It's too early and it may seem a silly notion, but it may be time for all good people to rise up and band together in order to stop Johnny Depp from winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Sweeney Todd. If anyone wants to launch a website to help amplify this feeling and (who knows?) maybe nip this one in the bud, 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?

Okay, bad joke. But there's this guy...Read More

Though Walt Becker didn't write Wild Hogs, its early progress is similarly angled, with much 'ewww!' mileage eked from the ways in which William H. Macy's sensitive-guy nature sometimes make him seem 'gay,' plus a randy cop (Scrubs' John C. McGinley) who misreads the traveling male quartet's bond. Studio product once ridiculed homosexuals outright -- now it goes the more insidious route of milking the straight characters' 'hilarious' revulsion whenever they come in contact with or are mistaken for gay people." -- from Dennis Harvey's 2.24 Variety review.

Here's what Zodiac costar Jake Gyllenhaal said to Newsday's Lewis Beale yesterday regarding David Halbfinger's N.Y. Times article about Fincher's obsession with multiple takes (which Mark Ruffalo also commented upon in Devin Faraci's CHUD interview): "It is positive, whether or not I was willing to admit that at the time. It's like working with a great teacher or coach -- you hate them while you're doing it, and then you win the game, and you'll talk about that for the rest of your life. And the complications of that relationship are what make it so special. We did a lot of...Read More

That was San Francisco Chronicle writer Leah Garchik who passed along buzz about that recent screening of Francis Copppola's Youth Without Youth, and not Tom Luddy.

"I always call international the new south, " says House Party director Reginald Hudlin (also the current entertainment president of BET Networks). "In the old days, they told you black films don't travel down South. Now they say it's not going to travel overseas." -- from Michael Cieply's N.Y. Times piece about the legend of films with African-American casts, backdrops and storylines being weak overseas. It's a situation that "may" be changing, Cieply says.

During an on-stage interview at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade theatre last December, Alan Arkin said the job he wants more than anything else is to be in a big-studio franchise movie, the kind of film in which he'd have to gesture wildly in front of a green screen and go, "Look out, the thing is coming!"

I don't know if Arkin's winning of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine had anything to do with this, but his agent has gotten him what he wants -- the role of CONTROL in a big-screen version of Get Smart with...Read More

Termite art -- that 's the best term I've heard so far (taken from a recent review by the Village Voice's Nathan Lee) that summarizes the aesthetic essence of Zodiac. And when you talk to Robert Graysmith, the author of the two Zodiac books ("Zodiac" and "Zodiac Unmasked") that served as the basis of "Jamie" Vanderbilt's script, you get the idea that he's a kind of termite himself -- a relentless eater and chomper of information.

Graysmith is the main character in the film (wth his name used and everything), and he's played...Read More

The Bucket List's IMDB synopsis says it's about two terminally ill older guys -- Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman -- who "escape from a cancer ward and head off on a road trip with a wish list of to-dos before they die." I'm not going to make any negative assumptions because Rob Reiner is directing. Just because North, Ghosts of Mississippi, The Story of Us, Alex & Emma and Rumor Has it bit the dust is no reason to think rashly.

The problem, for me, is this: Nicholson looks too well-fed to play a dying cancer patient....Read More

This Radar Online report about the National Enquirer running fake Anna Nicole Smith body-bag photos is icky and surreal. If once a magazine indulges itself in running faked Photoshop images, very soon the editors will come to think little of running intrusive and sometime sloppily reported stories about celebrities; and from that to paying low-life sources and running photos of celebs in their out-of-shape bodies at the beach, and finally to general obnoxiousness and tackiness.

"An even greater challenge to both newspapers and broadcast networks is the growing power of the internet as a news distribution platform," reads an online summary for News War, a four-hour PBS Frontline special examining the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the news media today.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes, says "we haven't seen the model for how broadcast journalism is going to end up on the Internet, but it has to go there. I mean, you don't see anybody between 20 and 30 getting their news from the evening news; you see them getting it online."

An...Read More

Screengrab's "Ten Best Nude Scenes of '06" piece amounts to two goodies -- Gretchen Mol's outdoor nude scene in The Notorious Bettie Page and Sophia Myles in Art-School Confidential -- and eight so-sos.

Nine days ago this foreign-shores guy listed the 10 greatest speeches and monologues, and every last one was an AFI cliche that nobody wants to be reminded of ever again.

He even gets the Trainspotting speech wrong, which he excerpts as follows: "Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family, Choose a big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends... Choose your future. Choose life."

That's okay, but nowhere near as good as the...Read More

The Permalink doesn't work but Screen Grab posted a short item yesterday about Francis Coppola having begun to screen Youth Without Youth. The low-budget, European-shot film "was shown to invited guests at Lucasfilm's headquarters in the Presidio" within the last couple of days, the copy reads. Here's the uh-oh part: "The filmmaker's invitation stressed that the movie, Coppola's first in 10 years, is intended to be particularly personal, in keeping with 'the great cinema of Europe and Japan that had first inspired me to become a filmmaker myself."

"The thing about America, is that it is without walls. You can get almost anywhere if you insist upon it. There are no credentials for [talk-show hosting]. There's no kind of credentials to be president! Except age and place of birth. It's kind of a low bar. I hope that next time people go to the polls they vote for the guy who can read rather than the guy they'd rather have a beer with." -- Real Time's Bill Maher talking to Time's Ana Marie Cox.

Wells response: As Maher knows, red-state cultural conservatives -- particularly the religious types -- have pretty...Read More

Here's a podcast chat I did the day after the Oscars with The Envelope's Tom O'Neil. It won't make your underpants fly off, but it plays okay.

I haven't seen Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife (Fox Searchlight, 3.16), but there's a fundamental problem with the basic premise. Rock, who directed, co-wrote and stars, plays a bespectacled, suit-wearing husband (Gina Torres is the wife) who develops an extra- marital itch for a hot lady (Kerry Washington). The problem is that I don't believe Rock could get worked up about anything other than some matter that immediately affects the business fortunes of Chris Rock.

Some actors project empathy, vulnerability...a regular-guyness. At best, Rock projects the vibe of a whip-smart, slap-happy alien.

I...Read More

A smart salute for Mark Ruffalo, an actor with a solid-gold attitude who shudders at the idea of ever going "waah, waah, waah" over anything. CHUD's Devin Faraci asked him about the tension that reportedly kicked in when fellow Zodiac costar Jake Gyllenhaalwas asked by director David Fincher to do dozens of takes for certain scenes. Here's an excerpt:

Ruffalo as Det. Dave Toschi in David Fincher's Zodiac

Faraci: "Some of your strongest scenes in the movie are with Jake Gyllenhaal. What's he like to work with?"

Ruffalo: "He was good. I've known Jake for...Read More

Here's an Eddie Murphy observation from someone who was at the Kodak. I'm not trying to beat a dead horse -- it's just that this person doesn't agree with the descriptions about Murphy bolting in some kind of fuming, petulant fashion.

"I was at the Oscars, sitting towards the front in the orchestra, and I watched Eddie Murphy leave the auditorium. He passed less than twenty feet away from me and I watched him very carefully because I knew the loss for Best Supporting Actor had to sting and was hoping he was just taking a short break and would return soon.

"For...Read More

A long ways down the road is The Long Play, a movie driven by the re-teaming of Martin Scorsese and Departed screen- writer William Monahan. Paramount Pictures is funding the development of the script, which reportedly follows two guys "through 40 years in the music business, from the early days of R&B to contemporary hip-hop."

What's that...the late '50s to the late '90s? No way...no way in hell. Two friends getting older, grayer and fatter as the years roll on and the music gets shittier? The evolution of great pop music from the early '60s to the present (which would obviously be...Read More

If you were studying Peter O'Toole just before Forest Whitaker was named the winner of the Best Actor Oscar, and then at the precise moment that it happens, it's clear O'Toole wanted to hear his own name very badly (who wouldn't?) and that he was pretty much primally shattered when he didn't. It's a look of "oh dear God, it's happened again."

O'Tooler recovers quickly and applauds Whitaker like a gentleman, but those facial spasms got to me. He wore that same haunted look in 1980 during the curtain call for a critically-despised Old...Read More

Hilary Clinton's main problem is that she appears too cautious, too calculating and over-scripted. If you ask me she's demonstrated this in an unmistakable way by having recently told CNN's Bill Schneider and Douglas Hyde that her favorite all-time movie is Casablanca.

Anyone who says Casablanca is their all-time favorite film is deliberately trying to sound bland and unsophisticated

What a totally softball, timid-ass thing to say...Casablanca! A perfect film of its type (I still enjoy it from time to time), but way too sanctified and high-pedestal-ed. All you can say is, "That's the...Read More

This is mildly disturbing only because the global-warming deniers and the reactionaries are going to use stories like this to justify careless consumption across the board. That said, Al Gore, no matter what his individual carbon footprint might be, needs to reconsider how such stories will affect the overall green effort. He probably needs to live in a much more spartan fashion. Besides, he'll lose weight that way.

A perfect confirmation about Eddie Murphy having left the Kodak auditorium after he didn't win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar has arrived by way of L.A. Times columnist Joel Stein, who spent last Sunday night hanging at the Hollywood Bowl parking lot with all the top celebrity limo drivers, one of them being Murphy's driver, Karlo Ateinza, who's been hauling Murphy around for the last seven years.

"Karlo wasn't having a great night because Murphy lost early," writes Stein. "I''m really sad. I feel sorry. He should have won it,' Karlo said. 'But Alan Arkin...Read More

Hollywood Interrupted's Mark Ebner riffing on last night's Oscar show & the continuing celebrity meltdown syndrome.

In a New Yorker piece called "The New Disorder," David Denby discusses the trend of dense, complex, interwoven plots in movies from Pulp Fiction to Babel.

"The Guillermo Arriaga-Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu films are hardly the sole topsy-turvy narratives out there," he notes. "In recent years, we've had movies, like Adaptation (written by the antic confabulator Charlie Kaufman), that are explicitly about the making of movies, and others, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (also written by Kaufman), that move forward dramatically by going backward in time.

"Then, there is a related group...Read More

"After the wonderfully imaginative Mexican movie Pan's Labyrinth chalked up three quick victories -- for art direction, makeup and cinematography -- it must have looked to most people like a major upset when it lost best foreign-language film to the German The Lives of Others," writes Newsweek's David Ansen.

