Alex Gibney, the director-writer of the Oscar-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, was handed the Writers Guild award for documentary screenplay last night (i.e, Wednesday, 2.1). Gibney’s triumph happened two days after the start of the criminal trial in Houston of former Enron Corp. executives and Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skillingn. At issue is whether Lay and Skilling were the spinners and bad guys behind accounting scheme that crashed Enron, once the seventh-largest company in the country, in December 2001. Watch Gibney’s film and tell me your verdict

Another possible inclusion in Oscar Balloon ’06, for perform- ances if nothing else: Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., late ’06). Based on a reputedly strong novel by Ron Hansen, with period- sounding dialogue said to make Missouri (and the characters) in the 1870s seem very strange and exotic. It’s apparently the first film Dominik has done since Chopper, which harbored Eric Bana‘s breakthrough role. As tabloid readers know, it stars Brad Pitt but also Sam Shepard (as Frank James), Sam Rockwell, Mary-Louise Parker, Zooey Deshanel and Michael Parks. Kinda sounds like Son of the Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, don’t it?

Still another addition to the Oscar Balloon ’06 list has been sent in, this time by reader Nate Meyer: Kenneth Lonergan‘s second film Margaret (Fox Searchlight), which seems to contain echoes of Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter since it’s about a 17 year-old Manhattan high-school girl (Anna Paquin) on a major guilt trip because she believes she played a role in a bus accident that took a woman’s life. Pacquin’s costars are Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno. Will this come out in ’06 or…?

All Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez want to do is wallow in comfort. To them it’s all about hangin’ back in the parlors of grindhouse, guns, babes and blood…in style and pizazz and dime-store machismo. Neither wants to reach deep inside and create something half-original about love and desire and struggle on the planet earth. They obviously don’t have the temperament to do this, but I’m starting to formulate an idea that they don’t even have the nerve. The latest wallow is going to be funded by the Weinstein Co., with both Tarantino and Rodriguez planning to direct a 60-minute horror tale. Rodriguez’s will be a zombie thing called “Planet Terror,” and Tarantino’s, to be called “Death Proof,” will a slasher piece. They’re a pair of middle-aged teenaged wankers…wasting their time and pissing away their talent.

Oscar Balloon ’06 addition/suggestion from reader Joseph Jones: Little Children, director Todd Field‘s follow-up to his Oscar-nominated In the Bedroom, starring Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson and Jennifer Connelly. Based on Tom Perrotta’s novel, it’s about young marrieds whose lives intersect on the playgrounds, town pools and streets of their small community “in surprising and potentially dangerous ways.” (Reader Josh Capps informs that “dangerous ways” actually means “adultery, internet porn, and the presence of a paroled child molester“) New Line will distribute. There’s no IMDB date listed, but it sounds to me like a September-October-November slot.

Here’s another ’06 contender: Milos Forman‘s Goya’s Ghosts, a Saul Zaentz production with Javier Bardem and the luminous Natalie Portman in a double role. Synopsis: “In 1792 Spain, the revolution has sent neighboring France into turmoil and the Spanish church decides to restore order by bringing back the dreaded Inquisition. A key orchestrator is the enigmatic and cunning priest Lorenzo (Bardem), a man who seeks power above all. Lorenzo’s friend is Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgaard), Spain’s most famous artist and portraitist to kings and queens. When his beautiful model Ines (Portman) is unjustly imprisoned and tortured by the Inquisition their friendship is put to a test as Goya begs Lorenzo to spare the poor girl’s life.” Kinda sounds like rough-going to me, but reader Darren Buser suggests that Bardem “could wind up a Best Actor contender. As could Natalie Portman, who is playing two roles (the muse and her daughter), in the modes of beautiful and sad-ugly-pathetic

I have to drive up to Santa Barbara today around noon and get myself set up at Fess Parker’s Doubletree hotel before ambling over to a gathering across from the Arlington theatre (an hour or so before the 8 pm debut showing of Robert Towne‘s Ask the Dust) for festival director Roger Durling, so the column will be down for a few hours…

“The Bagger” (i.e., N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr) has a pretty good rundown about who’s got the edge (and why, and what might overtake them) in the various Oscar categories. But he’s wrong when he says that Brokeback Mountain “has no mono- poly on social relevance. If anything, Crash has a more contemp- orary lilt on a more chronic, widespread issue.” What…roadside racism? That doesn’t hold a candle to what Brokeback is funda- mentally about, which, as I tried explaining in mid-December, “is the terrible price of letting a good thing go… the tragedy of a person feeling love or passion for something (a relationship, a career ambition, a creative dream) and not doing anything about it.” Such spiritual cowardice is everywhere across America, in every small town and family and festering in at least half of the nation’s office cubicles…and it’s one of the biggest reasons for the drinking and the Vicodin-taking and the arguments between lovers and marrieds from Bangor to Capistrano. There is nothing sadder or more debilitating than to be a citizen of Del Mar Nation. I lived there when I was in my 20s, and I know.

I read Henry Bean and Leora Barish‘s script of Basic Instinct 2 four or five years ago…and although it’s nicely-written hack job it’s still an empty programmer because it’s about absolutely nothing. Nothing, that is, except the task of mounting a sequel to a hit 1992 film. Sharon Stone was 33 when she made the original — she was 47 when the Michael Caton-Jones follow-up was filmed last year. And somehow the idea of Michael Douglas‘s San Francisco cop character (i.e., “Shooter”) having been ice-picked sometime after the close of the ’92 film and before the start of ’06 version…well, I didn’t like that. N.Y, Daily News columnists Rush & Molloy are reporting that “Sony execs have been going back and forth with the ratings mullahs over Stone’s various postures in Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction…we’re not sure what they thought of the early scene in which a man is pleasuring Sharon while she’s speeding along a cliffside road. But the MPAA did get hung up on some scorching orgy scenes. At first, it slapped an NC-17 on the flick. But after some snipping by director Michael Caton-Jones and editor John Scott, the ratings board deigned to give it an R.” I admire Stone for having shot steamy sex scenes at her age, and without a body double, but if a movie isn’t “about” anything that matters to you or me or Henry Bean then it’s crap, and crap is crap is crap…and it doesn’t matter how hot the dopey sex scenes are.

I spoke to Liam Neeson twice last summer at a couple of post-movie-premiere parties, and he said that the plan was for Steven Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln movie, in which he’ll play the title role, to start shooting sometime around March ’06. Forget it — Spielberg’s spokesperson Marvin Levy told me yesterday the Lincoln project (which will be based in part upon Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s recently published book about Lincoln) won’t roll anytime soon and is basically up in the air.

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick says that “an era has ended with the closing of Loews State, the last movie theater operating in Times Square, once the nation’s premier moviegoing district.” I’ve been in NYC dozens of times over the last 20 years (I lived there from ’78 to ’83) and I didn’t go to this low-rent basement-level theatre once…not once. Lumenick says that the State — a modest four-screen multiplex tucked into a sub-basement of the Virgin Megastore on Broadway at 45th Street — was the final holdout in an area that once housed more than a dozen movie palaces along Broadway and Seventh Avenue between 42nd and 47th streets.” First, there were precisely twelve Times Square theatres in the old days — the Paramount, Astor, Victoria, RKO Warner, the Rivoli, Leow’s Capitol, the Roxy, the DeMille, the Trans-Lux, RKO Palace, Leows State and the Criterion — and second, they went from 42nd to 51st Street. The National wasn’t a classic Times Square movie palace…got started in the mid ’70s, so it was too “new” and didn’t count. And I’ve never heard of the Strand.