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23 year-old Saoirse Ronan, who was honored last night at the Santa Barbara Film Festival but is also unjustly destined to lose the Best Actress Oscar to Three Billboards‘ star Frances McDormand, is at the top of her game right now. She’s obviously got it, and is certain to fortify her Streep-like portfolio by leaps and bounds over the coming decades. Everyone at the Arlington theatre, including moderator Anne Thompson, was thinking this last night.

But for all her intensity and brilliance Ronan has chosen to star or costar in more than a few iffy films over the last decade, and when you get right down to it she’s scored big-time in a stellar, triple-A, bull’s-eye fashion only twice — as the titular character in Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird and as Eilis Lacey in Brooklyn (’15).

She made a brilliant debut at age 13 in Joe Wright‘s Atonement (’07), playing a nearly demonic provocateur, and she acted the blazes out of her Susie Salmon role in Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones, but the film was too Jackson-y and CG’ed to death. And she was completely delightful in Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel (’14). And that’s as far as it’s gone so far.

Ronan has three films due for 2018 release, but the only one of real consequence will be Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots, which Focus will release on 11.2. Reactions to Dominic Cooke‘s On Chesil Beach (Lionsgate, 6.15) have been muted, and her other ’18 release, Michael Mayer‘s The Seagull, was shot in the summer of 2015 — do the math.

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Last night’s Virtuosos celebration at the Santa Barbara Film Festival — moderated by Dave Karger, attended by Kumail Nanjiani (The Big Sick), Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name), Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), Hong Chau (Downsizing), Mary J. Blige (Mudbound) and John Boyega (Detroit) — was easily the loosest, funniest and most spirited I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve been watching Virtuoso events since whenever they began. Nanjiani and Chalamet were the stand-outs, closely followed by Kaluuya.

I love Najiani’s comic attitude — dry, droll, blunt. 100% truth, incapable of gush.

I exchanged greetings with Chalamet at the after-party, and I was kind and considerate enough not to mention his recent decision to throw Woody Allen under the bus. I understand why he went along with the mob on this one. He has a career to protect and obviously needs to be in league with the cool kidz. It’s very easy to stand outside the arena on Monday morning and say “I would’ve acted differently or more thoughtfully” or what-have-you.

By the way: Nanjiani said he’ll be starring in a “low-budget” thriller for director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, whose 2010 short, Diarchia, I happened to see last year. I personally know Filomarino as “Ferdy” via HE’s own Luca Guadagnino. Nanjiani didn’t mention a title, but it’s set in Greece and will begin filming in August, he said. Contracts are being ironed out as we speak.

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In a just-posted N.Y. Times piece, Uma Thurman has told Maureen Dowd some specifics about Harvey Weinstein having sexually assaulted her, but the main thing is her continuing rage at Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino for having forcefully cajoled her into driving a shitty, rickety Karmann Ghia during a sequence set in rural Mexico. She wound up hitting a palm tree.

Dowd’s Times story contains the actual video.

“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” Thurman says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again.’ When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Thurman’s then-husband Ethan Hawke let Tarantno have it.

“I approached Quentin in very serious terms and told him that he had let Uma down as a director and as a friend,” he tells Dowd. It was like “Hey, man, she is great actress, not a stunt driver, and you know that.” Hawke added that the director “was very upset with himself and asked for my forgiveness.”

“Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, Thurman had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue. Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document ‘releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,’ she says. She didn’t.

“Thurman was in ‘a terrible fight for years’ with Tarantino, she says. ‘We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.’

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Last night Darkest Hour‘s Gary Oldman, a lock for the Best Actor Oscar if there ever was one, did 90 minutes on-stage with Leonard Maltin. The specific occasion was a presenting of the SBIFF’s Maltin Modern Master Award, the festival’s highest honor, and it was like a coronation. The generic thing when you host one of these SBIFF tributes is to prostrate yourself and worship the honored guest like he/she is a combination of emperor, genius and living God, and Maltin did that, all right.

“You’re perfect, Gary…everything about you is wonderful, and it gives us such pleasure to celebrate that. Allow us to kiss the ring.”

What I’m saying, obviously, is that I wish these tributes could be a tad less kiss-assy and a little more like those witty, erudite 90-minute discussions that Dick Cavett used to do with Katharine Hepburn and others, but you can’t fight City Hall.

