The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted his first spitball projection of the Best Picture Oscar race (alng with other projections in other categories).

“HE truth bullet” commentary represents the kind of bottom-line reality check that Feinberg isn’t allowed to pass along at this stage, as he’s obliged to be diplomatic.

BEST PICTURE FRONTRUNNERS:

Oppenheimer (Universal) / HE truth bullet: Academy members have no choice but to nominate Chris Nolan‘s film because of the great reviews and excellent box-office. The bottom line is that despite its many commendable aspects, Oppenheimer is overly dense (i.e., it doesn’t breathe) and is rather punishing to sit through when you watch it for the second time. Plus Nolan wimped out by avoiding the horrors of Hirsoshima and Nagasaki.

The Holdovers (Focus) / HE truth bullet: A well-written, perfectly acted, old-fashioned ’70s relationship film…pure crowd pleaser, total home run, flawless within its realm.

Barbie (Warner Bros.) / HE truth bullet: Guaranteed to be nominated for the box-office explosion aspect alone, and it might even wind up winning, especially given its popularity among the quarter-of-an-inch-deep New Hollywood Kidz. But it’s pure feminist candy and is really too misandrist when you step back and think about it. Best Picture Oscars should be about more than just the mere earning of big money.

Poor Things (Searchlight) / HE truth bullet: A glint-of-madness feminist fantasy…wildly imaginative, Terry Gilliam-like sexual Barbie with actual fucking going on. The sexual current will put off some within the 45-plus community.

Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple/Paramount) / HE truth bullet: A highly respectable historical drama as far as it goes, but far from a home run. No strong point of view about anything. HE gives it a respectable B or B-minus.

The Zone of Interest (A24) / HE truth bullet: Searing moral perceptions by way of alluded-to Nazi horrors, but overly dry, chilly and oblique. Yes, I know — “oblique” is the basic idea.

Past Lives (A24) / HE bullet: Forget it — an unsatisfying, wafer-thin non-romance that lacks nutritional value. Not happening.

American Fiction (Amazon — haven’t seen it)

Anatomy of a Fall (Neon) / “Good’ European courtoom drama but too long, too protracted, no real surprises, doesn’t really pay off.

Nyad (Netflix — haven’t seen it but Oscar action sounds like a stretch).

Last night I caught Craig Gillespie‘s Dumb Money (Sony, 9.15), which had its big premiere in Toronto a few days ago.

It’s based upon Ben Mezrich‘s “The Anti-Social Network“, a 2021 non-fiction account of the GameStop short squeeze, which principally happened between January and March ’21.

The key narrative focus, of course, is class warfare.

Dumb Money is a Frank Capra-esque tale of a battle of influence between financially struggling, hand-to-mouth Average Joe stock investors vs. elite billionaires who tried to reap profits out of shorting GameStop.

The legacy of the 2008-through-2010 recession and movies like Margin Call (’11), The Wolf of Wall Street (’13) and The Big Short (’15) resulted in considerable hostility towards Wall Street hedge fund hotshots.

The venting of this anger was enabled by the ability of hand-to-mouth, small-time traders keeping up with fast market changes through social media investment sites like R/wallstreetbets.

I’m too dumb to fully understand the intricacies of the term “short squeeze**,” but I understand the broad strokes.

I didn’t love Dumb Money, but I paid attention to it. It didn’t exactly turn me on but it didn’t bore me either. I didn’t once turn on my phone. I was semi-engaged.

Paul Dano‘s performance as Keith Gill, the main stock speculator and plot-driver, is fairly compelling. The costars — Pete Davidson, American Ferrara, Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Sebastian Stan and Shailene Woodley — deliver like pros.

I spent a fair amount of time wondering why the 39 year-old Dano is heavier now than he was as Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad‘s Love and Mercy, for which he intentionally gained weight. The real Gill is semi-slender or certainly not chubby.

Clearly Margin Call, The Big Short and The Social Network have far more pizazz and personality.

