HE readers are hereby invited to predict the 2013/2014 Oscar winners in all the categories [nominees listed after the jump]. All submissions must be in by…I don’t know, Saturday, March 1st at midnight? The winner will receive either a cash prize of $100 or $125 or will be treated to a nice dinner or lunch by yours truly if he/she happens to live in Los Angeles. While we’re eating I’ll record our conversation and take pictures and make an article out of our encounter. Spell out predicted winners in BOLD CAPS. No revisions once you’ve sent in a list. The winner chooses the restaurant.

I read a good amount of Vanity Fair‘s Hollywood issue during yesterday’s Heathrow-to-JFK flight. Is it me or is this one of the shallowest and most skin-deep Hollywood issues ever? Maybe it is me, but I seem to recall previous VF Hollywood issues that mixed serious industry reporting (trends, capturings), high-end portrait photography and fascinating, well-reported old-Hollywood sagas or “how a classic film was made” stories (usually written by Peter Biskind) with the more glammy, superficial stuff used for tinsel diversion. The emphasis in the current issue is on appearances above all, on show-offy posings and people who are just about perfect, and who are always depicted as being vaguely or obliquely boastful. It feels like…I don’t know, a “woman’s issue” of some kind. Vogue-ish. It seems to skirt rather than dig in. It lacks salt and manliness and consequence. I kept saying to myself as I flipped from article to article, “So fucking what? Who gives a shit about these fucking people?”

I abandoned the cockatoo diet this morning at B & H Dairy (127 Second Ave., New York NY 10003). It wasn’t so much the feta omelette as the steaming home fries. When the air outside is like dry breathable ice you have to order something hot and heaping. Winter food. It’s the steam more than anything else. The look and the warmth of it as you sit and watch and impulsively take out the camera. That’s what counts. The eating…okay, the first couple of bites but after that not so much.

Solid ice right at the top of the stoop. It’s not guaranteed that someone will come out the front door, not look down and slip and fall down the stoop, but the odds have definitely been maximized..

A great little copy line countered by a 9% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Vampires and zombies are beyond tired and have been mined to death, and yet they keep coming. Last night I watching AMC’s The Walking Dead — second-tier garbage but my elder son Jett, who’s no impressionable pushover, is into it. Go figure.

“Congrats to that distinctively BRITISH film, Gravity, for its many BAFTA wins tonight. Pip pip cheerio! Fish & chips!” — my first tweet upon landing at JFK last night and reading about BAFTA champs. (Can’t embed link with iPhone WordPress app.) Cheers for 12 Years A Slave ‘a Best Picture win. I’m sorry to say that Chiwetel Ejiofor‘s Best Actor BAFTA triumph, fine in itself, probably stops Leonardo DiCaprio‘s rumored/suspected Best Actor momentum dead in its tracks. Matthew McConaughey can breathe easy.

Berlin was almost balmy during the Berlinale. Overcoat-and-scarf weather, for sure, but far from oppressive. Prague was the same — chilly temps that required basic bundling but certainly tolerable and manageable. New York City was in another league entirely when I landed last night. It’s Antarctica here. Icy winds, snow piles, ice on the front stoop. The good citizens of Bedford-Stuyvesant are not exactly vigilant at shovelling sidewalks and scraping ice for general safety’s sake. You could die in cold like this. They could find you on a street corner at 5 am, frozen stiff with ice crystals blocking your nostrils and icycles hanging from your ear lobes.

Beware of dodging jokers. By this I mean anyone who makes a joke but isn’t joking. If anyone makes a humorous reference to something they’ve noticed about you or want from you or dislike about you, they’re not making a joke. They’re being dead serious under the guise of humor. I never grin or chuckle at this shite. I always look the “joke”-teller in the eye and say “so this is what you really want or think?” or “do you really think I’d say or do that?” Because there are no jokes. Anyone who uses humor to mask what they feel or believe is not to be trusted. It means they don’t like dealing straight cards, and are likely to hide or dodge or lie when push comes to shove. (It’s roughly the same thing with people who begin a statement by saying “honestly?”) It also means they’re not very perceptive, and/or that they’ve never read Freud’s “The Joke And Its Relation to the Unconscious.” Qualification: Deadpan put-on jokes are exempted from this criticism.

