Lily Gladstone‘s Killers of the Flower Moon Best Actress campaign isn’t just founded upon her Native American identity, although that’s obviously the main rallying point. (Gladstone is a distant but direct cousin of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, who served from 1868 to 1894.)

Now hear this: According to various sources including her Wiki page, Gladstone is non-binary (goes by both she/her and they/them pronouns). So now she’s really got the woke bull by the horns — native American plus non-binary. Imagine the hearts of all those Millennial and Zoonmer Academy and SAG members going pitty-pat upon hearing this news.

And it’s probably even easier to politely dismiss or shoulder-shrug Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (Searchlight, 12.8), which, for the fourteenth or fifteenth time, is a sexual Frankenstein meets Barbie with the same confident and completist feminist imprimatur at the conclusion.

But like Maestro, Poor Things really gains during a second viewing. I can’t wait for viewing #3.

I hate to say this, but credit is due to Everything Everywhere All At Once (a movie that I mostly hate) for expanding the procedural boundaries of what a Best Picture contender can be. The younger Academy members who voted for it basically said “weird, imaginative, ouside-the-norm surreal content is totally approvable in this realm.” So in a sense EEAAO has done Poor Things a favor.

Times Picayune columnist and movie critic Mike Scott:

David Poland:

The Critics Choice film nominations will be revealed one week hence — Wednesday, 12.13 at 9 a.m. Pacific.

Many CC members are shameless whores to varying degrees, but if they fail to nominate BlackBerry‘s Glenn Howerton for Best Supporting Actor they will have double-branded themselves as valueless sluts for all eternity.

Do they even know what’s happening out there, or for that matter within themselves?

Do they understand how mesmerizing and shattering the last half-hour of Maestro is? Do they have even a glimmer of a hint at how wonderfully surreal and groundbreaking and resplendently out there Poor Things is?

They wouldn’t dare blow off The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph for Best Supporting Actress, but has it sunk into their gelatinous membranes how perfectly alive and percolating Paul Giamatti is in that Alexander Payne film?

And that presumption is precisely what a vast majority of Americans are reportedly at odds with…most of them really don’t want Trump or Biden as the principal contenders…they don’t want a repeat of the ’20 race, and yet Joe believes “I have to save this country from that beast by running again…I’m the strongest contender against him.”

Posted on 11.8.23: A second poll is claiming that Mumbling Joe is polling significantly behind The Beast.

Right now, Biden is polling above where Jimmy Carter was in ’79 but two points below where Trump was in ’20. Even Zoomers and Millennials are siding more with Trump….what the fuck? It’s the age thing, for God’s sake — nobody wants a doddering, slurry-voiced, neck-waddled great grandfather running the show.

If Joe hangs tough and loses to Trump, his name will be mud for generations because he will have set the stage for a tyrannical, sociopathic, anti-Democratic bully boss to reclaim power when all the indications are/were that Joe would lose. Good God, how blind can everyone be?

Given that a generic Democrat is polling ahead of Trump right now, the responsible thing would be for Joe to bail on his re-election bid and let Gavin Newsom step in.

’70s and ’80s sitcom colossus Norman Lear, that liberally attuned conceptualist, creator, producer and satiric savant (All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons) has passed at age 101. Full respect and salutations…no one will ever forget that pork pie hat, and all that churned and geysered under it.

Roughly 21 months ago: “I’d love it if a semblance of All In The Family could return as a present-tense social-issues Hulu series, except Archie could be…well, a bit like myself…sensible liberal older guy, perhaps an editor and founder of an online publication or web business of some kind, grappling with the pressures of HR woke terror in the workplace, clashing with Millennial or Zoomer daughter and BIPOC son-in-law who are living with him while they save for a house.

Basically Hollywood Elsewhere meets Norman Lear except Archie Wells wouldn’t be as smug or under-educated as Carroll O’Connor was…it could write itself.

Filmklassik liked the idea but said she show would have to be different.

