I can see why Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics were fighting over the U.S. distribution rights to Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking. (Fox Searchlight won.) The script is very witty and sharp. The dialogue, if nothing else (and there’s plenty else, starting with Aaron Eckhardt’s performance as Washington, D.C.’s all-time smoothest pro-tobacco lobbyist)…if nothing else describing the rationale “I have a mortgage to pay” as a “yuppie Nuremberg defense” will give it a kind of instant fame in chat rooms and cocktail parrties. Okay, somebody is now going to tell me that some comic coined the “yuppie Nuremberg defense” term ten or fifteen years in his/her stage act…right?

I saw Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes (20th Century Fox, 10.7) this morning and it got me. It’s “commercial,” yes, but not in the pat sense of that term — this is the best classy chick flick since Terms of Endearment, and they both have award-level Shirley MacLaine performances. Once you get past the first half-hour, which has a rote, almost sitcommy flavor and is all about showing us what an infantile self-destructive screw-up Cameron Diaz’s character is (and why her older sister, played by Toni Collete, is perfectly justified in wanting her out of her life), In Her Shoes starts to touch bottom when Diaz visits her long-lost grandmother (MacLaine) at a Florida old-folks home, and then it takes off and starts getting better and sadder and wiser and more touching. This is not an Armond White movie, but it’s exceptional nonetheless. It’s going to get every woman in the country and a lot of guys, it may wind up as as a Best Picture nominee, and this is MacLaine’s year, I think, to win another one. Collette and Diaz will probably also be nominated in their respective categories (which may be different), and Hanson also as Best Director. This sounds gushy, I realize, but trust me — Shoes works the way a big-studio, high-pedigree, lay-the-groundwork-and-then-make- them-feel-it emotional drama should. Hanson knew exactly what he was doing.