?

Hollywood Elsewhere has joined the Malek movement in the Golden Globe realm, but has him in fifth place on the GD Oscar ballot. Because I honestly believe that the top five Best Actor contenders are, in this order, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Ethan Hawke, Viggo Mortensen and Malek.

For the most part Anne Thompson‘s assessment of the Best Actress Oscar race isn’t politically wrong. In all likelihood The Wife‘s Glenn Close, The Favourite‘s Olivia Colman, A Star Is Born‘s Lady Gaga and Can You Ever Forgive Me‘s Melissa McCarthy will be Oscar-nominated. No argument there.

But I’m not sure about Roma‘s Yalitza Aparicio. Because I don’t think she really steps up to the plate and performs her role as Cleo, the saintly maid — I think she very believably inhabits this passive character but she’s not really swinging the bat like Hank Aaron or Willie Mays — she’s not bringing her Vivien Leigh or Geraldine Page or Jo Van Fleet. She’s a little too quiet and still. The only time Cleo really steps up to the plate is during that third-act seaside sequence when SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER.

The actress who really and truly deserves the fifth slot is Cold War‘s Joanna Kulig. Her performance in Pawel Pawlikowski‘s period drama reignites the spirit of Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim along with a spritz of Gloria Grahame. A femme fatale songbird, an emotional force of nature, trouble from the word go.

I’ve had Kulig in my Gold Derby Best Actress roster for several weeks now, and the same status quo fuddy-duds who told me for weeks that Ethan Hawke‘s First Reformed performance could never land a Best Actor nomination until they were proved wrong are the same who’ve been telling me that Kulig can’t happen either.

Maybe she’ll make it and maybe she won’t, but I know Kulig is far more deserving of that fifth slot than Aparacio. And Thompson doesn’t even have Kulig listed as a long shot! C’mon!

…are not necessarily tragedies. They become tragedies only when the warning signs are ignored and reality checks are strenuously avoided.

To go by a just-posted Variety story (“Tiffany Haddish Bombs on New Year’s Eve, Fans Walk Out of Comedy Show”) and a recently-posted Instagram video, Tiffany Haddish may have to take certain steps (perhaps as many as 12 of them) in order to straighten things out. Maybe. Seems that way. Ciroc vodka, etc.

michfonte@luislucien: “It was horrible. She came out at 11, she was obviously wasted and just couldn’t put it together. It was honestly obvious she was unprepared and then she has the audacity to say that this won’t happen again, [and] that she’ll be prepared next time. How about this time?”

Yesterday seven Indiewire contributors riffed on twenty 2019 films that may, in some cases, excite woke-ish or avant-garde sensibilities…who knows?

In alphabetical order: James Gray‘s Ad Astra, Harmony Korine‘s Beach Bum, Mia Hansen Love‘s Bergman Island, Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Taika Waititi‘s Jojo Rabbit, Rian Johnson‘s Knives Out, Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted, Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse, Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women, Noah Hawley‘s Lucy in the Sky, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite, Melina Matsoukas‘ Queen & Slim, Josephine Decker‘s Shirley, Kore-eda Hirokazu‘s The Truth, Benny & Josh Safdie‘s Uncut Gems, Jordan Peele‘s Us, Benh Zeitlin‘s Wendy and Janicza Bravo‘s Zola.

Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

Around 9 am this morning Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn posted an analysis piece titled “Audiences Aren’t Getting Dumber, They’re Just Overwhelmed.” No offense to Eric, but I found a comment thread riff by a guy named “Jasper” (a nom de plume inspired by Chinatown‘s “Jasper Lamar Crabb“?) to be slightly more interesting.

“We’re living in oversaturated media times and it will only get worse, because everybody will [eventually] be a filmmaker, a studio and a distributor at the same time. All technology is going into this direction. Moving images will eventually be an ‘extension of man’ that Marshall McLuhan didn’t dare to dream of.

“Entertainment will always matter because life is actually pretty boring: Children are boring, jobs are boring, everything will bore you after a while…even sex. But cinema never gets boring, because it constantly re-invents itself and is open for new content.

“Moving Images are also a technique of creating ‘proof’ and to communicate your experience. For example take a look at “Camino-One feature length selfie” (2019).

“To see films on smartphones is okay if the films were made for smartphones to begin with. There are other films, of course, that were not intended to be seen this way. Perhaps they could carry a warning’ at the beginning or a ‘plan’ how to watch and show them?

“First Reformed should definitely be seen in a dark, big cinema full of people, otherwise it probably doesn’t work as intended.”

