BLOOD SIMPLE. There Will Be Blood may be the strangest Best Picture Oscar nominee since -- well, ever. Like the Oscar-nominated oddballs The Elephant Man and The Piano, it's soaked in enough rich period detail to satisfy Ismael Merchant, but it takes a relentlessly eccentric approach to storytelling -- it fact, the plot (independent oilman Daniel Plainview scraps out a big claim in turn-of-the-century California) is more like a private agony writ huge. John DeFore astutely calls it "both an epic and a miniature" -- though it has a great scope of events and scale of ambition, only a few of the characters matter, and actually maybe only one of them really does. And we barely get to know him, because there is not that much to know.

Plainview is all ambition -- "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people." Of course we may expect such a creature to attract unsought obstacles. The biggest of these is Eli Sunday, a deranged charismatic preacher whose father's oil-rich land Plainview has swindled for himself. Plainview could buy Sunday off with a small show of respect, but this he refuses to give.

Why? We suspect that Plainview sees something like God in Sunday, and though it is little spoken of, we have reason to believe that for Plainview God is the force that seeks to thwart him: that kills his men, blows up his wells, broke his leg. (Here be spoilers.)

Sunday seems to believe the same thing. But though they are locked in struggle, the two men don't have the same ends. Plainview wants dominion over the earth, Sunday dominion over men. (Later, we'll see that each wants a little of the other, too.) When circumstances give Sunday an opportunity to kill Plainview's plans, he doesn't do it -- he prefers to use it to torture Plainview at his weak point, his anguish at "abandoning" his adopted son, and thus exact a more personal revenge that exalts his own power to save souls.

Plainview submits to save his claim. The oil flows, the fortune is made.... but There Will Be Blood.

This leads to an ending many critics find problematic. I disagree. It's formally audacious, but the whole film has been that -- this is just a new, shocking type of audacity. Suddenly it's years later, we're in a little room, and under bright lights Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano (Plainview and Sunday) act their asses off in a chamber drama/cage match. And there's Blood!

I suspect the arguments over the ending have less to do with the tone shift than with an unease with the whole film that the mini-gotterdammerung ending throws into relief. For me, the ending satisfactorily fulfills the story. But what about that story?

In reducing it to its crucial elements, I fear I may have skewed the impact of the film as a whole. The struggle with Sunday is important, and that character is beautifully realized by Dano: full of mad energy in preaching and in rage (and reminiscent of a young Gene Wilder when his voice frantically scrapes the top of its register), but dazedly calm when the fit is not on him. His Biblical mood swings are an intriguing foil for Day-Lewis, who gives us a more clinical psychological reality, in which the madness appears in streaks suppressed by his drive to get the job done -- until there is nothing suppressing it at all.

I can't quite put my finger on when it becomes clear that Plainview is depraved. The madness of his drive is clear from the time he drags his shattered leg to the assayer's office rather than to a doctor. And even his first speech, to a community whose land he wishes to drill, shows us how strange he is. I have seen Day-Lewis' voice compared with John Huston's; my buddy Bob heard Jack Palance. I heard a man who is sure of himself but hiding something so deep that it has calcified his speech, albeit into pleasing patterns.

It's a good choice, as they say, and it affords Day-Lewis enough vocal headroom to play bravura when he needs to. But while his confrontations with Sunday are key, they are few, and the rest of the ample time leaves us with this man and the weaker characters, whom he can do nothing but negate.

When he is briefly drawn out by a visit by a putative "brother from another mother" (the excellent Kevin J. O'Connor), Plainview only relaxes enough to explicate his already obvious contempt for humanity -- and, in the end, his anger at being made to trust. The closest thing to a love-object in his life is his quasi-son, adopted in infancy from a dead comrade. Little "H.W." grows into an affectless, close-mouthed boy who shadows his father and seems to accept his guidance as love, until an accident leaves him deaf; then he begins to act out viciously, and Plainview sends him away. This leaves Plainview with an obvious psychic wound which Sunday exploits, and which drives him to extravagant anger at people he imagines would "tell me how to raise my family." But it is clear -- even when the boy returns and Plainview smothers him with affection -- that he realizes that he has given the child no real love at all, because he has none to give.

What Plainview has been hiding (until the end, when he has nothing left to hide) is an inability to empathize with any other human being. When we begin to understand this, the film achieves a kind of emotional stasis: we can have terror, terror in abundance, but no pity. Which is to say, we cannot have tragedy. So when the final release comes, it is pure grand guignol: a blood-letting battle of monsters.

For all the extravagant brilliance of his production (every craft aspect of which is stunning), Paul Thomas Anderson has been brutal about withholding the emotional release that such a big movie leads us to expect. It's a chilling sort of grandeur and I can understand why a lot of people find it repulsive. I can't imagine it will find a lot of love at the Oscars, even for Day-Lewis, whose performance peels the fucking paint off the walls. A Gordon Gekko may invite us to sneaking empathy with his lascivious cruelty, but Plainview gives no quarter and can expect none.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...

... about the "Day of Resistance" for gun nuts. Now please excuse me, I'm watching the Oscars (and doing okay with predix, and live-tweeting).

UPDATE. Oh speaking of Oscars, attend this especially Zhdanovite horseshit from Mark Joseph at National Review called "Lincoln’s Lost Opportunities":

First, there was the team that brought forth this film about the president who founded the Republican party, a team led by the blue-state heroes Steven Spielberg, screenwriter Tony Kushner, author Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Daniel Day-Lewis....

Oh wait, it gets better:

There is another surefire way to keep traditionalist audiences away from a movie, and the makers of Lincoln played that card as well: bad language...
“Sadly, the movie also contains about 40 obscenities and profanities, including four ‘f’ words and more than 10 GDs,” noted MovieGuide, a site that a good number of traditionalists consult before attending movies...

And another thing: What was all that anti-businessman talk in Citizen Kane? No wonder America hates Hollywood!

UPDATE 2. Jesus, Nate Silver knows everything.

UPDATE 3. Post-Oscar whining commences; I assume tomorrow there'll be plenty of rightwing argh-blargh about Michelle Obama's appearance. (Here's an early return from Todd Starnes on Twitter: "Tonight was supposed to be about Hollywood - but Mrs. Obama made it about herself." The concern of a Fox News shouter for the noble traditions of Hollywood is touching.) Meanwhile at National Review, somebody named Gina R. Dalfonzo:

Whatever one thinks of the movies being honored, and however fervently one roots for one’s favorites, there’s a depressing sameness to the annual Oscar ritual these days.

"These days"?

Chris Loesch was tweeting about how conservatives need to quit “belittling” pop culture, and start recognizing “the importance of engaging in and making good art.” He made a very good point. But the engaging would be so much easier if, on occasions like these, Hollywood’s best and brightest would give us something to work with.

The Oscars gets a billion viewers worldwide every year. Why would they give a fuck what conservatives think? See "market, free."

Still -- do read my Voice thing. They beat us if we don't deliver traffic.

UPDATE 4. Also at National Review, Wesley "Make Sure to Include My Middle Initial, I'm a Pompous Ass" Smith:

Can you imagine the Oscars allowing anyone to host the big show who had mocked defenseless minorities? No? Well, think again. This year’s host, Seth McFarlane, created Family Guy, a show which castigated the late Terri Schiavo as a “vegetable”...

I await Smith's denunciations of those who wring humor from the tragedy of people slipping on banana peels.

NOTES ON THE CULTURE WAR. Big Hollywood:

Add one more soldier to the Left’s war on Fox News: Oscar the Grouch.

Oh, wait, it gets better:

Last week, in a re-broadcast of an episode that originally aired two years ago...

Aw, c'mon guy -- it only took Fox eight months to catch up with the Obama children's song.

