Make no mistake about Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread being a very good film. But not by the measuring stick of Joe and Jane Popcorn. It’s a high falutin’ critics’ film, and the other day a critic friend mentioned that Phantom Thread is “the kind of film that makes people hate the critics whose reviews convince them to see it.”

By that standard the Boston Society of Film Critics is about to earn a fair amount of enmity for naming Phantom Thread as 2017’s Best Picture.

Even by an elite-quill-pen perspective giving the year’s top prize to Phantom Thread strikes me as very peculiar. It assembles its own meticulous realm with deft and intelligent brush strokes and delivers superb performances, for sure, but it’s no one’s idea of a satisfying film that really pays off. To call it a better film (more moving or satisfying, more cannily reflective of real-life) than Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name or Dunkirk is just perverse. What is the BSFC trying to do, get attention for themselves? Demonstrate that no one can be weirder or more anal?

Other BSFC winners:

Best Actor: Daniel Kaluuya for Get Out. Wells reaction: Seriously? A good-looking guy who gave an okay performance in a clever social-metaphor horror flick. Nobody at Gold Derby has listed Kaluuya as a Best Actor contender. Nobody at all. Gary Oldman, Timothee Chalamet, Daniel Day-Lewis, James Franco and Tom Hanks — get with the program, Beantowners!

Best Actress: Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water. Wells reaction: Not Saoirse Ronan…seriously? Okay, your call.

Best Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project. Wells reaction: Fine.

Best Supporting Actress: Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird. Wells reaction: Fine.

Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread. Wells reaction: Again, a very perverse call.

Best Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird. Wells reaction: Agreed.

Best Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema for Dunkirk. Wells reaction: Good call.

Best Foreign Language Film: Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, which won everything at the European Film Awards the other night.

Who would want to bang out predictions for a bunch of Golden Globe nominations? The winners are of some interest, but the nominees? We all know the films and performances that will probably make the cut, and if this or that favored contender doesn’t make it then the Golden Globe nominators will have caused a stir and maybe a few gasps.

The 75th annual Golden Globe Awards are slated for 1.7.18, or a week and a half before everyone leaves for Park City (and thank God for that spiritual vacation from the hammer blows of the Oscar game). Oscar nominations will close voting on Friday, 1.13.17. Oscar noms will be announced on Wednesday, 1.24, or during the final third of Sundance ’18.

The 2018 Golden Globes nominations will be announced tomorrow morning at (choke) 5 am Pacific.

Likely noms in Best Picture – Drama category: Call Me by Your Name, The Post, The Shape of Water, Dunkirk, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Florida Project, Darkest Hour. 50/50 prognosis on Mudbound. Question: Given the HFPA’s absurdly loose definition of “comedy or musical”, why isn’t the sometimes darkly humorous Three Billboards expected to compete in that category? I don’t consider Three Billboards to be a comedy, but it’s certainly funnier than I, Tonya, which the HFPA will apparently place in the hah-hah category.

Likely noms in Best Picture – Comedy or Musical category: The Big Sick, I, Tonya, Lady Bird, The Disaster Artist, Get Out. Has anyone seen The Greatest Showman? I could see the HFPA nominating it in order to get Hugh Jackman and company to occupy a table, but given the presumptions about this film it would be highly cynical to nominate it just to nominate it.

I don’t see the point in predicting acting, directing or screenwriting nominations. Okay, Call me By Your Name‘s Luca Guadagnino should be nominated for Best Director. I just don’t feel like expending the energy. I’ll jump into everything tomorrow. At a decent hour.

In an 11.27 post called “2018 Hotties Prioritized,” I listed 40 noteworthy 2018 films that will probably generate excitement and perhaps even award-season followings — The Irishman, Roma, Back Seat, First Man, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Wife, Radegund, Widows, If Beale Street Could Talk, Mary Queen of Scots, On The Basis of Sex, Suspiria, Wendy, Sunset, Chappaquiddick, Soldado, Loro, The Nightingale, etc.

29 decent-sounding titles have since been added — Unsane, The Widow, Ad Astra, E-Book, Kursk, Cold War, Can You Ever Forgive Me — for a total of 69. Please tell me what I’m forgetting.

Yes, I’m also looking forward to Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther, Peyton Reed‘s Ant Man and the Wasp and Ron Howard‘s Solo.

