I’m tapping out a reaction piece to this morning’s Oscar nominations, but let’s take a minute to celebrate HE’s three “yay, team!” cartwheel cheers. One, the five nominations for The Wolf of Wall Street (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay). Two, the highly deserved but left-field surprise nomination that went to Wolf‘s Jonah Hill, whose chances weren’t looking very good this morning by the sheer measure of racetrack odds. And three, the shutout of Saving Mr. Banks across the board — no Best Picture nom, no Emma Thompson nom for Best Actress, no Tom Hanks nom for Best Supporting Actor, no Best Screenplay nom for Kelly Marcel…Banks shovelled the Disney corporate blah-blah, the hit pieces had their cumulative effect and Banks went down. (What say you, Scott Feinberg?) Serious question: Which Oscar advocates and columnist big-mouths can claim to have really beat the drum for Jonah, as I did from the get-go? Which Oscar prediction experts foresaw that he might be nominated this morning? This is a major what-the-eff? for the know-it-alls and a major triumph for Mr. Hill. Here’s a post-announcement chat between myself and Sasha Stone, recorded a little after 6 am this morning.

I landed in Salt Lake City at 6:45 pm, a shuttle dropped me off at the Park City condo around 8:30 pm, I unpacked my stuff and went right over to Fresh Market to stock up. At the checkout counter I ran into Indiewire critic Eric Kohn and five young critics (Carlos Aguilar, Robert Fowler, Mary Sollosi, Emma Myers, Kyle Burton) participating in a Sundance Institute Fellowship for Film Criticism and funded by the Roger Ebert Memorial Scholarship. (A sixth young critic wasn’t there.) The critics, chosen from roughly 400 applicants, are going to be reviewing films under Kohn’s guidance during the Sundance Film Festival as a kind of rough-and-tumble workshop. Tough deadlines, publicists, long ticket lines, party food, not much sleep, long hours…enjoy Sundance, guys!

(l. to r.) Eric Kohn and five of the six participating critics (l. to r.): Carlos Aguilar, Robert Fowler, Mary Sollosi, Emma Myers, and Kyle Burton…although I’m not 100% sure of the sequence of the names because Kohn sent a needlessly complicated email stating that the names should be regarded counterclockwise. Who says “counterclockwise”?? Everybody says “left to right” when they send along captions.

My Salt Lake City flight leaves in about three hours. No significant snow is expected in Park City for the next five days, which is disappointing. Maybe the lack of snow will cut down on the presence of skiiers on the city buses. Skiiing is great in and of itself but during the Sundance Film Festival there is nothing lower on the Park City social scale than skiiers. They sit on the buses like zombies, their eyes devoid of any apparent feeling or spark, and I sit across from them, not exactly filled with contempt but regarding them askance and muttering “one of the world’s greatest film festivals is going on right now and you’re here to ski?” Oh, and one other thing that I should have reported earlier but I only just read the report myself: Carol Rixey, the elderly proprietor of Park City’s Star Hotel who five years ago refused to honor my sentimental room reservation by leaving my cowboy hat at her establishment, passed away last May. She fell through a ceiling while repairing a floorboard in the attic of the hotel. Carol was 86. Condolences to her family and friends. I never blamed Carol for not only dismissing my cowboy-hat gesture but for becoming so alarmed by my articles about this misunderstanding that she gave my hat to the Park City police. Before this happened Carol treated me like family when I stayed at the Star in ’07 and ’08. She was kind and tough and never minced words.

Hat-tip to the Warner Home Video marketing guys for creating an original cover design for the forthcoming Bluray of William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer (4.22.14) rather than use the old 1977 one-sheet concepts. Original art is S.O.P. with Criterion Blurays, of course, but corporate marketers tend to succumb to boilerplate instincts. That awful jacket design for the recently released Bluray of Shane, for instance.