Oscar starts his own news network, GNN (Grouchy News Network). An irate viewer calls in to berate him that the news is not grouchy enough:

“I am changing the channel. From now on I am watching ‘Pox’ News. Now there is a trashy news show.”

Later in the episode, Anderson Cooper from 4th place CNN, guest stars as a reporter for GNN. He interacts with “Walter Cranky” and “Dan Rather-Not” — Muppets representing real-life liberal news personalities — and they talk about “Meredith Beware-a” and “Diane Spoiler.” But no affectionate nicknames for Fox News personalities; no Spill O’Reilly or Brittle Hume...

Now they're complaining that the liberal conspiracy won't make up funny names for their heroes. Next week: Media fails to give Hannity a high-five.

The post is over 900 words long, by the way. But that's nothing -- Jonah Goldberg cracks 2,500 words with "How Politics Destroyed a Great TV Show" at Commentary (!). Warming up with a mixing bowl of warm cake-batter and a lament that one line in the last Star Wars movie "unraveled the entire moral superstructure of the Star Wars franchise," Goldberg goes on to bitch about a bunch of TV shows that offended him ideologically before deciding that "denouncing the ideological intrusion into the dialogue of Grey’s Anatomy as a corruption of artistic integrity offers such televised junk more respect than it deserves." So he jumps on his trampoline and heads for the loftier reaches of Battlestar Galactica.

Goldberg, who thinks Norman Mailer was overrated, explains that the show was boss when he was able to read its plot threads as against abortion and communism but sucked when he could no longer find a way to make it conform to his views on the Iraq War. In a final insult to all that's Goldberg, "for having the 'bravery' to tackle the occupation of Iraq, the producers and lead actors were invited to a panel at the United Nations to dilate on the war on terror." It's worse than when Joanie married Chachi.

Money quote:

It’s been said that the difference between the truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. After its third season, Battlestar Galactica steadily failed on both counts.

Well, I say the difference between a Magic 8-Ball and Jonah Goldberg is that a Magic 8-Ball has to be right sometimes, and Goldberg fails on both counts.

OSCAR CATCH-UP, PART 2. The Kids Are All Right. Cholodenko's a weird one -- High Art and Laurel Canyon are like traditional Hollywood movies re-edited by someone with brain damage; all the right pieces are there, and sometimes beautiful, but they're stuck together in ways that vitiate rather than amplify their impact. (I really like High Art, especially when Patricia Clarkson's onscreen, but watching it is a frustrating experience.)

But The Kids Are All Right benefits from Cholodenko's discursive approach more than the others because it's unified by a conflict that is almost laughably formulaic: Daughter of uncooperative lesbian couple tracks down sperm-donor dad; hijinks and hetero adultery ensue! It's like someone smart and serious radically remixed I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. The plot is so strong that Cholodenko can mix and mash to her heart's content and never lose track of what's at stake.

Thus, we can have enjoy the bonding of the kids with the donor, and even have some fun with the (spoiler spoiler spoiler) affair between the donor and one of the lesbians, but the danger these developments present to everyone's happiness is never far from our minds. When the broken pieces are put together at the end, the resolution feels incomplete, not because the art has failed because it has succeeded -- she actually captured the messiness of life without making a mess.

There are plenty of good privileged moments in the movie, but I especially liked the scene in which the donor (the ultra-brilliant Mark Ruffalo, who reacts to the pain he's feeling with some petulance, as if it were something from which he thought he was exempt) explains to his usual fuck-buddy why he doesn't want to sleep with her. He wants to say what's in his heart without actually revealing anything -- the secret affair requires it, but we get the feeling this is not an uncommon mode for him. Finally he clumsily burbles about how at this stage of his life "I don't want to be that guy" who's still going around doing what... he obviously really still enjoys doing. The girl responds, with perfect appropriateness, "Fuck you." Life, ladies and gentlemen, captured on film.

The Social Network. A smart friend asked me: Why does anyone think this movie "defines a generation"? Oh, that's easy: Because they're old and The Social Network believably shows young shits acting like shits. Duh.

I'm old too, and a Leveller to boot, so my favorite part of the movie is the beginning, when the shittiness of Harvard shits is vividly revealed, and the Trent Reznor music has just started to kick in. Really, I loved it: For 20 minutes we're immersed in a milieu both dark-and-aged (kudos, DP Jeff Cronenweth) and totally frattish, and the kids are believably and expeditiously shown to be in equal parts callow and ambitious, and swimming in privilege. It's such a casually brutal portrayal that, at that stage, you might have convinced me that it defined something-or-other.

That doesn't last, but that's not so bad. Indeed, the ripping Alan Sorkin gabfest unto which we devolve is sort of the definition of not-bad. Sorkin's dialogue is always crisp, glib, and fun, and he's major enough that he can get top actors to supply the character attributes his writing by and large doesn't bother with.

In this regard he's extremely fortunate here, especially with Jesse Eisenberg. His Zuckerberg has been characterized as an Asperger's case, but the brilliance of the performance is that you can't write off his self-involvement that easily -- you can imagine all kinds of reasons for his behavior (parental coddling, youthful alienation, genius), and still be left wondering -- which, if I may say, is the kind of mysteriousness that distinguishes great acting, and probably why his narrow-band performance got an Oscar nomination.

But his singularity is something from which the other characters aren't exempt (except for his partner Saverin, very well played by Andrew Garfield). I still recall with a little shiver the shy arm-punch Zuckerberg gives Saverin when he arrives at his and Sean Parker's apartment, and it strikes me now that this is the reason: It's the most intimate gesture in the movie. Most of the characters are so absorbed in self-definition strategies that they can't bond. Maybe that's what really spurred the "defines a generation" idea -- unlike almost any other movie about young men (and it's almost exclusively about men) I can think of, The Social Network portrays a set of manhood rituals that drives them apart instead of bringing them together, and maybe people (and, who knows, maybe Sorkin) think that this is what the internet has done to them.

POST-OSCAR RIGHT WING STYLEE: PAJAMAS MEDIA STRIKES BLECH! Let's see how the coolio conservatives responded to this year's Oscars:

Beginning to wonder how long it will take Jon Stewart to crack an anti-Bush joke.

[snip]

Waking up with George Clooney next to me would make it very easy for me to get out of bed.

[snip]

And so far, [Jon Stewart]'s making fun of Hollywood's devotion to the Democrats. So, I'll say good for him.

[snip]

"A return to glamour" is tonight's theme, says host John Stewart. Has he seen any of tonight's nominated movies? I know I haven't

[it was a joke, tanning-bed boy! snip!]

Clooney's award was payback for being robbed for his performance in "Return of the Killer Tomatoes["].

[snip]

YAY!! For March of the Penguins!!!!!! A well-deserved victory.

[snip]

J-Lo just spoke of forgiveness and resentment in a very angry tone: Which do you think she (and the Academy) really wants us to feel tonight?

[snip]

I love Sam Jackson, but hate it when Hollywood jerks itself off. Bo-ring.

[I should interject that there are intentional jokes embedded in this horseshit, in which right-wing bloggers pretend to be Hollywood celebrities making catty comments about the participants. Follow the link and prepare to laff ("prepare" meaning, in this case, drink a bottle of Jack Daniels and get Gilbert Gottfried to read it to you). snip!]

Robert Altman is the most overrated director in Hollywood history. There, I said it. He's so beloved by actors because he over-indulges them.

[fuck you. I mean, snip]

Compare Witherspoon's speech to Julia Roberts's from a couple years back. The gal has class.

[snip]

Here's the statistical rundown: Crash, with a theatrical box office of $53 million, is the lowest-grossing Oscar winner since "The Last Emperor," going all the way back to 1987. And that's in non-inflation adjusted numbers. The average box office for all of this year's Best Picture nominees was the lowest since 1984. I believe history will mark this year as the beginning of the end for traditional, big-studio Hollywood. Of course, I could be wrong. Of course, some say that year transpired long ago.

