So what’s the thinking behind Warner Bros.’ A Star is Born and 20th Century Fox’s Bohemian Rhapsody being submitted as dramas for the 2019 Golden Globe awards, instead of the expected musical or comedy category?

I’m presuming that the Warner Bros. strategists are calculating that a Golden Globes comedy/musical category may result in a kind of Academy-mindset downgrade for A Star Is Born. They want Bradley Cooper‘s romantic musical drama to be regarded as a burnished, triple-A effort in all respects and therefore Best Picture material, and so they’re going for a higher grade of estimation.

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Kudos to Deadline‘s Pete Hammond for implying that the Gold Derby community is full of shit for buying into the idea of that Olivia Colman‘s performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite is a Best Actress thing, and stating plainly that in a fair and just world she “should be in supporting.”

Hammond is 100% correct because Colman is not playing a lead protagonist but a mark, the victim of a kind of royal-court con. By the standards of The Sting, she’s playing Robert Shaw while Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone — the film’s actual leads — are playing Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

Anne Thompson agrees but also seems to be capitulating to Colman’s Best Actress narrative because, she says, “Fox is maintaining a kind of radio silence” about the Colman thing.

Nobody is a greater admirer of Olivia Colman than myself. I’ve mentioned this before, but don’t forget that I actually raised dough to fund screenings of Tyrannosaur so people could appreciate how great Colman was in that film.

Significant Tom O’Neill remark: “Poor Glenn Close. If she doesn’t get nominated for The Wife…” Hammond: “Oh, she’ll get nominated.”

Thompson on Can You Ever Forgive Me‘s Melissa McCarthy: “Talk about a narrative!”

HE has issues with Jake “junket whore” Hamilton, but he’s completely correct here in pushing back against the anti-First Man tweets by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Plus he fails to mention a noteworthy flag-unfurling scene involving Neil Armstrong‘s son.

If you’re someone who is concerned or offended by the “American flag controversy” surrounding First Man, I urge you to please watch this clip.

Having actually seen the film, I’d love to clarify a few things for you.

Thanks to @fox32news for giving me time to do this. pic.twitter.com/WP6zw5TyLo

— Jake Hamilton (@JakesTakes) October 10, 2018

First Man director Damien Chazelle to Josh Rothkppf during last weekend’s Hamptons Film festival, as posted by Gold Derby‘s Bill McCuddy: “Art is an inherently political act. But there is a distinction beneath that as to certain choices. That wasn’t a political decision and I hope anyone who sees the movie knows there’s nothing political about it. The moonwalk is only eight minutes. This is about the eight years that led up to it, but in terms of that moonwalk I felt a responsibility to show people things they hadn’t seen.”

Flags aside, HE objects to Hamilton’s “Ron Burgundy” suit jacket.

Consider this DVD Beaver comparison of a shot from Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot. The top image, cropped in 1.66, is from the seven-year-old MGM Bluray (released in May 2011); the bottom image, cropped at 1.85, is from the new Criterion Bluray version.

See the differences? The woman in the top left has her forehead and bangs cropped off by the Criterion guys, and the 1.66 image reveals a part of her right eye that’s missing on the 1.85. On the 1.66 you can see a little bit more of Tony Curtis‘s satin dress below the pendant around his neck. And there’s a bit more image on the right side of the 1.66 version.

Please tell me how it’s better to see less of what Wilder and his dp, Charles Lang, originally captured via the Criterion Bluray. The quality of the two images is identical so how is it better to lose information on the tops and bottoms? Somebody explain. I’m all ears.

Initially posted on 8.5.14: This scene, I submit, contains one of Henry Fonda‘s greatest acting moments. It’s from William Wellman‘s The Ox-Bow Incident, of course — a 1943 film, set in 1880s Nevada, about a lynch mob looking to avenge an uncomfirmed killing of a well-liked local rancher. Fonda plays Gil Carter, the former boyfriend of Rose Mapen (Mary Beth Hughes) who has recently married a snooty San Franciscan named Swanson (George Meeker). Watch Fonda’s gradually shifting reactions to Swanson, particularly starting at the 1:40 mark. That very slight tilt of the head at 1:45…perfect!

Fonda was 37 at the time of filming. Jane was about five; Peter was two or three.

