As anyone might have predicted, the Gold Derby-ites (a.k.a., the Goldies) have tumbled for Les Miserables, pushing it ahead of Argo and Silver Linings to lead the Best Picture Oscar race. I had Les Miz at the top back in mid-October but Pete Hammond and Peter Travers, among others, have now ditched Argo for Tom Hooper‘s period operetta. Argo is now the proverbial ex-girlfriend — hurt, abandoned.

A friend’s wife has said that Les Miz ranks at the top of her personal weep-o-meter, and that’s often the name of the game when it comes to calibrating Best Picture winners. And then this HuffPost rave by longtime producer Jay Weston…it’s obvious what’s happening. It’s probably a lock to win.

But there’s a small cabal of Les Miz dissers out there, and I’ve just spoken to one. He’s a seasoned producer who tends toward generosity and has been around the block and loved, incidentally, Alan Parker‘s Evita — the last mainstream Hollywood translation of a musical and the last to deliver, in Hooper’s words, a musical in “through-sung” form.

“I don’t care what people are saying — this is an almost objectively dreadful movie,” the producer told me a few minutes ago. “And I know there’s a major effort underway but I don’t think it has a chance of winning the Best Picture Oscar. Anne Hathaway is fucking terrific and guaranteed to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but the early screenings have been stacked with fans of the stage musical version and it was a little embarassing at times, I thought, when somebody would start applauding after a song and nobody would join in.

“On stage Les Miserables seemed large because you’re using your imagination, but the film feels very small in a way,” he continuted. “Perhaps the biggest problem is the singing is apart from Hathaway…Hugh Jackman is mezzo mezzo and Russell Crowe is awful…he looks the part but it just doesn’t fly. And the early CG looks like a cartoon.”

An assessment of the here-and-now by TheWrap‘s Steve Pond contains elements of what I’m describing and reporting.

The usual deal when I visit and cover a regional film festival is balancing the necessity of respectfully attending and reviewing certain screenings and events with having to cover the general waterfront in the column (Zero Dark Thirty surge, coming Les Miz kickback) and going nuts in the usual hair-pulling way. What else is new?

The truth (of which I am not especially proud) is that yesterday I was a derelict guest of the Hanoi Film Festival and that all I did, really, was attend a nice festival party at a penthouse suite atop a big, swanky, Vegas-styled hotel. Apart form filing, I mean, and taking a two-hour walk in the old quarter. And that’s not much. After last night’s event I walked back to the hotel in the rain — about a 3 kilometer trek.

“In Liz and Dick, an actor who has been through several rings of hell — and may not, for all I know, have gotten back yet — portrays someone who went through something similar. Put another way, one of the most impulsively, spontaneously emotional actresses of our time portrays a similar performer.

“For all the differences in their circumstances, accomplishments, and worlds — Lindsay Lohan‘s performance (not her impersonation) is thrillingly immediate, not a composition of interpretive pieces but an incontrovertible, full-spectrum presence, even if the mirror itself is broken and some shards of character are still missing from view.” — New Yorker/”Front Row” columnist Richard Brody in an 11.26 posting.

If I was Lohan, whose performance as Elizabeth Taylor has made her one of the most reviled laughing stocks of the 21st Century and who is reportedly devastated by the pans, I would fly to New York immediately, contact Brody and absolutely insist on some sort of emotional reciprocity.

The Zero Dark Thirty aesthetic integrity train has left the station and has begun to share and confide. I’m not interested in producer-screenwriter Mark Boal‘s feelings of bafflement at the “surreal and bizarre” Republican attacks on the film, and it’s a given that Kathryn Bigelow‘s replication of the attack on the Osama bin Laden compound would be super-scrupulous. What I want to hear about is their decision to avoid the conventional emotionalism that most directors and writers would have gone for in telling this story because it “gets” people. This I respect enormously.

A current or ex-pothead parent cannot tell his kids to abstain. He/she hasn’t the authority. But he/she can tell them it’s a complete no-go as a steady lifestyle component, and that it’s almost guaranteed that daily or frequent turning on results in a lack of drive, ambition and discipline to some extent. In this sense pot is almost a worse thing to get down with than booze because boozers, at least, tend to perform better professionally.

“It’s an odd thing realizing that you’re seeing a movie that is a step above most of what you have seen in the commercial cinema this year,” MCN’s David Poland wrote last night. “My pulse gets faster, I start being a little hyper-vigilant, even though I don’t take notes in movies — at least the first time through — and I start hoping, beat after beat, scene after scene, that the high won’t disappear.

“And that’s what I felt from the very first minutes of Zero Dark Thirty tonight.

