Director Blake Edwards, 88, has passed. It’s become an HE tradition to always say something a little too honest on these occasions, so here goes. For the last 45 years Edwards has been celebrated as a master of slapstick, but I found most of his stuff laborious, in part because so many of his films (certainly beginning in the early ’70s) exuded a square establishment sensibility. A respected auteur, surely, but he always seemed to me like a schmaltzy, well-paid, Malibu-colony type of guy.

I never sensed, in short, that Edwards’ film were about anything more than (a) the fact that he had a certain instinct for comic timing and orchestrating pratfalls, a gift that arguably put him in the same realm as Mack Sennett (but nowhere near that of Buster Keaton), and (b) that he enjoyed livin’ the high life and therefore felt compelled for some reason to stock his films with evidence or reflections of this. And I always hated the way his films were lighted and shot in typical big-studio “house” style.

Edwards had a good run with Peter Sellers, of course, but Sellers’ greatest director friend/ally was Stanley Kubrick, not Edwards.

Truth be told, there are only two Edwards films I really and truly admire (as opposed to liking or tolerating). One is Experiment in Terror (’62), a creepy no-frills noir about a terrorized bank teller (Lee Remick) and a cop (Glenn Ford) trying to protect her. The other is SOB (1981), an inside-Hollywood satire that feels somewhat realistic (Edwards finally got down with this one) and is full of roman a clef characters (Robert Vaughn as Bob Evans, Marisa Berenson as Ali McGraw, Shelley Winters as Sue Mengers, etc.)

The Edwards films I regard as “fine,” “okay” and/or “relatively decent” are Breakfast at Tiffany’s (except for Mickey Rooney‘s awful performance), Days of Wine and Roses (a very good drama), A Shot in the Dark (moderately funny at times), What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (loved some of this), The Party (some brilliant portions), Wild Rovers (decent western), 10 (overrated but funny at times), and the low-budget That’s Life (Jack Lemmon facing old age and male menopause depression — an honest and decent film).

In the wake of the SAG and Golden Globe noms, Scott Feinberg has statistically assessed which nominatable actors and actresses are looking pretty damn good, which are looking dicey, and which are more or less up shit creek.

This — right now, this morning, this past week, most of this month — has been one of the coolest ad moments in HE’s six-year history history with all the hotties flashing on and off and shouting “me, me, me…no, me!” It feels so cool, so right. All the sweat and struggle has been worth it. Nothing is easy and everything is hard, but in a racket like mine, this is about as good as it gets ad-wise.

“Mark Zuckerberg was recently named Time‘s Man of the Year. Who reads Time magazine? Old people who don’t read blogs. Why is this important? Because if Time says Zuckerberg is important he must be important. So maybe that movie about him is about more than just some asshole kid inventing a hot website. Maybe it really is about someone who changed the way the world works. Maybe I should give it another look. Maybe it really is better than The King’s Speech. Ahh, screw it — I’m voting for The Fighter.” — HE reader Matthew Morettini.

The Screen Actors Guild nominations are up, and there are at least three if not four outrageous omissions. Many fine people have been honored, but SAG, I feel, has truly shamed itself by failing to nominate Javier Bardem‘s legendary performance in Biutiful for Best Actor as well as Lesley Manville‘s shattering turn in Another Year for Best Actress.

Perhaps the biggest fall-on-the-floor WTF is SAG’s decision to nominate Jeff Bridges‘ True Grit performance as one of its five Best Actor hopefuls. This is just sloppy, chummy, boomer-fortified cronyism, pure and simple.

The third SAG outrage is nominating Hilary Swank‘s sufficient-but-nothing-special performance in Conviction for Best Actress. Because in so doing they’ve blown off the much more deserving Manville as well as Michelle Williams, who kills in Blue Valentine. It just makes me sick.

If you ask me Valentine‘s Ryan Gosling should have also been Best Actor-nominated, but I recognize that there are only so many slices in the pie and someone has to be left holding an empty plate.

They also blew off Animal Kingdom‘s Jacki Weaver for Best Supporting Actress. You know why? Five’ll get you ten a good portion of SAG’s membership hasn’t bothered to watch the Animal Kingdom screener. Plus they ignored all three of the Social Network guys — Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake and Armie Hammer. And yet they nominate Jeremy Renner for delivering a standard chilly psychopath turn in The Town? What bullshit!

