The Weinstein Co. threw an elegant lunch today for Rob Marshall‘s Nine at Per Se, the renowned gourmet restaurant on the Time Warner Center’s fourth floor. Nine stars Daniel Day Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman and Kate Hudson attended; ditto an assortment of Manhattan industry/media types (Harvey Weinstein, Ron Howard, producer Ed Pressman, screenwriter Stephen Schiff, Martha Stewart, Campbell Brown, Larry King) and hot-shot journalists.

Nine star Daniel Day Lewis, director Rob Marshall at today’s Weinstein Co. Nine luncheon at Thomas Keller’s Per Se — Monday, 12.14, 2:35 pm.

And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg, Nine costar Judi Dench — Monday, 12.14.09, 2:55 pm

Nine costar Judi Dench, Harvey Weinstein (standing), unidentified guy (seated) -12.14.09, 2:20 pm

If I was flipping through Variety and came upon this ad, which doesn’t even mention Glenn Kenny or The Girlfriend Experience, I would keep flipping. You can barely make him out. I know Kenny wasn’t in any close-ups, but wasn’t he at least in a shot that was sharply focused and well-lighted? This stinks.

Apparition has picked up Floria Sigismondi‘s The Runaways for distribution, says L.A. Times/Company Town contributor Steven Zeitchik. Apparition is planning “a roll-out that lies somewhere between a platform and wide release” beginning in March 2010. In other words, it may not be as much of a problem movie as I was detecting on 12.12. The big premiere will be next month at Sundance, of course, with “a possible Joan Jett performance in Park City, Utah.”

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick assessed the New York Film Critics Circle winners today as follows: “The NYFCC and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association rarely agree on their top choices. [So it’s] really fascinating is that with two major exceptions — LA went for Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart and Yolande Moreau in Seraphine — the New Yorkers almost exactly duplicated the L.A. list.”

It also “carries real weight that both groups gave their best picture award to The Hurt Locker and Best Director to Kathryn Bigelow,” he said. I agree and so does everyone else.

NYFCC winners plus HE reactions:

Best Film — The Hurt Locker. HE comment: Very cool.

Best Director — Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker. HE comment: Damn right.

Best Screenplay — In the Loop. HE comment: Excellent!

Best Actress — Meryl Streep for Julie & Julia. HE comment: Goddammit….why? Is it that critics feel that Streep hasn’t won enough awards? Her Julie & Julia thing is just another “expert” Streep performance, which really isn’t much more than a bit. It doesn’t begin to compare with Carey Mulligan‘s in An Education. What the eff is going on here?

Best Actor — George Clooney for Up In The Air and Fantastic Mr. Fox. HE comment: Fine.

Best Supporting Actress — Mo’Nique for Precious. HE comment: There could have been no other choice. The word has gone out and the fix is in. This is like being at a Mussolini youth rally.

Best Supporting Actor — Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds. HE comment: I fucking give up.

Best Cinematography — Christian Berger for The White Ribbon. HE comment: Okay, but I’m more of a Barry Ackroyd for The Hurt Locker type of guy.

Best Animated Film — Fantastic Mr. Fox. HE comment: Respectable choice.

In a 12.14 interview with Jezebel’s “Irin,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis riffs on Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow and what she calls the hateful “bullshit” pedigree of the Oscars. I love this interview! Magnificent salty slams from a senior representative of the Gray Lady!

“Something like a woman winning best director for directing an action movie and not a romantic comedy is symbolically important,” she says. “Whether it then leads to a lot of women doing things outside of the pathetic comfort zone of romantic comedy — and I say that as someone who loves romantic comedy — we’ll see.

“We know that because women are allowed to make romantic comedies that they can make romantic comedies. That’s in everyone’s comfort zone. The idea that a woman can be a great action director is not in everyone’s comfort zone. That’s [Bigelow’s] exceptionalism.

“The only thing Hollywood is interested in money, and after that prestige. That’s why they’ll be interested in something like The Hurt Locker. She’s done so well critically that she can’t be ignored.

“But let’s acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially…I’ve learned to never underestimate the academy’s bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.”

In the same 12.14 Jezebel interview, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has explained why romantic comedies are always fairly terrible, discussed the output of Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers, and explained why women pay to see crappy chick flicks regardless.

“One, the people making [romantic comedies] have no fucking taste,” Dargis says. “Two, they’re morons. Three, they’re insulting panderers who think they’re making movies for the great unwashed and that’s what they want. I love romantic movies. I absolutely do. But I literally don’t know what’s happening.

