In the speculative spitball realm Cate Blanchett is running against herself in the Best Actress category. The Weinstein Co. is pushing her touching Carol performance for Best Actress consideration, and in their usual favored-nations way Sony Pictures Classics is advocating her nomination in the same category for her gutsy, steely turn in James Vanderbilt‘s Truth. Blanchett may be nominated for one of these but winning the Oscar again after her 2013 Blue Jasmine victory is unlikely. The only way to win a second time is to top the previous performance, and if you ask me her Truth performance definitely outshines her work in Carol, and even, I feel, the acting she delivered under the direction of Woody Allen. Her work in Truth is blistering, ballsier; the role is more realistically tragic. I made a similar statement 15 years ago when Steven Soderbergh‘s direction of Traffic and Erin Brockovich were deemed equally award-worthy. I posted a “letter to the Academy” piece on Reel.com that insisted his work on Traffic was far superior, and that’s what he finally wound up taking the Best Directing Oscar for. It would be gracious if the Weinsteiners were to decide to focus on Rooney Mara‘s expected Best Supporting Actress nomination for her performance as Blanchett’s lover and let the Blanchett thing go. They won’t do that, of course. Award-season strategizing is not a game of croquet; it’s more like rugby. But the proof is in the pudding and Blanchett’s Mary Mapes, trust me, is quite the thing.

All hail the late Yogi Berra — one of the greatest baseball players and most noteworthy philosophers of the 20th Century, and a real-deal American legend. I’m not much for eulogies of baseball champs as I’ve been to fewer than ten games in my entire life, but boy, did I love what Berra was or seemed to be — a guy who looked a bit like a monkey from a mezzzanine-level seat but had the spark of something-or-other, something that felt grand and hearty and poetic — he stood for persistence, leg muscles, hard work, a sense of humor, Yoohoo soft drink and Miller High Life. And he had a gift for dugout eloquence second to none. Short, strong, muscular, great smile, great attitude…and he lived in Montclair, New Jersey. What a guy.

What if Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Laurence Olivier costarred in a first-rate historical war satire at the peak of their respective popularity and power in 1959, and nobody cared all that much when it opened and nobody at all (except for guys like me) gives a damn about it today? 20 months ago I posted a piece about how it was impossible to watch The Devil’s Disciple, a respectable, vigorously acted adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s 1897 play about the Revolutionary War, outside of an annual July 4th airing by TCM. I reported that the black-and-white drama, directed by Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger, Thunderball), wasn’t on DVD or Bluray, and that you couldn’t stream it on Netflix, Hulu or Vudu. But now, lo and behold, a Bluray version from Kino will street on 11.24.15.

In my book any 1950s film captured in VistaVision and rendered in Bluray and/or high-def streaming is worth seeing, even if the movie itself is mediocre. One mark of a serious cinephile is the ability to ignore script or acting flaws and just zero in on the cinematography, which in this instance is fairly ripe and robust. It is therefore permissible to have an interest in a Bluray of Hal Kanter‘s Loving You (’57), which was shot in VistaVision by the great Charles Lang — an Oscar nominee for his lensing of Sabrina, Separate Tables, Some Like It Hot and One-Eyed Jacks.

There is, of course, no such thing as a really good Elvis Presley film, but the first three — Love Me Tender, Loving You and King Creole — are at least tolerable, and the semi-autobiographical Loving You, the only color film in this trio, is the only one in which Presley performs a few straight-up ’50s rock tunes. Paramount may have leased the rights to Warner Home Video or not, but for some reason there’s no Bluray or high-def streaming version of Loving You for sale or on the horizon– only an out-of-print Lionsgate DVD from 2003, which collectors are selling for $70 bucks and higher. Forget it.

Hand-crafted leather wristbands are for long-of-tooth rock musicians like Keith Richards — venerated, old-school guys who want to exude a certain still-at-it studliness. Maybe younger guys wear them also — what do I know? –but I’m pretty sure that no one wears them except for performing musicians, and I don’t mean guys who play for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I once saw a photo of Jean Genet wearing something like this. I wore one for a few months back in the late ’70s, but I threw it away when a girlfriend or my mother said it looked too leather bar-ish or whatever. In any event a vague Keith Richards mood overcame me last night when I was browsing around the Will leather goods store in Venice, and now I’ve got this thing around my right wrist. It’s not too thick, has a nice weave — I don’t see the problem.

It took Sony Pictures Classics an awfully long time to release their Truth trailer, but here it finally is, a little more than three weeks before the 10.16 opening. Concise, nicely cut, pro-level — more of a grade-school introduction to Rathergate than a summary of the flinty, well-modulated, hard-hitting flick I saw in Toronto, but it’s certainly good enough for openers. Note: I would have posted this a couple of hours earlier but I had one of those James Stewart-meets-Carlotta Valdez-in-Vertigo wee hour wakeups (bolt upright, eyes glaring) at 3:30 am. I eventually crashed again and re-awoke at 9 am.

I’ve been telling myself over and over that I wouldn’t buy Criterion’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle Bluray because the DVD version is perfectly fine. And then I weakened last night during a visit to Amoeba, and before I knew it I traded it for some Blurays I didn’t want and then I drove home and popped it into the Oppo around 10:30 pm. Wow…this is really, really much better than the DVD. Much. The added detail is so fresh and eye-filling that you just want to dive into it. It looks like a perfect, un-projected print delivered by the lab a few hours ago. The colors are much more vibrant and life-like. I still resent that Criterion cropped it at 1.85:1 when it’s obvious from the 1.66:1 opening credit sequence that a good amount of information has been cleavered for no good reason, but this is magnificent work. Cheers to the Criterion team. This is the best Coyle I’ve ever seen or will see for the rest of my life.

