It is believed that Academy members (a) don’t watch many award-season movies in theatres, (b) skip chapters or fall asleep when they watch them at home on DVD screeners, and (c) prefer to allow the winners of the guild awards (PGA, SAG, DGA, etc.) to “influence” their vote rather than listen to their own criteria or instincts. Yes, Virginia — Academy members are sheep. And therefore last night’s tie for the Producers Guild Daryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Theatrical Motion Picture, shared by 12 Years A Slave and Gravity, is something of a big deal.

Until last night it was presumed that the sheep could and would probably give the Best Picture Oscar to American Hustle if that David O. Russell film had won the top PGA trophy on the heels of winning the SAG Best Ensemble Award two nights ago (i.e., Saturday, 1.18). Now the woolies are lost and wandering around the labrynthian forest without a shepherd to guide them…baaah! They’re going to have to decide among the top three contenders on their own…baaah!

I’ve just realized that Steve James‘ Life Itself, which I saw an hour’s worth earlier this evening and was completely knocked over by, has a press & industry screening tomorrow night at 7 pm at the Holiday Cinemas. Now I can see the whole thing. Smooth and incisive and as plain-spoken as Ebert’s prose, Life is definitely among my best of the festival this far (along with Whiplash, Laggies and The Skeleton Twins).

Amir Bar-Lev‘s Happy Valley is a shrewdly sculpted, richly perceptive study of denial — of people’s willingness and even eagerness to practice denial if so motivated. The specific subject is the Penn State child-abuse sex scandal of 2011 and 2012, which resulted in convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky doing 30 years in jail and the late beloved Penn State coach Joe Paterno being at lest partly defined between now and forever as a pedophile enabler. The Freeh report (conducted by former FBI director Louis Freeh and his law firm) stated that Paterno, Penn State president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and school vp Gary Schultz all knew about Sandusky probably being guilty of child molestation as far back as 1998, and that all were complicit in looking the other way. State College residents and especially Penn State football fans were enraged when Paterno was fired for not saying or doing enough. Even after the Freeh report they wouldn’t let go.

(l.) convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky; (r.) the late Joe Paterno.

Like everyone else, I thought the Armond White foot-shooting incident (the City Arts critic allegedly calling 12 years A Slave director Steve McQueen an “embarassing doorman” and a “garbageman” at a 1.6 New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony, and getting expelled by the NYFCC on 1.13 as a result) had been sufficiently reported. The matter was written about thoroughly and eloquently by Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman on 1.13 and by New York critic David Edelstein on 1.14. But two days ago (Friday, 1.17) a N.Y. Times Cara Buckley story brought it up again. Buckley’s piece is not a career obit or a hand-wringing lament about boorish public behavior, but is more or less neutrally respectful of White’s position that he was booted out by a group of Hollywood-kowtowing, left-liberal commissars. Really?

There’s one thing I’ve been told by a certain NYFCC member that I completely accept, to wit: the NYFCC committee did not enjoy giving White his walking papers and were quite anguished about it, but as White had refused to explain or apologize for the incident at their 1.13 meeting, they felt they had to lay down the law. “It was lose, lose,” Edelstein tells Buckley. Giving White the boot left him feeling “devastated and dreadful,” he says, because “we need to treasure the cranks, we need to treasure the crackpots because the [film criticism] profession has gotten so cautious.”

Six- or eight-paragraph Sundance “reviews” are out of the question for me. Between three movies per day and all the running around the most I can manage, it seems, is to tap out tweets and then build these into three- or four-paragraph riffs, but I have to do this on the shuttle bus between screenings or while sitting in the hatefully drafty Yarrow lobby or in my seat at the Library of the Eccles before a film begins, and then bang out what I can in the mornings before the day starts. But even by that loose-shoe standard I’ve been falling behind over the last 48 hours. (Yesterday I had to move out of condo #1 and into condo #2, a time-eating pain in the ass.) So I’m staying in the pad for a few hours today (Sunday, 1.20) to catch up.

Kelly Reilly, Brendan Gleeson in John Martin McDonaugh’s Calvary.

At 2:15 pm an 11-hour adventure begins. Amir Bar Lev‘s Happy Valley, an examination of the Jerry Sandusky sexual-molesting Penn State reach-around scandal, screens at the MARC. Then I’ll be catching the first hour of Steve James‘ Life Itself, the 112-minute Roger Ebert doc. (My suspicion is that it’s going to be an overly Valentine-ish portrayal of the late critic — I’ll at least be able to detect whether that’s true or not within 60 minutes.) Then comes John Michael McDonaugh‘s Calvary (which I’m 100% certain will be a moderately engrossing, well-written thing with a flawless Brendan Gleeson performance) at 6:45 pm. The q & a for this Ireland-set drama will end around 8:30 pm or so, leaving about 75 minutes before Richard Linklater‘s 160-minute Boyhood begins. Between the intros and whatnot the epic-length docudrama-resembling narrative will end around 1 am. Back to the condo and crash by 2 am, maybe. Monday’s writing and screening scheduled will of course be compromised by this.

Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins is the third bang-slammer I’ve seen at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, the other two being Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash and Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies. (If I had rushed to Saturday’s 9 pm screening of Maya Forbes‘ Infinitely Polar Bear I might have had a fourth, to go Justin Chang‘s Variety review.) Here’s Geoff Berkshire‘s Variety review of The Skeleton Twins — pretty much a rave.

Made/assembled by Lance Bangs, and sent to my inbox earlier today…even though the piece went live on YouTube yesterday.

So Matthew McConaughey has the Best Actor Oscar in the bag, and the Best Supporting Actor winner will be, of course, Jared Leto. Even people in rural China know that Cate Blanchett is a deadbolt lock for Best Actress. But at tonight’s SAG awards, a surprise. 12 Years A Slave‘s Lupita Nyong’o finally beat American Hustle‘s Jennifer Lawrence for Best Supporting Actress…yes! And American Hustle won the Best Ensemble award, meaning that it’s now it’s at least probable that David O. Russell‘s film will take the Best Picture Oscar, and that Glenn Kenny will owe me $50. Remember when $50 seemed like a moderately hefty sum?

I’ve only three films on today’s schedule, which may sound lazy but is more realistic, I feel, in terms of filing and eating and getting various stuff done. If you see four films you’re constantly running and can barely breathe — it’s awfully tough to file. (It’s difficult enough to write anything with three films to cover.) 75 minutes from now (i.e., 11:15 am) I’ll be seeing Zach Braff‘s Wish I Was Here, the “Kickstarter movie” that’s basically about Braff’s underemployed 30something actor character becoming a homeschooler. Costarring Mandy Patinkin and Kate Hudson. At 2:30 I’m catching a Library screening of Craig Johnson‘s heavily hyped The Skeleton Twins. Kristin Wiig and Bill Hader giving “astonishing dramatic performances” as an estranged brother and sister, etc. Finally there’s a 6:30 pm screening of Ira Sachs‘ Love Is Strange, a relationship drama about a couple of older gay guys (John Lithgow, Alfred Molina) facing convulsive changes after they decide to get married after being together for nearly 40 years.

“A number of people have asked me, what if you had stated your position [about] the morality [in The Wolf of Wall Street]. It’s a bad thing [that] they behave this way, not behaving just in terms of the drugs and the sex [but] the violence of the ‘confidence man,’ taking your confidence and your trust. That’s one guy here and perhaps other guys, or it could become the entire financial establishment. That’s happened many many times in history. So you take this as a microcosm, this kind of thinking is what it’s about. It’s obscene. You say, okay, fine, you go home and you feel you’ve done your duty by watching a film that has an obvious moral statement, you know it’s there, and forget about it. In the meantime, I wanted to get deeper and provoke it, provoke the audience. It came out of just frustration. Frustration and anger about this situation in 2008. Go back and there’s more and more. People get thrown out of their houses, people sleeping in the street, people killing themselves. Why? So you can have a plane ride and have sex on a plane? That is the thinking that disturbs me. Saying, what you do with your private life is up to you. But when it’s affecting people the other way and nobody goes to jail or nobody is really stopped, I don’t understand. Anyway, that’s my reason for doing it this way.” — Wolf of Wall Street director Martin Scorsese to interviewer Paul Thomas Anderson and audience during a 12.15 q & a in Century City, recorded and transcribed by Award Daily‘s Sasha Stone (whom you can hear chuckling through the video).

I wasn’t expecting that much from Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies. I was actually a bit fearful before tonight’s Eccles screening. Having more or less hated Touchy Feely, I thought she might be on a downturn. But surprise — Laggies is the best Shelton pic since Humpday (’09), and that was essentially a bromance. Laggies is a Keira Knightley movie aimed at women and couples, but I swear to God Shelton and screenwriter Andrea Siegel get it right. The only problem is that Knightley’s character lies her teeth off in almost every scene or something like 80% of the film. She doesn’t lie emotionally or behaviorally in our eyes but she’s almost constantly fibbing to…you know what? This needs a more thorough explanation and I cant tap one out in the back of a moving cab.