I’m sorry but I have this aversion to Nicholas Hytner and Alan Bennett‘s The Lady In The Van (TriStar Pictures). I know that my respect for Hytner, Bennett and Maggie Smith, who plays the title role, requires that I catch it when it plays at the Toronto Film Festival. But I really don’t want to hang with a homeless lady who lives in a van outside a playwright’s (i.e., Bennett’s) London home for 15 years. Only in plays or films are homeless people semi-endearing; the ones I’ve run into have all been an obnoxious pain of one kind or another, and you really want to spare yourself the aroma if at all possible.

I recognize the game that The Lady In The Van is playing. It’s testing the viewer’s compassion. If you wind up feeling some measure of affection for Miss Shepherd, you’re a decent person, and if you find her tedious or repellent then you’re a shit. Can I just call myself a shit right now and spare myself from watching it?

With the Gold Derby gang having begun to pull award-season predictions out of their ass, we might as well have fun by asking ourselves (with almost no firm knowledge about anything and with the b.s. factor piled higher than an elephant’s eye) a subversive question of sorts: Which of the presumably Oscar-friendly headliners may experience the hype-and-crash syndrome that befell Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, Ava DuVernay‘s Selma and Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood last year?

This is a fool’s errand as every film has its own path to follow and no two Oscar-season experiences are the same, but let’s play this stupid game anyway. For those who were living in caves in Northern India during last year’s Oscar season with no wifi access, here’s a recap of what happened with these three.

Starting in late summer and all through September, October and November, several Oscar handicappers had Unbroken at the top of their list of likely Best Picture candidates. Grit and survival in a Japanese POW camp, Coen brothers‘ script, Roger Deakins‘ cinematography…can’t be denied! And then Jolie’s film screened on Sunday, 11.30 at the WGA theatre on Doheny and it fucking collapsed. The air just whooshed out. High levels of craft but too labored, too Christian, too torture-porny. It was respectably reviewed and made $115 million domestic, but the Oscar game was stillborn when everyone realized it was more or less The Passion of the Christ revisited — a stealth Christian film.

I have this memory that in the ’90s and certainly in the ’80s, a mildly diverting, old-fashioned comedy like Peter Bogdanovich‘s She’s Funny That Way would have hung around in first-rate theaters or plexes for two or three weeks and then downshifted into sub-runs. Playing in respectable situations for 14 or 21 days gave marginal films an aura, a certain cultural presence. Now they’re a data burst on the way out the door. She’s Funny That Way is playing in two Laemmle theatre for seven days (mainly to get reviews and interviews from critics in thrall to the Bogdanovich oeuvre and legend) concurrent with VOD access. I didn’t care for She’s Funny That Way very much. It can’t hold a candle to Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig‘s Mistress America, which is much better at adapting the spirit of screwball comedy to the 21st Century. But I feel for and respect the people behind the Bogdanovich film, and I feel badly that it’s getting the bum’s rush. Two-day-old LexG tweet: “Remember when a 7-day run was like a HOLY SHIT embarrassment that denoted a real bomb, not the DEFAULT for 60% of theatrical releases?”

Edward Zwick‘s Pawn Sacrifice (Bleecker Street, 9.18) is a fact-based biographical thriller about the genius-level Jedi skills and curious obsessions of legendary chess master Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire) and particularly Fischer’s world-famous 1972 face-off with Russian champion Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber) in Iceland. I purposely didn’t research Fischer before seeing the film late this afternoon; I just wanted Maguire’s performance to take me somewhere or not. It did, all right. It’s not the same kind of portrayal of mental dysfunction as Russell Crowe‘s Oscar-winning portrayal of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (i.e., no imaginary characters), but it’s in the same general ballpark. Maguire is more than convincing; he seems consumed, possessed. Schreiber’s Spassky also nails it nicely. The film depicts a period in which Fischer (who died in 2008 at age 64) was half unhinged and half holding it together. The screening happened at West Hollywood’s London hotel; a reception followed.

Pawn Sacrifice costars Michael Stuhlbarg, star Tobey Maguire at post-screening reception at London hotel — Sunday, 8.23, 6:05 pm.

