Anora doesn’t have to win everything. It’s okay — it’s still the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar.

Brutalist topliner Adrien Brody losing the SAG trophy for Best Actor and A Complete Unknown Timothee Chalamet taking it instead truly warms the cockles of my heart…thank God! I would have been crestfallen if Brody had triumphed. Brutalist haters, unite!

And hooray for Team Conclave taking SAG’s Best Ensemble. Does this mean there’s a chance that Conclave might win the top Oscar prize? Yes, there’s a decent chance of that happening. But it’s not all that likely.

Am I slightly bummed by Demi Moore snagging SAG’s Best Actress award? Yes, that bums me out a bit. Will I get over it? Yes, I will.

I’m thinking about writing a Hollywood book about the deranged and hysterical media war against Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (‘18), but also about something bigger and broader — how the Green Book maelstrom launched the not-fully-concluded era of the woke baddie-waddies —- the censorious, ultra-sensitive identity fanatics who all but suffocated the film business during the woke terror era (2016 to 2024).

With the winds currently shifting and woke mentalism beating a retreat like Napoleon out of Russia, it’s now okay, I’m thinking, to write a book that recounts an honest history about how extreme progressive scolds tried like hell to murder one of the gentlest and most unassuming stories (and a fact-based one at that) about racial reckonings and journeys of self-discovery ever created within the Hollywood realm, and yet how the pissheads couldn’t quite deliver the death blow.

A book (which Sasha Stone was going to co-write with me…now she feels that we’re too far apart on the Trump factor) about how the uglies tried to bludgeon a good, modest little film…how they did everything they could to kill its chances in the Oscar race, and how they wound up failing…tough shit, assholes!

A book about a now-seven-year-old film that didn’t mine as much as gently explore a relatively dark and indecent era in American culture as far as the racial divide was concerned, and yet a film that played its cards just so…deftly, I mean…a film that fair-minded movie lovers fell for and which wound up snagging a Best Picture Oscar.

I’m talking about a film that made Manohla Dargis, Spike Lee, Inkoo Kang, Richard Brody, David Ehrlich and a whole army of progressive haters see red…a movie that led to a thousand cursings and spit-takes.

I’m thinking of a book would examine on a deep-dish, inside-the-beltway basis the blow-by-blow wokester campaign to disembowel Green Book, starting with the big ecstatic debut at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2018 and ending with Peter Farrelly’s film taking the Best Picture Oscar on 2.24.19, not to mention Mahershala Ali snagging Best Supporting Actor (traitor!).

Augmented, of course, by the usual backstory and perspective reporting — (a) a history of previous takedown campaigns, (b) the eruption of pernicious wokeism itself in ’16 or 17 or thereabouts, (c) a history of the actual 1962 Green Book road trip, (d) a history of the Green Book project. and the various participants, how it all came together, the initial marketing, how the woke resistance formulated, and so on…whizzing bullet by whizzing bullet, grenade by grenade,

I’ve already written a good portion of this saga in Hollywood Elsewhere…I must have tapped out 10 or 12 adversarial columns at the very least.

And yet the hysteria that swirled around Green Book during the last four months of 2018 and the first two months of ‘19 is not a story many people know. [Sasha wrote the next three or four paragraphs.] You’d have to be on the inside of the insular bubble that the Oscars and Hollywood have become….a political climate that began with the emergence of this warm-hearted, crowd-pleasing flick about friendship and tolerance, and yet ironically resulted in one of the screenwriters being banned from the ceremony, the film’s director persecuted on phony sexual assault charges, one of the actors called a racist and a general upending of the way the Academy votes on Best Picture.

The shock of the 2016 Donald Trump election sent Hollywood reeling, but the combination of rising activism and woke ideology collided with old-fashioned storytelling to create a firestorm that the film awards industry still hasn’t recovered from.

The trouble began to brew the year after Trump won the presidency, when La La Land was deemed “racist” and lost to Moonlight. It intensified the following year when Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was knocked out of completion because it, too, was deemed “racist.”

Green Book was the film that ignited a guerilla movement of woke scolding, instruction, obstruction and correction. 

Will a BAFTA Best Picture win lock in Conclave’s frontrunner status and finally put an end to sick, delusional stateside fantasies that Wicked or Emilia Perez or, God forbid, The Brutalist might snag the golden Oscar ring?

The Brutalist, which received nine BAFTA noms this morning, is a film designed to make viewers feel awful. This is not a strongly contested opinion. I would feel differently if (this is an absurd fantasy) A24 had offered complimentary snorts of high-grade heroin to select viewers in order to lessen the glum mood, but that’s water under the bridge.