[Very astute. And what might the sell-by date be for a combine of Republican bloggers playing at red carpet? snippety snip snap!]

If you really want to know how these people think, why not go straight to Free Republic ("Looks like Brokeback got rear ended") and be spared the pathetic attempt to be hip?

TIME-LAG OSCARS BEER PART FOUR. ART DIRECTION: How do you portray the "climate of fear of McCarthyism" in art direction? With sketches! Keanu should be appointed Oscar Presenter Partner for life. I’ve never seen him better.

SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS MONTAGE. I love the eazy-flow music they use to bring out Samuel L. Jackson, but I really wish they’d mix things up by giving him something like the Yale Fight Song. Now what is Hollywood, that chancred whore, trying to tell us? They call me Mister Hollywood – and you shouldn’t hate me for making you think with movies you don’t go see! You like some of it, don’t you? Like when Jack Nicholson pushes those dishes off the table? That was cool, right? So gay cowboys are just like Tom Joad! Well, it’s Chuck Workman, probably, and it’s a nice warm bath of righteous both self- and unhyphenated for all us rebels & dreamers! And Jon Stewart deflated cannily! And whatshisname the President re-inflated deadly-ily! Uncomfortable truths! And please go to movie theatres, where you get "sound coming at you from all directions" (I thought they closed the Selwyn) and New Orleans and hey, wake up people, here’s Salma Hayek!

BEST SCORE: The best one of these medleys I ever saw starred Liberace, who opened the proceedings by announcing, "I made my greatest contribution to the movies years ago – I stopped making them!" and then pounded the keys to lead the Oscar Philharmonic in classics like Theme from "Beastmaster". Still, I won’t let nostalgia prevent me from acknowledging the good work on auditory view, though I doubt that any of these scores is improved by having Itzhak Perlman carry the melodies on his fiddle (and wrapping it all up with a cute little flourish)… oh great, more homosexualist propaganda and by a foreigner yet! Somewhere Roger L. Simon is chewing the rim of his fedora.


BOMBAST MONTAGE. Jake Gyllegehuillahall says, "there’s no place to see them like on the big screen" and the audience pat their palms as if they don’t want to look too eager to drag us wretches into the cineplexes for their benefit. Then another Chuck Worman joint. Point taken, and thank Skerner God of Wood the Hollywoodians have King Kong and The Matrix to remind people that you can still have a good time stoned and watching things go kablooey, and you won’t even get ringworm by leaning your head back on the theatre seat.

BEST SOUND MIXING: You get the difference between this and Sound Editing, right? This is basically Best Sound. They split off Sound Effects Editing years ago because… fuck, I forget why. King Kong! I might win this pool if everyone else in my office had a bad hangover on Friday.

ROBERT ALTMAN! Holy fuck! Robert Altman! Even Streep and Tomlin doing a stupid bit about overlapping dialogue (Hello? Howard Hawks?) and improvisation (hello Cassavettes?) can’t fuck this up. Or can it? Shouldn’t they be smoking joints? Big, fat spliffs would have sewn up the urban youth demo. What a pleasure, though, to see him honored. But what’s the ornery old coot gonna say? "I thought this award meant it was over…" Then he tells what he’s up to. Then he tells about his next movie. "It’s not over." And "to me it’s just one long film." Well, yes, auteurist that I am, I cannot disagree. Nice analogy of the sand castle. "Have a drink, watch the tide come in, and the ocean just takes it away… I’ve built about forty of them…" And a nice "one more thing… eleven years ago I had a heart transplant… the heart of a young woman, I think in her late thirties… I think I’ve got about thirty years left." God, I hope so.

ROBERT ALTMAN CONT. What did Robert Altman do? Worked in almost every conceivable genre: detective story, gambling drama, service comedy, space movie, westerns, English murder mystery, L.A. murder mystery, musical, filmed theatre, etc… Illuminated everything he touched. Let actors breathe. Let the soundtrack breathe. When Hollywood funding was not forthcoming he scraped it up himself and kept working. Made beautiful images. Warren Beatty dying in a snowbank. Helicopters descending on Los Angeles. The Last Supper in a Korean MASH tent. Michel Gambon smashing away a rocks glass. "Rufus Rastus Rawlston Brown, whatcha gonna do when the rent comes ‘round?" "Y’all settle down now – this isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville."

TIME-LAG OSCARS BEER PART FOUR. ART DIRECTION: How do you portray the "climate of fear of McCarthyism" in art direction? With sketches! Keanu should be appointed Oscar Presenter Partner for life. I’ve never seen him better.

SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS MONTAGE. I love the eazy-flow music they use to bring out Samuel L. Jackson, but I really wish they’d mix things up by giving him something like the Yale Fight Song. Now what is Hollywood, that chancred whore, trying to tell us? They call me Mister Hollywood – and you shouldn’t hate me for making you think with movies you don’t go see! You like some of it, don’t you? Like when Jack Nicholson pushes those dishes off the table? That was cool, right? So gay cowboys are just like Tom Joad! Well, it’s Chuck Workman, probably, and it’s a nice warm bath of righteous both self- and unhyphenated for all us rebels & dreamers! And Jon Stewart deflated cannily! And whatshisname the President re-inflated deadly-ily! Uncomfortable truths! And please go to movie theatres, where you get "sound coming at you from all directions" (I thought they closed the Selwyn) and New Orleans and hey, wake up people, here’s Salma Hayek!

BEST SCORE: The best one of these medleys I ever saw starred Liberace, who opened the proceedings by announcing, "I made my greatest contribution to the movies years ago – I stopped making them!" and then pounded the keys to lead the Oscar Philharmonic in classics like Theme from "Beastmaster". Still, I won’t let nostalgia prevent me from acknowledging the good work on auditory view, though I doubt that any of these scores is improved by having Itzhak Perlman carry the melodies on his fiddle (and wrapping it all up with a cute little flourish)… oh great, more homosexualist propaganda and by a foreigner yet! Somewhere Roger L. Simon is chewing the rim of his fedora.

TIME-LAG BLOGGING THE OSCARS IN REAL TIME-LAG! PAAAAART OOOONNEE BOYEEEE! Welcome to the Oscars, which all good Americans are supposed to hate for their liberal gayness. I’m actually grateful to have that all out in the open. I sorta had an inkling when I started following these things as a child that my interest was corrupt and vile. Sometimes, like when John Podhoretz gets into the Oscars, we forget that. But thank God or the flying spaghettini spaghetti sauce monster or whatever we decadent creatures are supposed to call it/him/her/Gaia, we have Roger L. Simon, an actual screenwriter, to tell people the real truth. I’ll give you the link later. Or you can go to his site and find it yourself, it ain’t hard.

Well, I don’t have cable, so this is how I get to see Jon Stewart. He’s hilarious. I should have realized that Jon Stewart would be a little ahead of his audience. It works fine because he’s usually a little ahead of his audience (but packs his TV auditors with homosexuals who will laugh at anything). The tentativeness of the laughs just add a little extra layer of hilarity – like Stewart cracks on Walk the Line and Joaquin Phoenix just inflates his face a couple of centimeters.

Music during acceptance speeches? That’s what Oscar has been missing! Now everyone sounds like piano-bar performers telling the crowd to tip their waitress.

BEST SUPPORTING DUDE: Clooney’s speech has humor, and righteousness and self-righteousness in equal measure (well, maybe a little more of the former). Obviously a depth-charge (ah ha ha ha! Git it?) on behalf of the homosexual agenda.

BEST SPECIAL EFFECTS: Does it say something about our culture that a very talented comedian must pretend ineptitude to get laughs? The metaphor for a closeted lifestyle is obvious.

