My Favorite Gene Hackman Line Readings

I know, I know. My eulogy for Gene Hackman argued that he was such a quality actor, he did not even need lines to impart character and feeling. And that’s still true. But movies haven’t been silent since 1927, baby, and though I feel like modern movies would benefit not so much from wordlessness as more attention to visual storytelling, there is also so much character and feeling that can be imparted through line readings. Even more than that, some actors can take certain lines that are dead on arrival and then revive them. Hackman could do both. See below.

“I heard that one myself, Bob. Hell, I even thought I was dead ‘til I found out it was just that I was in Nebraska.” – “Unforgiven” (1992). It’s everything, but it’s chiefly the way he says “Nebraska.” He emphasizes the second syllable by stretching it out, bringing the vast, desolate prairie of the state to life in his elocution and in doing so, improbably, incredibly inverting the neighboring state’s “Is this heaven?” “No, it’s Iowa.” 

“It was just a bunch of N*zi goons.” – “The Package” (1989). As a green beret who finds himself trying to prevent an assassination, the way Hackman says this line, dismissively, with both a literal and figurative shrug, is not making light of their abhorrent ideology, not at all, but rightly reducing it to gum on his shoe.

“Trials are too important to be left up to juries.” – “Runaway Jury” (2003). It’s a trailer line, meaning a line that effectively describes the entire movie, one in which Hackman’s diabolical jury consultant works to swing a trial in favor of his wealthy clients. Yet, Hackman sells it by saying it in such a way to convey how his character is selling something, a service, the little leading chuckle at the end and the fiendish winkle in his eye deftly conveying not so much that the actor is on the joke but that the character is in on the joke, a well-heeled huckster giving you his signature pitch.

“Well, keep your strength in the dribble, alright.” – “Hoosiers” (1986). There’s the moment during the regional finals when the god-fearing bench player Strap is unexpectedly thrust into action and answers the bell and when Hackman’s Coach Norman Dale asks what’s gotten into him, Strap replies, matter-of-factly, “The Lord. I can feel his strength.” And Dale’s reply, gleaned from the two critical baskets Strap scores coming without bouncing the ball even a single time, is a line that Hackman does not render mean-spirited like a non-believer telling a believer he’s full of crap, but more akin to a semi-bemused matter-of-fact strict believer of his own in basketball fundamentals.

“Are you listening to me?” “Yes, I am!” – “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001). True, few lines have ever made me LLOL (literally laugh out loud) in a movie theater louder than Hackman in this same movie saying, “This is my adopted daughter Margot Tennenbaum,” giving it a real ring of familiar formality, an asshole who does not quite know he’s an asshole, but it’s this line, “Yes, I am” that I think of most. It happens when his son Chas (Ben Stiller) is ordering his father Royal (Hackman) to stay from his sons, Royal’s grandsons, but he’s not sure his dad seems to be hearing. “Are you listening?” Chas demands and the parenthetical instruction in West Anderson and Owen Wilson’s screenplay is “screams” which is exactly how Stiller reads it. Royal’s response in the screenplay, however, contains no such parenthetical and the line “Yes, I am” concludes with a period rather than an exclamation. But Hackman does not just say it; he screams it right back; as he does the following line, “I think you’re having a nervous breakdown!”

Wes Anderson often likes to employ symmetrical frames with his actors looking directly into the camera, essentially opening a portal between them and us. This scene is symmetrically framed, too, though the actors are not looking at us, and yet, Hackman opens that portal, nonetheless. He opens it by seeming to respond to Stiller in the moment, an actor utterly alive to his character, to his scene, to the camera. 

In Memoriam: Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman, dead at 95, was described in some obituaries as a Movie Star and in some obituaries as an Everyman, two contradictions in type that go to show how he occupied a unique place in the firmament of cinema. He was a late bloomer who emerged during the era of so-called New Hollywood, when the idea of what constituted American movies was changing and the idea of what constituted American movie stars was changing too. That’s why despite resembling a truck driver, or a doorman, as Steven Hyden put it a decade ago, Hackman still became someone on par with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. He also brought his own notorious temperamental edginess to his roles, evocative of how a movie star’s personality tends to write over a scripted part, and yet, he vanished into those roles anyway, inhabiting his characters down to the bone so that you could hardly tell it was him, achieving the supreme state of naturalism, acting as being. Consider “The Firm.” Tom Cruise is acting so hard you can practically see the sweat stains while Hackman appears not to try at all, carving a quiet, nigh impossible sympathy for his villain out of thin air. 

