It’s official: THR’s Scott Feinberg is no longer the award-season best friend of September 5 (Paramount, 12.23), the Black September docudrama that Scott insisted for weeks was the highest-ranked, most-likely-to-prevail Best Picture contender. He’s walked away and is casting September 5‘s fate to the wind. Life can be cruel.

Among Feinberg’s top ten, five truly stand tall…movies with something really going on inside ** (and in this order): Anora, Conclave, A Real Pain, All We Imagine As Light, September 5.

** Something besides mere identity issues or tedious Brady Corbet brushstrokes or franchise spectacle.

Glenn Kenny to Ben Reddick in mid 1930s: “Stop trying to make the term ‘Oakie’ happen. It sounds like something a 12-year-old would say, and I don’t care if Woody Guthrie had used it a couple of times “

The great Daniel Craig has snagged the National Board of Review’s Best Actor trophy for his portrayal of a skittish, emotionally vulnerable yage man in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer….whoo-hoo!

Meanwhile the influence of the great Martin Landau was felt among the Spirit Awards’ gender-neutral Best Lead Performance nominees with the absence of The Brutalist‘s Adrien “cry me a river” Brody.

What does that tell you, that Brody’s a likely winner in the big game? The man wasn’t even nominated.

Anora‘s Mikey Madison was nominated in this category, however. Ditto Sebastian Stan for his performance as Donald Trump in The Apprentice….cheers!

Plus Anora snagged a total of six Spirit Award nominations, including one for Yura Borisov as Igor, the compassionate baldy with a soul.

On top of which the NBR guys totally blew off Emilia Perez.

Nothing horrible or turbulent, all good.

It never really registered before today that Julie (Creature From The Black Lagoon) Adams has a significant costarring role in Arnold Laven’s 1957 film, which I’ve never seen but is loosely related to On The Waterfront.

Starting around the 11-minute mark, Jane Fonda feigns ignorance about crazy woke extremities (“I’ve never heard about men getting pregnant…who is the far left?”), and Bill Maher explains what they are, where they’re at and what they seem to believe in.

At the 1:33 mark, Martin Landau conveys his opinion about Adrien Brody‘s profuse first-act weeping scene in The Brutalist. Okay, he’s not talking about Brody but he may as well be.

“Only bad actors show you emotion. How a character hides his feelings tells us who he is. No one tries to cry in life. Everyone tries to hide it.”

And yet Brody was obviously excellent in The Pianist. So let’s get down to it — only bad directors urge their actors to openly cry, or allow their actors to do so. The bad guy, in short, is Brutalist helmer Brady Corbet, not Brody.

Bottom line: Mid-vote brunching is not only an act of coarse irreverence but is anathema to all true Movie Catholics. Strictly for chumps.

And Adrien Brody‘s performance as Lászlo Tóth, the period film’s profusely weeping, cigarette-smoking, heroin-shooting protagonist, has won the New York Film Critics Circle’s Best Actor prize.

I’ve only seen the first half of The Brutalist (really couldn’t stand it) but I know what this performance primarily is, and this is an outrageous decision.

Virtuoso Nickel Boys auteurist RaMell Ross won for Best Director. If Ross had been handed some kind of Best Audacious First Film trophy, fine. But Nickel Boys doesn’t work and actually becomes quite tiresome. This was a broad consensus view at Telluride so don’t tell me.

I haven’t seen Mike Leigh‘s Hard Truths so no opinion about Marianne Jean-Baptiste winning for Best Actress…congrats.

A Real Pain‘s Kieran Culkin won the Best Supporting Actor trophy — the only NYFCC decision I wholly agree with.

Carol Kane was named Best Supporting Actress for playing music teacher Carla Kessler in Nathan Silver‘s Between the Temples. Call me superficial, but I didn’t see it because I didn’t want to invest in the once-svelte Jason Schwartzman playing a chunky-bod. (He’s even fatter in Queer.)

Sean Baker won a Best Screenplay awards for Anora….he should have won for Best Director, and Anora should have won Best Film….the NYFCC are really a bunch of eccentric assholes this year!

…against the descendants of all the senior producers and creatives on the original The Wizard of Os (’39). Elphaba is suing for damages in the hundreds of millions because the Margaret Hamilton version of the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West is defamatory, plain and simple. Everyone understands this, but Louis B. Mayer sure didn’t. He didn’t understand that young Elphaba was a wonderful person at heart…a school-age girl who was unfortunately treated with cruelty during her time at Shiz University.

And following in the path of Glenn Powell‘s character in Twister, relegated to the sidelines during the action-packed climax, there ain’t no savior prince in the new Snow White (Disney, 3.21) — this is apparently a militant, storm-the-barricades show aimed at progressive women of all ages. (The script is by Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson.) Okay, there’s the kind-hearted, mild-mannered Jonathan character (Andrew Burnap) as well as the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia)), but, like Powell, these are second-banana characters.