I guess I’m not understanding the tie situation that’s resulted in six, not five, American Cinema Editors nominations for a dramatic feature. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m a little fucked up or something. The Best Edited Feature Film noms were snagged by Boyhood, American Sniper, Gone Girl, The Imitation Game, Nightcrawler and Whiplash. So which two films tied for fifth place in terms of ballots, thus necessitating a sixth nomination?

I completely get and approve of nominations for (in this order) Whiplash, Gone Girl, The Imitation Game, Nightcrawler and American Sniper. But, due respect, I honestly don’t get an editing nomination for Boyhood. It’s obviously an assured, smoothly assembled time-passage thing but I didn’t emerge from last January’s big whoop-dee-doo Sundance screening saying, “Whoa, the editing!”

The ACE nominations for Best Edited Comedy or Musical: Birdman (best invisible cutting of the century), Guardians of the Galaxy (what?), Into The Woods (really?), Inherent Vice (forget it) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (yes!).

It takes character to admit you haven’t seen a respected, well-known film. I’d rather not admit to anything that makes me look under-experienced or under-educated. I prefer to fake it until people see through me, and even then I prefer to fake it. All to say I’ve never quite seen Stanley Donen‘s Two For The Road. That’s a way of saying I might have seen it, but if I did I’ve forgotten it. Until this evening I’d also never seen Preston Sturges‘ The Palm Beach Story. I didn’t see the Criterion Bluray — I watched a high-def version on Amazon. I’m asking HE loyalists to stand up and admit that they haven’t seen this or that significant, world-class film. Go on, get it off your chest.

I just want it understood that this Boyhood-over-Birdman thing in the current Best Picture graph is strictly a meditative exercise. My gut tells me it’s almost certainly Birdman but I’ve been saying that all along and…I don’t know but maybe I’m tired of myself and all of my creations. I just wanted to try this out and think it through and see how it feels and so on. Nothing more than that. It’s a dance step, a theory, a posturing, a hypothetical.

If this was a bit earlier in the season and my own passionate preferences had something to do with these charts, I would have Snowpiercer‘s Tilda Swinton in slot #5 for Best Supporting Actress…hands down, no question. Laura Dern has it now because she’s been campaigning and out there and pushing the ball along. What am I saying? I don’t know what I’m talking about. I couldn’t suss the fifth slot so I went to Tom O’Neil‘s Gold Derby chart and decided to follow suit. I actually didn’t like her character very much in Wild. I hate people who insist on unhappiness-suppressing cheerfulness all the time. As for the fifth slot in the Supporting Actor chart, I completely agree with handing it to The Gambler‘s John Goodman. I think he was better in his way than The Judge‘s Robert Duvall was in his.

Birdman‘s Michael Keaton isn’t exactly a great, screeching, large-winged bird (I know — a lazy analogy), but he’s been at the top of the Best Actor list so long he may as well be. The Theory of Everything‘s Eddie Redmayne is the puppy everyone wants to pat and hug and nominate for transforming himself into a contorted, bespectacled, wheelchair-bound guy we’ve all been reading and thinking about for decades. Selma‘s David Oyelowo is a kind of oratorical stallion — an avatar or carrier of a spirit that has been in the air for 50-odd years. The Imitation Game‘s Benedict Cumberbatch is a kind of distingushed genius otter, as Cumberbatch himself with tell you, with a special sway over the ladies. Nightcrawler‘s Jake Gyllenhaal is a kind of grinning nocturnal lizard, claws out, tongue flicking. Foxcatcher‘s Steve Carell is an exhausted wildebeest who’s falling behind in the herd and terrified of approaching predators. Bird, puppy, stallion, otter, lizard, wildebeest…check.

