Brown tunics, bulky bear bodies, submission, seemingly forced ecstasy, echoes of Jim Jones, etc.

Hallelujah pic.twitter.com/mqXXE0yaN0

— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) January 6, 2020

Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks measuring stick. The legendary director is famed for having said that a good movie (or a formidable Oscar seeker) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”

Hawks also defined a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.” Well, that lets Taika Waititi out!

How do the ten PGA-nominated films rate on the Hawks chart? Here’s my take:

Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman: This 209-minute film has at least 10 great scenes, but the last 30 to 40 minutes (suspenseful build-up to Hoffa shooting, Hoffa shooting, getting older, “Peggy hates me”, white hair, assisted living, buying the coffin, “leave the door open a bit”) amount to one of the most shattering finales in American cinema. With The Irishman it’s not a matter of choosing great scenes, but asking “which scenes aren’t great or good?” The answer is “none.” Plus: “It’s summer.”

Noah Baumbach‘s Marriage Story. Three great scenes: (a) Adam Driver singing “Being Alive” (although one could argue this is not really an integrated Marriage Story moment as much as a Stephen Sondheim time-out); (b) Laura Dern‘s rant about how the culture has unfairly regarded women over the decades; (c) the screaming fight between Driver and Scarjo in his apartment (although this is closer to a strong scene than a great one).

Sam Mendes‘s 1917. Three great scenes: (a) The smoking German biplane crash crashes into the wooden shack, the British soldiers pull the pilot out, etc.; (b) The scene with the brother (Richard Madden‘s Lieutenant Blake) at the very end; (c) the stand-down scene with Benedict Cumberbatch at the very end. I think the feeding-milk-to-the-baby scene is memorable but perhaps a little too calculated. There are many stirring, oh-my-God scenes in 1917, but they all kind of bleed together because it’s all a stream-of-movie-consciousness thing.

Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. Four great scenes: (a) The howling finale at Rick Dalton‘s Cielo Drive home, followed by the invite to visit and schmooze with Sharon and her friends. (b) Cliff Booth visits the Spahn Ranch. (c) Cliff dukes it out with Bruce Lee. (d) “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans” in the Musso and Frank parking lot.

James Mangold‘s Ford v. Ferrari. One great scene: when some Italian guy (or was it Jon Bernthal‘s Lee Iacocca?) tells Tracy Letts‘ Henry Ford II that Enzo Ferrari had called him fat and that Ford, an assembly-line manufacturer, is unworthy of the racing-car realm. The film has many good or very good scenes, but this is the only great one. I’m sorry but that’s how I see it. Plus it has one bad scene — the scene in the diner between Christian Bale and Matt Damon when they’re laughing about the absurdity of creating a competitive Ford race car in the span of several weeks, etc.

Todd Phillips‘ Joker. Three great scenes: Dancing down the Bronx staircase. Arthur Fleck’s big talk-show finale when he plugs Murray Franklin on-camera. Arthur escaping the destroyed police car and comes upon a riot of clown faces on the street. This film has no bad scenes. Everything works and is all of a piece.

Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite. Many pretty good scenes and always a sense of mise en scene aliveness and invention, but no great scenes. One fatally bad scene: The former maid Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun) shows up at the big swanky home in a rainstorm, rings the bell, asks to be let it. The four new employees, a family which managed to get Gook fired, is lying around drunk and bleary-eyed. Good has every reason in the world to expose their scam and ruin a perfectly good thing, so what does her replacement Kim Chong-Sook (Chang Hyae-jin) do? She does what no sane person would ever do. She lets Gook into the house. It’s called bad plotting.

Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women. No great scenes but two very good ones — the fantasy finale when Saoirse Ronan‘s Jo, encouraged by family and friends, chases after Bhaer (Louis Garrel) and stops him from going to California, and the scene when she negotiates copyright and royalties with Tracy Letts‘ Mr. Dashwood. Bad scenes: Florence Pugh’s snarly Amy burns Jo’s manuscript. Laurie has a change of heart and proposes to Amy minutes after telling Jo that she’s his everything. Returning from having given their food to a local poor woman, the March sisters return to find their dinner table loaded down with a banquet (provided by Chris Cooper) that would be enough to feed a Union regiment on a furlough. Bob (Better Call Saul) Odenkirk suddenly shows up with whiskery sideburns…the fuck?

The vigorous campaign by high-ranking female producers and journalists to badger and guilt-trip industry males into nominating Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women for this or that award has once again come up short. Or at least has stalled in front of the locked gates of the Director’s Guild of America.

The five nominees for the top DGA prize are Martin Scorsese for The Irishman, Quentin Tarantino for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Bong Joon-ho for Parasite, Sam Mendes for 1917 and Taika Waititi for Jojo Rabbit.

The general consensus is that Waititi took what would (or should) have been Gerwig’s slot. So does Gerwig defy the odds and somehow luck out with an Academy Best Director nomination for Little Women? Or is this all she wrote? You tell me. I suspect it’s probably a wash for Gerwig from this point on.

The DGA guys have, however, paid tribute to three female filmmakers — Mati Diop for Atlantics, Alma Ha’rel for Honey Boy and Melina Matsoukas for Queen & Slim — in the first-time feature film award category.

