The first scene in David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia (’62) depicts the motorcycle death of T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole). It tells us that Lawrence was speeding so fast that when he saw two wobbly bicyclists that he veered and tire-screeched away and lost control and wiped out. But — I’ve just learned this for the very first time in my life — this Pathe newsreel footage shows that Lawrence crashed into the rear tire of one of the bicyclists, and this is what caused his death. Why did Lean go “naaah” and choose his own accident scenario? Mystifying.

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In a typical, non-BLM year without the hovering, wrath-of-God, Cecil B. DeMille woke cloud (“Do you want to face excommunication for voting or even thinking what some of us might perceive as ‘the wrong way’?”), this year’s SAG winners would have probably tipped for The Trial of the Chicago 7 (ensemble) with the four acting winners being Carey Mulligan, Anthony Hopkins, Daniel Kaluuya and (yes) Glenn Close.

But this was the year and so last night the SAG acting awards went a different way.

SAG/AFTRA felt they had to vote virtuously this year. And was that such a bad thing? Their award picks have to be like their Instagram page. In their own way they meant well. Why did Viola “the black Meryl Streep” Davis win? I suspect that if Andra Day was a Best Actress SAG nominee she and Davis would’ve split the vote with Carey Mulligan the winner, which is what might happen at the Oscars.

Just remember who the SAG/AFTRA members are. There are 160,00 of them, first of all, and they are not, by any notion of any organizational definition, creme de la creme types…be honest. There’s a fair amount of chaff in the Academy, but SAG/AFTRA is mostly chaff.

There’s a certain elite subset of this org, I suspect, that probably wanted to vote for Day but voted for Davis because a Day vote wasn’t possible. I’m talking about name-brand actors and actresses with attuned social awareness, liberal beliefs, hefty salaries, nice homes, Instagram and Twitter accounts.

THR‘s Scott Feinberg: “SAG Award winners are chosen by the entire membership of SAG-AFTRA, the world’s largest union of actors, comprised of about 160,000 members. Academy Award winners are chosen by the entirety of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an organization of 9,395 people from every facet of the film industry, 14 percent of whom are actors and, in most cases, presumably belong to SAG-AFTRA. So yes, there is some overlap.”

There was definitely a let’s-give-it-to-the-POCs vibe last night. And yet, when it came time to award Best Ensemble — the SAG equivalent of Best Picture — they gave it to the white, mostly Jewish guy movie! So odd. Can’t make sense of that.

In SAG’s Best Actress lineup, there was only one black actress or even actress of color in the lineup. That was an easy call for a group and an industry and a community for an entire year top to bottom prioritizing actors of color and women.

For ensemble it was tougher because there was one white-guy movie and then four movies with casts of color. So figuring out which one to vote for was harder and likely those votes split up. Ma Rainey split with Minari, probably, handing the win to Chicago 7.

A friend claims that that Viola Davis WAS favored to win early on. (I don’t recall that but whatever.) And then Mulligan came along and then Andra Day arrived and then things shifted.

But the inconsistency of it is kind of funny. The way it plays — four neat POC acting winners like woke ducks in a row and yet Best Ensemble goes to the all-white-guy movie — it just shores up the perception that the votes in the acting categories were not sincere.

Every performer nominated was good (even Davis, in her over-the-top and out-of-period “I’m gonna tear whitey a new one!” way, which all you have to do is look at six photographs of the real Ma Rainey to see was probably totally historically inaccurate). But this just has the total ring of “Look how hard we’re trying.”

Knowing Carey Mulligan as I do (or used to), I know she’s not having a Mommie Dearest fit at home this morning, sticking pins in voodoo dolls of Viola Davis and Andra Day. But in her heart of hearts, she’s probably thinking such thoughts. She’s only human.

Yes, at the end of the day Nomadland will probably win the Best Picture Oscar. Chloe Zhao‘s magic-hour film is almost the definition of a reasonably artistic but inoffensive feel-good empowering Oscar movie. And it has the POC thing going for it as well. In this year of anti-Asian hate crimes, the fact that Nomadland would be the second Best Picture winner in a row to be directed by an Asian filmmaker…oh, sorry! I shouldn’t have said that!