“You’ll recall that Rob Reiner’s Meathead, while smug and kind of a freeloader, often made tenable arguments: ‘Race shouldn’t matter, Arch. Black, White — who the hell cares? You gotta treat everyone the SAME.’ But in All In The Family 2.0 (or perhaps AITF HE) — if they wanted to be accurate — the freeloading son-in-law would have to say: ‘Race MATTERS, Arch. It just does. You gotta treat folks differently on the basis of it.”

“Here, Filmklassik added, is how wokesters would describe vintage All In the Family characters if they were to run across them tomorrow: “Archie Bunker? Racist!” “Michael ‘Meathead’ Stivic? Racist!” That’s how fucked-up it’s gotten.

“Won’t Give You Warts,” posted on 6.1.16:

“Tribute documentaries about famous folk tend to be fairly similar, especially if the subjects are still living. They mainly say that the celebrity is a pretty darn wonderful person — modest but brilliant, witty, accomplished as all get out, rich, fascinating, compassionate, loves his/her life, good with kids, pets dogs.

“Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing‘s Norman Lear: Just Another Version Of You pretty much sticks to this formula.

“I could call it a cut or two above the usual, certainly from a technical standpoint, but Lear, the 93 year-old creator-writer-producer of such legendary ’70s TV series All In the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time and The Jeffersons, is never presented as anything but the most happy and wonderful fella.

“Which he may well be for the most part, but c’mon — everyone has known hurt, failure, shame, regrets. Everyone has aspects of their nature they wish they could iron out or refine. Everyone experiences nightmare flashes from time to time. Including the very wealthiest.

Time‘s decision to celebrate Taylor Swift as the Person of the Year is, of course, first and foremost a shallow commercial hustle.

The editors are basicallly saying “superfluousness is not a crime…it’s not so bad and in some ways is pretty great…all hail the island of leave us alone, we’re happy where we are, don’t puncture the bubble of insularity that so many millions of women (mostly younger) want to live inside…that bubble of complacency…that temporary (hopefully eternal!) shelter realm…success, simplicity of mind, in some instances (probably more so than we’d like to admit) the shroud of vapidity.

No offense to Taylor herself — she’s smart, capable, knows what she’s doing. But the Time guys are squeaking mice. There are more things in heaven and earth, guys, than are dreamt of in your marketing philosophy.

AI kingpin Sam Altman would have been an unsexy choice, but what he’s helped to unleash is obviously exerting thousands of times more infuence (and an infuential threat) upon our land, culture and souls than Taylor Swift.

If it has to be someone or something vapid in order to make Time into a bigger cultural thing, I would blend Swift with Barbie and Greta Gerwig and call 2023 The Year of of the Self-Celebrating, Wrapped in Commercial Glory Girly Girls Who Have Little Use For Men and Would Pretty Much Like to Cast Them Aside Except For The Sperm Donation Stuff….Barbie, Taylor, Beyonce…the whole commercial and cultural blitzkrieg of it all.

Denny Laine has passed at age 79. Before his long ’70s association with Paul McCartney and Wings, Laine was one of the key Moody Blues guys. His time with the band lasted from ’64 to ’66, and I’m pretty sure he was with them when they recorded “Stop.” I’ve never been much of a “Go Now” fan.

I saw Sean Mullin‘s It Ain’t Over, an affectionate, unexpectedly emotional Yogi Berra doc, about a year and half ago. Now this Sony Pictures Classics release is looking for some awards attention, and is having an invitational screening at the Union Square Regal on Thursday, 12.7, with N.Y. Times contributor (and occasionally acidic HE commenter) Glenn Kenny moderating the post-screening discussion.

“Yogi Yogi Yogi,” posted on 6.13.22:

Speaking as one who grew up in the tristate area (New Jersey, Connecticut, Manhattan) and managed to attend a grand total of two Yankee games and no Mets games that whole time, I’m not what you’d call a diehard baseball fan. But I certainly knew and admired Yogi Berra (1925-2015), a legendary Yankee catcher (18 seasons), power hitter, “bad ball” hitter and shoot-from-the-hip philosopher whose peak years were in the ’50s and early ’60s.

