I just finished watching an Oscar handicap discussion between Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neill and Variety‘s Tim Gray.

I watched this discussion for one reason — to see what these four savvy insiders would say about the effect of the National Society of Film Critics condemning Variety for the Promising Young Woman apology and to what extent this influences Carey Mulligan‘s bid for a Best Actress Oscar. (I think she’s locked in all the more.) What did these four have to say about this hot-button issue? Nothing — they completely ignored it.

What I mostly got out of the back-and-forth was a refreshed Best Picture reading — i.e., Nomadland might be slowing down or even slipping while Trial of the Chicago 7 and Minari might be gaining ground. Is this true? You tell me.

Anne Thompson (Indiewire): “Nomadland is an anomalous movie, a road movie, a hybrid in which [many of] the crafts are not in there…but it’s still the strongest Best Picture contender…they love this movie. Chicago 7 is very very strong [and] a possibility…I’m not saying it will but it could take over Nomadland. Minari is moving up, totally surging…it is so strong [3 Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, 10 Critics’ Choice Movie Awards nominations, 6 Independent Spirit Award nominations + the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film]. One Night in Miami is steady as they go, and Ma Rainey too. Mank is going to be like The Irishman — a lot of nominations and we’ll see what it actually wins. Promising Young Woman is surging too.”

HE reply: No mention of Sound of Metal and Da 5 Bloods? Anne knows that Ma Rainey and One Night in Miami are mezzo-mezzo and not really going anywhere. She knows this, and yet she gives them the old college cheer. I too am sensing a slight slowing in the Nomadland force flow. It may be holding but it’s not building.

Tom O’Neill (Gold Derby) “Promising Young Woman is popping up in all kinds of places for Best Picture, [and this is] surprising us so we have to take it seriously here. It’s surging every which way.”

HE reply: “When Tom says he and his Gold Derby colleagues are surprised by the surge of Promising Young Womwn, he means that by his own sights he wouldn’t be picking it as a possible serious Best Picture contender.

Pete Hammond (Deadline): “Well, something’s gonna win. My problem with all of this…prognosticating in this very weird season and not even quite a month away from the nominations…a lot of Academy members just haven’t seen this stuff. One person said they should send a Roku box or an Apple TV device to everyone because a lot her friends are watching these movies on their computers. I’m not sure that Nomadland is a computer movie [as] it’s very deliberately paced and you have to stay with it and get enveloped by that kind of a film. A critics favorite definitely, that can help it along but not always. I think The Trial of Chicago 7 has all the [classic] ingredients that make for a Best Picture winner, particularly when we watch the news and see what’s going on and how this movie is so prescient right now. Academy members like to be on top of something important….whether that [points to] Chicago 7 or Frances McDormand stacking boxes at Amazon…I don’t know. I do think that Minari with the wind at its back from the Parasite win last year. Minari…you saw the SAG nominations and all the nominations from the Critics Choice awards…that might be the consensus choice…it gets a good amount of number one votes but it gets a whole ot numbers twos. I loved Promising Young Woman personally….I think it’s a great movie. Mank may not be a #1 choice. I just talked to an Academy member…we disagree on Mank, he said. ‘You don’t like it?’ Yeah…you don’t? ‘Not really.'”

HE reply: Pete saying that “something’s gonna win” means he’s not feeling great surges of enthusiasm anywhere, about anything.

Timothy Gray (Variety): “The below-the-line people will vote for Mank and Trial of the Chicago 7. Sacha Baron Cohen seems like a front-runner.”

Hammond: “Some people think Nomadland is a great immersive movie, and another person I spoke to was looking at his watch half the time.”

O’Neill: “Let’s discuss the speculation about Chadwick Boseman having this wrapped up. Peter Finch and Heath Ledger are the exceptions to the role. I don’t think this is a lock at all for Boseman. On the other hand he’s ahead among Gold Derby critics.”

