As an ethical exercise, it would be hugely spirit-lifting if just one greatly-admired performance could land an Oscar nomination without the support of a costly campaign. Just one instance in which the Academy at least nominates a performance that doesn’t have big dough behind it…no payoffs, no Hollywood Elsewhere ads, no industry party schmooze, no post-screening q & a’s, no drinks on the house. I understand, of course, that the vast majority of Academy nominations come out of this process, and I’m certainly not complaining about this…hardly! I have my hand out along with everyone else’s.

But what if there was an Academy rule stating that in each acting category, a sixth nomination would be pro bono and go to any deserving performance that has NOT been promoted for whatever reason? Or which hasn’t been campaigned for because a certain actor or actress has a distaste for campaigning or is working on a new film and can’t get away or whatever?

How about if just one performance this year could receive this tradition-defying largesse?

We’ve all understood for the last 30-plus years that Michael Mann is a distinctive heavyweight who doesn’t make programmers. He’s makes classy, hot-shit Michael Mann films, some of which have been deemed award-worthy (The Insider, Last of the Mohicans) or genre-altering (Heat, Thief, Collateral, Manhunter) or at least exceptional in this or that way (Ali, Public Enemies, the “fumes” of Miami Vice). They’re always an event, at least in the minds of critics and Mann-heads and ubers. Which is why the current absence of invites to see Blackhat, Mann’s cyber-thriller which opens on 1.16.15, is puzzling. Mann’s previous pattern has been to let his critic loyalists (a group I’ve proudly belonged to for 20-odd years) have an early looksee before the all-media crowd, but apparently not this time. I’ve written and called Mann’s office twice about this….radio silence. All Universal publicity will say is they’re waiting for Mann to say “okay, let’s roll.” Odd. The town will shut down at the end of next week (1.19) and won’t be humming again until Monday, January 5th, at which point Blackhat will be only 12 days away from opening. I don’t want to think what I’m thinking but the signals suggest that Blackhat is less than a classic Mann “event” film. I’m crestfallen at the possibility. The Sony guys will tell you Blackhat is obviously in synch with the New Terrorism. The right movie at the right time…so what’s with the hesitation?

Straight Euro-flavor hardboiled-assassin paycheck endeavor from Taken director Pierre Morel and producer Joel Silver, with Sean Penn playing George C. Scott‘s laconic existential gunman in The Last Run (’71). Actual Wiki synopsis: “International operative Martin Terrier (Penn) wants out of the game so he can settle down with his longtime love (Jasmine Trinca), but the organization he works for has other plans in mind, and he is forced to go on the run across Europe.” Any film that offers beaucoup European scenery gets a pass from me. Do the job, deposit fee, move on with your life.

Today’s Sony Hack-Mail Blast: Cameron Crowe‘s still-untitled romantic dramedy (Columbia, 5.29.15) that costars Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams, was more or less panned by Sony honcho Amy Pascal in an in-house message (dated 11.13.14) to senior staffers. An earlier version of the film-once-known-as-Deep Tiki nearly went before the cameras 2009 with Ben Stiller and Reese Witherspoon costarring, but the plug was pulled in pre-production. Except that, in Pascal’s view, “Cameron never really changed anything” in the re-written version, and so the script problems are stubbornly manifest. “I’m never starting a movie again when the script is ridiculous and we all know it,” Pascal wrote, explaining that “people don’t like people in movies who flirt with married people or married people who flirt.”

Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone in Cameron Crowe’s film that will eventually be given a title sometime in the first third of 2015.

Son of Deep Tiki had been slated to open on 12.25.15, but on 7.21.14 it was bumped to 5.29.15.

Last night Buzzfeed‘s Mathew Zeitlin reported on another embarrassing Sony hack email exchange, this one involving Sony honcho Amy Pascal, her husband Bernie Weinraub and N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd. The hacked e-mails indicate that Dowd allowed Weinraub to read a work-in-progress, not-yet-published column (which ran on 3.4.14) that flatteringly profiled Pascal. In an email to Weinraub, Pascal said she was fearful about how she might appear in the column and asked Weinraub to intercede — “I’M NOT TALKING TO HER IF SHE IS GONNA SLAM ME…PLEASE FIND OUT.” Weinraub emphasized to his wife that “you can’t tell a single person that I’m seeing the column before it’s printed…it’s not done…no p.r. people or Lynton or anyone should know.” When Zeitlin asked Weinraub for a comment yesterday, the former N.Y. Times movie-beat reporter wrote back, deer-in-headlights style, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Dowd has supplied the following statement: “I never showed Bernie the column in advance or promised to show it. Bernie is an old friend and the Times’ former Hollywood reporter, and he sometimes gives me ideas for entertainment columns. In January [’14] he suggested a column, inspired by a study cited in the L.A. Times about the state of women in Hollywood. Amy is a friend and I reassured her before our interview that it wasn’t an antagonistic piece. She wasn’t the focus of the story, nor was Sony. I emailed with Bernie and talked to him before I wrote the column in March, getting his perspective on the Hollywood old boys’ club and the progress of women. But I didn’t send him the column beforehand.” Which of course contradicts Weinraub’s e-mail to Pascal that says “I’m seeing the column before it’s printed.” So Weinraub was fibbing?