I was going to say I’m as pleased with Ridley Scott‘s The Martian as the next guy. It’s fine — a smart, well-jiggered, studio-formula rescue movie. It’s basically Argo in space with a brainier script and a welcome emphasis on nerd science and good botany. Except I’m bothered by the over-praise from nearly every journalist who attended last night’s L.A. screening. Every so often a smart, classy, satisfying entertainment will come along — a movie that gives you a perfectly good handjob — and for whatever reason it makes perceptive, emotionally balanced critics wet themselves. These guys know better but they lose their bearings and drop to their knees and go all falsetto on their readers.

I didn’t flip out when I saw The Martian in Toronto, but I liked it as far as it goes. I called it a “seriously enjoyable, technically satisfying and emotionally inspiring big-studio rescue + popcorn movie that’s about as deep as a jacuzzi. And it’s fine for that. It’s aimed at the people who really love halftime shows at the Super Bowl. And it’s very amusingly written and rank with pop-music usage and smart-ass commentary — it’s almost a Tarantino movie in some respects.”

On top of the handjob this thing is looking to give you a backrub. It uses formula-uplift plotting all the way. That and the same kind of cleverly written stock dialogue and stock characters you’ve seen in a dozen escapist films like this. The same kind of chops, in fact, that were used in those Jerry Bruckheimer-produced action ensemble films from the ’90s or early aughts. It’s great when a film like this assumes that you’re smart enough to get all the terminology and whatnot. And at the same time assuring you that nothing too crazy will happen.

Two days ago I sank into a depression pit following Room‘s big audience-award win at the Toronto Film Festival. Then I was slammed by HE commenters and on Twitter for being a  sexist curmudgeon. And then I felt even worse after reading Katey Rich‘s Vanity Fair piece about how Lenny Abrahamson‘s film is now looking like a game-changer in the Best Picture race. But then shafts of light pierced through the clouds, and now it appears as if the beginnings of a nascent counter-movement among free-thinking XY-chromosone types may be forming. The comfort of fraternity, of siding with like-minded fellows! I don’t like Room at all, and therefore I am.

First, Time‘s Rebecca Keegan tweeted that she “can’t figure why Room has made some dudes so angry.” My heart skipped a beat. “Dudes” as in plural? Keegan pointed to a tweet by Mashable‘s John Lincoln Dickey in which he called Room “an awful, joyless, airless experience.” Thank you, God! I knew then and there that an army of Room haters were out there. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Then I heard from a big-league film critic who said that while Room “is an improvement over Abrahamson’s excruciating Frank, simply because [it has] realistic people and emotions and is therefore somewhat credible and relatable, I am [nonetheless] much closer to your view than to the film’s lovers, as I’d have to be led on a leash to ever see Room again. The TIFF award startled me as well, as it’s hard to believe people loved it that much.”

The consensus is that Scott Walker has suspended his campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination because he did lot of things wrong. The bottom line is that Walker (a) never even began to ignite in the polls and (b) ran out of money. One of the factors, according to New York‘s Jonathan Chait, is that “wealthy New York donors came away from discussions with Walker concerned that he actually believed what he said in public about same-sex marriage.” He just never seemed like much of a vision guy. He was never able to shuck that Wisconsin governor comfort-zone attitude. The only time he really stepped up to the plate was in his quitting speech, when he urged other weak sisters to get out of the race so that somebody strong can defeat Trump.

Then again many voters (especially Republicans) decide who they like based on primal gut reasons. The one thing I liked about Walker was that he’s a big Harley Davidson guy, and the one thing I really didn’t like about him (apart from his being an anti-union servant of the Koch brothers) was his bald spot. This may sound silly to some, but I suspect that this physical shortcoming did him no favors. Think about it — Americans haven’t elected a President with even a slight balding issue since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 — 60 years ago. Every elected President since John F. Kennedy has had a full head of hair. I’m not suggesting that Gerald Ford‘s bald spot meant all that much to voters in ’76, but I think it might have been a marginal factor in his loss to Jimmy Carter. I’m only saying that the Samson rule of thumb (i.e., hair = virility, potency) still has a residue of traction.

Last January I wrote that with Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling costarring, Plan B’s big-screen adaptation of Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short” “could be an award-season contender when it pops in ’16 or ’17. Margin Call, Wall Street, Boiler Room…that line of country. But not — I repeat not — with Adam McKay, by any standard a low-rent comedy guy and commercial opportunist, directing and writing.” I still maintain that McKay’s earlier films (the two Anchorman flicks, Talledega Nights, Step Brothers) were crude and unfunny and aimed at animals, but I was apparently wrong about what he might do with The Big Short. Paramount has decided to release it platform-style on 12.23.15, which means they’re confident it’ll end up on a few Ten-Best-of-the-Year lists and perhaps even figure in serious Best Picture contention. (I still say McKay’s lowbrow aesthetic will get in the way of this.) With Short having taken the place of Oliver Stone‘s Snowden, which has been bumped into ’16, there are still four heavy-hitters opening in December — The Revenant, Joy, The Big Short and The Hateful Eight, not to mention Concussion, In The Heart of the Sea, Son of Saul and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Sasha Stone‘s “if it hasn’t been seen in the early fall festivals it probably won’t be in Best Picture Contention” theory is being put aside for the time being.