“When Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Sid Ganis announced the expansion of the best picture category to 10 nominations back in June, everyone was talking about J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek being the kind of movie that might benefit from a wider field,” writes Variety‘s Glenn Whipp. “Critics liked it; audiences loved it: It was the type of sturdy popcorn movie that, if nominated, might give the awards telecast a ratings boost — or, at least, stem further viewer erosion.

“Now, as Oscar season kicks into gear, nobody is talking about Star Trek much anymore. And, as audiences and Academy members have seen most of the Oscar contenders, a vague sense of discomfort hangs over Hollywood as some naysayers wonder how they might possibly fill out a ballot that now includes 10 slots.

“‘This is not 1939,’ says one Academy member, who like most people interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified. ‘I’m just not seeing stuff that’s blowing me away, and it’s October. When the year began, I was hoping for masterpieces. Now I’d just take a good midrange drama, and I’m not even getting that.'”

Due respect but what is this person talking about? 1939? As in what happened to good old David O. Selznick, Victor Fleming, John Ford and Michael Curtiz?

The Academy is full of people who live in a kind of denial-prone nostalgia bubble who won’t give in to serious enthusiasm about any film unless “the waitress takes you into a back room and sucks your dick,” to borrow a line from Reservoir Dogs. Has this guy seen Up In The Air, The Hurt Locker, An Education, A Serious Man, Bright Star, District 9, etc.? I’ve heard this complaint year after year. I know what these guys want from a film. They want something grand, bold, devastating. An experience that will melt them down, lure them into a Godly embrace, inspire them to run out and hug their kids. A movie to go “wow!” about with your friends in the lobby and make everyone do cartwheels. Or that…you know, will bathe them in a soaring orchestral score by James Horner or whatever.

In short, they want the kind of high-pedigree, finely-fused emotional bath movie that the major studios used to try to make but began abandoning in the ’90s, and have now pretty much given up on. They’re investing in Guy Ritchie movies for December release these days, and Guy Ritchie ain’t Sidney Lumet or Mike Nichols or David Lean. Well, the save-us-from-disappointment crowd had better get with it. They’d better wake up and smell the cappucino. The reality is that the Oscars have pretty much become the Spirit Awards in tuxedoes and designer gowns. That’s the world we’ve all created and are living in. I for one am down with that, but some people are beyond reach.

“Anyone can formulate a personal version of heaven — an aerie of angels, a tropical getaway, a cloister with 72 virgins, a sports bar with unlimited beer and bigscreen, or an ethereal place where you could mingle and chat with everyone from Socrates to Groucho Marx,” Variety‘s Todd McCarthy wrote in a 10.22 column. “Last week I discovered the closest approximation of paradise I can imagine for the hardcore film buff at the Grand Lyon Film Festival in the center of France.

(l. to r.) Clint Eastwood, Cecile de France, Bertrand Tavernier, Therry Fremaux.

“This six-day event was defined by three elements: reliably fine films, incredible food and good, smart people to share both with. This setting afforded attendees a state not of ecstasy, perhaps, but of a consistently high mellowness.

“The St. Peter of this blissful environment was Thierry Fremaux. Though Fremaux is best known to the world as major domo of the Cannes Film Festival, his professional base has long been his native Lyon. There, working with fellow Lyonnois Bertrand Tavernier, he has been director of the Institute Lumiere, a superbly administered shrine to the fathers of cinema, Auguste and Louis Lumiere. The brothers’ stately home is maintained as a beautiful museum devoted to the movies’ earliest days in the 1890s; right next to it is an intimate modern cinema where the institute runs an outstanding year-round screening schedule of classics, strongly contributing to the city’s conspicuously avid and film-literate population.

“The new film festival could accurately be called ‘Cannes Classics X 10,’ a notable magnification of the annual Cannes sidebar Fremaux initiated to spotlight the latest in global archival restorations. Part of Lyon’s charm is that it doesn’t show bad films. The reason is that it doesn’t show any new ones, except for the odd documentary about cinema subjects.

