It’s time once again to ask the Universal Home Video guys why we still can’t buy, rent or stream Frank Perry, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne‘s Play It As It Lays (’72). Every two or three years I re-post an article that I wrote in 2003 about its absence. It played years ago on the Sundance Channel but right now it’s not on Amazon, Hulu, Vudu or Netflix The last I checked Universal had the home video rights, and as far as I know the ball is still in their court. How many years or decades is this negligence going to continue?

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A half-hour ago Sao Paolo entertainment journalist Guilherme Genestreti asked me the following question: “The 2014 Academy Awards seem to be the most disputed in the decade if we consider that five of the nine best Picture nominees have been awarded by the guilds (SAG, DGA, PGA, WGA). In your opinion, why is there a lack of a clear consensus for a Best Picture winner this year?”

My answer: “There was only one grandslam, socially-reflective auteurist super-flick that will be watched and pondered decades hence, and which clearly deserves to win the Best Picture Oscar, and that’s The Wolf of Wall Street. But the old, calcified and conservative Academy membership is too smug and reactionary to get this. They basically like to give awards to movies that make them feel emotionally comforted and which validate their own feelings of self-worth (like Crash) or echo their core emotional feelings, and no Best Picture nominee has movie has really done that this year.

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Sasha Stone slapped me around yesterday for not posting that Lee and Low chart showing the lack of diversity among members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I just figured it was old news that the Academy membership is primarily old (or oldish), white, clubby and liver-spotted. Two years ago an L.A.Times survey reported by John Horn, Nicole Sperling and Doug Smith informed that Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male, have a median age of 62.

Here’s the real problem, as the Times survey informed: “People younger than 50 constitute just 14% of [AMPAS] membership.” The over-50s run the show, I realize, but the under-50s should constitute at least 1/3 of the membership, if not a greater percentage.

I also feel it’s not necessarily a profound loss to world culture that, as the chart states, “over the last 10 years no winners of acting Oscar have been of Latino, Asian or Native American descent.” To that I say, “Really? Well, keep trying!” Honestly…why should I give a damn if a politically correct Utopian vision of demographic equality hasn’t been reflected by acting Oscar winners since 2004? It’s a Darwinian world out there, my friends. Scramble or be scrambled upon. Dog eat dog. Dog doesn’t return the other dog’s phone calls.

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Three days ago a “tribute statue” of the late Steve Jobs, designed by Serbian sculptor Dragan Radenovic, was unveiled in Belgrade. [Photo after the jump.] It’s basically Jobs’ head on a four-sided pole with Cyrillic letters and a “1” and a “0” sticking out. It immediately reminded me of that green-head-in-a-fishbowl alien in William Cameron Menzies‘ Invaders From Mars (’53). The face of this Mediterranean-looking guy with the big brain helmet and the serpent tentacles (and no arms or legs or trunk) is one of the creepiest images the movies have ever delivered. Mr. Fishbowl, a kind of Einstein general behind the Martian invasion, was described in Act Three as “the sum of all intelligence.” He conveyed his orders to the Martian mutants by moving his crab pincers.

This isn’t the first time that memories of the fish-bowl guy have been stirred.

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In my realm the basic Oscar oppression is that Academy members always vote from a lazy and complacent place. They’re too old and smug and soft-minded to search for and identify and support the best films. They prefer comfort to envelope-pushing or greatness. But in Marshall Fine’s view, this is nothing compared to the much bigger sensibility gap between those of us who follow the Oscar race and average ticket buyers who don’t give a rat’s ass, and the fact that the economic benefits of being nominated or winning are in flux as we speak.

There’s always been a huge aesthetic gap between Serious Film Catholics and casual ticket buyers. The former tend to view Average Joes as not just “easy lays” whose tastes are stubbornly unsophisticated, but in some ways committed to being “stupid and ineducable,” to quote from “The Film Snob’s Dictionary.”