BEST LONG CARTOON: The two guys wearing big bow-ties are obviously channeling teh gay! Why don’t they thank their life-partners?

DOLLY PARTON: Tomorrow when I sober up I’ll look around for links telling us how Dolly isn’t what she used to be since she got involved with the transgenderalist agenda. I am of course talking about The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Whorehouses in a musical comedy! These people will do anything to tear down our moral infrastructure.

BEST SHORT MOVIE: Who knew? I based my office pool pick on the pictures and synopses at oscar.com. I lost. That guy looks gay.

BEST SHORT CARTOON: See above, except it’s a couple accepting so the gay – oh wait, life partner check!

BEST "CULINARY CONCEPTIONS THEMSELVES": I should be writing this copy. "Novelist Jane Austen herself would have nodded with approval" – or maybe she would just be nodding!

Vomit break!

MORE OSCAR STUFF. The Dark Knight. I can see why this film was so popular with culture warriors -- it is quite literally insane. An endless series of moral double-crosses by brooding, butched-up quasi-characters is meant to demonstrate that humanity is so corrupt, yet deserving of salvation, that the heroic Batman must become a fugitive in order to preserve order. Of course, to make it work, a cosmo burg like Gotham City must be subjected to Iraq-style chaos at the hands of a terrorist who is also, in Heath Ledger's performance, a disaffected youth who hates his father. It's as if Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause became the scourge of humanity.

At least the action sequences are lucid, which has been a problem in the past -- contra Dennis Lim (and his excellent slide show), Christopher Nolan handles the smash-'em-up segments far better than some recent Oscar nominees. I could follow the fight scenes much more easily than the shifting attitudes of the filmmakers toward the proper placement of right and wrong. Sometimes the mob is mindless, and sometimes moral; sometimes we are encouraged to cheer the philosophy of total war, and sometimes it's just a ruse by The Joker to kill innocents. The logic, such as it is, is that of a hormonal comic book nerd convinced that everything is rotten and that a magical being could set things right, were it not for the interference of Muggles, for whom the nerd yet retains some affection when they're not yelling for him to come out of the bathroom already. This kind of fantasy has been much tried in our era, but with the possible exception of Tim Burton's moody and unpopular Batman Returns never gets anywhere near the Mabuse films of Fritz Lang, which for all their paranoia are more firmly based in what grown people would recognize as reality.

Ledger's a gamer. The Joker is one of the great creations of comic art -- a Lord of Mischief like Loki and Puck turned sinister. I still like Cesar Romero's the best: a real clown, as unmodulated and unaware of his affect as a funhouse gargoyle. Jack Nicholson was obliged to be more of a head case, but was still able to rise to the required mania and weave it into some dazzling filigrees. (I'm unfamiliar with Mark Hamill's well-regarded cartoon vocal performance.) Ledger, a more thoughtful actor, can't match their brio, so he makes his Joker a plain psychotic with a high tolerance for pain and a gift for getting into his targets' heads. It's a rigorously psychological performance, and he was right to go that way: you can imagine even a good actor playing the same hammy lines for pure affect and making a horrible botch of them. Ledger gets inside the Joker and lets the cleverness of his verbal inventions tickle him into rancid pleasure. His performance is at bottom as dour as the film, but much more serious. If he had to go out, this was a good way for him to go.

UPDATE. Comments on this have been especially good, even from CG. I have a strong prejudice against comic book movies (though when they make The Lockhorns orAndy Capp I'll be there opening day), so I'm not the best audience for this one. I was struck by Chris Wren's remark that "It's a man... who dresses up a bat... and goes around beating up criminals. That's all Batman can EVER be." I think he may be right, and that serves what may be this movie's purpose; all Batman's meaning is impressed upon him from the outside, making him the sacrificial goat for the sins of Gotham. But what are its sins? Not wanting to get killed? Thinking about sacrificing others before not going through with it? There's only one sin you can pin on them: not being Batman. It's an adolescent rejection and retribution fantasy with a $185 million budget.

BETTER THAN TED WILLIAMS. At nine for twenty, I more than batted my weight, so I count my Oscar predictions a success. Of course I missed the big Million Dollar Baby surge. Prolly wun cuz a tha pro-death librul ending. Clint Eastwood is the new Michael Moore!

I was feeling prescient there for a while, thinking the Aviator craft awards were the first clanking hints of a steamroller, rather than gracious pats on the back for an also-ran. When Finding Neverland got the Best Score award, I was convinced I had cracked the code.

But I was surprised by Charlie Kaufman, whose film was one of the few I'd actually seen -- I liked it but figured it was too arty-farty for this lot -- and the Eastwood love-fest. In retrospect, it figures that they would heap garlands on him rather than Scorsese. Let's face it, Hollywood's love for New York -- which reached its fullest effulgence when they honored Woody Allen for making fun of L.A. in Annie Hall -- died when they started using Toronto as a stand-in for us. He'll never win now, and he can't go back -- the mean streets where he made his bones are all cleaned up. Maybe he'll devote the remainder of his life to looking for the director's cut of The Magnificent Ambersons. Well, he could do worse.

I have to say that Sidney Lumet's speech was my favorite bit. To devote his only moment in the Oscar sun to an encomium of movies as they were made in the days of giants was an act of admirable and rare humility. Chris Rock was a little too jazzed -- you could tell by the timbre of his throat-screeches that he had pumped himself out of his zone -- but didn't embarrass himself. And I liked that so many of the men in the audience wore long ties. I still haven't figured out the ankhs, but I expect I'll hear about them when the culture-warriors commence firing on Monday morning.

OSCAR ADVANCE POSTING. O helldamn, this has been a thick and thorny stint of posting lately, so let's talk Academy Awards. It's my plan to see a bunch more of the nominated achievements before February 29, but I will here give readings on those few I can intelligently judge:

Johnny Depp. After all his wonderful and sometimes strenuous prior performances, I think the voters finally named him because this one has a smidge extra of something he has always had (charm) and one thing he's never had (a Disney vehicle). His Jack Sparrow is, in long form, a somewhat sloppy performance -- its highs and lows come and go, and do not describe an arc; but then, neither does the film. Surely his languid incongruousness amid all those laudably stiff supporting performances helped him stand out. His long suit in this competition is his boldness of conception (think Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune) -- his short suit, one nice fat scene that would encompass all the Oscarworthy qualities.

Bill Murray. A New York Post gossip columnist caught Chevy Chase besmirching Murray's underplaying of this role. Truth be told, it's a fair cop, but in this relentless becalmed film, that may be why people applaud him so. In his Oscar-ignored Rushmore breakthrough, Murray was also in perfect low pitch with his cinematic surroundings -- recall him saying, to Max asking whether he was alright, "Mmmm... I get a little lonely sometimes." That Rushmore was brilliant, whereas Lost in Translation is only a nice college try by a Hollywood nepot, matters only in timing: Otherwise we'd be talking about Paul Giamatti right now. Lost is a modish and tidy packaging of middle-age and coming-of-age crises that also affords Murray a reward for his serious late work in films like Rushmore, Hamlet, and The Royal Tannenbaums. I do think Murray is a little stiff here at times (his smile at the end of his last encounter with the girl is thoroughly unearned and unconvincing), but there are many, many times when he is sweetly fluid, and these linger in the memory.

Diane Keaton. Holy shit she's good. The acting-ability gap between Annie Hall and Reds, her next nomination, is on balance small; the gap between Reds and now is huge. Even in the rather dicey, low-comedy early innings of Something's Gotta Give, she is believeable and grounded, on the limited basis the film then offers; but as the love affair takes off, she is b&g in everything. When I saw her part from the Nicholson character by kissing him wildly and declaring, "This... this is heartbreak!" I thought: This, this is Duse, this is Nazimova! For she is not only believeable and grounded, but magnificent and wild, justified and ancient, at every part of the spectrum. And she retains all the best qualities of her earlier career: the unpredictability, the sense of humor, and the tendency to suddenly shatter.