The Bridges thing is mind-blowing. What is the big award-worthy deal about snortin’ and harumphin’ and stumblin’ around as scuzzy old Ruben Cogburn? Bridges knew he had a problem because of Cogburn’s similarities to his drunken Crazy Heart performer so he went with a deeper, drawlin’ gravel-gut voice and scowled a bit more and got to wear some old western duds and shoot a bunch of guys. And this results in a SAG nomination at Bardem’s and/or Gosling’s expense?

I’m not putting Bridges down. I would have done the same thing in his shoes. But the Ruben Cogburn role isn’t that intriguing or compelling. Was Bridges nominated because he’s charming and likable? That’s true, Bridges is that. He’s a very personable guy. So are the Coen brothers — a couple of very witty and likable fellows. So is Matt Damon — an ardent Hollywood lefty, hates Jimmy Kimmel, narrated Inside Job. So is John Boehner, I’ll bet, after a couple of drinks.

The other SAG-nominated Best Actor contenders are Colin Firth (The King’s Speech), James Franco (127 Hours), Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Robert Duvall (Get Low). Good for them.

The Best Actress nominees besides Swank are Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) and Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole).

The Best Supporting Actor nominees besides Renner are Christian Bale (The Fighter), John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone), Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right) and Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech).

It’s good that both Amy Adams and Melissa Leo have scored Best Supporting Female noms for their work in The Fighter. Good also on The King’s Speech‘s Helena Bonham Carter, Black Swan‘s Mila Kunis and True Grit‘s Hailee Steinfeld.

I would feel sullied by predicting Golden Globe wins so I didn’t respond to Tom O’Neil‘s queries about same. (Sorry, Tom!) But you don’t need to be Jimmy the Greek to realize than since The King’s Speech got the most Golden Globe nominations that it may be favored to win the awards for Best Drama and Best Actor (i.e., Colin Firth). That’s what a lot of the journalists who did respond (Pete Hammond, Dave Karger, Michael Musto, Steve Pond, Kris Tapley, Anne Thompson, et. al.) are expecting. Visionaries.

But of course the HFPA knows what most Academy members are also realizing, which is that championing The King’s Speech, well crafted as it is, will bestow the faint aroma of old-fartism upon their organization, and if they want to project a more youthful, forward-looking, 21st Century attitude they’ll want to go with The Social Network or The Fighter. O’Neil, Cinematical‘s Erik Davis, Film Experience‘s Nathaniel Rogers and Fandango‘s Chuck Walton are Network guys; USA Today‘s Suzie Woz and In Contention‘s Guy Lodge are Fighter fans.

In their 12.15 piece about yesterday’s announcement of the 2010 Golden Globe nominations, N.Y. Times reporters Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes report that “what got Hollywood buzzing was the complete shutout of a perceived Oscar front-runner — Paramount’s True Grit, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen — and the boost voters gave to The Fighter, a gritty boxing drama that took more than four years to make and that received six nominations.”

Cieply and Barnes are right — HFPA’s True Grit shutdown and its support of The Fighter was one hell of a surprise to the Hollywood community, and indeed to the world. Unless, that is, you’d been reading my comments about these films since they first began to be shown, in which case the Golden Globe noms would have gotten a shrug. I don’t give a shit about the Globes, but their nomination sentiments are usually in line with the Academy’s, and as soon as I saw these two films I sensed a fairly obvious current — The Fighter has it and True Grit doesn’t.

In a 12.1 review, I explained that Grit was a remote and mostly dislikable film, and that “craft only gets you so far…a film has to be about something that matters to many if not most people. True Grit [is] beautifully made with some deliciously formal old-west dialogue (much of it straight from the Charles Portis novel, I gather) and a smart, spunky debut performance from Hallie Steinfeld, but it’s basically a cold and mannered art western that matters not.

“The Coens are obviously cream-of-the-crop fellows but I didn’t give a hang about any of it. Their film has a certain historical charm and color but it feels too brusque and chilly, and it’s nowhere near as amusing as I’d heard it would be.”

