Earlier today a friend observed that the 2020/’21 Oscars are going to be a virtue-signaling “shit show.” Representational politics, woke priorities, aspirational attitudes…pretty much everything that your average popcorn-eating movie lover doesn’t necessarily look for as he/she buys a ticket or pops for a rental.

At least a few of the 2021 Best Picture contenders will be about POC characters and situations, and the odds that a woman will be nominated for and possibly win the Best Director trophy are fairly high. The presumption is still that Nomadland is the odds-on favorite to win the Best Picture Oscar, and that its director, Chloe Zhao, is likely to win for Best Director.

This morning I threw together a list of likely contenders while asking Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy for their own Best Picture spitballs. We all agree that the hottest five are Nomadland, Florian Zeller‘s The Father, David Fincher‘s Mank, Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World. Yes, two of these are unseen but you know Fincher and Greengrass will deliver..

After that it gets a little dicey. I feel that Regina King‘s One Night in Miami is a respectable film as far as it goes, but not necessarily Best Picture material. Then again it checks the right boxes. I haven’t seen Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari but it also has the right kind of non-Anglo pedigree. Lee Daniels‘ The United States vs. Billie Holiday also meets the requirements. Ditto Shaka King‘s Judas and the Black Messiah and George C. Wolfe‘s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix, 12.18).

There’s also Taika Watiti‘s Next Goal Wins, but who knows?

Here’s what Stone said earlier today about the Best Picture Oscar situation as it currently stands:

“The good news about [my] list is that it checks off the boxes of what is required of Hollywood and the Oscars at this point in time.” Politically, she means. The right kind of potential would-be nominees whose nominations would convey the right kind of values and statements for the political-cultural times in which we live.

“The slate overall is a bit slimmer than we’re used to, which will allow for less juggernaut competition and thus, films that might not have a shot otherwise will likely have a better shot to be represented,” Stone explained. “It’s probably going to be GenZ’s favorite Oscar year ever.

“I would not be surprised to see Rod Lurie’s The Outpost pop up in a few places as it’s one movie that is really not like any of the others and could stand out for that reason. But for now, I think it’s probably too risky to predict for the Academy.

Earlier this month I posted a list of films that qualify as the year’s best for cinematic reasons alone, without necessarily assessing the wokester factor. Here they are.

Blind comment #1: “The bottom line is that there aren’t that many [Oscar contending] movies this year so it’s a good time to really pay the p.c. piper.” Blind comment #2: “Critics group choices will be politically correct up and down the line. You know that.” Blind comment #3: “Here we have the full spectrum of identity politics represented [with the current list]. Not just Chicago 7 but also a Black Panther movie. Not just a woman director but women of color. You get the drift.” Blind comment #4: “The political Oscar calculus was already bad enough [before the pandemic]. This year it’s gonna be 100X worse.”

From Scott Eyman’s “Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise” (Simon & Schuster, 10.20), as excerpted in The Daily Beast:

“[Writer] Bill Royce and Grant even had a conversation about sex. After Royce unburdened himself about his affairs with both men and women, Grant responded by implying he had been basically gay as a young man, later bisexual, still later straight.

“[Randolph] Scott, he said, had seen their relationship as ‘locker-room playing around.’ It had nothing to do with how a man should lead his life. Besides that, at one point Darryl Zanuck had taken Randy aside and told him that enough was enough.

“Grant explained sexuality in terms of performance, of acting. He told Royce that to not completely explore one’s sexuality would be like an actor playing only one character for life. Everybody, he said, had more than one character inside them. He didn’t think homosexual acts were anything to be ashamed of, or, for that matter, proud of. They simply were part of the journey, not necessarily the final destination.

“I think Cary saw the searching I was doing and trusted me. He had been influenced by the Kinsey report and saw sex as a spectrum. Most people think it’s either/or. And there are men like that, but there are also men who are occasionally gay and occasionally straight. I remember one thing Cary said: ‘England is Victorian, but America is more Victorian than England.’

“My sense of it was that he found homosexual life unrewarding. As he got older, he wanted children, and he didn’t think he had any chance at a child as long as he was living that life.

