Apologies for the Becket obsession, but I've just found an mp3 file made from two of the better Peter O'Toole rants in the film.

"Younger viewers live their lives pushing the envelope, breaking rules and bending rules," Manhattan ad exec Shari Anne Brill tells The Envelope's Scott Collins. "As long as the Oscars are perceived to have a certain rigidity, they're not going to be relatable to young people." Adds [publicist Howard] Bragman: 'The problem with the shows is that they lack any kind of spontaneity or buzz factor.'"

Collin's piece suggests/contends that the show may get higher ratings if Borat's Sacha Baron Cohen...Read More

Nikki Finke is reporting that last Saturday night, at a swanky dinner party thrown by movie producer Leonard Goldberg in honor of Viacom honcho Sumner Redstone, that Redstone passed along a Dreamgirls post-mortem that had originated with Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey. Redstone told the gathering that Brad explained that the reason Dreamgirls wasn't nominated for a [Best Picture] Oscar was because "everyone hates David." As in Geffen, the producer of Dreamgirls."

After hearing yesterday of his death, I tried to recall a vivid movie memory pertaining to Sydney Sheldon, the very successful screenwriter, TV producer, Broadway producer and hack romance-novel author. I thought and thought, and the only thing that punched through was a moment from 1977, when I was watching The Other Side of Midnight -- a grotesquely glamorous soap-opera drama about an ambitious hottie (Marie France Pisier) climbing her way to wealth and privelege through a series of relationships with ambitious and/or powerful men -- in a small theatre in Westport, Connecticut.

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For anyone heading to the 57th Berlin International Film Festival (February 8 thru 18), here's a programming rundown. One note of concern ; Gregory Nava's Bordertown, the Jennifer Lopez drama about the scores of unsolved Juarez-El Paso female murders, is skedded to be shown. This turkey has been looking for a distributor for eons and finding no love. Lopez movies are almost always mawkish, straining, off-balance. Didn't she say she was looking to quit movies a while back? That awful Bronx accent she accentuates in the trailer for El Cantante...

I had only one medium-sized problem with the rough version of Resurrecting the Champ, which director Rod Lurie showed me several weeks before it played at Sundance '07. The problem was Samuel L. Jackson's decision to play the lead character, a homeless guy with a secretive past, with a "whinny" voice -- a raspy-reedy emission that feels like the polar opposite of Jackson's usual sonorous, street-cat tenor-baritone thing.

Jackson in Resurrecting the Champ; Brando in The Godfather

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In a piece timed to ride the marketing back of Number 23 (New Line, 2.23), the Joel Schumacher creeper about a face-painted wackjob obsessive played by Jim Carrey, industry journalista Kim Masters has written about Carrey's career "crash" in the new Radar, which will hit the stands in about two weeks. Radar's publicist won't show me the article, but it's at least partly about the big-studio plug-pullings of Used Guys and Ripley's Believe It Or Not, both of which Carrey had intended to star in.

"Whatever Little Miss Sunshine is about, it isn't about anything bad," Oscarwatch.com's Sasha Stone wrote yesterday morning, echoing Richard Corliss's just-posted views in Time. "It's all good. It deals with the goodness of humanity underneath it all; it has an idealist's view of people. It is the only one of the five [Best Picture nominees] that does.

"The country needs to vote for Little Miss Sunshine because to do anything else opens the door to the truth. We can't handle the truth, not right now, not when we don't really know what's coming next.

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Armond White's N.Y. Press review of Becket is more than a little similar to an appraisal I wrote last year....odd. Easily the most single-minded Manhattan- maverick critic (at times almost peculiarly so), White is an absolute must-read because of his occasional grand-slams -- reviews that pinpoint not only the artistic dimension but the agenda of certain films, like when he called Billy Elliott "a balletomane chickenhawk fantasy."

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Village Voice critic Ed Gonzalez pisses on Becket! Fine, permissible, whatever. The guy has chutzpah.

"Going into the Sundance Film Festival, word was not good," writes Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt. "Coming out of the festival, you realize how little value this 'word' actually possesses. All that acquisition frenzy wasn't because of the high altitude. Sundance audiences' thunderous ovations for every movie are getting to be a joke, but in many cases they were deserved."

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"We are in another of those historical moments, with grim death gargling at you around every corner and people being slaughtered like sheep. Of course, Academy voters could heed the incendiary Zeitgeist and vote for Babel, a film about international chaos, or Letters from Iwo Jima, depicting the last days of a losing war. The Queen shows a head of state stubbornly resisting the popular will, and The Departed is a chic bloodbath.

