Hello readers,

I am writing this before the polls have closed on Tuesday, so I have no idea in what mood this letter finds you. Hopefully you are happy that Kansas is now a free-love mecca of progressivism, a queer spirit finally oozing its way out of its long cloister in Wichita and Manhattan and overtaking the car dealership owners’ mansions of Overland Park. It is my profound wish that you are reading this email after being out all night at a party in Dearborn or on Mackinac Island, eyes squinting in the light of a new era glinting with glorious insistence off of Lake Huron. It is my sincere desire that this email is sitting unread in inboxes from El Paso to Beaumont, everyone too busy out dancing in the streets, waving palm fronds as the inaugurated boy king of the Senate and the Real Texan governor-elect parade across the state. 

But maybe none of that is happening, and maybe I should have waited to write this letter until there was concrete news. The problem is, we record the Critical Darlings podcast on Wednesday mornings, so I have to write that day’s letter in advance, and so my hands are tied. I apologize if things have gone terribly wrong and some goofy email about movies is the last thing you want to be reading right now. (Though, in my defense, you did open the email.) I’m choosing to believe right now, at 4PM on Tuesday afternoon, that things will go as we’ve dared to dream they will. You in the future of course already know the answers, but I’m still putting that prayer out there. 

I wasn’t sure what to write about today, because there’s not a ton of exciting new stuff being released that I haven’t already written about. Club Kid arrives in theaters this week, but I reviewed that from Cannes. I’ll talk a little about Wild Horse Nine in Friday’s letter. And I am ethically barred from covering The Cat in the Hat because I conceived and directed the picture. But I assure you, it is a masterpiece. 

On TV, there’s like . . . nothing? I mean, there is that new gay show It Gets Worse, from that young British influencer (you’ve probably seen the clip of him and Andrew Scott doing therapist role play?), but I wasn’t able to attain screeners. So I’m going in as blind as you. I will give it a try, though, as one must always give the new gay show a try when the new gay show comes around. Maybe I’ll write about it after I’ve seen a few episodes. 

So my options are pretty limited today, and what does one do when one is out of material? Pivot to Oscars! Yes, forget the elections, let’s talk about a wholly different kind of contest, one with far fewer consequences for the American people. (Though there are of course some consequences; this whole political mess is almost assuredly a result of Brendan Fraser winning for The Whale.) 

Since I last did some Oscar predicting, things have changed. Digger became the highest grossing Digger-based film of all time, The Social Reckoning taught us that Facebook is bad, and of course Inde Navarrette hosted Saturday Night Live. How have those events, and others, changed the race? Let’s take a look.