I’m obviously unable to come to any semi-final decisions about which actresses might end up as the leading 2017 Best Actress contenders, but I’d be more than a little surprised if the finalists don’t boil down to the following: (1) Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; (2) Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes, (3) Meryl Streep, The Papers; (4) Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water; (5) Kate Winslet, Wonder Wheel; and (6) Judi Dench, Victoria and Abdul.

I know next to nothing about Annette Bening‘s performance as Gloria Grahame in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. Talk to me after it screens in Toronto, but right now my gut says…okay, a definite maybe.

Women under pressure, embarked on life-changing journeys, seeking resolutions and satisfaction. McDormand’s character demanding answers and finding closure. Stone and Streep as famous, real-life women subjected to tests of character and mettle in the early ’70s. Hawkins doing it silently, all with her face and eyes. Winslet going through the pains of hell in early ’50s Brooklyn. Dench’s Queen Victoria bridging culture gaps.

Remember — it’s not just about stirring, eye-opening performances, but the quality of the films that these performances are woven into.

Right now I’m not feeling it as much for Jessica Chastain in Molly’s Game (uncertain fate awaiting Aaron Sorkin’s film + same brittle tough-girl performance Chastain gave in Miss Sloan?); Jane Fonda in Our Souls at Night (out-of-competition slot for Souls in Venice Film Festival creates question mark — undeniable nostalgia factor for fourth Fonda-Redford teaming), Diane Kruger, In the Fade (not happening), Jennifer Lawrence, mother! (Aronofsky doesn’t seem to be courting Oscar voters this year, at least not by the standards they live by); Carey Mulligan, Mudbound (Mulligan is always good but acting-wise the film belongs to Jason Mitchell and Mary J. Blige); Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird (haven’t seen it….zip); Michelle Williams, All the Money in the World (no idea, not a hint).

Milton Lawson to Jeffrey Wells: “Longtime fan of the site, here to show you a new short story you might enjoy called ‘Roger Ebert and Me‘. It’s a short 10-page comic about a true Movie Catholic enduring a crisis of faith. Filled with cinematic easter eggs. I know you’re not the biggest fan of the comics medium but sometimes it can be put to great use beyond the spandex superhero realm. Check it out? Here it is.

Wells to Lawson: It’s perfect up until the moment where your character talks about his mother, and Roger says she wouldn’t want you to give up hope. That’s fine, but it goes off the rails after that. Roger is not the Silver Surfer. He cares and has great insight, but he doesn’t have special cosmic powers, and he’s not the bringer of perfect, inspired solutions. He was just a brilliant critic who died too soon. You can’t put him on too high of a pedestal.

What needs to happen is this: You and Roger visit the diner where the Looper scene with Bruce Willis was shot. (Or the Baltimore diner from Barry Levinson‘s Diner.) As you’re walking toward an empty table, Roger notices Gene Siskel talking to another young cineaste like yourself.

Roger: “Uhh, Gene? The hell are you doing here?”

Gene: “Well, I’m dead too so I can do anything I want. And I can dispense life wisdom as well as you can, Roger, and probably a little better.”

Roger: “You never quit, do you, Gene?”

Gene: “Oh…Roger, this is Kevin Zackey, by the way. Kevin? Roger. Kevin’s going through a rough patch.”

I’m told that Kate Winslet isn’t the only one who delivers a grand-slam, award-worthy performance in Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel (Amazon, 12.1). Unexpected as it may sound, Jim Belushi scores strongly and sympathetically as Winslet’s schlubby-nice-guy husband who grapples with some kind of Chekhovian anguish when her waitress character, Ginny, takes up with Justin Timberlake‘s Mickey, a Brooklyn lifeguard.

Has Jim Belushi scored with an Oscar-calibre supporting performance in Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel? As Marcus Licinius Crassus said in Spartacus, “Time will solve that mystery.”

A tipster believes that Belushi’s turn will probably generate Best Supporting Actor talk after Wonder Wheel debuts at the New York Film Festival on 10.14. Which, of course, would constitute a huge career rebound for Belushi, who’s been steadily working since his ’80s and early ’90s heyday (Red Heat, Salvador, K-9, Thief, Curly Sue) but in an under-the-radar, off-the-grid fashion. Or at least the grid that I pay attention to.

If the talk turns out to be valid, Belushi will have a perfect Oscar-season narrative along with a much-admired performance — riding high in the ’80s, loses the big-screen mojo, quietly plugs away for the last 25 years, does pretty well on TV (including his According to Jim series from ’01 to ’09, as a co-lead in The Defenders, a comedy series with Dan Aykroyd in 2010 and ’11 + a recent four-episode role in Twin Peaks) and is now suddenly back in the big game as a possible Oscar contender at age 63.

How did Belushi happen to land the role? Why him and not any number of higher-profile character actors who were probably considered? Last summer Woody was quoted saying that he cast Belushi because he was “absolutely perfect for it.”

Belushi as he appears in Wonder Wheel, as Kate Winslet’s cuckolded husband.

From 8.23 Washington Post story, filed by Katie Mettler and Lindsey Bever: “At a number of political rallies over the past year, a character calling himself ‘Michael the Black Man’ has appeared in the crowd directly behind Donald Trump, impossible to miss and prompting widespread fascination. Almost always, he plugs his wild website, Gods2.com, across his chest. Variously known as Michael Symonette, Maurice Woodside and Mikael Israel, he’s [a] radical fringe activist from Miami who once belonged to a violent black supremacist religious cult, and he runs a handful of amateur, unintelligible conspiracy websites. He has called Barack Obama ‘The Beast’ and Hillary Clinton a Ku Klux Klan member. Oprah Winfrey, he says, is the devil. Most curiously, in the 1990s, he was charged, then acquitted, with conspiracy to commit two murders. But Michael the Black Man loves President Trump.”

