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The Los Angeles Film Critics will vote today (i.e., Sunday). Steve McQueen‘s masterful 12 Years A Slave, a seeming shoo-in for several critics-group awards after ecstatic receptions at Telluride and Toronto, is now on the ropes due to industry hesitance and recent no-wins with the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review. To maintain vitality in the Best Picture race, Slave needs a LAFCA Best Picture win. And another, for good measure, from the Boston Film Critics, who will also vote today.

If LAFCA and Boston don’t step up to the plate and do the right thing by Slave, the Fox Searchlight release will face at least a somewhat steeper hill as far as potential industry support is concerned. But if LAFCA and Boston don’t “friend” Slave, they should do the other good thing, and that’s give their respective Best Picture prizes to Martin Scorsese‘s wild and mouth-frothy The Wolf of Wall Street — a madly brilliant slash across the canvas by our greatest filmmaker.

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I walked a couple of miles for the exercise this evening. Not quite like Arctic winds howling through Chicago, but certainly bone-chilling by Los Angeles standards. Frigid, gusty. It felt to me like the coming of winter in Cleveland or Syracuse or northern Ireland.

Earlier today I spoke with the New Orleans-based Dave DuBos, director-writer of a forthcoming horror film called Bayou Tales and host of WSGO’s “Movie Talk” on Saturdays. We began by kicking around The Wolf of Wall Street but mainly discussed Howard Hawks‘ definition of a good film (see related HE piece) and how that applies to this year’s crop of Best Picture contenders. Again, the mp3.

It’s time once again to apply Howard Hawks’ definition of a quality-level film to this year’s Best Picture contenders. A good movie, said Hawks, is one that has “three great scenes and no bad ones.” It shouldn’t be too much to ask that a Best Picture Oscar winner should live up to this, right?

John Wayne and Angie Dickinson conferring with Mr. Hawks on the 1959 set of Rio Bravo.

In my first Hawks criteria piece, I wrote that “great scenes are ones that you can’t forget because they’ve sunk in or hit a solid crack note of some kind. They deliver some kind of bedrock, put-it-in-the-bank observation about life or human behavior or just the way things usually are, and when they’re over you always say to yourself, ‘Wow, that worked.'” So let’s review a few Best Picture contenders and see if they cut the mustard.

Best Picture contender: The Wolf of Wall Street. Three great scenes?: Yes, but more in the realm of over-the-top bravura scenes as Wolf is a dark fantasia of corruption and venality, and not, you know, a straight-from-the-shoulder “drama” in the business of conveying fundamental human truths. The Leonardo DiCaprio-Matthew McConaughey chest-thump lunch scene. The Leo gives a pep talk to the Stratton-Oakmont troops scene (“Pick up the phone”). The Leo chats with the FBI guy (Kyle Chandler) on the yacht scene. The quaalude meltdown scene. The yacht-nearly-sinks-at-sea scene. How many is that? Wolf is one engine-rev scene after another.

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Why does this relationship dramedy (due for release in February 2014) seem less cloying and perhaps even more charming than one would expect from this kind of story? It feels a tiny little bit like Junebug. Is it because Scott Speedman and Evan Rachel Wood appear to have chemistry or…? The director is Andrew Fleming. It’s based on Barfuss, a 2005 German movie starring, directed and co-written by Til Schweiger.

Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street is a breathtaking, orgiastic, drop-your-pants comic masterpiece — a vulgar, hilarious, metaphorical indictment of the 1% Wall Street adrenaline greedheads who have devalued and cocained and flim-flammed the U.S economy into the ground over the last 30-plus years. It’s Scorsese’s magnum opus, an art-film humdinger for the ages. It’s pretty much guaranteed that the Academy fuddy-duds are going to go “whew, that was exhausting!” and “uhm, I didn’t like the characters very much.” And with these words they will be removing themselves from the pulse of 21st Century culture and basically putting themselves out to pasture. Either you get this film or you don’t, and if you get it…well, Wolf-ies forever! Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill), Best Adapted Screenplay (Terrence Winter) and so on.

It’s time to hop in the car and drive over to the Westside Pavilion for the noon screening of Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, which I’m partial to sight unseen because I’ve heard that the Academy’s 60-plus softies are likely to find it overly vulgar and abrasive and heartless. Anything that the complacent farts aren’t expected to like, I’m down with.

I’m way, way behind on Sundance 2014 assessments, but at least I spoke to a buyer this morning about the Dramatic Competition slate. He’s most excited about the following, he says: (1) John Slattery‘s God’s Pocket, an adaptation of a mid ’90s Pete Dexter novel, about the cover-up of the particulars that led to the death of an arrogant hell-bent type. South Philly-flavored, possibly Mystic River-ish. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Christina Hendricks, Richard Jenkins and John Turturro costar; (2) Damien Chazelle‘s Whiplash, adapted from Chazelle’s same-titled short and described as a kind of “Full Metal Jacket at Julliard as applied to drumming,” costarring J.K. Simmons and Miles Teller; (3) Jeff Preiss‘s Low Down — a portrait of legendary jazz pianist Joe Albany (John Hawkes) by way of a father-daughter saga, produced by Nebraska‘s Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, written by Topper Lilien and Amy Albany, and set in the L.A. jazz scene of the late ’60s and early ’70s (period trappings are expensive!); (4) Kate Barker-Froyland‘s Song One, an Anne Hathaway-starrer said to be a “nice, gentle, woman-friendly emotional drama” about a dreamy (shoe-gazey?) relationship within the Brooklyn music scene; (5) Craig Johnson‘s The Skeleton Twins, a kind of indie Beetlejuice-sounding deal costarring Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig and Luke Wilson; and (6) Kat Candler‘s Hellion, which is supposed to be “very good,” the guy says.

How many films have been at least vaguely inspired by Adrien Lyne‘s Fatal Attraction, all in? I’m having a little trouble acknowledging that this Michael Douglas-Glenn Close sexual stalker flick came out 26 years ago. Jesus. No defenseless animals were harmed during the making of Nurse 3D.

I recently noted that Sidney Lumet‘s New York-based Serpico (’73) was filmed when Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn were much grimier and grittier places than they are today. No Starbucks, no corporate franchises to speak of. Anyway I watched most of the just-out Warner home Video Bluray last night and it’s wonderful, really wonderful, to re-immerse in this exotic, never-to-be-seen again realm through Arthur J. Ornitz‘s cinematography, which looks flavorful but not especially grainy. I know this will be a tremendous letdown to the grain monks, but Serpico looks refined and pleasingly natural. And better than I’ve ever seen it look, like a nice wet print, straight out of the lab, untouched by human hands. It’s perfect. And the actors look so young! Even Judd Hirsch and M. Emmet Walsh seem wet behind the ears.

Serpico Bluray screen capture stolen from DVD Beaver.

Beware of spoiler after the jump: It’s been observed that J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost ends on a note of ambiguity. Does Robert Redford‘s “Our Man” come through or not? Is he saved by some guy in a boat or does the white light signify something? Today I read Chandor’s original 31-page outline. The ending is different than the one in the film. If you’ve seen All Is Lost, click through.

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