Movie Nation

People are still working themselves into a tizzy of outrage over who winds up winning Hollywood’s annual popularity contest and laughably inaccurate recognition of cinematic excellence.

Spike Lee reminds us that he hasn’t mellowed with age, taking all the acceptance speech time from the other winning writers for his multi-handed script Oscar for “BlackKklansman,” trying to storm out of the Kodak Theater when “Green Book” wins best picture and unloading on the movie to one and all when he loses.

Classy. Petulant, privileged and same old prickly bantam rooster, Spike.

I was rooting for a “BlackKklansman” upset and for Spike to get his due as best director. But all he did was remind me of the many times we’ve spoken in interviews, which sometimes went pleasantly and often did not due to his awful mood.

Justin Chang unloads in the Los Angeles Times that “Green Book” is the “worst Oscar winner since ‘Crash.'”

He forgot last year, but never mind.

Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan exchange “sideeyes” over “Green Book” winning Best Picture. So?

And on and on it goes. Over an award handed out by a vastly expanded and more diverse Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which still gets it wrong and pretty much always has. Same old Oscars.

But I think Chang accidentally hit on something pertinent to the whole argument. What do “Crash” and “Green Book” have in common? As I said in my review of “Green Book,” it’s “cinematic comfort food for the holidays.” “Crash” had that going for it, too. Optimism.

Comforting to whom? The vast majority of moviegoers, who want to feel good, even if the ugly truth is given a fresh coat of assuaged guilt, would be the answer.

“Crash,” manipulative as it was, covering a range of LA experiences re: race and crime and a roiled populace, was in the end, on the upbeat side. Good performances by Cheadle and others, a brittle turn by Bullock — and the film’s win was universally ridiculed.

“Crash,” like “Green Book,” made the viewer “feel” something. That’s the biggest thing they have in common. Anybody “feel” anything over the death in “A Star is Born,” over the life of privilege contrasted with powerlessness in “Roma,” “The Favourite” or “BlackKklansman?”

No? Then there’s my point.

Perhaps the only “worse” outcome this year would have been a “Bohemian Rhapsody” Best Picture win.

Seeing Javier Bardem joyously singing and dancing to “We Will Rock You” in the show’s opening number was THE telling moment of this year’s Academy Awards. “Bohemian Rhapsody” made Queen fans feel the way their songs and concert performances used to make us feel. Despicable director, lip-syncing star and all, it had that going for it.

Mahershala Ali seemed to be carrying the weight of “Green Book’s” vigorous social media, and yes “social justice warrior” beatdowns during his Best Supporting acceptance speech — stammering, at a loss for words, guilt-ridden. He didn’t have to accept the nomination, and he read the script. He didn’t have to accept the role.

But he saw something ennobling in the enterprise, the characterizations. As did Viggo Mortensen. They took a flier on Peter Farrelly being able to pull this off, and delivered a winner.

Farrelly? The second most classless performance by a director on Oscar night — ego tripping when he could have made the case for what “Green Book” actually is, what their intentions were, and defused a lot of this hatred. Nope. Read a laundry list of people nobody knows, crack a joke or two, make it all about “me.”

“Green Book” wasn’t the best picture of 2018. You could make the case for “First Reformed,” “Leave No Trace” or “The Favourite.” There were others that could have been nominated.

The rallying around “Roma” and “Black Panther” was misguided and tone deaf and created false expectations for middling movies. That sideeye, Chadwick, was ridic. Your comic book movie, as on-the-nose in its uplift as “Green Book,” deathly dull dialogue and triumphalist pose and all, didn’t deserve a nomination.

Chadwick Boseman’s been better in most every film I’ve seen him in, including the more moving, thrilling and problematic “Get on Up,” which should have been a Best Picture and Best Actor contender years back.

Oscar and the critics’ groups which delight in their “Oscar influence” got that wrong, too.

People remember “The Right Stuff,” “The Martian,” “Being There,” “Dunkirk,” “Loving,” “Get On Up,” “All is Lost” (a personal favorite) even if not everybody remembers which film the Academy voted into Oscar glory.

