10:38 pm: Mikey Madison wins the Best Actress Oscar!!! Demi Moore and her dishonest narrative have been defeated!!! Eureka!!

The HE server is stalling due to a traffic surge…apoligies

10:18 pm: Cillian Murphy strolls out to give the Best Actor Oscar to fucking Adrien Brody. I’m sick, depressed, pissed off, scowling. Timothee Chalamet, Ralph Fiennes or Sebastian Stan…awarding any of these performances would have been far more suitable. Brody has been going on and on and on….you should know what a drag it is to listen to you, man. Will you shut up? Pretentiousness…wow.

10:10 pm: The Brutalist wins for Best Score? Why? I don’t remmember a single note, a single stanza, a single measure…no musically enticing moments of any kind from that difficult-to-endure film.

10:08 pm: Conan O’Brien‘s best line of the night: “Anora having a good night so far,,,yeah, I guess people are pleased to finally see someone stand up to a powerful Russian.”

9:57 pm: HE fully approves of Walter Salles‘ I’m Still Here winning the Best Int’l Feature Oscar. Fully deserved. Proud moment all around.

9;54 pm: The fucking Brutalist wins for best Cinematography? Why? Because it was shot in VistaVision? The lensing is dreary, glum, morose. Very strange call.

9:40 pm: Morgan Freemqn offering a special tribute to the late Gene Hackman. “Rest in peace, my friend.” Freeman doesn’t look like himself these days. Hackman was given the cleanup finale position in the death reel. David lynch, Robert Towne, James Earl Jones. Who was snubbed?

9:36 pm: Dune Part II wins for Best Sound, Best Visual Effects….blah.

9:15 pm: Best Documentary Feature Oscar goes to No Other Land, which I’ve barely heard of and certainly haven’t seen. Pro-Gaza, of course. Yes, I intend to see it. Stop supporting terror!

8:57 pm: Mick Jagger strolls on stage! Best Original Song. Obviously Bob Dylan‘s songs were the best ones performed in a 2024 film. The Oscar goes to the Emilia Perez song, “El Mal.” Congrats!

8:55 pm: Wicked guys win best Production Design Oscar. Congrats,….nobody cares.

8:46 pm: Zoe Saldana has known for many weeks that she’s winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar so stop with the fucking crying already. Suck it in, show a little class….stop it! Take the bow, you won, great, congrats, etc. But enough with the identity crap (“the first Dominican woman to win this award!)

8:42 pm: Anora‘s Sean Baker wins Best Editing Oscar! Amazing! He’ll almost certainly win Best Director and w eqall know Anora is locked for Best Picture Oscar…four for Sean!

8:31 pm: The integrity of the Bond franchise is over, Amazon has bought out Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson and will proceed to franchise and stream it do death, and so the Oscars are mounting a big Vegas-y musical-slash-dance-ass tribute to the Bond films. This whole big sequence is basically a huge fuck-you to Amazon in general and Jennifer Salke in particular.

8:23 pm: Substance wins the Best Makeup Oscar…okay, that’s fair.

8:13 pm: Conclave‘s Peter Straughn wins Best Adapted Screenplay!

8:10 pm: Sean Baker wins Best Original Screenplay for Anora! This is a forecast of things to come, methinks.

8:08 pm: Nick Offerman (whom I never, ever want to see in a gay sex scene EVER AGAIN) does a voice-over harassment skit with Conan.

7:53 pm: Costume design! Which will go to either the Dune, Conclave or Wicked guys, right? And the Oscar goes to Team Wicked. Paul Tazewell! First black dude to win for costume design….racial barrier falls!

7:28 pm: You promised you’d be quick, Andrew Garfield….you lied. I hate corporate-funded, broadly ufunny, family-friendly animation. The dialogue-free Flow wins Best Animated Feature…whatever. Cheers. Congrats also to Latvia’s In The Shadow of the Cypress.

real shit https://t.co/qXD8DxzuBM pic.twitter.com/ldcebyPA3c

— zoë rose bryant (@zoerosebryant) March 3, 2025

7:28 pm: Robert Downey, Jr‘s flared tuxedo pants don’t make it. Shout-out to Anora‘s Yura Borisov! Jeremy Strong‘s performance as Roy Cohn was “a master class.” (Strong should have won,) The universally predicted win for Kieran Culkin has happened, of course. Culkin is jabbering jabbering jabbering…really cutting loose.

7:04 pm: HE dislikes watching Wicked‘s two wailing, warbling costars (Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande) over-singing the fuck out out of those wailing, over-emphatic songs….I already have a headache and the show just started…God!