Has there ever been less of a pulse in the Best Actress race? The passion out there is nonexistent. Nobody is saying anything about Julianne Moore except that she’s got it in the bag, and nobody has said a damn thing about that dutifully morose film she’s the star of, Still Alice. If another lead actress performance had any kind of serious competitive heat I would launch a “STOP JULIANNE MOORE” campaign just to take this race off life support…but nobody has the narrative to challenge Moore except, possibly, Cake‘s Jennifer Aniston, who delivered the goods and has campaigned her way into serious contention. Moore’s narrative is “Still Alice might be a Lifetime movie but she’s due” while the Aniston narrative is “Cake might not be a great drama but Jennifer’s fighting to get out of the light comedy/tabloid-queen straightjacket, and you have to hand it to her for giving it hell.” All I know is that every year you hear passionate feelings about this or that Best Actress contender…”Wow, that performance was her best, it got to me, it touched me deep down, I’m telling my friends” and so on. But there’s been absolutely no discussion out there about Moore’s Still Alice performance…no passion, no talk, no arguments, NOTHING.

Ava DuVernay‘s Selma will open wide on Friday, January 9th, but in Selma, Alabama — the smallish “Black Belt” city where the “Bloody Sunday” beatings happened on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday, 3.7.65, and where a portion of the film was shot last summer — the film will play for free at the Selma Walton theatre for the entire month, day and night, for roughly three weeks straight.

Paramount is picking up the tab in apparent gratitude to the city for hosting the Selma production and, I gather, to give it a little boost in terms of attracting tourism.

Located on the banks of the Alabama river and known as “the Queen City,” Selma sounds statistically like a fairly poor town. It’s in a fairly remote area, about 50 miles from any major interstate highway. The Wiki page says the citizenry was 80% black as of 2010 census, and the population hasn’t risen above 20,000 in well over a decade. 14 years ago the median household income for a family was $28,345. About 26.9% of families and 31.7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 41.8% of those under age 18 and 28.0% of those age 65 or over.

Yesterday’s general response to Mark Schultz‘s Twitter and Facebook tirades against Foxcatcher and particularly director Bennett Miller was that (a) it was late arriving, given that Schultz hadn’t said a thing before, (b) he seemed awfully angry and (c) he may have downed a few brewskis before tapping out his thoughts. Today he offered an apology for the anger levels but didn’t back away from his resentment of Miller for having indicated in the film that Schultz and the late John duPont (i.e., Steve Carell‘s character) may have had some kind of homoerotic connection. Schultz is “under contact to support the movie until the Oscars” (hah!) but post-Oscars he’ll unload with Katie Couric, he said.

As I began watching this Ben Zuk tribute recap of 2014 films, I said to myself, “Gee, with all this spritzy, pop-pop energy and visual whammo you’d never realize that 2014 was a relatively weak year.” But then that awful tinny music began seeping into the bloodstream and I became quickly apparent that Zuk was making no attempt at all to capture the interior rumble in all these films…the themes and ideas and the character bits and the dialogue…zero interest in the adult undercurrent stuff. This video is like all the other year-end recaps, pitched to the easy-lay submentals who want nothing more than rapid-fire cutting and fast-flash bullshit.

A little over seven months ago I completely flipped over Andrey Zvagintsev‘s Leviathan, which finally opens today. My 5.22 mini-review was titled “Crushes It — Almost Certain to Win Palme d’Or.” Two days later the Cannes jury gave Leviathan a piddly screenwriting award and handed the prestigious Palme d’Or to Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep, which I’ve since seen and quite enjoyed. The Ceylan is a mesmerizing, superbly constructed character piece — I was completely in its spell and barely noticed the running time — but it lacks the epic, symphonic power of the Zvagintsev (which is pronounced ZivYAHgintsev). Leviathan is a drop-dead brilliant, awesomely-composed-in-every-respect melodrama and moral tale that concurrently serves as a microcosm of (or metaphor for) a morally compromised, ruthlessly malevolent, bare-knuckled Russia. Political corruption, lust and infidelity, way too much vodka, blackmail and thuggery, gunshots, bromide-dispensing priests who kowtow to powerful scumbags, huge whale skeletons, crashing waves, rotting ships — this puppy has it all plus the aura of a majesterial art film plus opening and closing musical passages by Phillip Glass plus the most beautifully lighted, handsomely composed widescreen photography (by Mikhail Krichman) I’ve seen in a long time. And the acting — Elena Lyadova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Dmitri Seleznev, Aleksey Serebryakov, Anna Ukolova — isn’t ‘acting’ but rooted, rock-solid behavior that kicks ass all the way around the block and back to your driveway.”

