Two weeks ago I asked for reader assistance in assembling a speculative roster of 2017 releases that might wind up on the top-ten lists a year from now. It goes without saying that some of these may rank as 2017-18 award-season hotties by the blogaroos. Now we have at least the beginnings of a rundown — roughly 59 films.

Of these there are 35 that could be described as either highly promising or pick-of-the-litter, and nearly all from name-brand directors. At least five of these have the traditional earmarks of Best Picture contenders — Kathryn Bigelow‘s Untitled Detroit Riots Drama, Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Charles James ’50s period drama, Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing and Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour, a Winston Churchill vs. Nazi war machine drama.

Likeliest Best Picture Contenders (5):

Kathryn Bigelow‘s Untitled 1967 Detroit Riots Docudrama, written by Mark Boal, with John Boyega, Jack Reynor, Will Poulter, Ben O’Toole, Hannah Murray, Brandon Scales, Anthony Mackie, Jacob Latimore, Kaitlyn Dever, Jason Mitchell, Algee Smith, Joseph David-Jones and John Krasinski.

Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing (Paramount, 12.22), a sci-fi comedy about “a couple that has agreed to have themselves shrunk down, except the wife changes her mind after the husband submits to the process.” Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Christoph Waltz, Alec Baldwin, Neil Patrick Harris, Jason Sudeikis.

Paul Thomas Anderson Anderson’s ‘s semi-fictionalized biopic about legendary egomaniacal fashion designer Charles James (1906-1978) with Daniel Day Lewis in the lead role. Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported on 9.8.16 that the film will be set in the fashion world in London in the 1950s (even though James operated out of New York City during that decade). Fleming also said that Focus Features plans to release it in late 2017.

Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk (Warner Bros., 7.19), a partially IMAX-shot, World War II-era epic. Step back — it’s the new Nolan! Aneurin Barnard, Kenneth Branagh, James D’Arcy, Tom Hardy, Jack Lowden, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance.

Issur Danielovitch, otherwise known as Kirk Douglas, turns 100 today. Cheers, salutes and celebrations for a truly legendary fellow — an ego-driven, headstrong, no-nonsense hardhead, thinker and studly swaggerer during his day. A real 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 52 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 100 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 sometimes 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.

The gifted, ginger-haired French mouse otherwise known as Isabelle Huppert has agreed to receive the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Montecito Award on Wednesday, 2.8. The Elle star, a recent winner of three Best Actress trophies from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the Gotham Awards, was invited to participate by festival honcho Roger Durling, whose savvy endorsements of certain award-season contenders for the last dozen or so years has led to his status as a kind of swami-like oddsmaker, an Oscar whisperer, Santa Barbara’s “Nick the Greek.” Before this morning Huppert was a fairly certain Best Actress contender, but now with Durling’s tribute she’s locked down. Does anyone remember Huppert in Bertrand Blier‘s Going Places? That was when I first sat up and took notice, 42 fucking years ago.

When reps for Fences‘ Viola Davis announced that she’d be running as a Best Supporting Actress contender, there were two basic reactions: (1) If SAG and Academy members accept that she’s playing a supporting role, she’s got the Oscar in the bag but (2) will they accept this or call it category fraud, given that she’s playing the strongest female role with loads of screen time, and that she stands right up to Denzel Washington line for line, and that she won a Best Actress Tony award in 2010 for playing the exact same role? If there’s any mucky-muck about this, Manchester By The Sea‘s Michelle Williams (who totally kills within less than ten minutes of screen time) could be the surprise winner. Hidden Figures/Moonlight‘s Janelle Monae and Moonlight‘s Naomie Harris are evenly matched in third and fourth place. 20th Century Women‘s Greta Gerwig has earned a nom, for sure, but she was ten times more electric/magnetic in Frances Ha (’13) and/or Mistress America (’15).

John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, has died at age 95. He was just over 40 when the Friendship 7 capsule orbited the globe three times on 2.20.62. Glenn was elected U.S Senator from Ohio in ’74; he served in that capacity until ’99. He was portrayed by Ed Harris in Phil Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff (’83), and self-described in one scene as “Harry Hairshirt.” On 10.29.98, at age 77, Glenn flew as a payload specialist on a space shuttle mission (Discovery mission STS-95), and in so doing became the oldest person to orbit the earth. A full life, a good run. He’s looking down at the earth now like Keir Dullea‘s starchild at the end of 2001.