And now a Substance body-horror, Conan-emerging-from-Demi’s-body joke…”did Conan not have work done?….Hollywood’s biggest night starts at 4 pm…18 Netflix price increases!…I really loved The Butalist…I didn’t want it to end, and luckily it didn’t.” Hollywood hates, hates, HATES The Brutalist….joke about Karla Sofia Gascon‘s publicist using the “f” word 482 times. Adam Sandler poorly dressed routine was moderately funny.

…for the first half-hour of the show, give or take. I’m picking up a client at LGA at 6 pm and delivering them to Stamford (short trip), so I probably won’t be plopped in front of the 65″ Sony 4K HBR in Wilton until 7:30 pm, depending on the breaks. I will, however, be following the first 30 minutes of the show on the Hulu headphones.

Accurate or what? pic.twitter.com/j7ZeRSlv4z

— Community Notes & Violations (@CNviolations) March 1, 2025

…that you’d decide to re-watch Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse on Hulu Plus…imagine!

Posted on 1.9.12: “My own oft-repeated view is fact that anyone with a smidgen of taste or perspective knew from the get-go that Spielberg’s film didn’t have the internals that would make it go all the way, and that the only thing it had going for it was the fact that many respectable professionals (including IndieWire columnist Anne Thompson and Fox publicity honcho Bumble Ward) admitted it had made them cry.

“I have an odd theory. I could be off-base, but I believe that a particular line of dialogue did a lot to stop War Horse. That’s right — one line.

“It was spoken during the no-man’s-land, barbed-wire scene when the British and the German soldier are cutting through the wire that has totally entangled poor Joey. And they start talking about this and that, and the British soldier says (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “You know, here we are…soldiers from opposing sides, standing in a muddy no-man’s-land at night and helping this poor beast get free of the wire. Heh…you know something? I think we should give him a name. But what could we reasonably call him, given that he’s a horse and we’re in the middle of a war? Wait…I know! I think we could call him ‘war horse.’ It kinda fits, you know?”

“I was already slumping in my seat when that scene began. But after the British soldier said it I muttered to myself, “Holey moley! All right, that’s it…no way this thing wins the Best Picture Oscar. In fact, it may not even be nominated.”

From Oscar prognostiactor and East Hamptons quipster Bill McCuddy…

Conan joke #1. “Anora is about someone completely taken in by a waste-of-skin Russian who has no intention of living up to his promises, much less behaving like a man of honor in any capacity. President Trump saw it and said ‘See, that’s what’s wrong with Hollywood…that could never happen.'”

Conan joke #2. “Sylvester Stallone, Jean Claude Van Damme and Mr. Miyagi have agreed to train Zelensky for his rematch with Trump.”

…to behave this way in an emotional relationship film, or in any kind of film for that matter. Because men, being inherently gross, toxic and narcissistic, need to atone for the sin of having forced women to live in a demeaning box,,,because they now, as punishment, need to sit in the back seat or even the trunk. Men are no longer allowed to say to this or that woman that she needs “a lot of drinks” in order “to kill the bug” that she has up her ass.

When Jack Nicholson dies (no!) there will be torrents of tears and a shout of anguish such as the world has never heard before.

It’s 3:10 am, and I’m heading for a 5:30 am Newark Airport pickup. But this is funny. I think. I need to wake up first. Mike Myers!

The truly magnificent David Johansen has passed from cancer at age 75. He began coping with the disease last year, it says here. The poor guy fell and “broke his back in two places” last November. Back pain is agony…I’ve been there. I hope a friend or two slipped him some smack.

If anyone hears about a Manhattan memorial gathering or service of any kind, please let me know.

Johansen’s “Not That Much” is one my all-time favorite power-chord tracks.

The original “Hot Hot Hot”, recorded by the late Montserrat musician Arrow (aka Alphonsus Celestine Edmund Cassell), popped in ’82 but it became a bigger hit in ’87 with Johansen’s (aka Buster Poindexter‘s) version.

Posted on 3.16.23: Along with ex-girlfriend Sophie Black, who matured into a respected poet, I co-produced two Save The Whales benefit rock concerts in Wilton, Connecticut. Both were held on a 52-acre property owned by Sophie’s parents, David and Linda Cabot Black. The first happened over the July 4th weekend in ’76; the second (for which Sophie and I were interviewed for a 6.26.77 N.Y. Times piece) happened a year later.

And I was proud and gratified to book the David Johansen band for the ’77 show, as I’d been a fan of the New York Dolls; ditto “Not That Much” and “Funky But Chic.”

