It’s certainly not a burn. Not by my yardstick. Not if you accept and understand that a 40 year-old franchise can’t really go home again. Engages, strives, tries like hell. Draws a bead, hits the mark often enough. Aimed at families, sure, but in a way that doesn’t strenuously alienate. A diligent, crafty, resourceful attempt to wow fanboy dads who were 13 when The Empire Strikes Back opened in ‘80. Sticks to formula expectations as far as it can without seeming overly desperate. Plays the game like a spirited opportunist. A visual tribute to Empire‘s noirish lighting scheme. Perhaps a tad too jokey here and there. Tries your patience to a certain extent, okay, but whaddaya expect? A well-worn franchise is being re-milked, re-baked, re-fried, re-seasoned and vigorously stirred in order to turn a profit. A good looking-to-future-generations ending. Rian Johnson is an honorable tactician, an architect with a plan, an above-average engineer, a good fellow.

The rumpus started this morning just after the SAG nominations. It began with my being surprised by the fine-but-unexceptional performance by Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out being nominated for a SAG Best Actor award. “For playing cool, anxious and freaked in a horror comedy?,” I wrote. “SAG members honestly believe that Kaluuya’s performance was craftier and more planted or affecting than The Post‘s Tom Hanks, Stronger‘s Jake Gyllenhaal and Phantom Thread‘s Daniel Day Lewis? C’mon!”

The notion of Kaluuya suddenly becoming a Best Actor Oscar nominee and especially Get Out being positioned as a formidable Best Picture contender “makes me feel like I’m drowning, like I’m drowning in jello,” I wrote in a comment thread. “This is staggering…I’m literally wobbling as I walk around.”

About five hours ago Variety‘s Guy Lodge wrote, “It’s not like you need extra reasons to root for Daniel Kaluuya to get an Oscar nomination, but here’s one: it’ll make Jeff Wells actively convulse.”

Melanie Lynskey: “He said that people who voted for Get Out“ are ‘wrong’ and ‘perverse’…it’s hysterical.”

So I tweeted the following: “Guy & Melanie — who had even flirted with the idea of Kaluuya having given an award-worthy performance? Who even fiddled with it? Nobody had picked up this torch before the Boston Society of Film Critics did last weekend, and now all of a sudden you’re both longtime Kaluuya devotees. Bullshit.”

In response to my “who had even flirted?”, Joseph Finn tweeted “Literally 99% of the people who saw it and have been talking about it since spring.” Last February, he meant.

What Finn meant is that for the last nine or ten months in Coffee Bean and Starbucks cafes all over Los Angeles, people have been saying to each other, “Wow, that good-looking chill guy who perspires and opens his mouth in horror in Get Out when the evil whiteys try to hypnotize and lobotomize him? What a performance!”

My reply to Finn: “If you say so, but for months and months the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby spitballers never once mentioned Kaluuya, even as a boredom killer. So I guess the various chapters of the ‘Daniel Kaluuya deserves an Oscar’ fan clubs met in secret dungeon-like bars and cafes during the wee hours.”

Yesterday HE reader Dean Treadway asked me to reevaluate an 8.18.17 comparison piece, posted by Award Watch‘s Erik Anderson, between Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water and Marc S. Nollkaemper‘s The Space Between Us, a 13-minute, English-language short that appeared on 6.29.15.

The basic scheme of both films (erotic sparks fly when a clean-up woman at a research center encounters an aquaman who’s being kept inside a large tank) are obviously similar. The Shape of Water was shot between August and November 2016.

I never suspected for a nano-second that Guillermo would crib from another filmmaker, but I nonetheless asked him about this last night, and we spoke a little while ago today. He was in a rush so I took some hasty notes.

Guillermo said that he and Daniel Kraus (co-author of a forthcoming 2018 book version of The Shape of Water) began work on a The Shape of Water treatment after meeting on 12.17.11. GDT began to develop a script the following year; he also “memorialized” his partnership with Kraus in ’12.

He said that a Fox Searchlight rep would be able to forward docs that would validate this timeline.

Guillermo added that he watched The Space Between Us for the first time this morning.

GDT’s final remark: “What is funny is that I have two movies, Hellboy (’04) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (’08), with an aquatic creature inside a super-secret tank in a large laboratory….so that [general concept] is not exactly in the province of exclusivity.”

Nine months ago an extended trailer for Alex Garland‘s Annihilation (Paramount, 2.23) was shown at Cinemacon ’17. It wowed a lot of journos (myself among them) and exhibs. There was some talk about releasing it in late ’17, but that idea went south. I’ve been reading for months that it has a killer ending.

This morning’s trailer feels like a marginal improvement over the one that popped on 9.27.17.

It costars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, David Gyasi and Sonoya Mizuno.

Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Warner Bros, 2.9.18) is obviously a patriotic tribute piece about the three American guys (Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos) who foiled an Islamic terrorist attack aboard a Brussels-to-Paris train on 8.21.15.

The new trailer tells us the film will mostly be about back-story — childhood, friendship, military service in the Middle East, etc. It feels thin, but Clint has earned our respect and deference.