Conclave’s 12 BAFTA nominations have affirmed its leading heavyweight status, at least for now. And yet nipping at the heels of Edward Berger’s Vatican drama is Jacques Audiard’s diverting-but-not-good-enough Emilia Perez, which has landed 11 BAFTA noms…will you guys please stop this? Put a cap on it.

Both the Movie Godz and the Joe and Jane Popcorn community have spoken, and the time has come to put a respectful halt to the Perez hoopla.

There’s no questioning that it’s an audaciously conceived film (Mexican trans drug cartel musical) but without the second word in that five-word description there’s no way it would be a Best Picture headliner (voting for it makes people feel safer), and we all know this.

Not to mention those underwhelming RT scores (both critics and ticket buyers).

Queer’s Daniel Craig getting edged out of a Best Actor nomination by Heretic’s Hugh Grant is absolutely not right and certainly not cool. Craig’s performance as the William S. Burroughs-like lead character in Luca Guadagnino’s film is shattering.

And congrats to The Apprentice ‘s Sebastian Stan for landing a BAFTA Best Actor nom for his spot-on, half-sympathetic-during-the-first-half performance as Donald whack-ass Trump. Hooray also for Stan’s costar, Jeremy Strong, snagging a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

I’ve been thinking. It’s been 26 years and change since I began penning an online column. Hollywood Confidential, a forerunner of my present endeavor, launched in October ’98. 26 years of rapture and anxiety. I don’t suppose I’ve been in a state of true transcendental serenity more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it’s been a good life. All my life I’ve loved the magical getaway realm of movies. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But there are times…when suddenly you realize you’re nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself…what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything, or it made any difference at all really. Particularly in comparison with other journalists’ careers. I don’t know whether that kind of thinking’s very healthy, but I must admit I’ve had some thoughts along those lines from time to time.

In all my years on this planet I spoke to Sean Connery only once, during a roundtable at a 1982 New York press junket for Richard Brooks‘ Wrong Is Right.

I wasn’t much of a fan of the film (nobody was) but it was thrilling to absorb the vibe and smell the aroma of the manly, bigger-than-life Connery.

He wasn’t much of a kidder but he had an engaging smile. Every answer he gave was straight from the shoulder, bordering on blunt.

The word around the campfire at the time was that Connery had made a successful advance upon a female journalist during a hotel-room interview, although not necessarily during his Wrong Is Right activities.

We all have impulses, of course, but we control them for the sake of decency and our careers and reputations. But if you were Sean Connery back in the day, perhaps not each and every time.

Restrained but affirming machismo will always be cool. The calm, sensible mindset of a guy who wields a certain kind of rugged glamour and a certain amount of entertainment industry dominance…it was good for the soul to sense that, and even taste it through close proximity.

Connery was clearly a gentleman and imbued with a certain diplomatic finesse, and he was very handsomely-dressed in that hotel room, and he smelled good (soap, subtle musk cologne) and wore newish, polished, well-crafted footwear**.

When I was sitting three or four feet away from the then-52-year-old Connery I felt the right kind of vibes. This is a good place to be, I said to myself.

The world was a whole different place during the early Reagan era. Urban gay culture had begun to flourish (the Studio 54 heyday had happened only three or four years earlier) while AIDS was only beginning to be whispered about, but notions of abundant diversity had yet to manifest (the Central Park Five injustice was only a year old at the time) and white hetero straight guys like Connery were, unlike today, not regarded as inherently problematic or regressive or morally arrested — they held a certain sway. And fine sexual opportunities for young heteros like myself were rather wonderful, I don’t mind saying.

Merit ruled over equity (what’s equity?), transitioned biomales weren’t competing in women’s sports, Oscar handicappers didn’t know from identity campaigns, woke merely referred to not being asleep, etc. E.T., The Verdict, Blade Runner, Tootsie, First Blood, Five Days One Summer, The Year of Living Dangerously, etc. I would have that time again.

** Nobody wore whitesides in 1982 — civilization had been spared as they hadn’t been invented yet — but if by some bizarre quirk of time-shifting style or fashion Connery had somehow been wearing whitesides that day, the whole subdued machismo thing would have been shattered.

Jordan Ruimy recently polled over 100 name-brand critics and columnists (myself included) about the best films of the first half of the 2020s.

And as you might expect, the top five picks were mostly dreary or cerebral or vaguely punishing in a film-dweeb way. Mainly because the critics are status-quo sheep.

Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer, which I respected but didn’t especally enjoy (my legs and my soul groaned in anguish) tallied the most votes. The first runner-up was Todd Field‘s TAR, which I saw four times without ever really tumbling for…it kept pissing me off.

