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Right now the likeliest 2017 Best Picture nominees are Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk, Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name (Sony Pictures Classics, 11.24); Steven Spielberg‘s The Papers (20th Century Fox, 12.22); Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22); Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread (Focus Features, 12.25) and Hugh Jackman‘s The Greatest Showman (20th Century Fox, 12.25).

That’s six, but there could be two or three more: Guillermo Del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, Dan Gilroy‘s Roman Israel, Esq. and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘s Battle of the Sexes.

Denzel Washington as attorney Roman Israel in Dan Gilroy’s film of the same name, due for Columbia Pictures release on 11.3.

That’s my best guesstimate so far. Leaving aside the excellent Dunkirk and Call Me By Your Name, the others will most likely register as pretty good if not more so. But the surest way to calculate the odds is not to consider suspected quality as much as the socio-cultural agendas of this or that group that will champion this or that film.

I’ll tell you right now that the lack of a significant contender portraying an African-American milieu (unless you want to consider Roman Israel, Esq., an ethical drama starring Denzel Washington, in this light) or made by an African-American director means things are wide open as we speak.

Dunkirk will have the support of anyone with the ability or willingness to acknowledge grand, ahead-of-the-curve greatness when they see it. It will surely gather special support from 40-plus males and members of below-the-line guilds.

Call Me By Your Name will definitely corral those who are soothed by naturalism and stirred by its lulling emotional bath elements and bucolic travelogue delights. It will occupy a special place for those with the ability to appreciate and revel in an Eric Rohmer-like realm.

The Spielberg drama, which is about how Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Streep) decided to grow a journalistic backbone in the midst of the Pentagon Papers episode of ’71, will obviously have the 40-plus feminist vote and the support of sedate older boomers who automatically kowtow to anything bearing the beardo stamp.

As Battle of The Sexes is another feminist-themed drama set in the early ’70s, it may be highly competitive with The Papers as far as the older-woman or feminist-sympathy vote is concerned. If, that is, it turns out to be exceptional.

The Greatest Showman, a brassy musical about P.T. Barnum, will obviously excite those voters who prefer cheery, sparkly entertainments to solemn, thoughtful dramas or this or that sort.

I’ve only seen 10 or 12 minutes’ worth of Downsizing, but my impression following a viewing of said excerpt during last March’s Cinemacon is that it’s a visionary, Metropolis-like film that will definitely turn heads.

The only ones I really know about about are Dunkirk and Call Me By Your Name. I’ve read early drafts of The Papers and Downsizing. Everything else is spitballing.

On Facebook this morning Rod Lurie posted a lamentably familiar Joe Popcorn view about Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk. Lurie basically said that (a) it’s too brilliant not to be nominated for Best Picture but (b) it can’t win because the SAG contingent will find it too Olympian, too studied and not character-driven enough. Pretty much the same complaints could have been levelled at Barry Lyndon, right?

Dunkirk, of course, is much grabbier and more commercial than Lyndon ever had a hope of being, but the sons and daughters of the peons who spoke dismissively of Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 masterpiece are just as vocal today, sad to say.

“Yes, Dunkirk is a masterpiece,” Lurie wrote. “One of the great war films of our time, maybe one of the greats period. It’s an auteur’s work. Celluloid Beethoven. I saw it for a second time last night on IMAX — and the experience was different. Immersive. Ethereal. Especially in the ‘air’ segments where we were so in the sky that I feared running out of oxygen. And yet… and yet…Dunkirk will not win the Best Picture Oscar.

“Nolan likely gets the directing statue, so brazenly original a movie it is, so arduous an exercise it might have been, but it’s not getting the top award.

“Best Picture Oscars go to character-driven films. Pretty much every time they go to movies that are humanly driven and not necessarily creatively driven. Maybe that’s because ‘human’ movies are actor-dependent and actors are the plurality of the Academy.

