Yesterday afternoon I posted a director-writer’s opinions and preferences about current Oscar contenders, limiting the discussion to the top six categories (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor & Actress). Late yesterday I spoke to a woman producer with many TV and feature credits, and who’s been duking it out in this industry since the mid ’80s. A very sharp, very savvy lady. I’ve re-ordered the sequence of some of her quotes, pruned and condensed some of them, and in some cases run them verbatim.

Best Picture: “Call Me By Your Name is really the best picture of the year. There’s an unreasonable resistance to it among some, that it’s ‘just’ a gay love story set in the lush scenery of Northern Italy…the first Academy screening was only a quarter-full…but coming from a heterosexual woman, it’s the most honest and powerful film of the year. It’s about finding out for the first time what love can be, and how life goes on when your heart is broken. I think people should just GO SEE THE MOVIE. I haven’t met someone yet who wasn’t knocked out.

(l. to r.) Timothee Chalamet, Luca Guadagnino, Armie Hammer.

“Realistically for the Best Picture Oscar, it’s probably between The Post and Dunkirk. Dunkirk is a stunningly well made film, but it lacks that big emotional content. You begin the story with the thread of an average soldier who is just trying to survive, but not ever knowing anything about him handicaps the emotional takeaway at the end. It may win because it’s a great true story, but the heartfelt connections to the characters are impeded by their vague never revealed histories. Tom Hardy and Mark Rylance do very well with little, but could have been so much more. The Post is probably the winner. Streep and Hanks are on the top of their game. And the heroic relevance of the story is inescapable. Spielberg delivers.

“The curious enthusiasm for Get Out is mainly a box-office vote. If it wasn’t a big hit, it probably wouldn’t be as prominent in the Best Picture conversation. Mudbound feels like a smarter, better shot…a more quality-driven picture with a stronger message as well as a strong woman’s voice, although it’s not as edgy or commercial. Either way Get Out, clever and entertaining as it is, does not belong in the same category as Moonlight, Twelve Years A Slave, Hidden Figures and Fences. All of these movies make Get Out look weak. If Get Out had come out last year, it probably wouldn’t have been nominated. These previous nominees are worthy Best Picture contenders; Get Out has skated in during a weak year.”

Best Director: “Luca Guadagnino deserves to win for Call Me By Your Name. His film is so beautifully shot. The actors are terrific, the music perfect. But Chris Nolan will probably win it for the scope and scale of Dunkirk. Guillermo del Toro‘s work on The Shape of Water was wonderful, inspired. Greta Gerwig did a fantastic job on Lady Bird, and I think she deserves to get nominated for telling a small story so incredibly well. Steven Spielberg will get nominated for The Post. Deserves it, quintessential pro. Mudbound‘s Dee Rees is the most deserving underdog this year.”

I haven’t discussed Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water since it opened three and a half weeks ago. I posted my review exactly four months ago during the Telluride Film Festival. A day later I posted a back-and-forth discussion with a film critic friend, called “Shape of Water Pushback.”

Now that everyone’s seen it, I’m re-posting my initial response and asking for comments:

I wouldn’t describe myself as head-over-heels in love with Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water (Fox Searchlight, 12.8), but I certainly approve as far as it goes.

A sweet Guillermo fable through and through, I agree 100% that it’s definitely his best film since Pan’s Labyrinth — one of his smaller-scale creations that aims above and beyond the fanboy realm. Shape is a sci-fi period thing, a trans-species love story, a swoony romantic fantasy and an E.T.-like tale about a merging of disparate hearts and souls.

It also accommodates a darkly paranoid story about the forces of absolute badness looking to dissect and destroy an exotic life form. It’s a little stiff and overbearing at times, but generally mature and tender-hearted and ten times better than Okja, which used a similar storyline.

This is an adult fantasy piece full of heartache and swoony feelings, lusciously and exactingly composed, painted with early ’60s period detail and production design to die for. A movie completely dominated and in fact saturated with its Guillermo-ness.

I saw Shape late last night. The screening began at 11:20 pm and ended two hours later, and I was 100% alert and wide-eyed start to finish. This is what good movies do — they wake you up and keep you in a state of anticipation until the closing credits. Oh, and the headline I went with three days ago after the first Venice showing — Douglas Sirk’s Creature From The Love Lagoon — still stands.

Set in 1962 Baltimore, The Shape of Water is about a current that quickly develops between Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute and lonely but sensually attuned dreamer who works as a cleaning woman inside a government-run scientific laboratory, and a gentle, large-eyed aqua-creature with God-like healing powers (Doug Jones) who’s recently been captured in South America and brought to the lab for study and eventual dissection.

I began explaining my lack of interest in the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival two years ago. I respectfully blew it off again this year, and will most likely do the same again next year. Who cares? It’s just a big glossy event that mainly attracts red-carpet media types. No culture, no intrigue, too many limos, not for me.

