Very few remember and even fewer have seen Separate Tables, the 1958 parlor drama with Burt Lancaster, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Deborah Kerr and Wendy Hiller. And yet this constipated, dialogue-driven film, directed by Delbert Mann (Marty) and based on a pair of one-act plays by Terence Rattigan, was nominated for seven Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actress (Kerr), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Black and White), and Best Dramatic or Comedy Score) and won two (Niven for Best Actor, Hiller for Best Supporting Actress).

Separate Tables is exactly the kind of solemn, stiff-necked talkfest that was often regarded as Oscar bait in the mid-to-late ’50s. Decorum and public appearances undermined by dark secrets and notions of perverse sexuality, etc. Shudder! Erections and dampenings that dare not speak their name, or words to that effect.

Talk about “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” etc. Two years before Separate Tables appeared a creepy, low-budget sci-fi thriller called Invasion of the Body Snatchers opened and was promptly ignored by the highbrows. Four years earlier (in ’54) The Creature From The Black Lagoon was greeted with similar indifference if not disdain. Today a pair of direct descendants, Get Out and The Shape of Water, are Best Picture nominees, and there’s a better-than-even (though admittedly dwindling) chance that Shape will take the Big Prize.

Yesterday I received a hilarious, spot-on essay by the great David Thomson — about Separate Tables initially, but also about how the appeal and some of the “Academy inflation” of this 60-year-old film are echoed in I, Tonya and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Consider this excerpt especially: “About fifteen minutes into I Tonya, on being bowled over by the vicious hangdog look of Allison Janney’s mother, the toxic lines slipping like smoke from the fag on her lips, I was ready to give her the supporting actress Oscar on the spot. Twenty minutes later I was bored with her because she was still doing the same bitter schtick. She’s an act, a show-stopper, the sort of hag who would get a round of applause as she appears on-stage, severing any prospect of dramatic truth.

“It’s not that Janney is less than skilled, or hasn’t paid her dues for decades. She’s a clever old pro so give her the Oscar. But let’s abandon the myth that she is presenting a real ‘deplorable’ instead of saying, ‘Aren’t deplorables a riot?'”

Here’s the whole brilliant piece (the first 17 paragraphs about Separate Tables, and the rest about Janney and Margot Robbie in I, Tonya and McDormand in Three Billboards):

“I found myself watching Separate Tables on Turner Classic Movies. There it was, offered with the seemingly unassailable claim that it had been nominated for Best Picture in 1958 along with six other nominations. It even had two wins, and I remembered that one of them was for David Niven playing a bogus Major. I had seen the film in 1958 and flinched at it even then (the bogus business was all fusspot), in a year that included Vertigo, Touch of Evil, Bonjour Tristesse, Man of the West, The Tarnished Angels and many others that still seem of value.

Late yesterday afternoon the Academy announced that scuttlebutt to the contrary, Sufjan Stevens will perform “Mystery of Love” on the March 4th Oscar telecast.

Hollywood Elsewhere has a notion that the Call Me By Your Name guys were just as surprised and elated as I was by this decision. Direct quote from director Luca Guadagnino from his home in Crema, received at 8:28 am Pacific: “FANTASTIC!”

It was pure coincidence that producers Mike DeLuca and Suzanne Todd announced this hours after yesterday’s HE rant about rumors (which were first aired by Gold Derby‘s Chris Beacham) that Stevens might be eliminated from the show. And the announcement was not a reversal of an earlier indicated position when DeLuca and Todd didn’t ask Stevens to perform when they first invited him to attend the show. (In a 2.3.18 interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Michael O’Connell, Stevens said that he might not perform “Mystery of Love” during the ceremony since “they’ve only asked if I’m going to attend.”)

No, seriously — I think the Academy did respond to pressure from some quarter. Maybe the Sony Classics guys called up and said “Yo, what da fock?”

From KamalaHarris.org: “Just a few moments ago, NRA executive Wayne LaPierre attacked Kamala directly on stage at a conservative conference, one week after the tragic shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School.

