Couldn’t Fall Asleep Last Night Over Concerns That “Sinners” Might Receive Too Many Political-Window-Dressing Oscar Noms

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And then I woke up extra-early over the same, and then, exhausted by all the stress, I sank into a coma at 8 am and only just woke up at 9:30 am. Is Samuel Z. Arkoff celebrating in heaven? Aaaaaggghhh! …Clayton Davis lowers the boom!

Wasn’t it called Judas and the Black Messiah?

Let me get this straight: Ryan Coogler’s popcorn exploitation film (Irish vampires, good cunnilingus, Mississippi Delta blues, yokel racism) has gathered 16 Oscar nominations, the most for any film in history…fine. And yet (here’s the problem) the previous record holders for the most Oscar nominations — All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land, all with 14 — were and are, unlike Sinners, exceptionally good, dynamic, high-pedigree films.

Sentimental Value only received a piddly nine Oscar nominations this morning (kidding…nine noms is a tremendous feat for this Norwegian family drama), but it is surely a far richer, deeper and smarter achievement than Sinners…ten or fifteen times better, don’t get me started.

Is there any Academy member out there who would be gauche enough to speak of Sinners and the whipsmart, ultra-sophisticated Eve in the same breath? Titanic didn’t just make a ton of money, but hit the emotional jackpot across the board — obviously the highly profitable Sinners, a crude political allegory, never even tried to melt hearts. The closest analogy, I suppose, would be La-La Land, which was propelled by music as much as Sinners (although, due respect to Jack O’Connell‘s Irish soft shoe, only Damien Chazelle‘s film invested in knockout dance sequences).

I won’t argue that Ben-Hur (12 nominations) is a much better film than Sinners, but it’s certainly a “bigger” show…classier, costlier, more big-canvas-y, more breathtaking here and there, more grandiose. Plus Sinners doesn’t have anything close to a big, wowser, super-thrilling chariot race-type sequence…nothing that even begins to compete on that level. And there’s certainly no scene in Ben-Hur in which Charlton Heston‘s Judah Ben-Hur drops to his knees in order to give great head to Haya Hayareet‘s Esther.

How Can The Likely Response to “Melania” Not Bring Humiliation?

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It’s certainly fair to analogize the imminent opening of Brett Ratner‘s Melania with Susan Alexander Kane‘s anguished debut at the Chicago Opera House. No matter how anyone tries to spin it, the response will be humiliating. Amazon paid $40 million to license the film and produce a follow-up docuseries on the first lady…whore money…obeisance before power.

Economic Times, 1.18.26: “Despite President Trump’s recent statements that tickets to the debut at the freshly renamed Trump-Kennedy Center are a ‘very hard get,’ industry tracking cites a different story. Tracking models are now featuring a domestic opening in the low single-digit millions, a fraction of the $40 million Amazon invested.

“One source told Rob Shuter that in New York ‘only a handful of seats have been booked…the studio was expecting a big turnout, but so far it’s not materializing.'”

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Happy Haight-Ashbury Days

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This is far and away my favorite snap of the recently passed Bob Weir. Look at him…20 years old but could easily pass for 15 or 16. And that beaming Peter Pan expression…a tripped-out, light-as-a-feather vibe that says “toodle-fucking-whoo-hoo!”

By all accounts Weir was a happy, easygoing, spiritually nourished fellow who lived an active, buoyant life, and as recently as 20 years ago he half-resembled the guy he was on those Haight-Ashbury steps. But upon hitting his early to mid 70s Weir morphed into a grizzled mountain goat…a weathered, silver-haired, Gabby Hayes-like gold prospector, making camp in the Klondike. Weir passed a week and a half ago (cancer) at age 78.

Pic was taken on the steps of the famed Grateful Dead house (710 Ashbury Street) sometime in the summer or early fall of ’67. (l. to r.) Phil Lesh (25), Weir, some Russian-beaver hat-wearing guy who doesn’t look to me like Mickey Hart, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (22 but looking closer to 38…died at age 27 from too much booze) and Bill Kreutzmann (21).

Playboy After Dark, 1.18.69. Look at those tuxedo’ed, evening-wear phonies pretending to groove and bop to “St. Stephen” before it even begins.

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Towering “Supreme” Chalamet Sculpture in Turin Cinéma Museum

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…vaguely resembles Timothee Chalamet, granted, but my immediate response was that it looks more like late ‘80s or early ‘90s Eric Stoltz. (Two months younger than Barack Obama, Stoltz is now 64 — a jarring realization.) Plus the orange ping-pong ball is the size of a tangerine.

This sculpture indicates something, methinks. It suggests that the worldwide federation of hipster cineastes has planted a flag on the lunar Marty Supreme surface while the hermetic Academy is living on its own planet while doggedly embracing the OBAA Paul Thomas Anderson theology, blah blah.

I realize, of course, that the ICE terror in Minnesota has triple-cinched an OBAA Best Picture win along with PTA nabbing the Best Director trophy. No arguing this. But the international cool cats are almost certainly more into Marty.

