Hollywood Elsewhere apologizes for posting about the 2021 BAFTA noms three hours later than I should have:

All hail Sarah Gavron‘s Rocks, which has matched Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland with seven (7) BAFTA noms — the top two nom-getters. For a reason.

If nothing else, the 2021 Woke BAFTA noms have inspired me to finally see Gavron’s well-reviewed film, which premiered at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival, and received some sort of theatrical and/or streaming play in England last year.

The only problem is that when you do an Amazon search for Rocks, you get links for 30 Rock, School of Rock, Rock of Ages, Rock Dog and so on. Search the Criterion Channel and up comes Rocky VI, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and The Rocking Horse Winner.

Congrats also to BAFTA Best Actress nominees Bukky Bakray, the star of Rocks, and Wunmi Mosaku, the Nigerian-born star of a 2020 British horror film, His House, which is playing on Netflix. Other Best Actress BAFTA nominees are Radha Blank (The Forty-Year-Old Version) and Alfre Woodard (Clemency) plus Pieces of a Woman‘s Vanessa Kirby and Nomadland‘s Frances McDormand.

Does this roster strike anyone as a little…uhm, wokester-mandated? Maybe a little bit? As pointed out in the People’s Central Committee “conscious voter training” manual?

I’ll tell you what’s happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly unclear. Following last September’s BAFTA diversity review, which was prompted by the BAFTAS-so-white hashtag, the BAFTAs have become a People’s Central Diversity Committee thing, and if you don’t go along with it or think it’s a bit skewed….well, you need to get with the program.

The Lead Actor nominees are HE’s own Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal), the late Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Adarsh Gourav (The White Tiger), Anthony Hopkins (The Father), Mads Mikkelsen (Another Round) and Tahar Rahim (The Mauritanian).

I wasn’t exactly riveted by Gourav’s performance (too many blank smiles, didn’t care for the outdoor-pooping scene) and I thought Rahim’s performance was….well, okay but oddly passive. No issues with these guys being nominated, of course, but we all know what’s going on here. As HE’s friendo #1 says, “It’s the mandated woke thing, the obsessive ritual embrace of POCs, the shunning of white male actors. Ordinary people can spot this from a mile away.”

In fact let’s turn the show over entirely to friendo #1 and friendo #2…..take it away!

Friendo #2: “The BAFTAs went full equity. They did not trust their own members to choose the nominees for Best Director or the acting categories, which were selected by a jury, and the jury wasn’t even entirely composed of BAFTA members. They did this because they were called racists last year. It is just so self-serving. The idea is it’s supposed to be a competition where voters pick what they like best. But they removed that part of it and simply inserted the most diverse nominees in those categories. That is a perfect description of equity. It is simply not right to pretend to have a competition where you micro-manage or ‘cheat’ your way into good headlines. Why would anyone want that to be their achievement? Selected to make BAFTA look good? They want a pat on the back, fine, give it to them. But let’s not pretend these are competitive in any way. Why would anyone want that?”

Friendo #1: “They are trivializing the awards season right out of existence.”

Friendo #2: “And if you look at Film Twitter right now you will see the typical virtue signalers are out in force. I’m sure Mark Harris is going to pretend these are legit, white saviors on the loose.”

Friendo #1: “[They seem to be saying] it was only ‘racial bias’ that was preventing a micro-movie that no one cares about and that would never in a million years have been an awards contender like The Forty-Year-Old Version from getting the recognition it deserved!! Mark Harris is all in on this stuff. He’s become a black-armband-wearing cultural Gestapo agent, who mocked the canceling of those Dr. Seuss books by saying they were books ‘no one wanted any more.’ No one! Absolutely no one! And he gets to decide!”

Friendo #2: “Seriously this assumes that everyone is wrong about worth and that notions of ‘quality’ themselves are driven by white supremacy. That changes the whole definition of what is ‘good’ because white people can’t be trusted to judge quality. It’s completely insane. The BAFTAs should say ‘because we’re racists we’re going to stop having film awards and now we’re going to select by a woke jury the right contenders.’”

Friendo #1: “That’s exactly what they’re saying. With one rather luscious irony built in. The people who are making this judgement (about the cosmic racial historical fallacy of the judgment of white people)…are white people! What’s going on now with the BAFTAS, the Oscars and even the Globes…what’s going on is that the film world has stopped having film awards. They’ve swapped in something else…the Woke Feel Good If You’re a Person of Color Awards!

