I’ve explained over and over that the three strongest knockout films of 2017 are Luca Guadgnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk and Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird. In picking the most deserving recipient of the Best Picture Oscar, Academy members ought to choose between these three. They really ought to. Because Nolan’s is a brilliant, IMAX-sized work of art and a God’s-eye war film, and Guadagnino’s is a lulling, levitational love story for the ages, and Gerwig’s is a coming-of-age film with a wonderful prickly edge.

But nope, sorry, not happening. Dunkirk isn’t emotional enough, Call Me By Your Name has to stand down because older straight white guys don’t want to celebrate another gay film after Moonlight, and Lady Bird is just a flick about an anxious, creatively stifled high school girl. And so a pair of very worthy but slightly lesser films — Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, which received 12 BAFTA noms, and Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri — are stepping into the breach.

This seems to be the meaning of this morning’s BAFTA nominations, if they can be processed as foreshadowings of the 2018 Oscar nominations (which will be announced on 1.23). The 12 noms won by The Shape of Water plus the nine noms that went to Three Billboards means they’re the tippy-toppers right now.

Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour also received nine BAFTA noms, but you have to write some of that off to the Churchill factor (i.e., genetic British nationalism).

In other words, Fox Searchlight almost certainly has the Best Picture Oscar in the bag. After 1.23 it’ll be competing with itself on behalf of Three Billboards and Shape of Water. Not tooth and nail, of course, but voters will have to choose. Hollywood Elsewhere hereby congratulates FS on a fight well won, and twice over at that.

The only problem is that I’ve seen Three Billboards and The Shape of Water twice each, and with all due respect and affection for all concerned they’re just not brilliant or audacious enough to be celebrated as the two finest films of 2017. They deserve to be in the final round of contenders, for sure. And they’re highly commendable — Billboards for the writing and acting (McDormand, Rockwell, Harrelson), Water for the erotic fairy-tale aspects and luxurious production design and cinematography, and in terms of Sally Hawkins‘ extremely affecting performance. But they’re not quite ivy league.

In Shape, Michael Shannon‘s villain is way too one-note demonic, Doug Jones‘ aquatic creature has no personality or longing other than to be loved and protected, and it’s ludicrous to presume (as the movie tells us) that Shannon wouldn’t instantly conclude that Hawkins’ apartment is the only place to look when Jones turns up missing at the lab.

And Three Billboards is suspended in a fantasy realm in which McDormand evades the consequences of drilling a dentist’s thumbnail and firebombing a police station (despite Peter Dinklage vouching for her in the latter case), and Rockwell suffers no legal prosecution or civil lawsuit after he throws Caleb Landry Jones out of a window and off a roof.

And yet The Shape of Water and Three Billboards are the two apparent finalists because (a) they supply enough emotion and aren’t chilly in a Nolan-esque sense, (b) they don’t irritate older white guys by being gayish (Richard Jenkins‘ Shape character aside) and (c) their stories and themes are bigger and broader than that of a Sacramento high-school senior looking to go to college back east. They’re soft consensus favorites, and that’s how it seems to be going right now.

“A book is an entirely different thing…[White House reporters] can’t say what they know because they have to go back the next day…politics don’t matter…everybody looks at Trump the same way…this is an aberrant moment…early-stage dementia,” etc.

Last night Barbra Streisand recalled a major event in her career and in the annals of women directors — winning a Best Director Golden Globe award for Yentl, which she also produced, co-wrote and starred in. It happened 34 years ago, or in January 1984. Since then, she lamented, no woman has won a Best Director Golden Globe.

In any event Glenn Kenny vented this morning about some MSNBC pundit failing to recall how good it was. (Or something like that.) For the first time in many decades I began to think back to my one and only viewing of Yentl, recalling what I could of it, thinking about Mandy Patinkin‘s confused attraction for Streisand’s Yentl Mendel, whom he’s been told is a young boy.

I’ve looked at some clips since replying to Kenny, and plot points are coming back. Almost everyone had a favorable opinion of Yentl back then, but I’ve never wanted to re-watch it. Has anyone?

Just now a strange compulsion led me to buy a British Bluray of Jerzy Skolimowski‘s The Shout. I did so despite knowing that it’s not very good. It creeped me out when I first saw it at the 1978 New York Film Festival, but it also left me hanging. After it ended I felt as if bees were buzzing in my head. I looked at a friend and said, “Can you tell me what the fuck that was about?”