In an 11.12 piece called “Fighter Takes Manhattan,” I said without equivocation that David O. Russell‘s film “is not a ‘possible’ Best Picture nominee,” as Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson had put it. “It’s a lock for it, and if this doesn’t happen something is really and emphatically wrong with the Academy membership.”

On 12.8 I wrote that I’d “suggested to a columnist pal that he needs to focus on the surging of The Fighter as a Best Picture contender. This is a really well-made, deeply populist, authentic blue-collar drama that’s much better and far less sappy than…I don’t even want to mention Sylvester Stallone‘s Rocky because it just diminishes The Fighter‘s brand when I do that.” And then I gushed again on 12.10.

So who was saying that True Grit would be a contender? David Poland (bestower of the “curse”), Anthony Breznican and…? And who was pooh-poohing The Fighter‘s chances? Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson said a few weeks back that Russell has to pay for his You Tube on-set tantrums, but of course Fighter costar Christian Bale is just as renowned in this realm and is all but guaranteed to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and is in fact looking like the likely winner. I don’t think Russell has any lingering Huckabees issues because he’s wearing his hair shorter, and since he was wearing it much longer during Huckabees people, I think, get the symbolism of this.

As I wrote on 12.4, the trailer for Terrence Malick ‘s The Tree of Life “is basically saying that the cosmic light of the altogether is out there and within us, but the rough and tumble of survival (along with some brutal parenting at the hands of a guy like Brad Pitt‘s character) keeps us in a morose and damaged place. And what a sadness that is when brutalized kids (Sean Penn‘s character) grow up and start passing the grief along.”

However this came about, it needs something else. Jeff Bridges posing alongside the talent, I’m thinking.

I’m sorry but this looks and sounds dreadful.

This is old material but before listing HE’s best and worst Blurays of 2010, I need to re-acknowledge an unpleasant truth. While I’m perfectly happy with Blurays of older films that look like “film” (i.e., restored, cleansed of dirt and detritus, haven’t been digitally scrubbed to excess), I despise the ones that look like 16mm films shown at Howard Otway‘s Theatre 80 in 1979. And in my heart of Philistine hearts, I can’t help but love those Blurays that make older films look cleaner, sharper and more robust than they probably looked during initial release.

I’m sorry but this is what my primitive, insufficiently developed home-video taste buds tell me when I sit down and watch.

Which is why my three favorite Blurays of 2010 are Warner Home Video’s The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Universal Home Video’s Psycho and Spartacus. My fourth- and fifth-ranked faves are Criterion’s Days of Heaven Bluray and Paramount Home Video’s The African Queen — the finest celluloid-looking discs of the year. And my choice for the three worst are Criterion’s Stagecoach (easily the biggest Bluray burn of 2010), Studio Canal’s The Ladykillers and Warner Home Video’s King Kong.

My 2010 list of Blurays that I enjoyed and respected but didn’t exactly open up the windows and sing sonnets about include Fox Home Video’s Alien trilogy, Sony Home Video’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, Criterion’s Paths of Glory, The Thin Red Line, Black Narcisssus and The Red Shoes, Paramount Home Video’s Three Days of the Condor, Warner Home Video’s Dr. Zhivago and The Exorcist, and MPI’s Twilight Zone box sets (blue and red).

There are probably another 20 or 25 that I could mention but I have a 12:30 luncheon to get to and I’m pressed for time.

My understanding is that WHV didn’t distort or digitally scrub the original Treasure of the Sierra Madre elements but (as they did with the Casablanca Bluray) simply did an expert job of enhancing the basic monochrome values. But Universal did indulge in at least some digital scrubbing for their Psycho Bluray (you can tell), and a good deal of it with their derided Spartacus Bluray, according to restoration maestro Robert Harris. I know this is the wrong thing to say but while I agree with Harris that what was done with Spartacus wasn’t respectful of Russell Metty‘s original Super Technirama capturings, I rather like watching it because it’s nice and sharp and vivid. Put me in jail.

Which also means that while I know the notorious Patton Bluray is “bad,” I know when I pop it in that every digitally-refined detail is going to satisfy my inner hot-dog-eating Eloi. I’m going to sit there and go “cool.” If I had a 60-inch plasma and could see how the original photography has been digitally mauled, I would have a different view but I don’t — I have a 42-inch Panasonic plasma, and that much-despised disc looks pretty good to me.

