Last night I watched an Amazon instant-download high-def version of Lewis Milestone‘s Pork Chop Hill (’59). The monchrome tonalities couldn’t have been richer and the focus was razor sharp, but it was cropped at 1.78:1. I didn’t like that because I know there was plenty of visual material above and below the cleaver lines, and that Pork Chop Hill has been shown previously at 1.66:1. So last night I ordered the 2012 Region 2 French Bluray which delivers a 1.66:1 image. I’m what you might call a 1.66 loyalist, and this is how I handle things when push comes to shove. There’s an Olive Film Bluray coming out on 1.27 that uses a 1.85:1 crop, according to online info.

(l.) Olive Films Bluray of Pork Chop Hill, streeting on 1.27.15 in 1.85:1 aspect ratio; (r.) Filmedia Bluray, released in France in March 2012 in 1.66:1 a.r.

At the end of the day, or more precisely on the morning of Thursday, January 15, Selma might squeak by with a Best Picture nomination. Perhaps a last-minute sympathy surge will manifest from Academy members who were shocked it didn’t make the PGA’s Zanuck nominee list. But after this morning’s stunning PGA exclusion, I think the game is pretty much over. Selma screeners were slow in arriving when they arrived at all, the “disparagement of LBJ’s role” meme stuck to the wall, and some people apparently decided that they didn’t want to do the African-American suffering thing two years in a row after 12 Years A Slave. The current situation, in the wake of the PGA snub, is that Selma has no chance to win the Best Picture Oscar, and is apparently in some kind of struggle to even be nominated. But it might slip in. Who knows?

How long does it take a DVD duplication facility to crank out thousands of discs and pop them into jackets, and how time-consuming is the mailing process after that? It shouldn’t take that long, should it? I’m hearing it was pretty much DuVernay’s fault for taking a long while to finish post-production despite a nearly complete version (sans closing credits) showing at AFI Fest on November 11th. (On 12.5 Paramount’s Lea Yardum told BFCA members that Selma “has just recently been finalized…therefore we are unable to send you screeners.”) And I don’t know whose responsibility it would be except Paramount’s for taking as long as it did to send out Selma screeners, and for sending them only to Academy members when they were finally ready.

Balloting for Academy nominations closes on Thursday at 5 pm so DuVernay snagging (or not snagging) a DGA nomination on Tuesday, 1.13, won’t mean a thing in terms of Oscar noms. What matters, as In Contention‘s Kris Tapley pointed out this morning, is that four industry groups have announced nominations so far this year: SAG, ACE, ADG (i.e., Art Directors Guild) and the PGA. And only five films have been recognized by all four — Birdman, Gone Girl, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game and Nightcrawler. Selma has been hyped to heaven by its Oscar-blogging friends, but when push has come to shove it has not been cutting the mustard.

There has to be some frowning and head-scratching going on this morning by strategists working for Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken and particularly Ava DuVernay ‘s Selma as both are missing in the just-announced list of nominees for the Producers Guild of America’s Darryl F. Zanuck Award for best feature film. A Zanuck nom is regarded as a reliable Oscar bellwether — a reflection of general industry sentiments. The final lap of last year’s Best Picture battle was an either-or between 12 Years A Slave and Gravity, and this resulted in a PGA tie with both films winning half a Zanuck.

The nominees are American Sniper (what?), Birdman, Boyhood (of course), Foxcatcher (bounce-back from Schultz tirade), Gone Girl, Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, Nightcrawler, The Theory of Everything and Whiplash. A hearty back-pat for Nightcrawler and director-writer Dan Gilroy! And Gone Girl is back in the arena. And all hail Damian Chazelle‘s Whiplash.

The Selma exclusion is the biggest shocker. The civil-rights period drama is currently regarded as a likely Best Picture nominee by nearly all of the Oscar season know-it-alls (including me, despite my belief that it’s not a great film but a good one). So right now these people — particularly Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, who’s been one of the film’s biggest supporters — have some ‘splainin’ to do.

My guess is that recent negative reports about Selma having mischaracterized President Lyndon Johnson‘s attitude and record about the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are a factor in its absence. Too many reliable sources said that DuVernay got it wrong on this matter. The question is whether or not the PGA nominations will influence other voting bodies.

Josh Gad is apparently on-board to play Roger Ebert in Russ & Roger Go Beyond, a fact-based comedy about the making of Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, for which the 27 year-old Ebert wrote the absurdist screenplay under the tutelage of softcore producer Russ Meyer (Will Ferrell). 20th Century Fox financed and distributed the mind-bending, mildly awful sex farce about an all-girl rock band, opening it on 6.17.70.