"But the entire Academy doesn't vote in this category, only those members who have seen all five nominated films. Which means that closer to 500 people, rather than 5,800 (the membership of the Academy), choose the winner, and anyone with his ear to the ground could hear the enthusiasm that Florian Henckel...Read More

Zodiac director David Fincher "is not a police-procedural-type guy. He's not a people-type guy. He's a mood ghoul. I don't think he can relate much to moral outrage. What occupies him is how to send you home antsy, unsure of what you've seen but sure it was worse than you think. He gives you the existential willies." -- from New York critic David Edelstein's just-up review.

"With a runtime of over two and a half hours, Zodiac super-charges every minute with a maximum of minutiae," writes Village Voice critic Nathan Lee. "Dizzyingly dense, intricate in the extreme and relentlessly swift, it's the most information-packed procedural since JFK, though far more restrained when it comes to theorizing.

"The screenplay, meticulously engineered by James Vanderbilt, has been adapted from a pair of books by Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a cartoonist at the Chronicle who glommed on to the Zodiac case and eventually took it on as his life's work. Everything has been checked...Read More

Defamer has posted a video of Clint Eastwood's wife Dina brushing something off his lap during Martin Scorsese's thank- you speech, and it's nothing. And to see it, you have to sit through the whole sequence -- Coppola/Lucas/Spielberg presenter jive, the big announcement, Scorsese kissing and hugging those near and dear, addressing the audience, thanking the Departed cast, etc.

Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond offers his take on last night's Oscar show -- the ironies, surprises, whys and wherefores.

Every year comes the post-Oscar sourpuss reviews. But it didn't feel boring or torturous to me. You sit there and watch the damn thing and absorb the win-lose drama for just over three and a half hours, and then it's over and you figure who got the best scores and won the most money. I don't see the problem. Eat the chips and the dip and down a few beers.

Columnists always bitch about this and that. This presumably leads to a certain sharpening and honing, and perhaps a slightly better show next year. But last night's was far from...Read More

In Contention's Kris Tapley wants it understood that he wasn't with Eddie Murphy "to the last," even though the last Gurus of Gold listing shows him having voted for Murphy as his #1 choice. That chart, however, is dated 2.16.07, he tells me, so as of today it's ten days old. (All I did this morning was simply reference the last Gurus of Gold and Buzzmeter charts.) Kris's final In Contention calls, in which he predicted Arkin to win, is dated 2.23. He also claims he was the first guy on the block to say the award was...Read More

I'm all for rubbing salt in wounds, but I'm not entirely trusting that story about Eddie Murphy allegedly leaving the Kodak auditorium last night after he didn't win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. A reader named Michelle wrote about 100 minutes ago that she had heard KTLA movie guy Sam Rubin report about Murphy's abrupt departure this morning, but I talked to Rubin about 40 minutes ago and he said, "I didn't talk about that."

I spoke to a Paramount publicist who was working at the Kodak last night, but said he was doing something else when the Best Supporting Actor Oscar...Read More

"No one is expecting David Geffen to spend his days golfing, but there is a danger that if the coming election becomes his full-time hobby, his precision ruthlessness will distort the public process," writes N.Y. Times reporter David Carr. "After all, this is not a movie sale, a busted deal or a Don Henley album; this is about the duly elected leader of the United States.

"Geffen and Ron Burkle, another Los Angeles billionaire who is a staunch ally of the Clintons, have already fought for custody of the Los Angeles Times. No one wants to see the presidency treated as a cat...Read More

Alan Arkin's triumph last night over Eddie Murphy "was one of only two times I actually cheered," Manhattan movie journalist Lewis Beale confided this morning. "The other was when The Lives of Others won [for Best Foreign Language Film]." Me too. I didn't exactly cheer when Arkin won -- I murmured a quiet little "thank God" to myself, feeling a huge sense of relief -- but I whoo-whoo'ed my ass off when Lives director-writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck bounded out of his seat. But I also clapped and grinned a lot. It was a great show.

Even though I only got 16...Read More

Here's the Big Moment..the Best Picture Oscar handout. It's going to be Little Miss Sunshine, I can feel it, it is....I think. And the Oscar goes to The Departed...deserved! No problem at all...my favorite fim, after all. But we all know it was a very close vote. A few votes either way. Anyway....good news.

The original Three Amigos -- Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg -- give the Best Director Oscar to Martin Scorsese for The Departed.

Reese Witherspoon steps out to present the Oscar for Best Actor. It would be gracious and divine if Peter O'Toole could upset and win. If only...if only, man. And the Oscar goes to Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland. Fine. It's okay. And he's stammering again. And now he's got his groove on. Forest is better than okay. "Into the next lifetime!"

The Best Actress Oscar will go to....who might that be?....Helen Mirren for The Queen. Mirren gets a gold star for tributing everyone else -- her co-workers, her co-competitors. Classy lady, classy speech.

The Best Film Editing Oscar, presented by Kate Winslet, is supposed to go to Babel ( I don't mind if it goes to The Departed), and the Oscar goes to Thelma Schoonmaker for The Departed! A slight surprise! But a good one!

The Oscar for Best Song...great one-liner by John Travolta...."but that's enough about me"...and the Oscar goes to Meliissa Etheridge and her song, "I Need To Wake Up," from An Inconvenient Truth. She said it -- this is the generation that can wake up, stand up and make the necessary changes.

Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst announcing the winner of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and the winner -- there can be no doubt about this as we wait, can there?-- is Michael Arndt, the writer of Little Miss Sunshine.

Best Original Score Oscar goes to Gustavo Santaolalla for Babel. Screwed for the third or fourth time by Sasha Stone and Tom O'Neil!

Ennio Morricone....everyone loves you also.

Jerry Seinfeld announcing the Best Feature Documentary Oscar.."these incredibly depressing movies"...I missed the point of that "the deal is, you rip us off" joke...and the Oscar goes to An Inconvenient Truth! Not a surprise but a fluttery pleasure wave anyway. Al Gore's speech at the end was noble, perfect...what a guy. He's so much more tonight than he's ever been before. Al, everyone loves you, and everyone (even a sizable portion of the right-wing denial brigade) is on the team.

Jennifer Hudson has won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar! A great lady with great pipes! And she's giving a great speech. Good girl.

The Lives of Others has won Best Foreign Language Film! The astonishing has happened! And there's so much traffic on the server I can barely post anything.

The Best Visual Effects Oscar is supposed to go to....fantastic drug-use-reference joke by Robert Downey! The Visual FX Oscar is supposed to go to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. And the Oscar goes to Pirates! Superb work done by all, and also by the great Bill Nighy as Davy Jones.

The Best Cinematography Oscar is going to go to Emmanuel Lubezki for Children of Men. Oh my goodness....it's gone to Guillermo Novarro for Pan's Labyrinth! What's going on here? "Chivo" was supposed to be a lock. Whatever...not a tragedy. Pan's Labyrinth was beautifully shot, but I don't get it. I'm not going to win the Oscar pool.

Sherry Lansing....fine. I'm hitting the head. I'm hungry anyway. Ellen and Clint...that's funny. The digital camera routine with Steven Spielberg....funny. Ellen si a great host. As good as Johnny Carson was in the old days...as good as Billy Crystal in the mid '90s.

That Wes Anderson American Express commercial is still brilliant, especially that moment when Wes starts to talk and suddenly we hear the sound of gunfire -- BLAM! -- and Wes hesitates for only a second and then keeps going.

Best Adapted Screenpay Oscar presented by Helen Mirren and Tom Hanks, and it goes to Wiliam Monahan for The Departed. Totally expected. The guy needs to cut down on the cheeseburgers and the onion rings and the vodka gimlets, but I really loved/love what he wrote. And he has a soothing gentle voice.

Why is Jack Nicholson's head shaved? Britney Spears empathy?

The Oscar for Costume Design goes to Milena Canonero for Marie Antoinette. Screwed again by Sasha Stone and Tom O Neil!~

The orchestra cutting off Al Gore as he got out his speech to announce...hilarious! This has been a very witty, very engaging, very nicely produced show thus far. Congrats to Laura Ziskin.

Okay, here we go....the Murphy-Arkin moment. Rachel Weisz at the podium going through the speech, and the tension is all but unbearable as the winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar hangs in the balance. Here we go, I can take it....the Oscar goes to Alan Arkin! Oh my God! There is a God, there is a God in heaven. Thanks to all the saints and angels. I will say nothing more. The win is the win is the win.The right thing has happened. The Movie Gods have done what they do best. Why should I comment about what Ellen said to Marky-Mark?

The Best Sound-Editing Oscar, presented by Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear, is supposed to go to Letters From Iwo Jima....and the Oscar goes to the Jima guy! Sasha Stone is forgiven. The Best Sound Mixing Oscar is supposed to go to Dreamgirls, and the Oscar goes to...Dreamgirls! I have nothing to say about this except that anyone following my recommendatons so far isn't doing half badly!

Wait a minute...the Best Animated Short Oscar was supposed to be won by The Little Matchgirl. The Danish Poet won instead. Blame Sasha Stone, blame Tom O'Neil...blame somebody! Well, at least West Bank Story won for Best Live Short. I was in the bathroom when Pan's Labyrinth won for Best Makeup, but I'm starting to feel The Lives of Others may be doomed. As far as its chance for winning the Best Foreign-Language Oscar, I mean. Sniff.

Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman handing out the Best Art Direction Oscar, which will go to Pan's Labyrinth..right? And the winner is Pan's Labyrinth! Does this mean anything as far as the Best Foreign Language Oscar is concerned?

The Oscar show has begun, and Errol Morris is a genius...okay? He's perfect, inspired, wonderfully gifted. I want to see the long version of his interiew montage. My first impressions of Ellen DeGeneres -- everyone's, I imagine -- are quite favorable. She's obviously a very bright and witty lady. And obviously likable. The jokes are quite blunt (as in "beyond candid"). Which is why she's very funny. Peter O'Toole...eight nominatons as of tonight, right? Well, you know what they say -- third time's the charm!" "Al Gore is here tonight. America did vote for him, and then..." If there weren't blacks, Jews or...Read More

The Steve Pond vs. Nikki Finke reporting war continues, the latest salvo being Pond's claim that he has "copies of every daily show breakdown starting from Monday of this week and the awards never moved," as Finke claimed in her response earlier this afternoon. "The Dreamgirls songs have not changed," writes Pond. "They were pre-recorded several days ago, all with the same arrangements that will be used tonight. There was never anything changed in reaction to any of her reports." That's enough of this, I think...let's just let it go.