"Or, surveying this bleak terrain, the Academy membership might turn to the one feel-good movie...Read More

Heard this happened yesterday, couldn't find the story, gave up: Marcheline Bertrand, 56 year-old former actress, producer (Trudell) and mother of Angelina Jolie, died Saturday of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Sad, too soon, sorry.

And The Winner Is... blogmeister Scott Feinberg has written a very thoroughly thought-out, fairly persuasive explanation why Little Miss Sunshine is going to win the Best Picture Oscar. I love this little film but I'd personally rather see Babel or The Departed take it. Both are more exciting to watch and think about later.

"This year, producers and actors went for Little Miss Sunshine, directors liked The Departed, and the Globes went with Babel. So the Bagger can confidently say, with all the authority of his one year of experience, that The Win in best picture is up for grabs.

"If Little Miss were to sneak past the best the studios and their specialty divisions had to offer, it would be yet another message that the longshot is sometimes the best shot. Everything that was wrong about this film turned out to be the right...Read More

"Can we stop this before you go ahead any further? We can't have this kind of language in this film, to this degree." -- Warner Bros. honcho Alan Horn to Departed producer Graham King, having gotten a very clear idea from early dailies that no brakes were being applied whatsoever on the use of salty street patois ("ya muthah fucked me," etc.). (Quote passed along by King during Sunday's "Movers & Shakers" panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.)

"You are not entitled," Bill Condon tells N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson about winning an Oscar, "an honor he won in 1999 for writing Gods and Monsters and for which his Chicago script was nominated," she writes. Winning the fabled gold statuette "is a gift," he adds. "That sense that you deserve it is wacky."

"We were never going to win [the Best Picture Oscar], even if we were nominated," Condon says, laughing. "The money we would have spent on the campaign, the insane amount of money we saved...people spend like drunken sailors, you know." In PattonRead More

It may be too late and it may be a futile notion, but it's time for all good people to rise up and band together in order to stop Eddie Murphy from winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. If anyone wants to launch a website to help amplify this feeling and (who knows?) maybe trigger a turnaround of opinion, I'll contribute $100 bucks...seriously. He's the one bad guy in the bunch who, I feel, really doesn't deserve to win. Surely others feel this way?

I've seen that bored-indifferent, man-am-I-rich, leave-me-alone look...Read More

N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.k.a., "the Bagger") linked to a site ("the Shanghaiist") with six or seven Japanese- produced Tommy Lee Jones commercials for Suntory Boss coffee drink.

Sorry, but I 'm not getting whatever it is I'm supposed to get. The juiice isn't seeping in; I'm not feeling the tingle. The spots aren't that clever or witty or "cinematic." They're decent, servicable, not terrible, etc., but all they do is make you wonder how much Jones was paid.

At yesterday's "Movers & Shakers" (i.e., producers) panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein asked Little Miss Sunshine producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa to comment about the Academy's grossly unfair decision to exclude them from the official group of three who, if LMS wins the Best Picture Oscar, will be allowed to go up onstage and receive a statuette, despite theirBerger and Yerxa being the film's "real" ground-floor producers.

Yerxa gave a soft-pedalled response, saying that the Producers Guild, which approved Yerxa and Berger as one of the LMSRead More

I don't mean to sound like a rabbit-hole cineaste who only processes life in terms of movies and images, but this N.Y. Times photo of Iraqi soldiers dealing with captured gunmen during a sandstorm is like something Vittorio Storaro would have crafted if he was working on a feature about the Iraq conflict. Those burnished orange-sandy hues look like they were rendered with a color filter. Quite beautiful.

Once's Glen Hansard and Marketa Iglova giving an outdoor performance of "Falling Slowly" for HP's Backstage at Sundance 2007.

Filmmakermagazine has put up a Sundance video podcast by the great Jamie Stuart, a guy who delivers so much more than just your typical smart-ass, here's-what-happened diary-type deal that it's not funny. Make no mistake -- Jamie Stuart is the Stanley Kubrick/Alfonso Cuaron/Richard Lester/Sergei Eisenstein of impressionistic short-video film festival pieces.

The marketing geniuses at MPI Home Video don't have it on their site (and why should they? too logical!) but DVD Newsletter's Doug Pratt tells me the Becket DVD will "street" on May 15th. It's currently playing at Manhattan's Film Forum; opening at L.A.'s Nuart on Friday.

"What I do know is that Sundance has become a very big machine in which it has become increasingly difficult for modestly scaled films without stars, without powerful brokers and backing and manufactured buzz to attract attention," writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in a 1.29 piece.