A couple of months prior to the ’76 concert Johansen and I chatted in some downtown Manhattan bar, and I really liked his charm, aura, self-deprecating humor, etc. Plus I learned that night that Johansen loves (or loved) to play-act and pretend to be someone else. DJ made bank on play-acting when Buster Poindexter came along in the ’80s, but when I spoke to him that night he was speaking with a working-class British accent. Pretending to be, in a manner of speaking, some Jagger-like rocker from East London or something. It was well known at the time that Johansen was a lifelong New Yorker (raised in Staten Island), and so I was flat-out thrilled and fascinated that he was performing for me — an audience of one. Johansen was dishy in a Jagger-ish way back then, and the accent fit right in. I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live.

The Scorsese-Tedeschi doc is worth the price and the time.

Posted on 4.15.23: Last night I watched Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi‘s Personality Crisis: One Night Only, and I came out of it knowing and caring a bit…okay, a lot more about David Johansen than I had before I sat down.

It’s basically standard documentary portraiture, of course, but primarily a relaxed, low-key lounge concert film, shot in the Carlyle bar in January 2020.

The doc is augmented with recent interview footage (apparently shot in Johansen’s home by his stepdaughter Leah Hennessey, daughter of wife Mara Hennessey) plus some performance footage from the good old days (New York Dolls, ’70s solo career, Buster Poindexter in the ’80s and ’90s).

And the thing that stuck in my head, frankly, is the made-plain fact that Johansen is a free-floating existentialist dancer-singer-performer who’s more or less cool with the fact that he’s not stinking rich. He and his family are living with a certain amount of style, comfort and swagger, but the difference between David Jo’s lifestyle and that of, let’s say, Mick Jagger is apparently considerable or at least noteworthy. (There’s a moment during the Carlyle show when he repeats a famous line from Ira Levin‘s Deathtrap — “Nothing recedes like success”.) I also loved it when Johansen tells his stepdaughter about never having had a grand master plan for his life, and that he’s always considered his journey (Johansen is 73) in five-year increments.

Gene Hackman to director Barry Sonnenfeld immediately after seeing Get Shorty…

Shelley Winters, Marlon Brando during filming of A Streetcar Named Desire (early ’51).

Inebriated George Harrison about to throw contents of a mixed drink at a photographer inside West Hollywood’s Whiskey-a-Go-Go (August ’64).

Basil “Joe” Jagger and sons Chris (l.) and Mick (r.) — fall of ’56.

I’ve searched for years for authentic color snaps taken during the filming of The Young Lions (’58) — this is the only one I’ve ever discovered.

Anyone who would wear this peacock shirt is almost certainly beyond therapy:

“If the Democratic Party has a problem drawing young men who believe that the excesses of wokeness have left them behind, could there be a more appealing figure than the guy they’ve been watching argue about sports for the past decade?

“Over the past three months, Stephen A. Smith has teased a possible run for President in 2028. I have enthusiastically posted about this on social media for a variety of reasons, [although] the details of Smith’s potential run have shifted around a bit: In November, he told the hosts of The View that he was a ‘fiscal conservative and a social liberal,’ and, while he supported a ‘live and let live’ mentality, he wondered why liberals had allowed hot-button issues, like transgender athletes participating in sports, to define their platform.

“He also said that he would run as an independent because he wasn’t going to be ‘bought and paid for.’ Last week, when asked by his friend Sean Hannity about the possibility of a run — a subject that gained steam online after a survey of potential 2028 primary candidates showed him polling at two per cent, just a point behind the former Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz and the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro — Smith said that he could beat any Democratic candidate who was under consideration, including Kamala Harris.

“Smith is almost certainly a fiscal conservative, but people reposted a 2009 tweet of his that reads ‘I loved hearing Bernie Sanders. He personifies my views as an Independent.’

“Since the ’24 election, I have written about the need for a ‘hostile takeover’ of the Democratic Party and the potential for new candidates who stand far outside of the establishment’s tepid, catastrophic choices. The policy positions of these candidates, I believe, do not matter as long as they are within reason — which means that everything from full-bore leftist economic populism to staunch, performative centrism is on the table.

“Liberal voters are angry about pretty much everything right now. They’re mad that Joe Biden decided to run again for President; they’re mad at Washington insiders and the media for withholding information about Biden’s decline; they’re mad at some vague entity they usually call ‘the D.N.C.’ for not coming up with a better strategy to defeat Donald Trump; they’re mad that the Democrats have not put up more of a fight against Trump and Elon Musk post-election. All this alarm and losing has made Democratic politics a rather miserable and humorless endeavor.

“What’s required for 2028 is a combative, attention-grabbing candidate who can punch the Democratic establishment squarely in the face.” — The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang, posted on 2.14.25.

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