I’m already feeling miserable over the apparent likelihood that the weather may be chilly and wet during tomorrow’s Spirit Awards ceremony in Santa Monica. I’m also feeling glum over the distinct possibility that Jordan Peele‘s Get Out will beat Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name for the Best Feature prize. (I’m clinging to the fact that Guadagnino’s film won big-time at last November’s Gotham Awards, which may be a harbinger of Spirit thinking.) I’m presuming either Peele or Guadagnino will take the Best Director trophy. CMBYN‘s Timothee Chalamet and Lady Bird‘s Saoirse Ronan will presumably win the Best Actor and Best Actress award, but what do I know? Here’s hoping Lady Bird‘s Laurie Metcalf wins for Best Supporting Actress, and that Geremy Jasper‘s Patti Cake$, a Sundance breakout that made almost no money, takes the Best First Feature award. I’m playing the rest by ear.

For the seventh time, the Oscar Wilde Awards were celebrated at JJ Abrams‘ Bad Robot last night. Good people (Mark Hamill, Colin Farrell, Kathy Griffin, Martin Short, Diane Keaton, Barry Keoghan, Catherine O’Hara), warm vibe, nice speeches, tasty hors d’oeuvres, etc. But why didn’t Saoirse Ronan and Martin McDonagh show up?

The event was organized by US-Ireland Alliance honcho TrinaVargo, and was moderated by Abrams. It was too cold to hold the event outside (which has been the norm in years past), so everyone was crammed inside. Crowded as hell but no worries. Everyone spoke amusingly for two or three minutes. The Academic performed after the speeches.

The most moving portion of the evening happened during a reading of two poems — “The Bell and the Blackbird” and “Just Beyond Yourself” — by David Whyte.

Thanks again to JJ for the invite. May God abandon His/Her posture of neutrality and indifference and in so doing love and protect the Irish forever. I’m English (visit the village of Wells, Somerset some day) but my first thought when I visited Ireland in ’88 was “I could die here.”

I recorded a discussion a couple of hours ago with Jordan Ruimy. 78 minutes. Jordan’s insect anntennae are telling him that Jordan Peele‘s Get Out will pull off “the upset to end all upsets” when it comes to the Best Picture Oscar. I say “nah.” Peele’s only real shot is possibly winning Best Original Screenplay, despite most oddsmakers betting that Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards has this award in the bag.

But if Get Out wins…well, there will no joy in HE Mudville, I can tell you that. There will be, in fact, a great weeping and pulling of hair and refrigerator-punching…a great bellowing howl that will stand up to the legendary wailings of John Lennon during his primal scream period. If this happens I’m going to tap something out for the column but I’ll also record some thoughts verbally and post the mp3 as a form of post-traumatic therapy.

All I know is that apart from the sentimental embarassments (Chicago, The King’s Speech, The Artist, The Greatest Show on Earth, Driving Miss Daisy, Around The World in 80 Days), the idea behind any Best Picture selection is to somehow self-define, to capture cultural echoes, to say “this is a piece of who and what we are right now…not a profound summary of our contadictory drives and longings, but at least a partial reflection of same.”

This spotty, imperfect but occasionally honorable tradition will come under question if Peele’s film, a “trite get-whitey movie…a mixture of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and Meet The Fockers with B-level horror” (per Harmin’ Armond), takes the big prize.

If an emissary from the future had pulled me aside as I walked out of a Get Out screening at the Pacific Grove on 2.24.17 and said, “Jeff, you don’t know me from Adam and you obviously don’t have to trust me, but I’m telling you that a year from now Get Out is going to be a leading Best Picture contender, and may even win come March 4th, 2018″…if someone had looked me in the eye and said that in all sincerity I would have said “no offense, brah, but I really, really don’t think so.”

It turns out Oscar telecast producers Mike DeLuca and Suzanne Todd liked my notion about bringing back Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway to present an Academy Award on Sunday, only they’ve done me one better.

TMZ reported last night that Beatty and Dunaway will in fact present the Best Picture Oscar at the ceremony’s conclusion and, not as my “Mickey One” piece suggested, a “minor” award “for dignity’s sake.”

Excerpt: “[TMZ’s] Oscar sources tell us Warren and Faye both just showed up at the Dolby Theatre and rehearsed the big moment. We’re told they were shuffled onstage together very quickly to run through their bit. They went through their lines twice. She began by saying, ‘Presenting is better the second time around.’ Beatty followed up with, ‘The winner is Gone with the Wind. We’re told the writers are still putting finishing touches on their lines.”

Calling, please, for more show-stopping rants in which an offended party lets the offender have it in spades. Preferably with video clip attached. For me, nothing beats Steve Martin‘s brutal vivisection of John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles (’87), but it’s all a matter of taste.

