What the hell has happened to the inevitable Oscar triumph of The Holdovers’ Paul Giamatti? This was Paul’s year, his deserved payback moment for the Sideways snub of ‘05…and the SAG-AFTRA plebes have blown him off? My heart is breaking for the poor guy. Can the sardonically soulful Giamatti pull off an Oscar win regardless? You tell me. I’m really downhearted.

Major acting awards should be about major effing delivery…grand-slamming it…soul, gravity, reaching deep inside. Not this time. Congrats to the architects of Lily Gladstone‘s identity campaign. The Best Actress Oscar is now almost certainly hers, and everyone in the room knows the meaning…the final value of this.

SAG-AFTRA awards voters have been lowering industry property values for years…onward!

So that’s Chaya Raichik, the Libs of TikTok honcho, on the right with the pink hoodie, and masked-up Washington Post social media reporter Taylor Lorenz on the left.

In overly simple terms, we’re talking basic normie values and suspicion of unmitigated immigration of POCs from various cultures vs. unbridled wokeism (“whiteys need to be punished and brought down a peg or two”).

Yesterday HE tried to get the hang of Zoom, as the first “Misfits” Zoomcast is set for Sunday afternoon with a peek-out sometime later that evening or Monday morning.

Alas, HE mostly failed in this effort, and I am therefore grateful to Glenn Kenny for having generously offered to do the Zoom inviting, due to my woeful lack of facility with this extremely user-unfriendly software.

I spent three or four hours yesterday trying to figure out the protocols, and I’m just not smart or patient enough, it seems. And so to protect my sense of self-worth I’ve decided that it’s Zoom’s fault, not mine. As a result I’ve come to despise Zoom with a burning Ahab-like intensity.

Zoom has actually re-awakened long suppressed feelings of stupidity and self-loathing within me…feelings that I experienced when I was 13 or 14 years old and bored to death in history class. I so hated studying mind-numbing textbooks that I would invent my own answers to pop quizzes. When asked who was James Watt, the 18th Century Scottish inventor of the semi-advanced steam engine, I would answer that he was a pioneer in developing and measuring the illumination levels in electric light bulbs, hence the quantifying term “watt” as in 75-watt GE bulbs.

This was my burden, my plight, my anguish. For I was inexplicably hostile to standard terminology and accepted doctrine, and felt stubbornly inspired to defy it any way I could. And now, thanks to Zoom, I am re-living the dull panel-colony horror of being the dumb guy in class. Or, you know, an intellectually rebellious 13 year-old or whatever.

Again — HE’s very first Zoomcast will happen as planned, but only because Kenny has stepped into the breach.

Ray Bolger‘s Scarecrow: “Oh, I’m a failure because I haven’t got a brain.”

The Best Actress category represents the only major-category Oscar cliffhanger, of course — Poor Things‘ Emma Stone vs. Killers of the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone. And it’ll basically be decided during tonight’s SAG Awards telecast on Netflix.

HE is greatly concerned that the woke-minded SAG-AFTRA membership might vote to support Gladstone’s identity campaign (i.e., “put aside any notions of exceptional quality of performance — vote for me because I’m Native American”). Whoever wins tonight will almost certainly take the Best Actress Oscar, and so this is a fairly big deal as all the other Oscar categories have been pretty much decided upon or locked down.

I’ll be in West Orange, New Jersey when the decision comes down. I’m prepared to accept a Gladstone victory as long as everyone understands the woke bullshit dynamic, as a Lily win would have nothing to do with her having given a knockout performance, or one that could be fairly described as fascinating, audacious, richly-written, dig-down-and-touch-our-communal-soul, etc. What can I do if SAG-AFTRA tilts this way? Obviously nothing.

Travis Kelce‘s stunningly awful taste in jackets, shirts and pullovers continues unabated. A day or two ago he wore another sartorial nightmare garment while attending a Taylor Swift concert in Sydney. Couple this shamelessness with Kelce’s troglodyte behavior during the Las Vegas Super Bowl and you’ve got a very difficult package. If I was at a party and spotted some nameless nobody wearing a sweater or pullover like this, I would retreat to the other end of the room or maybe leave altogether.