In third, fourth and fifth place were The Daniels’ utterly infuriating Everything Everywhere All at Once (hated it with every fiber of my being), Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Drive My Car (too many Parliament cigarettes) and Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest (an austere one-trick-pony).

The second five (#6 through #10) were Justine Triet‘s Anatomy of A Fall (a good film but kind of a slog to sit through, and I really hated that little cloying kid), Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog (effing despised it), Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (yes! — the only film among the top ten that I really liked), Celine Song‘s Past Lives (fuck you) and Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Licorice Pizza (HE-approved with sight reservations) came in ninth and tenth.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the films that placed 11th and 12th either — Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin and Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman.

HE’s top five films of the 2020-2024 period are Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse (which premiered in Europe in late ’19 but wasn’t pirated for U.S. consumption until early ’20), Sean Baker‘s Anora, Steve McQueen‘s Mangrove, David Fincher‘s The Killer and Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers.

My #6 thru #10 are Steven Zalllian‘s Ripley, Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard, Edward Berger‘s Conclave, Tran Anh Hung‘s The Taste of Things (The Pot au Feu) and Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant.

Other HE faves: Maestro, The Holdovers, Happening, Quo Vadis, Aida?, The Pigeon Tunnel, The Apprentice, La Chimera, Riders of Justice, Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Worst Person in the World, The Beatles: Get Back, R.M.N., Bardo, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The King of Staten Island, The Trip to Greece, The Wild Goose Lake, Nomadland, In The Heights, West Side Story, Blackberry. (21)

In the view of Vanity Fair‘s Dominick Dunne and God knows many Menendez murder trial watchers the world over, the sexual abuse defense advanced by Lyle and Erik Menendez (i.e., my dad made me blow him repeatedly plus he fucked me in the ass a few times) and exploited to the hilt by attorney Leslie Abramson was — obviously, c’mon — something the boys cooked up in order to gain jury sympathy.

It’s one thing when a cynical, manipulative attorney attempts a bullshit defense strategy in court, but it’s something else when a nine-part Netflix series about the crime in question devotes most of an episode, directed by Michael Uppendahl and titled “The Hurt Man”, to a notably long and uncut single-slow-zoom-shot confession scene in which Erik recalls the lurid details of his father’s sexual abuse when he was a younger lad…a scene that zooms in ever so slowly upon Erik (I was vaguely reminded of that extra slow tracking, barren-hotel-room shot that Michelangelo Antonioni‘s The Passenger ends with) until it finally ends with a medium close-up…a prolonged scene in which Abramson’s back is facing the camera for the whole time.

And Erik’s bullshit sexual abuse fantasies are presented very seriously and solemnly…we’re meant to take Erik’s slowly unfolding recollections to heart…we’re meant to accept them as truthful and quite painful. This is quite a surreal strategy on the part of co-showrunners Ryan Murphy and Ian Brannen. You’re sitting there and wondering “why the hell is this bullshit fantasy being presented as a credible scenario?”

Consider these Vanity Fair Dominick Dunne links…they detail the whole lurid story. Here’s a good summary page with all the necessary links.

Sasha Stone has posted what seems to me like a reasonably perceptive montage of ten likely Best Picture Oscar contenders. I don’t agree that the respectable, earnestly acted Sing Sing belongs in this group and all the indicators suggest that Blitz doesn’t quite get there, but there’s no question that Anora and Conclave are, presently speaking, at the top of the list. I won’t be seeing The Brutalist, Hard Truths, The Room Next Door or Queer until later this month.

This is the first in a series of special Hollywood Elsewhere pre-Telluride Angelina Jolie hit pieces. No originals, all re-posted.

They will appear between today and Tuesday evening, or just before I wake up at 3:30 am on Wednesday, 8.28, in order to catch a 7:30 am LGA flight to Dallas, followed by a short hop to Alberquerque and then a rental-car drive to Telluride.

Posted on 2.11.15, the title was “Gone For Four Months“:

There’s this imaginary guy I’ve been visiting at Cedars Sinai. He went into a coma early last October and just came out of it yesterday. I wasn’t there when he awoke but he called today to say thanks for stopping by all those times. His mother told him about my four or five visits.

Then he said he’d gone online this morning and visited the latest Gold Derby and Gurus of Gold charts, and he wanted to know what the hell had happened to Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, which was the Best Picture front-runner for weeks on end. “Where’d it go?” he said. “What happened? It was the leading Best Picture contender…it was all over but the shouting and the formalities. Every last default-minded, deferring-to-Dave Karger Oscar expert had it at the top of their lists. What’s the most likely film to win Best Picture? Why…Unbroken! What else? And now it’s vanished.”

