A handicapper friend assures me that Penelope Cruz, star of Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers — a film that is 15 times better than House of Gucci, 10 times better than Spencer and far more emotionally rewarding than Being The Ricardos — is almost certainly good for a Best Actress nomination.

I hope so. I would certainly think so. I realize Cruz might not win for reasons having nothing to do with quality of delivery. But she needs to be nominated, at least.

I’ve seen the Almodovar twice and I know Cruz’s performance is the shit this year. She’s the absolute queen of her category. No other lead female performance comes close to plucking the emotional chords that she owns the patent on. She’s given the best female performance of the year. Don’t debate it, no question, put it to bed.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has Penelope in 2nd place as we speak. Feinberg Frontrunners: Kristen Stewart (Spencer); Penélope Cruz (Parallel Mothers); Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos); Lady Gaga (House of Gucci) and Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter).

I realize that in the myopic and strangely calculating award-season culture that we live in that some people are insisting otherwise…that Penelope is in the rear somewhere. They’re saying that Nicole Kidman (Ricardos) or Kristen Stewart (Spencer) or Lady Gaga (Gucci) are somehow better or at least more likely to win, partly because they’re backed by some heavy-hitter agencies and expensive campaigns.

Which is why I suspect that the best Cruz can expect is a Best Actress nomination. Because Oscar races are not so much about merit as muscle and power and primal audience longings and identifications. If it were my call I would give Cruz the Oscar now but she at least needs to become one of the five…c’mon.

I know that Pedro’s film doesn’t open until 12.24 but the big critics groups will begin voting soon. Somehow or some way the award-season heat has to start building in Cruz’s favor. I hope she gets there — her performances ‘is obviously much better than Kidman’s, Gaga’s and KStew’s — but she might not make it. I can feel it — she’s just not in the conversation the way the others are.

Repeating: Cruz’s Parallel performance is somewhere between 5 and 10 and 15 times better than all the other performances put together. It’s one of the finest efforts of her career, and yet if you talk to certain people her name is barely in the conversation. (David Poland actually believes that Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim is one of the top three contenders.) As we speak Cruz is regarded as a peripheral player, and she’s not — she’s the top.

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I was not a huge fan of most of the big grossers of 1976 — Rocky, A Star Is Born, King Kong, Silver Streak, The Omen, The Bad News Bears. I wasn’t even that much of a big believer in Hal Ashby‘s Bound for Glory (although I respected it). For me there were only five films that mattered that year — Network, All The President’s Men, Taxi Driver, Assault on Precinct 13 and Marathon Man. I still feel that way.

This photo ran in the Wilton Bulletin in early August ’76. It accompanied a story about a then-upcoming Save The Whales concert, which then-girlfriend Sophie Black (on my left) and I co-produced, and which was held on a hilly 52-acre farm owned by Sophie’s parents, David and Linda Cabot Black. The focus of the story was that a portion of the proceeds would be donated by Camp PIP, a non-profit that offered recreational facilities help to lower-income kids.

I must say that I was looking pretty good for a three-year-old. I turned four on 11.12.76.

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In Robert Wise’s 1961 West Side Story as well as innumerable stage versions performed over the decades, the dance scenes are never acknowledged by passersby, much less performed for them. In fact, passersby barely exist.

The basic rule is that each dance number happens in the hearts and minds of the Jets or Sharks. And one other thing: Except for the opening sequence (i.e., ballet-like daytime street fighting), the dancing happens in a restricted space of some kind (dance hall, tenement rooftop, back alley, dress shop, drug store, rumble under a highway), and always among Jets or Sharks and their immediate kin or sympathizers.

The dancing, in short, is restricted to the immediate “family.” Neighborhood civilians never notice or acknowledge that any carefully choreographed activity is going on. The dancing is rigorously intimate — members only.

Which is why snaps of that “dancing in the street during daylight” scene with Ariana DeBose (Anita) and David Alvarez (Bernardo) in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story have been bothering me all along. Because sidewalk neighborhood residents are clearly watching Anita and Bernardo and their friends “cut a Latin rug”, so to speak. And, one presumes, are enjoying the “show.”

That’s a violation of a basic West Side Story rule — and a red flag.

Earlier today Sutton Frances Wells, born on 11.17.21, had her very first experience with the great outdoors.

Her parents, Jett and Cait, drove her to Verona Park in Verona, New Jersey, which is just north of West Orange. Dressed in a pink winter coat, knit gloves and winter hat and lying under a blanket in a BMW-grade stroller, Sutton was rolled around and given her very first opportunity to breathe in those vibrant New Jersey aromas.

HE to Jett: “Hey, she’s sleeping! Her first time breathing that nippy New Jersey air and she’s catching 40 winks.”

HE to Sutton: “C’mon, man. Breathe in a few lungfuls of outdoor air, marvel at the big blue sky, smell the grass and trees and savor the sounds of other people talking and barking dogs and whatnot. Once you’ve done that, then you can take a nap.”

Sutton to HE: “Hey, give me a break. I’m only four days old. I sleep a lot. Deal with it. Verona Park will presumably still be there when I’m older and a bit more rambunctious.”

There were two slightly awkward things about Jonathan Larson‘s romantic life in the years before his untimely death in January 1996.

One was that he was straight, and nobody likes the sound of that. The second was the apparent fact that Larson’s two most conspicuous girlfriends, cinematographer Victoria Leacock and a woman named Susan (nobody seems to know her last name), were descended from …uhm, European tribes. This doesn’t square with 2021 sensibilities, of course. But Tick, Tick…Boom director Lin Manuel Miranda remedied the situation by casting Alexandra Ship as “woke” Susan, and now everything’s cool.

In sum, it wasn’t Larson’s “fault” for failing to become emotionally entwined with a woman of color back in the ’80s and early ’90s. He simply didn’t know any better at the time. No need to beat a dead horse, water under the bridge, etc.