That Italian director-screenwriter whose name escaped me while typing that photo caption in the story about those Santa Barbara Film Festival panels was Cristina Comencini — my apologies to her and for forgetting that Giovanna Mezzogiorno, the star of Comencini’s new film Don’t Tell (Lionsgate, 3.17), won the Best Actress award at the 2005 Venice Film Festival. I’ll be seeing the film Thursday evening (or on DVD…haven’t yet decided), and after that there’s a swanky dinner reception for Comencini and lah-dee-dah. My apologies again.

An anonymous online petition to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which so far has been signed by 4,313 people in Israel and abroad, is calling upon the academy to withdraw Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now from the list of nominations for Best Foreign Film. The real purpose of the petition, of course, is to tarnish the film’s rep among Jewish Academy members so they’ll vote for another foreign-language film and thereby lessen the odds of the acclaimed drama winning the Oscar. The petition argues that Paradise Now legitimizes mass murder, and portrays the murderers themselves as victims.” Uhm, okay….and disenfranchised Palestinians aren’t victims?

George Clooney said a day or so ago in Berlin that he doesn’t expect to win any Oscars on March 5th. I don’t know about that. He’s such a good politician and schmoozer and so well liked that he might just take the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his acting in Syriana…for putting on weight, growing a beard and looking vaguely bewildered and lost, or in other words for not playing a variation of that same guy he’s been playing over and over since One Fine Day. The Oscar should go to Cinderella Man‘s Paul Giamatti, but the momentum is swinging toward George…I think.

So Washington, the third installment of Lars von Trier‘s America trilogy, is on “indefinite hold” (is that another term for scuttled because nobody wants to sit through another one of von Trier’s talky, preachy, Swedish sound-stage, chalk-on-the-floor dramas after Manderlay?), and he won’t be premiering his next film, The Boss Of It All, in Cannes.

“From the start, Walk the Line was pegged as a solid, unspectacular film propelled by two dynamite performances. And whaddya know — the two performers got [Oscar] nods, and that’s about it. Now get ready for a month of stories from people in my business about how Crash is gaining momentum with voters because it’s about Los Angeles, where most Academy voters live. But don’t get suckered in. Brokeback is gonna win. The media is just bored.” — Newsweek’s Devin Gordon trying to alleviate his own boredom in the current issue.

Bottom line: if John Turturro‘s Romance and Cigarettes worked a little better it wouldn’t be “collecting dust at Sony Pictures, which inherited the movie as part of April’s Sony-MGM transaction,” as this John Horn story in the L.A. Times reports. I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival and liked the opening number sung by James Gandolfini and the madman chutzpah displayed by Christopher Walken, but the karaoke thing started tio feel more and more underwhelming and it didn’t seem to rock ‘n’ roll and kick it out with the right kind of primal energy. Diverting but not delicious.

So-so responses may be looming for Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion…if Peter Brunette‘s Screen Daily review out of the Berlin Film Festival is anything to go by. He calls it “a reasonably entertaining film [that] nevertheless falls quite short of the achievement of such Altman ensemble masterpieces as Nashville, M*A*S*H and Short Cuts.” And yet he calls Altman’s homage to America’s favorite radio show “a largely spirited affair, despite a few sagging moments. Paradoxically, it may play better in Europe and other territories than in North America, where its central plot of a soulless corporation overtaking a beloved, if superannuated, cultural institution may be seen as a bit shopworn.” The best parts involve the perform- ances, or mroe particularly Altman’s seamlessly blending of real variety acts with cornball fictional ones such as The Johnson Girls (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin) and the singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly ) and when the singing gets a-goin’, the Fitzgerald theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the show is broadcast live, starts jumping.” The other cast members are Keillor himself, Lindsey Lohan,
Kevin Kline and Virginia Madsen.

I don’t want to see this movie because I don’t want to spend any prolonged time with the balding, red-haired, dorky-looking guy in the photo. If I saw this guy coming towards me on a sidewalk …forget it.