Especially, I would add, when front-line newspapers like the N.Y. Times overlook -- i.e., fail to pay attention to -- certain modestly scaled but high-quality films that don't have stars, powerful backing & manufactured buzz...like John Carney's Once.

Manohla may not have deliberately bypassed Once...Read More

Observed during Saturday's backstage-at-the- Lobero luncheon that followed the Directors' Panel: a reapprochement between formerly feuding collaborators Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Guillermo Arriaga. Inarritu went up to the sitting Arriaga and gave him a hug; Arriaga reciprocated with a couple of comradely slaps on the back. Then they left the room together and stood alone out on the brick patio, shooting the shit for nearly ten minutes, no evident tensions whatsover. I thought to myself, "This would make a historic photo...the duelling amigos back together again"...but a voice told me to stay away.

It's over...Little Miss Sunshine is going to win the Best Picture Oscar. The SAG Awards made this quite clear -- done deal, finito, no further discussion. The Departed never punched through (except for the fait accompli of Martin Scorsese winning the Best Director Oscar), Babel had some headwind out of the Golden Globes but no longer (or am I wrong? ...I'm willing to consider a Babel win...just tell me how it happens)), and The Queen and Letters From Iwo Jima were never really in the game.

What a boring cavalcade of tedium the SAG Awards were tonight. No shockers, no mild surprises, the same people won who've won before...the same old heroin. The Best Ensemble Cast award went to Little Miss Sunshine...terrific, bolstering chances that LMS might actually take the Best Picture Oscar. The oppressiveness of Helen Mirren winning yet again for Best Actress makes her the Mao Zhedong of the '06 Oscar race. Forest Whitaker, who won Best Actor for The Last King of Scotland, is Zhou Enlai (or Chou En-lai, if you prefer). Jennifer Hudson...Read More

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil is reporting that O'Toole won't be at tonight's SAG Awards, but says that Miramax publicist Andrew Goldstein (did Tom mean to write Andrew Bernstein?) has confided that O'Toole "will attend the Oscar nominees lunch on February 5" and then stick around "for a few days" before retreating back to London. He'll come back for the Oscar show some two and a half weeks later.

A whole N.Y. Times piece about Grindhouse -- two high-style wankoff movies made in the spirit of '70s exploitation flicks, one directed by Robert Rodriguez, the other by Quentin Tarantino -- and not a single mention of the film's most fascinating element, which is how heatedly and lasciviously Rodriguez will photograph actress Rose McGowan in his segment, called "Planet Terror."

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In person, Leonardo DiCaprio is "polite, charming, makes jokes, engages eye contact. And manages in an almost Rock Hudson-like way to give almost no hint whatsoever of his actual personality," writes the Guardian's Carole Cadwalladr. I know what she means -- Leo's definitely a bit of a hider when he talks to the press -- but "in an almost Rock Hudson-like way"?

Romantic comedies "seem to have fallen out of step with modern life," writes N.Y. Daily News guy Joe Neumaier, the result being that "moviegoers are experiencing a kind of cinematic bed death when it comes to meet-cute flicks and affairs to remember."

He mentions recent or soon-to-open examples like Catch and Release (a dud), Music and Lyrics, Daddy's Little Girls and Starter for 10...Read More

"From its first screenings here at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, the micro-budget Irish film Once, rejected by many a festival en route to Park City, has generated word-of-mouth bordering on euphoria," Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips writes in today's (Sunday) edition.

"It's a marvelous film, described by writer-director John Carney as "a musical, maybe." It may well be the best music film of any stripe since Stop Making Sense a generation ago, and yes, that includes Chicago and Dreamgirls.

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Sundance juror awards are untrustworthy in that every year there's always one or two "huh?" calls. This is partly due to a long-established tendency of Sundance jurors to select recipients for inside-the-beltway political reasons, and partly due to the film festival aesthetic that tends to honor films that are nourishing (in the same way that boiled squash is nourishing) but not necessarily riveting or transcendent.

This isn't to say the 2007 Sundance Film Festival Award Winners are neces- sarily suspect; only that the Grand Jury awards rarely deliver ground-truth appraisals like the Audience Awards do.

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Two fascinating panel discussions happened today at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. I recorded both with my Olympus WS-300M, which I put right smack dab on the stage, five feet in front of the panelists...and it didn't quite work. The voices sound echo-y and a bit faint. There's a lot of good stuff in both discussions, but you'd do well to listen with headphones. They both last over an hour.

Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and Night Buffalo

The SAG Awards will air on TNT and TBS Sunday evening. My eyelids, trust me, are at half-mast as I type these projections/assessments:

Forest Whitaker -- whose performance as Idi Amin Dada was hugely enjoyable in a frightening sort of way, although I never felt it went past (i.e., deeper than) that level of engagement -- will almost certainly win the Best Actor award.

Helen Mirren is oppressively locked as the winner of the Best Actress trophy, although I really and truly feel that Penelope Cruz gives a much stronger, earthier, fuller performance in Volver.

Leonardo DiCaprio...Read More

The Once word-of-mouth seems to have taken hold and distributors are finally looking to buy it. One distrib chief has confided a sincere hope that his/her company will acquire it sometime later this week, "although there are 5 other distributors circling," he/she confided this morning.

Epic Movie will be #1 this weekend with a projected $17,368,000 by Sunday night. It wasn't press-screened, is said to be a piece of shit and will almost certainly be over and out the door by next week or the week after. Joe Carnahan's Smokin' Aces (which I don't give a damn about seeing) will manage a decent $14,129,000 on 2200 screens, roughly $6300 a print. Night at the Museum will be #3 with $8,601,000 for a total cume of $215,900,000. (The American public likes what it likes.)

Catch and Release...Read More

"What made me finally relax is that during one of the moments we were showing clips, [Helen Mirren] reached out for my hand and squeezed it and said I was doing a good job. Can you believe that?! At the end of the tribute, right before Bill Macy was to come out, the lights dimmed. She once again reached for my hand and squeezed it. 'This was lovely,' she said. 'Once in a lifetiime, thank you.' I looked up, and she had tears in her eyes." -- Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling, writing on his Read More

There is no Helen Mirren vs. Judi Dench suspense factor in the Best Actress Oscar race, so this Notes on a Queen mashup doesn't really coagulate.

I'd forgotten what a moving speech Adrien Brody gave four years ago when he won the Best Actor Oscar for The Pianist. His final thought (which he has to "shush" the orchestra to finish) about the citizens, whether they worship God or Allah, who were then just starting to be wounded and killed in Iraq is especially poignant now, for obvious reasons.

Joerg Wagner's Motodrom, one of the coolest (because of its avant-garde simplicity and lack of pretension) shorts I saw at Sundance '07. Many other excellent shorts are downloadable on the Sundance site, but I couldn't find one I saw that played just before Once, about a young guy and a girl flirting on the Paris metro by underlining words in books they're holding on their laps. Does anyone have a link to this?

I went to the opening-night Factory Girl party for the Santa Barbara Film Festival last night, but I couldn't get into the groove today. I blew off the Sacha Baron Cohen discussion at the Lobero early this afternoon, and then I couldn't bring myself to attend the Helen Mirren tribute this evening at the Arlington. I don't know why, but maybe I'm just feeling Cohen-ed and Mirren-ed out. (A lot of us are, no?) I promise to do better tomorrow. Apologies to Roger Durling and the gang -- just an "off" day. (Or something.)

There is something profoundly wrong with the mentality behind the Sundance aquisition frenzy. No, not Paramount Vantage paying $7 million for Son of Rambow (i.e., Billy Elliott if directed by Tim Burton). Not Adrienne Shelly's Waitress selling to Fox Searchlight for $4 million, despite it being a somewhat hammy, too-obvious thing. And not Harvey Weinstein buying Grace is Gone, a steady, honest film about loss and denial that may find fans among the rural reds. All of these are solid deals that make sense.

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An Envelope podcast chat (recorded Thursday afternoon) between myself and Tom O'Neil about Sundance '07 -- Once, Black Snake Moan, Grace is Gone, The Savages, etc. Plus L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan talking about same -- Once, Grace Is Gone -- plus Hounddog, Away From Her, In The Shadow of the Moon, et. al.

This TMZ video of Nicole Kidman's auto crash on the set of The Invasion, which appeared on the Drudge Report yesterday morning, shows Kidman grimacing for a very brief second, but then walking away from the banged up vehicle a few seconds later in a relaxed, we-be-cool way. I like that quality in a woman. This was a definite image-enhancer. (Apologies for putting in the wrong link yesterday -- "Leo jeered by Spanish press" -- which, by the way, is pretty funny, the apparent lesson being that it's rude to keep press people waiting.)

Today is Paul Newman's 82nd birthday, which reminds me that a respected big-name critic is hard at work on an ambitious Newman biography (he's been operating under-the-radar for the last several months). Let's hope everything's jake when the book finally comes out, which may be next year. Meanwhile, Turner Classic Movies is airing a kline-up of Newman films this week -- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Hud, The Hustler, The Rack and The Prize. The latter two aren't available on DVD.