That is not to say Hackman did nothing. Far from it. He considered his parts, he made choices. In a 2011 interview with Michael Hainey for GQ, he mentions a seemingly throwaway moment in “The French Connection” when his crude, dogged detective Popeye Doyle makes a pass at a woman and upon being brushed off, tosses a cruller over his shoulder as a key to unlocking his character. He could take the smallest of behaviors and then build a whole person from them. It’s that sort of attention to detail that made him a third thing: an actor’s actor, admired by his most venerable of peers for commitment and technique. Of course, cinema is generally defined as a director’s medium and as the myriad stories Hackman emotionally and vocally brawling with directors on set illuminate, he was not fond of them. “I don’t think he likes directors,” Maura Tierney told The AV Club in 2014 of her “Welcome to Mooseport” costar. “I mean, he did, I believe, tell the director at some point to, uh… [Starts to laugh.] “Will you just shut the fuck up and go over there and say ‘action’ or whatever it is you do?” 

That echoes experiences described with the actor by Wes Anderson during “The Royal Tenenbaums” and David Anspaugh during “Hoosiers,” among others. But by Anspaugh’s own admission, Hackman preferred working on sets with tension and would therefore seek to deliberately create an uncomfortable environment, even if, as Anspaugh noted, the actor would not exactly apologize for it. And whether that method was fair, and whether he took direction or not, he intuitively knew what a director needed, and what a movie needed too. He could fill up the screen and blow his stack with the best, as he did in “Crimson Tide.” In playing the commander of a nuclear submarine warring with his second-in-command (Denzel Washington) he seemed just as much to be playing what he really was, an actor who was king of the action-thriller, and who was now daring his co-star to take that crown, living the part in a way Washington answered. But Hackman also knew better than anyone the value of economy on the big screen; no one effused the ancient adage less is more with such precision. 

A shot from The Conversation that is the perfect symmetry of acting and directing.

When I saw “Hoosiers” at the Music Box Theatre in 2013, Chelcie Ross, a longtime actor who cut his teeth in Chicago and who played Hackman’s semi-nemesis in that movie, spoke, and said his co-star was always revising paragraphs to sentences and sentences to words and words to nothing at all. It was an apt description of the Hackman method. In that movie, he carried the weight of his character’s volatile past in his very air just as in “The Conversation” he seemed to dig a metaphorical moat between himself and the whole world just as in “Twice in a Lifetime” he needed no words beyond mere minor affirmations in the opening dinner table scene to convey a man at once happy in the presence of his family and dissatisfied with life. In the director’s commentary for his 1997 thriller “Breakdown”, Jonathan Mostow noted how his own leading man Kurt Russell would argue for certain lines of dialogue to be cut “because I can act it.” There was never an actor who could act it better than Gene Hackman.

Anora

We meet Ani (Mikey Madison), short for “Anora,” in the middle of a lap dance. That’s because it’s her job, and despite the neon lights and music, it feels no different than, say, peddling candy at Coney Island, another location that writer and director Sean Baker’s movie briefly visits; it’s hard out here. So, hard in fact, that when a wealthy Russian playboy, Ivan (Mark Edelshteyn), pays Ani to be his girlfriend for the week, a la Edward Lewis and Vivian Ward, and whisks her away to Las Vegas and asks her to marry him, she agrees. She is not swept off her feet so much as swept up in his extravagant lifestyle, all embodied in how Baker, who triples as editor, composes this sequence as essentially one breathless rush. And though Ani insists on a 3-carat ring in the wake of his proposal, suggesting she still grasps the transactional nature of their relationship, when Baker drops Robin Schulz’s reworking of Take That’s “Greatest Day” on the soundtrack in the wake of their wedding, the garish Vegas lights they stand beneath manage to momentarily gleam, and you might even believe the song’s words, as she might, that the future is theirs to find.

