In Maria Schrader‘s She Said, the performances of Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan as N.Y. Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, respectively, “seem” to be even-steven in terms of screen time.

They’re not actually — Kazan has about 20 minutes more screen time that Mulligan does. And yes, Kantor is working on the Hollywood sexual harassment story a little before she and Twohey join forces. And Kazan comes close to choking up in a couple of scenes in which she interviews victims of Harvey Weinstein.

But the film doesn’t play like a senior-junior partnership thing. The Kantor-Twohey dynamic is roughly the same as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman‘s Woodward and Bernstein in All The President’s Men — and so it doesn’t really add up that Kazan will be pushed for Best Actress and Mulligan for Best Supporting Actress, as Gold Derby‘s Daniel Montgomery and Chris Beachum reported earlier today.

It’s not a problem, mind, that Universal has decided to play it this way. Kazan and Mulligan are both excellent, however you want to slice it.

Paramount has decided to open Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon wide on 12.23…terrific. Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin: “Sources close to Babylon suggest the earlier release date points to the studio’s confidence in the film”…maybe.

Paramount could also be figuring it’s safer to sell the big, broad elements than depend on early-break word of mouth. Who knows?

What are the main elements? An epic-sized capturing of a wild, crazy time. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in the ’20s. A splashy old-time Hollywood epic about change and convulsion. Orgies, elephants, cocaine and all manner of perversity.

Martin Scorsese will hate me for this, but HE is asking for predictions about how well Babylon will do with Joe and Jane Popcorn. Film mavens will eat it up, of course, and even from this distance it seems assured of several Oscar noms (including Best Picture). But how will Millennials and Zoomers respond?

It doesn’t look like streaming fare — it almost looks like something out of the Ben-Hur factory…call it Ben-Twisted…emphatic, ambitious, large-scale, orgiastic..something you really need to see on a big-ass screen..

From a certain angle it seems like a descendant of John Schlesinger‘s The Day of Locust (’75). Not the same kind of package as Babylon (a darker one actually), but vaguely similar in certain big-scale, crowd-scene respects, and it certainly seemed lavishly produced when it came out. Production costs were around $5 million, or $27.5 million in 2022 dollars.

Babylon cost $78 million.

The new Tulsa King trailer makes the forthcoming Paramount + series (debuting on 11.13) seem like a deadpan crime comedy. I’m presuming it’s actually not since series co-creator Taylor Sheridan and co-screenwriter co-exec producer Terence Winter don’t do comedies as a rule, but who knows? I’ll tell you what I know — the trailer made me chuckle three or four times. Sylvester Stallone is playing the persona, of course, with a little tongue-in-cheek.

It’s not my fault that today is a slow one.

Rian Johnson‘s Glass Onion (Netflix, 12.123) screened last weekend at both the Hampton’s Film Festival and the Middleburg Film Festival. I’ve spoken to a couple of fellas who saw it but there’s plenty of time to get into reactions down the road. Okay, I’ll share a few.

There are, it turns out, a few Last of Sheila echoes but it does opt for its own plot, which restarts and constantly goes back upon itself toward the end. Somebody dies, yes, but not whom you might think. Yes, Daniel Craig‘s Detective Benoit Blanc is depicted as gay but so what? Janelle Monae is very good, one opined. Ditto Kate Hudson, said another. Longish, they both said. The title refers to the all-glass Greek island home owned by Ed Norton‘s “Miles Bron”, an Elon Musk-like tech billionaire. Dave Bautista plays “Duke Cody”, a YouTube star and men’s rights activist in the Joe Rogan mold.

Speaking of suspected or supposed gayness, here’s a Peter Ustinov Spartacus story [starts at 15:59]: “The [unit] publicist, Sonia Wolfson, said to me, ‘Oh, Peter, steer clear of the commissary today…Hedda Hopper is there and she doesn’t want to see you.’ Well, this was like a red rag to a bull. I didn’t want to see Hedda Hopper either but I didn’t see why I shouldn’t be seen by her. So I said ‘what’s wrong?’ and Sonia said ‘no, it’s too embarassing’ but I eventually wheedled it out of her. Hedda Hooper had said to someone that I was so brilliant as Nero in Quo Vadis that I’ve got to be queer. Well, of course, I went straight to the commissary, went up to her and said ‘how are you….hah-hah-hah-hah!’ and behaved in the way of a rather gross English sergeant, and we never had [any such trouble from Hopper] again.”

Another excellent Ustinov story begins at the 23:00 mark.

Just as diamonds are created under high temperatures and great pressure, grade-A or award-quality movies have never been gently sculpted into existence. They’ve always been produced under stressful, contentious, argumentative or even arduous conditions.

Hollywood has always been a rough-and-tumble industry. Over the last century the toughest wolves in the forest, attracted by the money and artistic acclaim and access to romantic opportunities, have come to Hollywood to compete and struggle and scrap their way to the top of the heap.

Or at least, that’s how things were until progressive aspirational purity became the industry watchword and Hollywood became a town run…intimidated, I should say…by a combination of fanatical wokesters and mainstream industry players who are terrified of being accused of harboring the wrong attitudes or beliefs.

Deadline‘s Michael Cieply explained the situation brilliantly this morning. He basically said that in terms of Academy membership, meritocracy is being phased out while equity is the new mandate.

“For the last few years**, AMPAS has been behaving less like an industry adjunct and more like a contemporary, socially conscious university.

“Admission [to the Academy], once based on merit and a semi-corrupt buddy system (akin to old-school ‘legacy’ enrollments), is now openly grounded in a college-like holistic approach that weighs achievement alongside identity factors.

“The mix is supposed to yield a membership, a movie community, and film content, that are somehow more diverse than in the past.

“Thus industry standing is no longer something you grab by the throat [or otherwise] achieved through wit, wile, connections, unfettered ambition, and, sometimes, talent.

“Rather, one is [now] granted status, based partly on identity, by the Academy and its outreach programs, and by associated and similarly oriented mechanisms at companies, guilds, film schools, festivals and so on.

“Achievement [still] matters,” Cieply notes. “But, as in many contemporary college admissions, it is just one in a basket of considerations.”

** since wokesters began to take over in ’18, he means.