In his 11.9.79 N.Y. Times review, Vincent Canby called it a “vivid, piercingly loud movie as well as an almost totally incoherent one.

“The story starts off well, like almost any ghost story made up by a child, but then it becomes so full of loose ends, contradictions, cryptic symbols and close-ups of objects that…one eventually tunes out of the narrative, much as one does when the child’s ghost story becomes too hopelessly muddled for even the child to unravel.

The Shout “is an elegant looking movie, nicely performed, but because it leaves one knowing less than one did at the beginning, it is easily forgettable. Except for the sound. Apparently to prepare us for the scene in which Charles screams his aboriginal scream, the producers seem to have sharpened or heightened the soundtrack in such a way that even ordinary sounds — the wind, for example — take on a painful sibilance.”

That’s the odd thing — Canby called it “easily forgettable” but I’ve never forgotten it. And now I want it again. Go figure.

Posted on 9.14.17 or roughly four months ago: Angelina Jolie‘s Evelyn Salt was trained as a child in a tough Russian Academy for lethal super-spies also…no? And then she went on to become a kind of double-agent? Red Sparrow (20th Century Fox, 3.2.18) is obviously a kind of retread. Director Francis Lawrence, the director of not one or two but three Hunger Games movies, is everyone’s idea of a hack, a journeyman, a well-paid stooge. In short, the perfect guy to helm Red Sparrow. Jennifer Lawrence looks either miserable or emotionally shut down or a combination of the two. I can’t wait to suffer through this thing.

“Drafted against her will to become a ‘Sparrow,’ a trained seductress in the service of Russian intelligence, Dominika is assigned to operate against Nathaniel Nash, a first-tour CIA officer who handles the CIA’s most sensitive penetration of Russian intelligence. The two young intelligence officers, trained in their respective spy schools, collide in a charged atmosphere of tradecraft, deception, and, inevitably, a forbidden spiral of carnal attraction that threatens their careers and the security of America’s most valuable mole in Moscow.” — from Amazon summary of Jason Matthews ‘Red Sparrow’ trilogy.

Oprah Winfrey‘s energy, compassion, discipline, business acumen and progressive views…her positivism, reach-out attitude, brains, confidence, phenomenal wealth…all of this would make her an excellent antidote to the Donald Trump poison if she were to run for President in 2020. Because she would almost certainly win.

I’d vote for Oprah without hesitation, without blinking an eye. Compared to the grotesque horrors emanating from the current White House occupant, President Winfrey would be a huge relief, a godsend…water from a mountain stream. Another headstrong leader, yes, but a sane one.

In mid-November ’16 Michael Moore said that Democrats “would be better off if they ran Oprah or Tom Hanks or…why don’t we run beloved people? I mean, we have so many of them. The Republicans do this.”

But at the same time I’m a little scared. Because Winfrey is a political neophyte, and she’d probably be looking at a steep learning curve, certainly in terms of D.C. relationships and practical politics. Remember how she said that she felt “hope” when President-elect Trump meet with President Obama 14 months ago? That was embarassing. Plus her ass has been steadily smooched by big media and tens of millions of fans since the mid ’80s, and keeping her cool and mounting a defense once the Republicans bring out their heavy artillery would be a new skill set for her.

We all know Oprah is brilliant and that she actually reads and is probably 25 times more knowledgable than Trump about the major issues, but I haven’t actually heard her specific views on anything. Maybe she should expound a bit on taxes, health care, military strategy, alternative fuels, climate change and North Korea before we all jump off the cliff?

Boiled down Oprah is the same kind of high-profile personality and political journeyman that Trump was/is — a self-made billionaire business person and a magnetic TV personality with a huge following. Winfrey would be the hopeful, progressive and inclusive side of this equation, but she’d be seen by many as a fundamentally Trump-ish candidate in the sense of being a political outsider with no I.O.U’s held by special corporate interests, etc. Okay, she’s in tight with liberal progressives, of course, but somehow this clan doesn’t feel as odious, at least not from my perspective.

Not long ago a director friend mentioned that of all the things he liked about Mudbound, he was most impressed by Rachel Morrison‘s cinematography. It’s not poised or prettified, he said, but it has an au natural thing — a humid, plain-as-dirt, you-are-there atmosphere.

A relatively young dp, Morrison delivered her first major-league score with her lensing of Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale Station (’13). She also shot Daniel Barnz and Jennifer Aniston‘s Cake (’14) and Zal Batmanglij‘s The Sound Of My Voice (’11).

