Posted today (1.8.23) by Awards Daily ‘s Sasha Stone — a blistering, on-target paragraph if I’ve ever read one:

The underlying reason, I suspect, is that NBC felt that they needed to be symbolically demoted because of the wokester condemnation of the HFPA over their previous (but since corrected) failures in the realm of DEI and specifically Black journalist membership.

By any fair and reasonable standard the HFPA has bent over backwards to reform itself, but still the Tomris Laffly Brigade wants this long-questionable org and its once-valued awards show (at least in terms of ratings) suffocated to death.

Given how the Golden Globes used to fuel-inject award season hype and especially considering that general award-season fervor is currently withering on the vine given the near-total absence of interest (much less enthusiasm) on the part of literally everyone outside the miniscule, industry-and-media-centric award season community (exacerbated further by the NSFC’s head-scratchy celebration of Aftersun’s Charlotte Wells), doesn’t it make sense to ease up and let bygones be bygones and try to return to the mindset of pre-woke-terror Hollywood (i.e., 2016 and before)?

Here’s an excellent, hand–wringing, hair–pulling piece on this topic from Awards Daily Sasha Stone:

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The starting bid is actually $1200 (or, if you will, four payments of $300 each).

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Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, HE’s choice for the Best Film of ‘22, has earned a solid passing grade (75%) from Joe and Jane Popcorn on Rotten Tomatoes. This represents a significant 30-point difference from the views of RT critics, most of whom are operating under the yoke of wokester mind tyranny and therefore compelled to dismiss the curious but compelling romantic dalliance between Olivia Colman and Michael Ward’s characters.

Almost certainly.

The National Society of Film Critics announced their 2022 film awards today, and there’s really only one way to interpret the Best Director trophy going to Aftersun‘s Charlotte Wells.

Aftersun is my idea of a spacey, ethereal mood-trip film. I’m not the only one who feels that it’s just not gripping or engrossing enough to warrant this kind of honor (ask any honest critic). This indicates that Aftersun‘s NSFC supporters voted for Wells as a gesture for feminist recognition and gender tokenism.

Like almost all major-outlet critics, the NSFC is composed of members who live in their own secular little world. In my opinion they’re residents of (a) the Planet Uranus or (b) the Abbey of St. Martin, where they live on chickens, raw lettuce, goat’s milk and goat cheese, and wear brown robes and sandals. As far as the Wells vote is concerned, they are absolutely not of this earth.

It could be argued, in fact, that Aftersun is a borderline infuriating space-out film. This is certainly my own personal opinion, I can tell you.

If Aftersun had been directed by a male, it most certainly wouldn’t have won anything. The NSFC critics know the truth of this, and of course they won’t admit it.

Best Picture / TÁR (61), Aftersun (49), No Bears (32) — HE strongly approves.

Best Director / Charlotte Wells, Aftersun (60), Park Chan-wook, Decision to Leave (47), Jafar Panahi, No Bears (36) — HE strongly disapproves.

Best Actor / Colin Farrell, After Yang & The Banshees of Inisherin (71); Paul Mescal, Aftersun…WHAT??; Bill Nighy, Living (33) — HE approves of Farrell winning.

Best Actress — Cate Blanchett, TÁR (59); Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once (38), (tie) Tilda Swinton – The Eternal Daughter / Michelle Williams – The Fabelmans (27) — HE approves of the Blanchett win.

Best Supporting Actor — Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once (45); Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway (35 — bending-over-backwards tokenism); Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin (27) — HE doesn’t approve of any of these performances.

Best Supporting Actress / Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin (57); Nina Hoss, TÁR (43); Dolly de Leon, Triangle of Sadness (35) — HE heartily approves of Condon’s win.

By HE standards Owen Roizman, who passed today at age 86, was and always will be one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers, certainly within the zeitgeist of the ’70s and ’80s. God, the streak Roizman was on between ’71 and ’78 alone! The French Connection, Play It Again, The Heartbreak Kid, The Exorcist, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Three Days of the Condor, Network, Straight Time. Not to mention True Confessions, Tootsie, Havana, Grand Canyon, Wyatt Earp, etc.

Special credit should be given to Roizman for stepping into that surreal episode when a William Friedkin-approved Bluray of The French Connection came out in ’09. Roizman didn’t tippy-toe around the obvious, which was that the ’09 Bluray’s bizarre color scheme (bleachy, desaturated, high contrasty) was an outright desecration. Three years later a properly remastered, Roizman-approved version was issued on a subsequent Bluray, and thank God for gloriously happy endings.

