The Film Independent Spirit Awards are about celebrating the finest lower-budgeted features ($20 million and under) in a given year. That has allowed for a whole lotta Oscar overlap over the last couple of decades as mainstream distributors (i.e., the folks who make and distribute expensive films for families with no taste and popcorn-inhaling knuckle-draggers) are 95% out of the Oscar-aspiring game, and so the Academy has focused almost entirely on Spirit-brand features.

Every so often a lower-budgeted Oscar nominee will have cost $25 million or thereabouts (i.e., Green Book) and is therefore ineligible for a Spirit Award, but generally the Oscars are the Spirits and vice versa.

There’s always more of a p.c. emphasis among the Spirit winners (diversity, representation, virtue-signalling) but over the last two or three years Academy and guild members have totally subscribed to the comintern mindset. Thus: “When talent and merit are replaced by representation, then we’re living in a world that doesn’t care about movies anymore.” — Brett Easton Ellis in a 2.19.19 guest column for The Hollywood Reporter.

This year, however, the Best Picture Oscar overlap is nil. The five Best Feature nominees at the 2019 Spirit Awards — Eighth Grade, First Reformed, If Beale Street Could Talk, Leave No Trace and You Were Never Really Here — are not nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. And only one of the Spirit nominees (the swoony, lovey-dovey, zero-story-tension, Wong Kar Wai-ish Beale Street) has arguably been nominated for p.c. reasons.

Here’s the HE rundown of some of the Spirit Swards — my picks for who or what should win vs. what will win.

Best Feature: Bo Burnham‘s Eighth Grade probably will win; Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed definitely should win. If Beale Street wins, you’ll know that the p.c. commissar mentality is really running the show this year.

Best Director: First Reformed‘s Paul Schrader has posted some edgy, non-p.c. observations on Twitter and Facebook from time to time, and so he has to be disciplined by the comintern with a no-win in this category. If you ask me You Were Never Really Here‘s Lynn Ramsay is the second most deserving nominee (after Schrader). Alas, the winner will probably be Debra Granik, director of Leave No Trace — a movie that was made solely for the Sundance/Spirit realm, a film that exists in its own little world.

Best Male Lead: Ethan Hawke of First Reformed should win and will win. I’m presuming that the Spirit committee that nominated Blindspotting‘s Daveed Diggs for this award was, on some level, kidding. That or they threw his name into the hat as a p.c. gimmee, knowing full well he couldn’t possibly win.

Best Female Lead: The Wife‘s Glenn Close will definitely win, and so she should.

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You don’t want to cough or sneeze if you’re coping with ultra-painful rib trauma. So over the last five days (and, incidentally, for the first time in my life) I’ve mastered the technique of suppressing these urges. I swallow them, so to speak. A weird feeling but at the same time a relief to have “dodged the bullet.”

How am I doing? Incrementally better. I can raise myself out of a chair (or off the couch) without experiencing so much rib pain that I briefly flirt with the idea of suicide. That’s progress. Pain is still my constant companion — just not as acute. I still quietly moan from time to time. It feels better on some level to let it out like a two-year-old rather than maintain a stoic, Lee Marvin-like silence.

A Hollywood Elsewhere commenter who said something the other day about throwing me a few pain meds (or selling them to me) hasn’t gotten in touch via email or Twitter direct mail. I have no personal West Hollywood physician (because I’m more or less bulletproof except when I fall in the snow in the Sierra Nevada foothills), no drug-dealer friends or acquaintances.

I’m wondering yesterday if I’ll be up to attending the Film Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday. Shuffling along with my cane, etc. I’ll make that call on Saturday morning, I suppose, but in the meantime I’ll be picking up my press pass today in Deep Hollywood.

Five days ago (Sunday, 2.17) I slipped on some ice in the Sierra foothills, and fell hard on my back. The right side, which may have saved me. Nothing broken, cracked or bruised, but since that moment I’ve become the King of Pain.

I’ve been floating between three mindsets — anger at the agony, trying to fight off feelings of depression and trying to find ways to distract myself from this ordeal. But today I discovered a piece of Hollywood history that made me realize things aren’t as bad as all that. Or that they could be a whole lot worse. I’m still furious at my temporary fate, but when I think about poor Suzan Ball…

Click through to full story on HE-plus]

I’m sinking into my second viewing of Leaving Neverland (HBO,3.4 and 3.5), and there’s just no denying the drill-bit honesty of this film…no denial, no diminishment, tough as nails.

The millions who are still glomming on to the myth of Michael Jackson — that half-magical, commercially formidable, white-sock superstar aura that has persisted and expanded since his death on 6.25.09 — these millions who are still feeding off Jackson are about to experience a profound kick in the head from this four-hour doc.