This is bad, very bad, for the image of George Clooney. Good Night and Good Luck, Darfur and Pamela Anderson don't mix. I'm hoping it's not true; in fact, I'm going into arbitrary denial right now and presuming it isn't. One should always either fuck "up" or fuck laterally, but never, ever beneath your station.

The Academy's Producers Branch Executive Committee gave Little Miss Sunshine producers Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger the royal shaft this morning by excluding them from the final roster of producers eligible to receive a Best Picture Oscar, if and when Sunshine wins.

The irony is that Yerxa and Berger were (a) the first producers to read and then attempt to find funding for Michael Arndt's Sunshine screenplay (they came on board only three or four weeks after 9.11.01), and (b) the ones who brought in co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris...Read More

Leaving Salt Lake City this morning for Los Angeles, then driving right up to Santa Barbara for Roger Durling's hot-shit film festival, which kicks off tonight with a screening of Factory Girl. No more posts until day's end, at best.

After much waiting, the Los Angeles memorial gathering for the late Robert Altman has been scheduled. It will happen on Sunday, 3.4.07, at the main Directors Guild theatre, at 2 pm. The New York version will happen about two weeks earlier, on Tuesday, 2.20.07.

"And then the Best Picture category was announced: Babel, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, he Queen and Letters From Iwo Jima. Wait...are they nominating six [films] this year? The hundreds of reporters in the [Academy] auditorium were leaning heads together, making sure that they did not hear the name Dreamgirls.
They did not." -- from David Carr's Oscar nomination piece in the N.Y. Times.

"David Geffen's Dreamgirls was snubbed because Hollywood is jealous of him. So what that the Motown musical led with eight Oscar nominations (three of them for Best Song)? That tally may be a promotional wet dream, but trust me, DreamWorks and Paramount, who've been pimping this pic since those disgusting $25 movie tickets during the first 10 days of its theatrical run, are having dry-hump nightmares.

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Park City is dead, the festival is dead...it's over, emptied, drained. Figuratively speaking, of course. I'm outta here tomor- row and totally fine with that. I've been calling Paramount Vantage publicists to get tickets to the Black Snake Moan screening at 6 pm this evening, and they're not calling me back. I'm half inclined to shine it, but L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas is sitting next to me and sayng I have to give it a try, "it's your job," etc. I'm seeing Once a second time this evening at 8:30 pm, and that's all she wrote.

I too sat through yesterday afternoon's press screening of Hounddog, and I agree with everyone else that it's nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to release, nothing to rent, nothing to get shocked or stirred about...just another neo-Faulknerian Southern gothic wallow with a tasteful, non-inflammatory Dakota Fanning rape scene. I'll say this: Fanning is a very skilled, super-readable scene inhabitor. That may have been obvious to others previously, but this is the first film she's had to "carry" as the star. Here's an excellent rip-job review by Screengrab's Mike D'Angelo, and another negative review by N.Y. Post

I'm starting to agree -- Sundance '07 is definitely one of the worst in memory. I've seen about 16 or 17 films so far, and genuinely liked/admired five -- Once, Grace is Gone, Interview, The Savages and Broken English. I missed yesterday afternoon's press screening of Son of Rambow (described in Variety as "Billy Elliott directed by Tim Burton") but now that it's been picked up for $8 million by Paramount Vantage...Read More

"If you fail the first time, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again." -- Peter O'Toole's reaction to being Best Actor nominated for Venus.

How did Harvey Weinstein land that distribution deal for Grace is Gone last weekend? A producer at Monday's Picturehouse party told me that Harvey was so determined to lock things down, he drove over to the condo of the Grace producers at 4 ayem and knocked on the door -- bam! bam! bam! I don't know precisely which Grace producers were in the condo (it could have been John Cusack, Grace Loh, Daniela Taplin Lundberg, Ed Hart and/or Paul Bernstein), but the Weinstein home invasion sent them into a five-alarm mode.