They had a conversation about Oldman’s pre-acting career (delivering milk in the wee hours, getting turned down by RADA at age 16) and so on. They also screened the usual clips. I was deeply disappointed that Oldman’s portrayal of Joe Orton in Stephen Frears‘ Prick Up Your Ears was ignored. I knew they’d show a Sid and Nancy clip and the famous one from True Romance when Oldman played a rasta-haired drug dealer who thinks he’s black…I knew it!

Oldman was unfailingly charming and gracious — he played the part that was expected of him. And Maltin, being Maltin, stayed away from every interesting side topic imaginable. He didn’t get within 10,000 feet of Oldman’s conservative beliefs and his disdain for political correctness. I respect Oldman for his atypical non-liberalism — it’s one of the things that makes him interesting, distinctive. But there was no way in hell Maltin was going to bring this up.

My other regret is that clip of Oldman dancing to “Get Up Offa That Thing” while in Winston Churchill makeup wasn’t shown — it would have been a huge hit!

Past recipients of the Modern Miraculous Maltin Mashable Masters award have included Denzel Washington, Clint Eastwood, Will Smith, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, Michael Keaton, Ben Affleck, Christopher Plummer, Christopher Nolan, Bruce Dern, James Cameron, George Clooney and HE’s very own Peter Jackson.

The first and only time I sat down with Devin Faraci was in ’09 or thereabouts, in a midtown Manhattan restaurant. I’d been invited by Ed Douglas (now with Jeff Sneider‘s trackingboard), who was also at the table. Seven years later a long-dormant sexual assault charge surfaced and Faraci was soon toast. A week ago at Sundance I asked Douglas where Faraci is now, and he said he didn’t know. Tonight Faraci will appear in an interview on Zainab Salbi‘s #MeToo Now What?, a five-part series.

From “Faraci Goes Down,” posted on 10.11.16: “Apart from the issue of whether or not Faraci is widely liked or has created enemies, does an intelligent if abrasive writer-columnist deserve career ruination because of an unmistakably odious incident? Is it fair to send a drunken driver who has hit a pedestrian and who may be suffering from alcoholism…is it fair to sentence this offender to a long, life-destroying stretch in San Quentin? Some out there feel that capital punishment is the way to go, but I don’t know.”

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott has more or less thrown Woody Allen under the bus. Despite the facts in the most recent Robert Weide essay, the absence of any other accusations against Allen and evidence that child abusers are rarely one-time offenders, Scott believes Dylan Farrow.

“It’s a matter of who deserves the benefit of the doubt,” Scott explains. The article is anything but bluntly worded, but Scott seems to be basically saying that Allen’s history and more specifically his films contain little hints and half-revelations about his sexual nature and longings, and that these, to Scott, are sufficiently disturbing to give him pause.

This means, I presume, that Scott will be giving A Rainy Day in New York a bad review if and when it finds some avenue of distribution. (Everyone seems to believe that Amazon will cut the film loose sooner or later.) That or someone else will review it.

In his masterful Network, director Sidney Lumet clearly wanted the audience to regard Peter Finch‘s Howard Beale as half coming-apart but also half-inspired. As one who psychedelically sailed into the mystic and the Bhagavad Gita in my early 20s, I’ve always preferred to see Beale as a spiritual emissary, first and foremost:

“This is not a psychotic episode,” Beale says to William Holden‘s Max Schumacher. “This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I’m imbued, Max. I’m imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It’s a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing, as if suddenly I’d been plugged into some great electromagnetic field. And even to some great, unseen, living force. What I think the Hindus call prana.”

Rose McGowan has meltdown on stage at Barnes & Nobles book signing after trans heckler yells that she hasn't done anything for trans women who are victims of sexual assault. pic.twitter.com/fTRafCUNcL

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) February 2, 2018

Last night a friend conveyed an opinion of Rose McGowan‘s hyper, cranked-up behavior on Late Night with Stephen Colbert and particularly her Wednesday night meltdown at a Manhattan Barnes & Noble. McGowan is “losing her ever-loving mind. It’s basically Network. No one wants to say anything but it’s obvious.”

