A persuasive argument piece by MSNBC’s Sarah Bunting that Steve Carell deserves a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work in Little Miss Sunshine…hail to that. (He and Alan Arkin have been topping the list of Best Supporting Actor possibles in the Oscar Balloon since last spring.)
But the thing you really want to look at on the same page is that MSNBC slide show of Oscar bait movies …hah! The banner copy says that “Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed will take on Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers“…hah!! (Which is the reason why Warner Bros. isn’t bringing The Departed to Toronto — because it’s such a tangy Oscar contender.)
Of the eleven films listed by MSNBC as likely Oscar bait, exactly four are rock-solid contenders for Best Picture or Screenplay or some level of acting award — Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s Babel, Todd Field’s Little Children, Flags of Our Fathers and Pedro Almodovar‘s Volver.
And there are two likely-possibles as far as the acting categories are concerned — Phillip Noyce ‘s Catch a Fire (i.e., Derek Luke as a Best Actor contender…maybe) and Ryan Murphy‘s Running with Scissors (i.e., a possible Best Supporting Actress nod for Annette Bening).
The list also includes Chris Nolan‘s The Prestige but my gut tells me this is more in the realm of an entertainment than Oscar glory…but maybe not. (Disney publicists are convinced it’s their ’06 Oscar missile.)
Anything’s possible, but I will eat both of my loafers if any of the following four films, listed as hotties by MSNBC, significantly distinguish themselves in the derby: Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year, Steven Zallian’s All The King’s Men, Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia and The Departed.

“I’m very confused personally,” actress Karen Young, 47, says to the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Ron Dicker. “I feel like I was in this generation of women who were supposed to take care of ourselves, supposed to be totally self-sufficient and even support a husband. There was a lot of talk about being that way, and I don’t think it actually transpired. We kept our names, but that was about it.” — from Dicker’s 8.27 profile of Young.

I met Young at last year’s Toronto Film Festival when her latest film, Laurent Cantet‘s Heading South (Vers le sud),was first being shown. She’s also pretty good in Factotum, but me Young will always be FBI agent Robyn Sanseverino. She’s been kicking around since the early ’80s and that, so far, is her definitive role.

For some reason I never watched “How Scarface Got His Groove Back“, this trailer mash-up from editor Steve Kenny, when it surfaced last June. It’s not bad except for Brendan Raher‘s narration. He sounds too much like the guy who lives across the hall who just broke up with his girlfriend — trailer narrators always sound a little bit like slick Martians. (Editor’s Note: I came upon this Trailer Mash site — all trailer mashes, all the time — becuase David Poland linked to it this morning. That means Poland owns all links to this site in perpetuity.)

I know there are dozens of folks out there with Photoshop skills who can throw together a decent likeness of what Heath Ledger will look like as The Joker in Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight. A guy sent me a version today that didn’t quite make it, but it put the hook in. I know this is doable & not difficult. I’ll post the best one and provide all links, etc.

Holy moley…there goes that idea of a John Mark Karr thriller with Naomi Watts playing Karr, which I mentioned last Tuesday. The D.A.’s office in Boulder, Colorado, announced its decision earlier today not to file criminal charges against Karr in the death of JonBenet Ramsey because his DNA doesn’t match the evidence found at the scene of her death 10 years ago. Amazing. The guy’s a pathetic charlatan. Kick him out of jail, put him on a bus. No TV-movie deals, no rights to his story…over.

Tom Cruise has put together a deal with a group that includes Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskins and a chairman of Six Flags, Inc., to finance the overhead costs of Cruise/ Wagner Prods., according to this L.A. Times story by Claire Hoffman.

Six Flags? The Washington Redskins? Do they sound like rock ‘n’ roll Chateau Marmont-type names to anyone? A bunch of opportunistic guys can’t just get together and fund a Hollywood company — it can’t really work unless they can hear the “music” in their own heads…unless they have the right kind of attitude and profile. The right car, the right diet, the right kind of girlfriends or wives, the right wardrobe.
Look at Snyder’s photo — he looks like a guy who likes to eat steak and pasta, and who buys his suits at Men’s Warehouse. White shirt, red tie…gimme a break.
The question, of course, is whether any…hold that thought. Let’s just see what surfaces when the various folks in this financing group are explored as far as their associations are concerned.
When you’re desperate for someone to fund your operation, you’ll take money from a drunk skunk. Cruise’s TVQ rating has reportedly dropped over 40% over the past year and he’s not what he once was. The upside is that this can result in a liberated attitude on Cruise’s part — he could do some of his best work over the next 10 or 15 years because of this devaluation. But the bottom line is that he and Wagner pacted with somebody outside the loop. A deal with the likes of Snyder tells you no one was standing in line to make a deal. Nobody groovy, I mean.