Hammond: “Boseman might get two nominations and that’s never happened. They might want to go with Anthony Hopkins for Best Actor and Chadwick for Best Supporting. I don’t know that Da 5 Bloods has [sufficient] levels of strength among Academy voters.”

Gray: “One Academy member told me ‘all due respect but he’s dead and doesn’t need it…I’m going to vote for someone who’s still with us.'”

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#BREAKING: Former President Trump surprises supporters who gathered to celebrate Presidents Day by driving by in a motorcade in West Palm Beach, Florida. pic.twitter.com/dJ22CNG7fM

— Abhishek Saxena (@tagabhishek) February 15, 2021

Director-writer Michael Mann‘s Thief is a work of beauty for the most part, but it has two things wrong with it.

One, in the coffee shop scene James Caan explains his “this is who I am and how I operate” philosophy to Tuesday Weld. It’s basically a lesson he learned in prison — “nobody can hurt me if nothin’ means nothin’…if I don’t care about anything including myself.” It’s a variation upon Neil McCauley‘s “don’t get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.”

Caan clearly isn’t lying or trying to sell Weld a bill of goods. He’s laying his soul flat on the formica table. But why would Weld want a serious home-and-kids relationship with a guy who lives by that kind of nihilist “nobody owns me” attitude? It makes no sense. He’s telling her “if anyone tries to crash my way of life I will grab a lead pipe and do the same thing I did in the joint.” This is a guy to have a casual week-to-week thing with, at most.

Two, the ending of Thief — Weld and kid sent away, destroy the house, kill Robert Prosky and his goons — fulfills Caan’s lone-wolf aesthetic, but it’s not satisfying from an audience perspective. Which is why Thief topped out theatrically at only $11.5 million instead of $20 million or higher.

Audiences knew Caan was an odd duck and a weird hardass, but they respected his craft and professionalism. The most serene and settled moment in the film is when the big extended-blow-torch safecracking job is finished and an exhausted Caan is sitting in a fold-up chair and smoking a cigarette. The film should’ve ended right there — a job well done. Ending Thief this way would have (a) qualified it as a major art film because it didn’t end on a plot point, and (b) made it more popular.

I honestly flashed on this during my very first viewing of Thief inside the old Magno Screening Room (now Dolby 88) in February of ’81. I literally said to myself at the end of the big-blowtorch scene, “This is it…end it here and it’ll be perfect,.”

Audiences didn’t want or need a resolution to the Caan-vs.-corrupt cops-and-gangsters subplot. What mattered was Caan affirming his El Supremo status as the greatest big-time thief in the Chicago area, and maybe beyond that.

I shouldn’t start the week off with this as it’s not a big deal, but at the :52 mark MSNBC’s Willie Geist gets it wrong, In the course of introducing Pennsylvania Representative Madeleine Dean, he pronounced her first name as “MahduhLEEN”. If you’ve ever seen Vertigo you know it’s pronounced Mahduhlehn. Here are two authoritative instructionals.

Only now can this year-old story be passed along freely and openly. Correction: Tatiana’s first line of dialogue should read “when was the last time you had the wallet in your hands?”

The following true-life encounters occured during the Santa Barbara Film Festival. The first happened a year ago; the second in ’15 or ’16. It follows that most of what happens during my annual SB visits is uneventful; we only pass along the stand-out stuff.

Story #1: I was in the checkout line at Ralph’s on Carillo. A giggly party girl and her friends were buying four huge bottles of something alcoholic. Either the booze was pale yellow or the bottles were tinted that way. Didn’t see a label or sticker.

I asked the checkout guy, “What is that stuff?”

“Bocca,” he said.

“Bocca?” I repeated. I thought it might be some exotic liqueur. “Never heard of it.”

Actually I had in The French Connection — Tony Lobianco’s Brooklyn-based heroin dealer was named Sal Bocca. Roy Schieder: “Our friend’s name is Bocca. Salvatore Bocca. They call him Sal. He’s a real sweetheart.”

