I just sent in my 2018 Broadcast Film Critics Award ballot. The show begins late Thursday afternoon (1.11, around 5 pm) inside the cavernous Barker Hangar at Santa Monica Airport (3021 Airport Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90405). The CW will carry it.

BEST PICTURE: Call Me by Your Name

BEST ACTOR: Timothee Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name

BEST ACTRESS: Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Michael Stuhlbarg, Call Me by Your Name

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird

BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS: Dafne Keen, Logan (I liked The Florida Project‘s Brooklyn Prince as much as everyone else, but I was really knocked out by Keen)

BEST ACTING ENSEMBLE: The Post

BEST DIRECTOR: Luca Guadagnino, Call Me By Your Name

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, The Post

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: James Ivory, Call Me by Your Name

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Hoyte van Hoytema, Dunkirk

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN: Paul Denham Austerberry, Shane Vieau, Jeff Melvin — The Shape of Water

Is Trust going to run with the notion that John Paul Getty III engineered his own kidnapping to get money out of grandpa? The trailer seems to suggest this. Donald Sutherland‘s performance as the stingy billionaire of legend is going to be worth watching. Brendan Fraser has the same Fletcher Chase role that Mark Wahlberg played in All The Money in the World, but good God, Fraser looks like an inflated balloon. The ten-episode series begins on FX on 3.25.18.

Over the last 60 years we’ve seen four Invasion of the Body Snatchers films — Don Siegel’s 1956 original, Phil Kaufman’s 1978 remake, Abel Ferrara’s 1993 version and Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s decade-old The Invasion.

Now it’s time for a fifth involving the installation of seed-pod mindsets, with the change agents being the Millennial and Generation Z sons and daughters of today.

I’m talking about a scenario in which the Anglo Saxon whitebread gene is regarded as inherently arrogant, criminal and bad for the planet — flawed, cruel, heartless, exploitive. A consensus emerges that the only way to correct this abhorrent culture is to fully indict the historical criminality of whiteness over several decades and in fact back to the beginnings of this nation — what it’s been, what it is now and where it’ll lead if things aren’t turned around.

Alien spores float down from space, affecting only the children and grandchildren of boomers and GenXers. Once turned, the awoken are free to call Anglo-Saxon culture by it’s true name — oppressor, a cancer, a scourge upon humanity. Within days the idea is spread that it’s time for enlightened non-whites to marginalize or dilute or even overthrow white culture so that POC culture can re-shape things and bring in a little fresh air and more fairness, freedom and opportunity.

Gradually seed-pod consciousness spreads to members of the liberal intelligentsia, and more and more of them are suddenly embracing the program. The general idea is “let those shitty old crusty white guys eat some of the shit that POCs have been eating for the last couple of centuries,” etc.

Gradually it becomes accepted that if you’re white and straight you’re kind of a bad person, or at the very least suspect. And that you probably need to re-educate yourself and embrace the new reality…or else.

A clever horror-comedy satire that ten years ago would have come and gone and been forgotten by awards season is transformed by seed-podders into a Best Picture contender, and those who question the validity of this are regarded as cranks or closet racists.

Friends and family members of seed-pod film critics begin to notice a certain robotic manner and a glassy, out-to-lunch look in their eyes. Local constable: “But he looks like his picture, madam. Obviously he’s Guy Lodge, the Variety critic.” Mrs. Lodge: “But it isn’t him, I’m telling you. Something is missing. It’s just not Guy!”

Liberal-minded film critics Anne Thompson and Eric Kohn declare that they’ve been making sure that POCs are ranked prominently in their year-end awards ballot, partly because they admire their films but also because they’re about or were made by POCs.

Seed-pod urban culture begins to adopt other changes. Millenial and GenZ types begin to regard heterosexuality as a problem, and it’s gradually decided that it’s time to let LGBTQ folks run the culture and push heteros off to the side a bit. They’ll be allowed to walk around and buy groceries, but they need to accommodate themselves to the notion that straight whites are an underclass.