In an email sent last night a friend characterized regular HE commenters as “a pack of wolves,” and then said this is why she doesn’t comment herself. She doesn’t want to get bitten or snapped at, and so she’s a lurker…safer that way. This is not a new concern, but for some reason hearing her say this gave me pause. The vast majority of the biting and snapping is directed at me so why would an average reader (i.e., one who doesn’t have the personality of a timber wolf in winter) feel intimidated? I’ll put it to the wolves…er, the commenters themselves. Does my friend have a point? Does HE exude a snarly atmosphere that is scaring off potential commenters? Do you feel it’s fair to characterize HE regulars as wolves? If not, what animal species would be an appropriate metaphor? And lastly, is there anything I can do to remedy this situation? Or should I just shrug my shoulders?

HE to ADD types: Eleonore Pourriat‘s Oppressed Majority (Majorite Opprimee) doesn’t begin until the 45-second mark so hang in there. The 10-minute short has, I gather, been watched millions of times since being uploaded to YouTube a week or so ago. [The You Tube data doesn’t provide an upload date and comments have been disabled.] It’s basically about a sexist matriarchal society in a small French town, and all the crap that pudgy Pierre has to go through. Some Guardian guy called it “a thought-experiment [that naturally] exaggerates and condenses a lifetime of sexist remarks into a short story, and I don’t think anyone is suggesting that most women have to put up with this all the time.” But rather well done. Noteworthy. Worth your time.

“It was an incredibly honest, unique, specific and personal story of addiction. He lives to feed the beast and it gets him farther away from reality, intimacy and life. To me, it’s not even about gambling. It’s about a man and how he behaves in this pressurized world he has created for himself. There is no relief for this guy. It’s about a man who cuts off his feelings at the same time his girlfriend [Minnie Driver] comes at him harder. Life comes at him harder, too, but he can only think about his addiction.” — Phillip Seymour Hoffman on his role in Owning Mahowny.

The Kino Svetozor is a film lover’s theatre. Located in the cellar of an office building, just off Wenceslas Square. A good crowd attended Friday night’s showing of Nymphomaniac, Vol, 2. Two theatres plus a nice wifi cafe downstairs. Very worthy establishment. This and the Bio Oko are my favorite Prague cinemas. Update: Packing bags, cleaning up. Heading back to Berlin tomorrow on a 6:30 am train.

Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice, a Chinese murder thriller, won the Berlinale’s Golden Bear this evening, and Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel (here’s my 2.6.14 review) won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize. Richard Linklater was handed the Silver Bear for best director for Boyhood (which I saw and reviewed at last month’s Sundance Film Festival). Alain Resnais’ Life of Riley which took the Silver Bear/Alfred Bauer Prize for “feature film that opens New Perspectives.” (I’m sure Glenn Kenny levitated upon hearing this news.) Dietrich Brueggemann’s Stations of the Cross which won the Silver Bear for best screenplay.

Paul W.S. Anderson‘s Pompeii (Sony, 2.21) is obviously CG-driven exploitation schlock aimed at the submentals. What else to expect from the low-rent director and producers (Jeremy Bolt, Don Carmody) behind Resident Evil: Afterlife? The CG alone is cartoonishly excessive. (There is nothing more loathsome than CG that doesn’t make the slightest effort to look organic — that flaunts its digital nature.) Imagine if Roman Polanski‘s Pompeii project, based on Robert Harris’s historical novel, had made it to the screen. Imagine a semi-realistic recreation of what ancient Pompeii and the Mt. Vesuvius disaster of A.D. 79 really looked and sounded like. Literate dialogue, believable characters, etc. Or if that reported Sony minseries, also based on the Harris novel that Robert Towne (Chinatown, The Firm) adapting, had been brought to fruition. A shame all around.