The 2021 Critics Choice Awards nominations were announced this morning. Congrats to David Fincher and the 12 noms gathered by Mank. Come one, nearly come all…almost everyone’s invited…spread it around…may the best contenders win, or at the very least show up. Will the March 7th show happen “live” with actual bodies, tables, food, drinks, red carpet, etc.? Of course not.

Boldface HE indicates winning preference; # indicates HE runner-up preference. Note: Not all the nominees are listed here.

BEST PICTURE
Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Mank (Netflix)
Minari (A24)
News of the World (Universal Pictures)
Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures) / HE
One Night in Miami (Amazon Studios)
Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)
Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios) / #
The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)

BEST ACTOR
Ben Affleck – The Way Back (Warner Bros.) / #
Riz Ahmed – Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios) / HE
Chadwick Boseman – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Tom Hanks – News of the World (Universal Pictures)
Anthony Hopkins – The Father (Sony Pictures Classics)
Delroy Lindo – Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
Gary Oldman – Mank (Netflix)
Steven Yeun – Minari (A24)

BEST ACTRESS
Viola Davis – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Andra Day – The United States vs. Billie Holiday (Hulu) / #
Sidney Flanigan – Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Focus Features)
Vanessa Kirby – Pieces of a Woman (Netflix)
Frances McDormand – Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)
Carey Mulligan – Promising Young Woman (Focus Features) / HE
Zendaya – Malcolm & Marie (Netflix)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Chadwick Boseman – Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
Sacha Baron Cohen – The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix) / #
Daniel Kaluuya – Judas and the Black Messiah (Warner Bros.)
Bill Murray – On the Rocks (A24/Apple TV+)
Leslie Odom, Jr. – One Night in Miami (Amazon Studios)
Paul Raci – Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios)
SPECIAL HE WRITE-IN VOTE: LaKeith Stanfield, Judas and the Black Messiah (Warner Bros.) / HE

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Maria Bakalova – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Amazon Studios)
Ellen Burstyn – Pieces of a Woman (Netflix)
Glenn Close – Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix)
Olivia Colman – The Father (Sony Pictures Classics) / HE
Amanda Seyfried – Mank (Netflix) / #
Yuh-Jung Youn – Minari (A24)

BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS
Ryder Allen – Palmer (Apple TV+)
Ibrahima Gueye – The Life Ahead (Netflix) / #
Alan Kim – Minari (A24)
Talia Ryder – Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Focus Features) / HE
Caoilinn Springall – The Midnight Sky (Netflix)
Helena Zengel – News of the World (Universal Pictures)

Except for the modest-sized fire, which isn’t enough to warm our high-ceilinged hotel room. Plus the 3G wifi disappoints. Poco Cielo Hotel, adjacent to La Fonda. Another Tijuana dental appointment tomorrow at 2 pm.

London Critics Circle Awards / a bold HE indicates emphatic agreement. Note: A24 waited way too long to release Saint Maud, which premiered 17 months ago in Toronto.

FILM OF THE YEAR
Nomadland / HE

FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM OF THE YEAR
Another Round / HE

DOCUMENTARY OF THE YEAR
Collective / HE

The Attenborough Award:
BRITISH/IRISH FILM OF THE YEAR
Saint Maud / haven’t seen it

DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR
Steve McQueen – Small Axe / HE

SCREENWRITER OF THE YEAR
Chloé Zhao, Nomadland / HE

ACTRESS OF THE YEAR
Frances McDormand – Nomadland

ACTOR OF THE YEAR
Chadwick Boseman – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

SUPPORTING ACTRESS OF THE YEAR
Maria Bakalova – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

SUPPORTING ACTOR OF THE YEAR
Shaun Parkes – Mangrove / HE

In the comment thread for “Why I’m A Mooch Fan,” “seasonalaffleckdisorder” asked this morning “why you think the Mooch is acceptable in some way after he was complicit in the worst administration in U.S. history?” To which I replied:

“He’s explained it all. He had that job for 11 days, made a mistake, got fired, saw past himself, turned a corner. He wasn’t (and isn’t) Heinrich Himmler. He’s from a Long Island blue-collar family (like Ron “Born on the 4th of July” Kovic). Fellow New Jerseyan Bill Maher has an apparent place in his heart for the Mooch, whom he once called “a killer” — a kind of Scorsese character, a financial sector Michael Corleone with a common-man ethos going on, which is to say a semblance of a moral center — a dark-haired, well-dressed guy who never shot Virgil Solozzzo or Cpt. McClusky or ordered the deaths of the heads of the five families. He’s not an X-factor writer or movie fanatic like me…not a musician or a Richard Alpert-like mystic or an ex-LSD crusader or a guy with my own specific values, but he’s a non-evil operator with a wife and kids, and he hails from a culture I know and understand to some extent. There’s something about that streetcorner patois that reaches out. Mooch is a classic fiscal Republican, and that doesn’t make him Satan. Anyone who has the ability to pick himself up off the floor and say, ‘Okay, I made a mistake, that didn’t work, maybe I was an asshole, let’s examine why, on to the next episode” — anyone who can dust himself off and turn a page has my respect.”

