The annual Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Women’s Panel (i.e., Creative Forces: Women in the Business) came off smoothly and without a hitch today. Moderator Madelyn Hammond kept the ball in the air with the help of panelists Susan Cartsonis (producer, Storefront Pictures), Svetlana Cvetko (cinematogrqpher — The Architect, Inside Job, Red Army), Alison Eastwood (director, Battlecreek), Liz Garbus (director — What Happened, Miss Simone?), Shannon McIntosh (producer, The Hateful Eight) and Rosa Tran (producer, Anomalisa). Best line: Cvetko’s stating that her core belief — “Be yourself” — was passed along during an impressionable moment by a very wise cab driver.

(l. to r.) producer Shannon McIntosh, director Allison Eastwood, director Liz Garbus, dp Svetlana Cvetko, producer Susan Cartsonis, producer Rosa Tran.

(l. to r.) Madelyn Hammond, Cvetko, Cartsonis, Tran.

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is dead at age 79, probably of a heart attack. Glory hallelujah! A toxic right-winger, an enemy of Roe vs. Wade and Obamacare, a supporter of Citizens United, a chronic enemy of gay marriage and affirmative action, voted with Bush on Bush vs. Gore…urinate on his grave.

Online and Twitter reactions have been in the realm of great comfort and joy. President Obama will of course nominate on of his own, and the Supreme Court will be a less conservative body at the end of the day. Rabid Congressional righties will probably try to stall any confirmation hearings until after the inauguration of President Trump.

A spokesperson said that Scalia, in Texas for a hunting trip, went to bed Friday night, told friends he wasn’t feeling well. He didn’t rise for breakfast the following morning, and the group he was with left without him. Someone eventually went in to check on the guy and found him unresponsive. Sometimes there’s God, so quickly!

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For whatever reason I decided to watch John Sturges‘ Marooned (’69) yesterday afternoon on Turner Classic Movies. I was in my hotel room and fiddling around and suddenly there it was, and since I’d never actually watched it start to finish I figured “why not?…in 2013 Alfonso Cuaron told Wired magazine that he watched over and over as a kid.” Maybe so but Marooned is an embarassment — comically inauthentic, a stiff. Compared to the verisimilitude of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apollo 13 and Gravity it’s like an Ed Wood film. How could Sturges, a tough pro who knew from quality, have made something this mediocre? Poor Gregory Peck, poor David Janseen, poor James Franciscus, poor Richard Crenna, poor Gene Hackman, poor Nancy Kovack, poor Lee Grant, poor Mariette Hartley, etc. They all behave as if they’d just been told they have cancer. From Wiki page: The 1970 Mad magazine satire of Marooned, called Moroned, described story events in actual film time. NASA officials are pressed to launch the X-RT — ‘the Experimental Rescue Thing’ — in ‘about an hour…maybe…an hour and a half, tops”. One astronaut sacrifices his life to escape the film critics.”

Scott Feinberg did it right in Santa Barbara last night. The Hollywood Reporter columnist kept last night’s group interview with the five Oscar nominees for Best Director — Room‘s Lenny Abrahamson, The Revenant‘s Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Spotlight‘s Tom McCarthy, The Big Short‘s Adam McKay and Mad Max: Fury Road‘s George Miller — to a tolerable two hours, and it just seemed to zip along. And it was funny at times. And I got into the after-party (thanks to Sunshine Sachs’ Brooke Blumberg) and had some chummy words with Inarritu, etc. A good night, zero frustrations, bons amis.

Oscar-nominated directors on the Arlington theatre stage (l. to. r.): Room‘s Lenny Abrahamson, The Revenant‘s Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Spotlight‘s Tom McCarthy, Mad Max: Fury Road‘s George Miller and The Big Short‘s Adam McKay.

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Pete Hammond suspects that Adam McKay‘s The Big Short will win the Best Picture Oscar. He believes that if The Big Short wins the top BAFTA award on Sunday night, “It’s over.” But you know something? During the film-clip reel at the start of last night’s Directors Tribute at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, The Revenant got the biggest applause. It was only a gathering of well-to-do Santa Barbara film fanatics, yes, but you could feel it — The Revenant has the most passionate following. I’m a devoted Spotlight fan, but my insect antennae is telling me that The Revenant will take the big prize on 2.28. It has the most Oscar nominations, Alejandro G. Inarritu won the DGA award, Leonardo DiCaprio is locked for Best Actor, it won the Golden Globe award for Best Picture, Drama, etc. Oscar voting began today — Friday, 2.12.16 — at 8 am Pacific. Voting closes on Tuesday, 2.23.16 at 5 pm Pacific.