For the last five or six years Norwegians have been cutting their teeth on the disaster genre. First came Roar Uthaug‘s The Wave (’15), which I enjoyed and admired. Then John Andreas Andersen‘s The Quake (’18), which I didn’t see. And now Pål Øie‘s The Tunnel (aka Tunnelen), which opened in Norway in December 2019. It naturally reminded me of Rob Cohen and Sylvester Stallone‘s Daylight (’96).

The Tunnel (Samuel Goldwyn) begins streaming on 4.9.21.

IMDB user review: “To be honest, it’s not that great. No big-star cast, no fancy special effects but somehow i enjoyed it.” — Fella_shibby.

For what it’s worth, HE agrees with the cancellation of Pepe Le Pew, the sleazy French skunk who’s been putting lechy moves on reluctant cats since 1945, or 76 years ago. “Constantly on the quest for love” isn’t the half of it — he’s a masher, an obnoxious creep, even a “normalizer of rape culture,” as Charles Blow recently wrote. American culture chuckled along for decades**, but no longer.

One presumes that Speedy Gonzalez is next on the chopping block. And then that racist Jack Benny-Mel Blanc Mexican band routine that I wrote about on 4.28.18:

“Obviously built on dismissive racial stereotypes, this Mel Blanc-Jack Benny routine was regarded as hilarious back in the day. If I were to really let my guard down I’d admit that it’s still half-funny now, albeit in a lame, stupid-ass way. Four years ago a YouTube commenter named Armando Vertti said “I’m Mexican, and I find this SO FUCKING FUNNY!” It shows how different American attitudes were back in the Eisenhower-Kennedy days. (The sombrero-wearing guy was Mel Blanc, who voiced all the big WB cartoon characters — Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, etc.) Will I get into trouble for posting this? I’m just saying ‘this is how it was.'”

The tide began to turn in the mid to late ’60s. Bill Dana dropped his Jose Jimenez routine in 1970.

The ten nominees for the Producers Guild of America’s Darryl F. Zanuck Award (equivalent to the Best Picture Oscar) are Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Judas and the Black Messiah, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Mank, Minari, Nomadland, One Night In Miami, Promising Young Woman, Sound Of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7. The shafted include The Father (easily one of the most carefully crafted alternate-reality films I’ve seen this century, one that doesn’t so much flip between reality and fantasy as one that deals old-man fantasy cards off the top and bottom of the deck) and News of the World. The champ will almost certainly be Nomadland. I’d be down with Chicago 7 becoming a surprise winner. The fact that Sound of Metal is the most spiritual film of the bunch…unfortunately that’s neither here nor there. I wish it were otherwise.

Everyone knows what it means to “do a Norbit” — it means possibly ruining your chances of winning an Oscar (as Eddie Murphy arguably did in 2006 and early ‘07) because you’ve given a downmarket, verging-on-hard-to-take performance in a coarse popcorn film released during award season and more precisely in the dumping ground of January and February.

Richard Brody Bulletin: Murphy’s Norbit performance is the 17th finest of the 21st Century.

From Richard Brody‘s “The Best Movie Performances of the Century So Far” (3.6.21), a perfectly written explanation of his #1 pick — Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Brody: “DiCaprio is the most paradoxical of actors. A star since he was a teenager, he built his career around his charisma and his gift for mimicry; in most of his early performances, he seemed to be impersonating a movie star, and slipped frictionlessly into his roles as if they were costumes, regardless of the physical difficulty they involved. With The Wolf of Wall Street, he finally achieved his cinematic apotheosis. In the role of Jordan Belfort, a super-salesman and super-con-man whose hedonistic will to power is one with his consuming fury, DiCaprio seemed to tap deep into himself, even if in the way of mere fantasy and exuberant disinhibition. He so heatedly embraced the role’s excesses that they stuck to him; he flung himself so hard at its artifices that he shattered them and came through as more himself than he had ever been onscreen; he and his art finally met.”

Jordan Ruimy: “Richard Brody is the Armond White of ultra-progressive cinematic Bernie Bros.”