Pic will costar Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos as themselves. Based on “The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes” by Jeffrey E. Stern, Stone, Sadler and Skarlatos.

From director Clint Eastwood, comes an incredible true story portrayed by the actual heroes who lived it. This February, in the face of fear, ordinary people can do the extraordinary. #1517toParispic.twitter.com/KhrOCHRQPg

— The 15:17 to Paris (@1517toParis) December 13, 2017

As the largest voting bloc within the Motion Picture Academy, members of the Screen Actors Guild have a big influence upon the Oscar race. It is generally presumed, therefore, that nominees for SAG’s Motion Picture Ensemble Award (i.e., “Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture”), which were announced this morning along with other nominees, are indicators of significant strength in the Best Picture competition.

And so today’s Ensemble Award nominees — The Big Sick, Get Out, Lady Bird, Mudbound and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — are sitting pretty. It also means that six other leading Best Picture contenders that weren’t nominated — The Post, Call Me By Your Name, The Shape of Water, The Florida Project, Darkest Hour and Phantom Thread — might have something to worry about.

And I mean especially The Post. This morning’s SAG nominations were like an impact grenade upon that Steven Spielberg film. Smoke, chunks of plaster on the floor, ringing in the ears.

No significant support for a tale of 1970s journalists in Nixon-era Washington, D.C. — too long ago, right? No love or allowances for the exquisite acting delivered by some fine, laid-back people in the sunny, far-away Lombardy region of Italy in the early ’80s. Not enough interest in Londoners facing the threat of Nazi Germany in mid 1940, No particular affection for struggling underclass types in an Orlando hotel. No particular affection for neurotic fashion-world elites in mid ’50s England.

Four of the five ensemble nominees are small-town American stories, self-enclosed and unto themselves, suburban or rural-ish. The only cosmopolitan big-city flick is The Big Sick.

Was identity politics a factor in the decent-but-no-great-shakes Mudbound and the horror genre comedy Get Out making the cut? Of course not. They were selected by merit and merit alone.

SAG nominees for Best Actor: Timothee Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name), James Franco (The Disaster Artist), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel, Esq.). Likeliest winners: Oldman or Chalamet.

HE comment: Kaluuya? For playing cool, anxious and freaked in a horror comedy? SAG members honestly believe that Kaluuya’s performance was craftier and more planted or affecting than The Post‘s Tom Hanks, Stronger‘s Jake Gyllenhaal and Phantom Thread‘s Daniel Day Lewis? They really think that, or they want to think that? C’mon!

Democrat Doug Jones has won the special Alabama election, defeating Republican asshat Roy Moore by roughly 20,000 votes, give or take. A crowning victory for lefties, and a devastating setback for Donald Trump. The sexual misconduct accusations plus the huge Democratic get-out-the-vote effort did it. Damn near half of the Alabama voters wanted one of the biggest jokes in American political history to serve in the U.S. Senate so don’t celebrate too much — the bumblefucks nearly got their way. 74% of white men and 65% of white women voted for Moore, but 92% of black men and 97% of black women went for Jones. Thank God and glory hallelujah.

Things could shift around in the Best Picture race, of course, but right now and for what it’s worth, “estimations” by Variety‘s Kris Tapley say that the following five films — The Big Sick, Darkest Hour, The Disaster Artist, Get Out and Mudbound — might not make the cut.

Or maybe one or two of them might. Who knows? Correct me if I’m wrong, but Tapley’s suggestion that these five are “on the bubble” seems to mean “watch out, homey…you might be in trouble…don’t step on any banana peels.”

Which of these “bubble’ pics has the best chance of being nominated, or is Tapley correct for the most part? Disputes, quibbles, exceptions, etc.?

Tapley’s frontrunners (listed alphabetically): Call Me by Your Name (Sony Pictures Classics), Dunkirk (Warner Bros. Pictures), The Florida Project (A24), Lady Bird (A24), The Post (20th Century Fox), The Shape of Water (Fox Searchlight), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight).

The year’s first holiday-vibe moment happened last night at the Smoke House, where Tatyana and I went after the 7pm Disney lot screening of The Last Jedi. Nice-smelling wreaths, soft amber lighting, twinkly Christmas lights, carols playing softly, friendly vibes.

French champagne received today from friends at Amazon…thanks!

Holiday greetings from Pete and Madelyn Hammond.

Tatyana and I have fallen in love with these little amber-tinted table lamps at Smoke House.

A sure sign that a film has caught on with the cultural elite (or perhaps just regular mainstream types) is when a parody video appears:

Pick of the Litter:

1. The Empire Strikes Back (’80)

Good, Close Second:

2. A New Hope (’77)

Efficient, Rousing, Entirely Decent:

3. The Last Jedi (’17)

Not Bad, Mixed Levels of Success:

4. The Force Awakens (’15)
5. Rogue One (’16)

Mixed, Worrisome Anticipation Factor:

6. Solo — The 120 Days of Alden Ehrenreich (’18)

Sub-par:

7. Return of The Jedi (’83)

All Prequels Suck:

8. Revenge of the Sith (’05)
9. Attack of the Clones (’02)

Lowest of the Low:

10. The Phantom Menace (’99)