Sasha Stone and I were all over the map when we recorded the latest Oscar Poker this morning, but two of the topics were (a) Amy Heckerling‘s Clueless having topped a Cinemafanatic poll about the most essential female-directed films, and (b) the Gold Derby spitball polls of users and “experts” about seemingly likely nominees for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, etc. Again, the mp3.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has launched the 2015 Oscar season speculation with a poll of “experts” (which I contributed to last night) along with a user/reader poll. The users poll is mostly bullshit, of course, but it gives you a rough idea about which films and actors have the heat among the pseudo-informed, industry-watching outliers. I don’t know much more but I can offer some strong positive or negative suspicions here and there, particularly in the Best Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress categories.

Best Picture: The Revenant will most likely emerge as the industry front-runner before long, and it has the vague advantage of being an unknown until it starts screening around, I’m guessing, 11.20 or thereabouts. Having read the script and seen a live reading of The Hateful Eight, I have very little belief in its Best Picture chances. Joy and The Danish Girl are inevitable; ditto Carol and Steve Jobs. If you ask me the first-rate Brooklyn is also a fairly strong contender, but not so fast when it comes to Bridge of Spies and Suffragette. Forget Inside Out — it’s relegated to Best Feature Animation and that’s that. Nobody in my realm knows squat about Spotlight and Black Mass. I agree with Kyle Buchanan that Mad Max: Fury Road deserves a Best Picture nomination but who knows who that’ll play? Beasts of No Nation, an allegedly strong entry, will probably never snag a Best Picture nomination, given the gruesome subject matter.

One noteworthy thing about Michael Caine‘s icy performance in Get Carter is that he always looks stern, steady and focused. But by his own admission Caine was half in the bag while filming this Mike Hodges classic. During the ’60s and early ’70s he was smoking at least 80 cigarettes and “drinking two to three bottles of vodka” a day, Caine was once quoted as saying. He reportedly quit cigarettes “following a stern lecture from Tony Curtis at a party in 1971,” and he has credited his wife Shakira, whom he married in ’73, for steering him away from vodka.

I’m not saying that dislikable but tolerable Hillary Clinton won’t muddle through, land the Democratic nomination for President and beat whomever the Republicans nominate, but I’m not the only one who’s feeling more and more concerned that the email thing (i.e., “Eghazi”) is going to hang around forever, and that her negatives are going to keep climbing and that she’s going to gradually sink further in the polls, and that somebody like Marco Rubio or Donald Trump might actually win the general election, and then we’d have a climate-change denier in the White House.

I realize that the odds still favor Hillary because of her support from women, educated male liberals, Hispanics and African Americans. But the situation still feels dicey and I for one am very, very scared. There’s certainly no basis for unshakable confidence in Clinton. Nobody loves or even likes her very much in my realm. She obviously lacks that natural rock-star thing that her husband had and still does. She’s smart and scrappy but a shitty candidate with a curiously suspicious nature and the wrong kind of vibes, not to mention a flat, brittle voice and a cackly laugh.

But there’s a solution, and its name is Biden-Warren. If Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren would announce they intend to run as a pair, as President and Vice-president respectively, the Hillary bandwagon would run out of gas very quickly. Imagine! Warren alone would scoop up a lot of Hillary’s female supporters in a heartbeat, and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders would just as quickly lose the dynamism because Warren’s beliefs about income inequality are seen as more or less synonymous with his.

Yesterday a tally of the best (i.e., most popular, significant, important or essential) films by women directors surfaced on Cinemafanatic.com, a blog by movie-worshipper and journalistic pinch-hitter Marya Gates. The list came from a poll that Gates conducted of “over 500 critics, filmmakers, bloggers, historians, professors and casual film viewers.” I agree with nearly every film that made it. Not with the rankings in some cases, but the list is a reasonable one. Except, that is, for Amy Heckerling‘s Clueless being the #1 film of them all.

True, Clueless has 142 votes compared to the 144 votes cast for Sofia Coppola‘s Lost in Translation so maybe Gates just forget to switch them out, but even Clueless in second place is pretty weird. Clueless above Zero Dark Thirty, The Piano, The Hurt Locker, Orlando, Winter’s Bone, et. al.?

