Nemiroff: “This is what they should do going forward….just keep it simple and keep it about cinema.”

Cinema? With the exception of All Quiet on the Western Front and The Whale, the ’23 Oscars were almost entirely about identity politics and voters wanting to blend in with the EEAAO wave because it felt safer to do that. Because they didn’t want to labelled (or even self-labelled) as fuddy-duds.

At the 43:00 mark, Sneider says that EEAAO is no classic like Network while Nemiroff (easily one of the scariest pundits counters that it is one of the greatest films of all time.

Sneider (43:07): “I think there will be a little EEAAO backlash in the coming months, simply because it won so many awards. If it had won three awards like CODA or Green Book…but it won seven above-the-line Oscars. I think that’s too many. Is it on the level of a Network? No — this isn’t an all-time, classic timeless movie…c’mon.”

Nemiroff: “Yes, it is!”

Sneider: “No, it’s not.”

Nemiroff: “Yes, it is! Without a doubt! It’s probably gonna [be taught] in film school classes in the future. What is not to love about this film?”

Likeliest, Well-Fortified, Semi-Inevitable (7)

Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer (Universal, 7.21)
Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (Focus Features, 11.10.23)
Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie (Warner Bros., 7.21)
Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon (Apple)
Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple / Paramount)
Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix)
Michael Mann‘s Ferrari (STX)

Semi-Likely (4)

Celine Song‘s Past Lives (A24)
Ben Affleck‘s Air (Amazon, 4.5)
Matt Johnson‘s BlackBerry (IFC Films, 5.12)
Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn (Amazon/UA releasing)

And The Rest…(10)

David Fincher‘s The Killer (Netflix)
Wes Anderson‘s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Netflix)
Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24)
Blitz Bazawule‘s The Color Purple (Warner Bros., 12.20)
Todd Haynes‘ May December
Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (Searchlight)
Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid(A24, 4.21)
Sean Durkin‘s The Iron Claw (A24)
Yorgos Lanthimos‘ And (Searchlight — anthology film)
Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest.

Conclusion: It’s not my natural inclination to define or classify films according to the cultural heritage or ethnicity of their creators — in my eyes good cinema is good cinema. But it does seem to appear that 2023 will gradually become known as The Year of the Resurgence of Older White Male Filmmakers. We all understand that older white males are bad (i.e., inheritors of an evil legacy) and deserving of cultural belittling and dismissal and perhaps even punishment, but Club Diverse can’t win each and every year.

Martin Scorsese, 80
Chris Nolan, 52
Alexander Payne, 62
Ridley Scott, 85
Ben Affleck, 51
Matt Johnson, 36
Bradley Cooper, 49
Michael Mann, 80

To ethnically round out the Best Picture roster, Blitz Bazawule‘s The Color Purple will almost certainly have to be factored in.

Celine Song‘s Past Lives, which premiered at Sundance ’23, could emerge as a strong contender. I don’t see Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie as an awards-level effort but let’s wait and see.

Keep in mind that anyone can guess or strategize their head off but no one knows what’s coming. Not really. The deeply loathed Everything Everywhere All At Once was NOWHERE on anybody’s predictions list this time last year.

Kevin Costner‘s Horizon trilogy won’t start shooting until April (i.e., next month ) so it seems unlikely to become a ’23 release.

Could Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (’02), which stars a balding, overweight, Uriah Heep-like Nicolas Cage as a bizarrely fictionalized version of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, be made today? I saw it again a few nights ago (4K Bluray), and yeah, it’s possible it could be made today, sure. But some characters would have to be un-whited as the film, shockingly and almost incomprehensibly, doesn’t have a single African American or Asian American face….eeeeeeee!!!! And Ron Livingston‘s Marty Bowen, Kaufman’s agent, wouldn’t be allowed to say that he fucked this or that girl in the ass.

22 years ago I reviewed Kaufman’s Adaptation script and called it ‘one of the most inventive and out-there scripts I’ve ever read.’ The main character, I explained, “is Kaufman himself, and that’s a big whoa right there. A screenplay about a screenwriter trying to write the screenplay? But it’s much more than that.

The ‘subject’ of Adaptation is an actual, one-time orchid-worshipper named John LaRoche (Chris Cooper), whose attempted theft of rare flora from a Florida state preserve eight years ago resulted in his being prosecuted by the state and, from that, a New Yorker profile of LaRoche and then a book called “The Orchid Thief” (Ballantine), by staff writer Susan Orlean (so named in the film and played by Meryl Streep).

Adaptation is primarily about Kaufman’s struggle to adapt “The Orchid Thief” into script form, but it’s also about LaRoche and Orlean and the importance of nurturing a devotion in life to something perfect and beautiful. It’s about the striving of mortals to merge themselves with the sublime — Kaufman in his way, LaRoche and Orlean in theirs. Like the screenplay, the movie is half about Kaufman’s situation and half about LaRoche and Orlean’s. But it begins and ends inside Kaufman’s head.

HE to Happy Larry: Your observations are “inspiring” in a certain light. Life will sometimes surprise. Unsung or less-than-stellar talents sometimes luck into unexpected rewards. And as truly grotesque as The Whale was and is in certain respects, Brendan Fraser‘s fat-suit performance was as respectable and even touching as this sort of thing gets. (Especially the white-light death scene.)

But Everything Everywhere All At Once will forever be regarded as an irksome (do I hear infuriating?) curio…a film that even the director’s own mother didn’t get and couldn’t understand the adulation for.

Did you honestly come out of that film full of “holy moley eureka” enthusiasm for Ke Huy Quan‘s performance? He was more or less fine (said his lines with urgency and proficiency, hit his marks) but he won because of (a) the comeback narrative + (b) the Asian identity pride thing + (c) because he brought big emotion to his Golden Globes acceptance speech.

Jamie Lee Curtis‘s IRS bitch performance was broad and coarse and rather absurd, like a character out of The Wizard of Oz….I felt intensely irritated by her acting (and her clownish makeup) start to finish.

Michelle Yeoh‘s athleticism and commitment to the dismayed, stressed-out character she played was also fine but again, her Oscar was about (a) Asian representation and (b) breaking the glass ceiling =plus (c) Cate Blanchett already has two Oscars.

Do you honestly think that EEAAO will be watched and re-watched by future film enthusiasts? That it will be cited by future film historians as a ground-breaker or seminal influencer? There’s a community of film Catholics who are sadly burdened with a sense of taste, and among this fraternity EEAAO is not just disliked but deeply loathed. In my humble judgment it is one of the absolute worst films to ever take the Best Picture Oscar….hands down, no question. The Movie Godz have taken note and are actually fuming as we speak.

Nancy Wells, Lizabeth Scott, nylons.

Dead Reckoning (’47), a noirish hriller in which Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott costarred, stinks. I caught it once and probably never will again. Scott, a femme fatale type with a smoky voice, never appeared in a really good film, not even during her mid to late ’40s heyday. You could argue that her most appealing performance was in Loving You (’57), and in that she was a second-banana to Elvis Presley.

I would plunk down whatever for this real-life, utterly convincing Disney-made Star Wars lightsaber, and I’m speaking as someonme who totally abandoned the mythology after The Phantom Menace came out, or roughly 24 years ago. What will Disney charge? Minimally $750, I would think, and possibly a grand. Maybe $1500.