The ultimate heat-generating, blogaroo-friendly, 10-day award-season gathering kicks off tonight — Nick the Gr…sorry, Roger Durling‘s Santa Barbara Film Festival. Tonight’s opening event (kicking off at 8 pm) is a Modern Master award tribute for Denzel Washington, whose recent SAG win suggested that Casey Affleck‘s fait accompli Best Actor Oscar might not be a fait accoimpli.

Could Denzel snatch it? I kinda doubt it but maybe. I suspect the SAG thing was an anomaly, but you tell me.

Hollywood Elsewhere drove up yesterday via the scenic coastal route, which took 150 minutes or so but was well worth it. I’m bunking in room #236 at the Fess Parker Doubletree, and incidentally coping with a cold — Vitamin C carpet bombing, antihistamines, Alka Seltzer daytime, Vitamin B-12 shot at 5 pm.

Taken from room #236 at Fess Parker Doubletree — Wednesday, 2.1, 6:45 pm.

This question is being posed at least two years too early, but who has the better shot at the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination, Cory Booker or Gavin Newsom?

As predicted, as expected, a certain needling presence in the HE realm has called out yesterday’s Moonlight riff (“Moonlight in the Ozarks“) for stating that a big part of Moonlight‘s success with critics and industry types is that it’s black and gay, and that it wouldn’t have done half as well if it had been about some rural gay kid from the Ozarks. The needling presence accused me of expressing myself in a racially incorrect manner. Here’s my reply, sent a few minutes ago:

Do you keep a hickory stick at home to beat people like me with…you know, people who don’t get it the way you do?

You know that Moonlight, which I’ve admired all along as far as it goes, would be considered a marginal film at best, and certainly not a Best Picture contender, if the lead protagonist was a gay white-trash kid/teen/older guy from the Ozarks. You know this and you lie all the same.

You know that a certain carte blanche NY & LA p.c. mindset exists regarding any and all black, gay, lesbian, transgender, fat-shamed or Native-American characters in movies. You know it, and yet you lie and try to give me grief because I speak plainly and frankly about these matters rather than put on my p.c. ballet shoes and tippy-toe around them.

Moonlight is very good for what it is, but it’s on the slight side. It really is — it’s not a full-boat movie as much as a sketch, a concept, a less-is-more exercise. It’s one of those films that feels like a short story and expands when you think back on it (which, granted, is always a mark of something exceptional or at least rooted) but there’s still not a whole lot of “there” there.

Journalist pal #1 (who’s gay): “I hated it.” Journalist pal #2 (who’s straight): “It’s not gay enough.”

The early life of a “soft” kid, Chiron (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders), who’s lonely, scared and huddled, is influenced by two factors — a kindly local drug dealer (Mahershala Ali) who briefly provides some much-needed paternal attention and affection, and in his mid teens by a kid (Jharrel Jerome) whom Charon is drawn to and who winds up giving the teenaged Charon (i.e., Sanders) a life-altering handjob on the beach.

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You’re not allowed to say or even think this, but I’d like to offer a mild, no-big-deal hypothesis. If Barry Jenkins had decided for whatever perverse reason to (a) transpose Tarell Alvin McCraney‘s “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” from its Miami setting to the Ozark mountain region of southern Missouri, and decided to cast white rural types (yokel accent, under-educated, Trumpian beliefs) as the three manifestations of the Charon character but (b) still deliver an exquisite, humanistic film in terms of the directing, writing and performances…would Moonlight be as much of a thing?

The answer, of course, is that the Ozark version of Moonlight almost certainly wouldn’t become a Best Picture contender — face it. It might not have even played Telluride. Because there is considerable disdain among journalists, industry hipsters and Academy members for yokel culture right now, just as there is considerable support (at least in the initial film-festival stages) for almost any film focusing on African-American and/or gay characters. What am I saying? As good as Moonlight is and always will be, it solidified its award-season cred because the characters, culture and general Miami milieu were recognized as right and proper by the p.c. cool kidz.

“If you focus on Trump too much, he can literally vacuum out your brains. These are deliberate fabrications…he’s throwing dust in our eyes. He can make you crazy. When you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” — Thomas L. Friedman, N.Y. Times columnist and author of “Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations.”

What turn of events could have suddenly made it clear to Ben Affleck that he can no longer direct and star in The Batman (which has always struck me, by the way, as a comically brain-dead title)? Affleck and Warner Bros. had been contractually committed to Affleck wearing both hats for the last 18 months so what changed their thinking?