What I mean is that the Jackson-guilt denialists are finished. Jig’s up. Once this four-hour doc hits HBO, forget it.

Leaving Neverland is a talking-heads horror film — an intimate, obviously believable, sometimes sexually explicit story of two boys — Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck, now pushing 40 — who became Michael Jackson’s special “friends” — i.e., lovers, masturbation buddies, fellators — while their more or less oblivious parents went along, thinking that the relationship was more of a kindly innocent bond.

Wake up: Jackson was a finagling fiend, a smooth predator, the kindest serpent.

Hollywood Elsewhere won’t be catching Captain Marvel (Disney, 3.8.19) until the evening of Monday, March 4. Very few critics or columnists (if any) are more antagonistic to superhero movies than myself. If I therefore give Captain Marvel a thumbs-up review, it’ll really mean something. You really can’t trust the others. Well, you can but you know what they’re like.

A producer friend recently spoke with an Academy voter (a guy) about Roma and the Best Picture crunch:

“He said there’s a strong contingent of Academy members voting against Roma, because of Netflix. The feeling was that by giving Netflix the Best Picture win, it could be a vote for streaming and against theatrical releases. He felt that Netflix would use the win to pull more and more films into the streaming universe and thereby be voting for the beginning of the end of theatrical film releases. He also said there was a lot of resentment for the amount of money spent on ads by Netflix (30$ million?) which even in a typically ferocious campaign season, felt like someone trying to buy his vote.”

An anonymous editor speaking to Indiewire‘s Bill Desowitz: “I haven’t seen Roma because Alfonso Cuarón took an editing credit without ever having touched the Avid and that offended me so deeply that I won’t go near the film. It was non-union so he, not being a member of MPEG, was able to get away with it.

Also: “I think the lousy field of candidates for this year’s Best Picture Oscar could be a result of that push to include people who really have not yet developed the taste level or artistic maturity that comes with experience.” He’s referring, of course, to the “New Academy Kidz.”

Ex-Monkee Peter Tork has died at age 77. I’m glad he lived a relatively long life and enjoyed a degree of financial comfort, but God, the poor fella — famous in the mid to late ’60s (actually ’66 to ’71) for being one of the ignoble Monkees, but eternally branded, despite having worked as an actual musician, as a kind of buffoon — an amiable performer who’d forever be tainted as a sell-out.

Tork’s Wiki page: “Stephen Stills had auditioned for the new television series about four pop-rock musicians but was turned down because the show’s producers felt his hair and teeth would not photograph well on camera. They asked Stills if he knew of someone with a similar ‘open, Nordic look,’ and Stills suggested Tork audition for the part. Tork got the job and became one of the four members of the Monkees, a fictitious pop band in the mid-1960s, created for a television sitcom written about the fictitious band. Tork was the oldest member of the group.”

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The latest alt.sexuality acronym is LGBTQIA. Remember the good old days when it was just LGBT? Then along came Q — questioning — which I never really understood. Every gay person I’ve ever known has told me they knew their orientation when they were five, six or seven. So if you’re “questioning” you’d have to be…what, three or four? That or extremely indecisive. It just doesn’t seem as if adults walking around and questioning their sexual identity could ever be all that numerous. Now the culture has added I — intersex — and A — asexual or allied. I’m sorry but what’s intersex? I’m honestly stumped. I understand asexual and allied.

It’s been suggested that the sooner Jussie Smollett offers a full mea culpa and falls on his sword, the better. Issue an unqualified apology to all the actual victims of racist or anti-gay hate attacks and also (I know this sounds extreme but he may as well be comprehensive) to the reprehensible MAGA community. He just needs to come clean, drop to his knees, weep, beg forgiveness, and announce that he’s entered therapy. Then he needs to write a magazine article about what happened. And then go on a talk-show and speaking tour. After he pays the fine and serves the time, he needs to move to Paris or Barcelona or Berlin. He could become a stand-up comic, billing himself as Jussie “lying ayehole” Smollett.

Raising myself off the couch to a standing position is too horrible to contemplate, and so I sit for hours on end. Everything is anguish and occasional agony. If I drop something on the floor I leave it there — it’s too painful to bend over and pick it up. (Yesterday my iPhone sat on the living room floor for three hours.) I don’t speak words any more — I moan and groan and occasionally wail like a 17 year-old kid who’s been bayoneted on the battlefield. Yesterday I went to a nearby West Hollywood chiropractor, but he told me there’s no real chiropractic solution for bruised ribs — I just need to wait until they heal. I’m stuck. If only I was friendly with a couple of drug dealers. Even one.

5:50 pm update: Okay, it doesn’t hurt quite as much as it has over the last two days.

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