Two days ago (3.16) I took a shot at listing 2023’s likeliest Best Picture contenders. Nine in all. No hopefuls or maybe-level contenders — strictly serious only, “safe bets,” no pikers, etc.

The following day Variety’s Clayton Davis ran his own ‘23 rundown, generously allowing (as he usually does) for any and all possibilities from the Clayton realm. and that’s fine. Then again including The Marvels, Spider–Man: Across The Spider–Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 speaks for itself.

The five above-the-line Oscars won by Milos Forman and Ken Kelsey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (‘75) need to be rescinded because watching this movie causes pain to wokesters.

One of the unprosecuted charges against Jack Nicholson’s Randall P. McMurphy was statutory rape involving a 14-year-old girl (i.e., she declined to testify). And the film portrays him as a heroic rebel figure? Unacceptable. Plus all the mental- clinic guards are Black — negative stereotyping. And what about those racist Indian jokes directed at Will Sampson’s “Chief” Bromden? Plus all the patients are white.

Nine, ten years ago I was fine with the idea of splitting the U.S. of A. into two nations. But that was before woke Stalinism. Now I don’t feel as comfortable with the concept of living in an all-blue nation because a significant portion of the blues have become advocates of a Great Cultural Revolution a la China-in-the-’60s…scolds, fanatics, Robespierres.

“This isn’t the 1860s,” I wrote on 3.15.13. “Our borders are secure, we have nuclear weapons, and nobody’s going to invade. We can be two countries and make out just fine. Yugoslavia broke up into two or three chunks and they’re doing okay. Czechoslovakia became two nations and they’re holding it together. We could create our own Czech Republic — a Blue America — and let the ‘Slovakians’ have their own. I’m perfectly serious here. Get rid of the dumbshits and a lot of the nation’s big problems will become much more managable.”

But now I don’t know.

In a 3.15.13 riff titled “Common Knowledge,” I wrote that “the best thing that could happen all around would be to create a separate nation among the Midwestern and Southern areas of this country — just cut the yokels off and let them raise their own revenues and nurture their retro beliefs, values and prejudices. They’re just a drag on the rest of the country and the sooner Red America is cut loose, the better for the rest of us. Seriously.

In a 7.4.14 piece called “Independence From Ignorance, Stupidity, Downmarket Vibes,” I wrote that “the U.S. of A. is impossibly divided and never the twain shall meet. The right has gone totally around the bend. The urban Blues are the Czech Republic and the rural Reds are Slovakia, and I really think it’s time for the Czechs to sign a new Declaration of Independence and cut those bozos loose.”

“It’s not a rumor — many of the bumblefuck regions are where the least affluent, most downmarket, under-educated and culturally resentful U.S. citizens reside. If you can’t re-educate them the next best thing is to isolate them and let them stew in their own juices.” Alternate rationale: “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

A New York “Intelligencer” piece by Sasha Issenberg (“Maybe It’s Time For America To Split Up?“) has taken a serious look at cutting the red states loose and creating a sensible, solid-blue America that wouldn’t be hindered by racist bumblefuck obstinacy — an old HE fantasy. The difference is that Issenberg is envisioning a three-federation system — Blue, Red and Neutral.

A.O. Scott, the long-serving N.Y. Times critic (1999-2023) who’s shifting into book-reviewing, has tapped out a kind of farewell essay. Here are my reactions, including one unanswered question.

1. Why doesn’t Scott explain why he’s bailing? Does he feel like a burnt-out case? Okay, then say that and relate how he got to this point. What led to this presumed lethargy? What turned him off? Scott isn’t that old (56) but has reviewed films for the Times for roughly the same number of years that Vincent Canby did (23 or 24, give or take). So what’s the lowdown?

2. An unfortunate fact (and I take no pleasure in bringing it up) is that Scott, an excellent, highly perceptive critic for the better part of two decades, began to drink wokester Kool-Aid about three or four years ago, and in my humble view dented his rep to a proportionate degree. (Ditto Manohla Dargis.) On 1.17.22, I wrote about “a category of film lovers who have lifted off the planet so often and gone so far around the bend and outside of our solar system, caused for the most part by extra-passionate wokeness (which includes a rapt belief in the wondrous and transcendent benefit of abosrbing any and all films about POC characters, POC history and starring POCs), and who seem oddly committed to contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake (i.e., the Armond White syndrome). Due respect but after pondering A.O. Scott‘s recently posted list of the most award-deserving films of 2021, I have to acknowledge the possibility that even within his bizarre arena of N.Y. Times woke-itude, Scott may be even more of an eccentric than White, and that’s saying something.”

3. “Let’s not even mention Woody Allen,” Scott writes. No, let’s mention Allen and particularly Scott’s decision to wash his hands of this great Brooklyn-born artist, which for me was entirely foul and cruel and horrid. Allen is incontestably a great filmmaker — a man of considerable genius and relentless innovative creativity, a guy whose output has enhanced the quality and worldliness of American cinema over the last 55 years, and whose sterling reputation as a filmmaker will be remembered and cherished long after Scott and the other Allen denigrators have died and been forgotten.

4. Scott on Allen’s Match Point (’05): “It is the film’s brisk, chilly precision that makes it so bracingly pleasurable. The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen’s bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter.”