“My most profound Police moment happened on the evening of December 8, 1980, in a small pub in the Stockwell section of London. Never a hardcore audiophile and even less so due to being poor, I was a little late in getting into their music. I had just bought a cassette tape of Zenyatta Mondatta maybe a month or so earlier but I hadn’t listened to it that much. I was edging my way in. Anyway there I was in London, about to do a GQ interview with Peter O’Toole, who was extra-hot at the moment off his career-reviving performance in The Stunt Man. I was crashing with a couple of ladies I knew through a journalist friend, and I was sitting at a table and drinking a pint and feeling great about being in England for the first time alone, and then somebody got up and played ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ on the jukebox. And all of a sudden I heard that song for the first time. The juke was putting out super-thrompy bass tones and it just sounded perfect, and from that moment on I was a Police fan. The next morning I awoke around 7 am to news on the radio that John Lennon had been shot and killed only a few hours earlier in New York City.” — posted on 2.27.15.

In picking their favorite 2016 films, the three N.Y. Times critics — Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott and Stephen Holden — have not strenuously argued with the notion that critics live in their own cloistered realms, processing movies in rarified terms, knowledgable and sophisticated but breathing special foo-foo oxygen.

I agree with some of their choices — Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash, Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle, Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America, Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson, Andrea Arnold‘s American Honey. I am respectfully side-stepping discussions of Moonlight except to say that it’s a good film. No mentions of Robert Eggers‘ The Witch or Gavin Hood‘s Eye in the Sky, and yet Holden included Todd Solondz‘s groan-inducing Wiener-Dog among his honorable mentions. Wiener-Dog — the scourge of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival!

The Times trio appears to have been influenced by one important consideration, which is to avoid saluting or even mentioning the top-ranked faves of the Gold Derby-ites and Gurus of Goldies. Holden included the masterful Manchester by the Sea on his top-ten roster but not Scott or Dargis. THR columnist Scott Feinberg called the trio’s refusal to include La La Land and Hell or High Water among their top-tens “unfathomable.” Dargis at least mentioned La La Land among her “other loves,” although she says that she did so “mainly for its finale.” The trio didn’t offer even limited love for Denzel Washington‘s Fences; ditto Martin Scorsese‘s Silence.

I didn’t write the above headline with any intention to offend — I was just explaining what I’ve come to realize is a fairly reliable scenario. Johnson is a comme ci comme ca Republican who’s out to make dough and keep things as vapid and formulaic as possible. An amiable baba with a ripped bod. During the Obama era Johnson became one of the biggest emblems of the constellation of multicultural superstardom; now there’s something about him that smells a little Trumpish. His shallow opportunist colors are showing all the more.

When Michael Keaton‘s Ray Kroc tells Nick Offerman‘s Rick McDonald that he’s no longer interested in maintaining a cordial partnership (“I’m through taking marching orders from you and your endless parade of no’s, constantly cowering in the face of progress”), a little man inside me went “yes!” The Founder is easily one of the most fascinating ethical dramas of this or any other season, and a brilliant character study of a guy who’s far from “good” but whose motives and actions are understandable and hard to wholly condemn. Here’s the mp3.

The hastening of ecological ruination is no longer a threat — it’s now a plan, a coming policy, a nightmare waiting to happen. Donald Trump‘s decision to nominate Scott Pruitt, a climate-change-denying animal, to head the Environmental Protection Agency, all but ensures this.

The construction of this 12.7 N.Y. Times story about Pruitt’s selection, written by Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton, is immaculate and horrifying. It doesn’t contain a single wasted word, and is basically a kind of projection of a death sentence. And it’s not a dream.

Remember that third-act scene in David Cronenberg‘s The Dead Zone when Christopher Walken realizes what Martin Sheen will eventually do as President, and what…I shouldn’t complete this sentence.

Chapter and verse: “President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the E.P.A. itself.

“Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to ‘cancel’ the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a ‘war on coal.’