Who remembers “The Greatest Show on Earth,” which my friend Matt Olien labels “the worst Best Picture winner ever?” Snobs may smirk at “Dances With Wolves,” but there’s a reason it turns on TV constantly. “Do the Right Thing” might have been Spike Lee’s best picture, but with “Field of Dreams” and “Dead Poets Society” up against it, was he “robbed?”

Give it a few years, see if anybody’s still griping about how “Black Panther” was robbed after its formulaic twist on comic book “alternate history” has a sequel or two under its belt and its shortcomings (indifferent performances, cut and paste script, etc.) become obvious even to the oxygen deprived.

“Roma” is already forgotten, save by those who’ve never bothered to watch black and white Fellini classics which were its inspiration.

But the outrage over this Oscars goes on — trolling every moment of the telecast.

Rami Malek lets slip that Freddie Mercury was a “gay man” and Twitter explodes. The character went from being not gay enough for “Bohemian Rhapsody” to not stir up outrage, to its Oscar winning star taking heat for not covering all the nuances in Mercury’s bisexuality (married) in an acceptance speech.

A critic I don’t know had the most hilarious take-down of Malek on Twitter. Alonso Duralde urged Twitter users to “watch ‘Get On Up'” if you want to see a musical biopic in which the star (Chadwick Boseman, whom fanboys know can do no wrong) “did his own singing.”

Judas Priest, man. Are you blind and deaf? Any fool could tell Boseman wasn’t singing there, that was lip-syncing to the one-and-only James Brown. But even so, LOOK IT UP.

It’s enough to make you miss the days when Oscars were handed out pre-Twitter, when just you and your friends could fume over “The English Patient” or Dustin Hoffman winning for “Kramer vs. Kramer” while Peter Sellers went to his grave without an Academy Award.

Yeah, they vote on these awards and yes, they always get it wrong. Pretty much always, anyway.

Long long ago, before he became a Harry Potter character or was immortalized on “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” before his reliable-Liverpool character actor years in films and TV shows and films from “Finding Neverland” to “Robinson Crusoe” to “The Last Kingdom” and “Mary Queen of Scots,” Ian Hart made his mark in film because of his appearance.

He looked a lot like his fellow Liverpudlian, John Lennon. Filmmakers picked up on that and cast him as the iconic Beatle in movies such as “Backbeat” (1994) and most recently, as an aged non-pop star Lennon in “Snodgrass.”

The film that started all that and put Hart on the cinematic radar was a short speculative history feature, something of a landmark in “Queer Cinema,” 1991’s “The Hours and Times.”

Now, this slight, black and white character study, set in Barcelona and built on the notion that the ever-curious/always rebellious Lennon had a fling with Beatles manager Brian Epstein, has been restored for re-release.

It’s interesting historically — depictions of sexuality have progressed far beyond its tentative, 1991 flirting and “tub scene” — and in its spot-on depiction of the John Lennon in 1963, before the British Invasion of America, just as overwhelming fame were about to swallow him, his bandmates and eventually his marriage, culminating in his 1980 murder in New York.

Hart’s 1963 Lennon is cocky and insolent, keenly aware of the class differences a working class Liverpudlian would feel in the presence of a gay sophisticate and worldly Londoner like Epstein, given a buttoned-down and guarded guise by David Angus.

It’s obvious from the moment we meet them, on the flight to Spain. Epstein sips brandy, the disheveled mop-top seated next to him wakes up chewing gum, wanting another cigarette and another Scotch and Coke.

Extra attention from the flight attendant (Stephanie Pack) has already become an entitlement to Lennon.

“She’s just a bird.”

The two touch on “What do you want people to say about you when you’re gone?” Lennon asks the questions, rarely giving away his own ambitions.

Epstein? He wants the world to know that he did his utmost to do right by The Beatles, and “That I came to know myself.”

