A new Kate for “Leopold”.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscars Quest ’26 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, even if I have to force myself to sit through some of them by repeating “Rules are rules” to myself until I accept my punishment.

In my childhood Neil Diamond was among the many artists who surrounded me daily in a not-great era of AM radio. I was raised on Top-40 charts that were a bouillabaisse of easy-listening lullabies, crossover country hits, and disco’s lingering death-throes. When I finally got control of a radio dial around age 11, I changed channels hard enough to yank off the knob and never turned back. I still get goosebumps whenever I hear or even remember “America”, and not the good kind of goosebumps — the other kind that’s more like a rash. In retrospect, unfairly or not, he’d become one of my many symbols of Everything Wrong With Previous Generations’ Music.

Long story why, but last year my wife and I made the mistake of watching the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer starring Diamond as a middle-aged “fellow kid”, an aspiring schmaltzy singer whose name may or may not have been Schlemiel Schliamond. After an early scene of him helping some musician buddies by doing blackface, soon he’s discovered and becomes popular and insufferable. I’d say it was all downhill from there, but that’s assuming we were ever at the top of a hill to begin with. We keep plummeting till the grand finale with, of course, Diamond belting out “America” while his extremely faithfully Jewish dad (Academy Award Winner The Sir Laurence Olivier! I Am Not Making This Up) applauds like a bell-bottomed teenybopper and forgives his son’s multitude of sins and enormous ego. By then I was coughing up the kind of laughter that feels like the other kind of goosebumps have sprouted in your lungs. For a howler of a digestif, I looked up Roger Ebert’s one-star review, which was one for the ages.

In an uncanny bit of cosmic timing, two weeks later Universal dropped the first trailer for Song Sung Blue, a biopic with Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as Mike and Claire Sardina, the real-life stars of a Neil Diamond tribute act. I did not run right out and buy advance tickets. But here we are anyway, because Oscars Quest. Permission granted to treat me as a hostile witness.

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