It isn’t, though. Alas, Ivan is merely the idiot son, to quote the Handsome Furs, of Russian Oligarchs, and upon learning of his sudden marriage, they dispatch two Armenian thugs, Toros (Karren Karagulian) and Garnik (Vache Tovmasyan), and one Russian thug, Igor (Yura Borisov), to round up the newlyweds and annul the union. An Armenian Orthodox priest, Toros is literally summoned in the middle of a baptism, suggesting money always comes before God. The job proves more difficult than expected, however, when Ivan flees, going on a bender of strip clubs, sort of the idiot son’s version of running away home. His jilted wife and his peeved pursuers, then, form an unlikely quartet, at once aligned and in opposition, chasing Ivan across Brooklyn as a “Pretty Woman”-like fantasy recalibrates as a black-hearted comedy.

Indeed, though “Anora” is an independent, it often feels transplanted from Hollywood’s Golden Age, like 90 years ago this might have been a vehicle for Mae West. There is a distinct screwball energy to the chase scenes, in ways both big and small, in the out-and-out angry desperation effused by Karragulianas as Toros, and in the dumplings Garnik uses to nurse a wound in lieu of ice. Yet, at the same time, Baker’s editing is not always fast-paced, lingering on the real menace in the air, as in the sequence where Garnik and Igor try to corral the scrappy Ani. It’s deliberately and effectively unsettling; I kept laughing and then I kept feeling guilty for laughing.

Ultimately, though, “Anora” is not quite as difficult nor revelatory as these tangled sensations would suggest. True, there is something moving in the emergent Alice/Uncas like relationship of Ani and Igor, two physical laborers in their respective ways, proletariats under the thumb of the bourgeoisie. But the class commentary is not as nimbly sewn into the plot as a Golden Age comedy and what’s more never cuts all that deep, as obvious as the divide between Ani’s house beneath the train tracks and Ivan’s on the water. When Toros gives a maid a bigger-than-usual tip to clean up Ivan’s bigger-than-usual mess, the capping shot of the maid is as funny as it is revealing, the movie itself treating her as Toros does, uninterested in her plight, abandoning her just as he does.

“Anora” is not uninterested in Ani’s plight, obviously, it’s front and center, but it also never entirely brings her to life. Madison’s performance is lively, often incredibly so, but that is not quite the same thing. And by rendering “Anora” so plot-forward, Baker essentially yokes his characters to it, rarely stopping to have them explicate ideas or thoughts, meaning that any sense of character is what the actors bring. Maybe that’s less important with the secondary people but it’s a significant flaw where Ani is concerned. And for all of Madison’s energy, who Ani truly is and how she feels is much less clear, underlined in how we never quite know if she’s really in love with Ivan and going after him on blind faith, or if she’s hoping to ultimately play his family for a big payday. Maybe she doesn’t know herself, but if so, that inner struggle does not emerge, and it means what would be an utterly brutal punch of a denouement only half-connects. 

A Wholly Debatable (Un)Definitive Ranking of Star Trek Movies

Reflecting the weird state of our cinematic present, the 14th “Star Trek” movie, “Star Trek: Section 31” (is this like “Leonard Part 6?”), was released in January. Made specifically for the Paramount + streaming network, it is billed as a television movie, like “Murder by Moonlight,” though calling a movie released to streaming a television movie makes me think of the co-owner of the pizza place where I worked in high school when I asked him whether he thought the peanut butter or the jelly was more important in a PB&J: “What the hell’s the difference?” Indeed. And though I have more of a history with “Star Trek” then you might think in so much as my mom used to watch reruns of the original “Star Trek” show on the little monochrome TV in our kitchen that typically aired before dinner, I am no Trekkie, not even close, a needle starting at zero going the other way, to quote Neil McCauley, the legendary thief who probably never even knew who Gene Roddenberry was. And yet, if many others ranked “Star Trek” movies in light of “Section 31,” why couldn’t I? My list may not be valuable, nor enlightening, and definitely not necessary, God no, but it could be interesting, or at the very least, infuriating. And besides, do you want to read another Oscar take this morning about who should host or what should have won or what it all means and what in the world was Timothée Chalamet thinking with that yellow suit, or do you want to read a Nicole Kidman and Jean Harlow fan rank “Star Trek” movies? That’s what I thought.