As they lounge about the Barcelona Ritz, seeking “rest” for Lennon — away from the wife and new baby — and “nothing else,” we know the “nothing else” will turn to what Brian Epstein knows about himself and what the curious Lennon will learn.

“Dr. B. Epstein, Faith Healer and Proctologist,” he jokes, suggestively.

He wants to go to a gay bar, where they pick up another posh (Robin MacDonald), whom Lennon insults into leaving after they get back to the hotel.

Jealous? Losing his nerve over getting a taste of Epstein’s sexuality, which Lennon is constantly asking about?

There’s a tentativeness to “The Hours and Times” that seems as quaint as Epstein’s attraction to the very young and pretty porter (Sergio Moreno) who speaks just enough English to know what the manager of the world’s soon-to-be-most-famous band has on his mind.

Hart’s best moments come in his scene with the smarter-and-more-confident than she looks stewardess, who ends up in his room. His brittle insults, hinting at the guilt he’s carrying over marrying and fathering a child just as fame makes him irresistible to legions, also carry a little “might not be my type” in them.

Epstein is getting the same treatment, moments in the tub aside.

As history that probably never was, “Hours and Times” is more of an artifact of two long-gone ages, the era of its release and the “ancient history” of its setting, when The Beatles weren’t THE BEATLES and homosexuality was illegal in Britain (until 1967).

The slight film is not scholarship, any more than say “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood” is, falling as it does into that posthumous “Let’s claim this or that public figure for ‘our team'” category of gossip.

But Hart’s portrayal of the young Lennon, cocky before the confidence that universal adoration gave swept over him, remains definitive and makes one want to revisit “Backbeat” (where I first interviewed him) and get the fuller picture, Young John as Interpreted by Ian, in living color. Or “colour.”

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with nudity, profanity, alcohol and cigarettes

Cast: Ian Hart, David Angus, Stephanie Pack, Robin MacDonald and Sergio Moreno

Credits: Written and directed by Christopher Munch. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: :58

A post plastic and chemical “return to farming the way it was,” holistic, green, climate saving? Or just a bunch of hippy dreamers?

Cute trailer for this wide release doc.

Saw this trailer attached to “Arctic” the other day. A mid-April release from Bleecker

Street, this one seems poppish and could go either way. But we are intrigued.

Screen Media is releasing this “cursed” production, which once starred Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp?

It’ll reach theaters, then, not under a more prestigious studio’s banner. We know of a “one night only theatrical event,” which is Screen Media’s specialty, after all.  But at least it’ll be released. April 10.

When Tim Tebow gave up his NFL dream and turned to movie producing, it’s no surprise that he sought out a story about two things he knows — faith, and football.

So don’t expect the movie that comes with his name attached to it, “Run the Race,” to come with many surprises. Abrupt tests of faith, misdirection plays that life hurls at the heroes — sure. The aw-shucks, zero-profanity, tinged-with-tragedy story may have “family friendly” written all over it. But the Christianity feels a little shoehorned in, even if it is this faith-based sports drama’s reason for existing.

Tanner Stine and Evan Hofer play teenage brothers, basically raising themselves in tiny Bessemer, Alabama. Zach Truett (Stine) is nicknamed “Zach-attack” on the gridiron. Skinny and chicken-chested he might be, but he’s the wily star running back of the Bessemer Rebels, with dreams of impressing college scouts — particularly one from the University of Florida (Tebow’s alma mater).

Younger brother Dave (Hofer) is the responsible one, who maintains their jobs at the market run by godmother Louise (Frances Fisher). Dave goes to church and has a Bible at his fingertips. He can’t play football thanks to a brain injury a previous season. Not to worry. Zach is “getting us outta here. You have my word on it!”

You know what’s coming. Zach and his good ol’boy party pals get into a beer bust dust-up with some players from a rival school, Zach’s knee is damaged, ending his football season.

Might Dave be able to make the track team, win a scholarship and complete their overall mission, escaping the “trap” of a town they’re stuck in and the drunken father (Kristofer Polaha) who is, to Zach, “just some dude who left us after our mom died?”

