There is still, we’re told, a contingent of old-school SAG conservatives who are again determined to ixnay a CG-augmented Andy Serkis performance in the realm of Best Actor nominations. His latest and greatest, I mean. The unqualified raves for Serkis’ Caesar in War For The Planet of the Apes make this alleged SAG recalcitrance and obstinacy seem all the more embarassing. SAG naysayers can dismiss or marginalize Serkis’s soul-stirring performance but critics and ticket buyers know the truth of it, as history soon will.

Wake up, Academy and guild members — great acting is great acting. Filmmaking in 2017 is ten times more digitized than it was ten years ago, and 50 times more than it was in ’97 and so on. The bouquet of roses and aroma of strong coffee is in the air. You can’t continue to say “what coffee smell?” year after year after year. This is reality, Greg.

“Andy Serkis’s performance as Caesar is one of the marvels of modern screen acting…the motion-captured, digitally sculpted apes [in War] are so natural, so expressive, so beautifully integrated into their environment, that you almost forget to be astonished by the nuances of thought and emotion that flicker across their faces.” — from War review by N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.

“If he weren’t acting with dots on his face to be replaced by a detailed computer simulation of an upright chimpanzee, it would be all but impossible to deny Serkis an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.” — BFI critic Kim Newman.

Woody Allen‘s weeks-old decision to cast Call Me By Your Name star Timothy Chalamet and Elle Fanning in his next film was officially reported this morning by Tracking Board‘s Jeff Sneider.

The Chalamet-Woody thing was being passed around eons ago, but agents involved in the deal kept saying “not yet” and “hold your horses” and “sorry but we have to do this thing properly”…zzzzz. Woody’s casting decisions are often attuned to hot new flavors and currents, so it tells you something about Chalumet’s rising potency (and the buzz that’s been chasing Call Me By Your Name since last January’s Sundance Film Festival) that he’s the new Woody pick.

Chalamet played Matthew McConaughey’s son in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (I was too busy hating that film to notice), and then attracted modest attention with his performance in Julia Hart‘s Miss Stevens, which I thought about catching but didn’t. Then Call Me by Your Name arrived in Park City — bang! Chalumet will also be seen in Scott Cooper’s Hostiles, Plan B’s Beautiful Boy and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird.

Everyone knows Elle Fanning.

If there’s one thing we need in this world, it’s an HBO-produced, star-studded documentary about the power, glory and immaculate wonder of Steven Spielberg. Directed and produced by Susan Lacy, Spielberg will debut on Saturday, 10.7. I’m not saying the point of Lacy’s doc is to warm up the atmosphere and fluff up the bed on behalf of Spielberg’s The Papers (20th Century Fox, 12.22), but it certainly won’t hurt in this regard.

Lacy talked to Spielberg for 30 hours while collecting insights and recollections from J.J. Abrams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Dreyfuss, Ralph Fiennes, Harrison Ford, David Geffen, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Holly Hunter, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ben Kingsley, Kathleen Kennedy, George Lucas, Liam Neeson, Martin Scorsese, Oprah Winfrey and Robert Zemeckis. Is there a chance that even two or three of these guys will share something that isn’t totally obsequious and kiss-assy?

Imagine if Lacy’s doc was given to brutal honesty and was titled Super-Hack, and was basically about selling the idea that throughout his life Spielberg’s default instinct has never been anything more profound than wanting to get a rise out of Joe Popcorn, and that aside from E.T., Schindler’s List, Lincoln and maybe four or five other exceptions to the rule, there’s nothing wrong with banging out commercial movies or being the most talented and financially successful hack in Hollywood history. Celebrate that! Own it! No apologies!

Spielberg knows his craft like few others, but 85% to 90% of his films have mostly been free of any kind of singular passion or deep-rooted beliefs about human nature and how the world works or an underlying current of any kind. Spielberg is a Capra-esque suburban sentimentalist who believes in the goodness of American families, small-town neighborhoods, emotional moms, chubby kids, aliens cute and ferocious, happy endings, carefully choreographed action and wow-level spectacle. For over 40 years Spielberg has shoveled and the public has bought, and that’s why honest film historians of the future will regard him in the same light as Cecil B. DeMille and Mervyn LeRoy. Which is fine as far as it goes. By the way, whatever happened to Robopocalypse?

No one is happier than myself that the great Steven Soderbergh has returned to directing with Logan Lucky (Fingerprint/Bleecker, 8.18), which is just around the corner. That said, for the last few weeks I’ve been reluctant to share a slight concern about this blue-collar caper comedy set in North Carolina, but it won’t leave me alone so maybe it’s not as slight as I thought.

My concern is that the guys — Channing Tatum, Daniel Craig, Adam Driver — are too beefy-looking. Call me neurotic but I don’t want to watch a redneck movie in which the actors look like they’ve been inhaling chili dogs and french fries and chugging beer all day long. I want to see a fantasy redneck movie in which the actors look lean and muscular and well-buffed, like they flew in from Los Angeles a few days before the start of principal photography, and with their trainers in tow.