HE to Jasper Lamar Crabb: Good movies are about real life with the boring parts removed. Your job may be boring (sorry if that’s the case) but writing never is. Plus I’ve never found young kids to be boring. You know what’s vaguely boring? That short hiking film that you linked to.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s smackdown essay about Barack Obama‘s Best of 2018 roster (“What Barack Obama’s Year-End Movie List Reveals About Him“):

Excerpt #1: “I found it dispiriting — an example of caution masquerading as daring. The critically approved good taste that Obama displays in his list of favorite films is so impeccable that I kept combing through the list in search of a flaw in the diamond, a micro-glimmer of vulgarity or surprise, or just something a little offbeat, a dollop of idiosyncrasy that might tell us a bit more about who Barack Obama is, apart from someone with a platonically perfect record of movie fanship.”

Excerpt #2: “His taste in movies is so good that it’s too good for its own good.”

Excerpt #3: “It’s a bit strange to peruse Obama’s list for a glimpse of what’s inside his heart and mind, only to be confronted by the hive mind of the cinephile-industrial complex. Maybe that’s just who he is, but if you accept the list as Obama’s own, what it reveals about him is that he’s a man who instinctively focus groups his own taste to within an inch of its life.”

Excerpt #4: “Obama entitled his list ‘My favorite movies of 2018,’ but did he choose the movies he loved or did he get with the program? The most telling thing about his list is that there may be no difference.”

Posted on HE, 12.28.18: “Barack Obama‘s list of his favorite 2018 films reflect his sophisticated-cineaste sense of taste (he knows the turf) and eye for quality. It’s a list that Eric Kohn, Alison Willmore, Justin Chang or any scholastically correct, Sight and Sound-approved critic might have assembled.

“And yet I’m sensing that Obama chose these films very carefully, which is to say with a partial eye toward what the cool kidz on Twitter (i.e., the SJWs, the woke fascists) might say. Which is to say his list doesn’t seem entirely, real-deal honest.

“Obama’s list is partly ‘this is who I am’ and partly ‘these are the films that I know are the most critically approved and therefore the safest for me to include.'”

On this, the first day of 2019, a reminder that in choosing the best of the year and especially Best Picture, Academy and guild members are obliged to vote according to four criteria or lines of thought — (a) honoring unfettered quality, (b) voting in solidarity with megaplex ticket-buyers, (c) serving or following the industry’s woke political agenda, or (d) voting in order to tell the politically correct, beaver-hat-wearing lefty commissars to shove it for the sheer pleasure of saying that.

One, Academy and guild members can vote for the best or boldest or most affecting artistic achievement, which in today’s context would be Roma — let’s be honest. Or Cold War, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Favourite, Vice or Green Book. Or, if you’re into the slavish Wong Kar Wai tribute aesthetic, If Beale Street Could Talk.

Two, they can vote for popcorn-with-extra-butter megaplex movies, or films that have simply connected with the peon class (which Hollywood Elsewhere understands and feels a certain bond with) — A Star Is Born, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book and BlacKkKlansman (partly a serious drama about America’s racial past but primarily a popcorn movie about a police caper).

Three, they can vote for films that embody or reflect upon Hollywood’s political-social merit badge mentality, and which also reflect favorably on the voters’ own socially progressive convictions. The recipients of these films would be Black Panther (which is also the only film in contention that qualifies as a Hollywood historical benchmark breakout flick, and is also a worldwide hit), If Beale Street Could Talk and BlacKkKlansman.

And four, they can rally behind Green Book as a protest vote against the lefty woke thought-police scolds who, outside of the entirely necessary and long-time-coming movement to push back against sexual predators as well as discrimination in all its forms, are trying to muscle everyone and push them around and tell them how to think and talk and in so doing are generally ushering in a climate of politically correct terror that is beginning to rival the ’50s Commie-witch-hunt days and has already summoned parallels to the French terror of the late 1700s,…the idea is to take the “woke” criticism of Green Book and turn the tables by telling those Stalinist goose-stepping SJW assholes to sorta kinda GO FUCK THEMSELVES. In a polite, jovial, fraternal way, of course.

Los Angeles is easily the dullest, most lackluster city in the world for celebrating New Year’s Eve. Give me Paris, Moscow….even New York City in the rain.

Late Sunday afternoon: Drove northwest on Los Felix Blvd., took left on Catalina Street, parked the car at the corner of Catalina and Glencairn, hiked up to the top of the neighborhood and then onto the path to the Griffith Park Observatory. Spent 15 minutes looking at the view, taking pics, etc. Too crowded, too many commoners. And then back down the trail.