I just turned in my 2019 Critics Choice Awards ballot. The winners will be revealed at the big CC awards show on Sunday, 1.13, inside Barker Hangar. My main criteria was to (a) vote for serious true-quality contenders and not necessarily the hive favorites, and (b) to not vote for A Star Is Born in any category. I’ve omitted four or five of the minor categories.

BEST PICTURE
Black Panther
BlacKkKlansman
The Favourite
First Man
Green Book
If Beale Street Could Talk
Mary Poppins Returns
Roma
A Star Is Born
Vice

JW PICK: Roma

BEST ACTOR
Christian Bale – Vice
Bradley Cooper – A Star Is Born
Willem Dafoe – At Eternity’s Gate
Ryan Gosling – First Man
Ethan Hawke – First Reformed
Rami Malek – Bohemian Rhapsody
Viggo Mortensen – Green Book

JW PICK Willem Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate / Serious conflict — I wanted to vote for either First Reformed‘s Ethan Hawke or Vice‘s Christian Bale, but Dafoe’s Van Gogh slipped into my consciousness a couple of days ago and has hung in there.

BEST ACTRESS
Yalitza Aparicio – Roma
Emily Blunt – Mary Poppins Returns
Glenn Close – The Wife
Toni Collette – Hereditary
Olivia Colman – The Favourite
Lady Gaga – A Star Is Born
Melissa McCarthy – Can You Ever Forgive Me?

JW PICK: Glenn Close, The Wife / serious conflict here — my actual favorite is Melissa McCarthy but I’m also a Close supporter from way back. Plus a Close win at the CC awards will bolster her Oscar chances and thus lessen the odds favoring Lady Gaga.

Hollywood Elsewhere will attend the Sundance premiere of Dan Reed‘s Leaving Neverland, a four-hour doc about the experience of two men — James Safechuck and Wade Robson — who’ve claimed to have been molested by the late Michael Jackson as minors. The Channel 4 doc (technically a pair of two-hour docs) was added yesterday to the Sundance ’19 lineup.

Jackson’s Santa Barbara sexual molestation trial of ’04 and ’05 didn’t involve Safechuck and Robson but Gavin Arvizo, who’s now 29.

Portion of a statement from the Jackson estate: “This is yet another lurid production in an outrageous and pathetic attempt to exploit and cash in on Michael Jackson. This so-called ‘documentary’ is just another rehash of dated and discredited allegations. It’s baffling why any credible filmmaker would involve himself with this project.”

Statement from Reed: “If there’s anything we’ve learned during this time in our history, it’s that sexual abuse is complicated, and survivors’ voices need to be listened to. It took great courage for these two men to tell their stories, and I have no question about their validity. I believe anyone who watches this film will see and feel the emotional toll on the men and their families and will appreciate the strength it takes to confront long-held secrets.”

Leaving Neverland will pop on HBO sometime this spring.

As mentioned, Hollywood Elsewhere will be operating on God’s good humor and the kindness of publicist pals during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. I’ve been told I’m definitely good for several films (Neverland included) so things seem to be working out. If only I’d managed to be more “woke” over the last two or three years I would have my usual press pass and things would be less complicated.

This is right up Hollywood Elsewhere’s alley — “horror” in quotes mixed with social metaphor in order to reflect some aspect of present-day art or culture or whatever.

If Dan Gilroy‘s Velvet Buzzsaw (Netflix, 2.1) was opening in a standard theatrical-first way, it would probably suffer the fate of other upscale horror flicks (Hereditary, The Babadook, The Witch) — rave reviews, not enough business. Low-rent horror fans hate this smarthouse foie gras approach — they just want their meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

Wiki boilerplate: “After a series of paintings by an unknown artist are discovered, a supernatural force enacts revenge on those who have allowed their greed to get in the way of art.”

Gilroy to Business Insider: “It’s set in the world of contemporary art in Los Angeles, and its got a Robert Altman-like large ensemble cast. It’s got a Player vibe to it. There’s a large cast and we’re moving around from person to person as we move through this world. The story is being told through these different characters.” HE to Gilroy: Not primarily through Jake Gyllenhaal‘s character?

In a 1.8.19 Vulture interview with Mark Jacobson, First Reformed director-writer Paul Schrader has expanded upon his previously voiced opinion that low-rent audiences are the chief cause of today’s movie malaise.

During a BAFTA discussion in London a few weeks ago, Schrader said that “when people take movies seriously it’s very easy to make a serious movie. When they don’t take it seriously, it’s very, very hard. We now have audiences that don’t take movies seriously so it’s hard to make a serious movie for them. It’s not that us filmmakers are letting you down, it’s you audiences [that] are letting us down.” In other words, that was then and this is now.

Schrader offers more of a grand-sweep observation in his Jacobson chat:

“[What we’re discussing is] part of the larger question of the de-fraction of culture. The fact that there’s no center. There’s no Johnny Carson, there’s no Walter Cronkite, there’s no Bruce Springsteen. There’s no fucking center to popular culture. The atrium where everyone would get together to talk is now dozens of little rooms.

