If I was playing a Roman soldier in a costume flick I wouldn’t want to walk around with sandals and bare calves, or more precisely sandals and leather calf straps like George Clooney is doing in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Hail, Caesar!, which is now shooting. Exposed calves are fine on the beach or the couch or sitting around an outdoor cafe but in a Roman costume pic they convey vulnerability or weakness if you’re wearing military garb. Bare calves somehow work against that studly Roman general thing that we all want. I for one would demand to wear those leather calf-coverers that Rex Harrison wore in Cleopatra. [Go to jump page.] There’s nothing frail about Clooney’s calves, mind — he obviously doesn’t have Paul Newman legs — but the general look of sandals and leg straps looks too…unfortified? They seem vaguely Greek, which is to say somewhat frolicsome. If I’m not mistaken Sir Laurence Olivier wore leather calf-coverers when he played General Marcus Licinius Crassus in Spartacus (’60).

George Clooney as movie star Baird Whitlock in Hail, Caesar!.

I don’t have any strong arguments against Ramin Setoodeh‘s Variety piece about the apparent likelihood of Boyhood winning the Best Picture Oscar (“12 Reasons ‘Boyhood’ is the Frontrunner for Best Picture“). I would only add another reason why people might want to give Richard Linklater‘s film a double-down vote or, perhaps, vote for a Best Picture contender with a little more sting and snap (Birdman, A Most Violent Year, Gone Girl) or one with a bit more social gravitas (Selma).

That reason is Likely Voter’s Remorse, or the vaguely embarrassed feeling that many Academy members feel today (whether they admit it or not) about having voted for The King’s Speech, The Artist, Chicago or Crash, to name but four. Who out there will admit to being genuinely proud of the Academy’s embrace of these films as Best Picture winners? Just because “it’s a shitty year for the Oscars,” as one Academy member confided to Setoodeh, doesn’t mean that a soft, squishy, not-bad-but-not-great film has to win Best Picture.

Emotional default impulses always age badly, but tough, flinty films only get better with the passing years. Vote accordingly.

No film critic wants to be seen as insensitive or unsympathetic to characters suffering from a disease, especially well-off victims with a restrained and dignified air. And so Still Alice (Sony Pictures Classics, opening today in N.Y. and L.A.), a drama about a brilliant college professor (Julianne Moore) suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, is getting a 71% pass on Metacritic and an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But a few bold fellows have stepped up and called Alice a Lifetime movie — a mediocrity — ennobled by Moore’s touching performance.

We all know this won’t get in the way of Moore’s Best Actress Oscar. She’s due and all that. Plus she doesn’t have a heavy competitor to really worry about. But the reality can’t be waved away. Still Alice is a drag, man. It’s tedious and painful to sit through, and I don’t mean “painful” in an empathizing sense. I mean “oh, shit, I’m stuck here in this seat and I can’t get out until this movie comes to an end.”

But the right guys are standing up and calling a spade a spade, and right now you could almost use the metaphor of a small snowball starting to roll down a steep, snow-covered slope.

Sony Pictures Classics has announced that their Foxcatcher Bluray will pop on 2.17.15 — a little less than ten weeks hence. And yet three weeks after opening limited in New York and LA, rural moviegoers are still waiting for Bennett Miller‘s melodrama to open locally.

“Do you know why Sony is taking forever to release Foxcatcher in the hinterlands?,” writes Nick “Actionman” Clement. “I don’t get it at all. Not one theater in Connecticut is showing it. It’s been out for weeks now in limited release so what could be the delay? I’ve tagged both Sony Classics and Annapurna in a Facebook post, asking them the reason but no response…very irritating!”

My response: “They know it’s a quality film with a morose vibe…they know it’s a downer and that Average Joes probably need the nudge of awards to come out and see it. I’m guessing that they’re waiting for critics groups to chime in this month. That’s my guess.”

The Academy announced today that nine fantasy films about exotic creatures and monsters plus one serious, intensively researched sci-fi film (i.e., Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar) have been short-listed for the Best Visual Effects Oscar. In so doing AMPAS dismissed a pair of super-expensive, high-profile Biblical films, Darren Aronfosky‘s Noah and Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings, by leaving them off the list. Which means what? The Exodus effects are said to be quite impressive (I’m seeing it tonight) and Noah‘s visual treats were generally acknowledged as novel and in some ways genre-expanding. The nine monster flicks are Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Godzilla, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Maleficent, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, Transformers: Age of Extinction and X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Escapism of the calibre of Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (i.e., smart, low-key, character-driven humor delivered by name-brand actors) doesn’t happen very much these days. That aside, this mostly delicious scene has a huge flaw. When “Chicken” (i.e., Ron Leibman in disguise) throws Paul Sand off the platform and into the elevator shaft, we should of course hear an impact sound. This absence almost kills the gag. Why Yates, a first-rate craftsman who had directed Bullitt three years earlier and would pilot The Friends of Eddie Coyle two years hence, would overlook something this basic and obvious is beyond me.