Soft-porn producer Russ Meyer, Chicago Sun Times film critic Roger Ebert sometime in ’69 or ’70.

I was told about Gad’s casting by producer David Permut at today’s Variety brunch at the Parker Palm Springs. There was an earlier idea to cast Jonah Hill as Ebert, Permut told me a few months back, but that didn’t pan out. Hill has a thoughtful, whip-smart air about him — he would’ve been perfect. Ebert’s widow Chaz Ebert was at the same brunch, but had left by the time I heard about the Gad casting. I wonder what she thinks about her late film-critic husband being played by a guy who always seems to play hyper obsessives who can’t hold it in.

I was so taken aback by the notion of the geeky-mannered Gad playing the brilliant, urbane, smoothly-phrased Ebert that I forgot to ask Permut who will direct.

Russ & Roger Go Beyond has been described in Variety and Deadline stories as an upcoming indie since mid-2014. The screenplay has been written by Emmy winner Christopher Cluess.

From 11 am to 1 pm Hollywood Elsewhere attended Variety’s Creative Impact Awards and 10 Directors to Watch Brunch at the Parker Palm Springs. Totally relaxing…as pleasant and cheerful as this kind of thing gets. It was great shooting the breeze with The Judge costar Robert Duvall, Nightcrawler director-writer Dan Gilroy, Selma director Ava DuVernay, Leviathan director Andrey Zvyginstsev, Top Five director-star Chris Rock, Wild Tales director Damian Szifron, Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker, and Variety brunch host Steven Gaydos. And to discreetly gawk at Still Alice star (and almost-certain Best Actress Oscar winner) Julianne Moore, Foxcatcher costar Steve Carell and Boyhood director Richard Linklater.

(l. to r.) Wild Tales director-writer Damian Szifron, The Judge costar and likely Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Robert Duvall, Leviathan director Andrey Zvyagintsev at Variety‘s Palm Spring Film Festival brunch at the Parker Palm Springs.

(l.) Boyhood director Richard Linklater, (r.) Top Five director-star Chris Rock near end of ceremony.

Several attendees posing for a group shot. Don’t ask me to identity them all but obviously Chris Rock and Steve Carell are standing toward the left.

“At this point, everyone wants to know which film is going to win Best Picture,” MCN’s David Poland has written. “Anyone who tells you they know the answer is pulling their own chain. [But] it is looking more and more like Boyhood vs Imitation/Theory with the latter two splitting, allowing Boyhood to win. Birdman is divisive, especially amongst older voters.” Particularly older women, Poland neglects to mention. “There are a number of reasons why Selma is unlikely to win and two years in a row of ‘historical dramas focused on race’ is amongst them, whether we like it or not. Grand Budapest is a bit too light and magical and Whiplash is too thin, however entertaining. [And] Nightcrawler is just too brutal to win.”

I’m still waiting for a definitive sign that Boyhood is something more than a critics’ film, or more precisely a Steve Pond film. I’m not saying it isn’t that. Richard Linklater‘s Best Director campaign may indeed result in a win, but somebody needs to point out the solid indicators that say Boyhood‘s popularity is as deep and wide as the Jordan river. As much as I like and truly respect that film, I’m honestly questioning — unsure of — its strength amongst the fartists.

Mexican directors Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro are “stealing Hollywood’s thunder now. They’re doing exactly what the French” — nouvelle vague-ists Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette — “did in the 1960s. Birdman bears much the same relation to Batman as Godard’s Breathless did to The Maltese Falcon: it converts a Hollywood formula into its own kind of free-form jazz. [And yet] the Three Amigos are the children of globalism, as conversant in franchise formulas as they are in Mexico’s indigenous cinema. Working away at the fault-line that separates north from south, blockbuster export from indie import, they are bilingual, speaking Hollywoodese but making up their own grammar and syntax.” — from “Hollywood’s Mexican Wave,” a piece by Tom Shone in Intelligent Life magazine, January/February 2015.

For me the standout event at last night’s Palm Springs Film Festival awards gala was the appearance of Still Alice‘s Julianne Moore, who was conspicuously absent from the Oscar campaign trail all through the 2014 Oscar season. Her campaign strategist no doubt instructed that the “she’s due” buzz, which began during last September’s Toronto Film Festival, was all they needed and so let well enough alone. With absolutely no one anticipating flotation from Alice, a Lifetime disease-coping movie, the best approach would be to do nothing at all until January when things kick off in earnest with the Palm Springs Film Festival, the Golden Globes, the BFCA awards, etc. Team Moore knows that the competition isn’t that strong (with the exception of Cake‘s Jennifer Aniston, who’s running the most successful go-for-it campaign) and that they’ll almost certainly coast to a win. But the rest of us are bored. It would be far more engaging if at least one other contender posed some kind of threat to Moore…alas, no. Then again Moore’s speech last night was spirited, relaxed…a bull’s-eye.