Last night’s screening was Lysa Heslov‘s Served Like A Girl, which did well review-wise at South by Southwest ’17. Five women veterans who’ve endured serious trauma in the military create a shared sisterhood to help the rising number of stranded homeless women veterans, etc. It’s basically about women persevering, surviving and sticking together through thick and thin. Particularly mothers and daughters. Sad but stirring. Edited, scored with spunk and polish. I felt it. It got me.

Lysa Heslov, director & co-writer of Served Like A Girl, flanked by Catherine Bach (Dukes of Hazzard) and daughter following Monday’s screening at the London West Hollywood.

From Shari Linden’s THR review: “Glamorous gowns are definitely involved, and yes, there’s a talent contest, but the Ms. Veteran America competition is no beauty pageant in the conventional sense. The gutsy women who vie for the title come in all shapes and sizes. They’ve served in Afghanistan and Iraq, some have suffered dire injuries, and they’ve all weathered plenty on the home front as well. The participants profiled in Heslov’s documentary are the epitome of resilience, but they’re also disarmingly honest and funny as hell. In a word, they’re irresistible.

“Focusing on seven women involved in the 2015 competition (the fourth edition of the event), Served Like a Girl takes a while to find its groove. But as it sheds light on these women’s experiences and the larger issue of homelessness among female vets, the film grows deeply engaging. Whatever the perceived or real political and social divisions between military families and the rest of us, this rousing nonfiction feature by Heslov, a producer making her directorial debut, suggests there’s far more common ground than many might suspect.”

Posted on 1.4.17 by “Ned Glasgow.” This obviously isn’t HE material, but the unseen driver is Robert Carlyle‘s character in Trainspotting, or has at the very least been inspired by him.

All along I’ve been getting an “oh, God, no” feeling from Tulip Fever (Weinstein Co., 9.1) — a conviction that the 17th Century Amsterdam milieu is too far removed from my own, that it has nothing to say to me. The principal symbol of that apartness is the ruff, or that ridiculous ornate collar that men and women wore between the mid 16th and mid 17th Century, and which Christoph Waltz is seen wearing in a couple of scenes from the trailer. I saw Waltz surrounded by that absurd neck wear and I went “nope…can’t do this.” If I’d been director Justin Chadwick, I would have said to my costume designer, “I don’t care how inaccurate this is, but my actors are not wearing those awful ruffs…create something else, anything else. Audiences will take one look at Waltz and they’ll laugh.”

Christoph Waltz’s neck surrounded by a white ruff, a staple of mid-17th Century fashion in the Netherlands.

Morgan Freeman deserves to be the the next recipient of the SAG Life Achievement Award. The trophy will be presented at the 24th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on 1.21.18. But when I think of Freeman I think “immaculate actor, major brand, beautiful voice but for the last 17 years has mostly taken paycheck work.” How lucky or choosy has Freeman been in terms of scoring good roles in top-tier or reasonably decent films? Starting with his breakout role in Street Smart (’87), Freeman has a total of ten films on his serious honor roster: Clean and Sober, Glory, Driving Miss Daisy, Unforgiven, The Shawshank Redemption, Se7en, Amistad, Million Dollar Baby (Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor), The Bucket List (okay, a so-so film but Freeman was first-rate) and Invictus. Eleven films out of…what, 100 or thereabouts? And most of them in the ’90s. But he did his best in what he was able to grab. And Freeman’s pre-Street Smart perfs were distinctive, particularly his angry-convict scene with Robert Redford in Brubaker.

The 20th anniversary of There’s Something About Mary is 11 months off, but Fox Movie Night’s James Finn and Schawn Belston are celebrating it next week (8.29) all the same. Ben Stiller told the Farrelly brothers that he didn’t like the hair gel scene — thought it was unbelievable and therefore not funny. I felt the same way. The audience was roaring with laughter as I sat in my seat like a sphinx. The only Mary scene I really laughed at was Matt Dillon‘s with the dog.

Bobby and Peter Farrelly were touched by lightning for seven years — from Dumber and Dumber to Me, Myself and Irene. Their 21st Century track record has been spotty, but I’ll never back off in my admiration for 2012’s The Three Stooges. During a late ’90s phone interview I asked for their opinion of Ernst Lubitsch, and without missing a beat one of them said “who?” That’s confidence, that’s fearlessness.

Fox Movie Night used to screen classic studio-era films (All About Eve, The Ow-Box Incident), but nostalgia standards are changing. People in their late 30s and early 40s regard late ’90s films as kind of old-timey, ’80s films as moldy and crusty and ’70s and ’60s films as artifacts from the Iron Age.

$72 for a 50th anniversary remastering of the stereo and mono versions of the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request? Not happening. But I’ll never forget how Wes Anderson‘s decision to play the entire track of “2000 Man” during a third-act heist sequence in Bottle Rocket impressed the shit out of me. Does any lyric for any ’60s song deliver the prophetic ring of “I am having an affair with the random computer“? Mick Jagger > Nostradamus.

Christian Bale as Captain Joseph Blocker in Scott Cooper‘s Hostiles, which will premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. Set in 1892, pic is about Blocker and some other soldiers (Jesse Plemons, Ben Foster, Timothee Chalamet) escorting a dying Cheyenne war chief (Wes Studi) and his family back to his tribal lands. Could Bale be playing the great-grandfather of Dan Blocker, who starred in NBC’s Bonanza several decades hence, or is he just another rugged individualist given to blocking his emotions?

Christian Bale in Scott Cooper’s Hostiles.