“So back in the ’60s and ’70s, if you wanted to talk about the culture, and what was happening around us, you were going to have to talk about Bonnie and Clyde. Or The Wild Bunch. That was part of the conversation. And so, if you look back through that period, almost every week something came out that would give a critic a bone to chew on. If it had substance in it, you know. It’s taken 50 years for those opposed to the counterculture to finally win. To make sure that 1969 could never happen again.

“And of course, we could talk for days about the cowboy atmosphere we’re in now. Nothing we’ve learned in the last 100 years is of much value. We don’t know what a movie is anymore. We don’t know how long it is, we don’t know where you see it, we don’t know how you monetize it. What if it’s a net series? That is half hours, or 15 minutes. What if it’s 115 minutes, you know? That’s still a movie, isn’t it? Yes, it is. Mad Men is a movie — a 79-hour movie.”

A few days ago First Reformed star Ethan Hawke explained his opposition to the Academy’s four-months-defunct idea for a Best Achievement in Popular Film Oscar.

To hear it from Little Gold Men‘s Mike Hogan, Hawke believes that the popular-film Oscar would have detracted from awards season’s true goal: to boost the signal on under-seen, artistically challenging films.

“There already is a popular Oscar,” Hawke said. “It’s such a dumb thing to say. The popular Oscar is called the box office. They’re mad they don’t get prizes. You know, well…guess what, dude? Your car is your prize. Those of us who don’t have a car need a prize.”

Hawke misses the point from the Academy’s POV. Viewership of the Oscar telecast is dropping and will continue to drop because the vast majority of the moviegoing public doesn’t care about the smallish, Spirit Award-level films that have tended to win Best Picture Oscars over the last dozen or so years. Eventually the Oscar telecast will die if it doesn’t adapt to the times.

The fact is that the vast majority of moviegoers are agnostic regarding the faith of cinema — they don’t regard theatres at churches but as sports arenas, amusement parks, funhouses. Concurrently there is such a thing as applications of high craft in the making of popular films, and it wouldn’t devalue the smaller good films if the Academy were to acknowledge and celebrate this.

Once again into the breach: On 9.10.18 Bloomberg’s Virginia Postrel posted a solution to the Best Picture Oscar problem (tickets buyers preferring mass appeal or FX-driven popcorn flicks, Academy members preferring to honor movies that are actually good in some kind of profound, refined or zeitgeist-reflecting way) that I think makes a lot of sense.

The targeted hit pieces against Green Book that happened earlier today (i.e., Farrelly flash + Vallelonga-Trump-Jersey Muslims) wouldn’t have happened if Peter Farrelly‘s film hadn’t won three Golden Globes last Sunday night. The haters and wokesters wanted to cause as much injury as they could, and with due diligence they found the implements of destruction after two days of searching.

Knives were plunged into Julius Caesar for similar reasons. Woke twitter: “Not that we loved Green Book less but that we loved Rome more.”

In case there’s anyone in outer Mongolia who doesn’t understand what happened today and why, this is your explanation. Repeating: If the Globe wins hadn’t occured, these pieces wouldn’t have popped.

The wokesters have found a new way to torpedo Green Book. Much better than “magic negro” or “white savior.” This afternoon The Cut‘s Anna Silman posted a hit piece about Green Book director Peter Farrelly having comically weenie-wagged in front of two prominent persons 20 years ago.

How Brett Kavanaugh was Farrelly’s behavior? Sometime in the mid to late ’90s Farrelly jokingly whipped out his johnson in front of then-20th Century Fox honcho Tom Rothman. (Weird but who cares?) He also flashed Cameron Diaz in the same impish spirit, before she was cast in There’s Something About Mary. (That’s it…off with Farrelly’s head!)

Silman and her hit-squad allies found descriptions of said behavior in two 1998 articles, one in Newsweek piece and another in an Observer article by Nicola Barker (no link — available only on Nexis). Diaz hasn’t complained about Farrelly’s flashing, although Rothman was quoted by Newsweek as saying “it wasn’t a pretty sight…in fact, I’m still recovering.”

HE to Cameron Diaz reps: Your client to hereby requested to come forward and not only confirm Farrelly’s behavior but provide explicit damning details. Not by me but, you know, the em>Green Book haters. They’re looking to knock it out of contention once and for all, but they need your client to deliver the killshot quotes.

Silman: In these stories, it’s notable how Farrelly’s behavior is treated like a cute running prank instead of egregious sexual misconduct, illustrating just how much things have changed in the past two decades — indeed, much of it in the past year.”

Farrelly to Silman: “True. I was an idiot. I did this decades ago and I thought I was being funny and the truth is I’m embarrassed and it makes me cringe now. I’m deeply sorry.”

It really comes down to Diaz. If she waves or laughs it off, the story might peter out. But if she’s in any way traumatized or even irked by the memory, Green Book could be in trouble.

