Sasha Stone and I just finished an hour-long chat about Tuesday morning’s (1.24) announcement of the ’23 Oscar nominations, and the obvious fact that Top Gun: Maverick, which will certainly be among the chosen few, is the only prospective nominee that feels truly commanding. Authoritatively, I mean.

Despite the familiarity and the formulaic strategy, TG:M is the only finalist that feels home–runnish…not to mention the achievement of having joined forces with Avatar: The Way of Avatar to save and even restore a classic, life-giving Hollywood dynamic (thrills, popcorn, warm seats) to exhibition itself…there’s no ignoring the metaphor.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is passionately supported (I’ll give it that) but on its own terms (reach, theme, imagination) and despite an excellent final line it drives sane people crazy.

The Fabelmans is basically a double that makes you feel more relieved than fulfilled when it ends.

For all the brilliance and audacity Tar underwhelms — Kubrick famously said that strong films connect for the feel rather than the think, and Tar is not much of a feeler.

The Banshees of Inisherin is also more weirdly thinky than feely.

I don’t know what Elvis is but it sure as hell is no triple or homer. The Bazzyness is draining.

Women Talking is an earnest whiff. Babylon, due respect, missed it. The corrosive cruelty delivered by All Quiet on the Western Front is unforgettable but not, in the annals of world cinema, unfamiliar.

At the end of the day Avatar: The Way of Water is more about knockout efficiency than the turning of a special key.

Yesterday on Twitter I derided Anne Thompson‘s go-with-the-woke-flow celebration of the appallingly overcranked RRR as “virtue signalling.” Glenn Kenny called me a bad person for saying this.

HE reply: “’Virtue signalling’ is a fairly common malady. Common among older white critics, I mean. Hardly an insult. In their heart of hearts, they know what they’re up to. Someone comes along and calls it by its rightful name…not exactly a cruel or even rude accusation.”

Kenny: “So to call someone a liar is not an insult…gotcha”.

HE to Kenny: “Proclaiming your woke bonafides by praising an obviously mediocre film by a Tollywood schlockmeister…calling such a film an ecstatic experience isn’t ‘lying’ — it’s a way of telling your readers and fellow critics ‘look how liberated and post-racist I’ve become in my critical estimations! Except I’m post-racist in a good way. By thinking only positive thoughts about people of color.”

Kenny: “[So] you’re not insulting your dear old friend Anne Thompson, and she would never tell you to piss off on account of you doing so, or just ignore you. It’s true Anne is pretty good-natured. But everyone has their limit. And I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by suggesting you made yourself something of a non-person to her some time ago. And now you’re freer to lay it on than you ever were, since you’ll likely never lay eyes on her in person again.”

HE to Kenny: “Aside from the usual collegial chiding, I did absolutely nothing to warrant being labelled a ‘non-person’ in Anne’s eyes….nothing at all. It’s all horseshit.

“You wanna hear something? Last year a person in the know told me that when the #MeToo Millennial harridans and hardcore trans lunatics decided, for no sensible or logical reason other than the furtherance of woke psychosis (and with your own kind and gracious goading when you tweeted that I had behaved like some kind of sexual ogre because, in a state in which the legal consent law is 16, I’d fallen in love with a 17 year-old heiress when I was 10 years older), to classify me as a toxic person who had to be booted out of two fraternities (Gold Derby and Critics Choice)…

“You know what I heard later? I was told by a person in the know that my ‘dear old friend’ Anne Thompson, whom I’ve known and been friendly with since the early ‘80s…an old Entertainment Weekly colleague whose Hobart Ave. home she invited me to once or twice to when our kids were very young in the early ‘90s…this person in the know told me that Anne voted with the Robespierrres to eject me on one of those decisions. (I forget which.) That is what’s known in the journalism trade as exhibiting loyalty, backbone and character, or otherwise being (heh-heh) a good hombre.”

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Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale is a strange and shadowed study of self-imposed confinement. Brendan Fraser’s Charlie is a suffering sad sack, all right. I felt for the poor bloated guy, but what a tragedy. What a ghastly, grotesque experiment in plumbing the depths of regret and self-loathing, not to mention the drip-drip process of slow suicide.