Maybe.

There are plenty of signs of life in this conventional “sports is our ticket out” drama. Mykelti Williamson of “Forrest Gump” is spot-on as the motivating, cheer-leading coach who frets more about what an irresponsible kid might have done to “my season” than hos future. The script, of course, rubs that edge off.

Mario Van Peebles is perfectly charismatic as the preacher whose “Somedays” sermons, about things we’ll all get around to “someday,” reach Dave if not the absent Zach.

And there’s cute chemistry with the film’s love interest, the nurse intern Ginger (Kelsey Reinhardt of TV’s “Transparent”), whom Zach meets twice in the hospital, the second time flat on his back with an ACL tear.

“I remember you telling me how good you were.”

The odd good line — Dave changing the brothers’ escape plan with “I’d rather us be running TO something, than from something” — isn’t so much lost in the mix as kicked to the side with repeated interjections of religion.

That’s the way they play here, like an afterthought. Zach finding out Ginger is a devout Christian (he was raised that way by his mother, but gave up on it) and flunking The Jesus Test at his first meeting with their parents, Dave taking Pastor Baker’s homily that “You’ll be surprised how things start to change when you forgive someone” to heart in an instant regarding their hard-luck, hard-drinking but perfectly groomed dad.

The script takes a serious shot at stealing a little of that “I Can Only Imagine” magic with that redemption of the dad tack. Polaha is no Dennis Quaid, and like every other character, even no-good Dad has his edges rubbed off.

“Run the Race” never feels more abrupt that in its final jerks and jolts to an unexpected, unsubtle and undeserving climax.

But it’s competent on several levels, generally well-acted and no more unpleasant than it is challenging.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic content and some teen partying.

Cast: Evan Hofer, Tanner Stine, Mykelti Williamson, Frances Fisher, Kelsey Reinhardt. Mario Van Peebles, Kristofer Polaha

Credits: Directed by Chris Dowling, script by Jake McEntire, Jason Baumgardner and Chris Dowling. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:41

The title and genre will plant, in your mind, most of the obstacles, pitfalls and crises facing Mads Mikkelsen’s hero in “Arctic.”

It’s a tale of survival and it’s set way up north.

So yes, polar bears, frostbite, etc. are all on the menu of this intimate, minimalist account of surviving a polar plane crash.

But the limpid, expressive eyes of Mikkelsen, summoning all the sadness and soulfulness he can manage, lift this conventional narrative and make its almost dialogue-free presentation eyes-averting harrowing and downright moving.

He plays a pilot, Overgard, whose small cargo plane has crashed beyond the reach of civilization.

We don’t know how long he’s been there, because when we meet him, he’s well into a survival routine. He’s set up trot lines for fishing through the ice, has his watch set for daily treks to high ground to hand-crank the generator that runs his locator beacon.

We see he is methodical, able to improvise, “working the problem” as “The Martian” would put it.

And it may be futile, but he laboriously picks away at the snow, carving and maintainimg a vast SOS he’s written on cleared lava field landscape. Anything he can do to be pro-active is better than huddling in the wrecked plane waiting to die.

First time feature director Joe Penna lets Mikkelsen’s Overgard tell us his story and being in this predicament without flashbacks or inane “Cast Away” narration or “Martian” chatter. There was a co-pilot. He’s buried under a cairn on a hillside.

“Arctic” has just settled us into his routine when we and Overgard get our first taste of hope. Rescue! Or at least a helicopter that’s heard his beacon.

We and he barely have time to process this, with desperate igniting of flare in a coming blizzard, when the chopper crashes in the storm. Another body to bury, and now he has an injured would-be rescuer (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) to save with a little field surgery, try and communicate with and take responsibility for as his situation, and now hers, grows more dire.

The plot, scripted by Penna and Ryan Morrison, has a predictability you can set your watch by.

