The screening selections at Roger Durling‘s Santa Barbara Film Festival (1.27 — 2.6) are always well chosen, but the meat and the heat are always the tributes and panels. Because these events are always so smoothly produced and frankly kind of Deja Vu-like, some of us are hoping to again sample some of the delightful chaos that punctuated last year’s James Cameron tribute.

Here’s the final big-name roster: (a) Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right) receiving The American Riviera Award, and interviewed by Durling on Friday, 1.28 at the Arlington Theatre; (b) James Franco (127 Hours) getting the Outstanding Performance of the Year Award, and interviewed by Leonard Maltin on Saturday, 1.29 at the Arlington; (c) Christopher Nolan (Inception) being given the Modern Master Award, and interviewed by Deadline.com’s Pete Hammond on Sunday, 1.30 at the Arlington; and Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech) receiving the Montecito Award, again with Hammond interviewing on Monday, 1.31 at the Arlington. And then five nights later, on Saturday, 2.5, Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole) will be handed the Cinema Vanguard Award at the Arlington with Durling moderating.

The 2011 Virtuosos Awards, presented at the Lobero theatre on Friday, 2.4, will go to Lesley Manville (Another Year), John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone), Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom) and Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) with Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger on the mike.

The annual “It Starts With The Script” panel, which is always moderated at the Lobero theatre by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, will happen on Saturday, 1.29 at 11 am. Three hours later marketing whiz and “job whisperer” Madelyn Hammond will moderate the “Creative Forces: Women in the Biz” panel at the same venue. L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein will moderate the usual “Movers & Shakers” panel on Sunday, 1.30 at 11 am, also at the Lobero. Six days — Saturday, February 5 — the “Directors on Directing” pane will kick off at 11 am with EW‘s Dave Karger moderating.

Yesterday British critic-journalist Tom Shone, writing on his “Taking Barack To The Movies” site, reports that Matt Damon has told him that (a) Terrence Malick suggested the ending of Good Will Hunting to Damon and GWH co-screenwriter Ben Affleck during a dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts way back when, and that (b) they knew the notoriously reclusive director due to Malick being “best friends with Affleck’s godfather,” who isn’t named in the piece.

The godfather connection obviously suggests why Affleck ended up in Malick’s The Burial, the Oklahoma-shot drama with Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko and Rachel Weisz that’s currently in post and scheduled to open sometime in 2013. Kidding. But not that much.

Two days ago my opinion of Dominic Sena was basically favorable for having directed one of my favorite guilty-pleasure flicks of all time, Gone in Sixty Seconds. Though released in 2000, I think of that Jerry Bruckheimer fast-car movie as a ’90s thing because it closed out the glory period when Bruckheimer was cranking out high-octane, smartly-written Chateaubriand guy movies hand over fist. I would have that time again.

I also half-respect the effort that Sena put into Kalifornia, a 1993 Brad Pitt serial killer flick that resulted in Sena doing a six-year stretch in movie jail, and Swordfish, the semi-decent Joel Silver-produced action-thriller which featured a superb (some would say close to legendary) bullet-time explosion sequence.

And then the night before last I saw Sena’s Season of the Witch, and my mouth fell open. We’re talking (a) medieval adventure crap, (b) a completely predictable poor man’s Peter Jackson film, (c) nothing to give a friggin’ damn about except for one character, (d) men on horseback amidst mud and grunge and disgusting corpses, (e) nonsensical CG applications in pursuit of cheap highs, and (f) ridiculously disparate dialogue (Bruce Willis-style macho wisecracks mixed with the same mock-formal English used in all Hollywood-goes-medieval movies), etc. It’s not even worth going into, trust me. Okay, I could get into it but this is basically what we all have to sit through in January and February. Sit there and submit and go “aarrrghhhh, mommy!”

My son Dylan summed it up as we left the theatre: “Why did they even make this movie?”

At first it seems as if Season of the Witch is going to sell aggressive misogyny in a medieval guise by advancing the notion that many 13th Century women were in fact witches and that, you know, they needed to be hanged and drowned and burned. But then Sena drops this and starts concentrating on just one presumed witch (played by Claire Foy), who may or may not be wicked or possessed by a demon or whatever.

Like I said yesterday, Foy’s is only performance with a semblance of intrigue in the whole thing. The problem is that she spends 85% to 90% of the film all greasy and grungy and inside a wooden cage on wheels. Sena uses her in one partially-concealed nudity shot near the finish, presumably because he could.

The screenwriter is a guy named Bragi F. Schut. That’s made up, right? Either way the name is now mud in more ways than one.

Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir, who was sitting three or four seats to my right, was rolling his eyes when he wrote his review, but he at least found the energy and the motivation to stick to the subject without meandering around.

Right now Season of the Witch has an 18% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It might go up a tad when the kneejerk fanboys (i.e., guys who will put up with any film that dabbles in the cinefantastique realm by throwing in a few CG werewolves and flying demons at the end) start weighing in. It cost close to $40 million, and will probably take in $13 or $14 million this weekend. I presuming that Relativity made it with the idea that the impressionable overseas market would line up no matter what.