By the way: This afternoon “they” (Indiewire‘s Zack Sharf, among others) went after Nick Vallelonga with a deleted tweet about the Green Book co-screenwriter supporting Donald Trump’s tweet about mobs of New Jersey Muslims cheering the 9/11 disaster.

By The way: A friend sent me a Kate Erbland Indiewire piece about Green Book detractors and defenders. He interpreted the piece as more or less positive. Except it isn’t. The fact that Indiewire is basically Woke Central tells you the article had to contain a dig or two. Especially with Erbland, one of the woke-iest Indiewire staffers, on the keyboard.

Erbland quote: “The awards campaign for any biographical film benefits from the support of those who knew the subject, but for the increasingly embattled Green Book, it’s essential.”

Farrelly’s film was embattled when it first came out and the wokesters all jumped on it, but now that it’s won three Golden Globe awards and has acquired a positive good-vibe aura, Erbland is calling it “increasingly embattled.”

This is a code term aimed at Academy and guild members: It basically means “you don’t want to vote for anything controversial.”

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted an exhaustively thorough vetting of the highly questionable Green Book pushback. It’s a thorough and measured response to a controversy that should never have gotten traction in the first place, but in the process Feinberg offers his readers a chance to reconsider some unfortunate opinions.

Feinberg gives the haters a prominent forum for their ill-considered, woke-ass complaints, but all in all he doesn’t focus as much attention on the majority opinion — i.e., critics and filmmakers who love this good-hearted film across the board.

Charges of Peter Farrelly‘s film being either a white-savior or magic-negro film are completely stupid and dismissable. For the seventeenth or eighteenth time, Green Book is essentially a parent-child road relationship movie. But with Feinberg’s fair-minded assistance, people are now contemplating the bullshit complaints all over again.

And the Shirley family! What is their actual, deep-down issue? Are they angry that they didn’t see any money out of the film? Feinberg’s exploration suggests they might be just a bunch of agenda-driven soreheads.

Feinberg has bent over backwards to be fair, and in so doing has dented the Green Book bumper.

Variety‘s Matt Donnelly is reporting that the Academy honchos have totally given up trying to find an Oscar host, largely due to the mustard gas after-affect of the Kevin Hart debacle plus the fact that nobody they’ve reached out to has accepted the thankless gig. And so the 2019 Oscars will be hostless, Donnelly is hearing.

Does everyone understand how completely and irrevocably the prevailing climate of politically correct terror has neutered Academy honchos? How they’ve been bullied into a state of cowering haplessness? The SJW twitter commissars have told John Bailey and Dawn Hudson to go sit in a corner, that they don’t run things any more.

“The Oscars are poised to embark on one of the most radical reinventions in the awards show’s long history,” Donnelly has reported. “For the first time in nearly three decades, the biggest night in movies plans to go without a host, individuals with knowledge of the plans told Variety.

“Producers will select a crop of A-listers to introduce various segments instead of relying on one marquee name to kick things off in a monologue filled with Trump zingers, said the insiders. The producers and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group behind the Oscars, are scrambling to line up top talent needed to carry the telecast, which is just six weeks from airing live — on Feb. 24 — from Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre.

“Hand-wringing at the Academy has been palpable,” Donnelly writes.

“As it stands, no new offers are out, nor are any expected to be made to a single potential host to fill the void left by Kevin Hart, who dropped out within hours of being selected when he refused to apologize for his past homophobic remarks that had resurfaced on Twitter.”

In addition to starring in Jonas Åkerlund‘s Polar (Netflix, 1.25) as well as Joe Penna‘s Arctic, Mads Mikkelsen is reportedly circling Seal Hunter, a MeToo! survivalist saga about a female polar bear and a desperately hungry explorer trying to catch and kill the same seals in the same Arctic region. In addition Mikkelsen’s production company, Polar Visions, has begun preparation for a remake of Nanook of the North.

I’m kidding about the last two, but Mikkelsen is definitely the star of Polar and Arctic.

Hollywood Elsewhere has faith that the over-hyped, fated-to-lose storm clouds that are currently hovering over Bradley Cooper and A Star Is Born will not be dissipated by the BAFTA awards.

Five BAFTA nominations were handed today to Cooper and his much-celebrated remake (Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Music), but at the end of the day he’ll probably be in the same shell-shocked place that he was after losing big-time at the Golden Globes.

Bobby Peru needs to explain to HE reader how A Star Is Born is going to beat Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite, which was nominated in 12 categories, or Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma in any significant way.

Like Cooper, Cuaron also accumulated five BAFTA nominations (Best Film, Director, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing). Roma was also nominated for BAFTA’s Best Foreign-Language Film.

Hollywood Elsewhere salutes Glenn Close’s BAFTA Best Actress nomination. She’s up against The Favourite’s Olivia Colman, of course, and a considerable supply of hometown favoritism, but let’s see. We’re all sensing Close momentum in the wake of Sunday night’s Golden Globes, I think.

Here’s the whole 2019 BAFTA nomination rundown.