From “Druggy Wolf of Wall Street Is New Scarface,” posted on 12.13.13:

I saw Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street (Paramount, 12.25) for the second time last night, and it felt just as wild and manic as it did the first time. (And without an ounce of fat — it’s very tightly constructed.) And yet it’s a highly moral film…mostly. Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and all the rest are never really “in the room” with these depraved Stratton Oakmont brokers. They’re obviously juiced with the spirit of play-acting and pumping the film up and revving their engines, but each and every scene has an invisible subtitle that says “do you see get what kind of sick diseased fucks these guys were?…do you understand that Jordan Belfort‘s exploits redefined the term ‘asshole’ for all time?”

Why, then, did I say that Wolf is “mostly” moral? Because there’s a subcurrent that revels in the bacchanalian exploits of Belfort and his homies. It broadly satirizes Roman-orgy behavior while winking at it. (Or half-winking.) Unlike the Queens-residing goombahs in Goodfellas, whom he obviously feels a mixed affection for, Scorsese clearly doesn’t like or relate to the Stratton Oakmont guys. But the 71 year-old director also knows first-hand how enjoyable drug-abuse can be for cocky Type-A personalities in groups, and he conveys this in spades. Wolf is clearly “personal” for Scorsese. Like everyone else who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, he is believed to have “indulged” to some extent. (Whatever the truth of it, 1977’s New York, New York has long been regarded as a huge cocaine movie.) One presumes that Scorsese is living a sensible and relatively healthy life these days, but boy, does he remember!

From an English perspective, the Harry and Meghan story was always a primal one. We’ve all been educated to ignore and/or disdain issues concerning blood, tradition, ethnic heritage and tribal identity, but deep down many focus on these regardless. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex knew they were rattling that cage, and certain odious reactions from Harry’s family and the British tabloid press were enough to persuade the 30something couple to pull up stakes, leave England and set up a new base of operations in Montecito.

If Jackie Gleason‘s Minnesota Fats was watching last night’s Oprah, Meghan and Harry interview from the TV lounge at Ames Billiards, he’d probably say, “Big John? You think these kids are hustlers?” And then he’d smile and chuckle. And Big John would answer, “Yeah, hustlers but the snowflake kind.”

This morning (3.7) producer Robert Weide, Woody Allen‘s most exacting and persuasive defender, posted a fresh essay about Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick‘s strongly condemning, flagrantly unbalanced Allen v. Farrow.

Titled “The Interview That Never Happened“, the article was initially composed for “a major online publication” that wanted some balancing (i.e., mitigating) information and viewpoints as part of a piece on the HBO Max series. But then the publication changed course, Weide reports, and didn’t want to use his balancing info after all.

Weide knows all the ins and outs of the Woody, Mia, Dylan and Soon-Yi history, and the essay provides several sharp retorts to Dick and Zeiring’s assertions about Allen’s behavior and whatnot during the early 1990s.

Weide regards the filmmaking partners as “the winners of the Leni Riefenstahl Lifetime Achievement Award,” and the doc itself as “a one-sided hatchet job.” He’s not wrong about the latter.

However, at the beginning of paragraph #2 Weide states that he told the editor of the “major online publication” that he “wasn’t watching the series, but had heard reports from others who had seen all four episodes via press links.”

Nope — not good enough. The first three episodes of Allen v. Farrow are accessible now. All he has to do is turn on HBO or download the HBO Max app and watch them. As much as Weide knows the case from every conceivable angle, he can’t continue to dispute the content of Allen v. Farrow (which he has an absolute responsibility to do) without watching it.

HE congratulates Max Barbakow‘s Palm Springs, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and opened commercially last July, for winning the Critics Choice award for Best Comedy.

I don’t understand how anyone could’ve voted for this Sundance glee club film over Judd Apatow‘s The King of Staten Island, far and away a much better effort in terms of character, ground-level realism, dramatic construction and ace-level writing, is beyond me. Or Borat 2, for that matter.

It’s an indisputable fact that Palm Springs isn’t particularly good — a labored, haphazardly written, unfunny and occasionally callous thing. Here’s to a truly great time-loop comedy that was released 28 years ago, and to the judgment of today’s Critics Choice members. Here’s HE’s 7.10.20 review.

Some are still antsy or even fearful, but a N.Y. Times projection graph [below] indicates that things are looking up for the 2021 Telluride Film Festival, attendance-wise. Especially with the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine about to kick in.

