Brokeback Mountain not winning the Best Picture Oscar hit the film’s director Ang Lee in a soft spot, and it left some kind of bruise. He said in a TV interview that aired yesterday (Wednesday, 3.8) that promoting the film was “an arduous process” and that losing to Crash was a disappointment-and-a-half. “We’ve won every award since September, but missed out on the last one, the biggest one,” Lee said. But feeling disappointed “is human nature. And it wasn’t for myself. I led a whole team of people.”

Sales of the old Crash DVD (i.e., the one that went on sale last September, and not the “special edition” coming out 4.4) soared after the Paul Haggis film won the Best Picture Oscar Sunday night. In one day (aaah but which day?…Monday, 3.6 or Tuesday, 3.7?) Lionsgate sold 17,500 copies.

Another story about Bob Yari‘s lawsuit over being denied producer credit on Crash, and I’m not precisely understanding how it moves things along to hear Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, say that Yari has a tempestuous nature and a Producer’s Guild attorney say more or less the same thing.

I’ve finally heard an explanation as to why Mozart and the Whale costars Josh Hartnett and Radha Mitchell didn’t show up for the Santa Barbara Film Festival screening a month ago. The no-shows, I’ve been told, were basically about giving a fuck-you message to Avi Lerner, the film’s Israeli producer. The principals are angry because Lerner apparently wasn’t happy with a longer and allegedly better cut of Whale and, being the big-cheese producer, had it re-cut it into the shorter version I saw in Santa Barbara. I happened to enjoy and admire what I saw (as did Variety’s Todd McCarthy), but the longer version is said to have been a fuller, worthier film. I called Lerner’s office this afternoon to get his side of it, but neither he nor his assistant were available and no call-backs. My Mozart review called it “a Rain Man-type love story with a jumpy heart…jumpy as in child-like, energetic, anxious. A romanticized, tidied-up version of a complicated real-life love story, Mozart is nervy and provocative in more ways than one. Not calming or swoony like other love stories because the lovers are always in a fairly hyper and unsettled state, which feels a bit challenging, Mozart and the Whale nonetheless seems real and fairly honest and is obviously on a wavelength all its own. At first you’re thinking it needs a regular-guy character (like Tom Cruise‘s selfish prick in Rainman) to provide stability and perspective, but then you get used to the manic energy of it. And then you start enjoying more and more the vigorous cutting and the funky European-style tone (Norway’s Petter Naess directed), and particularly Hartnett and Mitchell’s performances, which feel wired and fresh and unlike anything I’ve ever gotten, tonally, from a love story before. I guess this pogo-stick element isn’t striking a chord with very many others since Mozart and the Whale has been having difficulty finding a distributor.”

I’m told by a trusted source that Lauren Bacall intended to wear her glasses during her appearance on last Sunday’s Oscar show, but at the last minute she didn’t (we can assume why) and this is why she had difficulty reading her copy. Sounds odd (Bacall never heard of contacts or laser eye surgery?) but a well-placed guy tells me that’s how it went down.

The website for Robert Towne‘s Ask the Dust (Paramount Classics, 3.10) nicely captures the film’s 1930s atmosphere and meditative mood. There’s not a great amount of advance heat coming from critics or the distributor, even, about Friday’s opening, but it’s my idea of a movie of genuine substance. Here are some excerpts from a piece I wrote after seeing it last month in Santa Barbara: “Ask the Dust is about how self-acceptance — who you really are, where you come from, what you’re feeling deep down — brings clarity and with that the noblest kind of strength, which is the ability to love. Some who see Ask the Dust may shift around in their seats a bit, but this is a film that knows what it’s doing and gets to where it’s going. It is what it damn well is. It’s meditative and sometimes talky as shit, and it feels visually claustrophobic in the middle section, but this is the kind of life that struggling writer Arturo Bandini (played very well by Colin Farrell) leads in his rented Bunker Hill room so you can’t say it’s not honest. And it pays off at the end, and you can’t say it’s not wonderfully written, and there’s a spiritual element in the water table if you settle down and let it soak in. I was in and out as I watched it, but this is the kind of film that comes together the next morning. You can say “not for me…I want the movie to pay off completely as I’m watching it” and I hear you, but movies that take a few hours to percolate are always the ones that we remember and value more because they hold up over time. Thematically it’s basically the same film as Curtis Hanson‘s 8 Mile, which was about Eminem being unable to rap with confidence or clarity until he stands up and admits he’s just this grungy white kid from a trailer park with a loser alcoholic mom. Dust is about Bandini coming to terms with his roots and how his own rage about suffering ethnic prejudice as a boy leads to treating Salma Hayek‘s Camilla disrespectfully and even cruelly in the same vein, and how accepting this helps him get past the crap and find his voice. Give up the pose and the attitude, admit who and what you really are, and you’ll be able to move on and be a man.