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Each Dawn I Die

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Each and every HE day begins with pre-dawn doomscrolling, and it mostly feels like a losing battle…a kind of slow suffocation of the spirit, and it’s all the fault of…okay, it’s mostly my fault for reading this crap, but AI–generated copy is truly the malicious element here.

I despise AI prose with every fibre of my being. It’s inhuman, it’s sickening, and it makes me want to throw up. The same bland but odious voice in every social-media article. It’s truly a poisonous scourge.

Wikipedia prose can also be a bit rote and deflating at times, but it’s far more precise and pared down (i.e., referenced and relatable) than AI slop. It mostly, imperfectly deals in straight facts and historical rat-a-tat-tat.

The only semi-positive bounce is that numbing AI prose inspires me to write in a way that sounds like something else — a recognizable human, let’s say…anxious, fallible, quirky, impulsive, disorderly, occasionally sentimental or irreverent, emotional, searching, imbued, somewhat erratic, peculiar, driven. So there’s that at least.

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Against My Better Judgment, Filled With Dread

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I’m going to submit to Nia DaCosta‘s 28 Years Later: Tne Bone Temple sometime this evening. I’m not going in with an open mind. I’m going in with a determination to find fault, and that won’t be hard. I can’t wait to hate it. I’m already miserable and the show doesn’t start for another three hours.

6:05 pm update: I’ve thought and thought about it, and I can’t do this. And I can’t sit through Avatar: Fire and Ash either. I just can’t.

Finally Saw Marina Zenovich’s Chevy Chase Doc

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Unlike many who’ve reviewed or reacted to I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not (CNN Films), which I wasn’t able to see until last night, I settled into the emotional and psychological aspects with an inclination to (a) not use or reference the ayehole term or (b) use Marina Zenovich’s absorbing, skillfully shaped footage to fortify any contentious or negative opinions I may have stored up about Chase over the decades.

I went into it clean and serene.

In a nutshell, I found it oddly touching. It’s not an indictment piece. It obviously penetrates but not with a scalpel or a machete. It listens, reports, contemplates, empathizes to a certain degree.

And I’ll tell you this: there are few things that give me a greater sense of emotional comfort these days than to know I don’t stand with the scolds…that I’m not a shrieking offense-taker or a hyper-sensitive prosecutor.

Here’s a message I sent to Zenovich around 11:30 pm last night:

Marina —  It’s an excellent portrait doc.  Very nicely balanced, very even-steven, very humane. Obviously a study of buried pain and bruisings, and a kind of sadness.  The gentle piano playing got me; ditto the look of alarm that comes over Chase when told that this or that person has it in for him.

I get people like Chevy, who lives only 14 or so miles from Wilton.  I expect a certain brusque callousness…not a problem. So many people are so in love with taking offense, and these are the people, I swear to God, who make life feel so unpleasant.

I always liked Jerry Lewis too, and Lord knows he was no day at the beach. Did I, like Chase, endure a rough, fearful, turbulent childhood? No, but I was certainly miserable throughout much of my tween and teen years. So I feel a certain empathy with people who’ve been dissed and suffocated or, you know, been made to feel morose on some level.

2026’s First Major Must-See

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Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake is finally about to open theatrically in the U.S (2.6.26)…finally! Just under three weeks from now. Sony Picture Classics is banking on Cake being honored on Thursday, 1.22, as one of the five choice nominees for the Best Int’l Feature Oscar.

Cake is an upscale crowd-pleaser in the finest, richest, most culturally authentic sense of the term…my idea of an instant classic and all but guaranteed to be nominated, etc.

I tend to be impatient with movies about young kids but this handmade Iraqi film (the first from that formerly turbulent, war-torn country to be shown in Cannes) is different…it has an impoverished but compassionate Bicycle Thief atmosphere with just a tiny little touch of The Red Balloon and maybe a slight spritzing of Hector Babenco‘s Pixote. You can tell almost immediately that it’s a grade-A, pick-of-the-litter pearl.

The President’s Cake world-premiered on 5.16.25 under Directors’ Fortnight at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It won both the section’s Audience Award plus the Caméra d’Or. It was thereafter selected as the Iraqi entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, and made the December shortlist.

Partially set in the wetland marshes of southern Iraq (which for the 37th time is not pronounced EYE-rack but Uhraq) but mostly in a big city (not precisely identified as Bagdad but shot there) and all of it occuring just before the 2003 U.S. invasion.

It’s basically about a nine-year-old girl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), who lives in a floating straw hut upon the Mesopotamian marshes with grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).

The plot comes from Hadi’s childhood memory of a school event in which one member of each class is chosen to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein‘s birthday (4.28). Lamia is selected to be her class’s cake-baker. She and Bibi are dirt poor and can barely afford, much less find, the chief ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar) but failing to deliver or, worse, refusing this honor is out of the question.

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