Charlie’s choking-on-a-sandwich scene is one for the ages; ditto his eating binge + vomiting scene. Ditto his sweat-soaked, white-light death scene (i.e., my favorite moment in the film). James Whale and Todd Browning would be impressed; so would Montgomery Clift.

Obviously an intelligent filmed play, and mildly pleasurable for that. Fraser’s performance is a whopping, tearful freak show, but I felt the heart of it. And I was moved by that final gasp (partly a cry of release) when he finally goes to God. And yes, I’m proud that I got through it. I‘ve been terrified of watching this film for months, and now I’m past that hurdle. And I’ll never have to watch it again.

It’s been predicted that Brendan Fraser will take the Best Actor Oscar, and not Colin Farrell. The reason, I’ve been reminded, was stated by Michael Keaton during a 2015 visit to The David Letterman Show**: “Illness always wins.”

To which I replied, “How is turning yourself into a 600-pound sea lion an illness?” I was told I was mistaken, that an eating disorder is an illness. “Is anorexia an illness?,” the opposition said. “If so, then so is eating yourself to death.”

“Neither are actual illnesses,” I argued. “They’re psychological or emotional conditions rooted in an abusive history or some other psychological affliction. They’re certainly not illnesses like cancer or lupus or coronary artery disease or diabetes or what-have-you.”

It was pointed out that many in the medical community would argue that Fraser’s condition is an illness, regardless if it is psych-rooted

Farrell, I was told, is the Bob Hoskins of this year’s race.  In 1986 Hoskins won just about every award for Mona Lisa.  He was also a lock to win the Oscar.  Except he wasn’t.  Paul Newman won for The Color of Money.  Newman had won the NBR award, and Hoskins had won everything else. It didn’t matter.  

HE retort: “But Newman wasn’t playing a guy with an illness — he was playing Eddie Felson, an ex-pool shark. Plus Newman didn’t refuse to attend the Golden Globes because the HFPA official had touched his ass and briefly fingered his anus.”

You don’t understand Academy voter psychology, I was told. “Fraser’s touching performance and the comeback narrative is too good for the Academy to not give him the Oscar,” he said.

Nope, I replied. Fraser the actor is too much of a whineybaby. And as miserable as his morbidly obese character is, you can’t call him a victim of an illness. Not really.

** Go to the 13-minute mark.

Doug Liman‘s Justice, a last-minute addition to Sundance ’23, is reportedly a deep-dig investigation into the behavior of Brett Kavanaugh during his beer-drinking hooligan days at Yale. It will screen this evening at 8:30 pm at the Park Avenue Theatre (aka the former Yarrow hotel at 1800 Park Ave, Park City, UT 84060). We all understand that Kavanaugh is a pernicious Trump conservative (he voted to overturn Roe v. Wade) and that Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth, etc. But post-confirmation the general feeling seemed to be that despite Kavanaugh’s gross fratboy behavior, no adult should be hung out to dry over alleged louche college behavior he may have been guilty of in his late teens and very early 20s.

And then he goes on Colbert and blows a significant percentage of his cool-kat cred by wearing whitesides. Yes, I’m kidding but on another level I’m not. Okay, he’s still Adam Kinzinger and still a man of substance, but why would someone with his integrity and moral fibre thumb his nose at the Italian suede lace-up crowd? He surely understands that whitesides are a sartorial equivalent of a red flag. They certainly are on this site.

Wiki excerpt: “Kinzinger voted in line with President Donald Trump about 90% of the time and voted against Trump’s first impeachment, but he subsequently became a critic of Trump and made headlines as a rare Republican officeholder willing to criticize him. In summer 2020, Kinzinger denounced QAnon and other baseless conspiracy theories that gained currency among Republican voters. After the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden, Kinzinger denounced Trump’s claims that the election was stolen and criticized Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

Robert Evans on aging, spoken directly to HE back in ‘96 or thereabouts: “Your hair turns gray, your nose gets softer, your ears get longer and your teeth get smaller.”

But noses don’t change their basic shape. Or at least mine never has. If you have, say, a button nose as a 22 year-old, you’re not going to end up with a Basil Rathbone nose when you’re 70.

Three hisses….hah! Mistake. Three guesses as to which Oscar prognosticator wrote the following, and the first two guesses don’t count.