The three best picture nominees I have seen were already here briefly judged, but there will be more viewing and judging, I promise, in days to come.

GOING FOR THE GOLD. I'm a hopeless Oscar nerd. Even worse, I'm the kind of Oscar nerd who makes predictions -- really unsuccessful ones -- based mainly on historical precedents and voodoo. I've had to do it that way because, usually, I never see most of the movies up for awards.

But the latest nominations have come out and I find, to my shock, that I have already seen three of the five Best Picture Nominees, and three of the 10 nominated performances. I could conceivably catch a couple of films before February 29, and be able to discuss this superficial topic with some expertise. Then I shall be part of the great world!

For the record, Lost in Translation is Antonioni for Dummies, Master and Commander is beautiful but curiously inert, and Seabiscuit blows. More snap judgements to come!

I guess they're gonna do this Past Oscar Winners thing every year. And good for them. They deserve it. But it's a little weird that they're doing it before the writing awards. I mean, don't they normally get the scribes out of the way earlier than this? If I were less cynical, I'd say this was because the writers are better valued in Hollywood than once they were. I am not less cynical. (Than what? -- ed. Than anything.)

I'm glad chunky Marcia Gay Harden came out in an off-the-shoulder number. I'm also glad chunky Geena Davis came out, perioid. I'm just glad for chunk, period. So sue me.


The writer of The Pianist did nicely. Pedro Almodovar! Bless him, he's doing the antiwar thing too, but very apologetically. But let's stop a moment -- Pedro Almodovar won a fucking Oscar!

BTW I am watching the Oscars now. It's a good, Chuck-Workman-like production. Steve Martin's funny, the glitz is edifying. I'll have to take their word for it that the set direction of Chicago is better than that of Gangs of New York. (Gangs is the only nominee I've seen.) It's nice to see you can still rely on the Oscars for distraction. I'm especially loving the tribute to Oscar musical numbers (is this Chuck, too?).

Oscar can make fun of itself, and other people can make fun of it, too, but when all's said and done, it represents admirably the big entertainment machine that has given pleasure to millions -- including even snooty Frenchmen like Jean-Luc Godard.

I know Hollywood is not too enlightened on digital copyright now, but as a celebrant of, and believer in, excellence wherever it occurs, I expect Hollywood will get that act together at some point. It's a huge nest of vipers, but it's also a huge nest of talent, and the latter, not the former, is its primary cultural tradition.

I mean, they're handling the short-speech thing well. That shows they've got something on the ball.

JUNO THE ALONE. The Best Picture Oscar nominees have developed a twee-indie slot, filled in 2004 by Sideways (which I considered here); last year by Little Miss Sunshine, which I admired with qualifications; and now by Juno. The hallmarks are high quirk, small scale, and some intellectual flourishes which mark them as upscale entertainments.

Juno goes a little further than its predecessors. For one thing, the twee is laid on with a trowel. The Kimya Dawson soundtrack assures more toothache than heartbreak (though I really hope she goes to the Oscars dressed like a bumblebee or something), and the Wes Andersonian sidebars and psuedo-naive animations indicate that Academy voters are finally warming to New Cool.

Certainly having a pregnant teen who isn't a beaten-down victim and in fact appears in control of her situation is a new one; Sharon Curley had great spunk in The Snapper, but she was grounded in an old-fashioned working-class reality and reacted to it, whereas our current heroine is exceptional in nearly every way and brushes off the social implications of her act as nuisances. She's as much a goddess as her namesake, and such social comedy as Juno provides is based on her and her family's steadfast indifference to other people's expectations. Her frank talk at the Lorings' -- "Maker's Mark, please" (flashes thumb) "Up" -- is funny enough that the other characters barely need to react. Despite some commentary we've heard about the movie, this very successfully removes society as a factor in her journey: her mission to deliver the baby to the appropriate couple is not a social policy decision but pure self-assertion by a precocious 16-year-old who trusts her own instincts completely.

It's to Juno's credit that she finally encounters disappointment in an unexpected way, handles it in a manner consonant with her character, and changes her mind about something important. (Spoiler alert.) When the couple she's picked don't live up to her expectations, she takes (private) time to absorb the loss, and gives the baby to the now-single woman she knows will care for it. If one were to try and put a message on it, it would look more like a plea for single motherhood in a world of inadequate males, and very much beside the point.

The mind-changing is dramatically interesting. (You still reading? I'm still spoiling.) Juno's most important relationship, on the story's terms, is with Bleeker, her best friend and father of her child. If her pregnancy isn't a significant problem for her in any other way -- her friends and parents are accepting, other people don't count, and the destiny her great intelligence and confidence indicate for her seems totally unaffected -- it's the sticking point between her and him. She shields Bleeker from the consequences as an act of love, but this has the effect of pushing him away, and -- classic turnaround! -- dim as he is in many way, Bleeker understands it better than she does. In fact, she doesn't have a clue, even when he tells her, and only the breakup of the Lorings brings her to the conclusion that Bleeker is important to her, not as the father but as the boy she was meant to be with.

If this sounds sentimental, that's because it is. Juno's pregnancy is a McGuffin that complicates her unconscious search for romantic love. Once this sinks in, the movie suddenly feels very slight. Though the tart, teenspeak dialogue and unusual premise make Juno feel hip and wised-up, Juno's gynecological coming-of-age basically leads to a life-lesson straight out of an after-school special. Through most of Juno -- and especially during the development of the troublesome relationship of Juno and Mark Loring -- we expect that the flip tone and emotional distancing of the characters are covering for something deeper. But as it turns out, not so much: everyone's a child, and not much capable of growth. Juno's final discussion with her father (which, significantly, she ends by deceiving him) and her profession of love to Bleeker return us right back to the breezy place where we started, only now Juno and Bleeker are for-reals gf and bf, playing emo bullshit on acoustic guitars. It's kind of a relief, but not a revelation.

Revelation's a lot to ask, though, so let us be content with the excellencies Juno offers. The dialogue really is snappy, and the actors sell it beautifully. It probably says something that the fine supporting cast is mostly from prestige TV shows: they have a great feel for lines that might have choked actors who aren't used to thinking fast. (I'm especially fond of Michael Cera and hope he gets the film career fate has perversely denied that other talented skinny-boy Topher Grace.) Ellen Page so dominates as Juno that I really suspect the movie wouldn't work at all without her. I haven't seen the other nominees but I wouldn't be shocked if she won the Oscar because her performance is so clearly indispensable. She's got the genius-child bull-headedness, and the charm to make us like it.

OSCAR NIGHT!

I saw Phantom Thread and The Shape of Water — couldn’t get to Call Me By Your Name before the Big Show, but I’ll take a stab at the Oscar thing anyway.

(As to those last two movies: I’ve been trying to figure out whether the last part of Phantom Thread is meant to be taken literally, which inevitably gets me to wondering whether the first part was meant to be taken literally. The odd meet-acute in the Blackpool tearoom, in retrospect, looks like someone, or two, acting out their first meeting, either as a sentimental gesture or for therapeutic purposes; and the integration of Alma into the House of Reynolds, from his sister sniffing her over to her near-erasure among the other white-coated votaries, seems like a highly distilled version of experience, at least. I started out, perhaps influenced by the writing about it, thinking Phantom Thread was about gender roles, but I’m willing to consider that it’s about the weird power of love itself. Definitely the most rumination-worthy of the bunch.)