The teaser-trailer for Pixar’s Cars (Disney, 6.9), the latest, certain-to-be-cool animated feature from John Lasseter (Toy Story 2), will be viewable on the Pixar site sometime tomorrow, apparently. (Looks like it’s live now but it isn’t, or wasn’t when I tried it ten minutes ago.) It’s about cars driving themselves around and going through identity crises, etc., but rising to the challenge a big third-act race at the end. (What else, right?) Hotshot race-car Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) finds himself in a proverbial meditative dead-end in a desert bumblefuck town called Radiator Springs on his way to the big Piston Cup Championship in California. The other characters include a 2002 Porsche called Sally (Bonnie Hunt) and a 1951 Hudson Hornet (Paul Newman). Other voices actors inlcude Tony Shalhoub, Michael Keaton, Cheech Marin and George Carlin.

Sharon Stone has formally confirmed she has a bare-assed scene in Basic Instinct 2. And with that out of the way…

A few Sopranos cast members were asked to spill some plot details about season #6 (which launches on Sunday, 3.12) by a “Page Six” reporter at Tuesday night’s MOMA premiere, but of course they wouldn’t. Nor will I (although I’m trying to figure out some way to write about the four episodes I’ve seen), but here’s a
little tiny taste of some dialogue from episode #4…hilarious. A born- again guy talking to Tony (James Gandolfini) and some friends (among them Michael Imperioli‘s Chris) about being saved, the legend of Charles Colson, dinosaurs and world history. Beautiful stuff.

“George Lucas is wrong about the future of cinema,” says Matthew Meyeretto, in a reference to this morning’s item sourced from Lloyd Grove. “The reason people still go to theaters is because of tent-pole pictures. Films like Crash have achieved a nice niche market but they’ll never attract that key market segment of 12-30 year olds that epic tent-poles do. We all know Kong ‘disappointed’ because it was too long and was too much of pet project for Jackson. If he had trimmed an hour off and made a straight monster flick that put the pedal to the metal within ten minutes and didn’t let up (including excising that silly scene of Kong skidding around on the ice in Central Park), it would have grossed $300 million stateside.”

“A check of Brokeback parodies on Google should convince anyone with half a brain that the American pop culture is intent on passing this passionate, well-meant, and well-made movie like a kidney stone. And how does the American pop culture pass what it cannot stand? Easy. It laughs that shit right out of its system. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, at bottom as conservative as the current U.S. House of Representatives, gave Ang Lee one Oscar (which surprised me), the writing team of McMurtry and Diana Ossana another…and with those bones thrown, felt free to move on. To Crash, of course. Crash was the perfect alternative, and — ahem — I had it picked for Best Picture the whole way. It’s the sort of flick the Hollywood establishment loves best and will always embrace, if given the chance, one where the complexities are all on the surface. [But Crash has] a valid point of view, a decent theme, and Paul Haggis made the most of it. But was it the best film of the year? Good God, no. Brokeback was better. So were Capote and The Squid and the Whale, for that matter. But let’s let it go, okay? The lights are off in the Kodak Theatre for another year. The set has been struck. The Academy sent the same soothing message it almost always sends: Everything’s all right, everything’s okay, the right movie won — the good movie, not the gay movie. Go to sleep, and sleep tight.” — From Stephen King ‘s latest column in Entertainment Weekly.

“So what happened? Brokeback won almost all the critics’ awards, but the critics are only trying to select the best movie. In Hollywood, the old guard never embraced Brokeback…it never had a chance to win over the 60-year-old straight white men who compose most of the voting. Giving Brokeback an award is not the kind of message Hollywood wants to send to middle America. Hollywood does not heart homosexuals. The only people in the country who really truly seem to believe that Hollywood is pushing a gay agenda message the throats of Americans are the ultra far-right wing…the Michael Medveds, Ann Coulters, and Gary Baumans. Think about it. Hollywood’s homosexual agenda? Gay actors can’t even come out of the closet. Gay executives and agents stay in the closet. There isn’t a more closeted business in the country, except, perhaps, the National Football League. Hollywood’s homosexual agenda? Name the great gay-themed movies over the last thirty years? Let’s see, Philadelphia (where the gay protagonist is dying) and… well, that’s it. That’s Hollywood’s gay agenda over the last thirty years. Two movies.” — Journalist, former newspaper editor and book author Gene Stone in the Huffington Post.