And if educated liberal Democrat white guys complain about any of this on social media platforms, the seed-podders tag them as closet Republicans or closet racists or closet homophobes. Would the seed-podders be delighted to bust these white guys on any of these counts and thereby eradicate or at least marginalize their asses and put them out to pasture? You have to ask?

The transforming of society has never been a gentle process, and to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs.

A libertarian-minded #MeToo pushback essay appeared in today’s (1.8.18) Le Monde, and the headline is a grabber — “We defend a freedom to annoy, [which is] indispensable to sexual freedom.”

Written by clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Sarah Chiche and supported by more than 100 “prominent” French women including Catherine Denueve and Catherine Robbe-Grillet, it basically says that the #MeToo movement is attacking sexual freedom and “binding women to a status of eternal victims”, and is becoming more or less Stalinist (my term, not theirs), and has thereby overstepped and made social and cyber life feel oppressive in some respects.

Here is the essence of the essay: “The philosopher Ruwen Ogien defended a freedom to offend essential to artistic creation. In the same way, we defend a freedom to annoy, indispensable to sexual freedom. We are now sufficiently warned to admit that the sexual drive is by nature offensive and savage, but we are also sufficiently clairvoyant not to confuse clumsy [attempts at flirtation with] sexual assault.”

I’ve explained over and over that the three strongest knockout films of 2017 are Luca Guadgnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk and Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird. In picking the most deserving recipient of the Best Picture Oscar, Academy members ought to choose between these three. They really ought to. Because Nolan’s is a brilliant, IMAX-sized work of art and a God’s-eye war film, and Guadagnino’s is a lulling, levitational love story for the ages, and Gerwig’s is a coming-of-age film with a wonderful prickly edge.

But nope, sorry, not happening. Dunkirk isn’t emotional enough, Call Me By Your Name has to stand down because older straight white guys don’t want to celebrate another gay film after Moonlight, and Lady Bird is just a flick about an anxious, creatively stifled high school girl. And so a pair of very worthy but slightly lesser films — Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water, which received 12 BAFTA noms, and Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri — are stepping into the breach.

This seems to be the meaning of this morning’s BAFTA nominations, if they can be processed as foreshadowings of the 2018 Oscar nominations (which will be announced on 1.23). The 12 noms won by The Shape of Water plus the nine noms that went to Three Billboards means they’re the tippy-toppers right now.

Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour also received nine BAFTA noms, but you have to write some of that off to the Churchill factor (i.e., genetic British nationalism).

In other words, Fox Searchlight almost certainly has the Best Picture Oscar in the bag. After 1.23 it’ll be competing with itself on behalf of Three Billboards and Shape of Water. Not tooth and nail, of course, but voters will have to choose. Hollywood Elsewhere hereby congratulates FS on a fight well won, and twice over at that.

The only problem is that I’ve seen Three Billboards and The Shape of Water twice each, and with all due respect and affection for all concerned they’re just not brilliant or audacious enough to be celebrated as the two finest films of 2017. They deserve to be in the final round of contenders, for sure. And they’re highly commendable — Billboards for the writing and acting (McDormand, Rockwell, Harrelson), Water for the erotic fairy-tale aspects and luxurious production design and cinematography, and in terms of Sally Hawkins‘ extremely affecting performance. But they’re not quite ivy league.

In Shape, Michael Shannon‘s villain is way too one-note demonic, Doug Jones‘ aquatic creature has no personality or longing other than to be loved and protected, and it’s ludicrous to presume (as the movie tells us) that Shannon wouldn’t instantly conclude that Hawkins’ apartment is the only place to look when Jones turns up missing at the lab.

And Three Billboards is suspended in a fantasy realm in which McDormand evades the consequences of drilling a dentist’s thumbnail and firebombing a police station (despite Peter Dinklage vouching for her in the latter case), and Rockwell suffers no legal prosecution or civil lawsuit after he throws Caleb Landry Jones out of a window and off a roof.

And yet The Shape of Water and Three Billboards are the two apparent finalists because (a) they supply enough emotion and aren’t chilly in a Nolan-esque sense, (b) they don’t irritate older white guys by being gayish (Richard Jenkins‘ Shape character aside) and (c) their stories and themes are bigger and broader than that of a Sacramento high-school senior looking to go to college back east. They’re soft consensus favorites, and that’s how it seems to be going right now.