“His conversation with Grant made Royce curious about Randy Scott. He was at the Beverly Hills post office one day when Scott came in to pick up some mail. He was dressed in tweeds, an ascot, had steel gray hair and sported a deep tan, just like Grant. Royce walked over and introduced himself. ‘Mr. Scott, my name is Bill Royce. I help Cary Grant with his place off Benedict and just wanted to thank you for your movies.’

“Scott smiled and said ‘Well, I haven’t seen him in a while. Tell Cary I said hello.’ Royce thought Scott was stunning; he went back to the house and told Grant about how Scott had looked. ‘Yeah, he was really something,’ Grant said, in a tone that combined esteem, fondness, and sadness.”

If you haven’t read Pauline Kael‘s “The Man From Dream City,” a 7.7.75 New Yorker essay, please take it for a spin.

Let me explain something. I’ve seen Spellbound four or five times, and as I sit here I can’t remember a single thing about Rhonda Fleming’s appearance in it. I know she plays a mental patient in Ingrid Bergman and Leo G. Carroll’s sanitarium and that she has an analysis scene with Bergman early on, but nothing she said or did in that 1945 film ever made the slightest impression.

Update: I just found a YouTube clip of the first ten minutes of Spellbound, which contains Fleming’s performance as a somewhat venomous sort. The performance struck me as brittle and surface-skimmy. She’s saying the lines but there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to listen. Which is why I hadn’t remembered anything before.

Fleming’s third-act scene with Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past was pretty good — she was bland but vaguely memorable in a “junior league patter” sort of way.

I don’t mean to project dismissiveness. Fleming had a noteworthy career and obviously lived a long life, and that took some doing. She hung in there. On the other hand she was a Republican. I don’t want to sound like I’m sounding. She was fine, a trouper, a one-time “Technicolor queen,” etc. And she sat for a 2006 interview with Bob Furmanek, the man most responsible for the 1.85 cleavering of God-knows-how-many 1950s films on Bluray, when Those Redheads From Seattle was shown in 3D at the American Cinematheque.

This reflects the way things were a week and a half ago. Right after Trump had left Walter Reed and was pumped up on drugs and talking about how great he felt. Things date so quickly now. The pace keeps accelerating.

The movie-watching world is divided into three distinct groups. One, those who not only know what FGD135 is but also CRM114. Two, those who have only a slight or vague idea what FGD135 might be but can’t quite place it. And three, those who don’t have even the slightest ephemeral interest and are even annoyed that you would ask them…”who cares?” One look at the analog technology tells them “not my orientation!”

From Adrian Horton’s Guardian review of HBO’s The Perfect Weapon:

“The hacking of Sony emails by a North Korean-backed team in China — a bizarre response to the studio’s planned release of a movie co-written by Rogen, The Interview, which depicted the fictional assassination of Kim Jong-un — marked a shift in the public understanding of corporate vulnerability to cyber-attack. But the concerns over security and kowtowing to the hackers’ will (the studio ultimately pulled the movie from most theaters) was frequently overshadowed by the gossipy contents of the hack itself, a media pattern repeated and refracted to more insidious effect in 2016, with the Russian hack and WikiLeaks release of Democratic National Committee emails.

“The Perfect Weapon argues, as numerous cyber and media experts have pointed out, that zeroing in on the content of the emails, and in particular on the narrative of a Democratic party ‘rigged’ against Senator Bernie Sanders, played into the Kremlin’s intention to roil the election with destabilizing noise. Even the specter of Russian meddling created an environment where ‘nothing is real and everything is possible’, says John Podesta in the film. ‘That really destroys the credibility of democracy, and that’s what Putin wants.”

“’America is uniquely susceptible to these kinds of attacks because of our openness, because we have a public square,’ said Maggio. ‘Disinformation, the hack-and-dump kind of attacks, are very effective at sowing a lot of chaos.’ Cyber weapons do not need to strike to be effective, due to what Sanger called the ‘perception hack’ — the recognition of foreign meddling as a possibility in any unclear scenario, a caustic understanding which erodes trust in American democratic processes and opens the door for muddled disputes of illegitimacy.'”

Last night’s SNL opener about the Trump-Biden town halls was a series of segments or highlights, separated by electronic noise or “snow”…the harsh-dot exploding pixel pattern that some of us recall from the antiquated ’80s (blank VHS tapes) but which really originated in the analog, pre-cable, coathanger-antenna days of the ’50s and ’60s.

