Herewith the second Oscar Poker podcast of ’24. National Society of Film Critics Calls. The N.Y. Times vs. Taylor Swift. I’m a Cannibal, You’re a Cannibal. Random Golden Globe Predictions. What is life without a little suspense?

Again, the link.

It should be understood that the 108–minute version of Ken Russell’s The Devils (‘71), which is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, was dissed by Russell and star Oliver Reed before their deaths. The franker British version, which runs 111 minutes, is the one to settle into. The Criterion Channel makes no mention of this, although it does offer a doc about the film’s censoring, titled “Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of The Devils.”

From a 1.4.24 N.Y. Times guest essay by Anna Marks, titled “Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do“:

“Whether she is conscious of it or not, Taylor Swift signals to queer people — in the language we use to communicate with one another — that she has some affinity for queer identity. There are some queer people who would say that through this sort of signaling, she has already come out, at least to us.

“But what about coming out in a language the rest of the public will understand?

“The difference between any person coming out and a celebrity doing so is the difference between a toy mallet and a sledgehammer. It’s reasonable for celebrities to be reticent; by coming out, they potentially invite death threats, a dogged tabloid press that will track their lovers instead of their beards, the excavation of their past lives, a torrent of public criticism and the implosion of their careers.

“In a culture of compulsory heterosexuality, to stop lying — by omission or otherwise — is to risk everything.

“American culture still expects that stars are cis and straight until they confess themselves guilty. So when our culture imagines a celebrity’s coming out, it expects an Ellen-style announcement that will submerge the past life in phoenix fire and rebirth the celebrity in a new image. In an ideal culture, wearing a bracelet that says ‘PROUD’, waving a pride flag onstage, placing a rainbow in album artwork or suggestively answering fan questions on Instagram would be enough. But our current reality expects a supernova.”

Question #1: When was the last time that a famous person was all-but-outed on the N.Y. Times editorial page?

Question #2: Even if Mark’s piece is unsubstantiated conjecture, and I have no way of knowing either way, her Times essay sets a new standard for invasive journalism. Can anyone imagine a gay activist calling out a closeted male celebrity in the same way? Shouldn’t closeted people (if indeed they are closeted) be left the hell alone?

Question #3: If you were Travis Kelce, how would you be feeling right now? What would be going through your head? Would you be shrugging it off with a chuckle? Or would you be saying to yourself “WHAT THE LIVING FUCK?”

The smartest way to figure out the winners of Sunday night’s Golden Globe awards (CBS, 1.7, 8 pm eastern / 5 pm Pacific) is to consider the primary mission.

Mission #1 is to give Paul Giamatti a Golden Globe award for his Holdovers performance. That’s the priority, the main thing…nothing else matters.

Two years ago the old Hollywood Foreign Press Association had been condemned and ostracized for being racist or insufficiently woke or generally bad news. Now that it’s Penske-owned and operated (i.e., the “Golden Penskes”) the impetus, obviously, will be to lean diverse whenever feasible to make up for alleged past sins.

The other presumption is that many if not most of the winners will align with the preferences of the dumbest, shallowest and least edge-minded voters.

Best Motion Pic / Drama / Anatomy of a Fall, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, The Zone of Interest.

HE pick: Maestro (easily the most dynamic and transporting film among the nominated six.). Safest default choice: Oppenheimer. Likeliest woke winner: Killers of the Flower Moon.

Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy / Air, American Fiction, Barbie, The Holdovers, May December, Poor Things

HE pick: Poor Things. Safest default choice: The Holdovers. Likeliest woke winner: Barbie.

Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Drama, Actor / Bradley Cooper, Maestro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers of the Flower Moon (not a chance!), Colman Domingo, Rustin (not happening!), Barry Keoghan, Saltburn (get outta town!), Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer (alien from Tralfamadore!), Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers.

HE pick: Cooper for Maestro. Safest choice: Murphy for Oppenheimer. Likeliest winner: toss-up between Murphy and Cooper.

Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Drama: Actress: Annette Bening, Nyad; Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon; Sandra Heller, Anatomy of a Fall; Greta Lee, Past Lives; (no way) Carey Mulligan, Maestro (yes!); Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla (not a chance)

HE pick: Mulligan in Maestro. Safest choice: Mulligan. Surprise winner: Bening in Nyad.

Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy: Actor: Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario, Timothée Chalamet, Wonka, Matt Damon, Air, Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers, Joaquin Phoenix, Beau is Afraid, Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction.

Should & will win: Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers.

Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy: Actress / Fantasia Barrino, The Color Purple, Jennifer Lawrence, No Hard Feelings, Natalie Portman, May December, Alma Pöysti, Fallen Leaves, Margot Robbie, Barbie, Emma Stone, Poor Things.

HE pick, obivous winner, hands down: Emma Stone, Poor Things

Best Director / Bradley Cooper, Maestro; Greta Gerwig, Barbie; Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things; Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer; Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon (no!), Celine Song, Past Lives .

HE picks: Cooper, Lanthimos. Likeliest winners: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer or Greta Gerwig, Barbie.

Best Supporting Performance in a Motion Picture: Actor / Willem Dafoe, Poor Things; Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon (no!), Robert Downey Jr, Oppenheimer; Ryan Gosling, Barbie; Charles Melton, May December (no!), Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things.

HE pick: Nobody…I feel nothing. Likeliest winner: Downey in Oppenheimer.

Best Supporting Performance in a Motion Picture: Actress / Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer; Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple; Jodie Foster, Nyad; Julianne Moore, May December; Rosamund Pike, Saltburn; Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers (yes!!)

Should win, will win: Randolph in The Holdovers.

I feel too fagged and shagged to predict any of the other categories.

Last night I watched Juan Antonio Bayona’s Society of the Snow (Netflix, now streaming), and while it’s obviously a thumbs-upper in several respects I don’t quite understand why so many critics have been doing acrobatic cartwheels.

It’s very good but it’s not a film that enables you to meet or know God…it doesn’t cleanse or purify your soul or bring about a shuddering emotional orgasm. Turn it down, ease up.

Society is obviously a very well-made, bracingly realistic survival film. I never felt it was doing anything but dealing straight cards about that horrible real-life ordeal that befell that Uruguayan rugby team when their prop plane crashed into the snowy Andes mountains in mid October of ‘72.

The smallish plane was carrying 45 passengers; upon rescue 71 days later all but 16 had died, and the survivors wouldn’t have lived if they hadn’t resorted to cannibalism, and not just strips of flesh and muscle but internal organs (heart, lungs, brains)…horrific but true.

I still feel that Bayona’s The Orphanage (’07) is his finest film, but Society of the Snow is quite the rugged accomplishment and I have no serious complaints. I do, however, have a few small ones.

One, there’s too much “acting” among the ensemble cast of young lads…too much eye contact, too much hugging, not enough bitter humor or a sense of “we’re fucked and I don’t need to fucking hug you” solitude.

Two, the incessant debate about whether or not they should eat their dead comrades in order to live is ridiculous — if they didn’t eat something (and there was nothing to eat up there) they would have died, period, and yet some (they were all Roman Catholics) insist that eating human flesh will damn their souls for eternity. Asinine.

Three, I should compare Society of the Snow with Frank Marshall‘s Alive (’93), which told the exact same story, but it’s been 30 years and I need to re-stream it. Does anyone have any vivid memories? Reviews mere moderately positive.

Four, Bayona’s film doesn’t make it clear that the crash happened entirely due to pilot error. Flight 571’s inexperienced co-pilot, Lieutenant-Colonel Dante Héctor Lagurara, fucked up and pretty much committed manslaughter, plain and simple.

Five, Bayona allows the viewer to presume that the survivors are eating the tastiest parts of the human body (ribs, arms, legs) until we see a glimpse of a stripped human rib cage…holy shit.

