Congrats to the five nominees for the 2023 Publicist Guild press award, listed in order of HE preference:

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone…a nomination and recommendation that speaks for itself.

THR‘s Scott Feinberg…ditto.

Variety‘s Angelique Jackson, who’s still best known for expressing disappointment over Anthony Hopkins winning Best Actor for The Father and thereby denying fans of the late Chadwick Boseman, whose Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom performance was also nominated, a cathartic moment;

Collider‘s Perri Nemiroff, one of the smiling-est film commentators on the web, not to mention a Noovie personality, and…

L.A. Times wokester film writer Jen Yamato, still best known for (a) complaining that Licorice Pizza made Asians into a “punchline“, and (b) complaining to Joel and Ethan Coen that Hail Ceasar, set in Hollywood in the early ’50s, didn’t bave enough minority characters (i.e., #WhyIsHailCaesarSoWhite?”

If you ask me Yamato, Jackson and Nemiroff were included to round things out. Stone and Feinberg are the only serious contenders.

My beloved elephant-hide wallet was waiting for me in the Metro North lost & found office — room #100 in Grand Central. I lost it 11 days ago, and they called me yesterday with the good news. I didn’t listen to the message but whatever. And the cash was still there! Unbelievable.

The correct phrase, of course, is “you must lead a charmed life.”

THR’s Scott Feinberg needs to step out of his DEI sewing circle and come to grips with the fact that outside of the identity fanatics Celine Song’s Past Lives is finished as a competitive Best Picture contender. It’s weak tea (i.e., doesn’t really pay off) and simply isn’t resonating. Let it go.

Scott can also double triple quadruple forget Past Lives’ John Magaro as a Best Supporting Actor hopeful. Not even remotely in the cards. Wimpy character, off-putting floor-mop haircut, too short.

Other ostensible Best Supporting Actor hotshots whom Scott needs to completely abandon: May December’s Charles Melton (Feinberg has the guy in fourth place!) and Killers of the Flower Moon’s Jesse Plemons.

Plus he has to stop shitting on BlackBerry’s Glenn Howerton (far and away the top indie-realm BSA contender as we speak) and The Holdovers’ Dominic Sessa. Howerton and Sessa are currently included in Feinberg’s “possibilities” (i.e., dead meat) roster.

Best Picture-wise Scott needs to elevate the eighth-place positioning of The Holdovers (right now it’s neck and neck with Oppenheimer and Poor Things) and also rescue the brilliant and dazzling Maestro from his seventh-place slot.

Scott further needs to come to grips with the fact that outside the all-non-white-identity-flicks-are-glorious-and-cleansing realm nobody really likes Killers of the Flower Moon. And nobody can figure out why Lily Gladstone’s Mollie Burkhart behaves in such a gentle and non-condemning way with her scurvy, dumb-scumbag husband Ernest, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Plus Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a one-trick pony, is out.

With my big, beautiful, elephant-hide wallet having vaporized in midtown Manhattan sometime on Friday, November 3rd (the day I saw Maestro at Dolby 88), I’ve spent more than a few hours trying to re-establish my identity — new plastic, new driver’s license, passport, insurance cards, social security card, etc.

I have high-quality images of the important identification docs on my phone, but they mean nothing to the DMV guys. To them I’m an Afghanistan terrorist. I had just bought a $39 Metro card…gone. The cash is gone.

Early tomorrow morning I’ll be making one last try with the Metro North lost-and-found team plus the Midtown North police precinct on West 54th Street, and then I’ll get into line for the 1 pm Napoleon screening. I’ve got one of those smallish Apple wallets arriving tomorrow night, but my heart is still cracked and aching. That big-ass wallet meant a lot.

…and yet it is. We all put our faces on when we go out on the town, and that, in a sense, is who we “are”. I don’t wear an HE face but I do work on the hair until it’s just so. I’ll spare you the regimen but it’s complicated. The idea is to present an appearance of tousled, casually styled 30something hair without appearing to have gone to a great amount of effort.

I wish I could’ve been there…the 70mm capability is a spiritually significant thing,

I’ve been a hardcore aspect ratio fanatic my entire life so I when I notice something unusual or striking about the masking of a new film, you can pretty much take it to the bank. I was in a local AMC plex last night, and impulsively decided to pop my head into a theatre showing The Holdovers. Despite having seen it three times (Telluride and Montclair film festivals plus last night) I noticed for the first time that it’s being projected at 1.66:1, or is masked at that aspect ratio.

We all understand that director Alexander Payne has gone to some effort to make The Holdovers look and feel like a half-century-old film, but honestly? 1.66:1 was more in vogue during the ’50s and the early to mid ’60s (at least when it came to United Artists releases). Outside of European projection standards and par-for-the-course 1.66 maskings, 1.85 aspect ratios had become ubiquitous stateside by 1970, the year in which Payne’s film mostly takes place. I nonetheless love that he tumbled for 1.66 anyway.

Nobody loves 1.66 aspect ratios like Hollywood Elsewhere…nobody.

To me 1.66 framings are a special turn-on — a standard of old-school visual integrity that either you’re on board with like a monk or you’re not and you’re lost.

The first three James Bond films use the 1.66 rectangle…perfection. I adore that John Schlesinger‘s Sunday Bloody Sunday (’71) adheres to same. I hated it when Richard Lester ignored the traditional 1.66 framings of A Hard Day’s Night and went instead for 1.75 when the Criterion Bluray version came out…heresy! The late William Friedkin once told me in no uncertain terms that Sorcerer was meant to be shown in 1.85, but he could have kicked back and opened his heart and gone for 1.66 and nobody would’ve said boo. Roman Polanski wasn’t “wrong”, of course, when he stated that 1.85 was the proper aspect ratio for Rosemary’s Baby, but when I saw a 1.66 version in Paris in ’76 or thereabouts, I knew…I just knew.

You can’t instruct a cinematic Philistine to get with the 1.66 program — they either understand or they don;t.

How much joy and rapture can Hollywood Elsewhere stand? Another Marvel movie — Julius Onah‘s Captain America: Brave New World (Disney, 2.14.24) — is apparently in some kind of trouble, which to me is a wonderful wonderful WONDERFUL indication of continuing franchise fatigue and a general belief across the land that Marvel has weakened and broken its own brand and that the party is winding down big-time. Pop the chamnpagne!

Three days ago Jeff Sneider reported that negative test scores have led to plans for extensive reshoots, and that three major sequences will be cut and re-lensed sometime between January and May of next year. Pic costars Anthony Mackie, Danny Ramirez, Carl Lumbly, Tim Blake Nelson, Harrison Ford and Liv Tyler. I’m feeling a rush of euphoria…the proverbial Wicked Witch of the West is.melting, melting…”oh, what a world, what a world!”

Reportedly Dave Green‘s Coyote vs. Acme will not be tossed into an infinite black hole but acquired by one of the usual suspect streamers, mostly likely Amazon. This, at least, is what Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro reported this morning.