Oscar Poker #19 is a discussion between myself, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and Hollywood & Fine‘s Marshall Fine about the stunning Oscar-race turnaround of the past week. Here’s a non-iTunes link. And here’s a bonus link to the first half-hour of yesterday’s Oscar Blogger podcast.

For whatever reason, watching this clip an hour ago just lifted me out of my King’s Speech melancholia. I’ve been living with it for six days now. It’s been like a chest cold only worse. Now, suddenly, I feel like there’s oxygen in my system again. Go figure.

I don’t like or visit ranker.com, but I have to say I liked Kristin Wong‘s “7 Greatest Bill Murray Stories Ever Told,” partly because I’ve never heard two or three of them.

Every time I re-watch my Bluray of Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton, which seems a bit more masterful each time, I feel a little bit worse about not being more enthusiastic when it first came out 40 months ago. I didn’t put enough feeling into my riffs about it. Calling it “never boring,” “a tense adult thriller about some unsettled and anxious people” and “as seasoned and authentic as this kind of thing can be” didn’t get it. I held back and over-qualified. And I’m sorry.

John Barry‘s Oscar-winning Out of Africa score was his masterpiece, I think. And this orchestral, overture-like version of Barry’s Born Free theme is much more moving than the pop song that everyone knows. Something about the vastness of Africa obviously moved Barry, and this, I think, should be his legacy.

The editing is lumpy and clumsy, and there must be quite a few more scenes and lines of dialogue that could be compared. Has someone somewhere done a better job than this?

True Grit: 1969 vs 2010 from Amfidiusz on Vimeo.

Last night’s Santa Barbara Film Festival Chris Nolan tribute was fine. Nolan was gracious and charming in his usual curt-but-frank sort of way, and moderator Pete Hammond asked lively and intelligent questions. And it was cool when Leonardo DiCaprio (wearing a super-short 1930s haircut for Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar, which starts shooting on 2.5) stepped out to present the Modern Master award.

Modern Master award recipient Christopher Nolan (l.), moderator Pete Hammond (r.) at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre — Sunday, 1.30, 8:40 pm.

The after-party happened at some ESPN tin-shack honky tonk-type joint on lower State Street. I’m sorry but I’m not very big on places that have extremely polite, 450-pound, seven-foot-tall black guys asking you for your ID at the door. I was half-interested in chatting with Nolan for a few minutes but I got tired of waiting around and and tired in general so I bailed…sorry.

Nolan’s big take-away quote was “it’s best to pursue the movie you want to see the most…one you really want to see yourself.” (Or words to that effect.) So that means Nolan really and truly would like to see another Batman movie? Honestly? And he’d like to see another Superman movie (which he’s producing)? Because I don’t believe him. At all.

Isn’t Nolan making The Dark Knight Rises (which starts filming in May) as a payback to Warner Bros. for their having bankrolled Inception? And isn’t he helping out on Zack Snyder‘s Superman flick because…well, c’mon, really, why would he want to make a Superman film? Why would anyone?

However well made they may turn out to be, Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises and Zack Snyder‘s Superman film are essentially (or conceptually, if you will) bullshit fanboy ComicCon movies that will almost certainly do nothing to profoundly affect the cause of great cinema or accomplish anything other than the selling of tickets.

Chris Nolan, Leonardo DiCaprio at the finale of last night’s Santa Barbara Film Festival Modern Master tribute.

One of HE’s broken-record rants is that fanboy superhero movies are a blight and a scourge and a form of cultural cancer, etc. All I can say is that Nolan — obviously one of the most talented and fascinating major-league auteurs of the day — is doing nothing to enhance his resume with these projects. I think he’s basically marking time and doing them for the money.

In a Howard Hawks-ian sense Memento was Nolan’s His Girl Friday or Ball of Fire, Insomnia was his The Big Sleep, The Dark Knight was his Red River and The Dark Knight Rises is going to be his Land of the Pharoahs .

Nolan needs to man up down the road and say no to the money and make some kind of little Memento-ish film again. He has to get off the corporate payroll and reclaim his soul by doing something other than make big expensive fanboy movies…please.

Note: This video of DiCaprio delivering his remarks last night looks pathetic, of course. But I’m posting it because at least you can hear what he said. My regular camera had no battery power so I had to resort to my iPhone.

The King’s Speech has won SAG’s Best Ensemble award, thus triple-confirming the inevitable Best Picture win. Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Actually they probably do know what they do and don’t give a shit about the judgment of history.

In today’s N.Y. Times, A.O. Scott has lamented with good reason “the peculiar and growing irrelevance of world cinema in American movie culture, which the Academy Awards help to perpetuate.” Diminishing education standards have surely fed into this. American backwater types have long regarded foreign-language films as too challenging or not comforting enough, but I’ve been sensing gradually lessening interest levels even among urbans over the last 20 or 25 years.

“There are certainly examples from the last decade of subtitled films, Oscar-nominated or not, that have achieved some measure of popularity,” Scott writes. “But these successes seem more and more like outliers. A modest American box office gross of around $1 million is out of the reach of even prizewinners from Cannes and masterworks by internationally acclaimed auteurs, most of whose names remain unknown even to movie buffs.

“This is less a sea change than the continuation of a 30-year trend. As fashion, gaming, pop music, social media and just about everything else have combined to shrink the world and bridge gaps of culture and taste, American movie audiences seem to cling to a cautious, isolationist approach to entertainment.”

No one cares about Henry Cavill being handed the big role in Zack Snyder‘s Superman: Man of Steel — nobody. The film will sell tickets when it opens and the Comic-Con fools will do their usual-usual and not a bird will stir in the trees. I agree with Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet that Snyder’s statement (“I am honored to be a part of [Superman’s] return…I also join Warner Bros., Legendary and the producers in saying how excited we are” about this) indicates that hiring Cavill wasn’t entirely his decision.

Last night’s James Franco tribute at the Santa Barbara Film Festival started out badly due to Franco arriving on stage almost exactly an hour late, apparently due to an Oscar rehearsal session running late. But after he finally sat down with interviewer Leonard Maltin, Franco was so Zen and relaxed and articulate in a kind of shoulder-shrugging way that he wound up seeming like the coolest, most spiritually together guest this festival has ever hosted.

He just didn’t try to “turn on the charm” or project or win anyone over. He just sat there and smiled or smirked when the mood struck and just let it all happen, man…whatever. Well, not “whatever” but a kind of “I’m easy, I’ll talk, sure…no worries.”

The above clip is of Franco describing his process of realizing that he had to leave all the weird dramas behind and get back to his Freaks & Geeks roots and being a loose-shoe stoner again in Pineapple Express.

And then Seth Rogen came on at the finale to present the award. He was really on it with his usual rascally energy mixed with a kind of roast-riff attitude. Just watch the clip — he was perfect.

I still say Franco should have made a bigger effort to be on time. Saying that a rehearsal went on too long is the same as saying “my car ran out of gas” or “I had to drive down to the pound and get my dog” or “my girlfriend threw all my clothes out of the second story window and I had to pick them all up and take the nice ones down to the cleaners” or “I was in the shower and it felt so good to just stand there with all that wonderful steaming hot water covering me that I stayed in the shower for about an hour and subsequently lost track of time.”