I’ll tell you what happened. Live By Night happened.

I didn’t have that many issues with Affleck’s 1930s-era gangster flick (Robert Richardson‘s fine cinematography certainly made it one of the handsomest crime dramas I’ve ever seen), but the fact that Live By Night, which Affleck directed and starred in, lost $75 million plus the general critical impression that it felt a bit staid and listless and lacked that essential snap (32% Rotten Tomatoes, 49% Metacritic) must have scared the shit out of Warner Bros. honcho Kevin Tsujihara.

Affleck is obviously a skilled, Oscar-winning director-writer but somehow or other he developed cold Batman feet and Tsujihara was nervous enough about the possibility that Affleck might deliver Batman By Night that they both figured “fuck it, let’s not risk it…not this time.”

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If you’re any kind of Zodiac fan, you know that David Fincher’s 162-minute Director’s Cut is the only version worth seeing or discussing. The original theatrical cut ran 157 minutes. The five-minutes-longer Director’s Cut offers expansions in ten scenes, and most importantly includes the black-screen musical time passage sequence.

No self-respecting cinefile would even consider watching the Philistines-only theatrical cut, and yet Cinefamily will be screening the 157-minute version on Thursday, 2.9, in honor of the film’s 10th anniversary. (In fact Zodiac opened on 3.2.07.) There’s still time to fix this. If Cinefamily doesn’t acknowledge error and announce that they intend to screen the 162-minute cut, they have no honor.

A 3.16.08 analysis by moviecensorship.com’s “Frankie“: “The five minutes of new footage edited back into the film will only go detected by either the filmmakers or Zodiac‘s die-hard fans. One will have to scrutinize over Zodiac‘s already-long 162 minute run time like it was the Zapruder film to catch all of the added scenes, which are mostly additional transitional cues and/or longer beats during the second act’s end-run-around of an investigation, culminating in the most noticeable of ‘new’ sequences — an extended ‘musical segue”‘ from the 1970s to the 1980s.

“But because Zodiac is a film about the consequences of details – big or small – about how even those filed under plain-slight can easily slip through the cracks, the new footage serves as another means by which Fincher enhances his audience’s viewing experience, aligning itself well with the investigation Zodiac’s detectives conduct.”

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In what universe does an overweight, balding, pasty-skinned physician have even a wisp of a chance of scoring with a group of nubile 20something nymphs on a Greek island? In the actual world a guy like this might strike up a casual conversation with vacationing beach hotties…maybe, if the women were bored and God smiled for perversity’s sake.  

For whatever reason an increasing number of cutting-edge filmmakers are refusing to accept that unattractive people live in a hole of muted misery for the most part, and that their lot in life, at best, is to only fraternize among themselves.  (Unless they’re rich, famous or brilliant.)  The universal law about birds of a feather flocking together for thousands of years can’t be changed just because a director-screenwriter (i.e., Suntan‘s Argyris Papadimitropoulos) decides to imagine otherwise.

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Last night Orange Orangutan fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates for declaring that the Justice Department would not defend Trump’s executive order on immigration. Shameless, sphincter-smooching White House spokesperson Sean Spicer explained that Yates “betrayed the Department of Justice” by refusing to defend Trump’s order. The statement added that Yates, a career prosecutor whom Trump named as acting attorney general, is “weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.” Dana Boente, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was named as acting attorney general.”

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“After 45 years of scattershot liberal protest, the Academy Awards are now the perfect bully pulpit from which to address the already glaring moral calamity of Donald Trump’s presidency,” Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has written in a 1.30 thinkpiece.

“Certainly, a balance needs to be struck: The point of the evening is to celebrate the movies nominated, and politics shouldn’t overshadow that. But I do believe that politics can blend with that. America will be watching — in greater numbers, I suspect, than we’ve seen for a long time. And not just blue-state America. I mean Trump voters too (do you think that none of them went to see La La Land?), and also swing voters, who may already be feeling a touch of buyer’s remorse, and who may have begun to peel off from the Trump crusade.

“What’s required is a way to speak truth — artfully and memorably, the way Meryl Streep did — to the Oscar-night viewers who are movie lovers who are citizens who have the power to change America. What’s required is a moment that can translate into a meme of protest. A lot of liberals have already begun to realize [that] the only way to defeat Donald Trump is to fight fire with fire — and on Academy Awards night, that means fighting show business with show business.”