HE quotes from articles about the 2010 Bluray standouts:

“Warner Home Video’s Sierra Madre Bluray is the most exquisitely finessed, luscious-looking black-and-white film I’ve seen in high-def since WHV’s Casablanca. The needle-sharp detail and mine-shaft blacks are magnificent. There are some dupey portions but nothing to worry about — most of it is pure pleasure. It’s so crisp and alive-looking, so perfectly honed and lighted that you can enjoy it entirely for the visual benefits alone. Which you wouldn’t want to do, of course, but I’m just sayin’.” — “2010’s Best Monochrome Bluray,” 9.28.10.

“If you step back from the screen — sit three or four feet away, I mean — the Spartacus Bluray looks way better than the Criterion DVD or the laser disc or any other home-video version that I’ve ever seen. For the first time since seeing Harris’s restored print on a big screen, I felt dazzled by some of the images. I was saying to my son Dylan, ‘I’m not supposed to like this but whoa…look at that!’ Harris will probably get angry, but this Spartacus delivers some of the sharpest, most gleaming and best-looking pop-out images I’ve ever seen of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1960 film outside of a theatre. As long as you keep your distance from the plasma screen, I mean. And especially if you squint a bit.” — “Wrong Response,” 6.1.10.

“The Studio Canal/Lionsgate Bluray of Alexander McKendrick‘s The Ladykillers is a strawberries-and-whipped-cream nightmare — perhaps the most visually unappealing manipulation of a classic film ever issued. It’s saturated with the brightest and bleachiest white light seen anywhere since the aliens stepped out of the mother ship at the end of Close Encounters. It’s like someone turned down the color key and then poured milk and cherry sauce over the master negative. The effect is one of rosey anemia — a sickly dilution like nothing I’ve ever seen from a 1950s color film.” — “Bleachy Pink Ladykillers,” 3.4.10.

“For me, the greatest Blurays of older films are the ones that look much better than the finest projected image in a theatre could possibly achieve in its original day. And which look better, even, than what the director or studio guys saw in a private screening room when they were catching dailies fresh from the set. That’s what the just-out Psycho Bluray is like. It’s beautiful. Although I still say they should have issued two aspect-ratio versions — one in 1.33, the other in 1.78.” — “Above and Beyond,” 10.21.10.

“Jett, who’s seen King Kong five or six times, walked in and took a look and said, ‘That’s it? It doesn’t look any different!’ I slightly disagree. I think the Kong Bluray looks a little grainier than the 2005 DVD did. Because Blurays always make grain pop through a bit more than it does via DVD or film itself. Grain becomes feister, livelier. The bottom line is that while the monks are applauding the Kong Bluray and calling it an upgrade in image quality, common-man types don’t see it this way and could even make the argument that it’s a step down because every scene is covered top to bottom with digital mosquitoes.” — “King Grain,” 10.4.10.

“How much better looking is this new African Queen than the version that gets shown on Turner Classic Movies now and then? A lot better, I’d say. Some of it looks amazing — sharper focus, smoother textures, no blotchy colors. There are portions that look only slightly or somewhat better because they were matte shots or African location footage to begin with, and therefore were never as clean and well lighted as the sound stage work Huston shot in London, but they still look better than they ever have. And the sound has been nicely enhanced (i.e., the usual scratches, hisses and pops removed).” — “Savoring Luscious Queen,” 3.5.10.

“It may sound extreme to call this an awful Bluray with others giving it a thumbs-up, but I’ll go one better: this is the worst-looking, worst-sounding Bluray of a classic black-and-white film in history. The reason is simple. The Criterion monks used a 1942 nitrate duplicate negative that had squawky sound and titanic grain levels plus all kinds of smudges and wounds and scratches, and then went by their usual creed, which is that ‘whenever the damage [is] not fixable without leaving traces of our restoration work, we elect to leave the original damage.’ Which has resulted in one of the biggest burns in Bluray history.” — “Graincoach,” 6.1.10.

An honest, plain-spoken, well-phrased piece about where things are was posted yesterday by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone. I should have paid attention but…what was I doing? I forget. Probably buried under two or three articles simultaneously.