What defines a really successful comedy? Being funny, of course, and preferably in a way that’s not too coarse or lowbrow. Clever, witty, feel-goody. You want it to be accessible enough for Joe and Jane Popcorn to have a good time with it, but you also want film critics to stand up and salute. And you definitely want it to turn a healthy profit. Some comedies do well with critics but not so much at the box-office. Or vice versa. And some fizzle all around the track — cruddy reviews, low grosses, unpopular with popcorn munchers, etc. Very few comedies hit it on all four burners.

Not everyone realizes that Amazon’s The Big Sick, which opened on 6.23.17 after debuting at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, has done exactly that. And this, by any fair standard, drops it into the Best Picture realm.

A dryly amusing indie comedy about ethnic issues affecting a relationship between Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani), a laid-back Pakistani comic, and Emily (Zoe Kazan), a spunky, willful white girl, The Big Sick managed a 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating and sold a shitload of tickets to Average Joes. It cost $5 million to make and earned $55 million worldwide, excluding ancillary revenue. Even if you throw in the “Hollywood bookkeeping” factor, you’ll still be well in the black.

The Big Sick has even become a top award contender in recent weeks. Holly Hunter‘s performance as Kazan’s mom has snagged several Best Supporting Actress nominations (the Independent Spirit Awards, several critics groups); ditto the screenplay (co-written by Nanjiani and wife Emily V. Gordon, and based on their actual romantic history) as well as the film itself being Best Picture-nominated by the Critics Choice Awards, the Satellite Awards and the Producers Guild of America.

Four burners plus the awards action makes five. Do I hear six?

I’ve seen The Big Sick three times, and each time it’s felt fresh and natural and sharp as a tack. It gains. After seeing it in Park City I called it droll humor for smarties and hipsters as well as dry and diverting. You never really know where it’s going, and that’s just how I like it. I loved the terrorist jokes (no, seriously), and it really does come together emotionally during the last 25%.

Nanjiani embroiders with a unique tone and sensibility, certainly within the realm of a modern American love story. He and Kazan hold things together for the first 40%, but it’s Hunter and Ray Romano (as Kazan’s dad) who bring it home.

Zoe Kazan, Kumail Najiani.

The only thing that really “happened” this evening was that Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney were energized in their respective Best Supporting categories. Dafoe isn’t as inevitable as he seemed earlier this evening, and Janney is aggressively snipping at Laurie Metcalf‘s heels. The snubbing of Call Me By Your Name (Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer, not to mention the film itself) made the HFPA seem timid and a bit dim. I don’t know how to assess the snubbing of The Post except to lump it in with the SAG and DGA blow-offs. Chris Nolan‘s brilliant Dunkirk was also dismissed, probably over the same old complaint about an ostensible lack of heart. For me the shunning of Jordan Peele‘s Get Out felt like a welcome respite from the incessant p.c. largesse-ing of recent weeks, and those candids of Daniel Kaluuya‘s subdued, almost forlorn expressions (“I’m good but let’s not get carried away”) won my respect.

8:07 pm: HE email to Call Me By Your Name‘s Luca Guadagnino: “You and your highly esteemed colleagues (Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, James Ivory, Peter Spears, Howard Rosenman, Sufjan Stevens) made the absolute finest film of 2017….hands down, no question, history will acknowledge. I will continue to say this over and over because it’s true. I love you and your facility, your gift. Onward, hugs, creations.”

8:04 pm: Barbra Streisand presenting the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Drama, and the winner is Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. Hugs and congrats all around, but I’d also love to hear from Chris Willman about this. Streisand won Best Director for Yentl 34 years ago, she reminds — the last time a woman won. Time’s up!

7:59 pm: Will Three Billboards‘ Frances McDormand or Shape of Water‘s Sally Hawkins win for Best Actress, Drama? McDormand wins! “I have a few things to say. I’m still not quite sure who the HFPA [members] are when I run into them, and they managed to elect a female president….just saying. Everybody brought their very best game to this one. The women in this room tonight are not here for the food — we are here for the work. Thank you.”

7:52 pm: Gary Oldman‘s chances of winning the Best Actor Oscar would have been down the tubes if he hadn’t won tonight, but he did. Golden Globe winner for Best Actor, Drama, and he forgot to thank director Joe Wright! And now, it seems, he’s a likely winner for the Oscar. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre. Timothy Chalamet, Oldman’s closest rival, will have many shots over the years and decades to come.