(Oh, and as to The Shape of Water: This is the Pan’s Labyrinth guy, alright, and another fable, but without the hard fatalism of the Spanish Civil War one, because we’re in America and Americans aren’t fatalists — though if you like you can think of the ending as non-literal, but if you do what’s that make the rest of the movie? [Publicity for the 1978 Superman said, “You’ll believe a man can fly”; The Shape of Water can boast, “You’ll believe a fish can fuck!”] It was thrilling to see the magic realism blend so seamlessly with the caper-suspense elements, and also to see the good guys and bad guys — though, as fable demands, clearly assigned and starkly painted — all get their little bit of humanity; even the Michael Shannonical scumbag moved me when he asked his general for permission to be just decent. [The general, however, can go fuck himself. I hate that guy.] I can see now why kulturkampfer Kyle Smith hated it so much — the black and the gay and the sex vs. The Man! — and, well, that’s just the icing on the fishcake.)

OK, let’s have a crack at these nominees:

Best Picture: The Shape of Water. Sure it’s odd — but it feels like what we used to call a movie-movie. I think Three Billboards has a chance, but Moonlight’s victory last year probably has voters thinking that would be just too much Quiet Brilliance in an industry mostly devoted to producing special effects extravaganzas.

Best Actor: Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour. You get old and play a British Prime Minister in heavy makeup, they have to give it to you.

Best Actress: Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. I was thinking Johnny Belinda II but great as Sally Hawkins is, voters may be wondering why Hillary Swank has two Oscars and McDormand only has one.

Best Supporting Actor: Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water. This is my sucker bet, some everyone expects either big prize-taker Willem Dafoe or Billboards’ Sam Rockwell to win, but my instinct, such as it is, is that the collision of the two favorites (and Woody Harrelson, who they’d love to give an Academy Award to sometime) will make an opening for a dark horse. Plus Jenkins’ arc is deeply moving.

Best Supporting Actress: Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird. I haven’t seen Allison Janney, but Lady Bird needs an award.

Best Director: Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water. I thought they were going to give Christopher Nolan this but

Best Original Screenplay: Get Out.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Call Me By Your Name.

Best Cinematography: Dunkirk.

Best Production Design: The Shape of Water.

Best Film Editing: Baby Driver.

Best Foreign Language Film: The Square.

Best Costume Design: Darkest Hour.

Best Original Score: Phantom Thread.

Best Original Song: “Mighty River,” Mudbourne.

Best Makeup: Darkest Hour.

Best Sound Editing: Dunkirk.

Best Sound Mixing: The Shape of Water.

Best Visual Effects: Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

And in the Who The Fuck Knows categories:

Best Documentary Feature: Last Men in Aleppo.

Best Documentary Short: Traffic Stop.

Best Animated Short: Garden Party.

Best Live Short: Watu Wote/All of Us.

And now -- magic time!

UPDATE, 8:18: I'm already losing!

UPDATE, 8:32: 1 for 3. There goes the rent money.

UPDATE, 9:30: [tears up his tickets and walks away slowly, in the rain]

UPDATE, 11:50: Well, I got the Big Five right, but otherwise wiped out -- 11 of our 23. I'd like to blame the Academy -- huh, Best Costume Design for a movie about fashion! So predictable! -- but really my mistake was paying attention; I always do better when I've seen like three movies all year. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Some other good versions out there,
But you can't go wrong with Muddy.
•  What with all the panic on the right that the liberals are going to burn down the churches, I figured I'd open up this recent Roy Edroso newsletter issue (Subscribe! Cheap!) featuring Dod Rheher exposing the latest trans-liberal-commie assault on His Values. Enjoy! 
•  Speaking of nuts, at National Review Kevin D. Williamson portrays the Democratic economic message thus:

The Kulaks Must Be Liquidated as a Class

That'll reinvigorate conservatism, alright right alright! Or at least keep the donors happy. Williamson tells us how all the tyrannies of the past few centuries are attributable to Marxists (though he skips, among other tyrants, the Nazis, since associating them with Marxists and thus with liberals is Legacy Pledge Jonah's side of the street). Then in a shock cut worthy of "the foundation of the city of... Imperial Rome" (though in fairness Buñuel was a surrealist, not a psychopath) Williamson speeds to his primary target:

Elizabeth Warren is going to look terrific in those mirrored aviator sunglasses and peaked captain’s hat. She’s spent half her life playing dress-up, morally — pretending to be an Indian — so she may as well dress the part of her aspirations. “Who are you wearing to the state dinner? Oscar de la Renta? Prada? Pinochet?”

Oh, yeah, Williamson skipped Pinochet, too, until it was time to compare the senior senator for Massachusetts to a fancy dictator he hadn't used yet. Williamson says Warren is in a panic because "her entire party lurches in a chávista direction" -- presumably meaning some members of it want to return the top marginal tax rate to where it was under the notorious Bolshevik John F. Kennedy (who was a reformer among his kind, however, as he reduced it from the 90-plus it was in the heyday of America's Stalin, Dwight Eisenhower).

Since Warren is a female as well as a liberal, Williamson has to drag her a while ("Senator Warren has pretended to be a lot of things. A Cherokee, for one" -- Fox and Friends, make room for one more!) before he gets to her alleged "asset-forfeiture scheme," a 2% wealth tax. You may see some purpose in such a tax in an era of rampaging inequality, flat wages, and nominally middle class families living in terror of sudden impoverishment, but Williamson thinks it exists because Democommies find it "simply morally obligatory to hurt wealthy people."

After more ravings in this line, Williamson gets to his wow finish:

You may not feel like a kulak. You may take comfort in hearing that only the “tippy-top” wealthiest people are to be expropriated in the name of social justice. Those children at Covington Catholic probably didn’t think they were Nazis a week ago, either. 

History is short, if you look at it with the right kind of eyes. Some of you might want to consider looking from Zurich or Singapore.

Ah, so Williamson is thinking of absconding with his thousands and fucking off to some faraway economic safe zone? The Ocasio-Cortez and Warren plans sound better every day!

MAN OF CONSTANT SORROW.

As I was watching the Coen Brothers 60s-folk-scene movie Inside Llewyn Davis I thought: Boy, sometimes the Coens just dump shit on a guy.

It's a trait I never liked in them. In Barton Fink, the hero is treated contemptuously as a poetaster, and in A Serious Man Larry Gopnik is such a schlimazel that we are invited to think, in the uncharitable way humans do when someone chronically can't get out of his own way, that failure is simply his fate.

But Davis has something neither Fink nor Gopnick have: obvious talent. While the Coens make Fink absurdly callow -- Hollywood at first seems to misunderstand him, and then to understand him all too well -- and Gopnick's tenure track doesn't look like much of an achievement, they make Davis a prodigy with a real gift.

Davis also has something else I don't see in those other guys: a glimmer of hope, if not for deliverance at least of recognition.

We meet Davis in 1961 Greenwich Village, singing the hell out of a song about a rambler who's bound to die, and then find out that his own life is almost that bad: his singing partner is dead and his career is stalled; he's broke, without even a decent coat to protect him from a god-awful New York winter; his record label isn't paying him. He's been couch-surfing seemingly forever.

But when a friend's girlfriend -- Jean of "Jim & Jean," a drippy duo -- tells Davis she's pregnant and, though she's not totally sure it's his kid, demands he pay for the abortion, Davis readily accepts. That surprised me because I'd been hearing everywhere that the character is "unlikable" (e.g., "a jerk of a hero"). But I liked him. Maybe because, in some ways, I've been him. But also, Davis behaves pretty honorably for the most part: he cadges flops, rides, and cigarettes, but he doesn't cheat anyone -- that is, he tries to fulfill his obligations, even down to taking care of a cat he has accidentally let out of a friend's apartment. (Other people think nothing of cheating him, though.) He only lets people (and animals) down when his extremely bleak circumstances make it too hard for him to do better.

