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Kevin Costner as NASA honcho “Al Harrison” in Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures.

When SAG and Academy members nominate actors in whatever category, they are naturally presumed to have chosen this or that colleague for two reasons. One, they’ve found the journey of a certain character to be emotionally moving and two, they’ve been impressed by a demonstration of exceptional “acting” skill. The winner of a SAG award or an acting Oscar will have usually aced both.

But I have a funny thing about “acting.” I respect and value top-notch thesping more than most, but the best performances, I feel, are those that don’t look or feel “performed” — the kind that fool you into thinking that the actor isn’t reading a line, or hasn’t been urged to sound or behave in a certain way. The kind of acting, in short, that doesn’t feel like “acting” at all. The art of apparently doing very little but hitting a bullseye.

If you ask me only three fellows in the Best Supporting Actor realm this year have met this particular standard — Kevin Costner in Ted Melfi‘s Hidden Figures (20th Century Fox, 12.25) along with Mahershala Ali in Moonlight (a steady, nurturing vibe — warmth, kindness, caring) and Lucas Hedges in Manchester by the Sea (naturalistic, matter of fact — no reaching). **

Costner has been excelling at non-actorish performances all along, but especially since he moved into his older-guy phase about 15 years ago. He’s really hitting his stride these days. His settled naturalism couldn’t be further from the peppy, mannered acting of James Cagney, but in every performance Costner seems to be following Cagney’s famous acting advice — “Know your lines, find your mark, look the other guy in the eye and tell the truth.”

Nobody “acts” less than Costner, and if you think that’s easy…

A few weeks ago I riffed about Costner bringing a settled, fair-minded authority and decency to his performance as “Al Harrison”, a NASA official in the film but actually a real-life composite character. Harrison is partly based on the late Robert Gilruth and also John Stack, a top aeronautical engineer at NASA for decades.

The ISIS-supported truck attack in Berlin occured in “my” neck of the woods, so to speak. It happened a bit east of Charlottenburg, or roughly a mile from where I’ve stayed twice (i.e., a friend’s place at Holtzendorffstrasse 29). It’s a beautiful area, full of oldish buildings, stylish shops and highly inviting cafes and restaurants. The classic Zoo Palast cinema is right nearby. Firstshowing.net‘s Alex Billington lives two or three miles to the east. Another horror to add to the list.

“Rex Tillerson, the businessman nominated by Donald Trump to be the next US secretary of state, was the longtime director of a US-Russian oil firm based in the tax haven of the Bahamas, leaked documents show. Tillerson — the chief executive of ExxonMobil — became a director of the oil company’s Russian subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas, in 1998. His name – RW Tillerson – appears next to other officers who are based at Houston, Texas; Moscow; and Sakhalin, in Russia’s far east.

“The leaked 2001 document comes from the corporate registry in the Bahamas. It was one of 1.3 million files given to the Germany newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous source. The registry is public but details of individual directors are typically incomplete or missing entirely.” — from a 12.18 Guardian story by Luke Harding and Hannes Munzinger.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allessandro has been speaking with Warner Bros. execs who are (a) upset about the tanking of Collateral Beauty and (b) believe that aggregate movie sites that summarize critical opinion (Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic) are largely to blame for killing this grotesquely awful Will Smith movie.

“Critics, more than ever, can dictate the financial fate of a movie, particularly one that’s inherently a crowd-pleaser,” D’Allesandro said in a piece that posted Sunday morning. “Critics arguably have the power to keep them at home, shut down a movie and put exhibition in a stalemate.”

Really? And all this time I’ve been under the impression that critical opinion doesn’t matter all that much with the hoi-polloi — that while moviegoers might occasionally glance at an upcoming film’s aggregate critical score, most of them pay to see a film because of the effectiveness of the ad materials (mostly the trailers) and what their friends are saying about the film on social media, or because of a basic gut feeling.

Critical opinion matters on a mass scale, I think, when it manages to incite or propel the general conversational verdict among ticket-buyers. Otherwise most people despise critics for their foo-foo sensibilities — for their anal-cavity-residing way of processing films (and for that matter life itself).