“I’ve been attending the Palm Springs Film Festival for the last few years,” I wrote on 1.3.16, “and at the end of every one I’ve asked myself ‘was that really worth it?’ I used to think of the PSFF as a warm-up for Sundance. Now it’s basically a big-media paparazzi pigfuck that every significant Oscar contender is obliged to attend, and all you can do as a columnist is…well, not much. Write observations, attend the events, listen to try-out acceptance speeches, snap a few photos.

“You drive all the way out there and stay in some old-style place for two or three nights for $400 or $450 bucks and for what? It’s a tax write-off and not entirely unpleasant (Variety‘s Sunday brunch party is always agreeable), but I decided to ignore it this year. Too much grief for too little yield.

A 2015 HE headline said it all: “Puttin’ On Ritz in Chilly Corporate Bunker Once Known as Palm Springs.”

I’m not saying the home-invader murderers in Eli Roth and Joe Carnahan‘s remake of Death Wish (MGM/Annapurna, 3.2) should be from this or that tribe, but the U.S. is a multicultural society, after all, and it does seem a tiny bit chickenshit that the bad guys are generic white scumbags, or cut from the same cloth as the three invaders (Jeff Goldblum played one of them) in Michael Winner’s 1974 original. Plus: Paul Kersey was an architect in the original — why is he now a surgeon? Why isn’t he a concert promoter, a car salesman or an owner of a fleet of dump trucks?

You need to look on the bright side of Bright (Netflix, 12.22). That 28% rating it received on Rotten Tomatoes means that a little more than one out of four critics liked it. More importantly, Bright is “the highest viewed Netflix film ever on the service in its first week of release and one of the biggest originals (including sequels/additional seasons) Netflix has ever launched,” according to a release. It’s also “the #1 movie on Netflix in every country (190 or so) since its release with more people viewing the film internationally than domestically.” Which is why Netflix announced today that they’ll be making a Bright sequel. David Ayer will write and direct; Will Smith and Joel Edgerton will also return.

Those Steve Bannon quotes, excerpted from Michael Wolff‘s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” and reported in today’s Guardian, are fairly wonderful.

Serving #1: “The three senior guys in the [Trump] campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Serving #2: “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero. They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

Serving #3: “You realize where this is going. This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first, and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner…it’s as plain as a hair on your face. It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.”

Serving #4 (and my favorite): “[Team Trump is] sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.”

A Machievellian Lucifer and demonic alt-right architect who totally had Donald Trump’s ear and back, a once-lordly, black-hooded figure who graced the cover of Time magazine turns around five months after leaving the White House and calls the Russki meeting “treasonous“?

For decades my sleep pattern was to get about six hours, midnight or 1 am to 6 or 7 am. Over the last couple of years I’ve taken a one-hour nap around 2 or 3 pm on the couch. But every now and then (i.e., usually when I’m really stressed about something) I’ll become a fitful sleeper, and that means a 3 or 3:30 or 4 am wake-up, which always results in (a) moving to the living room couch for a 90-to-120-minute Twitter session. (b) finally returning to sleep around 6 or 6:30 am, and (c) waking again at 9 or even 9:30 am.

Tatyana and Arianna Huffington say it’s better to get at least seven if not eight hours straight. While I recognize the soundness of that advice, I have this nonsensical, deep-down notion that overnight slumber is a little slice of death, and that if I sleep too much I’ll miss stuff, and that too much sleep is for losers — the horizontal equivalent of taking extra-long showers.

Last night was particularly bad. I fell asleep on the couch during the second hour of Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special, and then stumbled into the bedroom and tossed and turned for 90 minutes. And then, Tatyana tells me, I began snoring, which in my book is 100% unforgivable. (I told her this morning that “if this happens again, wake me up and kick me out of the bedroom…seriously.”) And then I woke up at 4 am and did the standard fitful — Twitter, back to sleep at 6:30 or 7 am, wake up at 9 or 9:30 am.

I go through periods, in other words, in which I am almost Al Pacino in Insomnia. But not quite.

From “Dave Chappelle Stumbles Into The #MeToo Movement,” a 1.2.18 N.Y. Times review by Jason Zinoman:

“In ‘The Bird Revelation,’ Chappelle…leans on the gravitas of Martin Luther King to pivot from the pain caused by sexual misconduct. He criticizes the ‘brittle spirit’ of the female comic who said Louis C.K. masturbating in front of her hurt her career, before imagining what would happen if Louis C.K. masturbated in front of the civil rights leader, prompting him to give up his movement.