And [spoilers henceforth] when he's drunk and/or morose he lashes out verbally, without regard for targets, which is what gets him beaten up -- a misfortune which, though it's not bigger than the ones he's already borne, in the context of the film seems huge, in part because the Coens play it out twice, bookending the film; and in part because, by the time we see the second version, we've seen Davis scramble to at last make something of his career, then scramble to fall back on a merchant-seaman gig, failing at both; if we had the impression when we first heard him sing that Davis had to make it somehow, the film's end makes it look impossible.

The question that usually comes up when a hero fails is: What has he done to deserve it? I thought for a while maybe Davis' talent is an illusion -- that what we see when he sings and plays is just what's in his mind, not the actual performance. When he plays at the Gaslight, his normal hang, the audience is little better than polite; when he plays for his infirm father, the old man shits himself.

Most devastating of all is the reaction of the Chicago impresario Mel Grossman (F. Murray Abraham, properly sepulchral). Davis plays him a gorgeous version of "The Death of Queen Jane," and the Coens take care to show us Grossman's stony face as he listens. Might it be a dramatic fake-out? No; when Davis is done, Grossman says, "I'm not seeing money here," and offers him a shot as a backup player, possibly in what will become Peter, Paul & Mary (his suggestion that Davis stay out of the sun to achieve a proper folky look comports with the story of what the real Grossman, Albert, told Mary Travers). Davis refuses, and Grossman suggests in a friendly manner that he go back to playing with his old partner. (Grossman says he never heard of the duo, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had, and knew the partner was a suicide.) Davis says it's a good suggestion.

That's where my own experience of the club world kicked in, and I realized: No, Davis is good -- and it doesn't matter. It turns out Grossman, who knows his business, is more interested in signing Troy Nelson, a young soldier/folksinger we saw play earlier (Stark Sands, disturbingly earnest), because he has a positive effect on people. Davis' effect on people, of course, is the opposite, and that's what hangs him -- angels could be flying out of his throat and people still wouldn't like him. That's show biz.

Why can't Davis see that? His snide remarks about other acts suggest that he thinks he has hold of something real in a world full of bullshit; all the other folks singing sorrowful songs are doing pretty okay and even going places, but Davis is actually suffering, sloshing through frozen puddles and losing breaks left and right, and his songs really reflect his experience. Oscar Isaac's wonderful performance, stunned and wary, gives the impression that what's eating Llewyn Davis has been eating him a long time, and he's made friends with it, as one does. And his singing makes his dilemma easier to understand. His songs are beautiful; if he changes, what happens to them?

So he's stuck in a feedback loop; his outbursts, his insistence on his own way of doing things, might be a reason for his failures, but they're also an understandable reaction to them. Opportunities keep coming, then going. Only one thing comes back to stay, and gives him some solace, some hint that things don't have to always fall apart, and that's the cat, revealed in a moment of grace ("you're forgiving me?").

And that's where some of the new information in the repeated sequence starts to make sense. By then we've seen Davis' triggering outburst, in which naturally he's lashing out at the wrong person, but at the climax of which he cries, "I hate folk music." It's as if he's calling something down on himself.

Among the other revelations is that back on the Gaslight stage, as Davis goes down, Bob Dylan is starting the career that will suck all the air out of American folk music and leave Davis and 99 percent of his comrades to find new careers. In a way, he's giving Davis his real break, delivering the coup de grace to a dream that's been killing him. Also: In a movie where everyone's always singing some variation of farewell, Davis looks after his assailant and says "au revoir" -- till we meet again.

He's beginning to see the light.

Oh, and he learns to keep the cat from getting out.

All the craft elements are excellent, as you'd expect; John Goodman's acerbic jazzman livens up the dead calm in the middle of the movie (and that whole scene where Johnny Five gets pulled out by the cops is some virtuoso filmmaking); Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake make credible folk twerps, and Ethan Phillips and Robin Bartlett lead a lovely troupe of Upper West Side bien pensants. Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography is justly celebrated already for making a cold, blue-and-brown misery out of 60's New York, as is T-Bone Burnett for making sure the tunes are in keeping not only with the era, but also with Davis' melancholy. Kudos also to the production design crew for the African masks and sad lamps.

A COUPLE OF LIVE ONES. While we're on artistic subjects, I think we should acknowledge a couple of fallen heroes. Sydney Pollack was a director of, let us say, likeably modest talents; I have always prefered to think that what I saw on his face as he accepted the Oscar for Out of Africa from Billy Wilder, John Huston and Akira Kurosawa (!) included some embarrassment. But he had his moments, and real charm and skill as an actor. I can't compete with David Edelstein's magnificent summation at New York magazine, but I will add that the very thought of Pollack laying it all out for Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut ("Okay. I think I should also tell you that I was there at the house." Tom Cruise: "Well, what an amazing coincidence." Pollack: "The words practically right out of my mouth") gives me the giggles, and I think he precisely caught the mordant Kubrick tone that baffled so many of the film's critics. It stunned me to learn that he'd been acting since the "Playhouse 90" days. Every time I saw him in a movie or on TV I thought, oh, here's Pollack slumming again. Maybe that's what they mean when they talk about making it look easy.

Also, word just came that Harvey Korman has passed. Korman was always willing to go too far, and on the Carol Burnett show you can often see how eager he was to crack up his fellow players. I still recall the impeccable timing of his reaction to Burnett's gushing Shirley Temple routine: he brought his fingertips to the bridge of his nose and, turning a beat into a drum solo, muttered, "Please, madam, I have diabetes." Blazing Saddles was his apotheosis. The movie pitched its tone on the border of hip and vaudeville, and while Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder worked the hipster angle, Korman came on with a fusillade of stutters, mad walks, lazzi and double-takes straight out of the Orpheum circuit. It played as well with stoned teenagers as it did with elderly variety-show fans. Hail and farewell to the last of the great schtickmen.

ROY’S OSCAR PREDICTIONS, FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.

Regulars will know that I have a childhood love of the dumb old Academy Awards and have been running my own annual predix for years, usually not very successfully but sometimes beating the spread in the Best Picture and Best Actor and other categories. Even if you don’t want the betting advice, you can just share my appreciation of the excellent nominees and the fun of the guessing game.

This year I’ve seen all the nominated films, and you can see my reviews at these links --Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Licorice Pizza, West Side Story, Nightmare Alley, CODA, King Richard, Belfast, The Power of the Dog, and Dune. 

I’ve also seen all the nominated performances and nearly all of the other major nominees -- which in my experience is actually not helpful for predicting, because I can be swayed by quality and pure enthusiasm into error. But I did my best, and included second-guesses. Onward! 

L Best Picture: The Power of the Dog. I don’t see any way around it. I keep hearing intelligent people -- including the New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan -- say that CODA will win Best Picture. But, quite apart from it being the absolute worst film of the batch, CODA doesn’t have the traditional profile of the five previous No Best Director Nominee Best Pictures (Green Book, Argo, Driving Miss Daisy, Grand Hotel and Wings). Some of those films are sentimental in some way, as is CODA, but they also have at least one established star or, at the very least, a grizzled old-timer lead or two. (Sorry, Marlee Matlin!) With its teen lead and funny-horny parents, CODA would be a run-of-the-mill YA picture but for the deaf angle, and I don’t think that’s enough, especially since the Academy has elected art films the past two years in row -- could they backslide into feel-good goo-goo-ga-ga for such an unworthy product? Not out of the question, but to me at best CODA’s more like Breaking Away -- a scrappy also-ran. 