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Word around the campfire is that Amazon will self-distribute Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria. (Same thing they’re doing with Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel.) I was told last May that this remake of the 1977 Dario Argento classic runs two hours, 50 minutes. (Argento’s version ran 98 minutes.) I’m now told Guadagnino’s cut will run 150 minutes with credits. LG screened it for the Amazon gang at the end of his recent L.A. visit.  He and editor Walter Fasano had applied finishing touches to their erotic witch flick before the unveiling. The costars include Dakota Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Mia Goth, Tilda Swinton, Sylvie Testud, Angela Winkler, Małgosia Bela, Lutz Ebersdorf and Jessica Harper. Do I know for a fact that everyone gets naked in that big scene I described a couple of months ago? No, I don’t. Suggested alternate title: All Of Them Witches.

This morning I sent the following to Amanda Grandinetti, identified on her Facebook page as the food and beverage director at the Chateau Marmont but, according to a longtime Chateau employee who insists that Grandinetti’s Facebook page is out of date, currently the managing director. Philip Pavel, who ran the Chateau for a long stretch, is now the big cheese at the soon-to-open NoMad hotel in downtown Los Angeles:

Amanda,

Mellow greetings, yukey dukey. I’m Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere columnist (www.hollywood-elsewhere.com) and longtime industry reporter going back to the early ’80s. I’m writing to convey a mild form of displeasure about a no-big-deal incident that happened last night at the Chateau Marmont, or more precisely at the outside entrance.

I don’t want to sound like an entitled asshole, but I’ve been attending industry parties at the Chateau for eons (mainly during Oscar season), and every so often I’ll pop by to meet someone for a drink at the restaurant bar, or maybe order breakfast or dinner or whatever. (Svetlana Cvetko and I met Guillermo del Toro there for dinner a year or so ago.) Or I might be with a visitor and just want to show them the Chateau’s to-die-for interior.

This was last night’s agenda — showing the interior to my wife Tatyana, who’s only been in Los Angeles for seven months and has never had the pleasure. But I was told by a polite young lady at the valet desk that we couldn’t enter without a room or dinner reservation. I said we were just looking to order a drink at the bar, no biggie. “The bar is filled,” she said. Obviously she couldn’t have known that. We went back and forth but her mind was made up.

What she meant, I presume, is that she sensed we were riff-raff, and so she was following an instinct to protect the hotel guests from people who might gawk or snap iPhone photos and otherwise generate un-coolness.

I totally get the “keep out the riff-raff” thing. If I was guarding the gate I would actually take pleasure in politely rebuffing any would-be visitors who looked like they’d just gotten off the tourist bus. Overweight types, noisy kids in tow, wide-eyed expressions, low-thread-count T-shirts, dorky sandals and a general approach to attire that’s more suited to a mall in Henderson, Nevada.

Your predecessor Phillip Pavel, who served as the Chateau’s managing director for a long stretch, said it succinctly a few years ago: “The Chateau Marmont has built its success on creating an environment where the privacy of our guests is paramount. Please know that the decision to not allow certain guests in our hotel is based solely on this concept.”

The problem is this: I’m not riff-raff, and I don’t look like riff-raff. I have the snooty cool thing down pat, and I was nicely groomed last night. I was wearing a dark blue Kooples shirt and white pants and shiny black loafers. The beautiful Tatyana was nicely dressed also. Nothing about us radiated “uh-oh…don’t let these chumps past the gate!” Granted, we didn’t arrive in a big black SUV and had just approached on foot, but still…what’s the deal here?

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Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Red Desert (’64) will screen this Friday (7.28) at the Walter Reade. Oh, that red hair and pale skin, that black mud and those gloomy gray skies and general sense of sprawling ecological ruin…mother’s milk to me.

I saw Red Desert for the first time two years ago. I know the Antonioni milieu, of course, and had read a good deal about it over the years, so I was hardly surprised to discover that it has almost no plot. It has a basic situation, and Antonioni is wonderfully at peace with the idea of just settling into that without regard to story. And for that it seemed at least ten times more engrossing than 80% or 90% of conventional narrative films I see these days, and 87 times better than the majority of bullshit superhero films.