Favorite HE passage: “Warner Bros. even received sympathy from a rival major studio distribution executive who defended the mass-appealing qualities of Collateral Beauty: ‘Film critics are narrow-minded and have dark hearts,’ the exec said. ‘They prefer something like Manchester by the Sea, which is significantly much darker than this film and deals with a similar set-up: the death of children.”

Wells to quoted non-Warner Bros. exec, D’Allesandro and all Warner Bros. kvetchers: The “critics have dark hearts and narrow minds” remark isn’t 100% untrue, but the inference that they prefer Manchester By The Sea to Collateral Beauty because of their own psychological dispositions is delusional on a Donald Trump level, guys. Collateral Beauty is cloying, sickening emotional goo while Manchester is an honest, artful, straight-dealing emotional masterpiece by a director-screenwriter who knows how to throw fastballs, sliders, knuckleballs and curves like a Baseball Hall of Fame legend and who knows how to tell jokes like an Improv headliner.

Emphatic agreement: Gavin Newsom in 2020. Tall, smart, good-looking guys tend to win elections.

The SNL guys are basically saying that while Dunkin’ Donuts has upgraded to some extent (they have decent wifi, good cappuccino), they can’t shake the fringe-level, low-rent class of customer they’ve been attracting since the mid 20th Century. Dunkin’ Donuts has a nice clientele, I’m sure, but in my mind it’s always been a pitstop for lower-level office workers, storage-facility clerks and meathead wage-earners. DD will never be Starbucks or Coffee Bean. When I think of Dunkin’ Donuts I think of those storefronts in the main Newark airport terminal or on some unexceptional boulevard in North Bergen or Jersey City. And that garish pink and orange design — home is where the heart is.

A grimy, noirish, degenerated social atmosphere — acid rain, steam clouds, digital ads flashing overhead, a general third-world vibe. Plus some Mad Max: Fury Road-meets-The Martian desert colors. Mostly the same basic atmosphere and design that made Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner a legend, and that’s cool for now. When push comes to shove director Denis Villeneuve will need to deliver more than cult nostalgia, of course, but he knows that. I give up: What’s the big, rusty, half-rotted lightbulb-shaped thing?

Everyone now knows that Passengers (Sony, 12.21) is saddled with a gnarly ethical issue. When engineer Chris Pratt is aroused from hibernation aboard a massive star cruiser in the midst of a 120-year voyage to a planet called Homestead II, he realizes he’s been accidentally revived — the other 4999 passengers will be in hibernation for another 80 years. Faced with a life of absolute loneliness and certain to die before the ship arrives, Pratt decides to wake up journalist Jennifer Lawrence, whom he’s fallen in love with after watching her video profile and reading her articles. On one hand his loneliness problem is solved — on the other he’s a creep and a kind of murderer.

HE commenter “Jeff” has mentioned that in a just-posted Fight In The War Room podcast, Indiewire critic David Ehrlich says that Passengers “would have been better served if Pratt died in Act Three and Lawrence then realized herself that she needs to wake someone up too to avoid a lifetime alone.” Good ending! Another scenario was subsequently suggested by HE commenter “Mr. Sunset Terra Cotta“, to wit: “Even if Pratt doesn’t die in Act Three, Lawrence decides she needs to wake someone else up to have an affair with when Pratt starts wearing thin.” Even better!

La La Land‘s Emma Stone, the presumptive front-runner in the Best Actress race, has won a trophy — an honor that had eluded her until today. The Utah Film Critics Association bestowed the honor. Yes, she may also snag the SAG Best Actress statuette and will certainly take the Golden Globe award for Best Actress, Comedy or Musical. But who can say about the Best Actress Oscar? Especially with Jackie‘s Natalie Portman as Stone’s chief competitor.

The UFCA also selected La La land as Best Picture, Moonlight‘s Barry Jenkins as Best Director (with La La Land‘s Damien Chazelle in the runner-up slot), Manchester By The Sea’s Casey Affleck as Best Actor, Fences‘ Viola Davis as Best Supporting Actress, and a tie between Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali and 10 Cloverfield Lane‘s John Goodman for Best Supporting Actor. Last June Variety‘s Kris Tapley and Janelle Riley suggested that Goodman deserved a Best Supporting Actor prize — somebody finally went for it!

