Sunday, 2.18, 3:10 pm BAFTA update: Emma Stone has won Best Actress, of course, but Oppenheimer‘s Cillian Murphy, a hometown favorite, has beaten The Holdovers‘ Paul Giamatti for Best Actor. Oppie‘s Robert Downey, Jr. and The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph have won in the supporting categories; Chris Nolan has taken the Best Director prize, and Oppenheimer will almost surely prevail in the Best Picture category.

Earlier: With KOTFM’s Lily Gladstone blanked and absent, Poor Things star Emma Stone will take the BAFTA award for Best Actress today, and will once again enjoy an Oscar bounce.

London’s 77th British Academy film awards are happening (or about to happen) as we speak.

The SAG-AFTRA lowlifes may give their Best Actress trophy to Gladstone regardless (they’re the most identity-conscious guild of all) but if they do this they’ll have to live with the backwash for the rest of their lives, not to mention the eternal disdain of the Movie Godz.

The SAG awards are next Saturday evening (2.24).

Okay, there may be one possible surprise in BAFTA’s Best Supporting Actress competish. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw is predicting that Saltburn’s Rosemund Pike will outpoint The Holdovers Da’Vine Joy Randolph…go figure.

1:30 pm update: Bradshaw was wrong — Da’Vine wins again!

At the start of an SNL hosting gig seven years ago (2.4.17), Kristen Stewart announced “I’m so gay, dude.” (Today’s preferred nomenclature of “queer” hadn’t yet taken command.) She didn’t say “I lean gay” or “I prefer gay” — she said “this is my effing home team, bruh.”

And yet THR’s Etan Vlessing, in a 2.18.24 report about Stewart’s remarks at a Love Lies Bleeding press conference at the Berlin Film Festival, has timidly described her as “bisexual” — an apparent allusion to Stewart having had boyfriends during the Obama years as well as a vague inference that Stewart might one day re-open the hetero pleasure chest.

I’m basically asking myself how effing chickenshit can a trade publication be about this stuff? Name one celebrity who’s come out and then did a 180 or even dabbled with straight behaviors. Okay, Cary Grant but he was never “out,” of course.

Do you think it’s some kind of coincidence that Al Pacino‘s hot-tempered, early ’80s Miami drug dealer and the jovial, family-friendly Bengal tiger who’s represented Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes for God knows how many decades…do you think it’s a coincidence that they share the same first name?

The instant I glanced at the cover of Glenn Kenny‘s “The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface” (Hanover Square Press, May 7) I totally guffawed. I said to myself, “Now that‘s a great cover for a Scarface book!”

Amazon copy: “With brand-new interviews and untold stories of the film’s production, longtime film critic Glenn Kenny takes us on an unparalleled journey through the making of American depictions of crime. ‘The World Is Yours’ highlights the influential characters and themes within Scarface, reflecting on how its storied legacy played such a major role in American culture.”

Last night’s Eras Tour show happened in Melbourne. 90 thousand women attended. Two more nights there, and then on to Sydney.

Friendo: “You know what I think this is really about? White women starved for representation.”

Translation: Where oh where are all the black chicks at Taylor Swift concerts? I’ve read that a small percentage of her fans are black, but I never see them at concerts.

@aprilfrancesc This moment!!! #erastour #taylorswift #night1 #melbourne #MCG #fearless #fyp #fyp #speaknow #taytay #missamericana @Lily ♬ original sound – April & Lily

The footage starts around the 6:30 mark, give or take.

John Clifford Floyd III is a criminal defense attorney who raised Fani Willis in both California and Washington, D.C.

AJC.com excerpt: “Floyd took part in sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in 1965 in Memphis, Tennessee. After a sneering white man spit tobacco juice on top of his head, he decided to take a more confrontational stance. He joined a faction of the Black Panther movement in 1967 in Los Angeles. He renounced violence and enrolled at UCLA to study law after two Panthers, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, were shot and killed in an altercation at a Black Student Union meeting.”

I suspected there would be an angry crowd in front of Manhattan’s Russian Embassy (9 east 91st Street), but for whatever reason I couldn’t find advance confirmation.

Tapping out yesterday’s riff about three approvable Taylor Hackford flicks (The Idolmaker, An Officer and a Gentleman, Against All Odds) led to a re-watch of Odds (‘84), and good God…I humbly apologize!

It’s been almost exactly 40 years since my initial late February viewing at the good old Academy auditorium (Wilshire & La Peer), and I guess I just wasn’t perceptive enough back then.

Eric Hughes’ plot (loosely based upon 1947’s Out of the Past) and especially the dialogue (or good-sized portions of it) are chores to sit through, and Jeff Bridges’ painfully unsubtle performance as main protagonist Terry, an aging, none-too-bright football player, gave me a splitting headache.

Young Bridges was often too emotionally emphatic and actor-ish, and in this thing he’s certainly too childish. I was starved for the adult attitude that permeates Out of the Past. Fortified by Daniel Mainwaring and Frank Fenton’s tart dialogue, laconic Robert Mitchum knew how to play this kind of material. Which is to say a bit cooler.

I was nonetheless okay with the opening 20 or 25 in Los Angeles (love the ridiculous hot-dogging on Sunset Blvd. at 80 mph) and especially that hot, flavorful lovers-in-Yucatán section (Terry blissing out with Rachel Ward’s Jessie), but when Alex Karras interrupts their lovemaking inside a Chitchen Itza temple the whole thing suddenly turns bad, and then it stabs itself in the chest by returning to L.A. for the final 40 or 45 minutes, which are mostly atrocious.

Ugly people behaving horribly…sullen, scowling, sneering, snorting blow. You can all go fuck yourselves.

The exception is a Century City office sequence in which the excellent Swoozie Kurtz, playing a secretary to Saul Rubinek’s odious sports agent, does Terry a great favor by stealing a trove of incriminating documents, and with a hostile Doberman growling and breathing down her neck.

Lesson learned: If you have fond memories of a Taylor Hackford film you saw when young, don’t re-watch it decades later. Leave it there.

The original Out of the Past is a shining, gleaming city in the hill…a much, much better film.

Three prognosticating know-it-alls — Jeff Sneider, Scott Feinberg and Clayton Davis— are predicting that Lily Gladstone will take the Best Actress Oscar after all.

May I ask what happened to the Emma Stone wave? Stone is an absolute total knockout in Poor Things, and it’s an actual lead performance as opposed to Gladstone’s supporting, half-somnambulant, less-is-less performance as Mollie Burkhart.

I’m not saying that anything has necessarily “happened” to Stone’s support, but I’ve been sensing that Stone and her people seem afraid to campaign with serious vigor, apparently out of fear that they might be seen as anti-Gladstone or anti-Native American or something in that realm, which is ridiculous.

Do I have to say this again? Enough with the damn DEI campaigns. The world is quaking, the woke thing is receding (just ask Bob Iger), and we all have to turn the cultural corner and get back to honoring performances based upon actual acting merit.

Yes, other political factors have always gone into wins but ethnicity has become too much of a thing, and it’s time to cut that idea down to size.

Gladstone has had a great bountiful time over the last several months (or since last May if you count the Cannes debut of Killers of the Flower Moon) and has derived a huge career boost. It’s been a happy chapter all around, and she’ll be completely fine in the years to come.

Enough with the ethnic-identity-warrants-awards mindset. We did that between ’17 and ’23, and now it’s over. Move past it, get with the new program, enough. We are here to go.