The girl and her pallies paid for the Bocca, and the guy packed the bottles in ordinary paper bags, which struck me as insufficient given their size and weight.

“How do you spell that?” I asked. The checkout guy ignored my request, but he looked at me sideways. “You never heard of Vocca?”

“No,” I insisted while offering a half-shrug of apology. Ping. “Oh, you mean vodka?”

“Yeah, man…vodka.”

“Oh, sorry. I misunderstood. Sorry.“

In fact, the checkout guy, who was (and undoubtedly still is) of Latin descent and spoke with a slight accent, was pronouncing his vees like bees. I learned that in Spanish class when I was 15. When you say “vamonos,” for example, the vee is pronounced as a blend of vee and bee.

Which partially explains the confusion. But vodka is pronounced “vahdkuh” and this guy was delivering too much of an “oh” sound. So just between us, it was mostly his fault. I’ve been saying the word “vodka” my entire life so don’t tell me.

Story #2: I was staying for a night (Saturday) at the Cabrillo Inn. I awoke around 6:30 am. I naturally wanted my usual cup of morning mud. There was no coffee-pot heater in the room so hot tap water would have to suffice. I turned on the faucet and waited. And waited. It didn’t happen — never even turned warm.

So I dressed and went downstairs with my day-old paper cup and my Starbucks Instant and strolled into the complimentary-breakfast room.

Some 50ish guy (a tourist from Chicago, he later explained) was standing inside and giving me the once-over. Two women were preparing things; they weren’t quite ready to serve. All I wanted was some hot water so I asked for that. In a minute or two, they said. I nodded and waited.

The Man From Windy City thought I had somehow overstepped.

Chicago guy: “Why don’t you ask the hotel manager?” Me: “What’s he gonna do?” Chicago guy: “That’s what he’s here for.” Me: “What’s he gonna do, push the emergency hot-water button?” Chicago guy: “He could get an engineer to fix the pipes.” Me: “At ten minutes to seven on a Sunday morning? Yeah, that’s a possibility.”

It was obvious this guy was a couple of cards short of a full deck and not worth conversing with, especially after he said, “You’re being a dick.”

Okay, but how did I earn that? By asking for some hot water? Or pointing out that his “ask the manager” idea was ridiculous?

Me: “Thank you. In your company, sir, it’s a pleasure.”

Things went downhill from there, and then we both decided to take a break and breathe easy. Then we got back into it.

Chicago guy: “Are you attending the film festival?” Me: “None of your business.” (I’m sorry but Midwestern tourists irritate me, especially when they offer unwarranted opinions and double especially when they’re wearing shorts and sandals and talking with a twang.) Chicago guy: “This is my first visit to California.” Me: “Great.” Chicago guy: “Can I take your photo?” Me: “No, you can’t take my photo.”

Then he did the old “heh-heh” chuckle thing, as if to say it’s all amusing and rolling off his back. So I imitated his chuckle and pretended to be him, accent and all: “Boy, this fella sure is a character and he sure is particular…heh-heh!”

A minute or two later he came over and tried to shake my hand. I declined. “What are you, a Christian?,” I asked. “Keep it. Convert to Satanism.”

Chicago guy is 50something and this is the first time he’s ever visited the West Coast?

I should have shrugged it off and shaken his hand. He was a jerk, but also a bigger man. I was being a grump.

The breakfast room lady gave me a cup of steaming hot water. I thanked her, grabbed a breakfast roll and left.

Acting-wise, Lindsay Lohan hit a triple at age 12 with The Parent Trap (’98), and then slammed two homers with her performances in Mean Girls (’04) and especially A Prairie Home Companion (’06). She’s made other films, of course, and has recorded some music and certainly made headlines, but let’s be honest — nowadays she’s primarily known as a stalled Rehab Queen (although she’s only 35) and a person who was happening a little less than a decade ago but no longer.