These movie ads ran in 5.29.63 edition of the N.Y. Times. What do they say about the state of that twilight era when JFK had a bit less than six months to live? That things were gradually transitioning out of the stodgy, conformist, straightlaced ’50s attitudes (the “Jane Fonda dies from having sex with Peter Finch” film, Hud’s barbed-wire soul, the predation of Hitchcock’s seagulls and black ravens, John Huston and Montgomery Clift‘s sexually subversive Freud) but that a basic ’50s psychology was still calling the shots.

The ’60s elation (the upswing, the changeover, “things are happening”) lasted for six years in this country — beginning on 11.22.63 or more accurately with the arrival of the Beatles in February ’64, and ending with the 12.6.69 Altamont festival. If you want a stricter definition a la Terry Valentine, it happened in “’66 and early ’67…that’s all it was.” Hollywood didn’t even understand what was happening until everyone saw Blowup (which opened stateside on 12.18.66), and even then they were slow to react. Essentially the ’60s were close to over by the time Hollywood began to make youthquake films, although special credit is due to Theodore J. Flicker‘s The President’s Analyst, which opened on 12.21.67.

All is forgiven if Timothee Chalamet stars in a full-length, 21st Century remake of Edward Scissorhands…minus the electric Caddy, of course. He’ll be forgiven for throwing Woody under the bus, forgiven for the forthcoming Dune (which is going to have problems), forgiven for everything. Winona Ryder is forgiven also. Just make this….please! Directed by David Shane (who helmed the commercial) or maybe Edgar Wright. I’m not kidding. Absolute genius-level Superbowl spot.

…won’t help us much if (forgive my language) the none-too-brights won’t get with the program. Only 35% of the African American population intends to submit (or has already submitted) to the stab. Not to mention the anti-Vax idiots who recently tried to interfere with a vaccination dispersal at Dodger Stadium. A November 2020 Pew poll revealed that 60% of respondents said they would “definitely or probably” take the coronavirus vaccine, which was up from 51% in September. Nothing works on a mass social scale if the moron effect is too widespread.

Right now we’ve got two hotties making the rounds — Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna. Plus England’s Oxford–AstraZeneca in the wings. Plus the forthcoming Johnson & Johnson one-stab vaccine. Plus the Russian “Sputnik”, the Chinese BBIBP-CorV plus a dozen or so emerging candidates. But if people are too stupid to line up and submit…

Anthony Scaramucci and the Meidas Touch guys…blunt observational music, fair-minded values, rough and tumble verbosity, refreshing candor….”the good Lord saved my ass, I got ejected like an Austin Powers villain.”

Being an ex-New Jersey native, I like to think that I understand tri-state area Italian guys. I didn’t hang with them but I got to know them a bit, and as cliched as it sounds I feel a certain familiarity and even comfort with their bedrock Catholic attitudes (family, loyalty) and ways of looking at life’s hurdles, etc. Even though I’m an LSD Hindu with English and German ancestry and little dabs of French and Welsh thrown in. So like it or lump it but I feel a kinship with the Mooch.

Respect for the late Leon Spinks, who died yesterday of prostate cancer in Henderson, Nevada, at age 67. Spinks won the heavyweight crown in ’78 after defeating Muhammad Ali in a split decision. He was later stripped of the WBC title for facing Ali in an unapproved rematch seven months later, which he lost by unanimous decision.

I’m sorry but when I think of Spinks, I think of Richard Pryor‘s 1978 riff on the guy — that’s the default impression.

Henry Hathaway‘s North to Alaska, a 1960 western comedy with John Wayne, Stuart Granger, Fabian, Ernie Kovacs and Capucine, ends with a three-minute and 40-second brawl in the muddy streets of Nome.

An outdoorsy action helmer who began in the ’20s, Hathaway wasn’t drawing upon a slapstick comedy background like, say, George Stevens might have, but this fistfight sequence is as carefully choreographed as Victor McLaglan, Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks‘ fight against the thugs in the first act of Gunga Din (’39). Ramming goats, a barking seal, a Salvation Army band…very broad and silly.

There are two accidental bits with Wayne — his hat is knocked off while he’s not wearing his toupee (:10), and then he slides backward through mud and lands under a mule, who starts kicking.

The best bit comes at 2:37 when Kovacs lands face-first into a puddle of liquid mud and then a barrel (apparently pulled along with an invisible fishing line) rolls over him.

Kovacs during liquid-mud pratfall.