“In the fest’s inaugural year, two of the major retrospectives were devoted to Sergio Leone (the complete works) and Don Siegel. The first Prix Lumiere, an award Fremaux expects to present annually and ambitiously conceives of as ‘the Nobel Prize of cinema, was bestowed upon Clint Eastwood, many of whose films as a director were also shown.

“The 79-year-old actor-auteur was busy in Lyon for four days, during which he was feted as the special guest at several dinners; gave a press conference introducing Siegel’s 1958 pic The Lineup; accepted his fest award at a public ceremony before 3,000 people; kicked an opening ball at a soccer game in front of 40,000 fans; and introduced a large-screen showing of a new print of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for 5,000 rabid cinephiles.

“At each event he caused a rock star-like frenzy. Fremaux was able to lure nearly 40 international directors to the fest’s opening night; within my first five minutes at a reception, I bumped into Alfonso Cuaron, Jerry Schatzberg, Emir Kusturica and Claude Lelouch. The great restaurant Le Passage functioned as the festival’s canteen, open at nearly all hours, and the central tented meeting place featured an embarrassment of enticing books and DVDs for sale.

“To my knowledge, there isn’t another film festival quite like Lyon anywhere else in the world. Bologna specializes in old films and rarities but remains rarefied rather than public, Pordenone focuses on silent cinema, Telluride maintains equally high standards but concentrates on the new. Roger Ebert‘s annual fest is perhaps closest in its devotion to past and neglected glories but shows far less.”

As I hear it, Kirk Jones‘ Everybody’s Fine (Miramax, 12.4), an About Schmidt-type family drama that will be reviewed following its AFIFest premiere on 11.3, isn’t necessarily a Best Picture candidate, but Robert De Niro, playing a dad looking to reconnect with his grown kids, could snag some consideration as a Best Actor candidate.

“It’s a low-key performance, which actors will like — understated — and he hasn’t been Oscar-nominated since Cape Fear, which was 16 or 17 years ago,” says a guy who’s seen it. “He more or less sells it with two scenes — a meltdown moment during a plane flight and an emotional scene at a hospital.”

Kate Beckinsale, Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell and Melissa Leo (in a very small role as a truck driver) costar.

Every so often an actor or actress you haven’t noticed before will just catch your eye. It helps if they can act, of course, but movie cameras just like certain people. And right away you’re thinking you’d like them to stick around. For me, this happened when Ophelia Lovibond came on-screen in Sam Taylor-Wood‘s Nowhere Man. I should have made some noise about her in my 10.29 review but I didn’t know her name. (The press notes weren’t much help.)

Nowhere Boy costar Ophelia Lovibond at last night’s London premiere

She’s in two scenes with Aaron Johnson (who plays John Lennon), one of them an outdoor quickie sex scene. Lovibond — curious name — has a certain directness, a straight-from-the-shoulder quality. And she has Liz Taylor eyes. Her next significant film is William Monahan‘s London Boulevard, a crime drama with Keira Knightley, Colin Farrell, Anna Friel, Ray Winstone, David Thewlis, Eddie Marsan, etc.

Miramax president Daniel Battsek, a good man, has been given the boot. As part of a late September announcement about streamlining/downsizing the company, Disney management stated that Battsek would “continue to oversee all aspects of creative, development, production and business and legal affairs” out of New York. Nikki Finke is reporting that Miramax’s NY office will now be closed, and that the whole operation will now move to the Disney lot.

A studio spokesperson told L.A. Times reporter Claudia Eller on 9.24 that “we continue to look at the best way to run our lines of businesses most efficiently.” I said in a 9.26 posting that “rhetorical references to ‘efficiency’ by management are usually cause for concern.” So there you go.

Sorry for Daniel — a longtime supporter and friend of Hollywood Elsewhere — and for anyone else at Miramax who may also be thrown over the side. It’s tough rowing out there.

I’m sorry but I’ve never found locations in and of themselves to be remotely scary. I don’t even find them unsettling. It”s interesting when you can sense the aura around certain places — the White House, Ground Zero, Dealey Plaza in Dallas — but that’s a long way from scary. It’s fascinating to stand in areas and buildings that have been used in famous movies (like Mission San Juan Batista near Hollister) but again, no spooks.

