It turns out Oscar telecast producers Mike DeLuca and Suzanne Todd liked my notion about bringing back Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway to present an Academy Award on Sunday, only they’ve done me one better.

TMZ reported last night that Beatty and Dunaway will in fact present the Best Picture Oscar at the ceremony’s conclusion and, not as my “Mickey One” piece suggested, a “minor” award “for dignity’s sake.”

Excerpt: “[TMZ’s] Oscar sources tell us Warren and Faye both just showed up at the Dolby Theatre and rehearsed the big moment. We’re told they were shuffled onstage together very quickly to run through their bit. They went through their lines twice. She began by saying, ‘Presenting is better the second time around.’ Beatty followed up with, ‘The winner is Gone with the Wind. We’re told the writers are still putting finishing touches on their lines.”

Calling, please, for more show-stopping rants in which an offended party lets the offender have it in spades. Preferably with video clip attached. For me, nothing beats Steve Martin‘s brutal vivisection of John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles (’87), but it’s all a matter of taste.

I regret blowing off a 7 pm screening of A Wrinkle Of Time at Disney tonight, but I’d rather attend J.J. Abrams‘ annual Oscar Wilde awards at Bad Robot. Then I’ll catch a 9:30 or 10 pm screening of Eli Roth and Bruce Willis‘s Death Wish at the Arclight or Grove. Yes, that’s right — MGM flacks wouldn’t invite me to a screening. 5:22 pm update: I’ve just returned from picking up my Spirit Awards press pass at Ginsberg-Libby.

Not long after Elvis Presley died of a drug overdose in August 1977, the blunt-spoken John Lennon told a reporter that Presley “died in 1958, when he went into the Army.” There were, in fact, two Elvis Presleys, but the better of the two was elbowed and suffocated early on — career pressures, tumbling tides, you-tell-me-what-else.

The one that mattered was Elvis #1 — a rip-roaring cultural force of the mid ’50s, a slender and sideburned Memphis native who exuded a pulsing sexual energy and totally ruled the rock ‘n’ roll roost from early ’56 to March of ’58 (when he began his two-year military hitch) and who made five half-decent films — Love Me Tender, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole and Flaming Star.

Elvis #2 was an in-and-outer and mostly a sell-out, the star of a series of appalling, ridiculous Hollywood films, a yokel who didn’t like the counterculture and the antiwar left, and thereafter became a flamboyant conservative who paid President Nixon an obsequious visit in December ’70, and then a flashy, entourage-flanked Las Vegas headliner, and finally a bloated, grotesque, drug-taking, peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich-consuming, on-the-verge-of-death wreck of his former self.

The apparent aim of this three-hour, two-part HBO movie, directed by Thom Zimny and debuting on 4.14, is to portray Presley as a serious, aspirational, hard-working artist during his slow-decline period (’58 to ’77). Maybe there’s more to this era than is commonly known, but…okay, I’ll watch it and see what goes.

I smelled bullshit the instant that I read a claim by N.Y. Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman that Hope Hicks‘ decision to resign (a) had nothing to do with her House Intelligence Committee testimony (i.e., “I’ve told white lies”) and (b) that she’d been planning to leave for “months“. (Hicks only took the White House Communications Director job six months ago — 8.27.17 — when Anthony Scaramucci left.) The general belief out there is that Haberman is a stenographer for the Trump White House. Sure seems that way.

Not exactly charismatic and a little wonky to boot, but he’s a good, sensible fellow.

“Polls have consistently showed broad support for a universal background check. National polls in 2016 and 2017 found between 84 and 94 percent of respondents supported background checks. But what about NRA members? While federal law requires background checks for sales from federally licensed dealers, unlicensed private sellers are not required to conduct background checks — although states can create their own laws. A 2015 poll of gun owners by Public Policy Polling surveyed 816 gun owners. 83% said they support a criminal background check for everyone who wants to buy a firearm. Of the 196 who said they were NRA members, the poll showed that 72% support background checks.” — from 2.27 Politifact article by Amy Sherman.

If a genie were to offer me one wish (instead of the usual three), I would ask for the collapse of the superhero comic-book scourge. For these films have transformed the movie-theatre experience, a once-hallowed shrine, into something brutishly primitive and whorishly repetitive. Excellent stuff is obviously being made and seen, but mostly on my 65″ Sony 4K. Dipshit superhero flicks, cheap horror, dumb comedies, family fantasies, romcoms and girl-power fables are tumorous metaphors for the quarter-of-an-inch-deep spiritual vistas and fast-food taste buds of millions of GenX, Millennial and GenZ moviegoers.

And I’m speaking as someone who refused to see Girls Trip but truly enjoyed the last hour of Black Panther, and definitely looking forward to Ant Man and the Sassy Bitch Wasp.

When will it all end? In a May 2016 essay that offered “a nuanced explanation of where the industry’s at, how it got there, and what it means for the future of movies,” TimStarz04 predicted a collapse sometime in the early ’20s. The then-current system (slambang superfantasy flicks costing an arm and a leg, and only a small portion of them returning substantial profits) is “unsustainable,” he said, echoing the views of many in the industry (including Steven Spielberg). He specifically theorized that 2016 “will be the first year of the collapse of the Hollywood [comic-book idiot] studio system that will probably take hold by the beginning of the 2020s.”

What has changed over the last 21 months, if anything? The answer is “nothing,” of course, but I’m asking all the same.

“People should look at comedies as dramas when they’re writing [them]. They should be a story that would work just as well without any jokes.” — Judd Apatow in just-popped (3.1.18) Masterclass trailer.

I’ve been saying this all along. A good comedy is just as story-savvy, character-rich and well-motivated as a good drama. Good comedies and dramas both need strong third-act payoffs. Take away the jokes, the broad business and the giggly schtick, and a successful comedy will still hold water in dramatic terms. But most comedic writers, it seems, start with an amusing premise, then add the laugh material, and then, almost as an afterthought, weave in a semblance of a story along with some motivation and a third-act crescendo that feels a little half-assed.

Remember Amy Schumer‘s eulogy at her dad’s funeral in Trainwreck? Exactly.

Posted by Time‘s Laignee Baron on 2.27: “An usually icy winter blasting through Europe reached Rome, blanketing the Italian capital in a rare four inches of snow.” Of all things fairest, first among cities and home of the gods is golden Rome. If was ordered to live there or else, I would say “okay.”

Official Sony Pictures Announcement: “Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film will be titled Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and will star Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. The film will be released worldwide on August 9, 2019.” Previous reports have said the film will shoot in Los Angeles sometime this summer.

Back to statement: “Tarantino describes it as ‘a story that takes place in Los Angeles in 1969, at the height of hippy Hollywood. The two lead characters are Rick Dalton (DiCaprio), former star of a western TV series, and his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Pitt). Both are struggling to make it in a Hollywood they don’t recognize anymore. But Rick has a very famous next-door neighbor…Sharon Tate.”

Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski at their Benedict Canyon home at 10050 Cielo Drive, sometime in ’68 or ’69.

First of all, it’s spelled “hippie.” (If you’re spelling it “hippy,” you’re referencing the 1963 Swingin’ Blue Jeans version of “The Hippy Hippy Shake.”) Second, Rick’s next door neighbors were big-cheese director Roman Polanski and actress-wife Sharon Tate, not Tate alone. (They weren’t separated or divorced.) Third, DiCaprio is 43 and looks it, and if a TV actor hasn’t hit it big or found a second career wind by his late ’30s, he’s probably fucked unless he’s a character actor. And fourth, Pitt is 54 and could maybe pass for 47 or 48, at best. You can’t play a struggling, trying-to-make-it guy when you’re 47…c’mon!

Pitt and DiCaprio could’ve played struggling guys a decade ago, when they were 44 and 33, respectively. That I would’ve believed.

Last November The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit reported that the film would cost in the vicinity of $95 million, which, when you add the usual absurd marketing costs, means it would have to gross $375 million worldwide to break even, according to “one source” Kit spoke to.

“Appropriately Damning Chappaquiddick,” posted on 9.11.17: “John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick (Entertainment Studios, 4.6) is a tough, well-shaped, no-holds-barred account of the infamous July 1969 auto accident that caused the death of Kennedy family loyalist and campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, and which nearly destroyed Sen. Edward Kennedy‘s political career save for some high-powered finagling and string-pulling that allowed the younger brother of JFK and RFK to more or less skate.

“Just about every scene exudes the stench of an odious situation being suppressed and re-narrated by big-time fixers, many of whom are appalled at Ted’s behavior and character but who do what’s necessary regardless.

“There’s no question that Curran, screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, dp Maryse Alberti and editor Keith Fraase are dealing straight, compelling cards, and that the film has stuck to the ugly facts as most of us recall and understand them, and that by doing so it paints the late Massachusetts legislator and younger brother of JFK and RFK (Jason Clarke) in a morally repugnant light, to put it mildly.

“Curran has crafted an intelligent, mid-tempo melodrama about a weak man who commits a careless, horrible act, and then manages to weasel out of any serious consequences.

“Chappaquiddick is a frank account of how power works (or worked in 1969, at least) when certain people want something done and are not averse to calling in favors. EMK evaded justice by way of ingrained subservience to the Kennedy mystique, a fair amount of ethical side-stepping and several relatively decent folks being persuaded to look the other way.