A Wholly Debatable (Un)Definitive Ranking of Star Trek Movies

12/13. Star Trek: Nemesis / Star Trek Beyond (2002, 2016). The two I haven’t seen. That rules me out of order, I know, but this whole list is out of order. 

11. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998). I have seen this one, but I confess, I cannot recall a single thing about it.

10. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). The main problem, as I see it, and this is true of its 2009 predecessor (see below) too, which I still rather liked, is that Chris Pine is doing a better James T. Kirk in “Into the Woods” than he’s doing in “Star Trek.”

 

9. Star Trek Generations (1994). The whole thing with Kirk and Picard just never felt right. Like Coverdale/Page. 

8. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984). Most notable for being Kramer’s favorite “Star Trek” movie. 

 
7. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). I always admired this one for zigging right outta the gate, but still, the inaugural “Star Trek” movie one is a little too much like 2005, the spiritual sequel between “2001” and “2010.”

6. Star Trek: First Contact (1996). I don’t have time to do the research, and I wouldn’t even be sure where to begin if I did, but there must be some sort of corollary between “Star Trek” enjoyed by non-Trekkies and John Kay & Steppenwolf appearing on the soundtrack.

5. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Unlike Kramer this was Jerry’s preferred “Star Trek” movie, and I can see that, but also, see #2 where I elaborate a bit more.

4. Star Trek (2009). J.J. Abrams’s aesthetic eventually wore out its welcome and exposed its limitations which means this reboot now stands as the definitive expression of his doing-125-in-a-65 but somehow holding it all together style, highlighted by literalizing a nostalgia trip, recalling a more innocent, amusing age of fan service.   

3. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989). This is insane, I know, but hear me out. Because while the 2009 reboot was very much J.J. Abrams’s movie, the truest auteur movie in the “Star Trek” canon is “The Final Frontier,” a vainglorious calamity made entirely in the image of its director, which is why I cannot help but sort of love it. 

2.Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). Ricardo Montalban was legitimately moving as Kahn, but I confess, I prefer Christopher Plummer more blatantly having fun as General Chang. Plummer channels his character’s penchant for Shakespeare into a Shakespearean kind of performance, casting the Klingon Court in the light of the Globe Theatre, not breaking the fourth wall in the traditional sense but somehow allowing us to feel as if we are in his presence and he in ours, nevertheless. Plus, Iman as the greatest of all Kirk love interests because she brings a little diva energy opposite the biggest diva of ‘em all.

1.Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). It is the greatest sci-fi screwball comedy ever made, and with a green message to boot. What’s not to love? 

That green message reminds me how I was recently reminded of William Shatner’s real trip to space aboard Businessman Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space shuttle in 2021. Variety published an excerpt a year later from Shatner’s book reflecting on that voyage, how he was overcome in “being confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands.” I do not doubt the sincerity of his feelings, nor the feelings of other space travelers who have experienced the so-called Overview Effect, but boy, talk about a cosmic kind of As a Father of Daughters moment. I was struck with my own sadness at the thought of people having to go all the way to space to grasp the preciousness of Earth. If all 8 billion people down here have to go all the way up there to get it, what hope do we have? In fact, it brings to mind DeForest Kelley’s incredulous observation in “Star Trek IV:” “You mean I have to die to discuss your thoughts on death?”

State of Play / Random Awards 2024 (truncated ed.)

The more movies you watch, the more you realize the Academy Awards are merely a drop in the bucket of film. Even so, I have always loved the Oscars. Because films are movies too and movies need a little glitz, glamour, some searchlights, and giant self-regard. Yet, as the 97th Academy Awards approach, I struggle to remember in the 30-plus years that I have been watching them when they have felt so small, so unglamorous, so inessential. It is not just the wrenching fallout of the Los Angeles wildfires, nor the pall cast by America’s Useful-Idiot-in-chief casting our lot, apparently, with the new Axis of Evil in addition to all the other acts of virulent stupidity. No, it’s the movie themselves. It was a year so uninspiring that for the third time in the last four, I was not even compelled to compile a Top 10 list, underlined in the underwhelming collection of Oscar nominees that not only failed to enter the zeitgeist but seem to suggest, as Matthew Gasda did for his Substack, the Academy Awards have been gamed.

