“I couldn’t care less what Scott Feinberg or anyone else says. I’ll put my money on Just Mercy winning the Audience Award in TIFF and being the one to beat for the Best Picture Oscar. It is this year’s Green Book — except it’s told through a black lens and pitched directly at a black audience. There are two white characters of note — Tim Blake Nelson and Brie Larson — who have maybe 15 minutes of screen time between them.

“Of course it’s conventional, but then so was Green Book, The King’s Speech, Spotlight, Argo and a ton of others. The transgressive Birdman-type winners are much fewer and further between, and tend to happen in years when here isn’t a big heart-tugging crowd-pleaser in the mix.”

HE comment: So Just Mercy is another Academy-pleaser by way of an emotional comfort bath, but at the same time it might be some kind of corrective makeup for the Best Picture triumph of Green Book, which was attacked for being insufficiently woke in its depiction of 1962 America? I was in heaven when the Academy told the SJW zealots to shove it up their ass by giving the Best Picture Oscar to Green Book. On the other hand one of the most depressing, suicidal-thought-inspiring events of my entire life was when The King’s Speech won the Best Picture Oscar. It made me want to buy packets of heroin.