Posted on 3.8.12: “The new, Owen Roizman-approved French Connection Bluray is a blessing…a pure celluloid capturing of a great New York film experience, some of it luscious, some of it spotty and grainy but all it looking true and right. Some of it looks more lab-fresh than I’ve ever seen. Punchy red neons and such. Other parts look…well, the way they did at Leows’ 86th Street when it opened in the fall of ’71, I’m guessing. Raw, wham-bam, high-impact footage all the way.

“No more bluish bleach. No more splotchy colors and monochrome, high-contrast crap. No more creepy-perverse digital fuckwad action. The guy who mucked up the notorious 2009 Bluray version, director William Friedkin, has come to his senses and re-done his masterwork under Roizman’s influience.

“’The nation’s three-year-long, Freidkin-incited French Connection Bluray nightmare is over,’ I tweeted. ‘The bleachy, splotchy ’09 version has been replaced.’

“On 2.24.09 Roizman spoke to Aaron Aradillas on a blog-radio show called “Back By Midnight,” and he called the transfer “atrocious,” “emasculated” and “horrifying.” He said that he “wasn’t consulted” by Freidkin and he “certainly wants to wash my hands of having had anything to do with [it].”

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We’re now officially a half-century beyond one of the greatest film years in Hollywood history — 1973.

I came upon a 12.28.22 stacker.com article called “Best Films Turning 50 in 2023,” and figured “okay, but why not just list the best and leave it at that?”

I was surprised to realize that HE’s 1973 roster — 10 stone-cold classics, 12 creme de la cremes, 13 good to very good — is almost as strong as my 1971 rundown, which I first posted in 2015.

Compare the top 22 of ’73 with HE’s best of 2022. Both were highly respectable years, but compare 1973’s top ten with the likeliest Best Picture contenders on Gold Derby (Elvis, The Banshees of Inisherin, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Top Gun: Maverick, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Woman King, Glass Onion, The Fabelmans, TAR, Avatar: The Way of Water, RRR)…it’s almost embarassing.

1973 stone-cold classics (10):

1. Badlands (d: Terrence Malick)
2. The Long Goodbye (d: Robert Altman)
3. The Exorcist (d: William Friedkin)
4. The Outfit (d: John Flynn)
5. Mean Streets (d: Martin Scorsese)
6. The Last Detail (d: Hal Ashby)
7. The Sting (d: George Roy Hill)
8. Last Tango in Paris (d: Bernardo Bertolucci)
9. American Graffiti (d: George Lucas)
10. The Last American Hero (d: Lamont Johnson)

1973 creme de la creme (12):

11. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (d: Peter Yates)
12. Blume in Love (d: Paul Mazursky)
13. O Lucky Man! (d: Lindsay Anderson)
14. Charley Varrick (d: Don Siegel)
15. Serpico (d: Sidney Lumet)
16. The Way We Were (d: Sydney Pollack)
17. Papillon (d: Franklin J. Schaffner)
18. Paper Moon (d: Peter Bogdanovich)
19. The Laughing Policeman (d: Stuart Rosenberg)
20. The Three Musketeers (d: Richard Lester)
21. Don’t Look Now (d: Nicolas Roeg)
22. Westworld (d: Michael Crichton)

1973 very good, highly respectable or at least enjoyable (13):

23. Amarcord (d: Federico Fellini)
24. The Last of Sheila (d: Herbert Ross)
25. The Paper Chase (d: James Bridges)
26. Save the Tiger (d: John G. Avildsen)
27. Scarecrow (d: Jerry Schatzberg
28. Sleeper (d: Woody Allen)
29. Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid (d: Sam Peckinpah)
30. Day For Night (d: Francois Truffaut)
31. La Grande Bouffe (d: Marco Ferreri)
32. The Holy Mountain (d: Alejandro Jodorowsky)
33. Emperor of the North Pole (d: Robert Aldrich)
34. Live and Let Die (d: Guy Hamilton)
35. Extreme Close-up (d: Jeannot Szwarc)

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HE’s Manwe Sulimo on BAFTA long lists:

West Coast Friendo:

If I could wave a magic wand, the Empire of Light cast — Olivia Colman, Michael Ward, Tanya Moodie, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Monica Dolan, Tom Brooke, Crystal Clarke — would be a SAG ensemble shoo-in.

And what about the Tar guys? Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noemie Merlant, Mark Strong, Julian Glover, Sophie Kauer, Zethphan Smith–Gneist?