** “A short squeeze is a rapid increase in the price of a stock owing primarily to an excess of short selling of a stock rather than underlying fundamentals. A short squeeze occurs when there is a lack of supply and an excess of demand for the stock due to short sellers having to buy stocks to cover their short positions”…huh?

Please go to the 8:37 mark in this discussion between CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who recently declared she’ll be running for re-election in 2024:

Anderson Cooper: “Is Vice President Kamala Harris the best running mate for [President Joe Biden]?”
Nancy Pelosi: “He thinks so, and that’s what matters.”

In other words, Pelosi doesn’t think Harris is the best option but doesn’t want to rock the boat or stir up trouble.

Nakedly Honest Pelosi Translation: “Obviously she’s unpopular and not respected, and is therefore a terrible albatross for this president, but he appears to believe that he’s stuck with her and so we’re stuck with them both and it’s awful.

“People are truly terrified that President Biden, who, if re-elected, will be 82 when he takes the oath of office in January 2025, may become incapacitated or fall ill or worse sometime during his second term and that Harris will become president. If President Biden, in conversation, was as sharp and lively as myself, it would be a different story. But he can barely get through two or three sentences without stumbling.

“This is a truly terrible situation to present to American voters — a shuffling, muttering, forgetful, fuzzy-brained president, obviously diminished by age as we speak and sure to diminish further as the years takes their inevitable toll….a president who may or may not go the distance, God forbid, and so a vote for Biden-Harris is an automatic vote for a potential President Harris, and in the minds of tens of millions of voters, including a likely majority of Democrats, that is a terrible proposition to put forward. So obviously she is not the best running mate for President Biden.

“Honestly? Joe himself should give serous consideration to hanging up his holster and letting the far more age-appropriate Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsom step in to the breach. But he won’t do that, of course. He can he drooling and half-conscious in diapers and pushed around a wheelchair and he won’t quit.”

From THR‘s Katie Kilkenny

Friendo: “Poor Things + Barbie = same story. Imagine if Barbie was about a sexual awakening after she gets her VAG.”

HE: “[A critic friend] said Poor Things was like Barbie directed by the Marquis de Sade.”

Friendo: “Okay but I say Russ Meyer.”

Three days ago (9.10) London Times columnist Hadley Freeman posted a thoughtful, paywalled essay about Woody Allen that’s certainly worth reading. I usually post excerpts from articles that I approve of, but this time I’ve pasted the whole thing.

By striking terror in the hearts of industry cowards and thereby suppressing the distribution of Allen’s Coup de Chance (even as a streaming title), Woody haters are perpetrating a social and cultural crime that is absolutely loathsome and pernicious.

After 31 years of this, it’s really time to back off and let it go. Lord knows their punitive point has been made over and over. They are the witch dunkers of Salem.

And as difficult as it may seem, they all need to once again attempt to understand a basic truth that all mature societies understand. A work of art or art-tinged commerce, like a movie or a play, is one thing, and the private behavior of its creator, however imperfect (and who among us is?), is something else entirely. They are two parallel twains that can not and should never meet.

HE to World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy: “Whadaya mean by saying that The Holdovers is ‘far from Alexander Payne’s best film’?

“It is one of his best, and it’s very carefully rendered…every line and and every shot lands just so…each and every brushstroke contributes exquisitely to the whole…c’mon, man, don’t be a snob!”

Here’s my abbreviated Telluride review.

In a 9.12 Time cover story by Stephanie Zacharek, Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese has confirmed what costar Lily Gladstone told Variety‘s Zack Sharf nine months ago, which was that Flower Moon, a sprawling crime epic about the FBI’s investigation of the Osage Nation murders in 1920s Oklahoma, was given a woke rewrite — one that de-emphasized the FBI nailing the bad guys and emphasized the perspective of Osage Nation and the pain their community had endured.