But the way he lets the camera linger over Mikkelsen’s consideration of the fish he must kill to stay alive, the fresh problem that a wandering bear creates, the opportunities and responsibilities that the near rescue provides, turns this into a tour de force.

Watch Mikkelsen’s face as he picks up his new charge, who slips into and out of consciousness. Human contact he takes in like the hard, uncooked ramen noodles he devours in the crashed helicopter. He melts just at the embrace of another hang being.

“Arctic” doesn’t vary from the conventions of this genre — ever. But Mikkelsen’s star turn at the center of it makes this wintry tale its own “Revenent,” with suffering and compassion, terror and even humor playing out on his expressive face, with the occasional tidbit of Danish profanity (Overgard mostly speaks English) for comic emphasis.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some bloody images

Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Maria Thelma Smáradóttir

Credits: Directed by Joe Penna, script by Joe Penna and Ryan Morrison. A Bleecker Street release

Running time: 1:38

There’s implicit pleasure in watching Patricia Clarkson in any guise, so throwing her at an aged alcoholic gay New Orleans police detective is reason enough to check out the new thriller “Out of Blue.”

The intensely atmospheric film, based on a Martin Amis novel (“Night Train”) with a British director of indifferently received credits (Carol Morley did “Edge” and “The Falling”), is a bit a meander — somewhat all over the place. But a top drawer cast, the setting and the way cinematographer Conrad W. Hall (“Grosse Point Blank”) films it give this whodunit just enough moody wit to come off.

An assistant professor of astronomy (Mamie Gummer, still “Meryl’s kid”) impresses her students with her passion for black holes and poetic questions about knowing “your place in the universe” and “We are all stardust” observations.

Then she turns up dead, a bloody corpse at the base of the telescope in the observatory where she’d just given an evening lecture.

Detective Mike Hoolihan (Clarkson) is on the case. She doesn’t just have a man’s name. She’s the last person who should be cracking wise about a colleague being stuck in the (fashion) past.

“You’re one to talk, Joan Jett,” comes too easily. Even the dotty, scattered but loving mother of the victim interrupts her grief to offer a little Southerly advice — “Ever dress like a woman?”

Mike sizes up the crime scene, and the camera tracks the details she spies — bloodspatter, a soiled sock, a bright red vintage shoe, a jar of face cream popular generations ago, with the lid missing. Jennifer, the victim, was a vintage clothing and collectibles fanatic, with the WWII era torch song “I’ll Be Seeing You” on the cassette in her late model T-bird.

Mike’s got suspects, more than a couple. There’s the fellow astronomer (Toby Jones) with the swollen jaw. Abscess, as he says? Or was he slugged in a struggle?

The boyfriend (Jonathan Majors) is another science professor, and is guileless enough to agree to an interrogation without a lawyer. Duncan figures out pretty quickly that being black trumps being a scientist, and he shouldn’t fall for her  “Help me figure out who did this.”

He remains a suspect for a lot of reasons, chief among them how he reacted to being told astronomer Jennifer was dead.

“Why?”

There’s also the gutted-by-grief wealthy Vietnam War vet father (James Caan) who walks with a cane and knows his way around firearms. Will his wife, the aforementioned ditz derailed by grief (Jacki Weaver) provide clues?

Mike is pursued by an ambitious young TV reporter (Devyn A. Tyler), even into her AA meeting. Turns out they have something in common. Maybe a couple of somethings.

Morley leans heavily on the science that Amis sprinkled throughout the book — discussions of how star collapses provided the building blocks of life, Schrodinger’s Cat and scientific “types” (people more interested in theoretical obsessions than the real world they’re stuck in).

There are many scenes where Clarkson’s Mike ponders the case, which seems just enough like “the .38 caliber killer” case of decades before to be worth mentioning. She considers falling off the wagon, and may already have as she hallucinates Jennifer’s life and obsesses over her music and “vintage” lifestyle.