I’m supposed to know my old movies, and yet the instant I saw this photo I realized that not only had I never seen The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947) but until last night I’d never even heard of it. There are always good reasons why movies disappear and never return. I’m presuming that however pleasing it might have seemed to moviegoers in late 1947 and ’48, Senator probably plays like a creaky comedy of manners. Forget about today — it probably had no social resonance five or ten years after it opened. It is one of thousands of respected studio-era films that nobody (not even classic film buffs) gives a damn about today. History is always a merciless critic. Only the truly world-class, creme de la creme efforts are remembered a half-century later. Ask yourselves — among the nine or ten Best Picture contenders vying right now, which will be remembered in 2065? Trust me, only The Wolf of Wall Street, Inside Llewyn Davis and 12 Years A Slave.

Presumably taken sometime in late December of 1947, or just after The Senator Was Indiscreet opened. George Sidney’s Cass Timberlane, another completely forgotten film that costarred Spencer Tracy and Lana Turner, was playing at Leows State.

Scott Feinberg‘s 1.15 Hollywood Reporter piece about recent anti-Walt Disney Facebook postings by Abigail Disney (grandniece of Walt, grandaughter of Roy Disney) is moot as far as the Oscar fortunes of Saving Mr. Banks are concerned. The case has been made over and over that Banks is a corporate whitewash that pampers Disney’s reputation and cheers his decision to ignore the complaints of the joyless, brillo-haired scold P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) in the creation of Mary Poppins (’64). The views of Academy members who’ve paid attention to these complaints and those who are committed to ignoring them in perpetuity are set in stone. Banks will probably be Best Picture-nominated and Thompson is a lock for Best Actress, but that’ll be the end of it.

The Razzies were a moderately amusing concept in the ’80s and ’90s, but the world has moved on. One reason they’re barely paid attention to is that worst of the year lists are ubiquitous online during December and early January, and whatever limited interest might exist in this post-relevant annual event (which attracted moderate attention when good sport Sandra Bullock accepted her Worst Actress award in person in 2010) has all but dissipated by the time of the presentation, which is always right before the Oscars per the scheduling of founder John J.B. Wilson. But the main reason the Razzies are roadkill is that they only go after easy prey. Where is the pizazz in announcing that Grown Ups 2, a piece of Adam Sandler sequel sausage that no one cared about to begin with, has acquired eight Razzies noms? The other worst picture nominations were won by The Lone Ranger, A Madea Christmas, After Earth and Movie 43.

Jimmy Fallon‘s Bruce Springsteen is really first-rate; arguably as good The Boss himself. This reminded me of the Joe Cocker-John Belushi SNL duet from…when was that, ’76 or thereabouts?

I trust I’ve made myself clear over the past several years. I love writing this column 24/7 but “the season” — the six-month period between Telluride/Toronto/Venice and the Oscars — is where the real fun and thrills lie. And yet the idea of this same period consuming huge amounts of time and energy and incalculable brain-wave activity in order to predict which films and filmmakers that members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will choose to give Oscars…what is that? I need to put this carefully. Covering the Oscar race pays pretty well, and for that I’m grateful. And I respect the fact that it’s a very, very difficult thing for a film to find sufficient acclaim to even get into the award-season conversation, much less become a finalist. There is real value in this, and each year serious payoffs are at stake. I don’t belittle this effort or the Oscar economy for a second.

But I do belittle the taste of those Academy members (i.e., not all) who have proven year after year that they have very little belief in serious Movie Catholicism, and that they basically regard the Oscars as a kind of high-school popularity contest. Yes, it’s always been this way but I think it might be getting worse. The King’s Speech and especially The Artist winning Best Picture took something out of me, and then the likable, perfectly efficient Argo after that…c’mon! And now the idea of an indisputable masterpiece like 12 Years A Slave possibly losing the Best Picture Oscar to a technically astounding, eye-popping thrill ride like Gravity plus the idea of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio having to do interview after interview to try and persuade the Hope Holiday contingent that The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t a celebration of vile behavior…I swear to God the doors of perception are narrowing.