Yes, this is somewhat amusing, but the CG isn’t quite good enough. Black-and-white Trump has been overly tweaked and fiddled with.

Ted Cruz’s campaign has pulled an anti-Marco Rubio ad (i.e., a kind of “Conservatives Anonymous” discussion group scenario) after learning that the ad features Amy Lindsay, an adult film actress who’s pushing 40 and was simply looking to expand her repertoire. What’s wrong with an actress trying to grow her life and deepen things a bit by appearing in a prominent political ad?

I understand why the Cruz campaign guys panicked, but maybe they shouldn’t have? If you’re any kind of fair-minded human being you have to believe in potential, growth, tomorrows, transcendence. Deep-sixing an Amy ad just because she’s “done” a parade of guys on camera seems heartless. Is she not human? Does she not have thoughts and rights? Does she not pay taxes?

Lindsay’s IMDB page list credits going back to to 1994, which indicates she was born in the mid to late ’70s. Her credits include Passion Lane, Indecent Disclosure, Animal Lust, Deviant Whores, Kinky Sex Club, Exposed and Insatiable Obsession, as well as an appearance The Portrait of a Lady (’96) which costarred Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich.

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I haven’t yet had the pleasure of catching Zoolander 2, but Leonard Maltin has. And he broke a career tradition by walking out. Which he never does, he says. Ever. But I’ve been proudly and decisively walking out on certain films for decades, and I’ve never looked back. With some films walking out is an act of dignity and self-respect. The feeling of pride when you bail on a rancid film is wonderful.

So okay, yes…perhaps it wouldn’t mean as much if I bailed on Zoolander 2. But a Maltin walk-out matters.

“As I embarked on the experience of watching Zoolander 2 at a press screening the other night, I had an immediate reaction of annoyance and impatience,” he writes. “The film was stupid right from the start. I told myself that I was wasting my time for no good reason. But I stayed. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, filled with puerile and unfunny gags; along with gratuitous cameo appearances by everyone from Katy Perry to Willie Nelson. If even one of them had seemed clever I might have summoned some hope for the rest of the picture, but it was not to be.

“Mind you, I thought the original Zoolander was pretty funny. I had no reason to expect this one to be so much worse. But it is.

“Finally, after almost an hour, I strode out of the theater, proud of myself for taking positive action and sparing myself further insult. If there are hilarious moments in the latter half of the movie I can’t cite them for you. I can only offer an honest appraisal of what I saw. I bear no permanent grudge against anyone connected with the movie and hope they do better the next time out.

“By the way, it felt good to get home earlier than usual, and I think I turned a corner. Life is too short to spend two hours in a state of total exasperation.”

In other words, Maltin, who’s been in this racket since the ’60s, has finally gotten to a place where I’ve been since the ’80s.

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Some p.c. goosesteppers have been giving Meryl Streep a hard time for saying a politically incorrect thing about diversity during a Berlin Film festival press conference. When asked about the lack of diversity on the Berlinale jury, of which she’s the president, Streep said, “We’re all Africans, really…there is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture, and after all, we’re all from Africa originally.” Which is true — homo sapiens did originate on the African continent. Streep was basically saying that we’re all the same species, all God’s children, all bonded under the skin. Which some of us recognize from time to time.

All along I’ve been curiously uninterested in seeing Louis Leterrier‘s The Brothers Grimsby (Columbia, 3.11), partly because (a) I’ve been feeling a bit Sacha Baron Cohen-ed out and (b) I don’t trust any movie that opens in another country first (i.e., 2.24 in England) and under a shorter title (i.e, just plain Grimsby). But now, after seeing this 2.10 Jimmy Kimmel Live! clip, I want to see it. Two qualifiers: (1) the bit everyone is laughing at won’t be in the film, and (b) something tells me I personally won’t find it nearly as funny. I’d rather see a biopic about the famously sarcastic New York TV newsman Roger Grimsby — seriously.