HE reply: “Yeah, she’s very hyper, like she’s on Ritalin. But sometimes the usual social niceties fall to the wayside when a person is really throbbing with a special spirit or current. She’s speaking her truth and seems sharp and lucid as far as that goes. On the other hand she’d like to string up a significant portion of the white male power structure, and there’s something a little Ox Bow Incident about that.”

Friend: “Is it drugs or is she just cray cray? She’s getting props tweets from Anthony Bourdain (‘In a world of timidity, compromise and bullshit , @rosemcgowan howls fearlessly at the moon‘) who clearly can’t see the problem here. Scary shit. Has to be drugs.”

HE reply: “Just as I was disinclined to see Howard Beale as raving and unstable, an instinct is telling me that however eccentric she may seem in terms of her manner and speaking style, McGowan’s anger is fed by honest experience, honest fuel. I’m not sensing a chemical imbalance as much as old-fashioned rage and rhetorical fire.”

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Sometime this afternoon (and hopefully before 3 pm), Hollywood Elsewhere will be driving up to the Santa Barbara Film Festival. The festival is operating under some spiritual duress, as recent trade stories have made clear.

There’s been much hand-wringing over the recent Montecito mudslide tragedy, which has caused the Four Seasons Biltmore to close until April 1st. No debris is littering Santa Barbara’s State Street, but the mantra of SBIFF director Roger Durling has been “never say die,” “let’s stand together” and “sticks and stones may break our bones, but mudslides will only make us stand taller.” Or something like that.

Actual Durling quote: “People want to be together and the festival is a way to do that. It was essential for us to get our act together.”

All I know is that the Montecito region of the 101 freeway has been open for about ten days now. I’ll probably encounter delays, but perhaps not hellish delays. Update: I couldn’t get it together in time. Driving up tomorrow morning.

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The final hour of Black Panther really nails it. It delivers the same kind of junkie fix that Marvel fans are accustomed to paying for, but it’s escapism fused with social vision and progressive identity politics — African pride, honor, heart, nativism, community. The last hour saves the day, but the first 75 is mainly about set-up and diversion — hidden Wakanda, vibranium, action detours (including a mad car-chase scramble in South Korea) but mostly set in a kind of tribal, primal heaven-on-earth.

I’m telling you right now that I’m more down with Peyton Reed‘s Ant Man and the Wasp, sight unseen, than Ryan Coogler‘s allegedly slambang Black Panther, which I won’t see for another two or three hours. Because it’s (a) obviously invested in the same wry comedic attitude that the original had, and (b) it’s clearly not solemn or portentous. The only thing I’m not sure of is Evangeline Lilly, who seems a little too snitty and frosty.

Ant-Man: “Hold on, you gave her wings?” Hank Pym: “And blasters.” Ant-Man: “So you didn’t have that tech available for me?” Pym: “No, I did.”

Is it really all that important to have Twitter-follower bragging rights? To some it obviously is, even to the extent of paying to acquire “fake” followers, as a 1.27.18 N.Y. Times story reported.

But if you’re a big-city, brand-name film critic like Richard Roeper, who’s been a Chicago Sun Times columnist, critic and book author since the late ’80s, who cares if you have 25,000 or 250,000 followers? If I were to pay for an extra 20K followers, how would this help my game in the great scheme?

It was reported yesterday that the Chicago Sun-Times will no longer be publishing anything by Roeper until it completes an investigation of his Twitter followers. Roeper was named in that Times story about the buying and selling of fake Twitter followers.

Chicago Sun Times editor-in-chief Chris Fusco: “We became aware over the weekend of issues relating to Rich Roeper’s Twitter account. We’re investigating these issues. We will not be publishing any reviews or columns by Rich until this investigation is complete.”

Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther had its big Los Angeles premiere last night. Right after a chorus of invested, eager-beaver critics tweeted what could modestly be described as over-the-rainbow responses. But you can’t rely on media types who were primed to worship it going in (along with those who were inclined to love it for reasons of representation and whatnot). Remember the ecstatic, holy-moley, touching-God tweets that poured into the twitterverse after the Last Jedi premiere at the Shrine?

The only thing that matters in the end is the opinion of the hard guys (those who assess a film straight from the shoulder sans agendas, and primarily in terms of filmmaking expertise and classic chops), and you’d better believe that Hollywood Elsewhere is among this fraternity. HE is seeing Black Panther tonight on the Disney lot, and then we’ll see what goes. Harumph.

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