Yogi Berra is one of the greatest sounding baseball names of all time, right up there with Moose Skowron, Goose Gossage, Miller Huggins, Ty Cobb, Bobo Rivera, Ryne Duren, Hoyt Wilhelm, Duke Snider and Mookie Wilson. (Berra’s birth name was Lorenzo Pietro Berra.)

There was always something simian about Berra’s size (he stood 5’7″) and facial features, but what a magnificent athlete. Named the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award three times, an All-Star player 18 times, played in 10 World Series championships (more than any other player in MLB history), a career batting average of 285 (struck or thrown out 7 out of 10 times — Mickey Mantle ended up with .298), caught Don Larsen‘s perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, etc.

And what a TV pitchman! Yoohoo chocolate drink, Camel cigarettes, Florida Orange Juice, Kinney Shoes, Miller Lite, etc.

What does Mullin’s doc do with all this? Nothing miraculous but it always satisfies. Mullin just lays it out, decade by decade, straight and plain, St. Louis childhood to World War II to years of Yankee (and later N.Y. Mets) glory and into the coaching years, and always with an emotional gloss or spin of some kind.

Is it par for the course and familiar as fuck to share various affectionate, awe-struck observations from players, commentators and family members who were Berra fans over the years (Billy Crystal, Derek Jeter, Bob Costas, Vin Scully, Joe Torre, Don Mattingly, Joe Garagiola, Roger Angell, Bobby Richardson, Whitey Herzog, Tony Kubek, Willie Randolph, Ron Guidry and the Berra family — Dale, Tim, Larry, late wife Carmen and granddaughter Lindsay Berra)? Yes, but it works here. Of course it does…you want it.

Does the doc feature a villain? You betcha — Hannah-Barbera’s Yogi Bear, a revoltingly cheerful cartoon character who came along in 1958, and was hated by Berra and everyone else over the age of ten. Thank God the doc doesn’t feature “Yogi,” a 1960 pop tune by the Ivy Three.

The personal Yogi stuff puts the hook in. The 65-year marriage to Carmen (1949 to her death in 2014). Home life in Montclair. The TV pitchman career. The D-Day heroism. Yogi’s long feud with Yankee owner George Steinbrenner after the latter fired him as manager (and by proxy yet). Dale Berra sharing the intervention moment when Yogi and his brothers confronted him about cocaine addiction.

I’ve decided to devote a separate piece to the better-known Yogi-isms — poorly worded sayings that don’t sound right at first, but start to sound right the more you repeat them or think about them.

Unfiltered Robbie, rephrased in boldface by yours truly: “When Tom [Ackerly] and I sat down to read the script….I mean, oh wow, okay, I’m loving it…I mean, it began with a Kubrick reference…but it’s gonna be haard to persuade [the studio] to let us do this and I don’t know that this is what Mattel had in mind, but they’re nnever gonna let us make this because of the jokey, mock-ironic current of anti-straight-male misandry that runs all through it…it’s such a shame that this brilliant piece of writing will never see the light of day.”

At the very least her chat with Oppenheimer‘s Cillian Murphy reminds that Murphy’s My Favorite Martian, alien-from-Betelguese performance in Oppenheimer was in fact a calculated performance. He’s actually human on his own terms.

Somewhere during its seven-month Broadway I saw David Mamet‘s Speed-the-Plow at the Royale Theatre (5.3.88 to 12.31.88). Jett was born on 6.4.88 — we probably attended an early fall performance,.

I’m thinking of it because at the time poor Joe Mantegna (who played Bobby Gould) was coping with the same affliction that is currently plaguing me. The late Ron Silver won a Tony Award for his performance as Charlie Fox, and the not-too-bad Madonna played Karen.

Fox: “It’s lonely at the top, isn’t it?
Gould: “Yeah, but it ain’t crowded.”

For some reason you can’t find a video of last Friday’s Real Time interview between Mamet and Bill Maher.