“A book is an entirely different thing…[White House reporters] can’t say what they know because they have to go back the next day…politics don’t matter…everybody looks at Trump the same way…this is an aberrant moment…early-stage dementia,” etc.

Last night Barbra Streisand recalled a major event in her career and in the annals of women directors — winning a Best Director Golden Globe award for Yentl, which she also produced, co-wrote and starred in. It happened 34 years ago, or in January 1984. Since then, she lamented, no woman has won a Best Director Golden Globe.

In any event Glenn Kenny vented this morning about some MSNBC pundit failing to recall how good it was. (Or something like that.) For the first time in many decades I began to think back to my one and only viewing of Yentl, recalling what I could of it, thinking about Mandy Patinkin‘s confused attraction for Streisand’s Yentl Mendel, whom he’s been told is a young boy.

I’ve looked at some clips since replying to Kenny, and plot points are coming back. Almost everyone had a favorable opinion of Yentl back then, but I’ve never wanted to re-watch it. Has anyone?

Just now a strange compulsion led me to buy a British Bluray of Jerzy Skolimowski‘s The Shout. I did so despite knowing that it’s not very good. It creeped me out when I first saw it at the 1978 New York Film Festival, but it also left me hanging. After it ended I felt as if bees were buzzing in my head. I looked at a friend and said, “Can you tell me what the fuck that was about?”

In his 11.9.79 N.Y. Times review, Vincent Canby called it a “vivid, piercingly loud movie as well as an almost totally incoherent one.

“The story starts off well, like almost any ghost story made up by a child, but then it becomes so full of loose ends, contradictions, cryptic symbols and close-ups of objects that…one eventually tunes out of the narrative, much as one does when the child’s ghost story becomes too hopelessly muddled for even the child to unravel.

The Shout “is an elegant looking movie, nicely performed, but because it leaves one knowing less than one did at the beginning, it is easily forgettable. Except for the sound. Apparently to prepare us for the scene in which Charles screams his aboriginal scream, the producers seem to have sharpened or heightened the soundtrack in such a way that even ordinary sounds — the wind, for example — take on a painful sibilance.”

That’s the odd thing — Canby called it “easily forgettable” but I’ve never forgotten it. And now I want it again. Go figure.

Posted on 9.14.17 or roughly four months ago: Angelina Jolie‘s Evelyn Salt was trained as a child in a tough Russian Academy for lethal super-spies also…no? And then she went on to become a kind of double-agent? Red Sparrow (20th Century Fox, 3.2.18) is obviously a kind of retread. Director Francis Lawrence, the director of not one or two but three Hunger Games movies, is everyone’s idea of a hack, a journeyman, a well-paid stooge. In short, the perfect guy to helm Red Sparrow. Jennifer Lawrence looks either miserable or emotionally shut down or a combination of the two. I can’t wait to suffer through this thing.

“Drafted against her will to become a ‘Sparrow,’ a trained seductress in the service of Russian intelligence, Dominika is assigned to operate against Nathaniel Nash, a first-tour CIA officer who handles the CIA’s most sensitive penetration of Russian intelligence. The two young intelligence officers, trained in their respective spy schools, collide in a charged atmosphere of tradecraft, deception, and, inevitably, a forbidden spiral of carnal attraction that threatens their careers and the security of America’s most valuable mole in Moscow.” — from Amazon summary of Jason Matthews ‘Red Sparrow’ trilogy.

Oprah Winfrey‘s energy, compassion, discipline, business acumen and progressive views…her positivism, reach-out attitude, brains, confidence, phenomenal wealth…all of this would make her an excellent antidote to the Donald Trump poison if she were to run for President in 2020. Because she would almost certainly win.

I’d vote for Oprah without hesitation, without blinking an eye. Compared to the grotesque horrors emanating from the current White House occupant, President Winfrey would be a huge relief, a godsend…water from a mountain stream. Another headstrong leader, yes, but a sane one.