Here’s the whole thing again plus the 29 newbies:

Topliners: 1. Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano); 2. Adam McKay‘s Back Seat (Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell); 3. Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, a space drama about NASA’s Duke of Dullness, Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke); 4. Saoirse Ronan in Mary, Queen of Scots (w/ Margot Robbie, David Tennant, Jack Lowden, Guy Pearce); 5. Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris (Jenna Fischer, Judy Greer, Bryce Gheisar, Alek Skarlatos, Thomas Lennon, Jaleel White, Tony Hale, P.J. Byrne).

6. Steve McQueen‘s Widows (Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Andre Holland, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell); 7. Terrence Malick‘s Radegund (August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Michael Nyqvist, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jürgen Prochnow, Bruno Ganz; 8. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma (Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Yalitza Aparicio, Daniela Demesa, Enoc Leaño, Daniel Valtierra); 9. Jacques Audiard‘s The Sisters Brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, Rutger Hauer, Riz Ahmed, John C. Reilly); 10. Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk (Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Teyonah Parris, Regina King, Colman Domingo, Brian Tyree Henry, Diego Luna, Dave Franco).

11. Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody (15-year period from the formation of Queen and lead singer Freddie Mercury up to their performance at Live Aid in 1985) w/ Rami Malek, Ben Hardy, Gwilym Lee, Joseph Mazzello, Allen Leech, Lucy Boynton. 20th Century Fox, 12.25.18; 12. Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife (Glenn Close‘s Best Actress campaign + Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater, Annie Starke. Max Irons); 13. Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On The Basis of Sex; 14. Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (costarring Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Jonah Hill, Jack Black, Mark Webber); 15. Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy with Steve Carell and Timothy Chalamet.

16. Xavier Dolan‘s The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates); 17. Asghar Farhadi‘s Todos lo saben (Spanish-language drama w/ Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Barbara Lennie, Ricardo Darin, Inma Cuesta, Eduard Fernandez Javier Camara); 18. Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman (John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Corey Hawkins — Focus Features); 19. Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York (Timothee Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Diego Luna, Liev Schreiber); 20. Stefano Sollima‘s Soldado (Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Catherine Keener — Columbia, 6.29.18).

The Last Jedi loving cup runneth over. Which is precisely why the only tweets I half-trust are from Scott Mantz and Kyle Buchanan. Believers are too vested, too eager to celebrate. I only want to read reactions from scoffers, smartasses, doubters, dissenters, dickheads, grizzled veterans, cynics, skeptics, people who carry wounds, all-seeing mystics, non-believers, agnostics, atheists, frowners. If only Paul Schrader had attended! HE’s big Jedi moment happens on Monday evening. Until then…

Initially posted on 12.9.16: Issur Danielovitch, otherwise known as Kirk Douglas, turns 101 today. Cheers, salutes and celebrations for a legendary fellow — an ego-driven, headstrong, no-nonsense hardhead, thinker and studly swaggerer during his day. A pusher, doer, striver. Douglas was one of the first male superstars to adopt a persona that was about more than just gleaming white teeth and manly heroism, although he played that kind of thing about half the time. But Douglas also dipped into the dark side, portraying guys who were earnest and open but hungry, and who sometimes grappled with setbacks and self-doubt and hard-fought battles of the spirit.

Douglas’s peak years as a reigning superstar and a producer-actor known for quality-level films ended 53 years ago with his last steady-as-she-goes lead in a fully respected film — John Frankenheimer‘s Seven Days In May (’64).

Douglas has been working and writing and flooring the gas ever since, but out of his 101 years only 15 of them were spent at the very top. He broke through at age 33 as a selfish go-getter in Champion (’49) and then fed the engine with 19 or 20 high-calibre films — Young Man with a Horn (’50), The Glass Menagerie (’50), Ace in the Hole (’51), Detective Story (’51), The Big Sky (’52), The Bad and the Beautiful (’52), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (’54), The Indian Fighter (’55), Lust for Life (’56), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (’57), the masterful Paths of Glory (’57), The Vikings (’58), The Devil’s Disciple (’59), Strangers When We Meet (’60), Spartacus (’60), Town Without Pity (’61), Lonely Are the Brave (’62), Two Weeks in Another Town (’62) and finally the Frankenheimer film.