Now that is not entirely a new phenomenon. Before optimization became the trendy buzzword of the tech bros who would change your life (while stealing its pertinent details), studios were always seeking to game the awards system. Mark Harris’s book Pictures at a Revolution is partly about how “Dr. Doolittle” luncheoned its way to a Best Picture nod in 1967 while Miramax optimized its own kind of Oscar movie in the 90s and the aughts and then relentlessly, viciously promoted them. Many of those Miramax pictures were, in fact, just outgrowths of what critic Dwight McDonald once deemed Midcult. In his piece, Gasda quotes McDonald explaining Midcult: “the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity [covered] with a cultural fig leaf.” In other words, rather than focus on making a quality film that might ultimately appeal to the Academy, you reverse engineer it by working backwards from the Academy’s taste. The bigger problem, however, is that now this suboptimal approach to art is threatening to become the American movie industry’s prevailing method. 

In a comprehensive piece for N+1 Will Tavlin guides us through the streaming titan Netflix’s entire history from a mail rental company chewing up Blockbuster to a vertically integrated behemoth that is reshaping, if not ruining, the film industry by putting the cart before the horse, as they say, and working backwards to create movies by harnessing the data of viewers to then turn around and meet their expectations rather than seek to surprise of subvert them. Movies are no longer the end, as Tavlin writes, they are the means to the end, the end being subscribers. Netflix acquires and then keeps them by relentlessly churning out content, ensuring there is always something else on; you can log off, but you can never leave. They produce this content in-house, a la the old studio system but without a genuine commitment to craft, evoking a modern variation of “The Producers” in so much as a rushed, shoddy production can be more beneficial than a thoughtful, solidly made one. Their watered-down movies might as well be television, blurring the line once and for all between the two, an art form intended for the big screen reduced to what may as well be reruns of “Caroline in the City” on a Tuesday afternoon. 

In an interview on Defector’s flagship podcast The Distraction, Tavlin was asked by host Drew Magary if he saw any way out of this predicament. Tavlin cited federal intervention as potentially the best remedy, as it was in the 1940s when the Paramount decrees negated the big studios’ own vertical integration. He seemed fatalistic about this proposition, though, and it’s hard not to understand why, what with an American government currently being run by a plainly stupid philistine who seems determined in his way to recreate Hollywood in the image of the People’s Republic of North Korea. His maniac second-in-command, meanwhile, is upending government agencies in part by firing scores of people and deploying A.I. software instead and it’s easy to imagine a near future where Netflix does the same, cutting out the middleman between data collecting and artificial intelligence entirely. Distraction co-host David Roth took hope that the janky product this type of method is already eliciting might also elicit pushback, an outcry for a true human handprint. Me, I don’t know, my faith in people has wilted significantly the last few years. 

Still, I did not want to end on such a hopeless note. And so, even if I felt just as unmotivated to compile a traditional Random Awards list as I did a Top 10, I had, nevertheless, jotted down a few Random Awards throughout the year that are vintage in quality and did not deserve to sit in the drafts folder forever. There is quality out there, somewhere. Therefore, a truncated Random Awards. 

Random Awards 2024 (truncated ed.)

Her eminence Nicole Kidman appearing live via satellite from her couch to present the truncated edition of Cinema Romantico’s Random Awards.

Line Reading of the Year: “Hoo boy, Lousy Carter, what the fuck?” - Olivia Thirlby, Lousy Carter. In her immaculate drawing-a-blank deadpan and real emphasis of that concluding question mark, Thirlby hysterically encapsulates just what her character is doing in this moment, delivering the eulogy for an eponymous character who never quite believed in the worth of his own existence. 

Best Use of Wikipedia: Rebel Ridge. If using a search engine is typically a lazy storytelling device, in this Netflix (irony!) action-drama, a bunch of small-town southern cops only realizing a few moments too late what they are up against upon consulting everybody’s favorite free online encyclopedia not only turns a reveal into a hysterical punchline but a hysterical evocation of their own laziness for failing to look into things. 

