Have you heard? Renee Zellweger is 100% guaranteed to win the Best Actress Oscar this Sunday for her touching performance as the beleagured, pill-popping, late-stage Judy Garland in Judy. How fitting, then, that five days before the Oscar telecast Variety‘s Marc Malkin has posted an interview with Garland’s equally famous daughter, the not-without-her-own-issues Liza Minnelli, 73.

Fitting but less than revelatory. Because Malkin and Minnelli almost totally dodge the Judy factor, and all Minnelli will say about Zellweger is “I hope she had a good time making [the film].”

Any journalist worth his or her salt wouldn’t avoid the Judy elephant if he/she could wangle a chat with Minnelli, and Malkin is no go-along fanboy so why did he post such a zero-content, kiss-ass interview? Apparently because Minnelli or her publicist told Malkin going in that she wouldn’t discuss Judy or offer an opinion of Zellweger’s performance. And Malkin said, “Okay, let’s do it anyway because…Liza!!!”

I don’t believe Minnelli hasn’t seen Judy. Does anyone? If Minnelli actually hasn’t seen it (which is theoretically possible) this would obviously indicate a neurotic avoidance syndrome that would choke a horse. But let’s presume that she has seen it, and is therefore harboring a reaction or two. If so, the only possible explanation for Minnelli’s silence is that (a) she has nothing all that nice to say, but that (b) she doesn’t want to rain on Zellweger’s parade on the final day of Oscar voting.

And so Malkin dutifully asks her a bunch of cottonball questions about her life and career.

In a 7.16.19 interview ET Online‘s Desiree Murphy asked Minnelli whether she’d seen the Judy trailer, which contained snippets of Zellweger’s performance. “Oh, really? No, no I haven’t [seen anything],” Minnelli responded. She called Zellweger “a wonderful actress” but added, “I just hope [the Judy filmmakers] don’t do what they always do. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

Even if she didn’t entirely care for the film and/or Zellweger’s performance, Minnelli could have offered a couple of puffy, insincere, carefully phrased thoughts — the kind of reactions everyone shovels when they want to say something nice but inconsequential. But she couldn’t even manage that, possibly because she regards herself as too much of a blazing truth-teller. Or, as I’ve noted, she’s intentionally avoided seeing the film, which of course would represent a herculean defiance of human nature as well as a bizarre response for a daughter who is naturally determined to protect and polish her mother’s legend as best she can.

Minnelli seems to have gone along with the interview in order to remind the industry that she’s in the pink and ready to work — active, healthy, parked locally, a few years sober. Malkin notes that Minnelli is living in “a modest Los Angeles-area apartment,” and that the main living room is “cozy with a grand piano squeezed into the corner,” and that “a collection of awards crowd a sideboard near the entryway.”

Malkin: Do you want to act again? Minnelli: “Oh, sure.” Malkin: “What do you want to do?” Minnelli: “Whatever comes up. I’ve always been like that.”

The Democratic party administrators responsible for Tuesday night’s massive screw-up of the Iowa caucus results have to be severely punished. The state-wide catastrophe was reportedly caused by a faulty app (created by Shadow Inc., a tech company owned by Acronym) that was sent out to caucus secretaries only two or three days ago. The guilty parties need to be busted. Their sabres have to be broken in two. And by the way this is presumably the death knell of the Iowa Caucus.

I want to say this plainly but carefully: I did not feel profound sadness when I read of Rush Limbaugh’s condition. His strident-rightie rhetoric did a lot to inflame Bumblefuck Nation and rupture the fabric of civility in this country and fortify the toxicity that fuels the culture-war fires to this day. In the eyes of many millions Limbaugh is a flat-out villain. Anyone on my side of the battlefield (i.e., with a liberal or progressive attitude or philosophy) who says he/she feels badly about Limbaugh’s misfortune is just “saying that”, trust me.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and Scott Johnson have co-authored a 2.3 article titled “Catherine Burns: The Vanishing of an Oscar-Nominated Actress.” It tries to paint a hard-luck portrait of a gifted actress whom Hollywood had given the backhand to, and who hated playing the Hollywood game, and who led a subdued and shrouded life over her last three or four decades.

