I missed this 2.5 “Page Six” item about Tony Curtis dissing Brokeback Mountain. The remarks came from a recent interview Curtis did with Fox News critic Bill McCuddy. Curtis’s views — he hasn’t seen Brokeback and probably won’t, “[it’s] not as important as we make it… it’s nothing unique,” and “Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn’t like it” — suggest that Curtis, 80, is no longer thinking like the sharp cat he used to be. He can dislike Brokeback all he wants, but refusing to see it and invoking Wayne and Hughes is way of saying he prefers the sanctity of nostalgia to the alive-ness and prickly challenges of the present. (I called Curtis this morning at his home near Las Vegas to make sure he was quoted correctly and fully, but he didn’t pick up.) I met and got along with extremely well with Curtis six years ago when I met him for an interview in March 2000, and back then, when he was 74, he seemed like a different guy. “Curtis has always embodied a certain pugnacious cool, as palpable today as it was when he was starting to come into his own as an actor, in the late 1950s,” I wrote in my March 2000 piece, which I called “Cat in a Bag.” “Bluntness, ambition, class resentment, latent anger — these are fires that have always burned within Curtis, the man…and it seems to me they’re still there.” In a larger sense Curits’s remarks mean that the older, somewhat more conservative Academy crowd will be voting for Crash, which a journalist pal has described as “the middle-class Best Picture choice.”

The New York Post‘s “Page Six” team has written that Man About Town star Ben Affleck took some affable jabs from director “Mike Binger” — try Mike Binder, guys — at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival the other night. Binder took Affleck to task for not attending the film’s Tuesday night premiere. “Fuck Ben Affleck for not being here,” the Post quoted “Binger” as saying. I don’t remember that one (I was in the 18th row) but Binder did say that Affleck’s performance is as good as it is in Man About Town “because I edited his performance very carefully…of course, if he’d shown up, I’d be kissing his ass.” The S.B. festival staffers were a little miffed because they’d booked Binder and his film with expectations that the cast — Affleck, Rebecca Romijn, John Cleese, Jerry O’Connell, Geena Gershon, Adam Gold- berg — would show up, and nobody did. I think that comes under the heading of “bad manners”, guys. You make a film, it preems in or near Los Angeles, and you’re obliged as professionals and as considerate human beings to support it, and to give it some attention with the media…period. Nobody knows what kept Affleck away from Santa Barbara (maybe it was unavoidable), but it was suggested at the Man after-party that maybe the new baby he and Jennifer Garner are taking care of had something to do with it. Take it from me: if anyone ever uses “baby” as a reason for not showing up at an event, don’t believe them. I’ve taken care of two babies, I know what it’s like and how demanding it is, and if you have something important to do for business/career reasons, you can always get away and do that…trust me.