The other real serious contender (though I wouldn't completely count out the sentimental-but-actually-good Belfast) is Dune, an impressive chunk of movie- and money-making. But this is the same Academy that hasn’t put up any Star Wars films for any serious awards since 1978. Since the days of five nominees, at least one Best Picture slot has usually been dedicated to a big, sleek Cadillac of a movie that shows lots of flash -- but these only win when you can take them to heart, and Dune is just too freakish for that. (You could say the same for The Shape of Water, a Cadillac/art film hybrid, but that was also a love story.) Plus, The Power of the Dog is just really, really good. [If not: Dune.]

W Best Actor: Will Smith, King Richard. I really liked his performance; that it was delivered under the hagiographic pressure of Richard Williams’ still-living and powerful daughters makes the achievement even more remarkable. This is a rich field but Will Smith is a beloved figure in Hollywood and these guys really want to give it to him. [If not: Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog.]

L Best Actress: Olivia Colman, The Lost Daughter. This is a tough one. Penelope Cruz is fantastic in Parallel Mothers but even with her moments of maternal horror it’s simply too subtle a performance for the Academy. Nicole Kidman did a creditable Lucille Ball, right down to Ball’s control freakishness -- which deprives her of the big emotional scene(s) that might have advanced her nomination. Spencer is a weird movie and Kristin Stewart’s Diana meets its challenge perfectly, but I think the eccentricity of the project cuts against her. 

That leaves Colman and Jessica Chastain, who in The Eyes of Tammy Faye really kills it; her and the other actors’ playing style is broad but rich in emotional truth, and she makes a woman who’s mainly remembered as a figure of fun into a sympathetic and even, ultimately, heroic figure. (Who didn’t feel that last parallel clip of Chastain and the real Tammy Faye deep in their gut?) The only question is whether the Academy will reward that kind of bravura loser story; it didn’t with Margot Robbie and I, Tonya. 

Colman’s performance, like Cruz’s, is subtle, but the character is not just experiencing shocks but also having an extended breakdown that’s brilliantly delineated by Maggie Gyllenhaal’s script and direction (and Jessie Buckley’s eerie flashback performance). And Colman approaches it with the guts of a cat burglar -- I was at several points shocked by how ugly and blinkered she allowed her character to be, yet I always saw where she was coming from (if only in retrospect) and was rooting for her all the way. Also the Academy has shown with Hilary Swank and Frances McDormand (and Luise Rainer and Katharine Hepburn) that it doesn’t mind giving Best Actress to the same woman within the same decade. [If not: Chastain.]

W Best Director: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog. [If not: Kenneth Branagh, Belfast.]
W Best Supporting Actor: Troy Kotsur, CODA. [If not: Ciarán Hinds, Belfast.]
W Best Supporting Actress: Ariana DeBose, West Side Story. [If not: Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog.]

These are the kind of sucker bets I usually miss, but not this year! I’m sticking with the conventional wisdom. (Here’s my demurrer, though: If some older voters felt themselves giving short shrift to CODA and the gooey sentiment it represents, maybe Branagh has an outside shot.)

W Best Cinematography: Greig Fraser, Dune. All five movies are beautifully shot but Dune, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and Nightmare Alley are the least imaginable without their distinctive look. I would tip it toward Bruno Delbonnel, but the Academy may feel black and white is cheating. And Dune is the Cadillac of the bunch. [If not: Delbonnel, The Tragedy of Macbeth.] 

W Best Screenplay (Adapted): Siân Heder, CODA. It’s ludicrous, but if the news of a CODA groundswell is at all true, this will get past The Power of the Dog. (A spasm of insight would shift it to Gyllenhaal’s structurally brilliant script.) [If not: Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter.]

L Best Screenplay (Original): Adam McKay and David Sirota, Don’t Look Up. I was sure the backlash this film got from liberal know-betters would redound in the film industry, but this actually won the Writers Guild of America Award, among others. I guess it’s because Adam McKay does writing that really feels written -- almost as much as Aaron Sorkin, but he’s not up this year. [If not: Kenneth Branagh, Belfast.] 

L Best Film Editing: Myron Kerstein and Andrew Weisblum, tick, tick… BOOM! As the year’s big-movie nominee, Dune should tend to prevail in craft awards unless wildly outclassed, and I frankly admire that Joe Walker and Denis Villeneuve made sense of a convoluted story and kept the battle scenes intelligible. But the underdog rumblings for tick, tick… BOOM!, unlike the rumblings for CODA, make sense to me: It’s such a brilliant assemblage of a messy story (with a first-time director), and it catches the rhythm of both the music and the lead’s hyperactivity. [If not: Walker, Dune.]

W Best Original Score: Hans Zimmer, Dune. As important as the unified visual style of Dune is, I can’t imagine it without the score -- it’s mixed way loud whenever no one is talking and with its blend of noises and actual music it really carries the far-outness of the thing -- it's practically an athletic composing performance.  [If not: Jonny Greenwood, The Power of the Dog]

L Best Art Direction: Tamara Deverell and Shane Vieau, Nightmare Alley. Dune has a great unified vision but so do all the contenders, and -- well, the nearly-expressionistic Nightmare Alley sets are just too good. Also, in this category, the past trumps the future. [If not: Adam Stockhausen and Rena DeAngelo, West Side Story.]

W Best Make-Up: The Eyes of Tammy Faye. [If not: House of Gucci.]

W Best Song: "No Time to Die," No Time to Die, Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell. [If not: “Sometimes You Do,” Four Good Days, Diane Warren.]

W Best Sound: Dune. [If not: West Side Story.]

W Best Visual Effects: Dune. [If not: Oh who are we kidding.]

W Best Costume Design: Cruella. [If not: Cyrano.]

These I am really, really just guessing at:

L Best Animated Feature: Flee.
W Best Documentary Feature: Summer of Soul*.
W Best International Film: Drive My Car.
L Best Live Action Short: On My Mind.
W Best Documentary Short: The Queen of Basketball.
W Best Animated Short: The Windshield Wiper.

Place your bets [not with me, I’m unlicensed] and see you tonight! (Oh BTW, cutting eight categories from the telecast including Editing, Score, and Production Design is straight-up bullshit.)

*UPDATE: One hour since posting, I have already copped out on the Documentary Feature category -- I figure if they give Flee Best Animated Feature they'll feel they've done their bit, while Summer of Soul is a blast of joy that people really want in their lives. OK, I'll stop fiddling with it! 

UPDATE 2, 7:20 pm: Just letting you true vipers know they've started giving out the pre-ceremony Oscars and I'm doing great: Got Best Sound, Best Doc Short, and Best Animated Short right!  They gave Best Live Action Short to Riz Ahmed's anti-racist anti-fascist The Long Goodbye, which I thought was too pushy-prop but apparently they liked it. (I did like the rap, though.) So I'm three for four so far, hooray! 

UPDATE 3, 7:45 pm: But now I'm fading! Dune took Best Editing and Best Production Design. But it also won Best Score and The Eyes of Tammy Faye won the makeup award. It's not too late for me to pull it out.

UPDATE 4. Three hosts is [said with a rich lady gangsta lilt] attrition by addition [dance move]. 

UPDATE 5. That's just a matter of timing. Look, by herself Schumer is a stitch, especially making fun of Leonardo DiCaprio and young girls. The Steve Martin gag still works! 

UPDATE 6. After Ariana DeBose's speech I feel like a little theater kid sitting on the floor in front of the TV sniffling. Brava! 

UPDATE 7. I'm doing great but am mainly commenting on Twitter -- to the extent possible, because I want to relax and enjoy these. But you know me -- I'm a kibbitzer. 

UPDATE 8. Someone should have told Will Smith that Frank Sinatra never smacked people around when the cameras were rolling.  

UPDATE 9. Well. I still think CODA is a drag, but one of the venerable Oscar traditions is bitching about how Oscar doesn't know what it's talking about, and my 73% score is not so bad. So, really, we're all winners! From Hollywood for Ugly People, Good Night!