In my somewhat hazy, impressionistic mind the 10 nominees for the 2020 Producers Guild of America’s Daryl F. Zanuck award (i.e., their Best Picture trophy) have blended into the Best Picture BAFTA nominees. Not actually but vaguely. And the proud contenders are 1917, Ford v. Ferrari, The Irishman, JoJo Rabbit, Joker, Knives Out, Little Women, Marriage Story, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Parasite. Some of these weren’t BAFTA-nominated but you get the drift.

Hesamodin Ashna is a well-connected Iranian politician and advisor to President Hassan Rouhani. I can’t say I was altogether concerned when I read the following tweet earlier today:

This is an old revisionist routine, but just for the record I thought I’d re-award some of the 1990 Oscars (i.e., the winners of the 63rd Academy Awards that aired on 2.13.91 or 29 damn years ago).

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Annette Bening has said she’ll never have “work” done, but she looked so different last night during her Golden Globes appearance that my first thought was “hmmm, did she capitulate?” She looked radiant. Blonde, swept-back hair. A bit more slender than before. Just-right eye makeup. Definitely an upgrade of some kind or another. Getting a touch-up these days is nothing — it’s like coloring your hair or getting a facial. All to say that if Bening did go undergo a procedure, it’s fine.

Bob Dylan‘s changeover from acoustic folk to electric rock existential poetry (aka “electric Dylan controversy“) wasn’t just a major creative growth move on his part — it also wound up galvanizing rock music across the industry, inspiring the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Byrds and many other to chime in with complex, socially relevant lyrics and musical attitudes. The shift began at the Newport Folk Festival in July ’65 (when Dylan was 24) and peaked with the infamous English booing tours (“Judas!”) of ’65 and ’66.

This chapter was totally covered in Martin Scorsese‘s Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, of course, but now James Mangold (Ford Ferrari, Walk The Line) is planning to direct the loosely-titled Going Electric, a Fox Searchlight film about this transitional period with none other than Timothee Chalamet as Dylan. Jay Cocks has written the screenplay; Dylan is actually exec producing.

I’d feel pretty good about this if I was Dylan, who believe it or not is around 14 months from hitting the big eight-oh. Chalamet is better looking than Dylan ever was, can act circles, can sing and probably plays guitar, and he’ll look the part when he grows out his Bringing It All Back Home Jewfro.

Better Chalamet, certainly, than Hayden Christensen, who played the Dylanesque “Billy Quinn” in George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl.

The Going Electric story was broken by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming.

Filed this afternoon by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg: “Marriage Story‘s Laura Dern has long been the frontrunner for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but there was a sense that she might have a hard time beating Hustlers‘ Jennifer Lopez with the HFPA, which could have shaken things up overall. Dern has always been an HFPA fave — she was once Miss Golden Globe, and had four other Globe wins heading into the night — so she was not to be discounted.

“But the fact that J-Lo couldn’t win [last night] with the HFPA — a group that loves mega-stars so much it gave Lady Gaga a Globe for her acting on American Horror Story: Hotel — makes one seriously question if she can win anywhere.”

“Little Women has found an audience, and it’s selling tickets. But it breaks no sociopolitical ground, and men don’t like it.

“If it earns Oscar nominations, how are the filmmakers to know that they are the result of the movie’s excellence, not of the campaign conducted by angry white women in the prestige newspapers? Perhaps the film may suffer the lowest fate of all in the outrage economy: to be understood, principally, as a work of art.” — from “Little Women’s Real Feminist Problem” by The Atlantic‘s Caitlin Flanagan.

If you have any sporting blood in you, you have to acknowledge that the pushback campaign — “What to do about the guys who don’t want to see Little Women?” — seems to have been tactically effective, and that Greta Gerwig‘s film may end up with a Best Picture nomination after all. Who knows? Not because the film necessarily deserves it, but because enough Academy members have been agitated or guilt-tripped into voting for Little Women.

From “What the Golden Globes mean for 1917, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and the Oscars” by Michael Phillips, posted this morning: “If 1917 doesn’t win the top Oscar, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will. It’s a statistical probability.”

Say what? Who says so? Because a majority of the Hollywood Foreign Press membership (about 90 people) voted that way? Phillips can’t just dismiss The Irishman with a wave of the hand. It’s a landmark film and a Scorsese gangster crescendo.

From Owen Gleiberman’s morning-after assessment in Variety:

“[Sam Mendes‘ film] hasn’t had a chance to get out there yet (it opens wide this coming weekend). And when it does, maybe a rousing reaction on the part of audiences will bolster its awards mojo. My feeling, however, is that 1917, with its look-ma-no-hands! one-shot gimmickry (please explain to me why this is more than a stunt), is a video game for fanboys posing as a drop-dead serious war movie. I think it would likely prove to be one of the most joylessly dutiful and uninspiring Oscar winners in memory. To me, seeing Mendes get up there instead of directors who made far more indelible (and celebrated) movies this year just didn’t feel right.”

HE to journo pally: “1917 is a respectable soulful tech thing — a ‘Ready Player World War I’ cake with emotional icing. It saves itself with the final scene with the brother, and I liked the symmetry of the beginning and ending of taking a nap against a tree.”

Journo pally responds: “The final scene does get to you, but I think in a mechanical/symmetrical and rather rote way. I don’t find it a truly stirring or awe-inspiring war film.”