Congrats to Hollywood Reporter columnist and blogger Anne Thompson for landing an Oscar-day gig as an ABC red-carpet chit-chat commentator (along with Leonard Maltin and Joel Siegel) during the network’s pre-Oscar coverage, which will start sometime around 3 pm on March 5th. ABC wanted a woman critic and general industry know-it-all to round things out with Maltin and Siegel, and Thompson is a perfect choice. I’m told the producers first went to N.Y. Times film critic Manohla Dargis but the notoriously camera-shy scribe begged off.

David Germain‘s AP story about Brokeback Mountain fading and Crash looking more and more like it might actually take the Best Picture Oscar gets your blood going a little, but it seems to me like a Big Reach. If it happens, I know a lot of people who will scream and shout and throw things and punch the refrigerator. But not me. Brokeback is a breakthrough movie of lasting importance and impact. It’s already “won” in so many different ways that not winning the big Oscar prize won’t hurt all that much, although there will be those who will strongly disagree. A Crash win will have a bigger hand-grenade effect than Shakespeare in Love‘s taking the Best Picture trophy from Saving Private Ryan.

“Just saw V Is For Vendetta (Warner Bros., 3.17) at an A-list screening [in Manhattan] and you can tell the crowd thinks the conservative-values, government-allied network is Fox News,” a New York critic confides. “And the Bill O’Reilly stand-in gets it in the shower. The movie, for me, is a really great ride at the beginning and the end but there’s way too much in the middle. I don’t know what I would take out — the torture scenes are great even if the payoff is obvious — but there’s a lot of long exposition. And you have to agree what starts out as cool nods to anti-government sentiment, homosexuality, liberal thinking, etc., turns pretty ham-fisted by the three-quarter turn. The most obvious thing this movie proves is what a horrible Natalie Portman-director George Lucas is. A lot of V-heads will see this thing over and over again, but the rest of us? Not sure.”

At the start of her column piece about Don’t Tell director Cristina Comencini, who is the only female director behind all of this year’s Oscar-nominated films, Anne Thompson asks, “What is it with Italian female directors and the Oscars? In 78 years, only three women — Italy’s Lena Wertmuller (Seven Beauties), Australia’s Jane Campion (The Piano), and Hollywood’s Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) — have been nominated for best director.” (The New Zealand-born Campion apparently comes from Italian stock — I know she went to Perugia as a young woman to learn to speak Italian.) The reason more female directors haven’t been nominated for Oscars, for openers, is because a lot of their scripts don’t get past the male readers and gatekeepers and greenlighters, and a key reason is because women directors (and I’m sure there are many, many exceptions to this prejudicial belief) are seen as being in thrall to stories about personal growth (i.e., politically-tinged stand-up-and-throw-off-the- yoke-of-male-oppression material, which red-state females don’t relate to as intensely as their blue-state, urban-residing counterparts, and which don’t tend to exude strong story tension), or delicate emotional-growth or emotional-passage issues, which tend to make guys (especially younger guys, the lifeblood of the movie business) nod off. Women may throw tomatoes at me for this, but they know as well as I do that male producers and studio execs have always felt queasy about greenlighting nest-tender movies about feelings, being hugged by sisters or former enemies or good friends in the third act, caring for sick parents or errant kids, restoring homes, trying to be a good single mom while putting up with sexist- abusive ex-husbands, dads and employers. (And this is being written by a guy who worships In Her Shoes and Whale Rider, and at least respected the craft that went into North Country.) Thompson says that Don’t Talk is “one of those rare movies that reflects a particularly feminine sensibility” and that it’s about “a brother and sister dealing with child abuse as adults, after their father’s death… they were trying to understand what happened in a detached way [and] they got through that and recovered.” Don’t Tell is obviously a smart and emotionally mature drama, made by a filmmaker of taste and sensitivity, but c’mon…you have to pinch yourself to stay awake through it. The fact is that smart aggressive women who are tough and shrewd enough to make it in the film industry are to some extent hobbled by their passion for making films about women’s issues and experiences, etc., and don’t seem as interested as certain high-end male directors seem to be in making films with common universal themes that transcend gender politics. I truly wish there were more women directors out there making vital movies and winning awards, and we’d all be better off if there were more diversity in the movie world, but at the same time I understand the reticence that male execs and producers feel about “women directors.” Okay, here we go…

Latino Review‘s Kellvin Chavez is reporting that Joaquin Phoenix has to pay the bills like anyone else, and has therefore agreed to play the lead in John Singleton‘s Without Remorse for Paramount Pictures. Pic will be an origin story thriller about how an Elite Navy Seal Commando named John Kelly becomes the C.I.A. operative known as Mr. Clark, the pivotal recurring character in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan books who was played by Willem Dafoe in Clear and Present Danger and Liev Schreiber in The Sum of All Fears. No offense, but with Singleton directing there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Remorse will even approach the quality of Clear and Present Danger. Singleton is Singleton (and I was okay with Four Brothers — I went with it) and that’s fine, but he’s not in the class of the great Philip Noyce. I don’t mean to be blunt but the thing for Pheonix to do is hold his nose, do the job and move on like a man.