” I personally don’t think [Ephron or Meyers] is a good filmmaker — they make movies for me that are more emotionally satisfying but with barely any aesthetic value at all. I really like Something’s Gotta Give, but I don’t think it’s a good movie. I’m of two minds. Sometimes I think what women should do what various black and gay audiences have done, which is support women making movies for women. So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That’s just like, blecch.

“I think it’s depressing that Judd Apatow makes the best romantic comedies and they’re about men. All power to Apatow, but he’s taken and repurposed one of the few genres historically made for women. We had so few [genres] that were made specifically for the female audience and now the best of them are being made by Judd Apatow. But what are his movies supposed to be about? Nominally about the relationship between a man and a woman, but they’re really buddy flicks

“There’s a reason that women go to movies like Mamma Mia. It’s a terrible movie, but women are starved for representation of themselves. I go back to Spike Lee and She’s Gotta Have It. I remember going to see it at the Quad in New York, surrounded by a black audience. People are starved for representations of themselves.”

In the same outspoken 12.14 interview, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has responded harshly and (I think) hilariously to a quote from Hollywood.com’s box-office analyst Paul Degarabedian in a 10.25 Washington Post article by Ann Hornaday.

“What women like, at least for now, are traditional narratives,” Degarabedian said. (Note: PD always says stuff like this, repeating status-quo views on tastes and trends.) “There’s no Bourne Identity with a woman starring in it right now. It’s almost as if in real life, women want to be empowered and in control, but on-screen they seem to like the old-fashioned damsel-in-distress, love-struck female.

In response to which Dargis says, “Fuck him! What an asshole! Yes, that’s what I want! That’s exactly what I want. If Angelina Jolie had been cast in a movie as a good as The Bourne Identity with a filmmaker like Paul Greengrass, I would have gone out to see it, and I’m sure I wouldn’t be alone. That is absurd. That’s blaming female audiences – you get what you deserve? Is that what he’s saying?

“It’s a vicious cycle,” Dargis also says. “We’re not going to movies because there aren’t movies for us. Therefore we’re not seen as a loyal moviegoing audience. My point is that if there are stories about women, women will come out for that.

“That’s why [women] go to a movie like The Devil Wears Prada and make huge hits. They want to see women in movies. People in the trade press constantly frame that as a surprise. This, gee whiz…Sex and the City‘s a hit, Twilight, hmm…wonder what’s going on here? Maybe they should not be so surprised. In the trade press, women audiences are considered a niche. How is that even possible? We’re 51 percent of the audience.”

The Zelig virus is alive and well among the Indiana Film Journalists Association as far as its choices for Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor. The winners are/were (and I really do think we’re getting damn tired of this) Mo’Nique in Precious and Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. respectively. They dared to be obsequious!

I’ll give this Hoosiers this much — they chose Up in the Air for Best Picture but they also chose Fantastic Mr. Fox for runner-up. Wes Anderson‘s film also won for Best Animated Film, beating out Up. The IFJA also chose Sin Nombre as Best Foreign Language Film — good. And The Cove for Best Documentary. Here‘s the rest.

If I could pick the winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar with a wave of my hand, I would give it to either Up In The Air‘s Vera Farmiga or Nine‘s Marion Cotillard. Primarily because they’re not Mo’Nique, but also because they play far more interesting women with greater portions of shading, strength and simple charm.

It’s easy to play two colors, as Mo’Nique does in Precious — i.e., repulsively malicious and boo-hoo-poor-me. It’s much harder to make a performance work without all the eyeball-glaring and emotional grandstanding, which is what Farmiga and Cotillard manage to do.

I admired the steady toughness in Cotillard’s wife-of-Guido performance, but especially the steel in her girlfriend-of-John-Dillinger role in Public Enemies, which of course is equal (if not superior) to her work in Nine. I’ve already noted that her entire Public Enemies performance can be summed up in that “bye-bye Blackbird” scene, and that she nails it cold.

And Farmiga achieves so much more in Up In The Air than Mo’Nique does in Precious….forget about it. The sexy-businesswoman warmth of her early scenes with Clooney, the calm frankness she radiates in counselling the heartbroken Natalie (Anna Kendrick) in that second-act bar scene, and the take-it-or-leave-it aloofness she conveys in her final conversation scene with Clooney. She’s really the greatest in this film, and yet Mo’Nique has the heat because…she’s badass Mo’Nique!

