4:15 pm eastern: All hail the Gods of Rome! Not only did Killers of the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone fail to win the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Leading Performance Award, but she didn’t even place in runner-up status (although she did so qualify in the supporting category). For now at least, her identity campaign has been stopped in its tracks…screech! The award has been split between Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Hüller, and Poor Things‘ Emma Stone.

The runner-ups are All of Us Strangers‘ Andrew Scott and American Fiction’s Jeffrey Wright,

LAFCA’s Best Supporting Performance awards have gone to Rachel McAdams, (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) and The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Runners-up: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Ryan Gosling, Barbie.

Earlier today: The Los Angeles Film Critics Association is widely regarded as perhaps the most fickle and eccentric awards-bestowing org on the planet. We all know this. Don’t argue.

Not only have they chopped the roster of eligible acting winners in half by dispensing with gender, but they’re known worldwide as the only major critics group that routinely takes a brunch break during voting….bagels and soft-spread cream cheese, lox and onions, potato salad, pickles, Ruffles chips, half-consumed jars of mayonnaise, etc. They’re dedicated to their eccentricity, and when they vote each year everyone says “okay, here come the virtue-signalling fruit loops.” Not that bagels, cream cheese, onions and wokeness necessarily go hand in hand.

Seven years ago (i.e., late ’16) LAFCA gave Lily Gladstone their Best Supporting Actress award for having stared longingly at Kristen Stewart while saying almost nothing in Kelly Reichardt‘s Certain Women — basically an attagirl identity award for Gladstone playing her own rural Native American self while conveying lesbian currents.

You just know they’re going to come roaring back and give her their Best Actress trophy for doing roughly the same thing in Killers of the Flower Moon, or for playing a hetero Native American woman staring daggers at Robert DeNiro and the other bad guys while saying almost nothing.

So far…

Best Screenplay: All of Us Strangers. Andrew Haigh.
Runner-up: May December, Samy Burch.

Best Cinematography: Poor Things (Searchlight) — Robbie Ryan
Runner-up: Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Original Films/Paramount Pictures) — Rodrigo Prieto

Best Production Design: Barbie (Warner Bros.) — Sarah Greenwood
Runner-up: Poor Things (Searchlight Pictures) — Shona Heath, James Price

Best Music Score: The Zone of Interest (A24) — Mica Levi, sound designer Johnnie Burn.
Runner-up: Barbie (Warner Bros.) — Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt.

Did you know that the late Robbie Robertson, who composed the metronomically rythmic tom-tom score for Killers of the Flower Moon, waas born with Native Anerican blood? His mother, Rosemarie Dolly Chrysler, was a blend of Cayuga and Mohawk, and was raised on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve southwest of Toronto.

And did you know that Robertson’s score stands completely on its own, and that his ethnicity means very little if anything in terms of the final impact? His music understands what Killers is about more than this torn and confused film knows itself. The Best Score Oscar is Robertson’s to lose. The work, not the blood.

Carey Mulligan and Michael Fassbender are obviously fine, gifted, thoughtful and certainly insightful artists….two youngish people in theh absolute fullness of their lives. But these Variety encounters are nonetheles vapid. Because they’ve been instructed (and have gone along with the instruction) to keep it fleet and zippy and mutually flattering and whatnot, and if you miss one of these conversations you’re fine. If you’ve seen their respective award-season films (Maestro and The Killer), you’ve got what you need. They’re both perfect.

A dissolve is when a shot fades and surrenders visual presence in order to transition to a subsequent shot that takes over. This clip from Shane is not that. This a shot of a gunslinger (Jack Palance‘s “Wilson”) quickly fading into a ghost — literally nothing — and then physically re-appearing three or four seconds later. He disappears in order to make a point (yo soy Senor Creepy), decides that the point is made, and then rematerializes into flesh, blood, bone, boots, hat and gunbelt.

….if you love and care for your kids or your pets. That’s your rote kind of good…the natural, vaguely banal, no-sweat easy kind. Jospeh Goebbels loved his daughters, Hildegard and Helga, until he poisoned them on 5.1.45.

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A 12.6.23 N.Y. Times piece about the dissolve, a classic but all but abandoned cinematic transition device, was posted a couple of days ago by M.D. Rodrigues. The article mainly focuses on Alexander Payne‘s elegant and artful dissolves in The Holdovers.

“Each dissolve is a dawdling ellipsis,” Rodrigues explains. “Over its course, feelings develop or disperse; life happens or doesn’t. With its slow, valedictory air, a long enough dissolve evokes the momentum of real experience.”