Best Product Placement: Green and Red M&Ms®, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point. A movie not so much about nostalgia as imbuing nostalgia through aesthetic, “Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point” creates a collage of emotions and feelings and sensory memories more than it unspools a narrative, like a slo-mo shot of so many holiday-themed chocolate confectionaries being poured into a bowl. As they were, I felt myself pulverized by flashes of holiday memory, of a gold-colored Anderson Erickson eggnog carton, of the blue Royal Dansk Danish butter cookie tin my grandmother would bring each December, of Holiday Greetings from Budweiser, in one breath laying bare how Christmas is inextricably intertwined with consumerism.

Best Laugh: Nicole Kidman, Babygirl. As I noted in my review, when another character humorously suggests she always assumed that Kidman’s character was raised by wolves or robots, Kidman’s laugh in response sounds robotic, a real live human being chortling in A.I. It’s a vocally fried chuckle on the level of Meredith Marks, which I understand might not mean anything to most of you but trust me, in the space of that laugh, Nicole touches the face of God.

The Ruffalo (most unsung performance in a movie this year): Hailey Gates, Challengers. As Helen, with whom lothario Patrick (Josh O’Connor) goes on a blind date solely in the hopes of getting a place to sleep for the night, Gates’s character is there to emphasize Patrick’s cruelty and provide a counterweight when the woman he really loves, Tashi (Zendaya), unexpectedly appears. But Gates makes all that count so much more by turning her character into a living, breathing human by effusing an insecurity that borders on tragic. It’s truly a supporting turn and the true supporting performance of the year. 

Best Metaphor: American Star, American Star. Granted, the 1940 ocean liner SS America that wrecked off the coast of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands in 1994 and was just lying there to be gaped at for three decades before finally disintegrating and collapsing into the sea last year, might be an obvious metaphor for a hitman (Ian McShane) aging out of that life and life altogether, an anvil dropped on the head more than merely on the nose. And yet, in the conveyance of this metaphor, and the grave resignation with which McShane receives it, that gargantuan nature is itself an apt metaphor for how it made me feel when at movie’s close, the ocean liner just...disappears. Is that the world, I wondered, passing me by? (Don’t answer that.)

2001 Oscar Best Original Song: Revisited

The nominees for Best Original Song at the upcoming 97th Academy Awards include two songs from “Emilia Pérez,” an original Elton John number from the documentary for his Farewell Yellow Brick Road concert tour, “Like a Bird” from “Sing Sing,” not to be confused with (God help us all) “Like a Bird” by Tiffany T*ump, and “The Journey” by Diane Warren from Tyler Perry’s “The Six Triple Eight.” This is Warren’s 16th Oscar nomination, five shy of Meryl Streep’s 21 Oscar nominations, which are 33 short of John Williams’s 54 and 38 short of Walt Disney’s 59. So, Warren has a long way to go to approach the record, but still, 16 is an impressive haul, even if she’s never won, recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 2022 after getting stiffed all those years. Were all her nominations truly earned?

Gees, I don’t know, and I wasn’t about to scour every year to find out. And though I originally intended to go back to the scene of her first nomination in 1987 for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from “Mannequin,” which stood no chance in the year of “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life” from “Dirty Dancing,” well, in my Best Original Song revisitations, I had already traveled back in time to the 80s, as well as the 90s, and so I figured it was time to bring this pointless exercise into the current century. When Warren was nominated in 2001, did she deserve it given what else might have been nominated that year, and whatever did win, should it have, at least if I, and I alone, were the nominating committee? Let’s find out!

2001 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees & Winner (in bold):

“Until...” from Kate & Leopold – Music and Lyrics by Sting

“If I Didn’t Have You” from Monsters, Inc. – Music and Lyrics by Randy Newman

“May It Be” from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – Music and Lyrics by Enya, Nicky Ryan, and Roma Ryan

“There You’ll Be” from Pearl Harbor – Music and Lyrics by Diane Warren

“Vanilla Sky” from Vanilla Sky – Music and Lyrics by Paul McCartney

Of course, we are required to remember right up front that Best Original Song is strictly limited to original songs in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star” by Linda Scott in “Mulholland Drive” and “These Days” by Nico in “The Royal Tenenbaums” are ineligible. Add “69 Police” by David Holmes in “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Beat It” by Michael Jackson in “Zoolander,” and Jamie O’Neal’s version of “All by Myself” in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and, as always, my God, what a category. Alas. 