Yeah, I'll be live-blogging during the show...sure. From a party. The host told me there'd be good wi-fi. Here's hoping.

"Hollywood is in a quandary....you have the feeling in many of my conversations that people feel married to the Clintons, but they're in love with Obama." -- Arianna Huffington speaking on a 2.22.07 National Public Radio report about the Clinton-vs.-Obama spat. As N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd said to MSNBC's Tim Russert about the impact of her interview with David Geffen, Geffgen "gave voice to a lot of what a lot of Democratic contributors have been saying about Hilary, which is that she's polarizing, calculating and over-scripted."

The Oscar Night upsets I'd most like to see happen (other than Alan Arkin beating Eddie Murphy) are...well, anything. I'll take any and all shockers. Except Letters From Iwo Jima taking Best Picture Oscar. I'd really, really rather not see that happen. But generally speaking, if no one except for obstinate love wolves like like Kris Tapley have predicted it and it happens, great. Peter O'Toole taking the Best Actor Oscar from Forest Whitaker ...fine. The Lives of Others triumphing over Pan's Labyrinth in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

Mark Bakalor of Oscar Central has posted his final Oscar calls. The word around the campfire is that year after year, Bakalor's calls are unusually accurate. And he has The Departed up for Best Picture. Ditto Scott Feinberg.

Peter Rainer, an extremely perceptive and respected film critic, has written an L.A. Times love sonnet to Eddie Murphy. Why would anyone on Rainer's level do this? What kind of editors would want such a piece at this stage of the game?

Ghost Rider, #1 again, will have about $19,421,000 by this evening, off 57% from last weekend. Business for The Number 23 significantly dropped from Friday to Saturday (i.e., indicating cruddy word-of-mouth), so figure $15.533,000 for late tonight. The Bridge to Tarabithia (or whatever it's called) is #3 with $13,655,000, off 39% from last weekend. Reno 911 is #4 with $10,646,000. Eddie Murphy's Norbit is fifth with $9,954,000, off 41%. Music and Lyrics, off 43%, is sixth with $7.964,000. Breach is #7 with $6,159,000. Daddy's Little Girls is at $4,.950,000 -- off 50%. The Astronaut Farmer is a fizzle -- $4536,000, $2100 a print....Read More

The box-office champ next weekend is going to be Walt Becker's Wild Hogs, a.k.a., Easy Rider with pot bellies (John Travolta, Tim Allen, William H. Macy, Martin Lawrence). General interest is 75, definite interest is 41 and first choice is 9 (as of last Thursday). Figure $30, maybe $35 million.

The likely #2 film among new 3.2.07 openers, Craig Brewer's thoroughly satisfying and self-aware Black Snake Moan, is at 51, 26 and 2...not much.

You won't find a greater aesthetic gulf next weekend than the one over Zodiac next weekend -- a gap between big-gun critics and Fincher buffs (except for...Read More

Wells to readers saying I should stop wiggling around and stick to my guns about predicting the Best Picture Oscar...fuck that. This is a crazy year, nothing is adding up, nobody knows anything and if the wind changes or I pick up a fresh scent or hint of some turn, I'm going to listen to that and re-calculate accordingly. Stating once again: my final, final call is for Little MIss Sunshine to win the Big Prize. And that's really and truly it. No more changing my mind unless some new, wild-ass revelation hits me this afternoon.

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke has responded to The Envelope's Steve Pond's saying some of her Oscar show spoiler calls are wrong by saying she was right when she reported them but that some bits have been changed or dropped at the last minute, partly in response to her having spoiled them in her column. She goes over every forecast, bit by bit...here it is.

"A rash of recent Oscar winners have been rewarded for playing real people, from Ray Charles to Truman Capote to June Carter Cash," reads the NPR promo copy for Pete Hammond's just-posted aural report. "Are the acting categories turning into best imitation of a real celebrity life?" Obviously. The Academy clearly prefers handing out awards to actors playing real-life people, i.e., those whom viewers know quite well for their voices and tics and body language. Hammond suggests the creation of a new Oscar category -- Best Celebrity Impersonation.

Hold on...more Steve Pond swat-downs of Nikki Finke's previously posted Oscar show spoilers. The Envelope's Tom O'Neil has just spoken to Pond and been told that "a lot of her stuff is either misleading or wrong."

Wrongo #1: Finke "claims that each of the Dreamgirls will sing each others' songs -- that's misleading," says Pond. "All I can really say is that the number is very collaborative, but if you love Beyonce singing 'Listen' or Jennifer Hudson singing 'Love You, I Do,' you're not going to be disappointed."

Wrongo #2: "It's true that one of the supporting awards will...Read More

The hell with it: I'm switching my Best Picture prediction to Little Miss Sunshine.

An older friend told me this morning "it'll probably be The Departed," pointing the tendency of older Academy members to shy away from comedies in choosing Best Picture winners plus the lack of Sunshine Best Director and Editing noms, blah blah.

I say throw out the stats. The bottom line is that we're living in weird times. Everyone knows the world is coming to an early end unless some big changes, and Bill Maher was totally dead-on the other night when he said that if people knew...Read More

If the Best Picture choice of the majority is going to be/has been about selecting the film with the most accessible emotional current (i.e., one that fulfills and satisfies by affirming some commonly-shared realization about life as Academy members know it), then Little Miss Sunshine is going to win the Best Picture Oscar tonight. "If," I say...

We all know that the statistics are against it with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris not having been nominated for Best Director and the film also not receiving a Best Editing nomination. I don't know how to calculate this...nobody knows. At the very least tonight's Oscar...Read More

Little Miss Sunshine won the Spirit Award for Best Picture yesterday, and with that an extra-special hooray for Academy-snubbed producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, who ought to take the stage tonight at the Oscar and when LMS wins Best Picture. Sunshine helmers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris also won for Best Director, and Sunshine author Michael Arndt won for Best First Screenplay.

Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt prior to yesterday afternoon's Spirit Awards -- Saturday, 2.24.07, 1:15 pm

Sunshine producers Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa after the big Sunshine wins...

The wi-fi in the big Spirit Awards tent was twitchy -- worked, didn't work, sorta worked -- so I threw up my hands after 40 minutes or so of futzing around. And then it was party time at Shutters for two, two and a half hours, and then a 90-minute horizontal...forget it. I blew it, slacked off, dropped the ball and, from a filing perspective, basically shined my Hollywood Elsewhere responsibilities.

The Lives of Others director-writer Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck fielding questions in the rear press tent at the Spirit Awards -- Saturday, 2.24.07, 3:25 pm

I'm not revealing anything if you're watching the Spirit Awards on IFC, but it's 3:36 pm -- the show's been running for 90 minutes -- and the winners so far that I admire and care about a lot are (a) Little Miss Sunshine's Alan Arkin, Best Supporting Male; (b) Michael Arndt, Best First Screenplay, Little Miss Sunshine; (c) Frances McDormand, Best Supporting Female for Friends With Money; Shareeka Epps, Best Female Lead for Half Nelson; Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck, director-writer of The Lives of Others, winner of the Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film; and Guillermo Navarro, winner of the Best Cinematography Spirit...Read More

I'm heading over to Santa Monica and the Spirit Awards tent around 11 ayem or so, Stand-up, stroll-around schmooze time happens between 12 noon and 2 pm, which is when the show goes on the air on IFC channel (5 pm eastern). There's also some kind of live webcast thing going on via www.ifc.com.

I'm bringing the laptop with a hope that some kind of wi-fi will be available. The Bagger says he'll be blogging from the press area so maybe he knows something. If the wi-fi''s happening I'll do my best with the...Read More

"The first, flat-out great film of 2007, David Fincher's spine-tingling Zodiac is a 158-minute, decades-spanning movie about one of America's most notorious serial killers," writes Boston Herald critic James Verniere. "This is the GoodFellas of psycho-killer thrillers.

"A remarkably accomplished, measured and mature procedural, Zodiacis to Se7en -- Fincher's 1995 breakthrough effort -- what the real-life case is to Dirty Harry, Don Siegel's great, lurid 1971 classic, featuring a Zodiac-like killer played by Andy Robinson.

"In many ways, Zodiac is Se7en stripped of its exploitation trappings, creepy credit sequence and twist ending and transformed into a great American crime epic.

When shooting on Zodiac finally ended, director David Fincher "found himself sifting through the digital equivalent of 1.3 million feet of film, enough footage to fill two features," writes EW's Benjamin Svetkey in the current issue. "After months of slicing and dicing, he emerged from the editing room with a cut of Zodiac that ran a tick over three hours.

"Even he knew it was too long, so the movie's original fall 2006 release was pushed to January, then to March, to give Fincher time to make more trims."

Why are we stuck with outmoded,...Read More

"Many of Nikki Finke's spoilers are accurate, but some are not," writes Envelope contributor Steve Pond declared last night. "Don't believe what she says about all acting awards being pushed to the last third of the show." The Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards, he means.

"Were you ever raped by Eddie Murphy or what? He must have done some kind of personal bad to you. Having said that, boy, do I ever agree with you. That guy is a world-class arrogant prick. If he wins this he'll be impossible to live with. He also does not deserve it. Its a shallow bullshit performance that is meritorious only for his musical and dancing talents. I said Arkin weeks ago." -- e-mail received this morning from a director friend who's obviously not to be trusted despite first-hand experience.

"[Oscar voters] tell the pollster, you or whomever, that they are voting for the serious gravitas-filled downer, Babel. But, mark my words, they are secretly voting for the pic that is their guilty pleasure, either Sunshine or Departed.'" -- posted by a N.Y. Times reader named Judy in response to a "Bagger" piece. Something about the conciseness and sense of certainty in this remark has given me pause. I'm suddenly thinking I might be wrong in predicting Babel to win. I need to think this over.

"Oh. she's an inninvala, invala...an invalid...it's practically like living alone."

Film Stew's Brent Buckalew (is that a nom de plume?) complains about a "horde of internet diarists and fanboys pounding on their keyboards in protest" about this year's Oscar nominees, and urges "enough already, give it a rest." Not a bad rant, but it's been posted about two or three weeks too late.

In Contention's Kris Tapley is predicting that Letters From Iwo Jima will take the Best Picture Oscar. A little voice was telling me this might happen about two or three weeks ago, but I told it to be quiet. I was actually a little ruder than that.

