Clint Eastwood has just thrown a heavyweight punch in the Oscar race, and the after-effects will be felt all the way until Feb. 27. His boxing movie Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.17, limited) had its first-anywhere showing at a very-limited-attendance screening last Friday night on the Warner Bros. lot, and then at a press-infiltrated Academy screening last night (Monday, 11.22) at the Director’s Guild. I’ve spoken to people who attended both, and they’re all seriously impressed or floored. (I was at the DGA screening also, and I fully concur.) Baby is a major art film… easily in the same realm as Clint’s Unforgiven, and, in the view of at least one major critic who attended the DGA screening, his best ever. Trust me, it’s a multi-Oscar nominee — Best Picture, Best Director (Eastwood), Best Actor (Eastwood), Best Actress (Hilary Swank). This means, of course, that Swank is once again duelling with Annette Bening — they last faced each other in the ’99 race when Swank’s Boys Don’t Cry performance beat Bening’s in American Beauty.

I missed the Variety item last Thursday (11.18), but Bob Berney’s Newmarket Films has picked up Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, that German-produced, end-of-the-Third-Reich, down-in-the-bunker movie that I saw a few weeks ago and quite liked. Obviously angling for a Best Foreign Film Oscar nom, Downfall is “an exceptional historical piece [that’s] all about detail, detail and more detail,” I wrote on 11.3. “Not so much a Hitler character study as a Guernica-sized, pointillist portrait of the last remnants of Nazi culture collapsing into itself.” Pic was written and produced by Constantin Film’s Berndt Eichinger, and costars Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler, Alexandra Maria Lara as Hitler’s private secretary, Ulrich Matthes as Joseph Goebbels and Juliane Kohler as Eva Braun.

Time‘s Richard Corliss has declared that Closer (Columbia, 12.3) “runs counter to the numbing predictability of most current films: the inevitable plot points of revenge and uplift, the reduction of human beings to heroes and villains, the avoidance of complexity in sexual matters.” And director Mike Nicohols observes in the same piece, “I thought we were way past being able to shock anybody …but people are shocked [by this film]. It’s not necessarily because of the language but because things that usually go unexplored are explored in public. Some people are armed against it. They say, ‘I just don’t know those people.’ Well, they’re you, man!”

Imelda Staunton’s highly-touted performance in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake (New Line) is falling off the screen as a Best Actress hopeful. One observer opined last night that Staunton and Drake peaked at the Venice Film Festival and just after, and have been fading ever since. One problem is that after Staunton’s Drake character gets popped for performing abortions, she goes into what amounts to a one- note emotional state of shock…eyes glazed over, look of horror on her face…and nothing more. Another problem is that no one has seen it. New Line is “having a hard time keeping it in theatres,” says one Academy pulse-taker. “In Los Angeles it’s currently hanging on at the Westside Pavilion and it’s already playing at the Pasadena Academy, a slightly discounted art house. Next they’ll probably send it to the Beverly Center, where movies go to die….”