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a piece about the poll earlier today and had this to say:

“Again, not criticizing Clueless but to me when you’re talking about ‘best’ you’re not talking about ‘favorite.’ You’re talking about incomparable works of art that are unequivocal. The Coen brothers, Scorsese, Hitchcock, Fincher, Coppola, Welles…on the female side, Campion, Bigelow, Wertmuller, Kent, Coppola, Ramsay, DuVernay, etc. I’m going to say it because probably no one else will. No one wants to be the one who is the asshole in the room shitting all over something as beautiful as this poll. And I’m not shitting on it. I’m not even shitting on Clueless.

“I’m just saying that if women want to really compete, if they want to really be taken seriously as artists on par with their male counterparts, we have to up the game a little here.”

“Young people are the only ones who ever talk about growing old gracefully. For those actually in the thick of it, the romance of that notion burns off pretty quickly, and wrinkles and creaky joints are the least of it: Growing old, gracefully or otherwise, means becoming the person you were always meant to be, only more so. After days, months, and years of gradual transformation, you wake up one day to find that you’re 1,000 percent you. Your good qualities have entwined so fixedly with the bad that it’s hard to distinguish which are which. By the time you feel wholly comfortable in your own skin, everyone around you may find you unbearable.” — from Stephanie Zacharek‘s Village Voice review of Grandma, an above-average film about a cranky, prickly older woman (Lily Tomlin) trying to help her granddaughter (Julia Garner) pay for an abortion.

I love that “1000 percent you” line — that’ll be bouncing around in my head for years to come. Ditto the “good qualities entwined so fixedly with the bad.” But I don’t feel at one with the tone of resignation in this paragraph. (It almost feels defeatist.) I guess this is because while I might have felt “wholly comfortable in my skin” a few years or even a decade or two ago, a lot of old skin was shed when I went sober three and a half years ago, and as much as I recognize there are certain aspects of my nature that will never change and that a certain sector of humanity will always annoy me (and very possibly vice versa), I don’t see the climate out there as all that prickly or adversarial. Sobriety really does make your life seem like something that might work out. And aside from advertisers, I don’t give that much of a shit about what most people think of me so…you know, fuck’ em.

I’ve heard from reputable sources that Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant (20th Century Fox, 12.25) is definitely the shit, and if that turns out to be true I’m betting that Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the lead role of 19th Century trapper Hugh Glass, may finally snag a Best Actor Oscar. He’s been Best Actor-nominated three times (The Aviator, Blood Diamond, The Wolf of Wall Street) so maybe this’ll finally be it, 22 years after he broke into features with This Boy’s Life. The guy’s paid his dues.

Leo has been a power-hitter and marquee headliner for nearly 18 years now, or since Titanic. Nobody can ever diminish or take away the killer performances he gave in The Departed, Inception, Revolutionary Road and The Wolf of Wall Street, but when I think of vintage DiCaprio I rewind back to that dynamic six-year period in the ’90s (’93 to ’98) when he was all about becoming and jumping off higher and higher cliffs — aflame, intense and panther-like in every performance he gave. I was reminded of this electric period this morning that I watched the above YouTube clip of DiCaprio in Woody Allen‘s Celebrity (’98).

I respected Leo’s performance in This Boy’s Life but I didn’t love it, and I felt the same kind of admiring distance with Arnie, his mentally handicpped younger brother role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, partly because he was kind of a whiny, nasally-voiced kid in both and…you know, good work but later. Excellent actor, didn’t care for the feisty-kid vibes. But a few months before Gilbert Grape opened I met DiCaprio for a Movieline interview at The Grill in Beverly Hills, and by that time he was taller and rail-thin and just shy of 20 years old. I was sitting in that booth and listening to him free-associate while saying to myself, “This kid’s got it…I can feel the current.”

At first glance Tony McNamara‘s Ashby (Paramount, 9.25) seems like a loose rehash of Theodore Melfi‘s St. Vincent. Bill Murray played the suburban-residing, raggedy-ass social misfit in the latter while Mickey Rourke plays a slight variation (i.e., an ex-CIA guy) in Ashby. Women hover in both films. One difference is that the kid being uncle’d, watched over and mentored in Ashby is a high-schooler (Nat Wolff) rather than a 12 year-old.