I know that as much as I admired Letters when I saw it in Manhattan in December, and as moved as I was by Ken Watanabe's lead performance, I haven't put the Warner Bros. screener into my DVD player since it arrived. On the other hand, I've watched...

"If Little Miss Sunshine beats The Departed, I expect Martin Scorsese to pull out a machine-gun and fire randomly into the voting members as they run screaming for the exits. And he'd be within his rights, too." -- from John Patterson's 2.23 well-founded Guardian rant, called "Oscar's Greatest Crimes."

"Little Miss Sunshine hit so big because it isn't afraid to mix laughs and darkness. It's hip enough for the urban elites but not so hip that it's sailing over the heads of regular paying customers. It's a very sophisticated, equal-opportunity entertainer." -- observation from Lewis Beale's New York Newsday piece about why LMS went over as well as it did.

The 9% Rotten Tomatoes rating that The Number 23 has gotten so far matches Norbit's (i.e., also at 9%). I missed the Number 23 screening on 2.15; the 9%, paradoxically, makes me want to rush down and see it at the 4 pm show. A perverse impulse, to be sure.

David Fincher's Zodiac (Paramount, 3.2) got two rave reviews today -- from Variety's Todd McCarthy and the Holly- wood Reporter's Michael Rechtshaffen -- and it opens a week from Friday, and yet the brainiacs at Metacritic don't even have it in their database.

HE's final Oscar calls, and thank God I won't have to tap out these names and movies in tandem ever again in this context after Sunday :

Best Picture: Babel (personal favorite: The Departed);

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Departed (LOCK);

Best Actor: Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland (LOCK) (although my personal preference: is for Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed / sentimental favorite: Peter O'Toole in Becket...sorry, Venus;

Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen (LOCK);

Best Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine (By a nosehair, if it happens). I realize/understand that the ogre Eddie Murphy...Read More

Praise God a bit more: critic David Ehrenstein confirmed on the Criterion forums a week and a half ago that Criterion will be issuing a DVD of Lindsay Anderson's If...., which I'm been pushing for since the turn of the century, sometime in June. If... isn't mentioned on the Criteron Co. site, but Ehrenstein said he's written the notes and that they're putting it out -- good enough for me.

A '60s rebellion allegory that brilliantly captures the rage and excitement of a revolution in poetic fantasy terms, If... begins as a relatively straightforward...Read More

An agreeably spirited piece by Radar Online's Shana Ting Lipton about the zen of Hollywood party crashing. It's not really about crashing the Vanity Fair party at Morton's, though, except for the tip about dressing like a fire marshall with a tuxedo underneath.

It's mainly about Rex Reginald, "the self-styled 'King of the Party Crashers' who claims that his story outline and party-crashing handbook were co-opted by New Line Cinema when they made the film Wedding Crashers." (What handbook? There's no link in Lipton's piece, it's not on Google and it's not being sold on Amazon.)...Read More

Nikki Finke is also revealing that the Oscar telecast will kick off with "an inspired piece of CGI trickery." Shocker! The Oscar show has been opening with inspired pieces of CGI trickery for years, since the Billy Crystal hosting days in the mid '90s. Wait...has there been a year since '97 when it hasn't opened with inspired pieces of CGI trickery?

Sticking to form, host Ellen DeGeneres will reportedly be placed into various scenes (presumably those from Best Picture nominees). Obviously Ellen will be CG'd into royal robes of The Queen, if this is in fact the plan. What else? Jack Nicholson...Read More

Another Nikki Finke Oscar-show spoiler: Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, 60ish graybeards all, will jointly present the Best Director Oscar to Martin Scorsese.

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke is reporting Seven Oscar-Night Spoilers, the biggest one being that the Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards won't be presented in the early portion of the show, as they always have. Instead, no acting awards will be given out until the last third of the telecast. The Academy is doing this, Finke understands, because Oscar viewership starts out strong and then wanes, and the only real cliffhanger is Eddie Murphy vs. Alan Arkin.

Please, Movie Gods...please don't let Murphy win. You're not pro-active and you don't interfere as a rule, but you know what's best and...Read More

The best thing in N.Y. Times guy David Carr's Oscar prediction chart [click on "Juicy Subplots & Other Picks"] is the roundabout suggestion that if and when Little Miss Sunshine wins Best Picture, that the officially nominated producers -- David T. Friendly, Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub -- plus the film's actual hands-on, Michael Arndt-hiring, Jonathan Dayton-and-Valerie Faris-hiring producers who weren't nominated because of the Academy's clumsy and insensitive rule-of-three -- Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, of course -- "perform a rear-guard action" and appear on-stage together as a quintet, arm-in-arm, all for one and one for all.

In a last-ditch attempt to squeeze intrigue out of a dying Oscar season, Rotten Tomatoes has put up an interactive feature called "The Best of the Best Pictures," a list of 78 Best Picture Oscar winners ranked by how well-reviewed they are -- not at the time of their release but (mostly) based on what today's critics have written. The worst reviewed is Cecil B. Demille's The Greatest Show on Earth. The all-time best reviewed is Francis Copola's The Godfather; the second best is Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront.

"I know less and less about who I am, or who anyone else is."

The problem isn't that Warner Bros. marketers waited too long to start emphasizing Leonardo DiCaprio's Best Actor performance in The Departed in trade ads. (It was the problem but no longer, I mean.) The problem is that The Envelope's Tom O'Neil, composing this comparative piece of art for an article he wrote about Leo's once-upon-a-time Oscar hopes, didn't properly tweak the November trade ad so it looks as sharply focused as the December one.

I realize that FORA is an acronym for something, but I don't know what. (Federation of Ravenous Alpha-Dogs?) Obviously it's a web TV thing. They sent me an excerpt of Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt talking about how how and why he was briefly fired off the project. No, wait...there's an entire program of Arndt talking about everything. You just have to click on it. It's free to watch. (Apparently.)

In an interview with USA Today's Anthony Breznican, the reigning Oscar Night ladies -- producer Laura Ziskin and host Ellen DeGeneres -- are a study in opposite attitudes and sensibilities. DeGeneres is a brainy, free-associative, improvisational wit. Ziskin wants to be hip and alpha-like, but she sounds like an affluent ooh-lah-lah control freak who's terrified (or at the very least alarmed) by spontaneity.

The Oscar show, I've just realized, is going to be a kind of war between the two. Ziskin will dominate, of course, being the big-shot producer in the control room, but many...Read More

Washington Times film critic Gary Arnold trumpets the virtues of the Paul Greengrass's United 93 -- good move -- but in the same piece calls The Departed "terminally wretched," praises Doug McGrath's Infamous as "far and away the superior biopic about Truman Capote" and describes Inconvenient Truth avatar Al Gore as "an alarmist pseudo-authority." I used to admire Arnold when he was the critic for the Washington Post back in the '70s and '80s. I don't know what happened.

Mediabistro.com on all the people I didn't talk with or take pictures of at last night's Radar magazine party at the Standard. I mostly stood around and talked about new scripts with a couple of very cool enterprisers, and otherwise tried to smile and not scowl until 9:30 pm or so.

A brotherly pat on the back to all those on Oscarwatch.com's Final Oscar Prediction Chart who are predicting Alan Arkin to take the Best Supporting Actor Oscar -- The Envelope's Tom O'Neil, Award Speculation, Buzzmeter, Spencer Shannon, Toronto Star's Peter Howell, Indiewire's Eugene Hernandez, N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Matthews and Trailer Spy's Julie Stone. Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond (who didn't send his picks into Oscarwatch, but he's standing by Arkin in his latest Hollywood Wiretap column)

Almost everyone else is sticking with Eddie Murphy, and two or three stragglers are picking Jackie Earl Haley.

Good things occasionally happen to...Read More

Eight or nine days ago, First Showing's Alex Billington paid roundabout tribute to 300, a film he believes is waaay ahead of its time, by listing a dozen motion pictures that were similarly ahead of the curve in their time and place. But with the exception of Mike Judge's Office Space and Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the films Billington lists are actually fanboy standard-setters. They did something fairly fresh and striking that led to commercial paydirt, and everyone followed suit in order to get in on a profitable new thing.

Films that are truly ahead of their time are most often ignored...Read More

Why do British actors often seem much more accomplished than their American cousins? The Guardian's Charles McNulty boils the answer down to two words -- theatrical training -- which allows for all kinds of delightful tonalities and wonderfully resonant deliveries, as well as the ability to make a line work on more than just one level.

"It's hard not to marvel at the virtuosic command of speech" that British actors possess, "the way Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Peter O'Toole make music out of spoken thought," he begins. "Steeped in Shakespeare and a culture committed...Read More

The Oscar field "seems to have left a number of academy voters feeling dispirited," writes Slate's Kim Masters. "One director said he stared at the ballot and considered leaving the best picture category blank. Then he gave Clint a tribute vote. A publicist told us he did not check favorites in a couple of major categories for the first time in his years of voting. 'I just said, 'Fuck it, I don't like any of 'em,' he explained."

With both Need (a somewhat "bent" relationship drama with Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts) and Dirty Tricks (a women-of- Watergate movie with Meryl Streep as Martha Mitchell and Gwynneth Paltrow as Maureen Dean) in pre-production, it could never be said that director Ryan Murphy (Running With Scissors) is one to let grass grow under his feet.

But who would've imagined Murphy directing something as unusual and film-buffy as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a drama about the making of Hitchcock's Psycho, and particularly the hurdles and roadblocks that the great British director (possibly to be played by Anthony Hopkins) went through in order to...Read More

Alright now, settle down: all Patrick Goldstein meant by digging into "Oscar bloggers" at the end of his "Winners & Losers: Big Picture Extra" column and saying that "after the millions of words they wrote pontificating about the Oscars they could've come up with a better pick for best picture winner than Dreamgirls" ...we all know what he meant.

He was, yes, tut-tutting all those prognosticators who'd been asserting for months and months that Dreamgirls was a guaranteed Best Picture nominee (a group that includes yours truly, Tom O'Neil, Sasha Stone, Pete Hammond and Goldstein himself) and, according to some,...Read More

Hillary Clinton "didn't stand outside the gates to David Geffen's mansion [last night], singing the Jennifer Hudson protest anthem 'And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going,'" writes N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "But she's not exactly Little Miss Sunshine, either.

"Hillary loyalists have hissed at defecting donors to remember the good old days of jumping on the Lincoln Bedroom bed. 'Hillary is livid that [Barack] Obama's getting the first big fund-raiser here,' one friend said.