Big stars will flirt with journalists from time to time. They’ll turn on the charm for a week or two and then “bye.” I was one of Douglas’s flirtations back in ’82, for roughly a month-long period between an Elaine’s luncheon thrown by Bobby Zarem on behalf of the yet-to-shoot Eddie Macon’s Run, and then the filing of my New York Post piece about visiting the set of that Jeff Kanew-directed film in Laredo, Texas.

Lady Bird‘s Laurie Metcalf has the top slot because (a) her performance as Greta Gerwig‘s high-strung, suffer-no-fools mom probably reminds women of contentious relationships with their own mothers, and because it feels as if Metcalf has managed a kind of big-screen comeback. She’s been working on stage and in various TV series all along, I realize, but to me she’s been absent from the big leagues since she played Andy Garcia‘s lesbian partner in Mike Figgis‘s Internal Affairs (’90).

Melissa Leo‘s brittle, neurotic nun in Novitiate is second because, I’m guessing, it took a lot of brass to make that performance come off. Mary J. Blige gave the finest performance in Mudbound, a notch ahead of Jason Mitchell‘s. In I, Tonya, Allison Janney plays the absolute worst movie mom in 36 years, or since Faye Dunaway‘s Joan Crawford terrified her daughter in Frank Perry‘s Mommie Dearest (’81). Phantom Thread‘s Lesley Manville has the fifth slot because the movie just arrived, but her performance is quietly compelling in an icy sort of way.

2018 will launch in 24 days, and it’s likely to be even more volatile than ’17. Certainly in terms of the Mueller investigation of Trump-Russia collusion and quid pro quo corruption, which will be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Boiled down to basics, Trump and his hooligans plotted to favor Russia on various financial and diplomatic fronts in return for Russian financial assistance for Trump’s failing empire plus providing major assistance in the cyber-takedown of the Clinton campaign. This will naturally lead to impassioned, across-the-board calls for Trump’s impeachment, but that won’t happen unless the November midterms result in significant Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, which, given the alt-right racial animus in Bumblefuck regions, is less likely than you might think.

Trump is facing three possible scenarios. One, he’ll decide not to run in 2020, a practical decision based on his pathetically low approval ratings plus his own lack of interest in wanting to endure a second four-year term. Two, he’ll be impeached in early ’19 and then decide to resign before a final Congressional vote, depending upon assurances from the feds that he won’t be prosecuted for treason. Or three, he’ll be impeached but not convicted a la Bill Clinton, and then will run out of dumb pride but suffer defeat due to a strong Democratic candidate.

In all three scenarios Trump is out as of 1.20.21, if not before.

The problem is that right now there’s no strong Democratic candidate, no heir apparent, no rock star. By the end of this year somebody with the chops and the nerve has to start testing the waters and coming into focus.

I would vote for Bernie Sanders in a New York minute, but I think his moment came and went in 2016. He would appeal to big-city multiculturals and progressives as well as a certain percentage of hinterland dumbshits, but low-information Southern blacks blew him off last year. I also suspect that people might feel a bit squeamish about electing a 79 year-old. (Same deal with Joe Biden, who’s a year younger than Bernie.)

I would also vote for the brilliant and ballsy Kamala Harris, currently the junior senator from California, but she needs to start conveying her intentions and making noise. Being a 50ish woman of mixed ethnicity, Harris would of course scare the wilies out of white working-class rurals and their girlfriends and wives, but these people are trash — the dregs of society. They’ll always, always vote for the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

Harris might become a bolder, more exciting figure when and if she steps up to the plate. I nonetheless have a sense that swing voters may turn out to less than fully aroused by her candidacy; ditto Bernie and Joe. I have a feeling that someone else needs to emerge, and I mean no later than a year from now.

Dwayne Johnson would probably be better than Trump, but only somewhat. We could do better.

“Excitement! Suspense! Childlike innocence! Ingeniously staged action set pieces! These are a few of the things you will not find, anywhere, in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Sony, 12.20). The one performer in the film who establishes his own relaxed rhythm, and stays in it, is Nick Jonas, proving once again that he’s got quick-draw acting chops. The movie has snakes and a crocodile pit and a scorpion slithering out of Bobby Cannavale’s mouth. It’s supposed to be a board game come to life, but really, it’s just a bored game.” — from Owen Gleiberman‘s 12.8 Variety review.

Even though he technically “belongs” in this rogue’s gallery. He did the right thing, listened to his colleagues, took himself out of the conversation.