Like terrified rabbits, Read More

John Stockwell's Turistas (Fox Atomic), which shot in mid '05 for a cost of $10 million, has earned $7,015,358 so far, according to the IMDB, after seven weeks of play. Understandably, Lionsgate UK has retitled it Paradise Lost for its U.K. and Ireland opening on 4.13.07. What's happened to Stockwell? He was a GenX Curtis Hanson after making crazybeautiful and Blue Crush, a first-rate, emotionally honest surfing movie, but he's allowed himself to slide into a pseudo-Lionsgate horror B-movie groove, making flicks about half-dressed kids dodging bad guys and killers in sunny climes (Read More

"I've been in this business a long time, and Adrienne Shelly's Waitress could have come to the festival, gotten a standing ovation and remained unsold. And to sell to Searchlight! She hit the jackpot! I tried to explain how great this was to her mother, Elaine, but even while I was talking we both started crying. But [producer] Michael Roiff and I are sure that Adrienne can still hear the laughter somehow and is happy.

"As someone said at her memorial service, Adrienne's life may have been cut short, but she sure left her mark." -- from ...Read More

"I think it's wonderful. I think it is not only an outstanding film, but it has created a genuine cultural shift in how people think about what I believe to be one of the most important issues of our times.'' -- Sen. Barack Obama commenting on An Inconvenient Truth being nominated for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar.

"What basis is there for everyone seeing Dreamgirls as the biggest Best Picture snub? Dreamgirls never won a critics award, nor was it the top film on all that many, if any, top 10 lists. The only reason to consider it a snub is because its assumed front-runner status was banged into our heads all year long. The real snub, in my mind, went to United 93 and Children of Men." -- A reader named "kbowen." (Wells to kbowen: Agreed.)

The Hollywood Reporter team -- Anne Thompson, Gregg Goldstein, Nicole Sperling -- has been wailing with the various Sundance acquisition stories that have broken within the past 36 hours or so. Goldstein claimed at last night's Cinetic party that they've whipped Variety's ass on most (or many) of these reportings/announcements. I have no reason to doubt this until somebody argues otherwise. It's all been appearing on Thompson's Riskybiz Blog...Read More

"Hounddog is an indigestible gumbo of Southern Gothic ingredients seasoned with snake oil, Biblical hash, and thoroughly unpalatable spice," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy.

"[Director] Deborah Kampmeier's second feature became notorious even before its premiere as the 'Dakota Fanning rape movie.' The problem, however, is not that pivotal scene, which is as tastefully handled as it could be under the circumstances, but the fact that, after a reasonably atmospheric, if uneventful, first hour, the picture subsequently runs right off the rails.

"Aside from Fanning and the controversy, the film has ...Read More

"Some will suggest that [Dreamgirls' loss] is a race thing, that an all-black cast has a hard time with the Academy, " writes N.Y. Times Oscar guy David Carr (a.k.a., "the Bagger"), "but check out the diversity among the actor nominations and ignore that excuse.

"What happened then? Mainly, Clint Eastwood, deep into his career, innovated midstream and came up with a Japanese take on the Battle of Iwo Jima. It's the kind of artistic and entrepreneurial performance that merits recognition and the Academy gave it.

"Dreamgirls also got skunked...Read More

"I think Sunshine is absolutely the front- runner. And the fact its directors didn't get nominated is irrelevant. The best picture and best director categories are so ridiculous anyway. How can something be the best picture and not be the best directed? And the reverse.

"So yeah, give props to Sunshine. I saw it for the second time on a plane back from Panama City, and it's really wonderful, funny, heartwarming, well performed...Read More

"When was the last time a film led in total nominations and got shut out of Best Picture, Director and Writing, as Dreamgirls was this morning?," asks Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond. "The answer, going back to the Academy's beginnings 79 years ago is...never (at least as far as we can tell).

"'We did everything we could (to get the Best Picture nomination),' a truly dejected DreamWorks consultant lamented after the announcement.

"Of course those three, count `em, three Best Song nominations ballooned the total Dreamgirls noms, making composer Henry Krieger...Read More

The 22nd Santa Barbara Film Festival (1.25 to 2.4) will have 32 of this morning's announced Oscar nominees in attendance -- Helen Mirren, Will Smith, Forest Whitaker, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jackie Earle Haley, Djimon Honsou, Jennifer Hudson, Queen screenwriter Peter Morgan, Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, Little Children helmer Todd Field, Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt, etc. The list goes on...you get the idea.

With Dreamgirls out of the running, which of the five nominated Best Picture films is the front-runner at this stage? Opinions, please. I suspect that Little Miss Sunshine is going to get dissed the most between now and ballot-closing day, even though the odds of winning don't seem all that great because Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris weren't jointly nominated for Best Director. LMS could win , of course. As a a big-name producer told me after last weekend's PGA win, "Sunshine...