I wrote this morning that the cruelty in Mo’Nique’s Mary character is so malignant and beyond-the-pale that it seems like a perverse reach. What parent or human being with a shred of conscience or humanity wouldn’t recoil at such a fiendish depiction? And who the hell would vote for it? What good can it do to put such an aberrational life form in a movie? Mary is a simple case of evil sensationalism. You might as well feature a parent who kills and eats kittens every day — what’s the difference?

It’s very easy to be “evil.” The trick is to present evil in a way that (a) people recognize as something they’ve known within themselves or people they’ve run into, etc., or (b) has a commanding sense of style and pizazz.

I would also approve Anna Kendrick in Up in the Air — a much fresher and livelier performance with many more ingredients.

The New York Film Critics Circle’s website has announced that the results of today’s voting will not be announced in real time, which has been the standard deal for years. (WTF? Why do a rollback on a perfectly cool policy?) The winners will instead be posted online when voting is complete, or sometime after 1 pm. I’ll be at a Nine luncheon from that hour until 2:30 pm or so, so I guess I’ll just file from there.

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick is “fairly sure” the NYFCC won’t choose The Hurt Locker for Best Picture because “they almost never go along with their Left Coast counterparts on principle. “Precious isn’t looking too good either, he says, due to the” awkward” factor stemming from NYFCC chairman Armond White, an African-American, having condemned Precious as racist. Nor does Lumenick see Avatar winning either, although a little voice is telling me that this could happen.

I know this much — if Up In The Air doesn’t win with the NYFCC, the Best Picture lock factor with the Academy will appear to have weakened. The big story of the next few weeks will be the Up In The Air cool-down factor will be discussed. I’ve already explained that if this happens, it’ll be due to gut-level reactions from pedestrian types who wanted love and hope from the film’s finale…but didn’t get that.

In a fair and just world A Serious Man will win the NYFCC’s Best Picture prize. This brilliant film needs a group like the NYFCC to stand up for it, which could result down the road (maybe) with the Coen brothers film being included among the Academy’s ten Best Picture nominees.

Here are some counter-riffs to Katey Rich‘s assessment on Cinema Blend of what’s happened so far with the critics’ group choices:

1. Rich: “The Hurt Locker is a formidable contender, but critic’s support might not translate at the Academy.” HE: In other words, the Academy will nominate a film for Best Picture, but it may not confirm the Big Win unless it’s made some serious dough (i.e., more than $12 million).

2. Rich: “Don’t mess with Mo’nique and Christoph Waltz, because they are apparently unbeatable.” HE: The critics who are voting for Mo’Nique and Waltz are spineless and easily-led sheep, listening primarily to the blah-blah conventional wisdom of last summer and the fall. I have nothing against Waltz per se, but I know why critics are voting for him — i.e., because he won a Best Actor award in Cannes and because they like to discover and promote a new face, especially a family man in his 40s who has been honest about having had a so-so career thus far.

3. Rich: “Despite the stellar reviews, Up in the Air isn’t the awards season steamroller it had the potential to become. That doesn’t mean it won’t win, though.” HE: This is because certain comfort-seeking critics have felt a bit deflated by the downish finale — by the fact that Up In The Air isn’t finally selling the kind of warmth and assurance that many people go to movies for.

4. Rich: “With the exception of Carey Mulligan, everyone seems to have forgotten that An Education ever happened — it wasn’t even in NYFCO’s top ten films.” HE: The NYFCO reflects geekish online culture, and An Education has a classy traditionalist vibe that’s a little outside the hip-dweeb barrier. But what’s going on with Mulligan losing to Meryl Streep and Yolande Moreau among the Boston and LAFCA groups? Has she peaked? Are journos rebelling against having heard over and over that Mullligan is the year’s big discovery, the new Audrey Hepburn, etc.?

5. Rich: “With the exception of Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’nique, everyone seems to have forgotten that Precious ever happened — it had scattered support for Best Picture and Best Director at NYFCO, but nothing too substantial.” HE: Good! Keep that ball in the air!

6. Rich: “Some people seem to still remember In the Loop — it won NYFCO’s Best Ensemble prize– and hooray for that.” HE: Agreed — a good thing.

7. Rich: “The Messenger didn’t take any major prizes among the critic’s groups, but it made AFI’s Top Ten and made it pretty deep into the voting rounds for several NYFCO prizes. It may only result in a Best Supporting Actor nod for Woody Harrelson, but there’s a lot of support for this film that’s being underestimated.” HE: Good for Woody, etc., but he was better in Zombieland.