In mid-November ’16 Michael Moore said that Democrats “would be better off if they ran Oprah or Tom Hanks or…why don’t we run beloved people? I mean, we have so many of them. The Republicans do this.”

But at the same time I’m a little scared. Because Winfrey is a political neophyte, and she’d probably be looking at a steep learning curve, certainly in terms of D.C. relationships and practical politics. Remember how she said that she felt “hope” when President-elect Trump meet with President Obama 14 months ago? That was embarassing. Plus her ass has been steadily smooched by big media and tens of millions of fans since the mid ’80s, and keeping her cool and mounting a defense once the Republicans bring out their heavy artillery would be a new skill set for her.

We all know Oprah is brilliant and that she actually reads and is probably 25 times more knowledgable than Trump about the major issues, but I haven’t actually heard her specific views on anything. Maybe she should expound a bit on taxes, health care, military strategy, alternative fuels, climate change and North Korea before we all jump off the cliff?

Boiled down Oprah is the same kind of high-profile personality and political journeyman that Trump was/is — a self-made billionaire business person and a magnetic TV personality with a huge following. Winfrey would be the hopeful, progressive and inclusive side of this equation, but she’d be seen by many as a fundamentally Trump-ish candidate in the sense of being a political outsider with no I.O.U’s held by special corporate interests, etc. Okay, she’s in tight with liberal progressives, of course, but somehow this clan doesn’t feel as odious, at least not from my perspective.

Not long ago a director friend mentioned that of all the things he liked about Mudbound, he was most impressed by Rachel Morrison‘s cinematography. It’s not poised or prettified, he said, but it has an au natural thing — a humid, plain-as-dirt, you-are-there atmosphere.

A relatively young dp, Morrison delivered her first major-league score with her lensing of Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale Station (’13). She also shot Daniel Barnz and Jennifer Aniston‘s Cake (’14) and Zal Batmanglij‘s The Sound Of My Voice (’11).

What defines a really successful comedy? Being funny, of course, and preferably in a way that’s not too coarse or lowbrow. Clever, witty, feel-goody. You want it to be accessible enough for Joe and Jane Popcorn to have a good time with it, but you also want film critics to stand up and salute. And you definitely want it to turn a healthy profit. Some comedies do well with critics but not so much at the box-office. Or vice versa. And some fizzle all around the track — cruddy reviews, low grosses, unpopular with popcorn munchers, etc. Very few comedies hit it on all four burners.

Not everyone realizes that Amazon’s The Big Sick, which opened on 6.23.17 after debuting at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, has done exactly that. And this, by any fair standard, drops it into the Best Picture realm.

A dryly amusing indie comedy about ethnic issues affecting a relationship between Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani), a laid-back Pakistani comic, and Emily (Zoe Kazan), a spunky, willful white girl, The Big Sick managed a 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating and sold a shitload of tickets to Average Joes. It cost $5 million to make and earned $55 million worldwide, excluding ancillary revenue. Even if you throw in the “Hollywood bookkeeping” factor, you’ll still be well in the black.

The Big Sick has even become a top award contender in recent weeks. Holly Hunter‘s performance as Kazan’s mom has snagged several Best Supporting Actress nominations (the Independent Spirit Awards, several critics groups); ditto the screenplay (co-written by Nanjiani and wife Emily V. Gordon, and based on their actual romantic history) as well as the film itself being Best Picture-nominated by the Critics Choice Awards, the Satellite Awards and the Producers Guild of America.

Four burners plus the awards action makes five. Do I hear six?

I’ve seen The Big Sick three times, and each time it’s felt fresh and natural and sharp as a tack. It gains. After seeing it in Park City I called it droll humor for smarties and hipsters as well as dry and diverting. You never really know where it’s going, and that’s just how I like it. I loved the terrorist jokes (no, seriously), and it really does come together emotionally during the last 25%.

Nanjiani embroiders with a unique tone and sensibility, certainly within the realm of a modern American love story. He and Kazan hold things together for the first 40%, but it’s Hunter and Ray Romano (as Kazan’s dad) who bring it home.

Zoe Kazan, Kumail Najiani.