I’m not saying Lohan is a permanent trainwreck whose personal weaknesses and lack of discipline have overwhelmed her career, mind, but that’s the image that has sunk in…be honest, Trey Taylor! Does Lohan need to “be” her image for the rest of her life? Of course not. She could begin to turn things around today, if she wanted to give it a shot.

The bottom line is that since ’05 or thereabouts Lohan has been more or less vying for the title of the 21st Century’s Tallulah Bankhead, which is actually a half-flattering description as Bankhead had a great decades-long theatre career (The Little Foxes, The Skin of Our Teeth, Clash By Night) and gave an award-worthy performance in one great film (Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat). When it came to nervy, challenging interviewers (the David Lettermans of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s) Bankhead would typically agree with every tawdry tabloid anecdote and own her reputation — she gave as good as she got.

But since the recent release of Hulu’s Framing Britney Spears (“I am deeply sorry“), Twitter has been revisiting other instances of brash insensitivity in terms of stars being raked over the coals for their perceived personal problems or for indelicate behavior in general.

This Lindsay Lohan interview on David Letterman in 2013 is horrifying to watch now. pic.twitter.com/lZxKVvbVB0

— (@treytylor) February 13, 2021

This morning I took part in a discussion about a 2.12 Wall Street Journal article titled “How Equality Lost to ‘Equity.’” The subhead reads “Civil-rights advocates abandon the old ideal for the new term, which ‘has no meaning‘ and promises no progress but makes it easy to impute bigotry, says Shelby Steele.”

Steele quote: “[The current meaning of the term] equity has no meaning, but it’s one that gives blacks power and leverage in American life. We can throw it around at any time, and wherever it lands, it carries this stigma that’ somebody’s a bigot.’ Its message is that there’s inequality that needs to be addressed, to be paid off. So if you hear me using the word ‘equity,’ I’m shaking you down.”

Here are some passages from the discussion that touched upon the Oscar race, and upon John McWhorter‘s “The Elect“:

Friendo #1: “The key concept is that ‘equity’ prioritizes equality of outcome over equality of opportunity.

“That’s where Martin Luther King Jr. would have reared up in protest against it. And where any sensible moral person today — e.g. the tiny fraction of those of us in media who actually resist woke mobthink — would stand up against it. Equality of opportunity should be the goal. Not outcome — that’s the social-cultural analogue of giving every kid a trophy.

“Applied to the Oscars, it’s especially ludicrous. Sure, you can have an Oscar slate where half the people are POCs, making up for past sins, etc., and we can all sing ‘Kumbaya’ and pat ourselves on the back when half the winners are black. But if that’s what you do, it’s such a contrivance, and you’re so cheapening what the awards are, that you’ve made it all mean next to nothing. ‘Look, Chadwick Boseman, Viola Davis and Delroy Lindo all won awards at the African-American Oscars! Hurray!! We woke white people really are something, aren’t we?!’

Friendo #2: ” The new enlightened white person religion [is about] atoning for past sins. I have a very privileged friend who lives in Ojai…married, rich, never had to work a day in her life. She’s now on a mission to explain white supremacy to all of her friends who ‘don’t get it.’ What does that do — it redeems and excuses her from accusations. I can’t wait until it all comes crashing down.”

Friendo #1: “If only it were driven by white guilt! The white liberals who Tom Wolfe mocked definitively half a century ago in ‘Radical Chic’ — Leonard Bernstein throwing his posh party for the Black Panthers, etc. — were driven, to a degree, by white guilt.

“The woke mob today is driven by white narcissism. By white vanity. Guilt would be too good for them. They’re adopted virtue-signaling as a lifestyle and as a cult. And as John McWhorter has brilliantly explained, these vanity rituals are so dependent upon reducing black people to a stupid masochistic permanent-victim status that, in fact, there’s no difference at all between white woke-ism and white supremacy.

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