If you could pick any actor or filmmaker to meet in a boxing ring, who would it be? Ten rounds, no holding or hitting below the belt…but you can slug away all you want. Or maybe you’d rather face down a film critic or a columnist? I’ve fantasized from time to time about beating up tech-support outsource guys from India, but I really don’t like slugging people. I haven’t been in a fistfight since the seventh grade.

I’m no longer the only guy advocating the Best Actress candidacy of Factory Girl‘s Sienna Miller, and breathing easier. Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, another “Envelope” forecaster, has put Miller on his own list. I’m not sure, though, if he’s actually seen her in Factory Girl or if he’s just riding the tailwind.

To listen to N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, Forrest Whitaker‘s Last King of Scotland stock has just dropped a couple of points. And yet New Yorker critic David Denby is deeply enamored, so maybe it all balances out.
Dargis has described Whitaker’s General Idi Amin as a character who “changes moods on a dime depending on the gas percolating in his bowels or the threats on his person, real and imagined. It’s a role rich in gristle and blood, and Mr. Whitaker makes the most of it, even if the performance and the film’s essential conception of Amin never push deep or hard enough. This actor can play devious, [but] what you need in a film about a man who fed the corpses of his victims to the crocodiles is something more, something hateful and vile.”
Denby, on other hand, says that “Whitaker, [giving] the performance of a lifetime, makes General Amin a charismatic madman. Whitaker has done some surpassingly gentle and rueful work in the past, but for this role he has transformed himself — he’s either sprawled in a stupor or alarmingly mobile, throwing his big body around the room as if it weighed nothing. His laugh is enormous, and his arms are like grappling hooks.
“This dictator has a terrifying affability: like many sociopaths, he can be surprisingly empathic. He figures out what people want, but, once they have received his generosity, he believes that they belong to him. Any check on his desires sends him into a rage, and, as Whitaker takes off into astonishing tirades, one eye opens wide, and the other droops viciously — even his vision is schizoid.”

TMZ.com is reporting that NBC’s Law & Order series “will air an episode in November featuring Chevy Chase as ‘a television celebrity who is pulled over for drunk driving while wearing blood-soaked clothes, and whose religious prejudice comes out after his arrest.’ I can hear Chase saying to the arresting officer, “The Irish Catholics are the cause of all the alcoholism in the world! Wait…are you an Irish Catholic?”

“The fall to me is always a scary time. It’s a traffic jam of very good, upscale academy-type movies all vying for screens on the same date” — Picturehouse chief Bob Berney speakng to “The Envelope”/L.A. Times reporters Rachel Abramowitz and John Horn for what seems to be their first Oscar-related piece of the year, appropriately titled “Let The Battle Begin“.

L.A. Times “Oscar Beat” columnist Steve Pond, New York Post critic Lou Lumenick and yours truly are the first three Oscar Wise Guys to name favorites in the top three races — Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress — on Tom O’Neill‘s L.A. Times-sponsored “The Envelope” website. Nine other pundits willl soon join in.
O’Neill writes that Lumenick’s decision to put United 93‘s Ben Sliney on his Best Actor list is a thin out-on-a-limb call — I agree only in the sense that Sliney belongs in the Best Supporting Actor category. Otherwise, I think he gives one of the most convincing performances of the year in Paul Greengrass‘s 9/11 film. And my putting Factory Girl’s Sienna Miller on my Best Actress list isn’t out-on-a-limb either because I’ve seen a rough cut of that film and I know she kills in it.

Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond dropped this idea in my lap the other day, but I’ve thought about it and he’s dead right: this year’s Best Actor Oscar race is starting to look like it might have some racial flavoring.
Things could change, obviously, but right now it’s looking like two of the stronger Best Actor contenders are African American — The Last King of Scotland‘s Forrest Whitaker and Catch a Fire‘s Derek Luke — and the current betting is that The Pursuit of Happyness star Will Smith will soon join them to make it three. And that’s not counting the distinct possibility of Djimon Honsou getting nominated for his performance in Ed Zwick‘s Blood Diamond. (I read somewhere that he registers more strongly than costar Leonardo DiCaprio.)
I haven’t heard anything trustworthy about Honsou’s performance (has anyone?) and it’s conceivable that Luke might not make the final cut (I would strongly disgaree with that but it’s early in the game and who knows?), but Whitaker and Smith are probable lock-downs. But if all four are nominated it could be a bit of a tinderbox. By which I mean it’s going to look a little bit gnarly for the Academy if a white actor — Peter O’Toole, say — wins the Best Actor Oscar with four African Americans vying for the same prize. Think about it. It’ll certainly look that way to some.
It’s a little early to get into this without anyone having seen Blood Diamond or The Pursuit of Happyness (I’m hearing that Columbia may be thinking about showing the Smith film sooner rather than later), but it’s something to keep in mind as things evolve.

