It was in the cards for several weeks, and now Miramax president Daniel Battsek has finally announced his acquisition of Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi, a profoundly gripping drama that I saw and wrote about during the latter stages of the Toronto Film Festival. More in the vein of Walter Salles’ Central Station than Fernando Meirelles’ City of God, Tsotsi has the chops to shoot right to the top of the list of Best Foreign-Language Feature hopefuls.

If you have the slightest appetite for good political theatre, reading this Daily News story about Warren Beatty’s anti-Arnold-Schwarzenegger speech in Oakland the other day will get your blood going. There are those who would love to see Beatty run against Schwarzenegger, but I there’s no way he’ll ever drop his Artful Dodger mentality and hang his hide over the side. It would be terrific, of course, if he did run. And I don’t agree at all with the view of Dick Rosengarten, co-publisher of California Political Week, that a Beatty candidacy wouldn’t fly. “I’m not sure two movie stars can run [against each other], not even here,” he told the News. Wrong — two former movie stars battling it out for the California governorship would be a totally natural and logical expression of the way Hollywood and politics have been bleeding into each other and upping the ante over the last 45 years.

The Great Liberal Hope who might actually pull the trigger some day will be Ben Affleck. Truth, Justice and the American Way will probably result in a career upsurge so it won’t happen any time soon, but when Affleck hits his next career pothole (five or ten years from now…who knows?) he might actually start making the moves. If you saw him on the political talk shows during the ’04 Democratic Convention in Boston, you know he’s got the makings.

You should have heard the crowd chortle with delight when Bill Hurt went into his irritated-older-brother shpiel in the last act of A History of Violence at the Grove yesterday afternoon. Hurt had them in the palm of his hand. He got a laugh with almost every line, every facial tic…and it was fantastic to feel a performance work as well as this. Being there put all doubts to rest: Hurt will be one of the Best Supporting Actor nominees when they’re announced in January. A performance that rocks as well as this one can’t not be recognized. Hurt nails it the way Beatrice Straight nailed it with that one marital-outburst scene in Network, opposite Bill Holden. There was a 4 pm and a 5 pm show on Saturday (I went to the latter), and nearly every seat was taken. And that ending…whoa.