5. One of the finest opening paragraphs in the history of movie reviewing was contained in Scott’s 5.25.01 review of Michael Bay‘s Pearl Harbor: “The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II has inspired a splendid movie, full of vivid performances and unforgettable scenes, a movie that uses the coming of war as a backdrop for individual stories of love, ambition, heroism and betrayal. The name of that movie is From Here to Eternity.”

6. From Scott’s farewell essay: “I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.”

A quote attributed to Ben Affleck in Rebecca Keegan’s 3.16 THR interview mentions his 17 year-old daughter, Violet: “I like the fact that she has this silver rapier tongue. [Then again] she lives her life largely in opposition to the work her parents have spent their lives dedicated to, where she’ll say things like, ‘I’m not sure film is really…do you think it’s a genuine art form?”

HE to Violet: “Movies have been, at best, a haphazard art form, which is to say one that occasionally detours into art or at least an attempt at same. A half-assed, now-and-then art form. Or at least during awards season until Everything Everywhere All At Once, the equivalent of a cinematic hydrogen bomb or mass cyanide capsule, came along.

“But on the audience side of the equation, the occasional communal appreciation of movies and least a semblance of a belief that movies can at least potentially deliver some kind of artful reflection of what it’s like to live and struggle on this planet…that communal tradition is pretty much over, and it’s been killed by your generation (GenZ) along with the Millennials.

“People have been communally watching proscenium-arch plays since the Greek and Roman eras, and feature films since 1915 or thereabouts — call it a century and change. And then you guys arrived and settled in and pretty much killed the whole togetherness aspect. Not altogether but, you know, mostly.

“Now it’s mainly about streaming content in your living rooms or on your Macbooks and iPads, but not really ‘watching’ because you’re constantly texting and multi-tasking and checking out TikTok videos whenever your attention wanders.

“So to answer your question, film used to satisfy the measurement of being an occasional art form until you guys dropped in. Commercial movie theatres used to be regarded in some quarters as churches…no longer! Now they’ve pretty much become gladiator arenas. People used to sit there for 115 minutes or longer and actually pay attention for the most part…no longer for the most part!

“Nowadays the only way to savor really good films in a theatrical environment with people who ‘get’ it and love the worshipful aspect is to attend an upscale film festival (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, Berlin, Sundance). Have you ever attended one of these? Maybe you should think about doing this. Can’t hurt.”

(Obviously the same laments, scoldings and heartbreaks apply also to Gen Alpha, born between 2010 and 2025.)

Originally posted on 1.27.20: On 1.14.20 author Stephen King stood up like a man and told the truth about the proper evaluation of excellence and award-worthiness in the realm of motion pictures. What was this brave and fearless statement? Simply that he “would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.”

Well, the wokester Khmer Rouge sure disabused King of that idiotic opinion, you bet!

They jumped all over his ass on Twitter, and before you could say “oh, no, wait…holy shit!” King was on his knees, grovelling and mewing like a kitten and saying he was so sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. “Please, wokesters…don’t cancel me for being an older white guy…pleeeease!”

Have white Academy members voted according to certain biases and blind spots over the years? No shit, Sherlock. I will never forgive those who voted to give the Best Picture Oscar to The Artist, The King’s Speech and Chicago, and that’s regardless of their ancestry, pigmentation or income levels.

Then again should every older-white-guy Academy member who voted to give the Best Picture Oscar to Moonlight be congratulated for showing an absence of these biases and blind spots? Well, not necessarily because in that case a lot of whiteys wanted to counter-balance the #OscarsSoWhite thing, and figured a Moonlight win would partially get them off the hook.

But in a neutrally just and fair world nobody should vote for anything because of guilt or out of some kind of subconscious need to make political amends. They should vote for a Best Picture contender or nominee because it happens to be, by the yardstick of the Movie Godz, an excellent film. Period.

As in the case of Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, which I instantly recognized as a world-class effort when I saw it in Telluride on 8.30.13. Or in the case of those who lazily or carelessly voted for Argo or the History Channel-ish Lincoln instead of the far more vital and envelope-pushing Zero Dark Thirty or Silver Linings Playbook.

King spoke truth to Twitter power when he said that “only quality” should matter — a statement King now says he “mistakenly thought was noncontroversial.” For his sins he was taken out to the Twitter woodshed and lashed with a strap of leather. He’s still carrying a few crimson welts, still bent over a bit.

With the memory of that punishment in his mind, King doubled-down today with another mea culpa — a Washington Post opinion piece titled “The Oscars Are Still Rigged In Favor of White People.”

Which they are. Changes have obviously been instituted (i.e., “the New Academy Kidz”) but the proportion of white vs. POC Academy members remains unfair and disproportionate, especially if you compare actual numbers and percentage charts in the matter of the Hollywood workforce. Or so I gather.

But as unfair and lopsided as things still are (no one’s disputing the statistics or denying that the playing field has to be further levelled), this shouldn’t enable or give license to Academy members to vote for a slightly-less-good film because it was made by the right people and/or the right reasons, or vote for a slightly-less-riveting performance because the right actor performed it. When the choices are put before you, you’re obliged to vote for the best.

I know it’s a terrible thing to say in the present context, but King was more accurate than not the first time.