2006 has been a significant just-say-no year as far as publicists screening (or not screening) movies for critics and journos. Earlier this year the trend of publicists deciding against holding press-screenings of mediocre movies seemed to accelerate. And now there’s a new development affecting…well, just Hollywood Elsewhere right now, but maybe others as the trend spreads. I’m speaking of being barred from screenings of a couple of films because of too much meanness and negativity in my postings.
I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that I’m off the invite list to screenings of Running With Scissors, in part because I wrote a piece about the implications of Ryan Murphy‘s film not going to Toronto (“The Old Toronto Sidestep” — a carefully-sculpted, fair-minded piece if I ever wrote one), and partly due to other jottings that have cast shadows. And apparently because I’ve been trashing Columbia and Sofia Coppola‘s Marie-Antoinette (once again — a very well-made, bold-stroke movie that I personally despise for its shallowness). And perhaps because I’ve also thoroughly trashed Columbia’s Stranger Than Fiction.
There’s another situation happening with Disney, apparently because I ran a negative pre-release review about the deplorable Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. My piece followed the two trade reviews plus David Poland‘s rave, in which he used the word “joy” to describe the way Pirates had made him feel (and would presumably make others feel). Disney didn’t like that I did this (it’s okay to run raves in advance but publicists naturaly want pans to run on opening day) and of course we all know what a fatal blow critics reviews were to the grosses of both Pirate pics.
One result is that Disney didn’t invite me to Monday’s all-media showing of The Guardian. No great loss, you might say. But now I’m wondering if they’re going to do the same thing with screenings of Chris Nolan‘s The Prestige (10.20), which is supposed to be quite good.
I don’t know if these shut-outs are necessarily the beginnings of studio vendettas (probably not — every day brings a new negotiation, a new set of cirumstances), but I know now that at least two distribution execs from Disney and Columbia marketing have followed the example of a situation that was happening at the end of last year with New Line Cinema (which has had a long-standing problem with my anti-Peter Jackson rants — can anyone think of a franchise more impervious to the slings and arrows of sourpusses like myself than the Lord of the Rings trilogy?) .
And I’m starting to wonder if this is just a flare-up, or will it increase, or will it just be a constant factor from here on?
The bottom line is that studio publicists are freaking more and more about high-profile internet buzz, and the message in all of these shut-outs is obviously, “Cool your jets, consider the political realities, use more modifiers, play a better game of pattycake…or else.”
On one level I can see their point. A studio is certainly not obliged to provide free access to product before it is in the marketplace. But to those leaning in this direction, I say this: No, you’re not obliged to show it to me…but you’re obviously making a statement by saying no to screenings. If you were to say, ‘Here’s our film, take a look but absolutely no reviews until opening day’, I would respect that and adhere. But you’ve chosen to be instinctual and defensive instead, and that, as you must understand, speaks volumes.

Here’s an absolute Hollywood Reporter Key Art Award nominee for best movie poster — Steven Soderbergh‘s The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.8). The Berlin-based, black-and-white noir is set in the late 1940s, and the poster seems to have been designed back then also. It’s not a blindingly brilliant concept — a fairly obvious one, in fact — but something about it is unusually authentic-looking, like it was really and truly slapped together in 1948. George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire costar.

The Calgary Sun‘s Kevin Williamson spoke to yours truly a few days ago about the sudden trap-door trend of studio execs just saying ‘no’ to humungous big-star deals. “There is definitely a sea change [happening] in Hollywood,” said Hollywood Reporter int’l general manager John Burman. “Not just in L.A., but in the world.” And one my quotes was, “Is it definitely a bend in the river? Is it analogous to the 1989 [anti-socialist] revolution in Eastern Europe? I don’t know, but I love that idea .”