The unexpected box office hit “Save the Last Dance” hearkens back to the glorious era of Julia Stiles: Movie Star just as the movie itself hearkened back to the golden era of the movie theme song with Fredro Starr and Jill Scott’s “Shining Through” which itself hearkened back to (borrowed from) Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” which is going to touch any Gen-Xer’s soul. As such, it takes the place of Warren’s “Pearl Harbor” theme. Sorry, Diane, you’ll have to settle for 15 nominations. 

At the 2014 Tony Awards, Neil Patrick Harris gave Sting a lap dance during a performance of “Sugar Baby” from “Hedwig and The Angry Inch.” And though the 74th Academy Awards might have finally been ready to give Oscars to two African Americans for leading roles, it probably was not ready for John Cameron Mitchell to give Jack Nicholson a lap dance on live TV. But that’s not my problem. I wish it would have happened, and even if it didn’t, “Sugar Baby” from the movie version of “Hedwig and The Angry Inch” still should have been nominated. And in an ironic twist that I think the writer of “Every Breath You Take” could appreciate, it replaces Sting’s “Until...” and knocks him down to three Oscar nominations all-time.

I’ll be honest, I am desperate to give Natalie Imbruglia a retroactive Oscar nomination for “Cold Air,” her contribution to the “Y Tu Mamá También” soundtrack, but then I re-listened to Enya’s nominated song. And while I might contend the LOTR trilogy is terribly overrated (to paraphrase Elaine Benes talking about “The English Patient,” stop telling your stupid story about the stupid ring and just throw it in the fire already), Enya is not. She stays. 

Paul McCartney had earned both an Oscar nomination and a win thirty-one years before in 1970 for “Let It Be.” But do you know who has never been nominated, before 2001 or after? Her majesty Mariah Carey, that’s who, the same woman who remains but one elusive #1 hit away from tying, ahem, The Beatles for most all-time. And while “Glitter” was a cultural punching bag, set those preconceived notions aside and the fact is, “Want You” should have been a hit itself. A #1 hit? Eh, I’m not sure, maybe more like #26, but a hit, nevertheless, and imagine Mariah following Enya at that Academy ceremony. 

Newman’s victory that year was a big deal given his scads of prior nods and no victory to show for it. You can see how big a deal it was in the reaction after his name is announced and I hate to take that away from him. But he has since gone on to win again, in 2010 for “We Belong Together” from “Toy Story 3,” whereas the late Adam Schlesinger was nominated only once in 1997 for penning the title track to “That Thing You Do!,” losing to Celine Dion’s unbeatable Rose and Jack ballad. And so, with the benefit of hindsight, but also with objective analysis vis-a-vis their two songs and every other eligible song, it is absolutely clear in retrospect that the Schlesinger penned “Pretend to Be Nice” from “Josie and the Pussycats” was the real Best Original Song in 2001. [Bangs gavel.]

Juror #2

Twelve jurors repair to the deliberation room and take an initial vote on the defendant’s guilt or innocence. All of them seem to lean toward guilt, save for one, “Juror #2,” Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), his trepidation emphasized by the heroic figure he cuts, hands on hips, gazing out a window. It evokes the window motif of Sidney Lumet’s celebrated “12 Angry Men” (1957), though Kemp does not quite evoke Henry Fonda’s Juror #8, the one who insists on seeking the truth. Without spoiling anything, suffice to say that Clint Eastwood’s 40th feature film is not about seeking the truth because it reveals the truth almost straight away. Instead, “Juror #2” becomes something more like a courtroom thriller as excruciating moral dilemma that deftly manages to bring itself to a conclusion without giving a definitive answer to the knotty questions it raises. And even if Jonathan Abrams’s screenplay is cloying enough to make the prosecuting attorney’s name Faith (Toni Collette), and even if it relies on a fair number of plot and character contrivances to keep it running, these are effortlessly papered over not just by the performances (I especially liked how grudging Collette makes her character’s turn away from careerism) but by the 94-year-old Eastwood’s patented just-the-facts filmmaking approach. Essentially, “Juror #2” takes the old E.M. Forster observation that “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” and then ruthlessly dissects it bit by bit, rendering a portrait of a key American institution that ultimately is only as good and trustworthy as the complicated people within it.