The plot is more cluttered than clear, almost playing fair with what the audience knows and what Mike should be able to reason out, but never quite. The

And there’s an odd omission of authentic New Orleans accents (just a couple) among all the folks that Mike deals with. As she’s supposedly a native, as is Patricia Clarkson herself, it’s odd that the drawling star of TV’s “Sharp Objects” doesn’t give us a hint of Mike’s bayou background.

“Out of Blue” seems a tad too much like its missing-word title — as if something important’s been left out of this adaptation. But the actors are a stellar crew (Jones, Tyler, Weaver and Reynolds stand out). And the reliably understated Clarkson gives us a taste of Det. Mike’s broken past, magical realist inner life and “process.”

That’s enough to make us want to ride along with this New Orleans cop, and help her fill in the blanks.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, strip club nudity, adult themes

Cast: Patricia Clarkson, Mamie Gummer, Jonathan Majors, Toby Jones, Yolanda Ross, Devyn A. Tyler, Brit Collins, Jacki Weaver and James Caan

Credits: Written and directed by Carol Morley, based on a Martin Amis nove. An IFC/BBC Films release.

Running time: 1:49

The longer I review movies, the more disconnected from the Academy Awards I seem to be. Disinterest settles in early in “Awards Season” and doesn’t abate with”Holltywood’s Big Night.”

I barely bother to watch the damned thing any more.

It’s not just the run up, the campaigning and Fantasy Football level hashing out “Who has Oscar buzz?” and “Who SHOULD have it?” that’s dispiriting. Taking the longer view, it’s the amount of nonsense, the self-importance and idiotic clumsiness of it all.

The Academy has never been a meritocracy, although greatly expanding its electorate and inflating the number of Best Picture contenders has at least ensured more populism and more diversity in the process and its product in recent years.

Has that made the TV show better? Has that led to winner after winner that will “stand the test of time,” movies guaranteed to be designated “classics” destined for whatever future platform does away with American Movie Classics and Turner Classic Movies?

Those are rhetorical questions that can only be answered with a question — “Seriously?”

The animated film I know I will be watching again in two, or ten years, is “Isle of Dogs.” I have seen the Best Picture, Best Actor Winner and the flm that should have produced the Best Actor (Bale, “Vice”) a couple of times already and will come back them and “The Favourite” in the future.

The Academy and its show producers have obsessed over running time and plunging ratings, and tied the two together — stupidly. When you’re watching winner after winner gasping for breathing lest they be “played off stage,” you know somebody’s missed the point.

They got their shorter show. They delivered a more diverse lineup of films — and honored some very popular ones. And shockingly, the overnight ratings (big cities only) showed a 14% spike over last year’s “all time low.” The curiosity factor was high, with all the hoo hah over host/no host, categories added and yanked, etc. That, and nominating popular movies helped.

I have never been a huge fan of this pageant, but starting with the whole “playing them off” obsession with time — gutting what could have been moving acceptance speeches from the likes of Martin Landau — I’ve found the show more irritating than entertaining. And almost never moving.

Spike Lee will never get another Oscar. It took Jordan Peele producing to get him to the podium last night, and there was no sadder sight than Lee, a legendary career behind him, mostly indifferent movies in his present, not being allowed to have his moment — savor it — for co-writing “BlackKklansman.” Rushing through thanks, tributes and politics. Being a Scrappy jerk in losing — vintage Spike.

Peter Farrelly, likewise, will not likely get to that point again after a long career in low comedy. He completely blew it on his screenwriting acceptance, calming down just a little when the Big Prize also went to “Green Book.” A laundry list of “thank yous” makes for terrible TV. He doubled down on it in winning Best Picture. Let Octavia have the final say (a producer).

I felt no real investment in this year’s crop of contenders — “The Favourite” was the best of them, “Green Book” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” let us feel compassion and um, “sparked joy.” It’s no wonder the raging Lady Gaga brigade spent the past two months attacking them. They were perfectly OK movies, as was “A Star is Born,” “Vice” and most of the rest of the Best Picture contenders.

