I had a nice and relaxed “Elsewhere Live” chat with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga on Wednesday, 1.11. Arriaga is the gifted screenwriter of Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Three Burials of Melqui- ades Estrada (Sony Classics, opening wide in early February) as well as three films by Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu — Amores Peros, 21 Grams and the forthcoming Babel. I’ll eventually put this into the “Elsewhere Live” archive, but here it is in the meantime. Arriaga spoke to me from his home in Mexico City.

Another slam against Munich, this one from the Washington Post op-ed columnist Charles Krauthammer. Doesn’t matter on this coast because Munich is a dead horse. In late December when the notion of “poor Munich” was the going thing I thought it might get lucky with a Best Picture nomination, but I doubt even this will happen now.

I was talking today with a journalist friend about David Poland’s Oscar blogger-rat pack analogy (Anne Thompson is Shirley MacLaine, Tom O’Neil is Joey Bishop, etc.) and the journo said, “Well, Poland’s part of this group so who’s he? Akim Tamiroff?” (This is a reference to Tamiroff having co-starred with Sinatra, Martin, Lawford, Davis, et. al. in the 1960 Ocean’s 11.)

I don’t cover Hollywood business-affairs stories because they’re boring (guys buying other guys’ companies and getting their friends to run them, etc.) but I’m told there’s activity going down right now regarding a purchase of Lions Gate. The suitors could be either MGM chairman-chief exec Harry Sloan, who’s an old pal of Lions Gate CEO Jon Feltheimer, except that Sloan would first have to void Sony’s purchase of MGM (he’s supposedly not happy there) by giving the money back and then he’d be free to do the Lions Gate deal. The other possible scenarios are about Paramount or Disney buying Lions Gate, as both are said to be interested. For all I know I’m being used to start a rumor and there’s no truth to it, but a guy I trust says it’s “definitely happening.” I called Lions Gate about this and their response was as follows: “We’re for sale every day on the New York Stock exchange because we’re a publicly traded company.”

David Carr, the N.Y. Times Carpetbagger guy, tried to dimiss Walk the Line as a Best Picture contender this morning. Or has this Johnny Cash biopic in fact lost serious steam? That would be news to me, but maybe I’m not talking to the right people. Carr back- handed Jim Mangold’s film with stealth and without seeming too aggressive. He merely said it “has faded from memory, perhaps because it was not that memorable of a film.” Maybe…but it’s the only the Best Picture contender on the short list that’s certain to top $100 million, and isn’t there some kind of interest in having at least one Best Picture contender be a popular hit?

I liked David Poland’s comparing the various Oscar bloggers to early ’60s Rat Pack members (Pete Hammond is Sammy Davis, Jr., David Carr is Dean Martin, I’m Bing Crosby, et. al.), but boy, is he wrong when he says the Oscar race “is a horse race” and “there is no Secretariat this year” and that “anything can happen.” I know it’s more fun to pretend the ball is still in the air, but that sad little flick about them cowboys jes poke-poke-pokin’ along has the Best Picture Oscar all but roped and tied, and for two reasons above and beyond the reviews and the critics awards and the guilds: (1) when sizable numbers of Average Joe’s in red-state areas went to see it last weekend, thus proving it’s not just a blue-state, big-city film, and (2) when the gentlemanly Larry Miller took it off the marquee in his megaplex in Sandy, Utah, it suddenly became The Movie That Got Shut Down by Red-State Bigotry, which of course gives a whole ‘nother dimen- sion. Now if you vote for ole Brokeback you’re socking it to Miller and his fat-cat cronies from Utah…yee-haw!

It’s very cool to be mentioned and quoted in this Variety piece, written by Patrick McLean, about the various Oscar bloggers (“Oscars watchers buzzed by blog blitz”), but I want to try to teach a grammatical lesson. Wired magazine tried to make the same point a couple of years ago and failed, to wit: it’s not “Web site,” it’s “website.” And when are editors going to get past this bizarre obsession with capitalizing the “i” in “internet”? You know, my Shortwave radio has been on the fritz for the last couple of days, so I guess I’m going to have to call a repair guy to come over and fix it. I would take it down to the shop myself but one of the Rubber tires on my car is flat. (The earlier joke about misspelling “grammatical” with just one “m” didn’t work so I fixed it.)

There’s a theoretical concern that Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, the undoubtably excellent Palestinian submission for Best Foreign-Language Film, isn’t going to make it because Academy members with a special loyalty to Israel are less than supportive because the film is a thoughtful, fair-minded look at a couple of would-be Palestinian suicide bombers. I called some people about this and there wasn’t much of a response so maybe it’s hooey. A distribution exec theorized that there might have been an anti-Paradise Now attitude out there last fall, but most of the ardent Hebrews have since shifted their animus toward Munich. If so, I guess Hany Abu-Assad owes Steven Spielberg a word of gratitude.

There are two gorillas among the Best Foreign-Language Film contenders: Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi (Miramax), a South African film which I loved and wrote wrote about September from the Toronto Film Festival, and Christian Carion’s Joyeux Noel (Sony Classics, 3.6), the French entry that I saw in Cannes last May and didn’t much care for. There’s also Lajos Koltai’s excellent Fateless (Thinkfilm, from Hungary), Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl (from Germany), Kwang-Hyun Park’s Welcome to Dongmakgol (from South Korea), Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (Palestine), Fabiane Beilinsky’s The Aura (from Argentina), Kaige Chen’s The Promise< (from China) and Anders Thomas Jensen's Adam’s Apples (from Denmark). When all’s said and done, I’m guessing Tsotsi will probably win. Other predictions? If I’m wrong, tell me why.