But there’s no question that Society is a first-rate effort…your belief in the frosty realism is absolute and bruising. I just didn’t find it miraculous or breathtaking or drop-to-your-knees astonishing. But it’s worth seeing.

Yesterday Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson posted an interview with Killers of the Flower Moon screenwriter Eric Roth, and in so doing passed along, for what seemed like the umpteenth time, the story of how Roth and Martin Scorsese‘s 209-minute period melodrama began as one thing (a traditional investigative crime drama) and then became something else (a sprawling white-guilt wokester saga about the the ache of the Osage murder victims in the early 1920s, and particularly the evil of the white Oklahoma yokels).

Leonardo DiCaprio had initially been set to play the intrepid Bureau of Investigation agent Tom White, the guy who ultimately indicted three of the killers but was unable to bring many other killers to justice. (Leo excitedly told me this during a 2019 party at San Vicente Bungalows.) But sometime in early 2020 and perhaps during the beginning of Covid, Leo had a change of heart.

He didn’t want to play White because — let’s be honest — the woke movement had taken hold in progressive Hollywood circles and he didn’t want to be attacked or sneered at for playing a heroic white savior — a politically uncool thing in the Hollywood climate that was then unfolding.

Leo instead wanted to play the none-too-bright Ernest Burkhart, who became complicit in the murders of certain Oklahoma Osage natives by way of his fiendish uncle (Robert De Niro‘s ‘King” Hale), and who also came close to murdering his own Osage native wife, Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone).

“At the beginning, Scorsese and Roth embraced a real John Ford Western,” Thompson writes.

Roth: “The early versions of the KOTFM screenplay were as much about Tom White as they were about the crime and everything else, and in that sense they were closer to the book. So it wasn’t a mystery in that sense.

“But then Marty began to express a bigger thing, which he’s so right about. It’s not a ‘who done it’ — it’s ‘who didn’t do it.’ As a social comment.”

God save Joe and Jane Popcorn from “social comment”, or more specifically social instruction.

Marty and Leo’s idea, in other words (allow me to offer an interpretation), was that we’re all guilty…all of us…back then and today.

In the same way that Randy Newman, in his 1970 song “Rednecks“, expanded the concept of racist attitudes and behaviors from the rural south to the entire country (“We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground”), Killers of the Flower Moon would essentially serve as an indictment of white racism all over, in every nook and cranny of the country…we’re all dirty and guilty and reprehensible as fuck.

There’s no way the wokesters would come after Marty, Eric and Leo if they made a movie like this, the thinking presumably went, but if they made a “hooray for Tom White” flick, they might be indicted or semi-cancelled for being old-fashioned or blind to the new woke enlightenment or whatever.

Sometime in early ’20 or thereabouts, Roth got a call from Scorsese. “Are you sitting down?” Marty said. “Because Leo has a big idea.”

Roth: “Leo didn’t want to be the great white savior. Very smart. And the more complicated part was the husband [Ernest Burkhart] and complicated for many reasons, but probably the most interesting is somebody who’s in love with somebody and trying to kill them.

“We always embraced [Mollie] as the centerpiece of the movie.” [HE to Roth: Why? She doesn’t say anything or do anything — she’s completely passive.] “We had many, many things that dealt with the Osage, the Osage customs, the Osage world.”

What?

In fact Leo’s decision to submit to woke sensibilities (and Marty and Eric’s decision to go along with this) ensured that Killers of the Flower Moon would become a long, half-mystifying, eye-rolling, ass-punishing slog — a guilt trip movie without any story tension to speak of.

And here we are now, unlikely to bestow any top-tier awards** upon KOTFM except, most likely and very depressingly, the Best Actress Oscar to Gladstone for basically playing a passive victim of few words, a sad-eyed lady of the oil-rich lowlands who sits around in native blankets and gives dirty looks to all the evil crackers as Leo injects her with poisoned insulin…fascinating!

** Except for the musical score by the late Robbie Robertson — this is likely to win.