“It was as outrageous as you would expect, and it’s clear from his rhetoric that they’re not just going after Kamala but after anyone who supports gun safety legislation. That includes Chris Murphy, one of the Senate’s strongest voices on gun safety.

“Now, this isn’t the first time LaPierre or the NRA have come after Kamala and her colleagues, and it will not be the last. If they think they can defeat Chris in November, there is simply no end to the amount of dark money they will spend to attack him. That’s why we need to make them pay for their outrageous attacks before they escalate even further in the days and weeks ahead.”

Opening graph of LaPierre’s Wikipage: “Wayne Robert LaPierre, Jr. (born November 8, 1949) is an American author and gun rights advocate. He is best known for his position as the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association and for his advocacy of school children being massacred by far-right wing psychopaths with weapons of war. He is widely viewed as owning the entire Republican Congress, which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in blood money from his organization.”

I don’t know which nominee for 2017’s Best Original Song is most likely to win an Oscar on March 4th, but Sufjan Stevens‘ “Mystery of Love“, from Call Me By Your Name, is easily (a) the catchiest, (b) the most transporting, and (c) the song that should obviously win. The 90th Academy Awards Wikipage lists Stevens as one of the performers so I’ve naturally been looking forward to the big moment when he strums and sings on the Dolby stage.

The other expected performers and nominated songs are Mary J. Blige (“Mighty River” from Mudbound), Miguel and Natalia Lafourcade (“Remember Me” from Coco), Andra Day and Common (“Stand Up For Something” from Marshall) and Keala Settle (“This Is Me” from The Greatest Showman).

Except last week Gold Derby‘s Chris Beachum wrote that “we are hearing rumors that only three songs will be performed: ‘This Is Me’ from The Greatest Showman, ‘Remember Me’ from Coco and ‘Mighty River’ from Mudbound.”

The next day Beachum added: “This is confirmed by someone we know involved in booking the show. Producers have blocked out the entire ceremony and say there is only time for three [songs] to be performed.” Beachum later clarified that “the person telling us this information has ties to the show but isn’t working directly on it…I haven’t heard anything so far to counter what is being rumored.”

My response to this heresay was, of course, “whoa, whoa, WHAT?” Call Me By Your Name is Best Picture-nominated, and the Academy is going to (a) ignore a totally hummable tune that everyone associates with Luca Guadagnino’s love story and (b) tell the great Sufjan Stevens that there’s no room at the inn? A lot of people are listening to that soundtrack album now…c’mon!

Last night I wrote Oscar telecast producer Mike DeLuca about this…David Lynch silencio. This morning I wrote Academy publicist Natalie Kojen, who referred me to Oscar telecast publicist Steve Rohr. More silencio.

Apparently there’s some rule that Oscar telecast producers are “obligated by the music branch to either perform zero, three or five songs for each ceremony.”

Actress-comedian Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) has developed a persona — a spirited cut-up who lives in her own little world — that has worked nicely for her. But during her 1.23 stint as an Oscar nomination announcer Haddish expanded upon this in a way that wasn’t necessarily flattering.

It seemed to me that Haddish portrayed herself that morning as being something of a cultural illiterate (“Ah gotta see this Dunkirk…a lot of people seem to like it”) and mis-pronounced the names of so many nominees (she even murdered Get Out‘s Daniel Kaluuya) that she seemed to be doing this deliberately as a bit. That or she simply couldn’t be bothered to rehearse.

Now Haddish has been hired to host the 2018 MTV and TV Awards, which will air on June 18th.

Honest question: If you were the director of the MTV show would you suggest to Haddish that she (a) rehearse the names of nominees so as not to stumble as frequently as she did a few weeks ago or (b) suggest that she double-down on the mispronunciations as a way of furthering her rep as an irrepressible personality who couldn’t care less?