I tried to break it to him gently. “What happened,” I explained, “is that Universal finally screened it, and a few days later the air had seeped out of the balloon. And then it just disappeared.”

He asked me why. “It was the Christian torture-porn thing,” I said. What’s that? “There was something in the movie that said that the more a guy has been beaten and tortured, the braver and more beautiful and closer to God he is.” Oh, the guy said, suddenly sounding weaker and less curious.

“Right now the only chance Unbroken has at the Oscars is Roger Deakins‘ nomination for Best Cinematography,” I said. “But it would be surprising to a lot of people I know if Birdman‘s Emmanuel Lubezki loses out.”

Chris Nashawaty‘s “The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982” celebrates eight landmark films that opened 42 years ago — Conan the Barbarian, The Road Warrior, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, The Thing and Tron.

But only three of these were truly stellar and earthshaking — E.T, The Road Warrior and Blade Runner. The other five were noteworthy but problematic here and there.

Poltergeist was pretty good but not classic. I actually sorta kinda disliked The Thing (I prefer the 1951 Howard Hawks version to John Carpenter’s) and Tron. Ricardo Montalban was great in The Wrath of Khan but otherwise calm down.

First and foremost, those who aren’t hiding their heads in the sand about the Joe Biden catastrophe (which lets out most of the lost-in-denial HE commentariat) need to listen to this All In podcast discussion between Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg. This is it, this is it, this is it.

Gurgling Joe Biden‘s taped, make-or-break interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos airs tonight at 8 pm, and I mean make-or-break for Stephanopoulos. He’s generally regarded as a “safe”, sensible-minded liberal Democrat, but if he goes too easy on Biden his reputation as a hotshot TV journalist will be instant toast.

Conversely if George’s questions for the Rotting Pumpkin are tough and unsparing and Biden stutters and chokes, Stephanopoulos will have earned a golden place in U.S. history.

Issue #1, obviously, is not Joe’s “one bad debate” bullshit (“That’s 90 minutes onstage…look at what I’ve done over the last three and half years”), but observations by many that Biden has been in a state of cognitive decline for at least a couple of years and that the administration and mainstream media types have been covering this up like obedient mafia goons.

So the “Joe is sharp as a tack” narrative has been a Big Whopping Lie — a major coordinated effort at gaslighting — and the current term for this is “agewashing.” The inevitability of neurological decline is obviously not a crime or anything to be ashamed of, but lying about the obvious is vile and infuriating and self-destructive.

Earlier today (7.5) The Ankler‘s Matthew Frank reported there’s a full-scale, anti-Biden revolt among the donor class.

Barry Diller told Frank he’s no longer a Biden supporter. Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings has called on Biden to step aside. Producer and showrunner Damon Lindelof “also published an op-ed urging Democratic contributors to seal their wallets until Biden is replaced.” At the Aspen Ideas Festival, speaking just after the 6.28 debate, Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel said “we are in Fuck City,” adding that Biden “is not the candidate anymore” and suggested his campaign will hit a dead end as a result of big money ‘drying up.'”

Frank: “Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who cofounded The Walt Disney Co., told CNBC yesterday that she plans to withhold donations until Biden drops out.

“I intend to stop any contributions to the party unless and until they replace Biden at the top of the ticket,” she said. “This is realism, not disrespect. Biden is a good man and has served his country admirably, but the stakes are far too high. If Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”

Three days ago the N.Y. Times Peter Baker, David E. Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Katie Rogers co-authored a report (7.2) titled “Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome.”

The first two paragraphs read as follows:

“In the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.

“Like many people his age, Mr. Biden, 81, has long experienced instances in which he mangled a sentence, forgot a name or mixed up a few facts, even though he could be sharp and engaged most of the time. But in interviews, people in the room with him more recently said that the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.”

The same day Carl Berstein told Anderson Cooper that sources have told him Biden’s cognitive issues have definitely become worse over the last six months and were evident within the last year.

In 7.2 New York’s Jonathan Chait posted an article titled “It’s Not Just an Age Problem. It’s a Trust Problem.”

Yesterday afternoon (7.4) Intelligencer‘s Olivia Nuzzi posted a piece titled “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden,” with a subhead that read “the president’s mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.”

The gaslighting thing, in short, has become the burning issue behind the “Joe is falling apart and should probably resign” swamp fire, and it’s now time for all the really bad people who’ve been saying the same thing on Hollywood Elsewhere threads to come forward, drop to their knees, admit they’ve been part of the lying throng and beg for forgiveness. Because they have no honor now — zero — and they need to atone before it’s too late.