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“Multiple sources” have told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Galloway that Sandra Bullock‘s Gravity compensation will be at least $70 million “when all revenue streams are factored in,” the story says. “Bullock’s deal with Warner Bros. for the Alfonso Cuaron-directed space epic calls for her to earn $20 million against 15 percent of first-dollar gross. That means once her advance is covered, she will collect 15 percent of the studio’s slice of the [rental] pie.”

For some arcane reason Steven Soderbergh has created a mash-up of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho (’60) and Gus Van Sant‘s color Psycho remake (’98). I guess you could call this an interesting experiment. I never much liked the Van Sant because he didn’t really remake the Hitchcock classic frame-for-frame — he fiddled with the particulars. “Lowery? I am dying of thirstaroonie.”

Again, the URL.

Last night Gavin Smith‘s Film Comment Selects series screened a double-header under the title “Healthcare Mayhem” — Blake Edwards‘ mediocre The Carey Treatment (’72), a Boston-set James Coburn drama that no one ever has to see or contemplate ever again, and a “pink” print of Paddy Chayefsky‘s (and Arthur Hiller‘s) The Hospital (’71). Smith is coping with personality issues that prevent him from communicating like an adult, but I’m told that both 35mm prints were supplied by Quentin Tarantino.

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After being indifferent for the longest time I’m now looking to drown myself in Martin Luther King scripts. Ava Duvernay‘s rewrite of Selma that Oprah Winfrey will be producing for Paramount. The Oliver Stone-authored revision of a King biopic (i.e, the one with Jamie Foxx attached) that was turned down by DreamWorks and Warner Bros. because it was too candid or revealing about King’s private life. And Paul Greengrass‘s Memphis project (i.e., the last days of MLK before his assassination that was on and off and then on and then off). I’ll even settle for an e-mail or call from someone who’s either read all the versions or has at least read coverage of same. I’ve heard all along that the Greengrass script is the best of them, but I’d like to dig in a bit and learn a bit more.

Darren Aronofsky had no choice when he set about designing Noah’s Ark for Noah (Paramount, 3.28). It couldn’t even vaguely resemble that perfectly designed, tanker-sized wooden vessel that Steve Carell built in Tom Shadyac‘s Evan Almighty (’07). And, of course, it had to look like something that could have actually been built by Average Joes in ancient times, and not something built by professional 21st Century shipbuilders in Nova Scotia, which is what the Evan Ark resembled. But Aronofsky’s Ark doesn’t look at all like something built to float. It looks like some kind of primitive warehouse or fortress. Men have known about the principles of ship-building since the dawn of the oldest civilization, and principle #1 was that all ships need a rounded bottom of some kind. So what is this?

Ark in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (Paramount, 3.28).

Ark in Tom Shadyac’s Evan Almighty (’07).

I’m not a big fan of true-life tales of characters surviving painful, ghastly ordeals. You know going in they’re going to make it through or why else would a movie have been made? So you pay your $14 bucks, you sit down and you’re stuck with the main character, suffering through this and that, nearly starving or being tortured or whatever agonies he/she endured. We can presume that the message of Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken (which Universal is releasing next Christmas) is that you can’t give up, you have to survive, tenacity is everything, etc. Yeah, that’s true. But why do I have to experience Louis Zamperini’s World War II ordeal? What’s in it for me?

There was one chance to save Non-Stop (Universal, 2.28), the latest action thriller starring Liam “Paycheck” Neeson…one chance to make it into something half-special or at least surprising. Neeson plays Bill Marks, an alcoholic air marshall on a New York-to-London flight. Before the plane is over Maine he’s dealing with a secret texter on the plane who’s threatening to kill passengers unless the airline transfers $150 million to his account. But it’s soon learned that the account is in Marks’ name, and before you know it the news channels are reporting that Marks is the bad guy. Or is perhaps a good guy with an evil twin or a split personality…something. He’s not, of course — nobody is going to pay Neeson eight figures to play the villain. But it would’ve been cool if the film had bitten the bullet and gone dark and subverted expectations. That, at least, would have woken me up.

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