“Kathryn Bigelow & Mark Boal are in a kind of sync that is rare in the history of cinema. Boal has raised the bar on the output of Bigelow’s master-level visual skill by giving her material to work with that is seriously challenging and meaningful. She’d make a great Bond movie, I suspect, but that was her earlier career. This is the stuff of Lean and Bolt. Of course, even that relationship had its misses. But this, the second movie for this duo, was ripe to be mediocre or even horrible. So there was enormous pressure to deliver…and in spite of that, they did.

“Comparisons to All The President’s Men are completely valid. But an even stronger beating heart lies beneath this material. B&B personalize the big picture for the audience in a not-so-tricky way…they put us in the room with torture…they remind us of the violence and danger inflicted by terrorists…and they let us experience the ‘it’s a job’ side of life and death. Because the truth of this story…the truth of almost all stories…is the balance between all those truths. ATPM has a lot of that balance too… but in the end, it is still about reporters and The Big Story. The stakes are much higher when lives are on the line in a very human, not movie-like, way. And Jessica Chastain is B&B’s way into that humanity.

“There are some truly great performances by actresses this year. Marion Cotillard is a miracle in Rust & Bone. Jennifer Lawrence is going to be one of our great stars for years to come and her superstar turn in Silver Linings Playbook shows us why, beyond doubt. But Chastain turns the double trick…movie star stuff and the in-your-face character work…and her movie is a more overt heroic tale than either of the other films.

“The supporting cast – and everyone else is supporting the one character with significance in each of the three acts – is flawless. Jason Clarke, Jennifer Ehle, Edgar Ramirez and Mark Strong kill it in the first act. (Everyone else, including Kyle Chandler, is great too.) The second act brings us Stephen Dillane and James Gandolfini and the return of some 1st acters and more terrific turns. And then, the third act is fronted by The Edgerton Boys.

“And Bigelow creates three quite different worlds for each act: the foreign war, the polite suited war that is Washington, and the last, where she takes one of the most well-worn tropes of the film world, ‘the raid’, and finds new notes and flourishes (some by subtraction), making it one of the best ever.

“This is as fine a piece of filmmaking as you will see. And while many will prefer other types of films – and that doesn’t make them wrong, just with different taste – this film hits to all fields in a way that others just don’t even try for. There are a few ‘forever’ films this year, starting – for me – with Amour. But when you run into a movie that has some real epic size, historic subject matter, thrills, a few great laughs, and boasts the skill set on display here…this is a different kind of collectable. Plus, you get three films for the price of one.

“Can’t wait to see it again.”

There’s an art to crossing streets in Hanoi. You can’t do it the New York way, darting quickly to avoid oncoming cabs or buses. You have to feel your way across, moving casually but ready to speed up or stop in the space of a heartbeat. Scooters and cabs swerve around you rather than you getting out of their way, like in New York. And you might run into a stray chicken or rooster at any moment. Just this afternoon I was standing on a corner and a red-necked rooster standing next to me took a leak.

I’m obviously in no position to talk as I won’t see Zero Dark Thirty until next Saturday, but the reason Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has declared that Jessica Chastain “gives far and away the best performance of the year by any actress, at least here in the US” — i.e., above and beyond Silver Linings Playbook frontrunner Jennifer Lawrence — is because her Maya character satisfies the Stone ideal of female characters exuding tough, stand-alone strength.

Chastain rules, in other words, because director Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal “designed the whole movie around her character, not framing her behind, depending on, flirting with any man but instead, holding her own.”

Whereas Lawrence’s Tiffany doesn’t cut it by Stone’s requirements because, as I explained on 9.27, Stone feels she’s “basically a male fuck fantasy, and the story itself is too male-centric because Tiffany is basically used by director-writer David O. Russell to support and complete Bradley Cooper‘s Pat Solitano character by (a) shaking him out of his ‘I need to get back with my wife’ obsession and (b) falling in love with him and gradually inspiring reciprocity.

“In short, the Silver Linings milieu is too male, too blue-collar, too football-fanatic and not positive enough in terms of pushing strong, independent-minded, take-charge, stand-their-own-ground female characters. Tiffany, in short, is too emotionally vulnerable and not Katniss Everdeen enough.

“Lawrence knocks it out of the park in the Silver Linings Playbook, ” Stone wrote on 9.26, “but] if she weren’t such a rising star she would be in the supporting category for her work here, as her function in the film is mainly to support Bradley Cooper’s character arc.

“What makes this an award-worthy performance is that Lawrence elevates it beyond what’s written on the page. She makes it deeper, richer, more compelling than it otherwise would be — it’s a male fantasy — yet Lawrence finds the truth in who the character is and that makes the difference.”