I love the way Werner Herzog pronounces his “ohs,” as in know and though and so on. It’s a very special “ohheww” sound. He spoke the night before last about the casting of Eva Mendes in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (First Look, 11.20).

Amy Rice and Alicia Sams‘ By The People: The Election of Barack Obama will finally debut on HBO on Tuesday, 11.3 — precisely 365 days after the ’08 Presidential election came to an end. I reviewed the film in early August after catching a showing at the Sunshine Cinemas, and there wasn’t any way to be kind or charitable. It’s a political chick flick with no edge — butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth. And it’s way too easy in its depiction of Hillary Clinton ‘s campaign.

I began by calling it “a fairly bloodless portrait of one of the most fascinating, breathtaking, sometimes ugly, occasionally transcendent, up-and-down racial-tinderbox elections in our nation’s history. It’s up-close and somewhat intimate and sorta kinda dull at times. Not novacaine dull but glide-along, yeah-yeah dull.

“You’d never know what a heart-pumping ride Obama’s two-year campaign for the White House was by watching this nicely assembled but excessively mild-mannered film.

“Rice and Sams were given extraordinary close-up access to candidate Obama and his innermost circle (David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, etc.) as well as Michelle, Sasha and Malia. The co-directors caught some good stuff along the way (Obama tear-streaking when speaking about his recently-deceased grandmother, a ten year-old campaign worker patiently dealing with a contentious voter over the phone, etc.) but it almost seems as if Rice and Sams agreed to let Axelrod and Gibbs co-edit the film with an aim to de-balling and up-spinning the final version as much as possible.

“This seems especially apparent given the overly-diplomatic and toothless portrait of Hillary Clinton‘s campaign. Her current position as President Obama’s Secretary of State obviously means it would have been very politically awkward for a documentary to bring up her frequently ugly, race-baiting campaign tactics and so — I don’t mean to sound over-cynical and pat-minded but how else am I to process this? — Rice and Sams have given her a near-total pass.

“There’s no mention of Hilary’s incessantly playing rhetorical race cards, talking about how working white people support her, etc. There’s no footage or even a mention of Bill Clinton, and therefore no mention of his post-South Carolina primary remark that Obama’s victory in that state was somehow comparable to Jesse Jackson ‘s win there in the mid ’80s. There’s no mention of Hillary’s cynical campaign speech about how Obama “will bring us together and the heavens will part” speech, which she delivered, as I recall, during the Ohio-and-Texas primary campaign. There’s no mention of Hillary’s made-up Bosnia story about dodging bullets when she visited that country in the mid ’90s. There’s no mention of Samantha Power‘s “Hillary is a monster” comment. There’s no mention of Hillary’s bizarre refusal to concede when she should have (i.e., after Obama had his electoral-vote triumph sewn up) and how she had to be stern-talked into doing so by Congressional and Senatorial colleagues.

“It’s even more bizarre that the racial resistance factor among white voters — surely the central hurdle of Obama’s campaign — is only faintly acknowledged. We’re shown a clip of a couple of younger Bubbas stating that Obama’s ancestry is a problem, but that’s just about it in terms of Rice and Sams catching the backwater attitudes that were brought up by reporters and the political talk-show crowd nearly every damn day during the primaries and the general election,

“The Reverend Wright issue is raised (how could it not be?) along with Obama’s historic Philadelphia speech about racial relations. But there’s no mention of Michelle taking heat for saying that the positive response to her husband’s campaign was cause for her feeling proud of the U.S for the first time in a long time. There’s no mention of that idiotic terrorist fist bump flap. No YouTube clip of that West Virginia cracker lady on the back of that motorcycle expressing cultural shock at the sound of Obama’s name. There’s no mention whatsover of the fear of the Bradley Effect, a now-discounted concern that white voters might change their minds about voting for a black candidate in the privacy of the voting booth due to latent racism. And Obama’s decision to finally cut all ties with Reverend Wright is completely ignored also.

