It hit me the other day that the award-season argument factor isn’t as strong this year as it has been in the past. Everyone seems to be adopting a comme ci comme ca attitude. Nobody seems to be cranked up about anything. There’s certainly nothing this year to equal, say, the sharp aesthetic divide between The Social Network advocates and the soft saps who fell for The King’s Speech. There’s no conservative vs. liberal social values clash as exemplified by Crash vs. Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture. There’s certainly nothing to match the revulsion that some of us felt about The Artist or Chicago winning their respective Best Picture Oscars. There have been no serious take-down campaigns except for the one against Truth.

I’m not saying the season is entirely lacking in emotionalism, but that the bonfires aren’t burning as brightly as before. The 2015/16 season has been characterized by a series of small brush fires. What has stood out is the lack of real feeling about anything or anyone.

There have been, however, unexpected responses to films that many had presumed would at least score a nomination or two, or to films and performances that really had no business being nominated or awarded. Here’s how it tallies from this end:

(1) The late-inning resurgence of George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road as a strong Best Picture contender, which was driven almost totally by critics group awards and not very much, it seemed, by Warner Bros. advertising and promo pushes. Emotional furnace level: 7.5.

(2) The curious but strangely passionate insistence by fans of The Martian that it deserves a Best Picture nomination. Make no mistake — this Ridley Scott effort is a highly intelligent, perfectly satisfying popcorn movie about a community of space agency types pooling resources to rescue a nice resourceful guy who’s stranded on Mars. There’s certainly nothing wrong with it. It’s totally fine. But Best Picture-nominating a film for simply being “likable” and/or selling a lot of tickets degrades the brand. Especially when its own distributor has encouraged its Golden Globes/HFPA classification as a “comedy.” Emotional furnace level: 6.

(3) The shameful dismissal of Love & Mercy as Best Picture contender by the blogaroonies for the reprehensible reason that it didn’t open during Oscar season and therefore didn’t really count. (Rationale: It doesn’t matter if their bread is sufficiently buttered with parties and ad buys — the movie HAS to open after Labor Day or it’s a no-go.) Ditto the corresponding under-support for Paul Dano, whose performance as young Brian Wilson was easily one of the year’s finest in whatever category (Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor). Philistines! Emotional furnace level: 9.

From a GQ piece by Joshua Rivera, posted on 12.24: “A lot of movie soundtracks aren’t so great right now. It’s surprising how many big blockbusters will be accompanied by scores that are hard to describe as anything other than ‘forgettable’. But what’s also interesting is that once-common musical ideas like motif have fallen out of fashion — when was the last time you saw a movie with a theme you could hum? The sort of instantly recognizable, heroic melody that has accompanied and elevated films like Rocky, or, hell, Star Wars, just doesn’t happen as often anymore, and in that way, Creed‘s score is kind of a throwback. But it’s a throwback that’s full of so much that’s new. Like hip-hop.

“Ludwig Goransson‘s Creed compositions frequently reference Bill Conti‘s legendary Rocky score, but in quiet ways — you first hear the Rocky theme’s familiar six-note refrain as the tender conclusion to the music that plays behind Adonis’ first casual date with Tessa Thompson‘s Bianca. It’s a technique that makes an old tune feel very different while also keeping you in subconscious suspense, wondering if you’ll ever hear those horns you know so well. And maybe you will — on some level, you know the movie has to go there — but Creed has other, more exciting things to do before that.”

11.25 HE post: “I’ve noted a few times that I prefer the kind of film score that seems to be watching the movie with you and expressing what you’re feeling as the story progresses. (Examples: Spotlight, Moneyball.) The other kind announces the emotional intention or goal on a scene-by-scene basis and more or less instructs you how to feel. Ludwig Goransson‘s Creed score is one of the latter, but it’s an arresting and often rousing example of this approach.

Sasha Stone and I waited until the National Society of Film Critics had announced their awards before recording the latest Oscar Poker. What’s up with the NSFC’s Best Actor going to Creed‘s Michael B. Jordan? And why doesn’t Sasha subject herself to the Palm Springs Film Festival? Oh, and Sasha doesn’t agree with Scott Feinberg, by the way, about Martian helmer Ridley Scott being in a better-than-decent position to win the Best Director Oscar. Why is Spotlight, easily one of the year’s best, piddling along with a mere $27 million in box-office receipts thus far? We’re all about to be soaked in O.J. Simpson lore starting around mid-January this month and into February-March. I sound much better this week, being mostly over the life-threatening illness. Again, the mp3.