"Who can pay attention to the Oscar battle between The Queen...Read More

Mark Ruffalo portrays real-life San Francisco detective Dave Toschi in Zodiac (Paramount, 3.2), and obviously bears a certain resemblance to the real guy in his prime. But one thing an actor playing a cop in a big-studio movie can never have is a little funny-looking pot belly, like the real Toschi had.

Mark Ruffalo (l.) in Zodiac; Dave Toschi in the '70s or early '80s.

Zodiac director David Fincher was a major hard-core accuracy freak in 10,000 different ways when he planned and shot this awesome film, but no director would dare suggest that...Read More

Film Jerk's Edward Havens is running his annual Oscar Handicap articles, which look at voting patterns at most of the Academy Awards categories. Here's the piece about the Best Picture race; links to the additional articles can be found at the end.

Big scoop: the Governors Ball, Vanity Fair and Elton John's annual AIDS Foundation bash are the only hot-shit parties going on this Sunday night. On top of which, according to The Envelope's Elizabeth Snead, no Oscar post-parties are being planned by Paramount, New Line, Fox/Searchlight, Universal/Focus, Disney/Buena Vista or Picturehouse. Oh, yeah? I've been told about a certain distrib-hosted party. Not that big a deal but it's said to be happening.

Wanna make book on the Oscars and maybe score some dough? Israeli film blogger Yair Raveh, master of a Hebrew-language site called Cinemascope, has a global bilingual Oscar pool up and running, for those who like to place bets from wherever. Raveh claims he's the only Oscar forecaster who's willing to put up cash on (no lie) betting Martin Scorsese is going to lose the directing award on Sunday.

Yoko Ono may (I say "may") have succeeded in "yanking" a 90-minute John Lennon documentary called John Lennon: Working-Class Hero, despite the producers having landed numerous TV and DVD deals going back to late '05.

Narrated by Gary Oldman, the doc is said to include "never-before-seen home movies" provided by Ono, plus a reported interview with Lennon's first wife Cynthia, who "allegedly complains on-camera that drugs and Ono were responsible for the break-up of their marriage," according to the notoriously sloppy British news service WENN, which never provides news links.

The report says Ono also...Read More

Here's the "wake up and smell the coffin"/Rome...lotsa wops, no pizza" deleted scene from The Departed. Performed by Jack Nicholson in a hat and inky beard dye, an older guy (too old) playing Leonardo DiCaprio's father, and some kid playing young Leo.

Peter O'Toole's recent visit with Charlie Rose is viewable on the site. It takes too long to sift through all the corporate sponsor promos, but eventually it comes up.

To hear it from The Reeler's Stu VanAirsdale, the highlight of the Robert Altman tribute was Julianne Moore's recollection about beiong cast in Short Cuts, and being told that the role required lower-level nudity and Moore telling Altman that "I really was a redhead."

I prefer the Paul Thomas Anderson anecdote passed along in David Carr's N.Y. Times story, to wit: "On the set of A Prairie Home Companion, Altman would listen carefully to the suggestions of others and then say, 'Let's not do that.'"

An Inconvenient Truth is going to win the Best Feature Documentary Oscar this Sunday, and the right thing, obviously, would be for not just director Davis Guggenheim walking up to the podium to accept, but also (hello?) Al Gore along with producers Lawrence Bender, Laurie David and Scott Burns. Obviously. But no. Just Guggenheim. But of course.

British online voters at msn.com have allegedly decided that Shakespeare in Love is the most undeserving Oscar Best Picture winner of all time. ("Allegedly" because I can't find the article that announces the tabulations -- the news has been passed along by a BBC web page.)

The people who voted obviously aren't very hip or knowledgable. Shakespeare in Love was a mostly tolerable, agreeably spunky period romance with a short-but-terrific Judi Dench performance. It wasn't "right" that it won over Saving Private Ryan, but it wasn't a rank embarassment. Mike Todd's Around the World...Read More

John Mikulenka's "Hunting the Zodiac," a 63-minute documentary "about the vast subculture of amateur detectives who are obsessed with solving the Zodiac Killer case from the late 1960s. Shot in 2001-02, the film chronicles a turning point in the hunt for the psychopath who killed at least 5 people in the San Francisco Bay Area and mailed more than a dozen bizarre letters and coded messages to local newspapers. Doc includes extensive interviews with the last two San Francisco homicide detectives to be assigned to the case, and it features more than 8 minutes of rare archival news footage from the earliest...Read More

N.Y. Daily News reporter Chris Rovzar on the costs ("up to $25 million a year per nominated film") and strategies that often/usually/ sometimes result in an Oscar nomination. The process is basically about having "a conversation with viewers," I told him at one point, "and keeping certain films in their mind as they mull over possible winners." My mind is freezing up; these phrases aren't registering; only five more days to go.

"Case Closed" author Gerald Posner, who believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter on 11.22.63, has pointed out in a N.Y. Times story that the just-revealed George Jefferies 8mm home movies of JFK and Jackie Kennedy riding in the Presidential limo on Dallas' Main Street (i.e., a minute or less before the shots rang out) that JFK's easily visibly bunched-up suit jacket explains why the back-wound bullet hole didn't line up with the bullet hole in his shirt.

And the bullet that ripped into both Kennedy and Connolly without altering its shape will be...Read More

The names of 35 world-class gentlemen directors have been named as creators of a series of three-minute films that will make up a feature film called "To Each his Own Cinema," which will be shown during the 60th Cannes Film Festival in May. The chosen all have a certain elite, Cannes- sanctified tasteful aura about them. They are Theo Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Bille August, Jane Campion, Ethan & Joel Coen, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Atom Egoyan, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Takeshi Kitano; Andrei Konchalovsky, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Roman Polanski, Walter Salle, Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Wim Wenders,Wong Kar...Read More

"Howard Dean has been a virtual Nostradamus on predicting what would happen in Iraq from the beginning. But he screamed once. He said 'yee-ha' -- publicly! He screamed louder than a crowd of people screaming at him, and the media acted like Grandpa just yelled out the 'N' word at a ball game.

"And before the war began, it was Al Gore who got it right, who spoke unequivocally about not making this bad choice, a choice that 77 Senators voted for. But during the debates of 2000, Al Gore...sighed! We can't have a sigh-er for president!...Read More

"A once venerated icon has been devalued by the hordes of eager-beaver marketers," the quote goes. "Welcome to the devalued world." And the topic is the over-use of laurels in film advertising. Whatever.

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil is reporting that "one of the best gurus of all -- Pete Hammond of Maxim and Hollywood Wiretap.com -- [has] just switched his best-pic prediction today from Little Miss Sunshine to Babel." But if you ask me, it's a shaky prediction based upon a dry hunch and a sense of Oscar fatigue.

"I've been talking to my Academy voter people and getting this survey, which told me last year Crash, Crash, Crash and not Brokeback at this point in the race," Hammond explains. "But I'm not getting that [this year]. It's all over the map. I talk to...Read More

If you're determined to believe something and you're smart enough, you can always make a case for it -- and it will sound half-reasonable. But when certain know-it-alls get into making a pitch along these lines, it can be truly fascinating to consider the motives, the personal politics and the mental contortions that went into it.

The defeat of Dreamgirls -- i.e., its exclusion from being nominated for Best Picture -- was a surprise to everyone, myself included. But it was also a thunderclap moment along the lines of Roman Polanskiwinning the Best Director...Read More

The front page of the IMDB is the same old design deal with the Times Roman font, but they've done a redesign of all the film pages using the Avant Garde font and a sense of more space.

This Best Picture slide show, which I saw a little while ago on Sasha Stone's Oscarwatch, is, for starters, technically substandard with its cavalcade of muddy desaturated third-generation poster images. And the music that plays with the images is trite and tedious. But the main import is one of vague depression as the thing that hits you most if how "meh" a good percentage of the Best Picture winners now seem to be, particularly those from the late '20s and '30s. The best decade by far was the '70s, no question.

Why is it I can't seem to make myself rent...Read More

Michael Tucker, co-director (with Petra Epperlein) of Gunner Palace and The Prisoner, or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, has written a piece for Vanity Fair.com ("My Prisoner, My Brother") about an American soldier from Ohio named Benjamin Thompson who "formed an unlikely friendship in the crucible of Abu Ghraib with an Iraqi detainee named Yunis" -- the Iraqi central character in The Prisoner who refuses to take any shit from U.S. soldiers -- "who was under his command."

The Bagger (a.k.a., N.Y.Times Oscar David Carr) has written that he "has no idea what horse, or frog, to saddle up" as far as picking the Best Picture nominee most likely to win.

"His industry sources left him even more baffled than before, and while some of the comments he got from readers, whose predictions he solicited yesterday, where amazingly cogent and persuasive, they also tended to argue for different movies. Expect to hear much sound and fury for the rest of the week, signaling precisely nothing."

It's Babel, okay? It's that old Crash magic plus the three countries and...Read More

Collider's Steve Weintraub (a.k.a. "Frosty") has posted some mildly nervy, undoubtedly fascinating comments from Departed screenwriter William Monahan that came out of an interview. One of the more interesting riffs concerns the rumors about one or more Departed sequels being planned.

"I read the prequel and sequel to Infernal Affairs for the first time a couple of weeks ago and there wasn't anything I could use in Boston situation, not now. The thing is, that world of The Departed is sort of an intensely personal literary construct. If you analyze what the commodity is now,...Read More

"Instead of living in Hollywood or Beverly Hills, Ryan Gosling has found a home in downtown LA for himself and his canine alter-ego George ('He doesn't like it that he's a dog, you can tell'). There, Gosling says, people 'are all doing something different. They don't all have a script in their car. I live on Skid Row. You can't filter yourself from reality there.'" -- from Gaby Wood's interview with Gosling in the 2.18 Guardian.

Interior of Tagine, a Beverly Hills Moroccan restaurant that Gosling partly owns and sometimes even works in.

"I live in the poor part of Bel Air...Skid Drive." -- a stand-up line Bill Maher used six or seven years ago, or perhaps as long ago as '99...I forget.

A journalist friend wrote a few hours ago that he'll "be so glad on Monday when it's all over" -- i.e., all the Oscar crap -- "for another year." It will be over for precisely four, maybe four and a half months -- until mid-July -- by which time the '07 campaigns will have been decided upon, pre-strategized and quietly launched. And then the game really kicks in come Labor Day.