Zap2It’s Daniel Fienberg reviews Madea’s Family Reunion, feeling more or less the same as I. The film hasn’t been screened for critics so there’s nothing out there. As I said in my Wednesday review, guys like me so aren’t the point.

Roger Ebert is offering positive and thoughtful reasons for his prediction that Crash will take the Best Picture Oscar, but in my mind he’s essentially predicting that older-Academy- member homophobia is going to ultimately call the tune. I think it’s a tiny bit derelict of Roger to not at least acknowledge what I’ve been referring to as the Tony Curtis factor. The 81 year-old actor was widely quoted as saying he “hasn’t seen the heavily Oscar-nominated picture and probably won’t, and the same is true for other Academy members,” adding that “Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn’t like it.” And surely Ebert has at least glanced at or heard about Nikki Finke‘s 2.2 L.A. Weekly column that said “this year’s dirty little secret is the anecdotal evidence pouring in to me about hetero members being unwilling to screen Brokeback Mountain…for a community that takes pride in progressive values, it’s shameful that Hollywood’s homophobia may be on a par with Pat Robertson’s.” I’m not trying to boil it all down to a single us-vs.-them issue, and I assume readers understand I’m not saying it’s homophobic to vote for Crash over Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture. But talk to people with older dads and uncles in the Academy, and they’ll tell you that the World War II generation has indicated they have problems with Brokeback along these lines. It’s also widely acknowledged that Crash, as a certain pundit put it to me a while back, is “the middle-class choice for Best Picture.” Middle class as in “ohh, I don’t know if I want to sit in a theatre with my wife and watch that pup-tent scene.”

Robert Redford on how he got interested in wanting to make a movie about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who wrote the early stories indicating there was some kind of White House involvement in the June 1972 Watergate break-in. And his attempts to get in touch with Woodward in ’72 and ’73, and initially getting blown off. Excerpted from Redford’s commentary track on the just-released two-disc special edition DVD of All The President’s Men.

“Truman Capote was short — 5 foot, 3 inches — and spoke in a strange, high-pitched Southern accent. He was a wildly camp gay who effortlessly held whole parties in thrall with his anecdotal brilliance and cool outrageousness. I have always remem- bered one story about him, which I hope is true. At the height of his fame, a lady spotted him in a restaurant, rushed over and asked him to autograph her breast. Capote did so. Her husband, incensed, strode over, took out his penis and suggested Capote might like to autograph that too. “Well,” responded Capote, “perhaps I could initial it.” — Brian Appleyard writing in the London Times about the mythology surrounding the famed nonfiction novelist.

“To his credit, Gavin Hood‘s meditation on truth and reconciliation doesn’t traffic in the cheap thrills of art-house exploitation, like City of God; he wrings tears with sincerity, not cynicism.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis on Tsotsi.

New York journalist Lewis Beale acknowledges there’s “no buzz” on Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty (Freestyle/Yari Film Group, 3.17), but says “it’s quite good and contains a really fine performance by no less than Vin Diesel. It’s the true story of the longest criminal trial in U.S. history, involving members of the Lucchese gang, and Diesel plays a low-level mobster who decides to defend himself. Given that 90% of the movie takes place inside a courtroom it’s still quite watchable (Lumet is an old hand at procedurals in this vein — Prince of the City, Twelve Angry Men). And it has one of those great casts of (mostly) New York character actors, including Ron Silver, Peter Dinklage, Alex Rocco (really great), Richard Portnow, and other faces you’ve seen hundreds of times. Linus Roache is also terrific as a driven prosecutor. Won’t do a dime’s worth of biz, but should get good reviews and definitely builds Diesel’s acting cred.”

In a run-up to tomorrow’s debut of Madea’s Family Reunion, here’s a Salon piece about the Tyler Perry phenomenon by Russell Scott Smith. “Blacks and whites don’t always understand each other,” it begins. “But in Hollywood, everyone’s favorite color is green. So movie executives of all races took notice last February when a movie called Diary of a Mad Black Woman hit No. 1 at the box office — despite no bankable stars, scant mainstream press attention and reviews that were almost laughably bad. ‘Downright awful,’ ‘an absolute mess’ and ‘one of the worst pictures in ages,’ critics wailed. Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek called it ‘the sort of movie that’s so bad, you just wish it would go away.’ Roger Ebert was offended by the movie’s star, a “Big Momma’s House”-style granny named Madea, who smokes reefer, keeps a pistol in her purse and slices up furniture with a chain saw. This ‘Grandma from Hell,’ as Ebert called her, was played in drag by Perry. ‘All blame returns to Perry,’ Ebert wrote. ‘What was he thinking?’ But there was no arguing the numbers. Perry made Diary on a shoestring $5.5 million budget, and as of last April it had grossed some $50 million.”