I’m not certain that Soderbergh told his male cast members to load up on working-class food for the sake of verisimilitude, but they sure as hell look it. I’ll do what I can to get past my discomfort with this aspect (Tatum’s bulk in particular — he looks inflated) but I will have to work my way past this…just saying. Did Burt Reynolds pack on the pounds when he made all those redneck movies that wound up destroying his career? No — he kept himself in shape.

The publicity guys are just starting to screen Soderbergh’s film, by the way. The first showing, set for Monday at 5 pm in Beverly Hills, conflicts with a hot-ticket IMAX screening of Dunkirk that evening so I guess I’ll have to wait a bit.

David Ayer’s departure from the new Scarface remake has reminded me of a thought that occured several months ago. I don’t want to see Diego Luna as the new Tony Montana, and I’m not saying this to be pricky or sound like an asshole. Luna is just not gangsta. Going back to Y Tu Mama Tambien he’s always been the mild-mannered amiable guy. He was steady and satisfying in Rogue One, but he doesn’t have that hungry animal quality that Paul Muni and Al Pacino had in their respective versions. What Latin actor would I prefer to see in the role? Gael Garcia Bernal, whose best role was in Pablo Larrain‘s No and who really lit the furnace in Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s amores perros. The new film, written by Jon Herman and the Coen brothers, will be set in Los Angeles. The producers are Dylan Clark, Scott Stuber and Martin Bregman.

In the category of Outstanding Variety Talk Series, Jimmy Fallon got stiffed this morning. Why did the TV Academy decide to nominate Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, Samantha Bee, James Corden and Bill Maher but not Fallon? I don’t know, hard to say — opinions?

Hooray for Alec Baldwin‘s Donald Trump inhabitings on Saturday Night Live, which won him a nomination as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series; ditto Melissa McCarthy‘s Outstanding Guest Actress nomination for her SNL portrayals of Sean Spicer.

Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour (Focus Features, 11.22) will obviously have to stand on its own two feet. And it may well do that. Wright is a first-rate helmer. And how can Gary Oldman not come out of the coming award season with flying colors? Chamberlain appeases Germany, Britain takes a pounding, Churchill rallies his countrymen, etc. Dunkirk‘s brother-in-arms. Oldman’s delivery of the “we shall fight them on the beaches” speech is more spirited — peppier, more actorish — than Churchill’s. The only thing that scares me is Ben Mendelsohn playing King George VI. Seven years ago Colin Firth was the late monarch’s emissary here on earth. Somewhere in heaven George VI is sulking.

In a just-released Awards Daily poll, over 100 newspaper, magazine, and online film critics and movie writers have named Jordan Peele‘s Get Out as their favorite film of 2017. What a lazy, submissive, grass-munching herd.

The lead of Jordan Ruimy’s article about the findings reads, “There was a time when film critics used to be a very unpredictable lot”…no longer! The runners-up were Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver and James Mangold’s Logan. A portion of those polled mentioned Cannes and Sundance films that will like emerge as the ’17 award season’s most critically acclaimed films. The most frequently mentioned were Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, Dee Rees’ Mudbound and Kogonada’s Columbus.

For the third time, Hollywood Elsewhere’s own Best of ’17 list: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick, (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation, (6) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (7) David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, (8) Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (even though I fundamentally regard this Paris-based ghost story as last year’s news as it premiered nearly 14 months ago at the ’16 Cannes Film Festival) and (9) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.

Can you sense the droll, dryly perverse tone of Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square (Magnolia, 10.27) from this trailer, even though the subtitles are in Swedish? Yo, Magnolia — where’s the English-subtitled version?

Two Telluride festival passes: $1560 ($780 x 2). 4 day, 8.31 thru 9.4 condo rental (Airbnb) : $890. 2 RT Southwest plane tix, Burbank to Albuquerque: around $400. Dollar rental car for 4 days: $278. Gas: $65 or $70. Hotel in Bloomfield, NM (between Albuquerque and Telluride): $140. Meals and drinks: God knows. Grand total sans groceries, cafe tabs: $3338 for four days of excitement and intrigue.

Last night Tatyana and I walked into in a downmarket Hollywood Blvd. bar, east of Cherokee. She ordered an Adios Motherfucker — 1/2 oz. vodka, 1/2 oz. rum, 1/2 oz. tequila, 1/2 oz. gin, 1/2 oz. blue curacao liqueur, 2 oz. sweet and sour mix, 2 oz soda (7-up, Sprite). I had a Diet Coke.

“While the foundation of Telluride has rightfully been a celebration of film, the Festival itself is more about the coming together of the lovers of film. From creators to admirers, it is about the people who fill and then transform the place. The collegial atmosphere, the ‘realness’ and accessibility of the people, their joy and warmth…those are the things that enchant Telluride — and what I hoped to express in the poster.” — Lance Rutter, designer of the poster for 44th Telluride Film Festival.

Sometime this fall or at least by Christmas I want a pee-pee tape…please. I realize I’m repeating myself.