Speaking as a major O.J. Simpson murder trial enthusiast and one who has seen six of the ten hours of the forthcoming The People vs. O.J. Simpson (FX series debuting on February 2nd) and as one who will attend Sundance 2016, I’m very much looking forward to seeing ESPN’s OJ: Made in America, a doc that runs 7 and 1/2 hours. Unfortunately the doc is being shown in Park City during a single marathon on Friday, 1.22, complete with a lunch break and post-screening q & a. Which isn’t going to work. I can’t devote a whole day to this — I would miss too many other screenings. If ESPN were smart, they would screen O.J.: Made in America to select LA and NY press before the festival. I would love to get into this but the first Friday of Sundance is always full of the hottest films. If ESPN won’t pre-screen it, how about a second marathon showing on Thursday, 1.28 or Friday, 1.29, when things will be much quieter?

A few days after the passing of legendary dp Haskell Wexler, the great Vilmos Zsigmond — a contemporary of Wexler’s whose career also flourished during the auteurist heyday of the 1970s — has died at age 85. Zsigmond’s sterling reputation largely rests upon groundbreaking photography he captured in films released between 1971 to ’81. During this decade he shot Robert Altman‘s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (a sombre, lantern-lit, snow-sprinkled western — probably Zsigmond’s best work), John Boorman‘s Deliverance (which used a rarely-seen desaturated color scheme), Altman’s The Long Goodbye (one of my favorite L.A. mood films), Steven Spielberg‘s The Sugarland Express, Jerry Schatzberg‘s Scarecrow, Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Michael Cimino‘s The Deer Hunter, Mark Rydell‘s The Rose, Cimino’s disastrous Heaven’s Gate and Brian De Palma‘s Blowout.

After Blowout (which I’ve never been a fan of) it was like the air just whooshed out and Zsigmond was stuck shooting…well, films that were nowhere near as good. Jinxed!, The River, The Witches of Eastwick, The Bonfire of the Vanities (the fuck?), Sliver, Intersection, Maverick (a $75 million Elvis Presley film), Assassins, The Ghost and the Darkness, Playing by Heart, Life as a House, Jersey Girl, Melinda and Melinda, The Black Dahlia, Cassandra’s Dream and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. What happened?

The National Society of Film Critics, a respected 53-member organization, has given its Best Picture award to Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight. Their Best screenplay award also went to Spotlight, which was co-written by McCarthy and Josh Singer. Totally approved, no arguments, adding to the general consensus, etc.

The NSFC’s Best Director award went to Carol‘s Todd Haynes.

And yet they also gave their Best Actor award to Creed‘s Michael B. Jordan — clearly a pushback against Leonardo DiCaprio‘s award-season Revenant narrative (i.e., “he suffered, he froze, he ate a buffalo liver”) and just as clearly some kind of joke as no one anywhere has seriously spoken of Jordan’s decent-enough performance as being award-level…c’mon!

The NSFC did very well, however, by handing their Best Actress award to 45 Years costar Charlotte Rampling. Thumbs all the way up on this one. Plus anything that might slow down the momentum of Room‘s Brie Larson is, I feel, a good thing. She’s going to be nominated, of course, but that scene in which she freaks out after seeing her son safe in the back seat of a police car is an absolute disqualification.

Naturally the NSFC gave their Best Supporting Actor award to Mark Rylance for his skillfully subtle, bordering-on-somnambulant performance as Russian spy Rudolf Abel in Steven Spielberg‘s Bridge of Spies. Rylance is the safe default choice this year for critics who take comfort in voting exactly as they’ve been told by other lazy consensus followers.

Ridley Scott is a highly respected, exacting and resourceful visualist with a fascinating filmography, and to hear it from Scott Feinberg and others he may well win an Oscar next month for his direction of The Martian — one of the shallowest, most audience-friendly, Orlando Disney World films he’s ever made. If he wins it’ll essentially be a gold-watch career achievement Oscar. Because just about every film he’s made since The Duellist has been better (more innovative, less predictable, more visually striking) than that Jerry Bruckheimer-level space-rescue movie that Sasha Stone loves so much. Scott films that aren’t as good as The Martian: Legend, White Squall, G.I. Jane, Someone To Watch Over Me, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Hannibal, A Good Year, Body of Lies, Robin Hood, Prometheus. Scott’s finest (in this order): Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, The Duellists, The Counselor (director’s cut), Black Hawk Down, Matchstick Men, American Gangster, Kingdom of Heaven (director’s cut), Gladiator.