There’s a line in a review of J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, written by Metro‘s Matt Prigge, that caught my eye this morning. The New York-based crime and heating-oil film, he said, is “all foreplay, but it’s good foreplay.” It’s actually mostly foreplay, not all. Because the movie “comes” at least four or five times. Or seven or eight times if your definition of a cinematic orgasm is on the liberal, less-strict side. What Prigge means is that A Most Violent Year never explodes in any kind of wild-ass, gun-crazy, super-splatter showoff fashion. It doesn’t give you an orgasm that leaves you panting and spent.

That’s because Chandor is keeping it “real”, which is a concept or approach that 90% of the action-film directors have pretty much thrown out the window. Their movies have foreplay, of course, as all action sequences have to deliver some kind of semi-realistic, semi-logical motivation, but the emphasis is always on climaxes, and as many as can be fit in. Except life in general is almost entirely foreplay. How often do people experience orgasms in their lives, apart from sexually? Damn seldomly. And yet 90% of moviegoers buy tickets with the expectation of experiencing one shuddering Kama Sutra moment after another.

Chandor’s film currently has a 92% Rotten Tomatoes and 84% Meteoritic rating, which obviously places it in the upper bracket of must-sees. But of course, as I noted on 11.7, there’s that title to get past.

“Violence certainly happens from time to time [in the film] but why J.C. decided to call it A Most Violent Year is…well, I don’t get it,” I wrote. “It’s about a highly disciplined, super-determined guy (Queens-based heating-oil supplier Oscar Isaac) trying very hard to solve his problems with honor and smarts and without resorting to violence or allowing his employees to do the same. It’s about clannish groups and predatory behavior and laws and bank loans and oil storage tanks and the whims of prosecutors. It’s an urban-jungle story in which violence only punctuates the story like periods and commas punctuate a typical paragraph.

Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher is about how a strange, obsessive, ostensibly Olympics-driven relationship between Pennsylvania millionaire John Dupont (Steve Carell) and former Olympic wrestling champ Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) led to Dupont shooting Mark’s older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo). The real-life Schultz has been highly complementary of the film and Miller over the last several months, but he’s suddenly changed his tune and thrown both under the bus, apparently over concerns that the film points to a homoerotic undercurrent between Carell/duPont and Tatum/Schultz.

Schultz has totally ripped into Miller on Twitter, calling him “scum” and declaring that “we’re done” and that he’s going to take Miller down, etc. He’s obviously quite upset but why the sudden turnabout? The film opened nearly six weeks ago, but Schultz seems to have suddenly decided that homoerotic interpretations by reviewers are hurting his reputation. It’s possible, I suppose, that Schultz’s Twitter account has been hacked (?). I’ve asked Miller and a Foxcatcher publicist what they know or suspect about this, but you know how people get when something like this blows up — they hunker down and dive into the bunker.

If Schultz has literally tweeted all this stuff it sounds to me like a delayed case of homosexual panic — not literally about gayness but media perceptions of his having had some kind of suppressed gay dynamic with duPont, which Schultz believes is harming his rep. Although he’s written that the gay element in Foxcatcher “wasn’t explicit [and] so I didn’t have a problem with it,” he’s now blaming Miller and the film for slipping this perception into the conversation.

I’m presuming Schultz might also be pissed that Channing portrays him as scowling, emotionally constipated and seriously inarticulate, which usually indicates some degree of emotional repression…but again, why six weeks after the film opened?

If Foxcatcher reps don’t get in front of Schultz’s charges and try to frame them in a fair and proper context, this will probably harm Foxcatcher as far as Academy nominations are concerned, particularly Carell’s possible Best Actor nomination. It gives people a reason to step back and say “hmmm, maybe not…maybe vote for someone or something else.”