Which means, now that I think of it, that it's time for the '07 Oscar Balloon to be thrown together. I can throw something together, of course, but it'll be better if...Read More

"Was it not just the other day that I mentioned the travesty of Prince of the City not being released on DVD? The double-disc treatment will get this masterpiece seen by many more than ever had a chance to catch it in theaters. I don't know of any other film of this quality not yet out in the format...and POTC really is the best antecedent of Zodiac, which I saw the other night.

"Zodiac is a film that, on the one hand, seems to burst a blood vessel of tension when it wants to do so (pretty amazing for a film that...Read More

WARNING: Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End plot spoiler about to be revealed, mainly because it's already been revealed on jimhilledia.com and I hate these movies anyway (not how well they're made, but how adamantly empty they are) so screw it:

"In the third installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Will, Elizabeth and Capt'n Jack Sparrow are once again thrown together for a showdown between the fiercely independent Pirate Lords from around the world and the all powerful East India Trading Company (!!) led by the mysterious & cunning Lord Cutler Beckett. With possession of Davey Jones's...Read More

An industry observer who talks to Academy members is starting to think that maybe Alan Arkin might eke out a win against the ogre Eddie Murphy. "[Arkin's] name is coming up, this and that person has told me they're voting for him. Plus he's in a Best Picture nominated film, so [Arkin's performance] is being seen by a lot of people. Plus it's not atypical for the Academy to have differences of opinion with SAG, and I'm thinking that such a difference just might be in this category [i.e., Best Supporting Actor].

"Murphy is a veteran, but Arkin is really a veteran,...Read More

"In Hollywood and on Wall Street, some question the focus at New Line Cinema," writes N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman. She then discusses the why and wherefores of that focus, or lack of. And yet the bedrock "thing" about Shaye and (talk to anyone who's made a movie for him or had his/her film distributed by New Line) the moody, somewhat erratic, dark-cloud manner in which New Line operates, is not really given a name in the piece.

Talk to anyone who's run a few laps around the track at 116 No. Robertson and...Read More

"When he sees a guy like you, all normal and everything, coming here with a nice pretty little girl, he should get the two of you a really nice room and a nice bed."

The Movie Gods are at peace. Children of Men dp Emmanuel Lubezki won the top feature film award at last night's 21st Annual American Society of Cinematographers Awards. "Chivo" also won the Best Cinematography category at the Orange British Academy Film Awards last weekend. This seems to pretty much settle it -- the Best Cinematography Oscar is Lubezki's to lose next Sunday.

Babel and The Departed tied for Best Edited Feature Film (Drama) at the ACE Eddie Awards tonight (The last time two films tied in a feature category was 1989 when Rain Man tied with Mississippi Burning.) The Best Edited Feature Film/Comedy or Musical award went to Dreamgirls. An Inconvenient Truth took the Best Edited Documentary award.

"It's dangerous to make broad generalizations about TV versus film without sounding as though you're comparing apples and tubas, but let's do it anyway: television is running circles around the movies," Newsweek's Devin Gordon argues in the new, just-out issue.

"The internet age has put both industries into a state of high anxiety, with everyone scrambling to figure out how money will be made in a digital future where people watch movies on their phones and surf the web on their TVs. But while the major film studios have responded by taking shelter beneath big-tent franchises, the TV industry has gone the...Read More

Another presumably choice DVD on the way: Peter Ustinov's Billy Budd ('62), a literate, superbly acted (by Terence Stamp, Robert Ryan, Melvyn Douglas, Ustinov), very handsomely photographed (monochrome, 2.35 to 1 Scope) adaptation of the Herman Melville novel about innocence wronged. Ustinov's Captain Vere is perhaps too humane and guilt-wracked, but the reptilian malevolence in Ryan's Claggart is fascinating, and the young, blonde-haired Stamp is angelicism personified before even speaking a word. Ustinov directed and produced. Due March 6th from Warner Home Video.

Universal is doing a little Children of Men promotion with CHUD and critic-essayist Devin Faraci, with reader questions submitted to director Alfonso Cuaron and Alfonso answers them on video. (Or so it says here.) Devin is asking HE readers to submit questions, which he presumes will be appropriately incisive and intelligent.

Hail Mary and holy mother of God: a double-disc Warner Home Video DVD of Prince of the City, my all-time favorite Sidney Lumet film, is "streeting" on 5.22.07.

I regard it more affectionately than all the other sublime New York Lumet films (including Dog Day Afternoon and Find Me Guilty) because it titanically reeks of coarse and odorous five-borough atmosphere in each and every frame. On top of which it may be the most deeply conflicted "moral drama" ever made -- it doesn't finally know what it's trying to say exactly, but oh the guilt!...Read More

If Children of Men's Emmanuel Lubezki doesn't win the Outstanding Achievement trophy at tonight's American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Awards ceremony at the Century Plaza, the Movie Gods are going to go into shock.

No disrespect to the work of Dick Pope, BSC (The Illusionist), Robert Rich- ardson, ASC (The Good Shepherd), Dean Semler, ASC, ACS (Apocalypto), and Vilmos Zsigmond, ASC (The Black Dahlia). It's just that Chivo's achievement was and is historic, wowser...no contest.

Here's a Sasha Stone ASC chart that I don't quite get.

The Envelope's Tom O'Neil hasn't joined the Babel club (he's a confirmed Departed supporter), but in an article called "Babel Rising" he says he's hearing more and more that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's film will take the Best Picture Oscar.

"I don't understand why everybody's saying the best picture race is between The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine," an Oscar voter "fumed" to O'Neil the other day. "I voted for Babel and I know a lot of other academy members who did, too!"

"Over the past week, while chatting with lots of academy members and other...Read More

I don't know from the 5th Annual International Online Cinema Awards, but they have their heads on straight and their priorities in order. Best Picture, Children of Men, and Best Director, COM's Alfonso Cuaron. Best Actor, Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed...yes! They didn't have the conviction or the character to go for someone besides Helen Mirren as Best Actress, but they went for Little Children's Jackie Earl Haley as Best Supporting Actor, Notes on a Scandal's Cate Blanchett for Best Supporting Actress, and The Departed posse for Best Ensemble.

Sasha Stone-bird is actually describing tonight's 57th American Cinema Editors "Eddie" Awards, colloquially referred to as the Ace Eddie awards, as "all-important." Can you imagine asking the checkout girl at Gelson's if she has any Ace Eddie predictions and her going, "Ohmygod! I forgot they're tonight! The Eddies!"

The dramatic feature film nominees are possible winner Babel (Stephen Mirrione, ACE and Douglas Crise), Casino Royale (Stuart Baird, ACE), possible winner The Departed (Thelma Schoonmaker, ACE), The Queen (Lucia Zucchetti), and United 93 (Clare Douglas, Christopher Rouse, ACE and Richard Pearson).

Nominees for the best edited comedy...Read More

"From now on you go into the forest, you can point, the bird lives in a round stick."

"I feel like film has become this very self- conscious medium. In a lot of art forms you see a movement from modernism to post-modernism, and I think right around the time of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark...it used to be that movies were about real life, and after the mid-'70s you started to have movies that were about other movies.

"As a reader -- I used to read screenplays for a living -- you read a lot of stories that are self-referential. I feel like that's a poison on the industry. I...Read More

"Last pic to earn as many bids as Dreamgirls without picture, directing or writing noms was The Poseidon Adventure in 1972, which from its octet of noms took home only a song Oscar (plus a special trophy for its visual effects)." -- from a Variety statistics piece by Keith Collins.

The bald-Britney-freakout story is all over the place. Fried, over the falls in a barrel...acck-acck! It's not the shaved-head appearance per se (she could have just done that and kept her cool) as much as (a) that tattoo-parlor employee saying Spears appeared "distraught and disturbed...very scatterbrained," plus (b) Spears' alleged reply when asked why she'd done it: "I don't want anyone touching me. I'm tired of everybody touching me."

Is this on the level of Norma Desmond walking dramatically down the grand staircase, playing Salome for the newsreel cameras and saying, "I'm ready for my...Read More

Moving Picture Blog's Joe Leydon is reminding readers of a Moviemaker interview he did last year with mile-high guy Ralph Fiennes.

David Fincher's 23 year-old commercial with the cigarette- smoking fetus, posted by Screen Grab's Bilge Ebiri.

Ghost Rider, the #1 film right now, is projected to wind up with roughly $47,344,000 by Monday night (i.e., concluding the four-day weekend). The second-place Bridge to Terabithia should take in $35 mill and change. Eddie Murphy's Norbit is #3 with $22,880,000. (Re-calculating by a three-day weekend standard, it's off 40-something percent from last weekend.)

Music and Lyrics is fourth with $14,735,000, and Breach is fifth with a projected $11,322,000. Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls is sixth with $10,963,000. Hannibal Rising follows with $6,065,000. Because I Said So is eighth with $5,892,000. Night at the Museum is #9 for $5,230,000, and The...Read More

"My name is Lewis Beale, and I am an Academy Awards addict.

"God help me, but it's only February and I'm already thinking about the 2007 Oscars. I just saw The Hoax, Lasse Hallstrom's film about the 1970s scandal involving author Clifford Irving, who claimed he had written Howard Hughes' 'autobiography.' Opening in April, the movie is a fun (if overlong) ride, but as the charming and utterly amoral Irving, Richard Gere gives a performance that, as I told one of my editors at another publication, is "Oscar-worthy."

"Someone, please -- organize an intervention. Is there some sort of Academy Awards 12-step...Read More

David Halbfinger's N.Y. Times piece (2.18.07) about David Fincher's Zodiac has some very candid quotes from the three stars -- Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey, Jr., Mark Ruffalo -- about Fincher's exacting perfectionism, and particularly how this sometimes led to their having to perform a scene 70 times or more. And it's hilarious stuff. Really. I would imagine that anyone reading this who hasn't yet seen Zodiac will now want to see it all the more.

"What's so wonderful about movies is, you get your shot," Gyllenhaal says. "They even call it a shot. The stakes are...Read More

A National Public Radio/"All Things Considered" piece by Kristal Brent Zook about certain African American women being angered by Eddie Murphy's portrayal of "an overweight, bossy, mean black woman" in Norbit. I think Murphy is entitled to be as vulgar and offensive as he wants, if he wants to go that way. I don't care if African-American women are offended, He'd be doing something wrong if somebody didn't get irate. A wallower needs the freedom to wallow. You can't put a dog collar on him.