“After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” Scorsese tells Zacharek. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”

In a 1.20.23 article, Gladstone explained to Sharf, Variety‘s resident wokester lobbyist and spokesperson, that Scorsese had basically re-thought the 1920s saga, which had begun as a kind of “birth of the modern FBI” story.

This is how Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s 2017 novel began, according to what costar Leonardo DiCaprio told me at a San Vicente Bungalows party in late 2019.

The basic plot, Leo said, would focus on former Texas Ranger Tom White (whom Leo was intending to play at the time), and his having been ordered by top G-man J. Edgar Hoover to take over the Osage murders case and make sure the bad guys pay the price.

But eventually Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth concluded that a “birth of the modern FBI” tale wouldn’t be woke enough (i.e., too white-guy oriented), and that their film hadn’t sufficiently considered the Osage native point of view of the killings and the investigation of same.

Gladstone told Sharf that Scorsese “worked closely with the real-life Osage Nation to ensure his movie would properly represent the community.”

The result was that “the Osage Nation ended up positively changing Flower Moon from what Scorsese [had] originally planned.”

“The work is better when you let the world inform the work,” Gladstone explained to Sharf. “That was very refreshing how involved the production got with the [Osage Nation] community. As the community warmed up to our presence, the more the community got involved with the film.

“It’s a different movie than the one [Scorsese] wanted to make, almost entirely because of what the community had to say about how it was being made and what was being portrayed.”

HE antagonist Glenn Kenny, for one, didn’t like the thrust of Gladstone’s statements, which was that Scorsese had altered course out of concern that Flower Moon would be perceived as too white-guy oriented (a la James Stewart in Mervyn LeRoy‘s The FBI Story, which I rewatched and riffed about on 7.16.23).

“That’s Gladstone’s perspective,” Kenny argued, “shaped through that of Sharf, and in any event has nothing to do with reshoots. Scorsese and company were getting Osage input from well before the cameras started rolling.

Kenny to HE: “Look, man, I know how precious the ‘Native Americans strong-armed Scorsese into going woke‘ narrative is to you, and I know you’re gonna stick with it through thick and thin, but just don’t pretend too much insider knowledge here.”

HE to Kenny: “So Gladstone misstated Scorsese’s creative strategy (i.e., before the alleged Osage Nation re-think) in order to celebrate the Osage Nation’s strength as a culture and to emphasize that their perspective on the 1920s murders was, thank God, crucially included at the 11th hour?

“You’re saying, in other words, that Scorsese had understood the entire Killers equation from the get-go, as had original author David Grann, and that neither of them needed woke tutoring as far as the Osage perspective was concerned? And that DiCaprio was full of shit when he told me in late ’19 that the film would be about the birth of the FBI?

“Gladstone, in short, was spinning her own impressions last January, and Sharf, a go-along wokester parrot, played along?”

Kenny to HE“: “Maybe so.”

HE respects Scorsese for dealing straight cards by confirming what Gladstone conveyed to Sharf last January.

To hear it from Zacharek, Marty is basically saying, in effect, “I knew we had to respect the Osage Nation viewpoint, first and foremost, and so we did that.

“I also knew, to be perfectly honest, that our movie wouldn’t be approved by the wokester chorus if Eric and I didn’t ease up on the ‘FBI agents as white saviors’ theme, and so we decided to woke it up and make the kind of of film that Lily and the Native American community in general wanted to see.”

Scorsese elaboration by way of HE interpretation: “It just seemed like a politically sensible and sensitive thing to do…now I can say with a proud and straight face that I’ve made a Scorsese-style woke film about Native American genocide in 1920s Oklahoma, and I feel completely at peace with this approach because the facts required it.

“In the final analysis these are the times in which we’re living, and I knew that the wokesters had dismissed The Irishman because it was too white and too goombah Italian and wasn’t in the multicultural swing of things like Parasite, and so I adjusted our approach so that Native Americans would approve, and that wokesters wouldn’t give us a hard time.”