Monica Vitti plays a twitchy and obviously unstable wife and mother who’s been nudged into a kind of madness by the industrial toxicity around her, and Richard Harris is an even-mannered German businessman visiting smelly, stinky Ravenna, a port city on the Adriatic, to arrange for several Italian workers to perform a long work assignment in lower Argentina.

You suspect that sooner or later Harris, whose hair has been dyed an odd brownish blonde, will make a move on Vitti but other than that nothing really happens. It’s about industrial sprawl and poisoned landscapes and a lot of standing around and Vitti’s neurotic gibberish and a certain caught-in-the-mud mood that holds you like a drug, specifically like good opium.

Each and every shot in Red Desert (the dp is Carlo di Palma, whom Vitti later fell in love with) is quietly breathtaking. It’s one of the most immaculate and mesmerizing ugly-beautiful films I’ve ever seen. The fog, the toxins, the afflictions, the compositions.

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HE to guy who’s seen Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel: “Without sourcing or even mentioning whom I spoke to or what country you’re from, how would you rate Kate Winslet‘s performance in terms of potential award-worthiness, on a scale of 1 to 10? It all comes down to the arc and the writing and the third-act catharsis, of course, but I gather she does a theatrical angst-and-hair-pulling thing due to Justin Timberlake two-timing her with Juno Temple, or something like that.”

Answer: “10. Truly. She’s amazing.”

Then I turned to a guy who’s spoken to a guy who knows a thing or two, and his reply was “I’ve only heard that she has a Blue Jasmine-ish meltdown that goes on for many minutes. So who knows but it at least sounds like a seven-plus at this stage.”

Blade Runner 2049 will probably land a berth at the Toronto Film Festival (right?), but the fact that it wasn’t announced among the first batch…what does that tell you? To me it suggests indecisiveness or an internal debate on the part of Warner Bros. marketing, but maybe not.

The fanboys are gradually starting to realize that the most Denis Villeneuve’s film can hope to do is “cover” the dog-eared design mythology of Ridley Scott’s 1982 groundbreaker. That’s it, that’s the shot. A revered, ahead-of-its-time cult movie did an urban dystopia thing 35 years ago, and here we are doing it again. Except we’re doing a nostalgic classic-rock thing, and we’re keeping Harrison Ford in the wings until the very end.

What’s the most memorable moment in Blade Runner? When Rutger Hauer‘s Roy dies and the dove flies away.

Again: It would seem that the decades-old Blade Runner suspicion about Harrison Ford‘s Rick Deckard being a replicant has been answered by the trailer for Blade Runner 2049. Deckard, like Ford, has aged, and that, for me, feels like proof that Deckard is flesh and blood. Why on earth would the Tyrell Corporation have constructed replicants that age like humans? This would make no sense at all — none.

The official synopsis says 2049 is about LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling) discovering “a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos,” etc. This “leads K on a quest to find Deckard, a former LAPD blade runner who’s been missing for 30 years.” It would follow, naturally, that the K-meets-Deckard moment happens in the third act.

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An announcement popped this morning about principal attractions slated for the 2017 Toronto Film Festival. As usual, Hollywood Elsewhere will be there with bells on following my Telluride attendance. All hail the enticement of Darren Aronfosky‘s mother!, even if it’s not playing Telluride.  Why turn down an Aronofsky film, Tom?

Don’t knock the Toronto rock: Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water (following showings at Venice and Telluride), Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour, Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing (which will also have previously played Venice and Telluride), the noteworthy inclusion of Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name after the forehead-slapping turndown by Telluride, George Clooney‘s Suburbicon, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton‘s Battle of the Sexes, Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Venice but no Telluride), Scott Cooper‘s Hostiles, Scott Cooper‘s Hostiles, Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird (also a Telluride firstie), Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War, Stephen Frears‘ Victoria and Abdul, et. al.