The N.Y. Times-produced 9 Kisses is a series of kissing scenarios (7 straight, 2 gay) featuring highly touted acting contenders. None are knockouts, but my favorite is Jenny Slate and Rosario Dawson‘s. Tells no story, has no real undercurrent, just playful giggly lezzy stuff…but it ratifies Slate as an elite big-timer…”one of us, one of us, one of us.” Seemingly directed in same outdoorsy setting (presumably a set) by Elaine Constantine, whose recently popped Northern Soul (opened in Britain a few weeks ago), a ’70s music-scene drama with Steve Coogan, isn’t viewable stateside, and didn’t to my knowledge play the Toronto or New York Film Festivals.

The St. Louis Film Critics have nominated HE’s own Tom Hardy for their Best Actor prize. They’re talking about his performance in Locke but they really mean Locke and The Drop. They also nominated Jessica Chastain‘s A Most Violent Year performance for Best Supporting Actress. The Academy has to ease up on the myopia and the knee-jerk kowtowing to awards campaigning and just give it up and do the right thing. They need to invite Hardy into the herd and respectfully eliminate the slowest-running wildebeest among the top Best Actor contenders — Foxcatcher‘s Steve Carell. There are lions running alongside looking to tackle as we speak.

According to some Topp-style trading cards provided to Entertainment Weekly by J.J. Abrams and Co., the Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens characters are as follows: Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron, John Boyega as Finn (British black guy with an Irish name…cool), Adam Driver as Kylo Ren (the black-cloaked bad guy in the snow-covered forest with the light saber), Daisy Ridley as Rey, and the little bowling-ball droid is called BB8. Excluding Harrison Ford‘s Han Solo, of course, along with various other holdovers (Hamill, Fisher) and freshies.

Let’s imagine that all of the women who have publicly claimed they were drugged and violated by Bill Cosby (over 25 so far) were to sign a letter asking the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to remove Cosby’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star for obvious reasons. The normal bureaucratic response would be to say “no, that’s inappropriate.” But if you think about it for 10 or 12 seconds, on what basis could the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce possibly argue against this? “Yes, he might be a serial rapist but he was Dr. Cliff Huxtable all those years and the fans can’t let go of that so let’s just leave well enough alone”? Note: Beverly Johnson’s Vanity Fair confession makes her the 26th.

On 11.29 I mentioned an Anthony Lane riff in the New Yorker about the absence of an Alan Turing poison-apple suicide scene in The Imitation Game. Turing had a fascination with Walt Disney‘s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and particularly the poisoned apple given to Snow White by the wicked witch. He committed suicide on 6.7.54 by biting into an apple filled with cyanide. Lane asked “how could a movie director, of all people, not make something of that?” Well, Game screenwriter Graham Moore made something of it in a draft written in 2011. I was sent a copy yesterday. A scene which the police discover Turing’s body with a poisoned apple by his side appears on page 124 and 125. The producers have said the scene didn’t work but it seems fine on the page. Here it is:

Sony Pictures chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin have apologized for having written “racially insensitive” cracks last year about President Obama in a now-public e-mail exchange, thanks to the Asian hackers. With Pascal about to attend a Jeffrey Katzenberg-hosted breakfast for the visiting President, she and Rudin bantered about what African-American movies Obama might have seen…ouch. An embarrassment, of course, but Pascal or Rudin are no more racist than you or me or Mike Binder or Glenn Kenny. I know Rudin slightly and have spoken once or twice to Pascal. They’re good Type-A people. Willful and tough but no fools, and careful as their positions require, which is to say “very.”

Here’s my theory about why they wrote what they wrote. On their own terms neither Pascal nor Rudin would come within 1000 feet of making a casually dismissive racist remark. But together and especially online they form a third “industry” personality — a combined persona that is more competitive, more cynical, a little less precise…more bluster and bravado than they would normally exude. While conversing the gentler angels of their nature take a backseat.

We’ve all experienced this syndrome socially. We say things in the company of friends and colleagues that we don’t really mean or believe, but we say them anyway because we want to banter and bond and keep the ball in the air, and sometimes we get sloppy and say something coarse, and for no reason that makes any real sense. We say something stupid or trite and then ask ourselves, “Did I just say that?”

A couple of weeks ago Al Pacino told me that Johnny Depp does the best Tony Montana he’s ever heard. Depp’s garden-variety Pacino isn’t bad either. Is he saying “a skeleton goes into a bar, orders a beer and a mop” or is he saying that “Skeletor” — Frank Langella‘s character in Masters of the Universe — does that? Depp heard the joke repeatedly and didn’t get it either.