Studio City Patch local editor Mike Szymanski is a personal friend of actress Sally Kirkland. That connection enabled him to get to Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank to do a video interview with the 71-year-old Oscar nominated performer after surgery for a weekend mishap at the Studio City Film Festival.

Kirkland is remarkably calm about the whole thing, even though she says the broken ankle and rehabilitation from her CAP Theatre fall will prevent her from walking for three months and has forced her to cancel four projects. “Life happens,” she noted.

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Ha ha. In a blog post yesterday, indieWIRE’s Hollywood movie maven Anne Thompson suggested that publicists hyping the Oscar-qualified Sally Kirkland live action short African Chelsea should have stayed away from the word “sure fire.”

The expression appears in both the press release headline and body-text, although it turns out the real culprit looks to be populist film critic Leo Quinones. On one of his “Film Freak” KFWB-AM broadcasts, it was he who first deemed the short to be “a sure fire Oscar nominee.”

FishbowlLA took the time to watch the six-minute drama, which is available for free at IMDB.com. And we’re here to tell you that the Oscar hype makes as much sense as calling a movie about a Hollywood exotic dancer African Chelsea.

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