"It's obviously possible for a movie to get nominated for Best Picture without its lead actors getting their own nominations. But is it possible for a film to be a Best Picture contender when its lead performances were widely panned, even by people who otherwise liked the movie? I'm referring, of course, to Beyonce Knowles, Jamie Foxx and Dreamgirls.

"Let's face it -- as much as everyone seemed to like Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson, and as much as you could legitimately call this an ensemble picture, Jamie Foxx and Beyonce Knowles...Read More

Once again, Warner Bros. deserves double credit as far as Leonardo DiCaprio is concerned -- a plus for getting him a Best Actor nomination in Blood Diamond (!), a not-very-good film, and a minus for not putting him up for Best Actor in The Departed, which would have been the right and proper move because the guy is flat-out great in the "mole" role. Congrats also to Mark Wahlberg for his Best Supporting Actor nomination.

"Many in our office are still getting over the fact that Dreamgirls was snubbed. I say, tough luck!" -- New York-based advertising executive in just-received e-mail.

The morning's flimsiest call has to be the Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for the Borat gang -- Sacha Baron Cohen & Anthony Hines & Peter Baynham & Dan Mazer. Adapted from "Da Ali G Show" because of very similar elements, concept, attitudes, etc.

You can get the whole Oscar nomination rundown anywhere at this point, but my two favorites are Variety and Oscar Watch. I just wish that the esteemed Sasha Stone would boldface her categories.

No Best Foreign Language Film nomination for Pedro Almodovar's Volver? And I was shocked, frankly, that Susanne Bier's After the Wedding, her weakest film ever, was nominated in this category. Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth and Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others were nominated....good calls. Less enthusiasm in this corner for Days of Glory and Water, but fine.

Another significant surprise (and a feather in the cap of not only Universal Oscar strategist Tony Angellotti but every impassioned, hard-pushing advocate of United 93 in the industry and press circles): Paul Greengrass, the director of United 93 -- a movie that many Academy members reportedly refused to even see, has been nominated for Best Director. A significant victory, no question. Whoda thunk it?

We'll never know the precise vote tallies, but this indicates that the vote to nominate United 93...Read More

Dreamgirls, the musical that many, many people (David Poland included) said over and over would win the Oscar for Best Picture, hasn't even been nominated for Best Picture....double, no, triple-strength shocker!...an omission that will live in the annals of Oscar nomination history.

Eight Dreamgirls noms, but not for Best Picture

The gloom clouds hanging over the Dreamgirls camp right now are extremely dark and Cecil B. DeMille-y. For what it's worth, my sincere condolences to Bill Condon, Larry Mark, Terry Press, Nancy Kirkpatrick, David Geffen and the gang. I never hated Dreamgirls...Read More

The Salt Lake City NBC channel cut off the live feed from the Academy right in the middle of the announcement of Best Adapted Screenplay nominees (I know...why am I watching television at all?), but the first early surprise (prior to the impact grenade of Dreamgirls' non-inclusion among the Best Picture nominees) was Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin getting nominated for Best Supporting Actress. That's an indicator of general industry sentiment about this Fox Searchlight film, and a further suggestion that Sunshine might really win the Best Picture race.

John Carney's Once, which I finally saw last night at 10:40 pm or thereabouts, is the Sundance heart & soul movie everyone's talking about. And you don't need to be an NYU film scholar to understand why. A kickaround, no-star Irish musical love story, Once has an ether-like spirit that anyone who's truly been in love will recognize in a flash.

Once costars Marketa Irglova (l.), Glen Hansard (r.)

It's about a pair of Dublin-based musicians -- a scruffy, red-bearded troubadour (folk-rocker Glen Hansard...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere has been out of business all day long due to an incorrectly installed DBD module, which affected my ability to go into Movable Type. The problem started at 8:15 this morning; the subsequent 11 or so hours were absolute hell. The problem was finally solved ten minutes ago by a genius named Chris Tillet. I'm asking that everyone observe a moment of grateful silence for the 2% or 3% of tech support people out there who actually know a thing or two and use their nimble noggins.

"A friend who visited Atlanta this past weekend tells me that Little Children was one of the options at her hotel for in-room pay-per-viewing. So I can't help thinking: No matter how many Oscar nominations the movie may receive on Tuesday, has New Line already written off the movie's prospects as a theatrical release?" -- recent entry on Joe Leydon's Moving Picture Blog.

In major denial: "I refuse to believe that Little Miss Sunshine, a movie the world loves but I loathed, is going to get a Best Picture nod." -- Salt Lake Tribune's Sean P. Means, in a piece about Tuesday's Oscar nominations.