“And there’s very little mention of the general campaign against John McCain and Sarah Palin. It accounts for maybe ten minutes out of the film, which runs somewhere close to two hours. (I should have timed it but didn’t.) No right-wing stirring of the racial pot, no mention of McCain’s ‘The One’ ad (and no clip of David Gergen explaining that the racial coding of that ad was clear to anyone who grew up in the South), no expressions of bone-dumb ignorance (‘He’s…I think he’s an Arab’) and/or racial hatred at McCain and Palin rallies (‘Kill him!’).

“There’s some good B-roll footage of Obama playing basketball with friends, but the best photo-op basketball moment of the entire campaign — i.e., the moment when Obama made a near-perfect shot from outside the penalty circle in front of an audience of troops in Iraq — is missing. It leads you to suspect/presume that Rice and Sams didn’t cover last summer’s Middle East/European tour, and to ask why.

“In sum, For The People emphasizes emotionality and intimacy at the expense of the fierce melodrama and primal intensity that were fundamental aspects of the story. I could be mean and call it a puff piece and….you know something? It’s not being mean to say that because it more or less is that. I’m not saying that Rice and Sams were in fact emotionally entwined with the Obama campaign, but the doc makes it seem as if they were. And that’s a no-no. You have to step back and disengage and be merciless, if necessary.

“There are several little things in the film that are pleasing or revealing in this or that minor way. But the fact is that most of the film is not focused on Obama himself as much as his campaign staff, and much of this footage feels like B roll. The narrative emphasis in the doc is akin to the kind of backstory you might pass along to your grandmother as you show her your family photo album and explain this and that. It’s too kindly and considerate and smoothed over..

“It’s been pointed out by a friend of Rice and Sams that ‘the filmmakers made the film they wanted to make…it’s called By The People. And they captured the emotion of the campaign.’ On this last point I respectfully disagree.”

I don’t know what I was doing when this Matt Zoller Seitz video essay about Elia Kazan ‘s On The Waterfront went up almost a month ago. The more-or-less conventional view is that the story of Terry Malloy vs. Johnny Friendly is “a rat’s fantasy” or “a stoolie’s defense.” Seitz argues otherwise, or at least that a fairer, more perceptive reading is somewhere in the middle.

Kazan’s rep has long been tarnished by his cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 by agreeing to confirm names of Hollywood professionals who had named by others as having once had Communist affiliations. Seitz, however, says he agreed to “name names,” which isn’t quite the same thing and is therefore, to my knowledge, not precisely true.

Hollywood Reporter critic Ray Bennett, not exactly known for his no-holds-barred contrary opinions, shocked the film industry yesterday by calling Sam Taylor-Wood‘s Nowhere Boy, which had its premiere last night in London, a “passable look at the early life of John Lennon…quite a dull film.” If Bennett, who gave a pass to Amelia and Momma Mia!, can’t find a way to bend over for this film, it suggests that the U.S. critical consensus might be an issue down the road.

The British critics loved it. Of course, they usually roll over for British-produced films so you need to take their Nowhere Boy views with a grain of salt. Here’s the Telegraph guy, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian, The Independent‘s Geoffrey Macnab and Time Out‘s Dave Calhoun.

With Hugh Jackman stating he’s not interested in hosting the 2010 Oscars, and the show’s new producers (Bill Mechanic, Adam Shankman) presumably aware that drawing younger viewers is a priority, let me repeat a truism voiced two years ago by Manhattan ad exec Shari Anne Brill, to wit: “Younger viewers live their lives pushing the envelope, breaking rules and bending rules. As long as the Oscars are perceived to have a certain rigidity, they’re not going to be relatable to young people.”

In other words, don’t hire another setttled smoothie. You don’t want your next host performing a 75 year-old Fred Astaire tune in evening finery — you want Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson (the most innovative/hilarious team to occupy the Oscar stage in recent years), or anyone for that matter with a post-9/11 fuck-all sense of humor and smarty-pants inclinations. I don’t care if Sarah Silverman‘s humor is of the LQTM variety — she’s da bomb. If the Vince Vaughn of the Wedding Crashers could host the show, the show would be instant gold. Suggestions? No more boomers, no more nods to boomer sensibilities…boomers are done.