According to a David Poland/Hot Blog posting, Star Wars creator George Lucas was introducing an award being given to Sid Ganis at the Publicists’ Guild luncheon (Ganis having been the in-house publicist on The Empire Strikes Back), and said the following: “Sid is the reason why The Empire Strikes Back is always written about as the best of the films, when it actually was the worst one.” If Lucas was kidding, whatever. If he wasn’t, or if he was only half-kidding, he’s reaffirmed his rep as one of the thickest and most clueless big wheels in the history of motion pictures.

You’re not supposed to say this and I’m not “saying” it myself — I’m just asking what people think. I realize there’s something in this that sounds a wee bit racist and lunk-headed, but an industry friend passed along a supposed distributor- exhibitor belief earlier today, which is that African-American audiences go to movies in proportionately bigger numbers on Sunday than other demos do. With every other group moviegoing falls off slightly on the day of rest, but with blacks attendance either holds steady or goes up. I heard this same view from a marketing executive five or six months ago. Both guys said this is backed up by surveys, data, etc. Is this a widely understood, research-verified cultural thing, or is it something else? And if it’s accurate, why does it happen?

The only Sunday night awards presentation that matters is the Writers Guild Awards, but interest levels are barely there because the Best Original Screenplay award is a lockdown for Little Miss Sunshine‘s Michael Arndt and the Best Adapted Screenplay trophy belongs to The Departed‘s William Monahan….right? The BAFTA Awards are strictly a second-tier deal, and too quirky besides.

No one remembers or cares about a so-so Battle of Thermopylae movie called The 300 Spartans (1962), and I seriously doubt if fans of Zack Snyder‘s 300 (Warner Bros., 3.9.07), which is about the exact same thing, will like it very much if and when they rent it out of curiosity over the next four or five weeks.

I’ve seen the older film a couple of times, and it always played way too tame and talky. Snyder’s film, on the other hand, is a visual mindblower — organic live-action footage simulating the brushstrokes of a graphic novel — with all kinds of sex scenes, beheadings and whatnot. The admiration of journalists like Anne Thompson and Suzie Woz aside, it’s a fanboy thing waiting to happen.

The opening sequence in The Lives of Others “isn’t particularly graphic or even suspenseful: the camera movement is almost placid, as if it were faking disinterest. But [it] gives a firm sense of a country in which paranoia is a part of the air, like a toxin leeching oxygen from it.

“And with it, director and writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck begins building the layers of emotional texture that ultimately make The Lives of Others — an Academy Award nominee for best foreign-language film — so moving, and so deeply satisfying.” — from Stephanie Zacharek‘s Salon review. The Sony Classics release has a 92% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Hard on the heels of Jurgen Trimborn‘s Leni Reifenstahl: A Life (Faber and Faber, 1./23.07), a galley proof of Stephen Bach‘s Leni:, The Life and Work of Leni Reifenstahl arrived yesterday via messenger. I went through 30 or so pages last night during dinner, and it’s obviously a very smart and perceptive read — thorough, respectful, in some ways admiring but always clear-eyed and carefully measured.

I was struck by the following graph in the final chapter: “Thomas Mann once wrote that ‘art is moral in that it awakens,’ but Leni’s art dulled and deceived. It is the perfect expression of the machinery of amnipulation it glorifies” in her two Nazi-era classics, Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Her films are, in the words of David Thomson, ‘the most honest and compelling fruit of fascist temperament — triumphant, certain and dreadful.'”

Roger Ebert personally endorses Eddie Murphy as the most deserving winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar?

Norbit is #1 for the weekend with a projected $31,376,000 — playing on over 3000 screens, earning over $10,000 a print, running only 87 minutes. Hannibal Rising is second at $12,417,000, Because I Said No is third with $8,902,000 and The Messengers is #4 with $6,752,000. A Night at the Museum is fifth with $5,390,000, Epic Movie is sixth with $3,886,000, and Joe Carnahan‘s Smokin’ Aces is seventh with $3,617,000. Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth is #8 with $3,446,000, Dreamgirls is ninth with $2855,000 (down to $1200 a print…lost 400-odd theatres this weekend…will probably lose another 750 to 1000 screens next week), and Stomp The Yard is #10 with $2,352,000.

“The late Murray Kempton once described editorial writers as ‘the people who come down from the hill after the battle to shoot the wounded,'” writes L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten. “Nowadays, media analysts are the guys who follow behind them, going through the pockets of the dead looking for loose change.

“So, yes, this column is about Anna Nicole Smith.

“Friday morning, less than 24 hours after she died in a Florida hotel room, the Drudge Report — our media culture’s digital arbiter of all things tacky and prurient — had 12 items posted on the onetime topless dancer. That would account for some of the media frenzy surrounding her death. It’s a little-known fact, but certain sectors of the broadcast media have long believed that if a dozen items on Anna Nicole Smith ever were posted on Drudge simultaneously, it would herald the onset of the apocalypse.

“Who knew? This is the way the world ends — neither with a bang nor a whimper but with cleavage.”

“I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness — a certain audacity — to this announcement. I know I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.” — from Barack Obama‘s formal announcement of his Presidential candidacy speech, delivered this morning in Springfield, Illinois.

“Why is it that the only people who really appear to lose control when they accept their [Oscar] statuette are the actors?,” writes MSN’s Jim Emerson. “Why don’t the art directors and sound editors sputter and wail as if they’d just been spared from lethal injection? If anything, you’d think the actors would be better able to control their emotions than most people.

“And you’d be right. You see, actors dig emotional meltdowns, on screen and off. They do it on purpose. It’s almost a form of noblesse oblige — a generous Acting Gratuity (more than 20 percent), if you will: “I will now treat you to an extraordinary demonstration of how deeply I am moved!” And, at the same time, it’s a form of grandiose self-inflation and self-abasement.”

The esteemed auteurs who produced Anna Nicole Smith‘s last film, an apparent piece of shit called Illegal Aliens, have cancelled screenings because, as director David Giancola has explained to the N.Y. Daily News, “so much of it is riffing on Anna and her riffing on herself, I just don’t think, with her passing, it’s appropriate to screen it so quickly after her death.”

The late Anna Nicole Smith in a still from Illegal Aliens

Smith lived a life that was mainly characterized by tastelessness and lack of refinement, and now that she’s gone her colleagues feel it’s time to get all sensitive and discreet. Not to mention the likelihood that the film’s only chance of being even marginally commercial would depend on it being released as soon as possible and then sent straight to DVD.

“We had planned to release it in April,” Giancola explained. “But right now, it’s such an early stage, we just don’t know.” Filmed in Vermont in 2005, pic is “supposed to be a comedy” and in it, Smith spends a lot of time making fun of herself. Considering how she died, that humor may now be lost. She plays one of three extraterrestrials who fight an intergalactic terrorist. Edgewood Studios bills it as “Charlie’s Angels goes sci-fi.”