Newsday's John Anderson sorting through the Oscar-nominated shorts (i.e., a task that's also allegedly been attempted by Matt Zoller Seitz in the N.Y. Times, Kevin Crust in the L.A. Times and Tim Gierson in the L.A. Weekly. Wait a minute...The Envelope's Steve Pond put his up last Wednesday.

"As this season of insane Oscar foreplay approaches its inevitably unsatisfying climax, making predictions is a dangerous game," writes City Beat critic Andy Klein, who dares to say the following a couple of lines later: "Alan Arkin will win Best Supporting Actor.

"Much of the smart money has been on Eddie Murphy for Dreamgirls, but, as several commentators have already noted, the release of Norbit in the middle of the voting period could cost Murphy dearly. It may not be the sort of movie Oscar voters go out for in droves, but no one with a...Read More

Two positive AICN fanboy reviews of Universal's Evan Almighty from a recent Sacramento research screening...whatever. I guess it's time to consider the possibility that this grossly expensive event comedy might not be so bad, although I still maintain that lots of money always works against any concept of "funny."

Here's a graph that got my attention more than any other: "The part of the film that surprised me the most, was how big it felt in sheer scope. I had no idea that the film would actually have so many animals, every single freaking member of the animal kingdom made it...Read More

"Nobody knows what will happen in the Best Picture category on Oscar night," Riskybiz blog's Anne Thompson begins. "I'm guessing The Departed is ahead of Little Miss Sunshine by a hair, and EW's Dave Karger agrees with me.

"While many Oscar prognosticators insist that Little Miss Sunshine is weak because it lacks a director nomination, or that Babel is strong because it has the most nominations (seven), I maintain that there is real affection for Little Miss Sunshine, which could win Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor, that Babel will likely win Score, that The Queen will win Helen...Read More

Ju-Osh said this morning in a Hot Blog reply that Black Snake Moan director Craig Brewer and his Paramount Vantage marketing pallies "should scrap their rather generic 'Everything's hotter down south' ad slogan for the 'It's hard out here for a nymph' gag slogan they debuted at Sundance. It's easier to remember and a hell of a lot funnier." Absolute 100% agreement from this corner. The former copy line. of course, is aimed at ahead-of-the-curve types who didn't see Hustle and Flow and don't get the synch-up with the "Hard Out Here for a Pimp" tune.

...

"These are the movies that are preoccupying the conversations that [have been happening] at the water cooler, in part because they are the most interesting films of the year -- in any language." So says N.Y. Times Oscar guy David Carr (a.k.a., "the Bagger") about the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, and, if you follow the link, N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James as well.

A story about Groucho and Chico Marx, passed along by N.Y. Times columnist Dick Cavett and called "Luck in the Afternoon." If I described it as "hilarious," a certain percentage would go "not funny enough." (By the way, the anecdote about meeting anti-Semitism with claims of half-Jewishness is funnier with that Barry Goldwater joke about asking an anti-Semitic golf course manager if he could play nine holes, etc.)

Update: CHUD correspondent Devin Faraci just pointed out that it's a "Times Select" piece, so I'm going to risk the wrath of Times Online staffers by pasting it here:

February 15, 2007, 7:44 pmRead More

The truth comes out about the heretofore denied Ralph Fiennes/ Qantas Airlines mile-high episode...no surprise.

I loved Joe Mantegna and particularly Ron Silver as production execs Bobby Gould and Charlie Fox in the 1988 B'way production of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, but (this may sound like blather but screw it) I was charmed, aroused and finally knocked flat last night by Jon Tenney (Kyra Sedgwick's boyfriend in TNT's The Closer) and Greg Germann (Talladega Nights, Friends With Money) as they played the same roles in the current Geffen Playhouse production.

Greg Germann, Jon Tenney following Thursday night's performance in Westwood

Tenney and Germann, real-life single dads and off-stage pals, have...Read More

"If all goes well for movie musical Dreamgirls, Oscar night will be a dream come true for supporting actors Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy," a 2.16 story by Reuters reporter Bob Tourtellotte begins. "But if history is any indicator and things go bad, it could end up a nightmare." Holy mother of God, will somebody straighten this guy out? Another neg-head looking to rain on Murphy's parade, or at least willing to consider the possibility that the expected coronation might not happen.

A little voice told me a few days ago that David Poland would do an au contraire on David Fincher's Zodiac. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. He didn't get United 93 either, which also favors a particular atmospheric realism in place of conventional plotting and clear-cut thematic delivery with a red bow on it. The man who loved Quills, Finding Forrester, Munich and Dreamgirls tends to miss films that don't fulfill certain dramatic or structural criteria that he carries around in his head (where's the ending? too long! too Pakula!) and which have a way of seeping into...Read More

There are several bootleg African Queen DVDs on Amazon, all of apparently inferior quality. (Or so I've read on message boards.) I don't know who owns the right to this classic film in North America, and I don't know if the owner has managed a restoration of any kind (which I'm told would be costly), but a first-rate, Criterion-level, beaucoup- bells-and-whistles two-disc set is obviously overdue. I'd plunk down $20 or $30 for a copy the first day. If I couldn't wangle a freebie, I mean.

I wrote DVD Newsletter's Doug Pratt and here's...Read More

The Toronto Star's Pete Howell got out his Blackberry and wrote his Ghost Rider review straight from the theatre last night. "It's a process I call BlackBerry Spanking, although this time I actually gave more than one star," he writes. "Ghost Rider actually gets 2-1/2 stars on account being smart enough to know it's stupid.

"As eternal damnation goes, it's a toss-up for Nicolas Cage," his review begins. "Would he rather face the razzing until Doomsday he's going to endure for dressing up in a bear costume to play a psycho cop in last year's The...Read More

"There are tons of people [who] hate me and hate my movies. But hey, my movies have made a lot of money, two-something billion dollars. That's a lot of tickets. They said that I wrecked cinema. They said that I cut too fast and now you see it in movies everywhere. It's easy to bash a movie but until they know hard it is to actually make one. Do I take pride in people knowing my style? I think it's nice people know a director has a style. And you can reinvent yourself too." -- Michael Bay talking to MTV.com's Josh Horowitz...

I couldn't find enough Academy people to talk about who's going to win Best Picture, but...but nothing. Nobody knows anything and that includes me. If anyone's predicting anything, they're saying it's Babel because (a) it has the highest number of prestige nominations (i.e., seven), (b) because the lack of both a directing and an editing nomination for Little Miss Sunshine suggests a Best Picture weakness, and (c) because the ceremonial Martin Scorsese Best Director bequeathing is considered sufficient for The Departed.

Variety critic Todd McCarthy has suggested that the key target audience for Zack Snyder's 300 (Warner Bros., 3.9) may be a bit broader than just your standard comic-book geek-fanboy action crowd. Warner Bros. would do well, he's essentially saying, to launch a concurrent ad campaign with The Advocate and other gay-friendly publications.

"Possibly nowhere outside of gay porn have so many broad shoulders, bulging biceps and ripped torsos been seen onscreen as in 300," McCarthy writes, adding that this "will generate a certain bonus audience of its own. It's not even certain Steve Reeves,...Read More

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick has just posted a link to the first Ghost Rider review, run by the Providence Journal. It's a somewhat negative take from L.A. Daily News critic Bob Strauss, although he commends Nic Cage for giving "a full-blown oddball performance...more Vampire's Kiss than National Treasure..a witty/nutso acting experiment from beginning to end.'' Strauss's review apparently wasn't supposed to surface until 1 a.m, or eight and a half hours from now. Big deal. As if reviews matter.

I could get back into running dialogue quizzes with sound files. I quit doing it before because I couldn't hack transcribing the dialogue and then having to format it. Here's the first one -- I've made it deliberately easy. It won't stay this way.

Chris Cooper's diseased military dad in American Beauty was acid-intense, his Oscar-winning role in Adaptation was puckish and surly in all kinds of infectious ways, and his Alvin Dewey portrayal in Capote felt completely authentic. But his Breach performance as real-life FBI agent Robert Hanssen, a traitor who sold secrets to the Soviets for more than a dozen years, may be the most fascinating thing he's ever done.

It sure felt that way to me during Tuesday night's screening at Mann's Chinese. Cooper takes a twisted uptight wackjob and turns him into a total "ride." I...Read More

The news about Aaron Eckhart playing Harvey Dent/Two Face in Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight has me hyperventilating. Tommy Lee Jones played the character in the reviled Batman Forever. Pic will see the return of Christian Bale, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and Gary Oldman. And of course, Heath Ledger will play the Joker.

The Harvey Dent casting was probably sealed when Eckhardt (r.) posed with Gina Gershon and director-writer Neil Labute at the relatively recent Three Amigos party.

Amazing -- Sony Pictures is actually doing something to help get the word out on Mike Binder's Reign Over Me (Columbia, 3.23.07).

"Maybe next year only 75% of the contending films will hire the Dart Group, suddenly aware that only Cynthia Swartz's favorite (Crash, The Queen) will actually get a Best Picture nod out of the hire. Maybe Tony Angellotti will get a reputation for good-mouthing movies. Perhaps Michele Robertson will have a karma reversal, though I don't know why she would. Maybe Terry Press will be the hot new consultant in town, a Jet to the Dartees' Sharks. Could Lisa Taback push Harvey or Sony back into the Oscar winner's circle? Perhaps Karen Fried will see what it's like when Focus actually has...Read More

Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls earned about $4.5 million yesterday, about $400,000 ahead of Music and Lyrics despite the Hugh Grant-Drew Barrymore film being in more theatres. The Perry film averaged about $2150 a print while the per-screen average for Music and Lyrics (which earned $4.1 milion) was about $1405.

Reuters reporter Sue Zeidler writes that Eddie Murphy "has been loved, hated and ignored but now he is back with Holly- wood heavyweights rallying around him for his career-redefining turn in Dreamgirls, a role that may win him an Oscar."

In support of this assertion she runs friendly-to-Eddie statements from (a) DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg (an obviously biased source who ironically provided the definitive dynamite-plunger quote about Murphy not being interesting in testing his acting abilities, i.e., "That's just not who Eddie is"), (b) film critic and historian Leonard Maltin (who merely observes that Murphy has been "laughing all the...Read More

"Peter O'Toole is a perfect example of the mysterious, almost cruelly diabolical ways in which Oscar works," writes Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond. "A couple of people have asked us recently how it was possible that he has never have won. The answer is that each year he's been nominated he's had the dumb luck to be defeated by incredibly formidable, unbeatable performances.