“Green Book” winning was no “upset,” any more than a “Roma” or “Star is Born” or even “Bohemian Rhapsody” win would have been. They’ve all had their share of pre-Oscar honors and all were in the discussion.

A sentimental Academy would have honored “BlackKklansman” with that award. Spike Lee certainly thought so. He stormed out when “Green Book” was, for a variety of reasons.

A younger Academy electorate means that “lifetime achievement awards” are all actresses like Glenn Close will ever get from here on out. There are scores of these “best actor/actress never to win an Oscar” contenders. Whatever career Olivia Colman has had, no matter how good she was in “The Favourite,” a Hollywood that acknowledges consistent excellence going back generations would have honored Close there.

Regina King has been better in several films than she was in the under-heralded “If Beale Street Could Talk.” But she won for the least interesting role/performance in that field. But as Emma and Rachel already have Oscars, it was her turn. I guess.

Mahershala Ali is two for two, thanks to “Moonlight” and “Green Book,” and a more diverse Academy suggests every Oscars from here on out will go out of its way not to ignore great performances, and perhaps even do it in a color blind way.

Rami Malek won Best Actor based on several magical moments of impersonation in “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Christian Bale was positively transformed in “Vice.” Better performance, but then Bale didn’t have to dance.

“Black Panther” won mostly honors that it deserved. A cultural-touchstone event, it was still, at the end of the day, a middling superhero genre picture and not worthy of Best Picture consideration. But with the Oscars becoming more diverse every year, that should broaden the appeal and the audience, in the long run.

In TV awards shows, diversity for diversity’s sake is a perfectly acceptable means to an end.

“Roma” should have never been a Best Picture contender. I saw it on the big screen, and it felt small screen, indulgent, a Best Foreign Language contender (and not the best of those this past year) and no more. Alfonso Cuaron is a great director, this wasn’t a great movie. That it was the odds-on Oscar favorite shows you how many Oscar prognosticators have never seen a REAL black and white Fellini film of the sort Cuaron was paying homage to. “Roma” is but a shadow of “Fellini Roma” or “La Dolce Vita.”

That cinematography win for this movie was an acknowledgement that the Academy has boosted membership, and has gotten young and callower in the process.

And as I have said from the start, when Hollywood gives a Netflix movie its top prize, the game is up for the Big Screen experience and The Academy Awards as we have known them.

But truthfully, the game is already up. This telecast, no host but plenty of game presenters (Trevor Noah, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, cute), will not stop its ratings slide and seems destined for Oscars.org streaming.

That’s kind of how I experience the telecast anyway — that “Sports Center” viral video truncated version of a generally tedious TV show.

Maybe then, when they’re just streaming the show, they’ll let the winners speak as long as they like.

That “Last Oscars” day isn’t here. Yet. But you can see the end from what we’re seeing right now.

Italian is a lovely language for storytelling, something you can experience even if you don’t speak the language. In films, the subtitles merely pinpoint the specifics of the story being told. The rhythmic dramatic pauses and musical Italian words easily drawn out for emphasis have the hypnotizing effect of making us “know” even if we don’t quite “understand.”

It’s the perfect language for a publishing phenomenon, a writer of literary fiction who became famous late in life, who blew up in New York and America even as her native Italy was trying to decide what to do with her, how to regard her.

Elena Ferrante wrote “The Neapolitan Novels,” also referred to as the Neapolitan Quartet, moody, internal and seemingly somewhat autobiographical novels that became the basis for HBO’s “My Brilliant Friend.” They follow two girls, born into impoverished, violent Naples during World War II, all the way through a life of loves, mistakes and trials on into old age.

In the documentary about her, “Ferrante Fever,” Hillary Clinton confesses she’s a fan during an interview in the middle of the 2016 presidential election. Fellow novelists such as Jonathan Franzen and Elizabeth Strout sing Ferrante’s praises, and Italian colleagues, filmmakers who have adapted her and others speak of “a writer who’s telling the truth.”