Will Day and Davis will really split the “Look at me! I love POCs!” vote. Once you have Day in the category, since both performances are about historical figures who sang, Day’s performance is so obviously greater in every way that who in their right mind would vote for Davis?

SAG’s feature film winners have been announced. 7:25 pm update: The Trial of the Chicago 7 has won for Best Ensemble and there’s been a sweep of the acting awards by four POCs — Chadwick Boseman and Daniel Kaluuya for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, and Viola Davis and Yuh-Jung Youn for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress.

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role: CHADWICK BOSEMAN in MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM (Winner…no surprise at all) (Winner)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role: BIG SURPRISE: Ma Rainey‘s Viola Davis snatches it from Promising Young Woman‘s Carey Mulligan. HE had presumed all along that Mulligan would win, and I frankly can’t figure where the Davis support came from except from (am I allowed to say this?) a rote allegiance among SAG/AFTRA voters for performers of color. Nobody in Oscar Handicap Land had hyped Davis from the start of the season…nobody. So what does this mean for Mulligan’s Best Actress Oscar chances?

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role: Minari‘s YUH-JUNG YOUN has won (another POC triumph) and Borat 2‘s MARIA BAKALOVA has been elbowed aside. (Winner)

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role: DANIEL KALUUYA in JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (Winner)

Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture: THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 / YAHYA ABDUL-MATEEN II / Bobby Seale, SACHA BARON COHEN / Abbie Hoffman / JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT / Richard Schultz / MICHAEL KEATON / Ramsey Clark / FRANK LANGELLA / Judge Julius Hoffman / JOHN CARROLL LYNCH / David Dellinger/ EDDIE REDMAYNE / Tom Hayden / MARK RYLANCE / William Kunstler / ALEX SHARP / Rennie Davis/ JEREMY STRONG / Jerry Rubin (Winner…Netflix memo: Let’s use this Big Mo headwind, guys, to try and dilute or diminish the persistent industry-wide presumption of of a Nomadland Best Picture Oscar win) (Winner)

…in which (a) over 95% if not 97% of ostensible movie lovers have no idea who John McCabe was, and couldn’t care less and will absolutely, positively never ask, (b) boxes of pink-colored Promising Young Woman swag has made their way around town, and (c) many people, knowing the vaccines are several weeks away from distribution for younger folk, still feel as if their souls have been drained dry.

Last night I paid $21.50 to see Nobody at the AMC Century City. I also paid $15 or $16 for a small popcorn and a hot dog. Plus $6 for parking. Call it $43 for an experience that was…well, kinda silly and, okay, somewhat “passable” if you lower your standards but certainly not in the least bit believable — not with unshaven, small-shouldered, not-tall-enough, late-50ish Bob Odenkirk in the role of a seemingly mousey dad who rapidly morphs into a version of Liam kick-ass Neeson.

Nobody actually feels like a cartoonish satire of a Neeson flick because the violent scenes are never realistic (do you believe that Odenkirk would whip five tough Russian dudes on a city bus after he stupidly empties a .38 pistol of all ammo, just to show how physically confident he is?), and because the violence becomes increasingly surreal as things move along. Sensible adults made this thing, but what did they make? Just a stupid bullshit face-puncher and ball-kicker aimed at multiplex morons…nothing more or less than that.

I wanted a Steven Soderbergh-style action flick that would try to respect reality and physics and deal semi-realistically with what a 50ish guy in reasonably good shape could manage within a John Wick-like, one-guy-vs.-the-mob vicious beatdown and shoot-em-up, and you know what happened? Director Ilya Naishuller, screenwriter Derek Kolstad and producer-star Odenkirk stepped out of the screen a la The Purple Rose of Cairo, walked over to where I was sitting (front-row, handicapped seat), took out their schlongolas and urinated right into my lap. I was too much in shock to respond.

Okay, I appreciated Naishuller’s decision to convey what a mundane, soul-draining life Odenkirk’s “Hutch” is living (before the rough stuff begins) with rapid-fire montage cutting, and I half-enjoyed the reliance on pop tunes to kind of, I don’t know, lighten the mood or something.