The first thing you have to ask about any TIFF is “how many high-profile titles are grim stories about some form of assaultive or debilitating trauma followed by painful recovery or, failing that, acceptance or closure”? I’m not posting a comprehensive list of these films here and now, but Toronto Agonistes certainly applies: Andy Serkis‘ Breathe, David Gordon Green‘s Stronger, Angelina Jolie‘s First They Killed My Father, Hany Abu-Assad‘s The Mountain Between Us, Paul McGuigan‘s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier‘s Long Time Running, et. al.

Thanks to TIFF’s regional designations after every film (listing them as a North American, Canadian or international premiere), we know almost everything about who’s doing Venice, Telluride and/or Toronto. Jig’s up, cat’s out of the bag.

I doubt that Telluride will be showing Dee Rees‘ Mudbound, which played Sundance last January, but if they do they’ll be granting it an exception that they didn’t grant Call Me By Your Name, which Tom Luddy deep-sixed for having played Sundance and Berlin. But Sebastian Lelio‘s A Fantastic Woman, which played Berlin and other international festivals, is going to Telluride, as indicated by TIFF’s calling it a Canadian premiere, which means the film will have been celebrated as a U.S. and international premiere prior to Toronto.

Here, based on TIFF’s info, are rosters of films playing and not playing Telluride (special acknowledgment to Deadline‘s Pete Hammond and the tireless Jordan Ruimy for sharing and clarifying):

Going to Telluride: Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour (which TIFF is calling a Canadian premiere), Paul McGuigan‘s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (Canadian premiere), Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing, Sebastian Lelio‘s A Fantastic Woman (Canadian premiere), Angelina Jolie‘s First They Killed My Father (Canadian premiere), Chloé Zhao‘s The Rider (Canadian premiere), Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton‘s Battle of the Sexes (calling it an “international premiere” = no Venice or Berlin), Scott Cooper‘s Hostiles (international premiere), Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird (international premiere) and Joachim Trier‘s Thelma.

NOT going to Telluride: Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (HE response: boooooo!), Robin Campillo‘s BPM (Beats Per Minute), Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! (baahh), Ruben Östlund‘s The Square (boooo!), George Clooney‘s Suburbicon, Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Stephen Frears‘ Victoria and Abdul, Andy Serkis‘s Breathe, Deniz Gamze Ergüven‘s Kings, Hany Abu-Asasad‘s The Mountain Between Us, David Gordon Green‘s Stronger, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s The Current War

Emilia Clarke‘s Rolling Stone cover is another celebration of her Game of Thrones fame (i.e., “Queen of Dragons”). Clarke has been dining out on that hugely popular HBO series for six years now, but gradually realized, as every star of a hit cable series has in the past, that she had to do more rep-wise than the usual usual, which in her case meant wearing that blonde wig and performing the occasional nude scene. The long game required it.

And so last summer Clarke starred in Phillip Noyce‘s Above Suspicion, a fact-based, late-’80s drama about Susan Smith, a drug-addicted Eastern Kentucky mom who lunged at an affair with a married FBI guy named Mark Putnam (Jack Huston) as a possible means of escape from her dead-end existence, but played her hand too hard and wound up dead in the woods.

(l.) Jack Huston as Mark Putnam, (r.) Emilia Clarke as Susan Smith in Phillip Noyce‘s Above Suspicion.

Clarke did good. Her emotionally poignant performance as Smith proves that she can operate above and beyond the realm of Tits and Dragons, and with scrappy conviction to spare. Tart, pushy, believably pugnacious. Clarke is English-born and raised but you’d never know it. Her Susan is the Real McCoy in a trailer-trash way, but she brings heart to the game. In other words she’s affecting, which is to say believably scared to death. What Clarke delivers, trust me, is a lot more than just the usual collection of redneck mannerisms.

Speaking as one who despises rednecks in general and who presumes that the residents of Pikeville, Kentucky, where Smith lived and died, went heavily for Donald Trump last November, it means something that I wound up feeling genuinely sorry for this spunky, self-destructive, long-dead woman whom Clarke has brought back to life.

How do I know all this? Noyce’s film screened last week for a select group of elite blogaroo types, and I can say straight and true that Above Suspicion, which is based on Joe Sharkey’s 1993 true-life novel, is a triple-A, tightly-wound, character-driven genre flick (i.e., rednecks, drug deals, criminals, lawmen, murder, car chases, bank robberies) of the highest and smartest order.

Most people would define “redneck film” as silly escapist trash in the Burt Reynolds mode, but there have been a small handful that have portrayed rural boondock types and their tough situations in ways that are top-tier and real-deal. My favorites in this realm are John Boorman‘s Deliverance, Billy Bob Thornton‘s Sling Blade, and Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero. I’m not saying Noyce’s film is the absolute, dollars-to-donuts equal of these films, but it certainly deserves to stand side by side as a peer, and is absolutely a close relation with a similar straight-cards, no-bullshit attitude.

Noyce always delivers with clarity and discipline but this is arguably the most arresting forward-thrust action flick he’s done since Clear and Present Danger. Plus it boasts a smart, fat-free, pared-down script by Mississippi Burning‘s Chris Gerolmo, some haunting blue-tinted cinematography by Eliot Davis (Out of Sight, Twilight) and some wonderfully concise editing by Martin Nicholson.

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My bad for not highlighting this Snowman trailer last week or whenever the fuck it surfaced. You can tell this chilly British crime thriller is a standout, in part because you know director Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In, Tinker Tailor Solder Spy) has his shit together. Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Val Kilmer, J. K. Simmons, Toby Jones, Chloë Sevigny. The Universal release opens on 10.20.17.

Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Detroit (Annapurna, 7.28 and 8.4) is a raw-capture history lesson hoping to arouse and enrage, but it mostly bludgeons. I’m saying this with a long face and heavy heart as I like and admire these enterprising filmmakers, but there’s no getting around the fact that they’ve made a brutal, draggy downer. Detroit lacks complexity and catharsis. It doesn’t breathe.

I was hoping that this blistering docudrama, which isn’t so much about the 1967 Detroit riots as the bloody Algiers Motel killings, would play like Gillo Pontecorvo‘s The Battle of Algiers, but alas, nope. Failing that I wanted Detroit to be an investigative political thriller in the vein of Costa Gavras‘s Z, but that wasn’t the scheme either.

No one is more beholden to Bigelow-Boal than myself; ditto their magnificent Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker. But after these two films I’ve become accustomed to brilliance from these guys, or certainly something sharper, leaner and more sure-footed than this newbie.

At best, Detroit is a hard-charging, suitably enraged revisiting of what any decent person would call an appallingly ugly incident in the midst of a mid ‘60s urban war zone. And of course the system allowed the bad guys to more or less skate or not really get punished. What else is new?

The Algiers Motel incident happened, all right, to the eternal discredit of Detroit law enforcement system back then. But guess what? It doesn’t serve as a basis for an especially gripping or even interesting film.

Detroit has good chaotic action, street frenzy, bang bang, punch punch and lots of anger, and I really didn’t like sitting through it and I watched it twice, for Chrissake. For they’ve made a very insistent but air-less indictment film — militant, hammer-ish, screwed-down and a bit suffocating.

In and of itself, the Algiers Motel incident repels but dramatically under-delivers. There’s not a lot of complexity in the portraying, although the episode obviously reflects upon several well-documented 21st Century instances of white-cop brutality and murder.

The white-guilt factor is abundantly earned in terms of the behavior of three pathetically brutal Keystone cops who also happen to be racist fucktards — Will Poulter‘s “Phillip Krauss”, Jack Reynor‘s “Demens” and Ben O’Toole‘s “Flynn”. But it needed more than this.

Ugly, blatant racism in and of itself is obviously repellent, but Detroit doesn’t feel sufficiently layered. It makes for a jarring but rather one-note movie.

The principal actors portraying the victims of harassment — John Boyega as Melvin Dismukes, Algee Smith as Larry Reed, Anthony Mackie as Greene — hold their own; ditto those portraying the shooting victims — Jason Mitchell as Carl Cooper, Nathan Davis, Jr. as Aubrey Pollard and Jacob Latimore as Fred Temple.

I can’t think of a single good sticker line — a line in the vein of Al Pacino‘s greatest Heat moments, say — or anything in the way of clever, diversionary movie craftsmanship. The Detroit script barely feels “written” in the sense that any number of urban thrillers have been. It doesn’t feel tightly sprung or strategized as much as thrown at the wall. 

Too often the film feels coarse, pushed, misshapen, misjudged. I plainly, simply didn’t like watching it.

I didn’t even like Barry Aykroyd‘s photography — way too many tight close-ups. And if you ask me the cop haircuts feel a wee bit too long for ’67, when straight-laced society was still rocking short hair and whitewalls. Longish hair (hint of sideburns) didn’t sink into mainstream society until ’69 or ’70 or ’71.

It feels like a decent if rudimentary attempt to recreate the Detroit chaos of ’67 rather than some wowser re-visiting or, you know, a major redefining or rejuvenation of same.

Yes, there are four or five uniformed law enforcement figures plus a nurse (played by Jennifer Ehle) who come off as decent human beings, but otherwise the idea seems to have been to remove any and all shading, dimension and subtlety as far as the white characters are concerned. After a while your spirit wilts in the face of this diseased, cut-and-dried cardboard slime factor. 

I’m not saying that white Detroit beat cops were anything but foul and deplorable for the most part back in ’67 (as many cops have recently shown themselves to be when it comes to treatment of black suspects in God knows how many altercations in recent years), but a movie of this sort has to deliver some kind of balance and finesse and shared humanity and quiet-down moments (i.e., we’re all scared children running around on God’s blue planet) or it’s just crude caricature — a racial hit piece.

Whatever the content or mood or metaphorical thrust, all good movies have to feel cinematically sexy. You have to be charmed by their chops, aroused by their strategy. If a movie doesn’t turn you on in one way or another or doesn’t at least make you sit up in your seat, it probably isn’t very good.

I could’ve rolled with Detroit if it had felt more slick and “commercial.” If only it had the look and professional cutting and smooth camerawork and assured pacing of Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning. Yes, I know — an absurdly inaccurate film history-wise, but a very good one in terms of chops, and a damn sight better than Detroit in this respect. Remember the repetitive hammer music in Parker’s film? Not very melodic but it really worked, really connected.

Detroit makes its points but it’s direct and blunt to a fault. The attack on the bin Laden compound finale in Zero Dark Thirty was 11 or 12 times better than anything in Detroit. Ditto that lively firefight involving Ralph Fiennes’ character in The Hurt Locker.

What happened to the smooth, fleet editing, and the sense of planted authority and versimilitude that I got from Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker? I’ll tell you what’s happened to it. It’s taken a powder.

It’s not a great idea to meditate too heavily upon basic “where is my life heading?” stuff if you happen to be up at 4:30 am, as I was a little while ago. I tried to concentrate on my usual pre-dawn iPhone surfing ritual, searching for stories or topics or bounce-offs that might be worth a comment or argument of some kind. But that old, regrettably familiar Ingmar Bergman-like sense of impending doom kept creeping in. It’s best not to dwell in this realm. Gloom thoughts always go away when the morning light appears. But that vague sense of big black wolves sitting outside your door at 5:10 am…whoa. Why am I even sharing this? I can’t even remember if I’ve seen Hour of the Wolf, which probably means I haven’t. But I guess I don’t need to, right?