Ferrante has let on that she’s unmarried, was born in Naples in the 1940s, and is a mother. Motherhood, mothers and daughters and bad mothers are recurring themes of her fiction. But Elena Ferrante is a nom de plume. We don’t know who one of the world’s most popular and “influential” (Time Magazine) novelists actually is.

“Ferrante Fever” doesn’t address that, and truthfully, doesn’t exactly break down her dozen novels in terms of plot, themes, incident or what have you.

Filmmaker Giacomo Durzi shows us animated sequences suggesting characters and states of mind.

We see clips of the Italian films (two of them) which preceded the HBO adaptation (“Fever” was filmed in 2016).

And as a woman, dressed in grey from her hat to her overcoat, walks away from the camera down city streets as we hear a narrator read (in Italian, with English subtitles) from Ferrantes’ collected letters to publishers and others, a manifesto of “The book stands alone” and other reasons she maintains her anonymity. The most convincing is her choice to eschew the pressures of having a writing career. She could just…walk away. And all she has to do is write. No writer’s conferences, festivals, publicity tours, endlessly tedious interviews.

Franzen (“Corrections,” “The Purity”) confesses to envying her that.

But with all this pussy-footing around what the books actually are about and how they read (a director mentions “like a crime novel”), the question of identity moves to the fore in “Ferrante Fever.” In avoiding the “Big Question,” and not really substituting enough of the writing, plotting and characters to give us a clear picture of her talent or make the documentary more compelling, we wonder if the fact that we don’t know who she is might be the secret to her appeal.

“Anonymous” became a celebrated writer for penning a roman a clef about the Clinton White House — “Primal Colors.” The book became a lot less interesting when we learned which overly-connected reporter on the beat wrote it.

Others have used that “mystery” as a selling point, a notoriety in itself. The novelist who wrote “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” went by B. Traven, and only was “outed” late in life — a German labor agitator and pamphleteer who escaped death threats as Hitler came to power by reinventing himself in Mexico — publishing in English (clumsy English), writing epics with big themes and working class pro-labor grit.

But suppose Elena Ferrante isn’t writing from direct personal experience, that the implied but denied autobiography isn’t what the books are built upon? There’s been research and speculation about her real identity in her native Italy.

A celebrated book of the ’70s and ’80s was “The Education of Little Tree,” an “authentic” portrait of growing up poor and Cherokee in Depression Era Appalachia. It turned out to have been written by a white supremacist and KKK member.

How will the National Book Award endorser, the English language translator (Anna Goldstein) and others who speak of how “empowering” these damaged, unrepentant women characters are feel about the books if it turns out, as has been speculated, that a man did the writing?

The anonymity is a big deal, even if the folks quoted here don’t want to admit it.

Lisa Lucas of the National Book Foundation (which hands out the National Book Awards) attributes the writer’s success to not just reviews, but the original viral” path to literary fame — passing a book around among your friends.

Goldstein, her translator, says Ferrante “shows you what you might not want to know about yourself.”

Franzen tore through the quartet in 15 days while on a book tour of his own and labels her “a writer who’s telling the truth.”

And a fellow Italian novelist smiles at the reluctance of Italy to give Ferrante “her” due with a bit of schadenfreude — “Success is never easy to forgive.”

But as we pass “peak Ferrante,” with her masterwork — “My Brilliant Friend,” “The Story of a New Name,” “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” and “The Story of the Lost Child” — adapted into eight HBO episodes, we ask the hard question that  “Ferrante Fever” never asks.

After the hype, the publishing phenomenon, the embrace by the academy, is there a legacy, a permanent place in the literary firmament?

Or is this just this generation’s great publishing stunt or worse, works of merit inflated in value because of the back-story fans and taste-makers have invented, even if only in their minds, a personal history that could turn out to be a myth?

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Elena Ferrante, whoever she or he might be, Jonathan Franzen, Anna Goldstein, Michael Reynolds, Elizabeth Strout

Credits: Directed by Giacomo Durzi, script by Laura Buffoni, Giacomo Durzi. An RAI Cinema/Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:11