I have a thing about tracks recorded by bands before they became big, and which have always been regarded as minor for the most part.

If the definition of a successful heterosexual relationship is one that lasts a long while, then I’ve pretty much been an embodiment of failure my whole life. I’m thinking it couldn’t hurt to review this life-long pattern from time to time. If you find this sort of thing icky or tedious, fine — don’t read it. But I have a lot of stored-up material, and some of it may translate into worthwhile reading. Or not.

My basic problem is that in the realm of serious, committed relationships I’ve always been emotionally and spiritually attracted to women of character, steel and substance, which is to say strong, smart, bossy women like my mother. But for whatever reason I’ve always felt less than fully “attracted” to these women on a long-term basis, and so sooner or later — sadly, lamentably — the sensual, Henry Miller or Anais Nin-type currents have always seemed to fall away.

I’ve always completely trusted and valued the various mother-figure types, but I’ve always had a strange concurrent thing for exotic fruit — unhappy or bothered women, passionate loonies like my late sister, impulsive poet-kooks, MILFs when I was in my teens and 20s, kamikaze women, curvy fly-by-nighters and gloomheads of various shapes and modes.

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Conservatives don’t represent the majority view, but they’ve nonetheless managed to tip things in their favor by cheating and playing dirty and blocking fair procedure. The four horseman of the apocalypse — gerrymandering, using all kinds of nefarious tactics to keep people of color from voting, dark money and the rank misrepresentations of the electoral college.

But right-wingers’ biggest ace in the hole — the factor that helps them more than any other dishonest, underhanded maneuver in their playbook — is the young person who refuses to vote.

If younger Texas voters got on the stick Beto O’Rourke would almost certainly beat Ted Cruz, but Texas leads the nation in disaffected voters. Right now the polls seem to indicate that Cruz will prevail, and there’s one reason for this — the refusal of young voters to step up to the plate.

Aside from murder and child molesting there is no human behavior more reprehensible than refusing to take an hour or two out of a single day to vote for the best person or, failing that, the lesser of two evils. Imagine all those hundreds of thousands who could’ve held their noses and voted for the deeply unattractive, heavily compromised Hillary Clinton, which would have saved us from Donald Trump. But they couldn’t be bothered. The general understanding is that young people are too pure to vote. They have an asinine view that candidates aren’t worth voting for unless they’re truly inspirational and unfettered. They make me sick with rage.

HE to under-30 assholes: “The responsibility of a country is not in the hands of a privileged few. We are strong and we are free from tyranny as long as each one of us remembers his or her duty as a citizen. Whether it’s to report a pothole at the top of your street, or lies in a State of The Union Address, speak out! Ask those questions. Demand that truth. Democracy is not a free ride man, I’m here to tell you. But this is where we live. And if we do our job, this is where our children will live.”

Formal oath-swearings are always accompanied by an open right hand. (And sometimes with the left hand on a Bible.) But you always swear with your fingers closed, not open. Open fingers are symbolic of insincerity or a lack of solemnity. Sir Thomas More: “When a man makes an oath, Meg, he’s holding himself in his own hands, like water. And if he opens his fingers then he needn’t hope to find himself again.”

Brett Kavanaugh’s opened-fingered oath showed who and what he is — a deceptive, unreliable partisan.

Valerie Plame got it right; ditto Barack Obama.

Naomi Watts got it wrong when she played Plame in Doug Liman’s Fair Game.

Yesterday the Daily Mail ran a story about Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount, 6.26.20), which is currently lensing in the San Diego area.

The article claims that Cruise barely looks older than he did in the original Top Gun, which was shot when he was 24. But he does look a bit more creased, of course. There was no missing that fact in last summer’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout. Every 56 year-old looks older than they did in their mid 20s.

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Two weeks away from starting principal photography, Annapurna bailed yesterday on Fair and Balanced, a Roger Ailes biopic to directed by Jay Roach based on a script by Charles Randolph, and costar John Lithgow as Ailes, Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, Malcolm McDowell as Rupert Murdoch and Margot Robbie as a fictional Fox News-employed character.

Who abruptly pulls the plug on a big-name, fact-based docudrama only 14 days before the start of shooting? Answer: No one unless something else is going on. Something unusual, head-turning, perhaps turbulent.

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