The 23-year-old Burns delivered an Oscar-nominated supporting performance in Frank Perry‘s Last Summer (’69), but she was never that lucky again. Burns made two more films in the immediate wake (Me, Natalie, Red Sky at Morning) and did some theatre and a lot of television over the next…oh, 15 years or so. She had dabbled in writing and allegedly focused on that entirely in the ’80s. Then she fell off the map.

A longtime Manhattanite, Burns married a non-industry dude named Kenneth Shire in 1989. Sometime in the aughts she and Shire moved into a retirement community in Lynden, Washington. The THR piece discovers that the 73-year-old Burns passed almost exactly a year ago and that cirrhosis (i.e., a drinking problem) was a “contributing factor” in her demise.

When contacted by the Seattle-based Johnson, Shire doesn’t mention her passing. He also lets go with some anti-Hollywood rancor. “She hated [Last Summer] and most everything that came with it,” Shire says. “She wanted to be remembered as a published writer of novels. My wife has been out of the business for decades. She is not old news. She is ancient news. We are in our eighth decade. We left that rotten business a long time ago. It’s time for some peace. Maybe someone else wants this kind of reminder of who they once were, but we do not.”

HE to Feinberg, Johnson: My impression was that the piece tried to inject a certain melancholy or sadness that may not have been warranted by the facts. It tried to make it sound as if Burns wanted to deepen or expand her career but Hollywood and to a lesser extent Broadway said no. In their usual callous way, Hollywood types didn’t think she had the right look.

Many are called, few are chosen. Talented as she was, Cathy Burns was one of the called.

Just because Burns delivered a special moment in Frank Perry‘s Last Summer as well as some noteworthy stage and TV-series performances…that doesn’t mean she had what it took to keep going and going as an actress, She apparently didn’t have that engine, that hunger, that gotta-gotta. We all know that these qualities are as important as talent.

A certain Hollywood columnist was dismissive of her looks, the article reports, and that obviously amounted to a kind of cruelty.

Burns’ looks were okay. She was small and mousey, but it takes all sorts to make a world. If you ask me she looked like a slightly less attractive version of Liza Minnelli‘s “Pookie” in The Sterile Cuckoo, and perhaps with a side order of Susan Oakes‘ “Anybodys” in West Side Story.

The main thing is that she didn’t have that X-factor dynamism that all successful actors seem to have. She had a certain recessiveness and a face that said “whatever” and “maybe you could leave me alone”. She was was hugely turned off by the day-to-day reality of being famous and recognized on the street or whatever.

I have a 1 pm appointment for a quickie procedure at a Beverly Hills dermatologist’s office. They’ll be removing a small basal-cell cancer thing on my chest. No biggie but I’ll be out of commission for two or three hours.

Update: My appointment was cancelled because I arrived at the clinic 15 minutes late. I’ve been re-scheduled for a 1.45 pm tomorrow afternoon.

The real-life echoes in Ben Affleck‘s basketball-coach character in Finding The Way Back (Warner Bros., 3.6) are obvious. Affleck has been famously struggling with alcohol issues for years, and so (in the realm of the film) is “Jack Cunningham”, a former basketball star who bends the elbow. The film is obviously self-portraiture to a certain extent.

Director Gavin O’Connor knows how to do sports redemption dramas. I still say Miracle (’04) is his best.

I saw this trailer at the Grove last weekend, and my first reaction (above and beyond the Affleck thing) was that it could be described as Hoosiers but with Dennis Hopper‘s rummy character taking the place of Gene Hackman‘s.

Why call this Finding The Way Back when (a) Nat Faxon and Jim Rash‘s The Way Way Back opened only seven years ago and (b) Peter Weir‘s The Way Back opened ten years ago? Why follow in that path? I can’t think of a decent alternative. All that comes to mind is Fat Bearded Boozer. Don’t laugh — people would pay to see a film with that title.

Who’s the large-framed, bald-headed, barrel-chested, red-sweater-wearing guy sitting between Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino? He looks a bit like Domenick Lombardozzi, who played Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno in the film.