7:15 pm update: Congrats to all winners of the 2021 Critics Choice Awards, and particularly to Nomadland (Best Picture), Chloe Zhao (Best Director), Chadwick Boseman (Best Actor, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom), Carey Mulligan (Best Actress, Promising Young Woman). Plus Best Original Screenplay — Promising Young Woman (Focus Features), Best Adapted Screenplay — Nomadland. Best Adapted Screenplay: Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures). Best Foreign Language Film — Minari (A24). Best Visual Effects — Tenet (Warner Bros). Best Visual Effects — Tenet (Warner Bros). Plus whatever & whomever I’ve overlooked.

5:20 pm update: Critics Choice members have handed their Best Comedy trophy to Max Barbakow‘s Palm Springs…God! I found more to like in The Prom than in Palm Springs, and that’s saying something. The finest feature comedy of 2021 was and always will be Judd Apatow‘s The King of Staten Island. followed in this order by Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and On The Rocks — those are the top three. What could have possibly been the motive among CC members in choosing Palm Springs? What is it, some generational thing? Has Scott Mantz been lobbying for it? If they didn’t care for Apatow’s film they could’ve at least gone for Borat 2.

Earlier: I’ve never played the awards-prediction game. I write about the good stuff, period, and couldn’t care less what the majority has gone for, particularly with the progressive woke virus permeating just about everyone and everything. You can always count on Critics Choice members to blow with the wind, and right now the prevailing winds are coming from Vichy.

That said, I voted for Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci in the Best Supporting Actor category — Judas and the Black Messiah‘s Daniel Kaluuya has won instead. For Best Supporting Actress I voted for The Father‘s Olivia Colman; in actuality Borat 2‘s Maria Bakalova has taken it. I voted for News of the World‘s Helena Zengel for Best Young Actor/Actress, but Minari‘s Alan Kim is the victor.

This Best Picture comparative rundown was posted by Sasha Stone. Boldface titles are those that were chosen by CC members and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts.

HE picks (posted a few days ago:

On 11.3, ex-NY Times reporter Alex Berenson tweeted an aghast response to an 11.2 Times piece (written by Selam Gebrekidan, Matt Apuzzo, Amy Qin and Javier C. Hernández) about WHO Covid responses. “[This article] about how China has blocked the search into the origins of #sarscov2 is bizarre,” Berenson wrote. “It explains how the PRC (People’s Republic of China) won’t allow a real investigation, but DOES NOT EVEN MENTION the possibility of the virus [having] escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

When Nicholson Baker‘s “The Lab Leak Hypothesis” was published on 1.4.21 in New York magazine, I was hesitant. I didn’t exactly wave it away, but I was reluctant to accept the lab-leak notion. I was still clinging to “dirty dead bats in the Wuhan wet market” theory.

“What happened was fairly simple,” Nicholson wrote. “It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed.

“Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally or ‘zoonotically.’ They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.”

A little less than four weeks later, in the.1.29.21 edition of Real Time with Bill Maher, an assertion by biologist and evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein and his wife and colleague Heather Heying, co-authors of “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century”, backed up Nicholson. It made me feel very uncomfortable. Mainly because agreeing or even allowing for this possibility meant giving credence to a suspicion that Donald Trump had voiced for some time, which is that the odds that Covid might have originated with an accident out of a Wuhan lab (specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology). The odds of that having happened, Weinstein saidm, were roughly 90%.

Maher to Weinstein and Heying: “We’ve heard a lot recently about the possibility that the coronavirus did start in a lab. Let’s talk about that. The fact that there is this lab…I think it’s the only one in the world quite like it, [and located] in Wuhan, where the whole thing started. It would almost be a conspiracy theory to think it didn’t start in a lab.

“And that theory was demonized at first — ‘Oh, come on, that’s conspiracy thinking, that it started in the lab.’ But it’s certainly a 50-50…would you say that?”

Weinstein: “Oh, it’s far more likely than that. I think I said last June that the chances it came from a lab were about 90%. This was never a conspiracy theory. In fact that term was used to simply make it go away. It’s an obvious hypothesis that is in need of testing, and we are only now, a year [into the pandemic], getting to the point where we can discuss it out loud without being stigmatized.”

This morning I watched a two-month-old “Joe Rogan Experience” with Berenson, and again I was thinking that it felt real. No proof and no smoking gun, but the fact that the mainstream liberal media won’t even touch this because they feel it would make them sound racist…I’m feeling more and more suspicious about this whole thing. It makes me sick to be anywhere close to the same side of this issue as Trump, but I can’t let my anti-Trump revulsion be the end-all and be-all.