Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has just advised me to be more vigilant in policing ugly comments on this site. Well, I do get rid of people who won’t stop with the personal insults or obnoxious scoldings, but I guess I need to ask again for a little more civility or at least for more effort in the parsing or shading or careful phrasing of sentences. I’ve been writing about the need to cut down on the piss-spray element for about five years. I would love it, believe me, if I could raise the intellectual water levels or at least attract some Cambridge don-like commenters who might….aahh, what’s the use? I’m a broken record on this topic. Things never change around here.

“Interesting, thoughtful, well-phrased opinions of any kind are eternally welcome here,” I wrote three or four years ago. “I believe in beauty, redemption, catharsis and the daily cleansing of the soul. I live for the highs of the mind — for the next nervy retort, impertinent crack, witty turn of phrase, turnaround idea or wicked joke. And I know — we all know — that blunt-gruff reactions and persistent ideological ranting works against the flow of such things. I will not permit the infinite array of reflections about life, movies and politics that could and should appear on Hollywood Elsewhere to be suppressed or pushed aside by the relentless hammerhead barking of a small cadre of ideological Mussolinis, tough guys and hardballers.”