When Scott Feinberg assesses the strength of Best Picture Oscar contenders, he starts by breaking them down into three categories — frontrunners, major threats and possibilities.

There are always two or three generous inclusions in the frontrunner group, but it’s always a good thing to be in this fraternity. Your film’s standing or status is regarded as healthy and at least semi-hopeful. But if your film is listed among the other two categories, it means you’re in some kind of trouble. Especially if you’re among the possibilities, which pretty much means “no way, Jose” or “you might as well throw in the towel.”

In a 10.17 article titled “First Post-New York Film Festival Read of the Race,” Feinberg has chosen ten frontrunners, seven major threats and eight possibilities.

Herewith are my own assessments of the top ten, title by title, blow by blow. HE favorites are signified by boldface BINGO.

In HE’s estimation there are currently four keepers among the ten — Barbie, Oppenheimer, Poor Things and The Holdovers.

FEINBERG FRONTRUNNERS:

1 American Fiction / HE sez: Haven’t seen it yet.

2. Oppenheimer / HE sez: Hauntingly brilliant but at the same time increasingly dense and airless and almost oppressively talky, and Cillian Murphy‘s zombie-from-Betelguese performance drains the sand out of your soul. BINGO.

3. Barbie / HE sez: The buoyant energy, dynamic visual scheme, tongue-in-cheek social satire plus the massive commercial success factor obviously locks it in tight, but imagine the howls of derision if a male Greta Gerwig had created a reverse-engineered satire that replaced Barbie‘s misandry with misogyny. A mixed BINGO.

4. Killers of the Flower Moon / HE sez: Sprawling mixed-bag, Satanic-paleface, poor-Osage period saga with no strong point of view. Excellent tech elements. Woke sentimentalists aside, nobody is going to feel all that excited about this. It’s certainly no BINGO.

5. Poor Things / HE sez: Roughly the same kind of feminist fantasy as Barbie, only sexier, crazier and more imaginatively out there. Seriously stand-outish. BINGO.

6. Past Lives / HE sez: Forget it…too delicate, too hesitant, too prolonged, no romantic payoff.

7. Maestro / HE sez: Haven’t seen it. Word on the street is that it’s no BINGO.

8. The Holdovers / HE sez: Sublime craftsmanship pays off like a slot machine…an emotionally fulfilling, character-driven Christmas holiday flick…back-to-the-’70s and then some…perfectly acted, wonderfully written, easily the most audience friendly of the finalists. BINGO.

9. The Zone of Interest / HE sez: Brilliant, austere, chilly…an exercise in minimalism that doesn’t leave you with much at the end.

10. All of Us Strangers / HE sez: The gay beard-stubble factor is off the charts. If Paul Mescal bothers you half as much as he does me, this movie will certainly present problems.

Below is a screen capture from Martin Scorsese‘s 2004 American Express commercial. This is the Marty I’ve adored for decades as opposed to the woke Marty who decided he couldn’t make a white guy movie when he started work on Killers of the Flower Moon. This recent Marty incarnation I don’t fully relate to. The “I only have eyes for the pain of the Osage” Marty is like a Marty who’s been taken over by seed pods from Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It looks like him and talks like him, but it isn’t him…it’s someone else.

And now comes the revelation that Leo did it…Leo talked Marty into dropping the “birth of the FBI” angle and giving Killers a woke makeover.

Glenn Kenny on this morning’s “Don’t Hand Me That Crap” rant: “Wells is being unfair, maybe, and also maybe comparing apples to oranges. But he’s not wrong in certain respects.

“Joni Mitchell sure knows a lot of fancy chords that Swift wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, and her lyrics have a more overtly literary edge than Swift’s. Joni made Hejira at age 33, and Taylor…made this movie.

“And Taylor will never work with the present-day equivalent of Weather Report, not least because they’re ain’t any. Which speak as much to Swift’s audience, and to the way pop music audiences have shifted, as it does to anything else. (Also to the contemporary condition of extended adolescence.)

“As popular as Mitchell was, she never achieved Swift’s pop-phenom level. There’s little real point in comparing them. But the fact that Swift was once floated to play Mitchell in a biopic (a bad idea that will not, one hopes, ever be resurrected) makes the analogies not quite irresistible but certainly understandable.”

Blunt message: “You’re going broke, You spend more than you make.”

Posted on 10.13.23:

In yesterday’s “Week-Long Ear Bug” riff, I shared the following observation: “Taylor Swift does what she does very well or least very successfully, but Joni Mitchell’s eclectic mode of expression (or a facsimile) just isn’t in her. She’ll never get there. Mitchell’s stuff is alluring, sexy, sophisticated, nectary, lasting — Swift songs are candy.”

In response to which the often annoying Michael DeGregorio wrote that “since Jeff Wells, a noted music critic who is intimately knowledgeable about song writing and lyric writing, has deemed it so it must be so.”

And then the equally annoying Glenn Runciter added this: “It’s not really a surprise that everyone who really values music will hold tight to the music of their youth and decouple from contemporary music when they reach a certain age. It’s not always a ‘get off my lawn’ kind of thing, but go on a music forum and you’ll see this writ large. Zero sum attitudes about music is such a waste of time.”

HE to Runciter: “How DARE you try to characterize my Mitchell-over-Swift preference as a ‘music of my youth’ thing? How fucking rote or lazy or lethargic do you have to be to default to a cliche like that?

“I’ve been listening to (for lack of a better term) crème de la crème music all my life. Most of what’s been recorded or live-performed over the last century is okay, approvable, marginal or negligible — finding the really and truly awesome, aspirational, soul-touching stuff is a needle-in-a-haystack exercise or adventure or both. How many tens of thousands of rock songs and Broadway musical tunes and serious orchestral compositions and live performances and choice recordings (including Chumbawamba, Bernard Herrmann, Django Reinhardt, Devo, The Who, George Gershwin, The Feelies, Patti Smith, Hank Williams, the Troggs, Caribbean island music, the Irish Chieftains, Graham Parsons, Gustav Mahler, Blondie, Television, Stephen Sondheim, Lou Reed, David Johansen, Miklos Rozsa, Godly the Ruler and the great Mose Allison) and movie-score tracks do you have to fucking listen to over the decades to acquire a trustworthy sense of what’s mostly good and what’s mostly crap?

I sat through an hour’s worth of Swift’s concert film last Thursday evening. Her songs aren’t even catchy and are pretty much on the level of Good ‘n’ Plenty; Mitchell’s are pricey and succulent Swiss chocolate. There’s really no debating this.

If you’re living in one of these soulless, pencil-thin glass towers on Central Park South, you are definitely suffering from a serious aesthetic deficiency — a condition some would call the wealthy Shallow Hal syndrome.