How odd, I thought, that SNL, which bases its currency on being connected to the here-and-now, would employ a visual signal that reaches back to early Ronald Reagan at the most recent. How would I transition between segments if I was Lorne Michaels? I don’t know to be honest, but give me two or three minutes and I’ll come up with something better than Milton Berle-era silver noise.

Brian Fox, a respected repertory cinema owner and programmer from the ’70s and ’80s and a longtime friend of mine, passed last Monday evening. A massive heart attack. Condolences to his wife Diane, whom I’ve also known for decades. HE commenters knew Brian as “Grandpappy Amos.”

I met Brian though the Westport Playhouse Cinema, which he began co-managing with partner Fred Kraushar, in late ’76 or early ’77. I wrote program notes for the WPC as a kind of warm-up exercise before becoming a columnist for the fledgling Fairfield County Morning News. Then I moved to Sullivan Street in Soho and began my miserable period of freelance struggling and living hand-to-mouth — easily the darkest chapter of my professional life.

Brian was a personable, soft-spoken guy with a certain dry, droll attitude. He could be blunt in his own deft and darting way. I distinctly recall Brian calling me “a failure” during my arduous freelance agony days in ’79 and ’80. He didn’t mean to hurt my feelings exactly — it just came out that way. His assessment may have helped me on some level. It may have lit a fire.

I also recall a late-afternoon moment in ’77 when a young Hispanic guy and his girlfriend came into the WPC to talk about movies and pick up a printed program. As they were leaving and wishing the business well, Brian said “adios.” Fred was laughing his ass off at Brian’s faux pas two seconds after they’d left. One of those momentary embarassments that was quickly brushed under the carpet. It’s okay to mention it now. (Or is it?)

Brian and Diane were married in ’79. They tied the knot in a temple in Fairfield or Bridgeport. I was invited to attend a large post-wedding reception that was thrown by Brian’s dad, Morris, who was a crafty, level-headed, well-connected businessman. That day I sampled my first taste of anti-WASP ethnic prejudice. The reception was all about Morris’s business pallies, and Brian’s WASP friends were not, shall we say, treated with a great deal of familial warmth. We were seated right next to the kitchen with the door swinging open every 20 or 30 seconds. The message was “as friends of Brian, you guys are welcome but that’s all.”

In early ’79 Brian leased a South Norwalk porn theatre and turned it into the Sono Cinema, a Thalia- or Nuart-like arthouse that helped launch a cultural urban renewal initiative. I became a licensed projectionist around this time and occasionally worked in the Sono booth. (This was when I learned about aspect ratios, aperture plates and headroom.) The Sono Cinema was a thriving business for three or four years but then the burgeoning home video business began to eat into revenues. In the mid ’80s Brian tried a fundraising campaign to get out of debt, but eventually had to throw in the towel.

Residents of Durham, Brian and Diane have lived for decades in a nice, well-tended home with a large deck and beautiful backyard landscaping. They also own a condo in Belize, on Ambergris Caye.

Diane called with the bad news last night, two or three days after some news outlets had reported it.

She and Brian had just finished a nice meat loaf dinner. Brian stood up and said he was feeling badly, and then he sat on the couch and recanted (“I’m okay”). Then he began to drift in and out in terms of verbal coherence. Diane called an ambulance, and they took Brian out on a stretcher. He either died on the way to the hospital or once he got there.

No warnings from his primary physician, no cholestoral concerns, and Brian took exercise walks three times weekly…it happened just like that. His biological father, whom Brian never had much contact with, also passed from a heart attack at around the same advanced age.

Brian was my idea of an excellent fellow. He knew movies backwards and forwards. A serious Fassbinder fan.

Bill Maher last night (10.16.20): “The vast majority of Catholics are not scary, not doctrinaire. But there’s another strain of uber-conservative Catholics who have an agenda, and it’s really about pining for the return to the middle ages, when the church was the state. The attorney general is one of these people. So is the Federalist Society, [which is partly] responsible for putting five justices on the court. The Knights of Malta and Opus Dei. These old-school Catholics play the long game. Amy Barrett has been on their radar since forever, because she was raised in an extremist Catholic community called People of Praise, an organization [in which] a husband’s responsibilities may include ‘correcting’ his wife should she stray from a ‘proper path.'” And so on, etc.

