A smart, strongly worded piece by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson about how the big-studio marketing departments only know how to sell fat tentpole movies these days, and why they should let their indie “dependent” divisions make and market the smaller-budgeted, character-driven quality level stuff. Probably true, but Thompson comes to her conclusion because of the failure of six character-driven films releases by the majors: 20th Century Fox’s In Her Shoes and Stay, North Country and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang from Warner Bros. and Paramount’s Elizabethtown and The Weather Man. The truth is that only one out of the six — In Her Shoes — was half-screwed by bad marketing (i.e., a trailer that made it look too chick-flicky). The other five totally shot themselves in the foot. Stay because it wasn’t much good. The Weather Man by being one of the worst soul-suffocating downers in movie history. Elizabethtown because it wasn’t good enough. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang because it was too glib by half and basically about its own cleverness. And North Country because a court case about sexual harassment is fodder for a 1985 TV movie.

The Hollywood Foreign Press has voted to move Hustle & Flow into the Drama category. This means Hustle star Terrence Howard will have to be nominated for Best Actor, and not Best Actor in a Musical, and if he gets nominated (which of course he should be…he’s monumental in that role) he’ll be going up against Heath Ledger, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ralph Fiennes…and one of those three will almost certainly win. So even though it’s idiotic (to put it mildly) to call Hustle & Flow a musical, the HFPA should have stuck to their loony-tunes classification because now the most Howard can look forward to is a Best Actor nomination. Bottom line: the HFPA has basically fucked him.