If you walk over and look them in the eye and ask them to please cut the crap, the AFI Sight & Sound gang will admit the truth.

They know that Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon is not one of his top-tier films. They know it’s basically a woke movie, a guilt-trip thing. They know that it has no character viewpoint other that “century-old Oklahoma white guys bad.” They know that Scorsese and Eric Roth decided to more or less abandon FBI agent Tom White, the central figure in David Grann’s 2017 book, in favor of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s dumbshit Ernest Burkhart, who isn’t worth the effort.

They know all that and voted Killers as the year’s top film regardless. Because they wanted to proclaim their belief and investment in the redemption narrative. It’s their way of saying “we get it Marty…you did your best under the circumstances and understandably felt that you couldn’t go with White as the champion…we get it and we support you and are on your side despite the fact that if we were voting on merit alone we wouldn’t have chosen Killers….you get that and so do we…plus we absolutely believe in the metaphor of Lily Gladstone‘s identity campaign for Best Actress…all hail our recognition of past sins and our attempt at absolution or at least forgiveness.”

Finally but limited…AMC Lincoln Square, Regal Union Square, Brooklyn Drafthouse. The suburbs are cooling their heels.

I prefer the idea of Poor Things or Maestro or The Holdovers taking the Best Picture Oscar because they’re such grand buffets…because they combine lavish and concurrent servings of cinematic nutrition and dessert, fascinating novelty and invention in the case of the first two and well-constructed involvement (endless emotionalism and irony, thematic richness, abundant imagination and just-right-ism, and inescapable leakage in the case of Maestro’s ending)…because they flipped me over and held me in their grip.

Oppie on the other hand…that oppressive college-lecture hall delivery and horrible, aching sense of frigid isolation (stuck in that godawful makeshift New Mexico isolation camp and that suffocating D.C. committee testimony room with the killer combo of Nolan’s dialogue and that soul-stifling, cold-eyed, alien-from-planet-Tralfamadore performance from Cillian Murphy, whom I now never, EVER want to watch in a film ever again….please.

I’ve begun to rewatch Oppie on Amazon and the subtitles do help to some extent, but I once again felt caught in a long, punishing endurance test…that same feeling I had during my two theatrical viewings…DEAR GOD I’ll never forget that feeling of entrapment and interior devastation…those volumes upon volumes of dialogue pages and a running-time clock that proceeded at a snail’s pace, only to chickenheartedly avoid the obvious and inescapable climax of those Hiroshima and Nagasaki infernos.

Oppie is obviously a smart, well-crafted, full-court-press film for smarty-pants viewers with greater intestinal fortitude than I, but it killed me to slosh through that Murphy-Oppie swamp…that dense narrative thicket, that after-school detention feeling…wading through a three-hour technical briefing that murdered my spirit and killed my legs and made me feel like Winston Smith’s head in a rat cage…a steady, plodding, scene-by-scene procedural that was always about Nolan saying “I won’t be coming to you because you have to come to ME”…an intellectually freeze-dried process if I’ve ever endured one.

And I’m supposed to feel somehow knocked out, by the way, by Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as the Salieri-like Lewis Strauss and those 16 or 17 repetitions of that outdoor Einstein-Oppie-Strauss scene that Nolan diabolically keeps cutting back to over and over and over again?

I’m glad that Oppie is so well liked and has enjoyed great financial success, and if it wins the Best Picture Oscar…fine.. But it compressed and suffocated and held me down on the wrestling mat, and is basically, for me, this year’s TAR.

Ten years ago 3.5% of Americans said they identified as LGBTQIA, and today 7.1% are so identifying — a 100% increase, mainly due to Zoomers and Younger Millennials wanting to mingle with the crowd and be trendy.

Boiled down we’re talking one out of nearly 15 people. Which means, of course, that nearly 14 out of 15 Americans identify as straight.

Do this year’s Best Picture contenders represent this approximate gay-to-straight proportion? Of course not. Do they tilt in the direction of gay-themed or gay-seasoned subject matter? No, they do not “tilt” — they lean heavily in this direction. Two-thirds to a third.

If you accept there are twelve top award contenders (and you really can’t count Napoleon among them), you’ve only got four that are completely, unregenerately, hot-dog-with-a-brewski, Travis Kelce, low-thread-count T-shirt straight with nothing the least bit gay or even gay-flirting among them — Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon and Past Lives. And three of these (Oppie, Holdovers, Killers) are period pieces.

On the other hand eight of the twelve award-season contenders have gay characters or gay sex scenes, or they satirize or belittle straight males.

1. Maestro (famous gay conductor lovingly married to beard wife, with whom he’s sired three children), 2. Barbie (dozens upon dozens of might-as-well-be-gay buff-bod Kens — the only overtly straight males are played by Michael Cera and Will Ferrell and the Matell board members), 3. American Fiction (Sterling K. Brown as Jeffrey Wright‘s gay brother, Clifford Ellison), 4. Poor Things (mostly hetero but with a lesbian oral sex scene in a Paris brothel), 5. Anatomy of a Fall (Sandra Huller admits to having had same-sex affairs outside the bonds of marriage to her late husband), 6. Rustin (charismatic gay civil leader of the ’60s), 7. Nyad (lesbian long-distance swimmer) and 8. The Color Purple (partly about lesbian-tinged relationship relationship between Celie and Shug, based on a book by bisexual author Alice Walker).

Summary: On-screen this season we have eight gay or gay-tinged films vs. four that are flat-out straight. In real life nearly 14 out of 15 folks are non-LGBTQIA.

What does that tell you about where Hollywood is coming from, and to what extent that they’re making films for the vast majority of moviegoers? At least as far as the ’23 award season is concerned? I’ll tell you what it means. It means that within industry culture, it seems safer or cooler to make gayish films or those with a little gay flavoring, It neans that industry culture sees Average Joe straight culture as crude or tedious or troglodyte-ish.

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Sidenote: You can apparently buy original paperback editions of Matt Bradley‘s “Homo Hill”, a respected, relatively trim account of urban gay life during the JFK era. It first hit the stands on 1.1.63.

HE isn’t 100% persuaded in terms of the Disqus poster’s identity, but it may the same Lily Gladstone with whom we’re all familiar,

Either way I have two replies — (a) thanks for the recognition and the for the implied limited respect therein, and (b) thanks for expanding my horizons with a Navajo term I wasn’t familiar with — da’alzhin, which means ayehole.

The HE comment in question appeared late last night. It was in response to yesterday afternoon’s “Lily Wins Again…Yeesh” riff. I’m mentioning it for posterity’s sake as her Apple handlers will most likely be urging @lilygladstone to delete the post, if (and I say “if”) the authorship is indeed genuine.

HE statement: I don’t have an issue with Lily Gladstone per se — not in the least. She’s fine within the realm of her own talent, and there’s nothing wrong per se with wrapping herself in a Native American identity blanket on the campaign trail.

Gladstone is simply out of her depth in the current Best Actress race compared to Emma Stone and Carey Mulligan’s guns-blazing performances in Poor Things and Maestro, respectively. Her Mollie Burkhart performance in Killers of the Flower Moon, good as it modestly is, is a supporting thing —it simply lacks the necessary scope, depth and intensity that is commonly associated with an award-aspiring lead performance.

Alas, Lily has been running an effective woke identity campaign (a three-pronged one, one could argue), and it’s obviously working with the rank-and-file. Such efforts have been yielding award-season fruit since the Great Awokening kicked in four or five years ago.