Posted on 2.23:

Werner Herzog lasted a half-hour with Barbie, and in so doing experienced “sheer hell.” Herzog isn’t “wrong” for having said this, but Barbie has its own mentality, its own satirical motor, its own creationist view.

Someone has finally acknowledged what I’ve been saying over and over and over for years, which is that Barry Keoghan looks weird, largely due to his bee-stung nose. It is apparently my lonely lot in life to be the pathfinder, the first one through the barbed wire, the canary in the coalmine. Thank God that Uncle Doomer has joined in.

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Two days ago I saw Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding (A24, 3.8), and tonight [Thursday, 2.22] I watched Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Drive–Away Dolls (Focus Features, now playing).

Both are quite dykey — hungrily, aggressively sexual. The Coen-Cooke is mildly crazy in a nervy, farcical way (vaguely recalling the tone of Raising Arizona, the 1987 Coen Bros. film) while the Glass is like a volcano that spews more and more lava. And from my surprised perspective, both are moderately approvable.

This is not what I expected. I was a little bit afraid that both would piss me off in some way or would at least be annoying, and neither did that. Neither film is truly double grade-A but at the same time neither has anything to apologize for. And the Coen-Cooke is often fleet and clever, and it ends perfectly with a reaction shot from a peripheral character…bingo!

Glass’s film, which really uncorks the madness during its final third, is subversive in a way that I didn’t see coming.

The Coen-Cooke is deadpan droll — much lighter and goofier than the melodramatic Bleeding, which deals straight cards until the end and never fools around — although with a fair amount of violence. But you also know it’s basically comedic and is therefore going to observe boundaries.

Maybe it’s me but both films seem determined to be as provocative as they can be with the sex scenes. A lot of slurping and smooching and fingering and muff-diving, and the Coen-Cooke even goes in for sizable wang prosthetics toward the end.

I flinched a bit when the Glass went in for some light toe-chewing — sorry but the toes in question struck me as too thick and knobby. A voice inside went “eeeww, no…too much.”

Call me full of it if you want, but I have this impression that U.S. filmmakers aren’t allowed these days to make sexually graphic hetero-love-affair films. They can only dive into hot sex if it’s from a gay or lesbian serving tray. The prohibiting of Last Tango in Paris-level presentation is understood in every progressive corner of the industry (you certainly couldn’t make a film about a couple of saucy women who love to get fucked by Glenn Powell-type guys and are totally into hungry blowjobs, not in today’s environment) and you can sense that Glass and Coen-Cooke knew they had carte blanche approval and that now (i.e., last year) was the time to go for it and pull out the stops.

Posted by Vanity Fair‘s Savannah Walsh, 2.22.24:

Earlier today Google announced a “pausing” of its Gemini artificial intelligence image generation feature after saying it offers “inaccuracies” in historical pictures.

This was a Google-speak response to the AI software having insisted on transforming all historical figures into persons of color. Google has posted an updated statement, saying that it will re-release an “improved” (i.e., significantly whiter) version soon.

May I ask a question? What is the basic difference between (a) black-icizing historical figures via Google Gemini and (b) movies using the presentism aesthetic to assert that people of color were or could, within the realm of our enlightened progressive imaginings, be persons of color in the past, including the British past?

Like the forthcoming Hallmark version of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, say?

Since ’15 or thereabouts we’ve all seen like-minded features, plays and cable series set in the 19th and 18th Centuries as well as Elizabethan England, including Netflix’s Bridgerton, Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots, Lynsey Miller and Eve Hedderwick Turner‘s Anne Boleyn, B’way’s Hamilton, Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (set well before Elizabethan times) and so on.

The casting of all these productions reflect the woke Hollywood aesthetic known as “presentism“. All Google Gemini did was take this well-established trend and inject into a software tasked with providing historical images.