7:45 pm: The Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Comedy/Musical goes to Lady Bird…of course! Greta Gerwig ascendant! The story of her life transformed. Hollywood Elsewhere totally approves. I remember that electric moment when I first saw it in Telluride.

My Telluride email to Gerwig: “By far the best, wisest, smartest, most emotionally resonant film I’ve seen at Telluride ’17. No question. I will say as much tomorrow morning. It’s the only real break-out and pop-through. And Saoirse Ronan, of course, for Best Actress. Loveless and First Reformed were also excellent, of course. But Lady Bird was/is the best of the bunch.”

7:35 pm: Lady Bird‘s Saoirse Ronan wins Best Actress in Motion Picture, Comedy/Musical. Well earned, fully supported, enthusiastically cheered. Everyone is getting pushed off too quickly, it seems. It’s 7:37 pm — the producers want this show over by 8 pm. It’s now 7:43 pm — they’re not gonna make it.

7:28 pm: HBO’s Big Little Lies wins for Best TV Movie or Limited Series. Watched two episodes, wasn’t delighted but didn’t mind it, couldn’t stay with it. If you ask me the awards onslaught (including the 2017 Emmys) is out of proportion to how good it really is/was. Who strongly disagrees?

7:18 pm: The Shape of Water‘s Guillermo del Toro wins Best Director award! “This fable has saved my life…The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water.” Guillermo tells the band to stop playing him off: “This has taken 25 years…give me a minute, give me a minute. I thank you [and] my monsters thank you.” Obviously The Shape of Water is going to win Best Motion Picture, Drama. 8:08 pm Update: Wrong!

7:03 pm: It’s time for the big Oprah Winfrey tribute. A good, willful progressive with her priorities straight, but never forget what Winfrey said in the wake of President-Elect Donald Trump‘s visit to the Obama White House: “I just saw the two of them together, [and] I will say this: I just saw President-elect Trump with President Obama in the White House and it gave me hope. To hear President-elect Trump say that he had respect for President Obama, it felt that he had reached a moment where he was actually humbled by that experience.” This, ladies and gentlemen, is part of who and what Oprah is. Be honest. Irrefutable. That aside, Winfrey’s speech is heartfelt, show-stopping. Truth-slap to racism, paternal power and brutal men, whose “time is up.”

6:56 pm: Master of None‘s Aziz Ansari wins for Best Actor in TV Series, Musical or Comedy. Check.

6:53 pm: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Best Series, Musical/Comedy) is really doing well tonight. On my knees, I guarantee with all my heart that I’ll never, ever watch this…ever.

6:40 pm: Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade (a top Hollywood Elsewhere favorite along with Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless) wins for Best Foreign Language Film! Congrats to all concerned, and particularly Diane Kruger, who gave a world-class, drill-bit performance. Congrats to the formidable Fredel Pogodin, who handled L.A.’s In The Fade publicity and screenings.

6:37 pm: Martin McDonagh wins for Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri — second setback for Lady Bird following Laurie MetCalf‘s unexpected loss to Allison Janney.

6:33 pm: Before presenting the Best Screenplay award, an out-of-the-blue tribute to Kirk Douglas, who’s 101 years old. Isn’t it great how age takes your legs away and shrinks you down to roughly half your size when you were in your prime?

6:28 pm: Allison Janney win Best Supporting Actress in I, Tonya! Second major upset of the night following Sam Rockwell win. I don’t think this means a damn thing, but credit is due. I, Tonya has its admirers, but it’s an ugly, ugly film — a wallow in a coarse social milieu.

6:22 pm: Coco wins Best Animated feature. No offense but Hollywood Elsewhere doesn’t do “animated.” But (a) congrats to all concerned, (b) takes all realms to make a world.

6:08 pm: Golden Globe for Best Actor, Comedy/Musical goes to James Franco! Like I wanted/predicted. Big hugs, applause, etc And he brings Dracula up on stage! “This was a movie about the best/worst movie ever made,” etc. Costar Dave Franco accompanies. Winner Franco getting played off. Franco brothers prevail — good one!

6:07 pm: Out of the shower. What’d I miss? Nothing.

5:57 pm: I’m sorry but I have to take a shower. If not now, when? The Golden Globe for Best Musical Score goes to Alexander Desplat for The Shape of Water. An omen of things to come? The Greatest Showman‘s “This Is Me” wins for Best Song….meh.