It may be that Stone will follow in the path of The Blind Side’s Sandra Bullock in ’09/’10.  Bullock was blanked in the Best Actress category by all the critics groups except the Washington D.C. area film critics org (which at least nominated her for Best Actress) but then started sweeping with the big industry awards in the final phase.

Two things before I take the rest of the day off. One, I feel no obligation to pay more than minimal attention to the fact that Zsa-Zsa Gabor — the first goddess of grasping Hollywood greed, the spiritual grandmother of the Paris Hilton-Kim Kardashian virus that has spread across our land, the oomphy blonde who became notorious for divorce settlements and nothingness and fame for fame’s sake — has passed at age 99. And two, I’m sorry to report that an Oscar Poker chat that I recorded with Jordan Ruimy a couple of hours ago just bored the pants off me when I tried to edit it down. Not Jordan’s “fault” or mine — we both just sounded under-energized or something. No depth or bounce or passion. Sometimes you strike out — it happens. Again, the mp3.

Shot in 1972, when Keith Richards was around 29.

The late Zsa-Zsa Gabor, who died today at age 99.

I have a built-in weakness as far as listing the most deplorable films of 2016 (or any year) goes because I tend to avoid the shit sandwiches, and so I didn’t even see Miracles From Heaven, Nina, The Brothers Grimsby, Alice Through The Looking Glass, Warcraft, Yoga Hosers, Bad Moms, Divergent: Allegiant, Inferno, Independence Day: Resurgence, Bad Santa 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Dirty Grandpa or Zoolander 2, which others have placed on their Worst of ’16 lists.

But I saw at least a few awful-awfuls, and the two that have tied for HE’s Worst Film of the Year prize, hands down, are David Frankel‘s Collateral Beauty (which I despised so much that I left a little before the one-hour mark) and Timur Bekmambetov‘s Ben-Hur.

If you want to disqualify my Collateral Beauty judgment because I bailed halfway through, you’d have to concude that Ben-Hur is HE’s worst because at least I watched it start to finish.

In my 8.19 review I called Ben-Hur “one of the lowest, cheesiest, scurviest, lemme-outta-here films made or distributed by a major U.S. studio, ever. Almost everything about it stinks of mediocrity — the tedious writing, the grayish color scheme, the C-grade cast delivering soap-opera performances, the low-budget vibe despite a reported $100 million having been spent.

“It’s like a 1987 Golan-Globus version of Ben-Hur starring Michael Dudikoff as Judah and Chuck Norris as Messala. It’s third-tier shit, shit, shit, shit, shit on almost every level.”

Significant stinkers that I actually suffered through: Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, London Has Fallen, Man Down, Sea Of Trees, Suicide Squad, The Hollars, The Girl on the Train, etc.

I’ve said three or four times that John Lee Hancock‘s The Founder (Weinstein Co.) is one of the most fascinating ethical dramas I’ve seen in a long while, and that Michael Keaton‘s performance as Ray Kroc treads the line between opportunistic go-getterism and ruthless assholery with the skill of a mountain goat.

And now Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has more or less said the same thing in this 12.17 essay:

“The Founder is a terrific movie, and it features Keaton at the height of his powers,” Gleiberman says.

“Ray Kroc, as presented, is a noodgy gadget salesman who isn’t going anywhere; at the start, he seems like a loser. But then, in 1954, he meets the McDonald brothers, Mac (John Carroll) and Dick (Nick Offerman), who’ve launched a highly popular burger stand in San Bernadino, not just by creating succulently tasty burgers but by replacing the old ’50s car-hop drive-in with a revolutionary new system. In their custom-built kitchen, everything is part of an assembly line, with burgers and fries manufactured en masse, at lightning speed, and each tasty component made to identical specifications.

“Ray sees how this restaurant — called McDonald’s — operates, and he takes in its clean family vibe, but he really sees the light when he looks at the picture on the wall of Mac and Dick’s office; it depicts a white McDonald’s with golden arches. In fact, the brothers have already built one just like it.