An above-average, all-star Oscar roundtable -- Helen Mirren, Penelope Cruz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Forest Whitaker -- by Newsweek's Sean Smith and David Ansen, including streaming video clips. From the 1.29.07 issue.

The Reeler's Stu VanAirsdale on (deep breath...no, two deep breaths) Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That, "already the subject of buying speculation after last week's TV deal with A&E Indie Films and one of the more eagerly anticipated competition titles among festivalgoers. The anticipation paid off: Bar-Lev's film is a meta-mix of doc ethics, art politics and family drama, a brilliantly paced mystery tale of a Binghamton, N.Y., four year-old whose abstract paintings develop a lucrative following before its authorship is drawn into question by an increasingly skeptical media...including Bar-Lev himself."

"Chicago 10 deliberately eschews context and perspective, the better to simply plunge the viewer into the maelstrom, as if these fires raged last week rather than four decades ago. [Brett] Morgen's message, however, while implicit, couldn't be much clearer. In lieu of a "comprehensive," "dispassionate," "balanced" portrait of the most explosive instance of American dissidence of the past half-century (at least), he gives us something much more valuable: a call to arms.

"Yes, the movie is blatantly stacked in favor of its hero-agitators, but it's also impossible to watch Chicago 10...Read More

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil attempts an explanation for Little Miss Sunshine's PGA Best Picture win.

I've been through not-so-hot Sundance Film Festivals before, and even the bad ones had their occasional pleasures and surprises. It's a little bit early to be asking if "this is the worst Sundance ever?" and then saying "yes, maybe"...like David Poland did yesterday. "We're two days into the festival and the buyers are ready to go home," he wrote. Let them go home already! There'll be more room at industry screenings if they leave, right? Am I disappointed I haven't seen something deeper, stronger, funnier, punchier? Yeah, I am, but there are five days to go...

I despise romantic comedies as a rule, but Zoe Cassevetes' Broken English is an exception, perhaps because it doesn't try to be "funny" as much as sardonic and bitterly truthful about what a slog it is out there for no-longer-young women who are "looking for love," or at least for a relationship that allows for the possibility of something nourishing and genuine.

For what it is and as far as it goes, English is very bright and absorbing, and it contains the most affecting and vulnerable performance of Parker Posey...Read More

James C. Strouse's Grace is Gone, which I saw last night at 10 pm, is the best film I've seen so far at Sundance '07. It's a plain and pared down thing, emotionally subtle but very specific and often moving, familiar and understated with a Midwestern voice of its own -- a family film about a very American, very here-and-now tragedy.

It definitely stands a chance of being remembered at year's end, certainly for John Cusack...Read More

Shocker! The Producers Guild -- not exactly a recent harbinger of Best Picture Oscar wins, but a significant indicator of industry sentiment -- has given Little Miss Sunshine its Best Picture award. I didn't see it coming, I thought they'd give it to The Departed.... amazing! Obviously the Dreamgirls Golden Globes momentum has been stopped in its tracks, Babel is back to maybe-but-who-knows? status, and it's a wide-open race for the Best Picture Oscar. There is no joy in Mudville (and you know where & what that is) this evening. Dreamgirls...Read More

Mike Russell has another comic-strip interview up -- this one with Guillermo del Toro explaining the fascist symbolism of his Pan's Labyrinth monsters, a.k.a., "Fascist Monsters of Filmland."

"Sasha, you're right about it being a long night. I'm already heading down to the Century Plaza. We're going to start drinking in our hotel room at about 4 before heading down to the cocktail hour at 6. The group I'm with is all about The Departed but we're realizing Dreamgirls is a very big possibility. In the last two hours I spoke with two other PGA members who said they voted for Sunshine. I'm baffled as to how this thing is going to turn out tonight." -- industry guy discussing tonight's Producer's Guild Awards on Oscarwatch.com.

The Society of Online Awards Prognosticators (SOAP) winners have been announced, and as I am a member, it's very gratifying to bestow the Best Picture award on Children of Men, and the Best Director award on its creator, Alfonso Cuaron. I would take the time to paste in and format the other winners, but I should have left and begun my Saturday Sundance expedition two hours ago. If the winners were listed on someone's site, I would naturally link to them/it.

The Hollywood Reporter team -- Nicole Sperling, Gregg Goldstein, Anne Thompson -- reported last night that Dan Klores' documentary Crazy Love will probably be distributed by Magnolia Pictures.

"Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton jumped into the 2008 presidential race yesterday," per N.Y. Times reporters Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, "immediately squaring off against Senator Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic field in what is effectively the party's first primary, the competition for campaign donations. <