Because she wasn’t sanctified or even discussed as a possible threat by the Wokester Award-Season Mafia. So vote for Reezie just to say “fuck you” to those bozo know-it-alls…Joey Berlin, Tom O’Neil, Clayton Davis. You’ve hated them all along, and now here’s your chance to make it count! Up with Reezie, down with Clayton!

Plus it doesn’t matter anyway as the whole Oscar pageant + cavalcade is slowly collapsing within itself…just ask Barry Diller! So vote for Reezie as a nice, friendly, “we’re all in this together” fuck-it gesture…as a message to the disintegrating established AMPAS order that says “we have the power now, not you”…as a “fuck you” to the Academy’s Identity Apology Museum….Cate Blanchett gave 2022’s best female lead performance and Michelle Yeoh is a classy lady who’s been working just as long and hard as Angela Bassett has (and I loved it when she politely told the sore loser Misogynoir crowd to go fuck themselves) but we’re voting Reezie all the same because “why not? and “who cares?”

A vote for Reezie, finally, is a vote for every divorced or separated, hard-working, under-paid and under-promoted actor in this industry who’s rarely been invited to the cool parties and has often felt obliged to shop at Trader Joes and Pep Boys and pay for a regular car wash ($16 and change) rather than a detailing.

I’ve been attending the Santa Barbara Film Festival since ‘03 or thereabouts, and I really wish I could’ve been there last night. All hail Cate Blanchett!!

A while back I tried to sell my Paramount homies on a special Top Gun: Maverick HE advertorial. The idea had already been written and posted on 1.13.23 — I just wanted to repeat it with a little Paramount dough behind me. The piece was titled “A Film That Saved Hollywood Could Also Save The Oscars.”

It seemed like the right pitch, and if you ask me this was underlined by the fact that Paramount recently launched a billboard ad campaign that echoed what my piece said.

At a time when the old energy current between Hollywood and mainstream audiences seemed to be dropping left and right, Top Gun: Maverick had pumped new life into the spirit of things, and should be roundly celebrated for reaching out and connecting…for making something actually happen in theatres at a time when too many films seemed to be limping along.

A Best Picture Oscar for a movie that had not only restored faith in exhibition but in Hollywood itself.

The current Paramount slogan says it all: BELIEVE IN MOVIES AGAIN. Which translates to BELIEVE IN HOW MOVES WERE DURING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND BEFORE. Which also translates into BELIEVE IN THE FUTURE and the distinct possibility that more films like Top Gun: Maverick could pop the champagne as long as Hollywood takes heed and acts upon the obvious.

Which is this: Joe and Jane Popcorn are sick of instructional woke content (identity politics, progressive guilt-tripping, historical presentism, torture-rack flicks like Last Night in Soho, a general aversion to anything rooted in straight-white-male perspectives, movies that constantly hammer the Millennial-Zoomer BIPOC gay trans #MeToo boogaloo…films that insist that entitled white assholes need to be scolded blah blah).

Joe and Jane Popcorn to Elite Hollywood Wankers: Whatever happened to movies like The Wedding Crashers, Tropic Thunder, Manchester By The Sea, Her, A Separation, Sicario, Leviathan, Hell or High Water, Call Me By Your Name, The Social Network, Superbad, Whiplash, The Witch, etc.? How about unwoke-ing your sorry asses and keeping it that way for the foreeeable future? And making more upcoming films like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon‘s Air? And while you’re at it, fire the Woke Award-Season Mafia goons and all the kiss-asses who keep pushing movies that make people miserable.

Alternate headline: “Make Joe & Jane Popcorn Happy, And They’ll Return The Favor In Spades.”

2nd Alternate headline: “Listen to Barry Diller!”

“We’re supposed to hate Jaws now?” He was responding to “Did These Chinatown Viewers Understand?” And I replied by summarizing Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” as follows:

The huge primal successes of Jaws (6.20.75) and Star Wars (5.20.77) slowly bland-ified the moody, anti-establishment ‘70s thing that had permeated Hollywood…the New Experimental Anti-Conventional Hollywood Party Era that began with Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and The President’s Analyst (all released in ‘67).

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the directing maestros behind Jaws and Star Wars, pretty much killed the cool kidz party by injecting (a) a win-really-big greed jackpot virus into the Hollywood bloodstream and (b) a strain of thematic infantilization into movies in general.

These guys didn’t didn’t suck the creative oxygen out of the room deliberately or maliciously, but the massive success of their historic blockbusters gradually introduced the idea of “high concept” and suppressed the commercial intrigue factor among industry folk and audiences alike for adult movies like Night Moves, The Conversation, The Outfit, The French Connection, Z, Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Rosemary’s Baby, Raging Bull, Scarecrow, Get Carter, The Day of the Jackal, Dog Day Afternoon, Godfather I & II, That’ll Be The Day, Stardust, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Chinatown, The Hospital, Network, Prince of the City, The Ruling Class, Quadrophenia, The Last American Hero, Performance, Don’t Look Now, etc.

During a brief interview on Kermode & Mayo’s Take, Till star Danielle Deadwyler said she agreed with Chinonye Chukwu, her director, that Till was shafted by the Academy due to “unabashed misogyny towards Black women.”

She also blamed the lack of nominations on “people who perhaps chose not to see the film. We’re talking about misogynoir. It comes in all kinds of ways. Whether it’s direct or indirect, it impacts who we are.”

Deadwyler: “The question is more intent on people who are living in whiteness, white people’s assessment of what the spaces they are privileged by are doing.”

Do actresses like Deadwyler and directors like Chukwu and Gina Prince-Blythwood have anything in their quiver besides guilt-tripping over white oblviousness?

Friendo Who’s Had It Up To Here With All This Sore Loser Stuff: “I’m so sick of this shit and so is everyone else. The problem is the media — all these woke cheerleaders. They have seriously damaged the discourse.”

HE to FWHIUTHWATSLS: “Of course, without a doubt…Deadwyler and her supporters firmly believe that Andrea Riseborough did it. But I have to admit that ‘misogynoir’ is a catchy-sounding term.”

FWHIUTHWATSLS: “The truth the media won’t say is [that] Deadwyler wasn’t THAT good in the movie. She was good, but the limitations of the movie didn’t allow her to be great.

HE to FWHIUTHWATSLS: “Her big Mamie Till scene was the emotional meltdown moment when she shudders and faints and rolls her eyes upward into her forehead.”

FWHIUTHWATSLS: “She was fine, but I found something a tad studied about her emotionalism. The whole movie was too studied. It was okay, but in a way it blew a great subject.”