Birdman director Alejandro G. Inarritu, star Michael Keaton, last night on Palm Springs Convention Center red carpet.

I sat through the whole thing, man…four and a half hours of chit-chatting and smiling and eating the salad and and dessert and the mashy meat entree, grinding it all out in that huge, cavernous convention hall, dressed in my tuxedo-like black suit and tweeting now and then at table 1302. (In Contention‘s Kris Tapley sat to my right.) The venue, as always, was basically a tryout venue for speeches that everyone will be giving over the next seven weeks or so, and there was something to be said, naturally, for hearing them for the first time.

The horses…I’m sorry, the honorees were Gone Girl‘s Rosamund Pike (Breakthrough Actress winner), Selma‘s David Oyelowo (Breakthrough Actor), Whiplash‘s J.K. Simmons (Spotlight winner), The Judge‘s Robert Duvall (who got the evening’s only standing ovation), Boyhood maestro Richard Linklater (Sonny Bono Visionary Award), Moore, The Theory of Everything‘s Eddie Redmayne (uncharacteristically dressed in black), Birdman director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, The Imitation Game‘s Benedict Cumberbatch and Wild‘s Reese Witherspoon.

Brad Pitt schooled 2400 people at the Palm Springs Film Festival gala at the P.S. Convention Center on the proper pronunciation of David Oyelowo‘s last name. I’ve been telling people for months now that you don’t have to worry about the last “oh” syllable. Just say “oh-yellow” and you’re more or less okay. If you can rise to the challenge and include that last “oh” and really say “Oyelowo,” then you’ll really be cooking with high-test. But if you can’t, no one will blame you. By the way: Se7en will be 20 years old this year…two decades as of 9.22.15. I remember the all-media screening at the Village Westwood like it was last month.

I’m staying, as noted, at the Casa Cody, which is right near downtown Palm Springs. Late this morning some drunk drove into a pole and knocked out the Time Warner wifi signal. Right after this I was asking the front-desk guy about alternate wifi sources, and during our discussion he called the place “Cassa Cody,” pronouncing the Spanish term for house — generally pronounced “casah” as in Casablanca — as rhyming with “pass” or “mass” or “crass” or “Cass Elliot” with an “a” attached. I didn’t say anything, of course…what would be the point?

The National Society of Film Critics completely dweebed out today by choosing Jean-Luc Godard‘s Goodbye To Language 3D as the best movie of 2014. They were basically saying, “This is a very weak year and we’re going to swan-dive into our own navels and do what we want…at the very least giving the top prize to a 3D Godard film that got a 72% rating on Metacritic and an 83% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and which Joe and Jane Popcorn wouldn’t see with a gun to their heads makes us feel good, and if it makes you scratch your head…too bad. Deal with it. But we can’t begin to feel any enthusiasm with the movies that the mainstreamers are championing, which are all ‘almost but no cigar’ films. At the end of the day we have to vote for a realm that we believe in.” Boyhood‘s Richard Linklater was named Best Director, Grand Budapest Hotel‘s Wes Anderson won for Best Screenplay nod, Mr. Turner‘s Timothy Spall won Best Actor for grunting, wheezing, murmuring and coughing, Marion Cotillard won Best Actress for her performances in The Immigrant and Two Days, One Night — that James Gray cabal won’t take no, will they? Whiplash‘s J.K. Simmons won the Best Supporting Actor prize, Patricia Arquette won Best Supporting Actress award for her work in Boyhood, and Citizenfour won the Best Nonfiction Film prize.

Some time ago Quentin Tarantino equated digital photography and projection with “the death of cinema.” Two days ago Mr. Turner director Mike Leigh, in a chat with Toronto Star critic Peter Howell, called this a “ludicrous statement because apart from anything else, it’s a backward-looking statement that is irresponsible. I remember a time in the late ’70s when people said, ‘Cinema is over.’ There are young filmmakers doing all sorts of fantastic things and part of the reason that’s possible is the democratization of the medium because of a new technology, so [Tarantino’s fight] is twaddle.” I don’t hate 35mm projection, but every time it feels like downgrade. I’ve ben spoiled by perfect digital upgrades and how great older films look on my 60-inch Samsung plasma. If God said to me, “35mm is completely finished…you’ll never see another film projected in 35mm ever again,” I would say “I’m sorry but okay, not a tragedy…I can handle it.”