“I will fight these bastards every night at 6 o’clock because I know what they want to do. They want to take down American workers, outsource jobs, destroy the American dream, concentrate wealth to the top and control minorities. That’s what they’re about.” — Ed Schultz, The Ed Show.

As some guy said, “Pretty damn offensive to kids born out of wedlock.”

So basically Robert De Niro‘s opinion will carry a certain weight four months hence when the Cannes Film Festival jury decides whether or not to hand the Palme d’Or to Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. That’s what it boils down to, I think. (Unless, of course, it doesn’t play in competition.) Or whether to tactfully sidestep the Malick altogether and hand it to Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin That I Inhabit or Lars Von Trier‘s Melancholia or some other form of winged bird.

I have to write that guy who’s bought the Old Town apartment I’ve been staying in for the last two years and make sure everything’s cool.

That Michael Cieply-Brooks Barnes N.Y. Times piece about True Grit (dated 1.14, in the 1.5 print edition) that I managed to ignore essentially cast Joel and Ethan Coen‘s western as this year’s The Blind Side. Their not-unfamiliar idea was that a film that had done so well with the Middle-American paying public ($91.5 million as of 1.4) has earned — required — special attention among Academy voters, especially given the 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating. Big money, across-the-board praise, a home run.

Okay, more like a triple. Three paragraphs near the end of the story mention that while True Grit has “done well with both the critics and with a robust, web-based circuit of professional Oscar watchers, [it] was quickly judged a miss by some of that crowd.” And then Cieply and Barnes excerpt disparaging opinions from TheWrap‘s Steve Pond and myself. Then they reverse gears and scurry back to the Blind Side notion by quoting David Poland‘s view that box office is a “major influencer” in the awards process.

I can imagine Joel and Ethan Coen shuddering at the Blind Side comparison. Or at least wincing. I certainly would if I were in their shoes. In a roundabout way I think Cieply and Barnes knew that mentioning the Blind Side‘s Oscar precedent, a valid observation in and of itself, would create an analogy and a linkage that would not be entirely welcome. I myself would never compare the two. In terms of craft, performance and austere art-western demeanor, True Grit stands on a barren, windswept mesa that is way, way above that 2009 John Lee Hancock film, which — don’t get me wrong — was and is a perfectly respectable thing as far as it went.

True Grit didn’t rub me the right way, okay, but I’ve said from the beginning that it’s “beautifully made,” “deserves respect,” and is “indisputably solid and grade-A with some deliciously formal old-west dialogue,” etc. And what Cieply and Barnes implied in their carefully honed, gray-lady prose was that True Grit is starting to be seen as a good film that is buying (i.e., ticket-selling) its way into Oscar contention, or in effect riding into the Oscar corral on the backs of Middle-American Joe Popcorn types and their obvious enthusiasm for it.

Whatever happens with the nominations (which almost certainly will include a nomination for True Grit costar Hallie Steinfeld) and final voting, True Grit should be honored for whatever it was before it opened commercially. It’s good enough to stand in the dust on its own two feet.

I could swoop down upon this item like a Japanese Zero on 12.7.41, but why? To what end? Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan says it well enough.

Those YouTube clips from a 1971 Dick Cavett Show featuring Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, Mel Brooks and Frank Capra that blogger Dennis Cozzalio posted earlier today were posted last August by UNC Chapel Hill screenwriting instructor Scott Myers. They’re terrific. I was may as well join the crowd.

Wouldn’t it be great if the big-time 1930s directors and stars had sat down for some kind of annual, informal, semi-throughtful chit-chat sessions with a renowned critic of the day, and if someone had caught these sessions on black-and-white film, say? There’s virtually no non-performing informal conversation footage of stars like James Cagney, Rosalind Russell, Carole Lombard, Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Joel McCrea, etc. A taste of how they actually were as themselves in their heyday. The studios kept them away from that kind of expression, of course. But what a shame.

The first 2011 Gurus of Gold chart is up, and if Tim Appelo, Peter Howell, Dave Karger, Mark Olsen, Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson want to hang tough and still vote their belief in The King’s Speech winning the Best Picture Oscar, I say fine, whatever, live and let live, comme ci comme ca, it’s a free country, etc.

The website for David Sington‘s The Flaw, which will play at Sundance, describes this 82-minute doc as “the definitive account of the roots of the biggest economic crisis to hit the world since the 1930s. Forsaking easy explanations of greedy bankers and incompetent regulators, [it] examines how America and the UK came to be gripped by the crazy belief that everyone could be rich and property prices would rise forever.”

How Inside Job-bed out are you? Are you rarin’ to go there again? I am, of course, but then I’m from Mars with insect antennae sticking out of my head. How about you? Ask yourself that. Go into the bathroom, look at yourself in the mirror and ask, “How Inside Job-bed out am I?”