Brendan Fraser‘s heyday happened between Les Mayfield‘s Encino Man (’92) and Paul Haggis‘s Crash (’05) — 13-year run, top of the heap, good as it got. The downslide began somewhere between ’08 and ’10 with the third Mummy movie and Furry Vengeance (’10). Fraser endured a rough six or seven years but lately he’s been getting back into it.

Now comes a compassionate, well-written GQ profile by Zach Baron about “the stupendous rise and surprising disappearance of [a] once ubiquitous movie star.”

Fraser has been making a modest comeback on TV over the last couple of years. The first bump came in late ’16 when he played a mournful secondary character in Showtime’s The Affair in ’16. While promoting this re-appearance, Fraser’s AOL encounter with Ricky Camilleri was regarded as one of the saddest such interviews in entertainment history.

Now he’s in FX’s forthcoming Trust, Simon Beaufoy‘s miniseries version of the John Paul Getty III kidnapping saga, and Condor, a miniseries inspired by Sydney Pollack‘s Three Days of the Condor in which Fraser will not play the Robert Redford role but some kind of conspiratorial heavy (possibly a version of “Higgins,” the CIA guy played by Cliff Robertson, or maybe John Houseman‘s character).

Three and a half weeks ago The Digital Bits‘ Bill Hunt reported that Warner Bros. Home Video will almost certainly release a 50th anniversary 4K Bluray of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hunt had been hearing “for months” that the disc was being prepared, but after hearing the same from “retail sources” he became convinced that it’s really, really being released, and probably sometime in early April.

Stanley Kubrick‘s groundbreaker opened in the States on 4.3.68, right when the LSD market was booming among middle-class, college-age youth.

And now someone has released an image of suspicious-looking jacket art. Where is the crucial mention of “remastered UHD 4K”? Are you telling me WHV marketers would’t emphasize that selling point?

Does this mean Hollywood Elsewhere is going to finally purchase a 4K Oppo player? No, it does not mean that. I’ve been waiting for distributors to start releasing 4K versions of classic-era, large-format films (Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, The Ten Commandments plus all the VistaVision films and perhaps even an assortment of spiffed-up 35mm classics) along with 4K renderings of the Hitchcock and Kubrick libraries, and no one (not even Criterion) has even begun to do that.

The only 4K Bluray of a ’50s-era title that I know of is David Lean’s The Bridge On The River Kwai. Sorry to sound like a peon but I’m fairly satisfied with a 4K streaming version that I bought on Amazon; ditto the 4K streaming version of Lawrence of Arabia. As things currently stand I don’t believe I’d experience a serious 4K bump if I were to buy the UHD Kwai along with the 4K Oppo.

I’m also delighted with WHV’s six or seven-year-old Bluray of 2001, and am not persuaded that I’d get that much of a bump from a 4K version. Maybe I’m wrong — maybe the UHD 2001 will deliver the wowser like never before. But I’m from Missouri. If WHV wants to offer a 4K streaming version, I’d probably buy that. But ixnay on the hardware. At least for now.

Andrew Pollack, whose daughter was murdered in the Parkland massacre, to Orange Orangutan: “We’re here because my daughter has no voice…she was murdered last week, shot nine times. How many schools, how many children have to get shot? It stops here, with this administration and me, because I’m not going to sleep until it’s fixed. It should have been one school shooting, and we should have fixed it…and I’m pissed. Because my daughter, I’m not going to see again.”

There’s no way to say this without sounding like a lowlife, but Marion Cotillard has an excellent nude scene in Ismael’s Ghosts (Magnolia, 3.23). I’m sorry but she does, and I’d be lying if I said I was neutral or displeased by this. Ditto Depleschin if he said he doesn’t approve.

The other stand-out scene comes when Cotillard dances to Bob Dylan‘s “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” I was reminded, of course, of Ralph Fiennes dancing in a similar fashion to the Rolling Stones‘ “Emotional Rescue” in Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash. Fiennes totally nailed it; Cotillard is okay.

“Just saw the Despleschin,” I wrote on 5.17.17. “Indulgent, too long, at times overheated, generally undisciplined, taxes the patience, no tension to speak of and all over the place. In a word, minor.”