“One thing is going away, another thing is coming in,” Payne has observed. “I can’t explain it, but there’s something poetic and melancholy about it.”

But near the start of Hal Ashby‘s The Last Detail, however, a dissolve is used for comic effect. I chuckle each time I watch it.

Otis Young‘s “Mule”, an in-transit sailor, is ordered to report to the master-at-arms (i.e., top sergeant). “Tell the M.A.A. you couldn’t find me,” Mule tells the lower-ranked messenger. “”He knows where you are,” the seaman replies. “Oh yeah?….when you’re in the Navy, shirtbird, and in transit, nobody knows where the fuck you are so go tell that F.A.A. to go fuck himself, I ain’t goin’ on no shit detail.”

What’s funny is how Ashby starts the slow dissolve before Mule has fully delivered his rant. It begins as Mule says “so tell that F.A.A. to go fuck himself,” as if Ashby is saying to the audience “this isn’t worth your time…he’s just blowing off the usual steam…just another pissed-off sailor…blah blah.”

“Don’t let that no-good, candy-ass, numb-nuts, twinkletoes crybaby back in here.” — Harry S. Truman.

I remain semi-mystified why the fix has been in on Justine Triet‘s Anatony of a Fall. It won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last May, the momentum kept building after the early fall fall festivals, and now it’s swept the European Film Awards in Berlin, taking Best European Film, Director, Screenplay and actress for Sandra Hüller.

It’s an approvable film within its own realm, but it’s not earth-shattering. It’s been overpraised from the get-go. Sometimes you can just tell that critics and industry voices decided to give a certain film is getting a pass because it exudes the right kind of social bonafides, and that’s that. A strong feminist imprimatur.

Take this line from an Anatomy of a Fall review by Film Yap‘s Nate Richards (posted on 10.26). The subhead calls Justine Triet’s murder investigation drama “one of the most gripping and memorable movies that you’ll see this year”…that’s a 100% decisive nope.

Anatomy of a Fall is a thorough, exacting and meticulous (read: exhausting) “what really happened?” exercise by way of a courtoom procedural, and is certainly smart and interesting as far as it goes but let’s not get carried away…please.

Sandra Huller is excellent as a bisexual writer accused of murdering her angry, pain-in-the-ass French husband (Samuel Theis), but the film goes on for 152 minutes, and the cloying kid playing Huhler’s half-blind son (Milo Machado-Graner) lays it on too thick, and the loud and relentless playing of an instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” drove me fucking nuts. The more I heard it, the more angry I felt…”Why is Triet making me listen to this over-loud track over and over?”

Another highly dubious declaration from Richards: “What makes Anatomy of a Fall so compelling is that Triet and Arthur Harari’s script has you constantly battle with yourself over whether or not you believe in Sandra’s innocence.” Not so! No battle! I was never even faintly persuaded that Huller might be a murderer…not for a minute.

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“We knew a [movie villain] of old by his Black Hat or his Black Moustache; and today by his white skin.” — a passage from David Manet’s “Everywhere An Oink–Oink.”

From Mark Athikatis’s Washington Post 12.7.23 review:

A just-released Wall Street Journal presidential preference poll has Nikki Haley running 17 points ahead of President Biden — 51% to 34%. That’s not a huge margin but the thundering rumble of mighty horses.

The Beast is also beating Gurgly Joe, but only by 47% to 43%. Biden and DeSantis are running even, 45% to 45%.

THR’s Scott Feinberg surely understands in the depths of his soul that he’s deeply disappointed (angered?) the Movie Godz by placing the three most admired, exciting and deserving Best Picture contenders — Poor Things, Maestro, The Holdovers — in the #5, #7 and #8 slots in his latest Oscar prediction column.

I realize that Variety’s Clayton Davis doesn’t approve, but American Fiction, as much as I adore the first 45 to 50 minutes and agree that it’s among the year’s finest, is not happening as a frontrunner. Pundit-wise it simply hasn’t caught on like some of us thought it might..

Take away the guilt + identity factors and nobody really loves Killers of the Flower Moon — it’s a long hair shirt movie with a tiresome lead character. And Barbie has been showered with more than enough accolades, thanks.

The latest Gold Derby rankings are more accurate.

Jordan Ruimy: “GD-wise I honestly think The Holdovers should be #3. Ahead of Poor Things. Joe and Jane LOVE The Holdovers. Every non-critic I speak to cannot stop raving about it.”