Shorter Stone: “SLP director-writer David O. Russell is too much of a sexist alpha male to give us the kind of strong female character we all want to see and need more of, but Kathryn Bigelow gets it like only a woman could, and she brings it home.”

Zero Dark Thirty “is not another Argo,” says Gold Derby‘s Tom ONeil. “It doesn’t have that hysterical pacing of a thriller. It’s got more of an art-house aura. That means it will probably do well with critics, who can be its Oscars champion, just like they were for The Hurt Locker.

“[This] is just the kind of flick that could win New York Film Critics Circle,” he goes on, “but it will have a disadvantage at the Oscars. It’s not going to nail as many nominations as Les Miserables or Lincoln, and maybe fewer than Argo and Django Unchained, too.” Keep ignoring Silver Linings, Tom…keep it up!

And then O’Neil warns that the lack of across-the-board nominations could “hurt” ZDT “since the movie with the most nominations wins Best Picture about two-thirds of the time.” I solemnly hate that reductive Jimmy-the-Greek oddsmaking thinking that says more nominations equal high likelihood of a film winning Best Picture…I hate it!

And let me explain again for the 22nd time that Quentin Tarantino doesn’t make Best Picture nominees — he makes enjoyably clever wanks that operate entirely within the realm of his own intensely jaded, B-movie-relishing sensibility. They don’t reach out to viewers where they live — they invite viewers to step inside and take a ride on their machine but that’s as far as it goes. I’m a fan except when it came to Inglourious Basterds, which I almost hated because of that baseball-bat scene.

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, and it suddenly hit me today, sitting in a swanky Hanoi hotel, that I really miss Tail of the Pup. The iconic hot dog stand disappeared almost exactly seven years ago. I might gone there three or four times at most (due to the health factor) but I loved that that vaguely gross architecture and the fact that it was sitting on San Vicente near Beverly for so many years (after being moved from its original location on La Cienega and Beverly).

The kids and I laughingly agreed in the mid ’90s that Tail of the Pup’s representation of a mustard-lathered dog on a bun looked (I’m sorry) like a bowel movement in progress.

Sigourney Weaver at original Pup stand on La Cienega near Beverly.

No one seems to be stating plainly that Tom Hooper‘s Les Miserables is not a musical — it’s an opera. And yet Hooper is steering clear of the term — too high falutin’ sounding, I suppose — and instead calling it a “through-sung musical.”

Maybe it’s me or maybe I’m a little fucked up or something (as Joe Pesci‘s Tommy said during that famous Bamboo Lounge scene in Goodfellas), but a musical narrative piece that is entirely sung without any dialogue to speak of is an opera, right? It doesn’t have to be La Boheme or Aida — you just have to sing it all the way through. Like Alan Parker‘s Evita. Yes, Parker’s film had five or six lines so that technically made it an operetta. But Hooper is saying Les Miz is “all song.”

Hooper explained his view in arecent chat with TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, to wit:

“Hugh Jackman said the other day that he thinks the movie musical is the Mount Everest of filmmaking,” Hooper said, “and I became intrigued about whether that combination of singing and music and storytelling could create an alternate reality in which emotion could be even more heightened.”

“While many of the most successful movie musicals of last 20 years have used various stratagems to deal with the musical problem — How do you get a modern audience to buy into people suddenly breaking into song? — Hooper went with a little-used solution: He created a “through-sung” musical in which the entire film is sung. There aren’t any jarring moments in which characters shift from dialogue to song because it’s all song.”

In other words, as Pesci would say, it’s a fucking opera.

“I really went back to school and studied all the great musicals,” Hooper said. “And I was struck by the difficulty of the gear change. I remember in ‘The Sound of Music,’ there’s a 28-minute stretch without a song, and then there’s a romantic song.

“And you kind of go, ‘Oh, we’re back in a song,’

“The original draft of the screenplay was 50 percent dialogue and 50 percent music, and I worried that there wasn’t a clear rationale about why you were singing at one point and speaking at another. And the more I looked over it, the more I thought, there’s not an obvious justification to be in one mode or the other mode. And then I thought, maybe the way to avoid those difficult gear changes is just to commit to singing.”

“The result, he said, is the creation of an alternative world. ‘We’re just saying, ‘This is a world like ours, but just as we generate grammatical and sentence construction, these people generate melody and rhyme construction. Other than that, it’s exactly the same.'”

I have to say that I love what Hooper said during a post-screening q & a about the benefit of having won a Best Picture Oscar: “I had a feeling after The King’s Speech that when the industry gives you that kind of acknowledgement, you should use it to take a risk or to stretch yourself. I didn’t want to be conservative and do another film like that.”