I regret blowing off a 7 pm screening of A Wrinkle Of Time at Disney tonight, but I’d rather attend J.J. Abrams‘ annual Oscar Wilde awards at Bad Robot. Then I’ll catch a 9:30 or 10 pm screening of Eli Roth and Bruce Willis‘s Death Wish at the Arclight or Grove. Yes, that’s right — MGM flacks wouldn’t invite me to a screening. 5:22 pm update: I’ve just returned from picking up my Spirit Awards press pass at Ginsberg-Libby.

Not long after Elvis Presley died of a drug overdose in August 1977, the blunt-spoken John Lennon told a reporter that Presley “died in 1958, when he went into the Army.” There were, in fact, two Elvis Presleys, but the better of the two was elbowed and suffocated early on — career pressures, tumbling tides, you-tell-me-what-else.

The one that mattered was Elvis #1 — a rip-roaring cultural force of the mid ’50s, a slender and sideburned Memphis native who exuded a pulsing sexual energy and totally ruled the rock ‘n’ roll roost from early ’56 to March of ’58 (when he began his two-year military hitch) and who made five half-decent films — Love Me Tender, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole and Flaming Star.

Elvis #2 was an in-and-outer and mostly a sell-out, the star of a series of appalling, ridiculous Hollywood films, a yokel who didn’t like the counterculture and the antiwar left, and thereafter became a flamboyant conservative who paid President Nixon an obsequious visit in December ’70, and then a flashy, entourage-flanked Las Vegas headliner, and finally a bloated, grotesque, drug-taking, peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich-consuming, on-the-verge-of-death wreck of his former self.

The apparent aim of this three-hour, two-part HBO movie, directed by Thom Zimny and debuting on 4.14, is to portray Presley as a serious, aspirational, hard-working artist during his slow-decline period (’58 to ’77). Maybe there’s more to this era than is commonly known, but…okay, I’ll watch it and see what goes.

I smelled bullshit the instant that I read a claim by N.Y. Times White House reporter Maggie Haberman that Hope Hicks‘ decision to resign (a) had nothing to do with her House Intelligence Committee testimony (i.e., “I’ve told white lies”) and (b) that she’d been planning to leave for “months“. (Hicks only took the White House Communications Director job six months ago — 8.27.17 — when Anthony Scaramucci left.) The general belief out there is that Haberman is a stenographer for the Trump White House. Sure seems that way.

Not exactly charismatic and a little wonky to boot, but he’s a good, sensible fellow.

“Polls have consistently showed broad support for a universal background check. National polls in 2016 and 2017 found between 84 and 94 percent of respondents supported background checks. But what about NRA members? While federal law requires background checks for sales from federally licensed dealers, unlicensed private sellers are not required to conduct background checks — although states can create their own laws. A 2015 poll of gun owners by Public Policy Polling surveyed 816 gun owners. 83% said they support a criminal background check for everyone who wants to buy a firearm. Of the 196 who said they were NRA members, the poll showed that 72% support background checks.” — from 2.27 Politifact article by Amy Sherman.

If a genie were to offer me one wish (instead of the usual three), I would ask for the collapse of the superhero comic-book scourge. For these films have transformed the movie-theatre experience, a once-hallowed shrine, into something brutishly primitive and whorishly repetitive. Excellent stuff is obviously being made and seen, but mostly on my 65″ Sony 4K. Dipshit superhero flicks, cheap horror, dumb comedies, family fantasies, romcoms and girl-power fables are tumorous metaphors for the quarter-of-an-inch-deep spiritual vistas and fast-food taste buds of millions of GenX, Millennial and GenZ moviegoers.

And I’m speaking as someone who refused to see Girls Trip but truly enjoyed the last hour of Black Panther, and definitely looking forward to Ant Man and the Sassy Bitch Wasp.

When will it all end? In a May 2016 essay that offered “a nuanced explanation of where the industry’s at, how it got there, and what it means for the future of movies,” TimStarz04 predicted a collapse sometime in the early ’20s. The then-current system (slambang superfantasy flicks costing an arm and a leg, and only a small portion of them returning substantial profits) is “unsustainable,” he said, echoing the views of many in the industry (including Steven Spielberg). He specifically theorized that 2016 “will be the first year of the collapse of the Hollywood [comic-book idiot] studio system that will probably take hold by the beginning of the 2020s.”

What has changed over the last 21 months, if anything? The answer is “nothing,” of course, but I’m asking all the same.

“People should look at comedies as dramas when they’re writing [them]. They should be a story that would work just as well without any jokes.” — Judd Apatow in just-popped (3.1.18) Masterclass trailer.

I’ve been saying this all along. A good comedy is just as story-savvy, character-rich and well-motivated as a good drama. Good comedies and dramas both need strong third-act payoffs. Take away the jokes, the broad business and the giggly schtick, and a successful comedy will still hold water in dramatic terms. But most comedic writers, it seems, start with an amusing premise, then add the laugh material, and then, almost as an afterthought, weave in a semblance of a story along with some motivation and a third-act crescendo that feels a little half-assed.

Remember Amy Schumer‘s eulogy at her dad’s funeral in Trainwreck? Exactly.