I’ve been attending the Palm Springs Film Festival for the last few years, and at the end of every one I’ve asked myself “was that really worth it?” I used to think of the PSFF as a warm-up for Sundance. Now it’s basically a big-media paparazzi pigfuck that every significant Oscar contender is obliged to attend, and all you can do as a columnist is…well, not much. Write observations, attend the events, listen to the try-out acceptance speeches, snap a few photos. You drive all the way out there and stay in some old-style place for two or three nights for $400 or $450 bucks and for what? It’s a tax write-off and not entirely unpleasant (Variety‘s Sunday brunch party is always agreeable), but I decided to ignore it this year. Too much grief for too little yield.

Last year’s headline said it all: “Puttin’ On Ritz in Chilly Corporate Bunker Once Known as Palm Springs.”

Posted two years ago: “Ten years ago the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival was a respected, smartly-programmed venue for foreign films with a few celebrities and photos ops on the side. Now it’s a star-studded, rock-your-paparazzi, award-season megashow with A-class celebs, limos, security goons and guys like me taking pictures and…uhm, oh yeah, right, a smartly-programmed venue for foreign film on the side.

“I didn’t attend last night’s big awards hand-out at the Palm Springs Convention Center but I attended the after-party at the Parker Palm Springs. For about 40 minutes. Great, I got in without a hitch…now what? Position yourself near this or that award-season contender so you can chat for 90 seconds before the next pushy, socially anxious reveller makes his or her move? It’s a zoo. I’m a quiet sitdown kind of guy. I’d rather hang out with my cats. Or…you know, do an interview in a hotel room or a cafe. But not this.

It hit me last night that I’ve never posted a 2015 Worst Films list, and that I’d better get down to it today. I’m figuring we’re still in a New Year’s Eve hangover mode and that 2016 doesn’t really begin until Monday, 1.4. The problem with worsties is that I rarely see movies with really bad advance word. Reverse Tolstoy: All good movies have qualities and undercurrents that are very particular and specific to themselves while all bad movies exude pretty much the same poison. So it’s probably better to just ask HE readers to post their own hate lists. Please, fire away.

What was my absolute personal worst, a movie I despised more than all the other toxic releases combined? I’m going to go with John Eric Dowdle‘s No Escape, which I paid to see at the Westside Pavillion last August. Review quote: “This is the kind of movie that makes you feel nauseated and humiliated. You want to escape before the closing credits start and hide your face and not look at anyone else who was in the theatre with you. You just want to run down to the garage and get the hell out of there.”

And: “No Escape caters to the fears of every whitebread moron who’s afraid of visiting anyplace the least bit exotic or even a wee bit unfamiliar, and who prefers to go on Carnival Cruises and visit Disneyland France and Cancun and Club Med hideaways.”

My second most hated viewing experience was Magic Mike XXL. Excerpt from my 7.3.15 review: “I called Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike ‘one of those summer films that comes along once in a blue moon — a fun romp filled with yoks and swagger and whoo-hoo, but also sharp, wise and shrewdly observed, and flush with indie cred.’ Magic MIke XXL, by contrast, is a film that smirks and piddles around but also pisses on you. A big yellow stream shooting out of the screen and onto my lap.”

I was struck this morning by a phrase in Larry Karaszewski‘s appraisal of James Bridges‘ Mike’s Murder (’84), as contained in a March 2012 “Trailers From Hell” essay. Larry notes how the film really captures the enervated spirit of ’80s Los Angeles, “the emptiness, the transitory lives, the relationships of people who only see each other every six months but still think they’re close.” Hey, that’s me. Well, kind of. I feel a genuine kinship with several people whom I almost never hang out with. I “see” some of them at screenings, parties and film festivals, but we never get together just to get together, not even “every six months.” Partly because some of these pallies are far flung (geographical distance isn’t what it used to be) and partly because I spend all my time banging this column out.

Straight question: How many HE readers have close friends whom they trust impeccably and feel entirely relaxed with, but whom they see once or twice a year, if that?

“A few days after seeing the newly manufactured, disposable Legal Eagles, I noticed that Debra Winger‘s last picture to be released, Mike’s Murder, was listed in The New York Times TV schedule, and that the Times‘ advice was ‘Skip it.’ Please, don’t skip it next time it comes around. I wasn’t able to see this film during its unheralded, minuscule New York run in 1984, but I caught up with it on HBO last year. [I]t has two superb performances — a full-scale starring one by Winger, and a brief intense one by Paul Winfield. She’s a radiantly sane young bank teller who has an affair with Mike (Mark Keyloun). She likes him — you can see her eagerness, even though she knows how to be cool and bantering with him…”