I can’t imagine it’ll make the slightest dent in the U.S., even among admirers of the kind of talky, drifting French films that over-40 urbans used to pay to see at urban arthouses on slow Sunday evenings. Back before streaming lessened their interest in seeing them in theatres.

The story (which is a kind of free-associating fantasia) concerns an impulsive, immature film director (Mathieu Amalric…frequently shouting, slurping alcohol, smoking cigarettes and doing his bug-eyed, intense man-child routine) whose imagination heats up and starts to merge with reality when an ex (Marion Cotillard) returns after a long absence, and stirs up a hornet’s nest of emotions.

From the lefty-progressive perspective things are looking good for the ’18 midterms. Trump is a louche sociopath who’s dirty to the bone, and every now and then God actually steps in and says “okay, I’m gonna put my finger on the scale and help out the good guys for a change.”

But lately I’ve become worried about hinterland pushback against the left. I’m even starting to worry that Trump might, God help us, be re-elected if a decent Democrat contender isn’t nominated, and right now there’s no rockstar in the wings. Not because swing voters will regard Trump as a first-rate President, but because some may be genuinely terrified of the alternative — of politically correct Stalinoids coloring the culture and pointing the finger every which way.

Attending the 2018 Sundance Film Festival is what put the fear in. As I mentioned on 1.21, it was like a socialist summer camp in the snow — insular, forward-thinking, politically correct, change-oriented, Time’s Up-embracing, POC and gay-celebrating. It felt a teeny-weeny bit oppressive. Like a shortage of oxygen or something.

I’ve been a lefty all my life and feel a deep-seated kinship with progressive ideals and goals today, but I’m genuinely scared about what lefties have been generating image-wise. By that I mean two impressions that have sunk in about what has felt at times like a cruel and dictatorial temperament.

One impression, which is arguably inaccurate, is that many lefties feel that whiteness is a genetically diseased condition, and nothing genuinely fair and benevolent can come from white people these days because there’s too much racism and horror in their history and so the historical ledger sheet has to be balanced. It’s not that whites have been asked to step back and let people of other shades run the show, but there seems to be a general sense that less whiteness will be a good thing all around.

A couple of days ago N.Y. Times film critic A.O. Scott wrote about interviewing artists and celebrities for the Sunday T magazine. The final paragraph reads as follows:

“The most challenging interview was with Greta Gerwig. When we spoke on the phone, she was in Sacramento and I was in Rome. The time difference was ridiculous, time was tight, and I felt a little awkward about the fact that I had just filed my review of Gerwig’s Lady Bird. I ducked into a doorway on a semi-quiet street and took notes by the light of a streetlamp.”

This took me back to “Adapt or Die,” an HE post from Rome that was filed on 6.2.17:

“The wifi at Hollywood Elsewhere’s Rome apartment (154 via Monserrato) is all but worthless, so I’ve been tapping stuff out at the nearby Barnum Cafe (Via del Pellegrino 87). A half hour ago the Barnum proprietors told me I’d have to take the Macbook Pro across the street as their place turns into an eating establishment around 8 pm or so. No problem. The wifi is strong enough to extend several feet beyond the cafe’s walls. So here I am, tapping away on a worn-down cobblestoned street that’s been here for at least 2000 years.”

The Black Panther sartorial thing is not for guys like me, and by that I mean X-factor movie guys. To me a movie is a movie is a movie — it’s not any kind of statement about representation or cultural celebration or any of that. It’s all about structure and believability and planting the seeds and delivering the right kind of third-act payoff, and that’s all.

Okay — if I could somehow buy an exact duplicate of Cary Grant’s three-button Savile Row suit from North by Northwest, I would wear it to a special screening at the Aero or Egyptian, but that’s as far as I could go.

The North by Northwest suit looks gray but is actually a kind of faintly blue-ish gray plaid. It was designed by Arthur Lyons at Kilgour, French & Stanbury.