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I’d rather hang out under the Aero marquee and shoot the shit with like-minded souls than attend all the hot pre-Oscar and post-Oscar parties this weekend.

Our first reaction to news of the sudden passing of a middle-aged rock musician is always the same. We all suspect “lifestyle issues” but it’s bad form to say that.

Another “brutally honest” Oscar voter has told THR‘s Scott Feinberg that her Best Actress vote went to Penelope Cruz.

There’s no question that the current surge belongs to Cruz, but was it humming last weekend during peak Oscar voting? Or did it only start to manifest over the last, say, three or four days? That is the question.

If Jessica Chastain wins the Oscar, fine — she gave a good performance in a so-so movie. Polite to moderate applause. But if Cruz wins, the roof will come off.

Sean Penn on Volodymyr Zelensky’s rumored-about Oscar telecast moment: “There are some who would say ‘politics are for another place’ and entertainment is [its own thing]. [But] there is nothing greater that the Academy Awards could do than to give Zelensky an opportunity to talk to all of us. And by the way, this is a man who understand movies and has had a very long and successful career in that.

“Now, it is my understanding that a decision had been made not to do it” — i.e., not to give Zelensky some Oscar air time. “If the Academy has elected not to do this…that will be the most obscene moment in all of Hollywood history, and I hope that’s not what’s happening….I hope that is not what has happened, and I hope that everyone [inside the Dolby theatre] walks out if it is.”

Hollywood Elsewhere is down on its knees in respect and tribute to Penn for saying this. Update: My presumption is that Zelensky is down with the Oscar message thing and has conveyed as much. If he hasn’t conveyed this and is indifferent to the idea, then perhaps it’s not something that needs to happen.

Giving Zelensky a forum for telling the worldwide Oscar audience about the horrors going on in Ukraine would be a blessed thing — the only blessed thing that the Oscar producers could possibly hope to bring to this three-hour telecast. The rest is all poppycock. I double-dare any HE commenter to step up the plate and tell me I’m wrong for supporting this. I double-dare you.

The notion of a U.S. President calling for the abrupt downfall of a Russian head of state is, you have to admit, fairly startling.

Not even Ronald Reagan went that far when he called the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world.” He didn’t call for Mikhail Gorbachev‘s ruin but the system he served.

It is noteworthy that Joe Biden‘s phrasing wasn’t alluding to an orderly electoral defeat of Vladimir Putin or by some other moderate measure — he was basically advocating the same kind of thing that Sen. Lindsay Graham called for two or three weeks ago.

Biden essentially said that Putin, a dictator, has to be somehow muscled out of power. In mafia-ese, that means “he’s gotta go.”

Literal quote: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

I also liked Biden calling Putin a “butcher” and a “tyrant.” I also liked “don’t even think about moving on one single inch of NATO territory!”

Sabre-rattling? Yes, of course, but that’s to be expected.

I heard yesterday that a major Hollywood-focused N.Y. Times piece would break today — an article that would cause a sharp intake of breath all over town. I knew that it wouldn’t really blow anyone’s socks off because…you know, the Times needs to play the game.

The piece, written by Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling, is no one’s idea of a gutslammer. It merely observes that the likelihood of CODA winning the Best Picture Oscar tomorrow night is (or soon will be) a watershed event because it’s an Apple + streamer that barely caused a ripple theatrically.

The piece also says that streaming is damn near everything now, that a significant percentage of the town doesn’t even differentiate between streaming and theatrical, and that fewer and fewer people are concerned about the receding of big-screen exhibition.

Many of us still are and always will be theatrical stalwarts, of course, but that’s because of our 20th Century roots and recollections.

The whopper, for me, is Barnes and Sperling’s statement that “with streaming proliferating, the worry is that theatres could become exclusively the land of superheroes, sequels and remakes.”

This has been a fact for some time. The growing animal character of the megaplex experience has been a creeping “thing” for at least 15 years. (The last great cinema year was 2007 — Iron Man opened in ‘08.) One of HE’s more familiar refrains has been that theatres have largely become “gladiator arenas” — places of congregation for the under-educated and anti-sophisticates, and particularly where films that aspire to adult-level quality fear to tread, or at least arrive with low expectations.

The analysis in Ross Douhat’s 3.25 N.Y. Times essay about the decline and near-collapse of the classic Hollywood theology and that once magnificent blend of quality-aspiring movies and the Oscar culture that promoted and celebrated them…the Douhat analysis is fairly spot–on except for one thing.

In order to fortify and burnish his reputation as a sensible, moderate, center-right columnist, Douhat declines to mention the central cancerous element that has, over the last five or six years, increasingly isolated Hollywood from the culture at large and prompted Joe and Jane Popcorn to reject the Oscar telecast in droves, especially in the wake of last April’s Union Station calamity.

In a phrase (or more precisely 22 words), Douhat declines to mention the climate of woke terror and the resultant overhauls and purges that have put the fear of God into everyone and everything.

Another essay, written by a Substack friend, says it plain. Here are some excerpts:

Note: Substack friendo fails to mention the Academy museum’s recent announcement that an exhibit focused on the Jewish-mogul founders will debut in the spring of ‘23.

First of all, if CinemaScore respondents give your film a B+, it basically means “meh, whatever, fine.” They almost never hand out C grades. Plus most of them figured The Lost City is just goofing off, and so they graded it on a goofy curve.

So where’s the joke? I wanted to laugh but…

The non-political Club Random is a cool hang.

My first reaction was that William Shatner…well, I guess there’s no point worrying about a pot belly at age 91. (He was born on 3.22.31.) Shatner: “Why can’t I play a thin, slim 60 year old?”

Maher: “You ‘re not really expected to have made it in your 20s, but when you slip into your early 30s and you still haven’t, that was the roughest time for me.”

Maher’s one-hour HBO Max comedy special, #Adulting, taped on 3.4 and 3.5 in Miami (Beach?), will air on 4.15.

Adam Carolla drop-by, posted on 3.22: