I’ve been attending the Santa Barbara Film Festival since ‘03 or thereabouts, and I really wish I could’ve been there last night. All hail Cate Blanchett!!

A while back I tried to sell my Paramount homies on a special Top Gun: Maverick HE advertorial. The idea had already been written and posted on 1.13.23 — I just wanted to repeat it with a little Paramount dough behind me. The piece was titled “A Film That Saved Hollywood Could Also Save The Oscars.”

It seemed like the right pitch, and if you ask me this was underlined by the fact that Paramount recently launched a billboard ad campaign that echoed what my piece said.

At a time when the old energy current between Hollywood and mainstream audiences seemed to be dropping left and right, Top Gun: Maverick had pumped new life into the spirit of things, and should be roundly celebrated for reaching out and connecting…for making something actually happen in theatres at a time when too many films seemed to be limping along.

A Best Picture Oscar for a movie that had not only restored faith in exhibition but in Hollywood itself.

The current Paramount slogan says it all: BELIEVE IN MOVIES AGAIN. Which translates to BELIEVE IN HOW MOVES WERE DURING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND BEFORE. Which also translates into BELIEVE IN THE FUTURE and the distinct possibility that more films like Top Gun: Maverick could pop the champagne as long as Hollywood takes heed and acts upon the obvious.

Which is this: Joe and Jane Popcorn are sick of instructional woke content (identity politics, progressive guilt-tripping, historical presentism, torture-rack flicks like Last Night in Soho, a general aversion to anything rooted in straight-white-male perspectives, movies that constantly hammer the Millennial-Zoomer BIPOC gay trans #MeToo boogaloo…films that insist that entitled white assholes need to be scolded blah blah).

Joe and Jane Popcorn to Elite Hollywood Wankers: Whatever happened to movies like The Wedding Crashers, Tropic Thunder, Manchester By The Sea, Her, A Separation, Sicario, Leviathan, Hell or High Water, Call Me By Your Name, The Social Network, Superbad, Whiplash, The Witch, etc.? How about unwoke-ing your sorry asses and keeping it that way for the foreeeable future? And making more upcoming films like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon‘s Air? And while you’re at it, fire the Woke Award-Season Mafia goons and all the kiss-asses who keep pushing movies that make people miserable.

Alternate headline: “Make Joe & Jane Popcorn Happy, And They’ll Return The Favor In Spades.”

2nd Alternate headline: “Listen to Barry Diller!”

Cartoonist and longtime chum Chris Browne, son of Hi & Lois and Hagar the Horrible creator Dik Browne and the guy behind the Hagar strip since ’88, has gone to Valhalla. His ship left port sometime yesterday. He and the Viking God Odin are now equally eternal, and I really wish Chris was still mortal, not just for his sake but my own. I really loved the guy.

“The Remembering,” posted on 4.6.18: “In the spring of ’80 I took cartoonist and longtime friend Chris Browne to an early press screening of The Shining. The old Warner screening room at 75 Rockefeller Plaza, I mean, on the eighth floor. Plush, nicely carpeted, 103 seats.

Browne has been drawing the “Hagar the Horrible” strip since ’88, and is quite the guy in cartoonist circles. But he was in a not-yet place back in ’80.

We were shown the slightly longer version that ended with Overlook manager Barry Nelson visiting Shelley Duvall in a hospital room after Jack Nicholson‘s frozen-icicle death. Like Steven Spielberg after his initial viewing, I wasn’t all that knocked out. It was only years later, having watched The Shining for the eleventh or twelfth time (who remembers?), that I realized it had seeped into my system and taken hold in some curious way.

A few critics were there along with Buck Henry (glasses, tan baseball cap), Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen.

As soon as the lights came up Browne whipped out his sketch pad and, in the space of two or three minutes, drew a cartoon of Henry and his friends in their seats, their eyes wide with terror and with little piss puddles on the floor below. Browne went up to Henry in the downstairs lobby and showed him the drawing. I can recall Henry’s dryly bemused expression with absolute clarity.

Yesterday I wrote Chris on Messenger and asked if he still had that drawing. If so I asked if there was a chance he could scan it and send it my way. Or, failing that, if could he re-draw it and send it along. (As noted, the original only took him three minutes to draw it inside the screening room.) Chris graciously agreed to re-draw it but (a) without McDowell or Steenburgen, and (b) without the pee puddles. So here’s Buck again, and here’s to the lightning-fast creative derring-do of Chris Browne.

“Death on a Bender,” posted on 3.20.07:

A pass-along from renowned cartoonist and old-time (i.e, ’70s and early ’80s hangover) Connecticut friend Chris Browne, who’s been writing and drawing “Hagar the Horrible” since 1988.

Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks grading system. The legendary director is famed for having said that a good movie (or a formidable Oscar-seeker) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”

Hawks also defined a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.” I don’t want to sound unduly harsh or dismissive but I’m afraid that the Daniels’ direction of Everything Everywhere All at Once…’nuff said.

How do the leading 2023 Best Picture contender films (numbering ten) rate on the Hawks chart? Here we go…

1. Edward Berger‘s All Quiet on the Western Front (Netflix): I’m thinking of several good or very good scenes that happen during the last 20 or 25 minutes, but no great ones. Paul (Felix Kammerer) and Kat (Albrecht Schuch) steal a goose from a farm they’d stolen from earlier, but Kat is shot by the farmer’s young son and dies. General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow) maliciously orders an attack to start 15 minutes before the 11 am ceasefire. And during the final battle Paul is killed with a bayonet, only a little before 11 am. AQOWF is indisputably urgent and compelling and often jarring, but I can’t honestly say that it contains a great scene, much less three of themk.

2. James Cameron‘s Avatar: The Way of Water (Disney): The climactic 45-minute battle aboard the sinking bad-guy craft — I think it’s fair to call this a great scene. But that’s the only one. Everything in this film is highly involving and proficient and certainly eye-filling, but emotionally and thematically it doesn’t really stay with you. Hawks shakes his head.

3. Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight): It has a few weird scenes and a couple that stand out in a certain off-kilter way, but none that really sink in — not in a way that really kicks up the dust and feels great. If you disagree please tell me what I’m missing or have forgotten. The cute little donkey choking to death on one of Brendan Gleeson‘s stubby fingers? That was just weird. Kerry Condon gently rejecting Barry Keoghan‘s proposal to become Mrs. Village Idiot…kind of a gulp moment. Condon’s dialogue aside, everything said in this film is eccentric and moody and nhilist. And yet it stays with you after it’s over. How many great scenes? I’m sorry but none.

4. Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis (Warner Bros.): The first very good scene is when Colonel Parker (Tom Hanks) realizes that the unknown Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) is perfect rocket-fuel — a white guy who sings black, and who also has an intense sexual rapport with the girls in the audience. The second keeper is Presley’s 1968 NBC comeback special. The third is when fat Elvis sings “Unchained Melody” at the very end. These are certainly standout scenes, but I can’t honestly call them great. Hawks is underwhelmed.

5. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s Everything Everywhere All at Once (A24): This alternate-universe hellscape subjects viewers to cruel and unusual punishment, regardless of whichever universe it may be happening in. For this is a 139-minute excursion into mind-boggling, brain-taffy torture. And yet it has one excellent scene, which happens inside Jamie Lee Curtis‘s IRS office at the end. Michelle Yeoh‘s Evelyn briefly slips into a daydream about her alternate selves and the multiverse blah blah, and when Deirdre asks if she’s paying attention Evelyn says, “I’m sorry…were you saying something?” Perfect! This is the only great scene though.

6. Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans (Universal): Three strong scenes — Sammy giving direction to a young actor prior to shooting Nazis vs. good guys war footage, Judd Hirsch delivering his bedroom rant about destiny, and Sammy explaining to his dad that he created a muzzle-flash effect by sticking pins into certain frames in the celluloid. The one great scene is when blustery and cantakerous John Ford barks at Sammy about what constitutes interesting vs. shit-level horizon lines. Overall The Fabelmans isn’t a bad film, but it flunks the Hawks test.

7. Todd Field‘s Tár (Focus Features): One great scene: at Juilliard Lydia (Cate Blanchett) exchanges challenging, brittle words with Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist) about his disdain for white cisgender composers like Johann Sebastian Bach. Intriguing creepy scene #1: Running through a Berlin park, Lydia is startled by a woman screaming in the woods, but she never explores what happened or who it was or anything. Intriguing creepy scene #2: While searching around in a dank basement of a rundown Berlin apartment building, Lydia is freaked by the sight of a huge black dog, or maybe a timber wolf. She runs up the concrete stairs and falls on her face. Shocking scene: The dismissed Lydia slips into a live performance of Mahler’s Fifth and violently assaults her replacement, Eliot (Mark Strong). Alas, Tar‘s one great scene equals a failing grade.

8. Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer‘s Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount): In a way the entire film is filled with “great” scenes, if you accept the idea that Maverick is perfectly fused and calculated — every scene is part of a single unpretentious, super-glammy, crowd-pleasing whole. Okay, it has no great scenes but is filled with dozens of good and very good ones. TG:M is the most satisfying, least problematic film of the year, plus it earned a shitload of dough.

9. Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness (Neon): An ascerbic social satire that has a few stand-out moments, but no great scenes…sorry.

10. Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking (UA Releasing): It’s a decent dialogue-driven film that should have been called Decision To Leave, but it has no great scenes…sorry. I don’t even think it has any extra-good ones. It’s just a sturdy, workmanlike thing with good performances all around.

In sum, not one of the ten Best Picture nominees satisfies the Hawks definition of a really good film. But of the ten, Top Gun: Maverick is easily the “best”.

The woke take on the Danielle Deadwyler-Viola Davis-Gina-Prince Blythewood shut-out narrative is summed up in two articles — a 2.7.23 Hollywood Reporter piece by Woman King director Gina Prince-Blythewood and Rebecca Keegan, and a day-old BBC.com article by Steven McIntosh, based on a Deadwyler interview.

Friendo #1: “I don’t have a lot of skin in this game. I haven’t seen either Till or To Leslie. But I do have two thoughts regarding this issue.

“1. If anyone bumped Viola Davis or Danielle Deadwyler out of the five Best Actress slots, it was Michelle Williams. I don’t know a single person who likes her performance, and quite a few think she’s downright terrible in The Fabelmans, (I personally think she’s basically ‘meh’ in the film). So when I saw she was nominated, I was totally gobsmacked.

“2. The fact that an Asian woman (Michelle Yeoh) and a Latina (Ana de Armas) were nominated means 40% of the nominees in the Best Actress category are minorities. The fact that Gina Prince-Blythewood and Danielle Deadwyler are now accusing the Academy of being ‘so white’ again says to me that the people following this path are showing that they have little or no solidarity with other minorities and people of color. It’s not a good look, and I don’t think will gain them a lot of sympathy.”

Friendo #2: “In the grand scheme of things, who cares if Dave Karger interviews you onstage at the Santa Barbara Film Festival? And I do think that Riseborough had something to lose. The woke ‘take’ on this (I put take in quotes because I think the take is insane — absolutely psychotic) is that there was something racist in what went down. Who wants to show up for an interview, even with Dave ‘Softball’ Karger, and confront a hint of that kind of energy in the room? Riseborough was totally right to sidestep the whole thing until the ‘racist’ taint blows over.”

Friendo #3: “The Michelle Williams theory is dumb. She was ALWAYS a presumptive nominee. These Fabelmans haters really have a hard time with certain aspects of reality, and her performance is exactly what it’s meant to be.

“I certainly agree it wasn’t Riseborough’s intent to push Deadwyler out. But that’s the perception of what happened, and with Prince-Blythewood weighing in and all the other factors, the hurt feelings and accusations of systemic racism are gonna continue.

“And if people like Prince-Blythewood keep making simplistic gender and race-reversed stuff like The Woman King with the expectation that Hollywood is just gonna reflexively give them awards for them, the whole mess is only gonna get worse. Miss me with that nonsense.

“And yeah, if I were Deadwyler’s rep, I’d absolutely say ‘if Riseborough comes to Santa Barbara, we’re out.’

“It’s equally plausible that Santa Barbara honchos saw the writing on the wall and exercised prior restraint.”

Friendo #4: “Perhaps Deadwyler did’t push hard enough. She may have figured that she had a significant boxcheck in her favor — a woman of color playing a grieving mother of a victim on a hate crime — and that wasn’t enough. As far as the Santa Barbara thing goes, it’s a shame that there’s not going to be an intelligent discussion or maybe even a debate between Deadwyler and Riseborough…not a Maury Povich-Geraldo Rivera knock-0down, drag-out brawl but an elevated mutually respected woman-to-woman discussion about what they both did and how this has all played out.”

The following suggestions are exercises in Orwellian neuter-speak, and Jeremiah Owyang, CMO of @rlynetworkassoc (advisor, speaker), is exactly the kind of fellow that I never, ever want to be or even get close to.

If you have any affection at all for vivid, arresting, semi-flavorful language or ripe figures of speech…please. Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, William Styron, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Parker, Studs Terkel, Charles Bukowski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neil, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote…they’d all be appalled.

Friendo: “Might as well just hand it all over to ChatGPT or whatever that open AI system is. I hate what has happened to the left.”

I’m not sure if Myrna Loy (1905-1993) ever gave a great performance. She shares a great “welcome home” scene with Fredric March in The Best Years of Our Lives (‘46), and is dryly amusing in a somewhat stiff-necked way in The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (‘47). But she was certainly in full command of a sexy exotic vibe in her late 20s and early 30s. She also gave great vibe in the Thin Man series.

Previously unreported fact: I stood five feet from the still curiously radiant Loy at a National Board of Review awards ceremony in late ‘81 or early ‘82. Ragtime costar James Cagney was also there; ditto Warren Beatty, who said something flattering about Loy — something about her beauty still making his pulse race a bit.

If Hollywood Elsewhere had Roger Durling‘s job as director of the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival, right now I’d be doing everything I could to add Andrea Riseborough to the SBIFF Virtuosos panel. She has to be included…no debate!

The current Virtuosos lineup includes Austin Butler (Elvis), Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin), Danielle Deadwyler (Till), Nina Hoss (Tár), Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All At Once), Jeremy Pope (The Inspection), Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All At Once), and Jeremy Strong (Armageddon Time).

The Academy’s statement, by the way, is merely about straddling the gulf between (a) ass-covering and (b) placating the conversation.

Read Pete Hammond’s excellent “Much Ado About Nothing” assessment.

We’ve all been touched by that haunting Citizen Kane moment when the elderly Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) recalls glimpsing a beautiful young lass in a white dress on the Staten Island ferry. No conversation or eye contact — just a glancing whatever when Bernstein saw her and melted, and then the ferry pulled out and that was it…”I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

Being the impressionable type and certainly a lot more impressionable than Bernstein, I’ve experienced several such moments over the decades. Probably dozens. But there was one in particular…oh, man. Early Clinton era, ’93 or ’94…yours truly inside West Hollywood’s Monkey Bar (8225 Beverly Blvd.), a highly magnetized, hard-to-get-into joint that had opened in October ’92 with a general understanding that Jack Nicholson liked to drop by now and then…probably the hottest place in California or maybe even the world that night. How do you calculate this stuff?

And suddenly my gaze fell upon actress Joan Severance, a total smoke show and a reasonably decent actress who was known for Red Shoe Diaries and Lake Consequence…around 35 at the time. Severance had risen from her seat at a well-located table and was staring at something or someone across the room, and my first thought was “she’s standing there because she knows everyone is looking at her and she loves the attention, and who can blame her?”

But my God, the beauty…those eyes, the cheekbones and that mouth, that exquisite jawline and the perfect hair and tanned skin…nothing happened and she certainly didn’t notice my marginal journalistic ass, standing at the bar some 30 or 40 feet away. But here we are 30 years later and this moment is a memory tattoo.

One reason I want to see Frances O’Connor‘s Emily is because of Emma Mackey, who has a bit of that Severance thing going on. She plays the titular role of “Wuthering Heights” author Emily Bronte.