And I half-enjoyed Christopher Lloyd‘s hoot-level performance as Odenkirk’s ex-FBI, retirement-home-residing dad, and I was glad to run into Aleksei Serebryakov (who played a leading role in Andrej Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan) as a Russian drug lord who likes to dance and perform in front of customers at a club he owns. I was stunned when a new version of Michael Ironside showed up — “new” as in 75 pounds heavier than he was in Scanners. Connie Neilsen is okay, I guess, as Hutch’s semi-patient, non-judgmental wife.

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“Yet Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick‘s Allen v. Farrow, praised in some quarters as ‘devastating,’ is a blatantly skewed narrative based on cherry-picking, distortions and evidence-free assertions (examined in my Quillette magazine review). If it does ‘cancel’ Allen for good, it will not be on its own strength but on that of a climate in which one must ‘believe survivors.’ — from Cathy Young‘s “Woody Allen is getting a raw deal: A new documentary doesn’t present a fair picture” — N.Y. Daily News, 4.2.21.

Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks to American literary critic, essayist and novelist Daphne Merkin about HBO’s highly torqued documentary, Allen v. Farrow, and the dubious claims it contains:

Posted on 7.10.09: “[Michael] Jackson‘s body is still missing his brain, which coroners are temporarily keeping for testing.” — from a 7.10 N.Y. Post story about the temporary parking of Jackson’s coffin in Berry Gordy‘s Forest Lawn crypt.

“Jackson’s brain, Donovan’s Brain with Lew Ayres, The Man With Two Brains, the brain of Dr. Hans Delbruck in Young Frankenstein. I feel an idea coming on.

“A struggling Broadway musical performer in his mid 20s comes to Vegas to find work. During a visit with an L.A. friend he’s hit by an SUV on the Hollywood freeway. He’s taken to USC and declared brain-dead. A brilliant irreverent L.A. surgeon somehow gets hold of Jackson’s brain, reanimates it with Dr. Victor Frankenstein-styled lightning bolts and transplants it into the dancer’s head. The kid survives and prospers as a kind of reincarnation of Michael Jackson — a dancing genius with a gentle little voice and a thing for young lads.

“And then what? At the very least it’s a short film. Seriously…this is a fairly good idea.”

I didn’t realize is was Easter Sunday today. Actually, to be honest, I kinda stopped noticing Easter when I hit my mid teens. I now regard Easter as being on the same level of importance as….I don’t know, Groundhog Day. It was a fairly big deal when I was a kid, of course. I actually played a Hebrew marketplace hustler in an Easter pageant performance at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Westfield, New Jersey. (Don’t ask.) I remember the palm fronds and the colors (violet and white) and the easter-egg hunts.

One of the reasons Geoffrey Wright‘s Romper Stomper (’92) works as well as it does — an anti-racist, anti-skinhead film that isn’t afraid to dive right into the gang mind and pretend-revel in the fevered currents — is John Clifford White‘s score.

The main theme, in particular, seems to simultaneously channel skinhead rage and, at the same time, deftly satirize it. I don’t even know what kind of brass instruments White used on these tracks — tuba? trombone? French horn? trumpet? But the sound and mood are perfect. Just a clever instrumentation of a melodic hook and obviously less than complex, but once you’ve heard the theme you’ll never forget it.

…and I’m sorry for this tiny little obit on page whatever on the N.Y. Times. I’d never seen this clipping before today. Posted last night on Facebook by film scholar, author (books on John Ford, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles) and San Francisco-based educator Joseph McBride.

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…it’s probably all over, everywhere, in the back of everyone’s mind. Chloe Zhao has the Best Director Oscar in the bag, no question, but the ragtag mob wants to stop Nomadland. It’s not about how good or great Zhao and Frances McDormand‘s film is on its own terms — the mob is simply starting to resent this apparently inevitable outcome and some are snorting about it. Plus the likelihood that aside from David Strathairn‘s kindly character the various 65-and-over nomads whom Fern shares stories and philosophies with are almost certainly Trumpsters, and the film ignores that probable aspect. In my book that’s a demerit. You can hear the drumbeat, feel it…muffled drums emanating from the dense jungle mist like an echo of Max Steiner‘s score for King Kong….”stop Nomadland, stop Nomadland…everyone gather ’round and stop Nomadland.”