“When suggesting a handsome man wouldn’t be accused of assault and rape, he says that if Brad Pitt did what Harvey Weinstein did, the response would be different. (‘Girl would have been like: I got the part.’) But Mr. Chappelle is just rehashing a Chris Rock bit on sexual harassment from the 1990s (‘If Clarence Thomas looked like Denzel Washington…’). It’s a joke that has not aged well, and this new version does not do Mr. Chappelle any favors.”

“Going to the movies has become like a theme park. Studios making bad content in order to appeal to the masses and shareholders is like fracking — you get the best return right now but you wreck the earth. It’s ruining the viewing habits of the American population and then ultimately the rest of the world.” — Jodie Foster speaking two or three days ago to Radio Times magazine, as reported by the Daily Mail‘s Ross McDonagh.

Foster isn’t wrong, of course, but I’ve been using the term “theme-park cinema” since at least the late ’90s and possibly a bit earlier. I actually stopped using it a few years ago. I moved on to other disparaging terms.

Here’s to Gun Crazy star Peggy Cummins, who passed in London on 12.29 at age 92. Odd as this may sound, I never even saw Joseph H. Lewis and Dalton Trumbo‘s groundbreaking film until three years ago. Here’s a confessional that I wrote in this space:

“I was flipping through films on my new Roku player and came upon a high-def version on Warner Classics. I’d been told for decades that Gun Crazy was an essential noir that everyone loves, but I wasn’t expecting to be blown away.

“I was half-asleep when I started watching at 11:30 pm but I woke right up. It’s genius-level — a major groundbreaker, pulp art. Those long takes shot from the rear of John Dall and Peggy Cummins‘ moving car (particularly that legendary three-minute-long bank robbery sequence), the urgent sense of immediacy, that semi-improvised-sounding dialogue, those urgent close-ups, conflicted emotions, the sexuality, the fog-shrouded ending in the swamp…all of it.

“I hereby apologize to Lewis, Trumbo, Dall, Cummins and the whole team for missing this classic for so long.

In years past The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and others have run articles that quote opinions from this or that anonymous Academy member about Oscar contenders. But they never run them until the nominations have been announced in late January. Hollywood Elsewhere feels it’s more worthwhile to run these opinions now, while the nomination ballots are still being mulled over.

This morning I spoke to a director-writer with several reputable credits. I’ve re-ordered the sequence of some quotes, pruned and condensed some of them, and in some cases run them verbatim.

Best Picture: “Definitely Dunkirk. I think Dunkirk was an exceptional job of directing. I thought it was an amazing picture, a David Lean-level thing, a throwback to another time. Big Picture filming. For years younger generations have been saying ‘yeah, we’re used to watching these things on iPads’ but Nolan is saying ‘no, no, you’re missing the point…these are movies for the big screen…you’re missing the point.’ And those people who’ve been saying that [Dunkirk] wasn’t emotional enough? If you didn’t feel the emotion during that last swooping shot of Tom Hardy‘s plane out of gas and gliding over the beach…if you didn’t feel the emotion in that shot…c’mon.

Sam Rockwell, Best Supporting Actor contender in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri.

“I totally agree with you about Get Out. It’s a good movie, but it’s not a fucking great movie, c’mon! I wouldn’t be mad if it won a Best Screenplay Oscar, but it’s not a Best Picture! I have a daughter in the business [and] she loves it, thinks it’s a Best Picture [contender]. But if Get Out or The Post, which I don’t think is a very brave film…if these two win the big awards [the Academy] is going to be hurting itself because it’ll be all about politics. They’re going to devalue the Oscars [by turning awards-giving into] temporary, transitional political statements. They’re going to hurt themselves if the award choices are too political. They want to address #OscarsoWhite….okay, we get it, we get it.

“Dunkirk, Lady Bird, Shape of Water, The Big Sick. Or Phantom Thread or Call Me By Your Name. These are real movies. They are about themselves, planting their own flag. The political thing might be a factor with Call Me By Your Name. Some are reacting to #OscarsSoStraight…it’s an agenda film. I think a lot of people would vote for it, for that reason.”

Best Director: “Again, Nolan. I have a lot of respect for [Get Out]’s Jordan Peele…he’s just not my idea of a Best Director nominee.. I also thought that Guillermo del Toro‘s work on The Shape of Water…it was like watching an old cobbler work…he purposely kept the creature work to a minimum….it made me feel like I was watching the story of the projectionist in Cinema Paradiso or, you know, the filmmaking in Amelie….it was like when I was a kid, falling in love with filmmaking.”

Best Actor: “I loved Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour. Oldman without a doubt. I thought he was just great, just great. Despite that London tube sequence when Churchill talks with the passengers, which I thought was one of the worst things…it totally ruined the movie for me. I couldn’t believe how badly that was done. Some say Oldman is ‘playing’ Churchill rather than channelling him. Well, how do you portray Churchill and not do that? I also really like the kid from Call My By Your Name. He reminds me of Saoirse Ronan in terms of ability and vulnerability.”