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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

The Interview has, of course, been making money online and in independent theatres, but obviously under special circumstances. Is it accurate to call the nearly $4 million earned so far decent or robust or something like that? It’s certainly less than earthshaking. It’s obviously going to end up with a whole lot less than it would have made if it had gone out wide theatrically. Would I like to see other mainstream fare released theatrically and VOD concurrently? Yes…to avoid mingling with the rabble. But if you were a financier or distributor of the next big dumb comedy, would you want it going out the way The Interview did?

I was going to politely and respectfully ignore the passing of Donna Douglas, 82, who became world famous when she began playing Elly May Clampett on CBS’s The Beverly Hillbillies, which ran from ’62 to ’71. I’m sorry but I don’t feel much enthusiasm for stars of TV series from the “vast wasteland” days of the ’50s and ’60s. Except, of course, for actors who appeared on The Twilight Zone. And then I remembered it was Douglas who played the “ugly” patient whose face is revealed at the end of “The Eye of the Beholder,” the famed episode that aired in ’60. Almost all of her dialogue was voiced by Maxine Stuart, who had one of those husky, Tallulah Bankhead-like voices (the kind women used to get from drinking whisky and smoking unfiltered cigarettes). This didn’t match Douglas’s milk-fed farmer’s daughter looks, of course, and is therefore one of that episode’s few stand-out flaws. Born in the worst days of the Depression in September 1932, Douglas was no spring chicken when The Beverly Hillbillies began — she was just turning 30, which is no big deal today but in the paternalistic early ’60s being 30 was almost regarded as “put out to pasture” time for dishy blondes. Douglas died of pancreatic cancer. Here’s the N.Y. Times obit.

Donna Douglas as she appeared in the final minutes of the legendary Twilight Zone episode, “The Eye of the Beholder.”