Except for the Four Fakers aspect, Martin Scorsese‘s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story was pretty much a purely pleasurable experience for everyone who saw it during the summer of ’19. It’s been on Netflix ever since, of course. And now Criterion has a 4K Bluray version coming on 1.19.21.

What’s my richest musical recollection from Scorsese’s doc? Easy — Joni Mitchell playing the then-recently composed “Coyote” for Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Gordon Lightfoot and others at Lightfoot’s home during the tour. The clip, originally shot for Dylan’s misbegotten Renaldo and Clara, is on YouTube, of course. “Coyote” would go on to open Mitchell’s 1976 album Hejira but was in the early stages while Mitchell was performing on the RTR tour.

From “The Four Fakers,” posted on 6.10.19: To my mind the only serious problem with Martin Scorsese‘s Rolling Thunder Revue doc is that he includes four phony talking heads among several real ones, and thereby violates the trustworthiness that we all associate with the documentary form, and for a reason that strikes me as fanciful and bogus.

The doc acquaints us with 22 or more talking-head veterans of the tour (Dylan naturally included) but among this fraternity Scorsese inserts what Toronto Star critic Peter Howell is calling the “four fakers” — made-up characters portrayed by real, recognizable people.

Sharon Stone, who was 17 when the Rolling Thunder Tour was underway, seems to be speaking as herself but she’s actually “playing” The Beauty Queen. At first Michael Murphy seems to be speaking from his own perspective, but then you realize he’s playing The Politician. Actor-performer Martin von Haselberg (the husband of Bette Midler) plays The Filmmaker. And Paramount chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos portrays The Promoter.

Some of what they say to the camera might be factually correct in this or that anecdotal way, but it’s all basically bullshit — made-up, written-out or improvised recollections that are performed for a chuckle, for the hell of it.

Scorsese explains his decision to include the four fakers in the press notes: “I wanted the picture to be a magic trick. Magic is the nature of film. There’s an element to the tour that has a sense of fun to it…doing something to the audience. You don’t make it predictable. There’s a great deal of sleight of hand.”

Who says RTR was driven by a sleight-of-hand, put-on mentality? I never heard that before. I thought it was about keeping it real, small-scale, people-level, driving around in a small tour bus, passing out pamphlets, etc.

Scorsese’s doc isn’t some fanciful, mask-wearing thing. 96% of it is just footage of Dylan’s ’75 Rolling Thunder tour throughout New England intercut with visual-aural references to what life was like back in the mid ’70s. The fact that it contains invented testimony from four fleeting fakers doesn’t dilute the basic composition. Perhaps the four fakers idea came from Scorsese’s regard for Italy’s Comedia dell’arte tradition.

In the process of reviewing Bruce Wagner‘s latest novel, “The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories“, Wagner’s editor at Counterpoint Press said that certain terms in the novel were “problematic,” first and foremost being the word “fat.”

Wokesters have banished the “f” word as flatly, decisively and eternally as the “n” word and other hateful epithets. I understand that, of course, and I know that the preferred term is “person of size” or, if you will, non-svelte. (“Calorically challenged” has always been frowned upon.) The long and the short is that Wagner was appalled at the editor’s refusal to allow the “f” word in his book, and for this and other reasons decided to self-publish the book for free.

Yes, I’ve used the “f” word a few times — Fat Thor, Fatzilla, etc. In late May of ’07 I was standing on a small bridge in Venice when I noticed a morbidly obese fellow and his wife reclining in a passing gondola, and the combined weight was such that the gondola was almost taking on water. “Wow, look at that fat guy,” I muttered to my son Jett, who was standing next to me. I knew I had misspoken. My voice had echoed slightly. Jett’s immediate response was to touch my forearm and go “sshhhhh.’

I’m not so stupid as to not understand that avoiding the “f” word is advisable. I get it. Of course. I realize. I’m just trying to get along. I am not a harshly judgmental person as a rule. I simply err on the side of offhanded candor from time to time.