5:52 pm: Amusing and energetic Seth Rogen hyping The Disaster Artist at the mike. The actual Tommy Wiseau at the table. The reel runs, and before you know it we’re onto the next thing. Alexander Skarsgard wins for Best Supporting Actor, Limited Series, Big Little Lies.

5:44 pm: John Goodman is cool, of course, but isn’t Rosanne Barr a serious Trump supporter? Sterling K. Brown wins for Best Actor in a TV series, Drama, in This Is Us. The Handmaid’s Tale wins for Best TV Series, Drama.

5:32 pm: Rachel Brosnahan wins GG for Best Actress in a TV comedy, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. One of these days I’ll hear the name “Rachel Brosnahan” and go “of course!” The Handmaid’s Tale‘s Elizabeth Moss wins for Best Actress, TV Drama…great. Uhhm…Moss was excellent in Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square!

5:18 pm: Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor goes to Three Billboards‘ Sam Rockwell! Surprise, right? Slight upset. Willem Dafoe stunned. What does this mean? Probably nothing but goorah for Rockwell, and goorah for Rockwell have lost the weight he put on for Three Billboards. Rockwell gets played off…my respect for going on that long. A much more interesting acceptance speech than Kidman’s.

5:15 pm: Big Little Lies‘ Nicole Kidman wins for Best Actress in a Limited Series….blather, blather, thank you thank you, tearful nod to her husband Keith Urban, etc. God bless, thank you…zzzzz.

5:10 pm: Calling out racism, sexism, hyprocrisy…all guys are vaguely guilty and some more so, that marvellous steely glare…Seth Meyers is such a bullwhip, so whip-lashy! Clever patter, kinda hate the man!

“Good evening, ladies and remaining gentlemen. Marijuana is legal and sexual harassment finally isn’t. For the males in the audience, this will be the first time in three months that it won’t be terrifying to hear your name read out loud. If it’s any consolation, I’m a man with absolutely no power in Hollywood.”

Didn’t I read Meyers wouldn’t be telling Trump jokes? “Remember when [Seth Rogen] was the guy making trouble in North Korea?” “Hollywood…Foreign…Press..the only names that would make Trump angrier would be the Hillary Mexico Salad Association,” blah blah.

“Harvey Weinstein will be back in 20 years as the first person who was ever booed during the ‘In Memoriam’ segment.” Doesn’t the late Harry Cohn have that honor?

“…that is alive every day in the White House.”

The Golden Globe awards will begin at 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Eastern. Never forget that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lives in its own little world, and that their picks are…well, they’re fine but not all that consequential. The only real benefit of winning a Golden Globe award is that you get to sell the fence-sitters with your acceptance speech. Remarks that are especially eloquent, confessional or heartfelt tend to enhance or underline one’s Oscar worthiness.

I’ll be posting my usual live-blog reactions to the winners as the show progresses.

Herewith are the likeliest winners according to the Gold Derby gang along with my own likes, misgivings and prejudices:

Best Film, Drama: Not a single Gold Derby-ite is predicting a win for the most beautifully woven and emotionally seductive drama of 2017 — Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name. Allow me, then, to predict this, partly because it’s the only film to vote for and partly out of spite for the herd-voting mentality. The Derby-os are mostly predicting a win for Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, which isn’t a “drama” as much as a romantic fantasy genre film –i.e., The Creature from the Love Lagoon. If Shape wins, great. But it won’t beat Lady Bird for the Best Picture Oscar.

Best Film, Comedy/Musical: The GD gang has almost unanimously predicted that Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird will win in a walk. HE agrees.

Best Director: The triumphant artist-poet who directed 2017’s finest film — Call Me By Your Name‘s Luca Guadagnino — hasn’t even been nominated by the HFPA so who cares? This is a joke. The Gold Derby-os are of the strong opinion that Guillermo del Toro will win. I for one would like to see Dunkirk‘s Christopher Nolan take it. Not would I mind if All The Money in the World‘s Ridley Scott wins as a gesture of respect for his last-minute nine-day re-shoot with Christopher Plummer.

Best Actor, Drama: There are more Gee Dees predicting a Gary Oldman win for his Winston Churchill than a triumph for Call Me By Your Name‘s Timothee Chalamet. I’d like to think that the relatively small group of HFPA voters might step outside the box and give the award to the younger contender. There really is no comparison between what the 22 year-old Chalamet pulls off in Luca Guadagnino‘s film vs. Oldman’s hammy, heavily-made-up performance in Darkest Hour. I’m predicting Chalamet, but I’m not confident that he’ll win.