"In 1962 he was up against Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. In '64, against Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. In '69, he faced John Wayne's Rooster...Read More

A Today show video report on Hollywood's Obama vs. Clinton competition, linked by the Huffington Report.

The piece is basically saying that Barack Obama has the heat and Senator Clinton is in trouble. That much-repeated David Geffen assessment is used: "[Clinton] can't win, she's an incredibly divisive figure, and I think that just ambition isn't a good enough reason." Arianna Huffington's quote isn't any kinder, observing that Clinton "is very calculating, always triangulating...you can almost smell the calculation." And then producer Lawrence Bender completes the thought by saying, "I think people are looking for something genuine."

That's it, Clinton...Read More

Have the Oscars become too elitist? L.A. Times guy Patrick Goldstein and John Horn get into it, but the answer is pretty clear to me: they aren't nearly elitist enough. Elitist as in, "Mob tastes be damned." Screw the current box-office favorites (if necessary) and celebrate the films audiences will respect 10, 20 or 50 years from now. And not the ones the Academy will eventually be ashamed of (Driving Miss Daisy, Around The World in 80 Days, The Greatest Show on Earth, Chicago, etc.).

One of the films showing in "Film Comment Selects," a series discussed in this N.Y. Times article by critic Manohla Dargis, is Frank Perry's Play It As It Lays. I've written a coupel of times over the last couple of years about this depths-of-despair Hollywood drama, hoping that Univeral Home Video might eventually be moved to put it out on DVD. Anyway, it's playing at Lincoln Center this month, it was playing on the Sundance Channel during the Sundance Film Festival, and it's had a couple of showings L.A.'s American Cinematheque theatres (the Egyptian and the Aero). I called Universal Home Video...Read More

This is the track playing during the opening credits of Zodiac, and it's not just a perfect way of immersing the audience in a late '60s mood and head-space -- it's perfect in and of itself.

A brief Zodiac riff from Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez, posted sometime late last week. Excerpt: "A dramatic departure for Fincher in both style and content (for one thing, a lot of the film takes place in broad daylight), Zodiac boasts superb work from a terrific ensemble cast, each [character] embodying the theme of obsession that forms the heart of James Vanderbilt's screenplay.

"The movie itself, too, is a work of obsession, devoted almost entirely to chronicling the minutiae of the investigation. Channeling a distinct 1970s filmmaking vibe (think All the President's Men), Zodiac has absolutely nothing in common with what...Read More

Reciting the fact that Al Gore is "on the right side of the war, owns the environment. and has already won the popular vote once before," N.Y. Observer columnist Bruce Fierstein is urgng Gore to announce his Presidential candidacy on 3.25 as he accepts the inevitable Oscar for Best Feature Documentary (i.e., An Inconvenient Truth).

I never wanted to say this before because I didn't want to be snide for its own sake, but (a) this is a slow day and (b) it's an honest fact: Jennifer Hudson has a little bit of a Joe Cocker thing going on when she sings "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" in Dreamgirls. I mean that her arms flop around in a kind of spazzy. herky-jerky way. Which Judy Garland's arms never did.

I was reminded of the arm action when I happened to click on YouTube video of one of her...Read More

What are you supposed to do when a series of Beyonce Knowles beach-bikini shots appear in Sports Illustrated? Just run them without comment? Well, I have a comment that I'm sure someone will take offense at. I think it's fair to say, given the subject matter, that Beyonce's stock has dropped ever so slightly because she doesn't have much of an "innie." There -- I've said it. I could explain why deep "innies" matter but this isn't Penthouse Forum. Okay, I'll explain it. Naah, forget it.

"'Eddie's got a lot of anger, which I still don't understand, but I'm not the only one. I could tell you horror stories about how late Eddie was to the set, how he wouldn't do line readings off camera with his fellow actors and how rude he was to other actors. He's not a happy person, as you know. On Coming to America, he said to me, 'We won't be friends, but we'll finish the film.' '' -- director John Landis (Trading Places, Coming To America, Beverly Hills Cop III) speaking to Craig Modderno for a 12.3.06 N.Y. Times piece....not that long...

Radar is reporting on the whacking of Star maga- zine editor Joe Dolce, whose departure from the upgraded-but-still-tawdry supermarket weekly was announced to the staff via e-mail yesterday. Radar's view is that (a) Dolce took a bullet for his about-to-be-former boss, Bonnie Fuller, and her $2 million contract, and (b) that Dolce has been "the glue that keeps Star from ripping apart at the seams."

An insider tells Radar that "everyone in the office knows that Joe would be breaking his ass to get out an issue while Bonnie was off doing her thing. Some describe...Read More

"I do not want to make a movie with somebody who is suing me," New Line chief Robert Shaye said in January about Lord of the Rings maestro Peter Jackson, even though Jackson sued only with the goal of forcing a third-party audit to determine if New Line had been on the up-and-up regarding Rings revenues.

Asked about this contretemps, director James Cameron has recently told Premiere magazine's Tom Roston that Shaye's reluctance to submit to an aduit is "bizarre."

Cameron adds that 20th Century Fox, with which he's had a 20-year history, "has always been very transparent financially...it's almost...Read More

After months of hemming and hawing, Saul Zaentz cutting a Goya's Ghost distribution deal with the Samuel Goldywn Co. is a kind of capitulation. In so doing, Zentz is saying, "Fuck it...this is the best I can get...if Goya's Ghost stays on the shelf any longer it's going to become a permanent embarassment so I have no choice...down to the sea in ships."

I linked yesterday to a Robert Novak story about Steven Spielberg back-assing away from a perception that he's more or less behind Sen. Barack Obama in order to sidestep into an open-minded posture about Hilary Clinton, etc. According to Slate's Kim Masters, a suspicion in the Obama faction is that the story (which Masters ridicules) "came from the Clinton camp, eager to put a stop to the 'Hillary Hemorrhages Hollywood Support' stories.

"In a recent visit to town, Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe conveyed the notion that folks should...Read More

I take a deep breath every time I click on a story on MTV.com, because I know what a groaning pain in the ass it is to wait for all the slick-ass visual razmatazz to load. But I did it anyway today because I wanted to read about Judd Apatow's (and Jake Kasdan's) Walk Hard, a put-on musical biopic in the vein of Ray, Walk the Line, Selena and Great Balls of Fire. It's about a fake music-industry giant called Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly), and I'll tell you right now it's going to be obvious and arch and not terribly...Read More

The whole The Number 23 mystique goes right out the window if this all-media screening at the Grove starts at 7:26 or 7:28 pm. As far as the media people attending are concerned, that is. It has to start at exactly 7:23 pm or nothing.

It's a four-day weekend coming up (i.e., President's Day on Monday) so the figures will be that much higher. Mark Steven Johnson's Ghost Riders (Sony, 2.16), the Nic Cage-with-a-bad-wig fantasy-actioner, will be through the roof with roughly $40 million -- 91 general awareness, 42 definite interest, 25 first choice. Music and Lyrics, a reasonably decent romance that's opening tomorrow, will do modest to decent business ($15 million?) over the four days. Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls is tracking okay for a film appealing to a niche audience (i.e., not expected to get across-the-board support) -- 42,37 and 6.

Breach is...Read More

Stax at IGN has "exclusively learned that J.J. Abrams is poised to direct The Dark Tower, based on the Stephen King literary series." Imagine going ahead with a project that sounds so Tolkien-esque and not feeling the least bit chastened or embarassed about it. Remarkable. "Sources also added that Abrams is indeed only producing Star Trek XI," Stax also reports. "It was recently reported that Abrams would not direct Trek XI, as many had assumed, but would instead turn his attention to a secret Paramount project titled Cloverfield." Am I misreading things, or is Abrams looking to become like Joss Whedon II,...Read More

I know when to leave well enough alone so I'm not posting this diseased music video out of an inability to restrain myself -- Bilge Ebiri did and I'm merely linking to it. Nonetheless, I trust this won't inhibit anyone from writing belittling responses in the direction of HE. And by all means, ignore what this video portends.

As Ebiri puts it, "The man is on his way to winning an Oscar and he's got the Number 1 movie in America [i.e., Norbit]. So now's as good a time as any to resurrect Eddie...Read More

N.Y. Times "Screens" blogger Virginia Heffernan has offered a comparison between "the astringent story about Anna Nicole Smith's death that appeared in the paper on Friday with the Times's misty obit for Marilyn Monroe" that ran on August 6, 1962. What a difference.

"The only thing that separates me from being up here and living in my mother's basement is Bill Weinstein," Michael Arndt said after winning the the WGA award for Best Original Screenplay the night before last. The Little Miss Sunshine author noted Weinstein's steady, early enthusiasm for LMS and his support through the four or five years of trying to get the movie made. (Note: this item was stolen from Anne Thompson's Riskybiz blog.]

With '08 election fever starting to heat up, James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo's ...So Goes The Nation, which is out on DVD today, might attract fresh interest. As I noted last fall, the doc "explains in the frankest terms imaginable how the John Kerry campaign blew it big-time with the middle American voting public, and how cagey and brilliant the Bushies were at almost every turn."

Distributed/produced by IFC First Take and Genius Entertainment.

The two things that come through on the doc are the fact that (a) many millions of...Read More

On Monday, 2.26 (i.e., the day after the Oscars), Manhattan's Museum of Television& Radio is presenting "The Unseen Dylan: Newly Restored Outtakes from Don't Look Back," with an introduction by Patti Smith and "rare footage" presented by the doc's director D.A. Pennebaker. MTV exec vp Bill Flanagan and On The Road with Bob Dylan author Larry Sloman will also attend. (A NY staffer said there are no plans for this presentation to happen at MTR's Beverly Hills location.) It's all a promo for the Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back -- 65 Tour Deluxe Edition DVD that "streets" the next day.

Patrick Goldstein's latest "Big Picture" L.A. Times column is about CNN talk-show host and whorish, suspender-wearing blurbmeister Larry King. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel, or is it more of a case of "give him enough rope..."?

Goldstein is, I feel, derelict by failing to mention a clearly understood fact: when a movie ad uses a Larry King rave, it's an almost-certain tipoff that the movie has problems. Anyone with half a clue about the movie business understands this.

"King sometimes will even blurb a movie he didn't like," Goldstein observes. "At lunch, he...Read More

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke on the how, why & whatever of Reese Witherspoon's decision to dump Endeavor for CAA. Good reporting, but on a scale of 1 to 10 how much do you give a toss?