In a dull piece about the culture of box-office reporting and editorializing, Slate‘s Bryan Curtis is calling Exhibitor Relations spokesperson Paul Dergarabedian one of the industry’s “color men… whose job it is to peer at the data and extract larger truths.”
Whoa there, sunshine. Dergarabedian does not extract larger truths from box-office data. He extracts larger homilies and bromides. He’s an extremely dull, water- soluble stats man who would choke on real color. There’s something vaguely anesthetic and Orwellian about Paul Dergarabedian. I’ve seen saying this for five or six years now and nobody ever listens. Journalists writing Sunday box-office stories need to find a guy who talks bluntly and colorfully (someone who talks like a cigar-chomping sports writer from the ’70s), and then toss Dergarabedian’s phone number once and for all.
And box-office assessment is no longer a Sunday routine, by the way. The basic indicators in any box-office weekend are 90% discernible when Friday’s numbers are made available on Saturday morning. I know a guy who’s been giving me figures on Friday night.

Speaking of belligerent assholes and the avoidance of same, Illinois Senator Barack Obama won’t run for President in ’08…but he should. Everybody says it’s too soon for the guy. But he’s 44 years old and JFK ran when he was a year younger (having made his early plans for making a run on the U.S. Presidency when he wasn’t quite 42) so what’s the problem? Obama is thoughtful, reputable, charismatic, learned. And in possession of that inner connectedness that people seem to recognize and respond to. Everyone knew this right after he spoke at the Democratic Convention in the summer of ’04. All I know is, Obama’s got “it” and Hilary doesn’t.

Sherrybaby star Maggie Gyllenhaal, interviewed by New York‘s Emma Rosenblum, addresses that dumb-ass pickle she got into last year by saying the United States was “responsible in some way” for 9/11. “It was just terribly misunderstood,” she explains. “I never said anything like, ‘We deserved this.’ Nothing like that.
“Instead of apologizing, I wrote a little clarification of what I meant. I said that as important as it is to continue to honor all the people who were hurt and killed on 9/11, which was catastrophic, it’s also equally important to be brave and patriotic enough to look at the ways we can change the way we live, in order to help what is undeniably a really bad situation in the world. And I’m proud of having said that.”
I think what she really meant — and I totally agree with her — wasn’t that we need to look at ways of changing the way we “live” (like what…eating Big Macs?) as much as we need to look at how commercially, culturally, politically and militarily the U.S. is impacting foreign cultures and creating all kinds of hate, and we also need to look at the belligerent, reactionary, oil-addicted assholes we’ve voted for and installed in the highest echelons of government.

Jack Nicholson‘s fiendish Irish gangster in Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed “is so evil that he wears a Yankees hat on the streets of Boston. ‘First of all, they wanted me to wear a Red Sox hat,’ Nicholson grumbles, ‘but I said, all things being equal, I don’t want to.” — from Logan Hill‘s chat with Nicholson in the current New York magazine.

I’ve been susceptible to the film-watching perceptions of UCLA prof Howard Suber since the mid ’90s, which is when I first listened to his incisive commentary on the Criterion Collection laser discs of The Graduate, High Noon and Some Like It Hot. Judging solely by how good these audio tracks were, I’m moderately revved about getting a copy of Suber’s “The Power of Film” by mail in a day or two.

“After 42 years of pontificating at UCLA and years of trying to distill what I’ve learned down into one short book, I’m now facing the same kind of problem that independent filmmakers face: how do you get people to even be aware that your work exists?”, Suber said in an e-mail a while back. Wait a minute…short book? The Amazon page says it’s 456 pages. I guess it’s one of those short-seeming books composed of zippy prose and brisk chapters.
I’ll be happy to do my part to spread the word, certain as I am that it’ll have a lot of tastiness and good humor, and knowing that Francis Coppola and David Koepp have logrolled the following respective comments: (a) “Suber’s understanding of film storytelling fills the pages of this wise, liberating book, with much of it is surprisingly contrary to what ‘everyone knows.'” and (b) “What Artistotle did for drama, Suber has now done for film. This is a profound and succint book that is miraculously fun to read.”
I especially love this comment from Howard: “The book is written for people like you who are so overwhelmed they do their reading in life’s most sacred moments, like the three minutes before falling asleep, standing in security lines at airports, and sitting on the toilet.” Aahh…film appreciation for the john!