Too many Academy members seem to favor films that provide an older person’s idea of emotional comfort (tearful sentiment, delivering some echo from their youth, resuscitating some facsimile of something well remembered) more than anything fresh or unusual or even semi-challenging. Not always but a lot of the time. This is partly if not largely due to the “deadwood” contingent — too many Academy members haven’t worked in the industry for too long, and their tastes are just too conservative and mildewed and doddering. Every year they bring everyone down.

“I was so taken with my first viewing of Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar, a Palestinian-produced thriller about betrayal and double-agenting in the West Bank, that I caught it again last night at the Palm Springs Film Festival,” I wrote on 1.5.14. “It’s a taut, urgent, highly realistic thriller that squeezes its characters and viewers like a vise. Omar is among the Academy’s short-listed Best Foreign Language Feature contenders, and with my personal favorites, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past and Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (which is quite similar to Abu-Assad’s film) out of the running, I guess I’m an Omar guy at this stage.” I’m presuming that the Academy will nominate it Thursday morning as one of five Best Foreign Language Features.

Of course Jennifer Lawrence is tied to the Hunger Games franchise like a slave! A very rich slave but a slave nonetheless. I laughed when I read American Hustle‘s David O. Russell had made this analogy. She took the money of her own free will, of course, and in so doing agreed to submit to the needs of the franchise until it finishes. To me this is a somewhat amusing, perfectly acceptable way to describe what Lawrence is going through; ditto with the X-Men franchise. But leave it to the politically correct brownshirt morons to complain and make a stink about Russell’s remark, for which he has now “apologized.”

Russell’s statement of contrition: “Clearly, I used a stupid analogy in a poor attempt at humor. I realized it the minute I said it and I am truly sorry.”

If I were Russell I would also agree to be whipped, bareback, in a public place as soon as possible.

I would also add the following to Russell’s apology: “The word ‘slavery’ can never be and should never be used in a non-literal fashion. It can only be used if the speaker is referring to actual slavery as it existed in the United States in the 19th century and in other cultures around the world, going back to the ancient Egyptians enslaving the Hebrews. It can never, EVER be used as a metaphor or a figure of speech. I was very arrogant and insensitive to use this term. The word has has one use and one use only.”

Five weeks ago I did a short little riff on six Sundance ’14 standouts. But the more I sift through the programs, the less excited I am. I’m not down on anything — just even-toned. The usual 25 or so films will be seen and the usual five or six (at most) will emerge as genuine standouts. The first order of business is always to decide which films look dicey, and in that effort my heartfelt thanks to the team at Total Film — experience has taught me that almost everything these guys are excited about and hoping to like, I’m probably going to find irksome or dislikable or worse. Here, in any event, are a few pre-festival spitballs — instinct, off the top, “what do I know?”

Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash appears to have heat, granted, but Miles Teller irritates me for what I freely admit are unfair and unwarranted reasons. (That “driving and not looking” scene in The Spectacular Now is one of them.) Steve James‘ Life Itself, the Roger Ebert doc, will be poignant and moving and very well crafted, I’m sure, but I wonder how nakedly honest — the more reverent the portrayal, the less interesting the subject becomes. Gareth Evans‘ The Raid 2: Bernandal is an instant must-to-avoid because (a) I hated The Raid (thanks once again to James Rocchi for recommending it two or three Torontos ago) and (b) I am, as always, fiercely committed to avoiding all Asian-based or Asian-produced action films for the rest of my life. The deadly obnoxious conceit of Michael Fassbender wearing a ceramic mask over his head throughout the entire length of Frank (according to plot descriptions) is obviously a potential catastrophe. The One I Love with Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss has to be at least decent. And the generic description of William H. Macy‘s Rudderless — “a musical drama about the power of a parent’s love” — has me scared shitless.