I’ll never stop loving this scene, and not just because it’s fun to watch the sly and sinister Richard Gere taunt the hot-blooded Andy Garcia. It’s because it was, back in 1990, one of the few scenes in a mainstream film to even casually mention the all-too-common dynamics of married sex. It is like that, especially with kids around. It is almost “something you have to put on the schedule.” I’ve been there. I know.

Without providing the root link, Awards Daily has posted the Ten Best Films of 2014 list by Time critic Richard Corliss. Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel is a ballsy #1 and Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Birdman is #10. Boyhood is #2 (fine), followed by The LEGO Movie at #3, Goodbye to Language at #5, Jodorowsky’s Dune at #6, Citizenfour at #8 (approved) and Wild Tales at #9 (ditto). But Corliss calling Luc Besson‘s Lucy his #4 film of the year is a problem. There’s no right or wrong way to look at any film, of course, except in the case of a soul-less, faux-Asian piece of CG-driven jizz whizz like Lucy.

An uptown know-it-all from way back, Corliss chose to single out Lucy, I suspect, in order to to demonstrate that he can be as louche and loosey-goosey as the next guy. A simple way to do that is to embrace a crappy film or two. A line in “The Film Snob’s Dictionary” states that the film snob can sometimes be “willfully perverse in his taste.” Check.

Yesterday at a Los Angeles press conference attorney Gloria Allred suggested that the accused serial rapist Bill Cosby might want to think about waiving the statute of limitations for the decades-old allegations that have been thrown at him over the last couple of weeeks so that “in a court of law the victims and Mr. Cosby would have an opportunity to have a judge and jury decide who should be believed.”

Failing that, Allred said, Cosby could donate $100 million to fund settlements for the alleged victims.

A $100 million payoff will never happen, of course, but Allred is at least offering Cosby a way out of the woods. Peace and serenity are not attainable, but if he wants a semblance of closure during his final decade or two of life, he’ll need to cough up 25% of his $400 million fortune. Pay these women off and the cloud will start to dissipate, she’s saying. You won’t be admitting anything but the everyone will understand. Do this and the court of public opinion might ease up and you can go to restaurants and tennis matches without people giving you death-ray looks.

“And what’s with Michael Keaton‘s non-stop running around with white Fruit of the Loom underwear, at least as far as this trailer is concerned? In my eyes Fruit of the Loom is pretty close to gold-toe socks in terms of aesthetic offense. The world of men’s underwear is pretty cool these days. I personally lean toward slim boxer underwear with a button-snap fly. Nobody with a shred of taste or self-respect wears Fruit of the Loom briefs, least of all anyone allowing for the possibility that they might wear them in public.” — from a 7.31.14 HE riff on a Birdman trailer.

“When it came to shooting a scene in which Keaton must walk (or rather, run) through Times Square in his underwear, costume designer Albert Wolsky put his foot down. ‘Michael would have preferred boxer shorts, but I felt very strongly that they had to be old-fashioned jockey shorts or BVDs,’ he said. ‘Otherwise he’s not vulnerable enough.'” — from 12.2 N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” posting by Rachel Lee Harris.

I don’t want to oversimplify but for the most part men and women who’ve been around the block tend to feel differently about ex-lovers. Once a relationship has come to an end and two or three months have passed, most guys will look back and say, “Well, that happened!” I for one feel it’s a good policy to be friends with exes if at all possible. No point in holding grudges. I got dumped a year ago and what of it? Let it go, move on. And yet many women, I’ve noticed, will say “oh, my God, what was I thinking?….why did I see in that fucking psycho? I’m thinking of moving to another city to increase the distance between us…maybe I need to post a notice on Facebook to spare other women the same nightmare…well, at least I’ve learned my lesson.” But if you had met this woman while she was still going out with the ex-boyfriend, she would be all mellow and smooth and comme ci comme ca with the guy. Everything would be cool or no biggie. To most…okay, to many women past relationships that didn’t work out are a blot on their souls…a huge mistake. They seethe about them for years, decades.

On 10.4 I riffed about Kathryn Bigelow‘s Last Days, an animated short doc about elephant poaching, which had previously been given a special screening during the New York Film Festival. I asked why isn’t Bigelow’s film hadn’t been made available right away by the Wild Aid guys…nothing. Now, two months later, they’ve finally released it. An elephant is killed every 15 minutes. Wild elephants may be all but extinct in 11 years. “Blame China,” you might say, but one of the biggest markets for ivory is right in New York City. Here’s the home page, so to speak.