New York Times reporter David Halbfinger has run a story about being invited down to the flat marshy area south of Marina del Rey to see the not-quite-right, slightly fake-looking object d’art recontruction of the collapsed World Trade Center towers for Stone’s (and Stacy Sher and Michael Shamberg’s) World Trade Center, about the two buried Port Authority workers who were the last (or among the last) to be rescued from the Ground Zero rubble. Could the producers have come up with a lumpier, more on-the-nose title? An idea, a plea…call it Underground already. A little understatement tends to go a long way.

Wait a minute…someone else (Newsweek‘s David Ansen) has seen Down to the Bone, that hide-and-seek movie that opened with zero fanfare in New York and Los Angeles about three weeks ago, and has come away impressed by Vera Farmiga‘s lead performance. Ansen says Farmiga is “a revelation as a working-class junkie struggling to get clean.” Yesterday (Saturday, 12.10) the Los Angeles Film Critics proclaimed Farmiga Best Actress of the Year for the same performance. This is fascinating. I was invited to three screenings by Lisa Danna of the GS Entertainment Marketing Group in early November, but I was too busy being busy.

Seconding Saturday’s L.A. Film Critics decision, the Boston Film Critics have proclaimed Brokeback Mountain as the Best Picture of 2005 and Ang Lee as Best Director. For the third time, Capote‘s Phillip Seymour Hoffman was named Best Actor by a critics group and, for the first time, Walk the Line‘s Reese Witherspoon won for Best Actress. And Cinderella Man‘s Paul Giamatti was named Best Supporting Actor, also for the first time. The Beantowners also seconded LAFCA’s handing their Best Supporting Actress award to Capote‘s Catherine Keener and their Best Screenplay award to Capote‘s Dan Futterman. And the Best Documentary award went to ThinkFilm’s Murderball…yay.

The nominations put out today by the Broadcast Film Critics Association are too easy and all-embracing. Ten nominations for Best Picture? Six nominations in each major acting category? And six Best Director noms? Why not seven in each category? Why not eight? Wait…why not nine or ten? Spread the love around! Kiss everyone’s ass! Get as many people to come to the BFCA awards as possible….wheeeeeeee!

By naming Keira Knightley as 2005’s Best Actress for her perf- ormance in Pride and Prejudice, The New York Online Film Critics have splooged all over their reputation as a serious quality- judging entity. The fact that Knightley is a lightweight attitude actress, a flirt, a woman who conveys no sense of even a stream (much less a river) running through her is incontestable and not open for discussion. The members of the NYOFC need to take a couple of days off, take a bus to the Pennsyvania countryside, check into a reasonably priced motel and get together and ask themselves how this could have happened. Otherwise, good calls all down the line. A nice pat-on-the-back attaboy for director-writer Noah Baumbach by proclaiming The Squid as the Whale as Best Picture. Capote‘s Phillip Seymour Hoffman was named Best Actor…but of course! The Constant Gardener‘s Fernan- do Meirelles was named Best Director…very cool. Casanova‘s Oliver Platt was named Best Supporting Actor…fine. Junebug‘s Amy Adams was named Best Supporting Actress, the great Terrence Howard was named Best Breakthrough Performer, Paul Haggis got the Best Debut Director and Best Screenplay award, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man was named Best Documen- tary (that’s two Best Doc awards for this absolutely first-rate film, which the perceptive Academy documentary committee didn’t even put on their short list), and Downfall was named Best Foreign Film.

Good move by the Los Angeles Film critics Association in giving the great Terrence Howard its “New Generation” award because ’05 was such a great breakout year for the guy (Hustle & Flow, Crash, Get Rich or Die Tryin’). Then again, the fact that Howard has been kicking around for quite a while makes the notion of him being a “New Generation” anything sound like a stretch. And LAFCA’s decision overlooks the very noteworthy fact that 2005 was Rachel McAdams‘ breakout year as much as anyone else’s. She stepped right up last summer and became the new Julia Roberts…signed, sealed, done deal. No, a better Julia Roberts!

The Envelope‘s Elizabeth Snead has done some followup reporting about Radar Magazine Online‘s item about Rachel McAdams (Wedding Crashers, The Family Stone) canning her personal publicist Amy Van Iden because Van Iden hadn’t told McAdams she would be asked to pose buck naked (alongside Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley) for the cover of Vanity Fair‘s upcoming Hollywood issue. Radar reported that McAdams walked out of the November photo session, but Snead heard differently. “McAdams did tee-totally freak when she got there and found out that VF’s ‘guest editor’ Tom Ford’s big artistic concept was to have the gals pose absolutely naked,” Snead writes. “She’d been prepared for a sexy shoot but fully expected a sheet or some lingerie or something. But — and here’s where it gets really interesting — McAdams went ahead and did the shoot. So much for taking a moral stand.” Uhhmmm…didn’t the fact that both McAdams and Knightley aren’t exactly top-heavy bodacious ta-ta types suggest to anyone (i.e., Ford or Van Iden) that there might be some hesitancy about such a shoot? I would probably be a wee bit guarded about this myself if I were female and flat- chested. It’s understandable.

Estimates for the The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe weekend haul have been modified due to a smaller bump in Saturday’s business than had been expected. The projection is now for a three-day $67 or $68 million haul, give or take, rather than $75 million.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has done the correct and expected thing by naming Brokeback Mountain as the year’s Best Picture, and also by awarding Brokeback‘s behind-the-scenes alchmeist Ang Lee as the year’s Best Director. But stoic Heath Ledger (“If you can’t fix, it, ya gotta stand it’) was nudged out by Capote‘s Phillip Seymour Hoffman for Best Actor. (These two are going to be nipping at each other’s heels between now and March 5th.) I’ll get into the Perplexing Mystery of Vera Farmiga in the next item. Hooray for William Hurt, the totally nutso-bonkers crimelord in A History of Violence‘s, winning for Best Supporting Actor award, and four sequential hoorahs to Catherine Keener for winning as Best Suporting Actress for her performances in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Capote, The Ballad of Jack and Rose and The Interpreter. And a big woo-woo-woo! for Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman and The Squid and the Whale‘s creator Noah Baumbach for splitting the Best Screenplay Award.

It’s 12:30 am and I just got back from two screenings, another Woody Allen q & a and some pizza and beer on the Strip, and I’m faced with a very strange turn of the screw. Vera Farmiga has been honored by the L.A. Film Critics as the year’s Best Actress. I go to almost everything that comes out and write about movies for a living, and I had trouble trying to remember who the hell Farmiga is when I first heard the news, and I never even bothered to see Down to the Bone, in which she gave her award-winning performance. No putdown to Farmiga, but this is a very typical LAFCA-like mzaeuver, which is to award someone primarily because…well, because they’ve done good work, most likely, but because they will also benefit from the attention that winning a LAFCA acting award will bring.