Blessing your Monday with this footage of De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci at the very first table read of THE IRISHMAN with Scorsese back in 2013. pic.twitter.com/VsyMvXgG6u

— Netflix Film (@NetflixFilm) February 3, 2020

Yesterday I spoke to three Academy members (two directors, one actor) about which Oscar nominees they were thinking of voting for. None of them had submitted their ballot. Two said they’d probably be waiting until the very last minute. They know what they admire or were most moved by, but they also know who’s probably going to win.

They also want to spread the love around so they’re involved in some emotional horse-trading. (“I know Bong Joon-ho probably can’t win Best Picture or Best Director but he has to win Original Screenplay,” etc.)

They basically regard the nominees as an embarassment of riches and don’t want to be lazy or cavalier in their selections.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

“Though it’s not especially good as a piece of formal filmmaking through its first three hours, McMillion$ tells a quirky and frequently hilarious tale filled with enough twists and turns that you’ll swear it came from the keyboard of a Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard.

“The story told here focuses primarily on the Jacksonville office of the FBI, described as a ‘Sleepy Hollow retirement office,’ accustomed to sniffing out cases involving health care fraud, bank fraud and other instances of white-collar crime. Our hero is Doug Mathews, a wet-behind-the-ears special agent whose ennui with the office’s standard cases leads him to begin poking into vague insinuations about fraud in the McDonald’s monopoly game.

“I love documentaries to be their own thing and I rarely itch for narrative remakes, but McMillion$ is practically begging for somebody like an Adam McKay — he’s already producing half of HBO’s slate anyway — to do a scripted mini. I think the only person who could possibly play ultra-enthusiastic, easily bored FBI agent Doug Mathews is ultra-enthusiastic, easily bored FBI agent Doug Matthews, though McMillion$ executive producer Mark Wahlberg would probably get an Emmy nomination for the role.” — from Daniel Fienberg‘s 1.28 THR review.

Hollywood Elsewhere is shocked and saddened to hear that Toronto Star film critic and cinematic wise man Peter Howell has taken a buyout and that henceforth “there is literally no entertainment department at the Toronto Star”, according to a Facebook post from Star columnist Rob Salem.

How could the Toronto Star cut loose one of its finest and best known name-brand writers? How could they not at least be interested in continuing to post Howell’s reviews and whatnot on a freelance contributor basis? In my mind Howell IS the Toronto Star.

Here’s hoping/presuming that he’ll continue to file for the Star as an indie contributor or at least for some other prominent publilcaton, and that he’ll be making the trek to Cannes in May and so forth.

Yesterday World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy posted 21 titles that may premiere at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival. From my limited perspective and/or knowledge base, we’re talking five hotties, 16 iffies and one enticing big-budget possibility that HE is suggesting and in fact pushing for — Chris Nolan‘s Tenet (Warner Bros,. 7.17. — John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh).

The five are (a) Leos Carax‘s Annette, an English-language musical about a stand-up comic (Adam Driver) and his musician wife (Marion Cotillard), and what happens when their daughter Annette is discovered to have a unique gift; (b) Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (Searchlight, 7.4.20 — 20th Century period comedy about journalism in a French city w/ Benicio del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey Wright, Mathieu Amalric, Steve Park, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson); (c) Paul Verhoeven‘s Benedetta (17th century lesbian nun drama, based on Judith C. Brown‘s “Immodest Acts — The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy”); (d) Sofia Coppola‘s On The Rocks (A24/Apple — a young mother (Rashida Jones) reconnects with her playboy father (Bill Murray) on an adventure through New York; and (e) Mia Hansen Love‘s Bergman Island w/ Mia Wasikowska, Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth.

The others are Apichatpong Weerasethakul’sMemoria; Nadav Lapid‘s Untitled, Nanni Moretti‘s Tre Piani, Laurent Cantet’s Arthur Rambo, Kornel Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman, Ana Lily Amirpour’s Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, Bruno Dumont’s On A Half Clear Morning, an untitled film from Hong Sang-soo, Abderrahmane Sissako’s The Perfumed Hill, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Petrov’s Flu, Abdelatif Kechiche‘s Mektoub: Canto Duo, Ildiko Enyedi‘s The Story of My Wife, Ulrich Seidl Bose Spiele, Maiwenn‘s ADN and Michaelangelo Frammartino‘s Il Buco.

Any other films that would make a good fit?