Now that I’ve seen Denis Villeneuve‘s Incendies (NY/LA, 4.22), I know that the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race is probably down to a choice between Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful and Susanne Bier‘s A Better World. Because as compelling and anchored and finely chiselled as Incendies is, it’s such an ugly and searing portrait of tribal rage, ignorance, cruelty and sadism that it’s finally one of those widely admired films that you’ll never want to see a second time, or even think about once it’s over.

Most critics have called Biutiful a tough thing to sit through, and it is that in some ways. But Incendies is such a grim march and so committed to the probing of an oppressive and penetrating vision of downer-hood that it would easily whip Inarritu’s ass in a one-on-one gloom match.

The story (based on Wajdi Mouawad‘s play of the same title) is clearly a reflection of the Lebanon horrors (Israeli army plus Christian militia vs. Lebanese PLO and non-combatants) of the ’70s and early ’80s. Aaah, to be immersed in primitive Arab-Lebanese-Christian rage on all sides — idiotic tribal traditions, threats of honor killings, sniper shootings, rural women shunning wronged women, torture, prison rape, machine-gun slaughter, burnt bodies, more torture, prolonged imprisonment…good stuff!

You’re sitting there going “boy, this sure is a good film…I wonder how much longer until it’s over?” I went out to the lobby around the 90-minute mark and asked the guy. He called the projectionist and got off the phone and gave me a look and told me to grim up and hang in there — I had another 35 to 40 minutes to go. Eff me. I really hate it when films thrust me into backward patriarchal societies and then block off all escape routes. What a completely nowhere fundamentalist culture we’re stuck with in this film, a world defined by rock and scrub brush and dust and hills and chained to such ongoing hate.

And to be doubly stuck in a lonnnng quest-for-the-ancestral-truth movie in which clue after clue is sought and uncovered, blah blah. Clue, hint, clue, hint…are we getting closer to finding out what really happened? No? It has to get there eventually, right?

Incendies is about a youngish Canadian brother and a sister whose Lebanese mother has recently died, and who are more less forcibly engaged in a search for their missing father and missing brother. And for all of it to end with a Chinatown-ish resolution that gives new meaning to the term “all in the family”? Which doesn’t really illuminate anything in a real-world sort of way? I don’t know, bro. A very “good” film but if I never see Incendies again it’ll be too soon. And I’ve seen Biutiful three times.

Cheers to Javier Bardem for having last night won the Best Actor Goya award for his performance in Biutiful. The Spanish Oscars were held last night in Madrid. Another gust of wind for the Biutiful sails.

No one will take the Best Actor Oscar from Colin Firth, of course, but if anyone could…

A week and a half ago I did a brief phoner from my Santa Barbara Film Festival hotel room with Biutiful director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. He was on a speaker and so was I, and when I played it back it was all but indecipherable. It was like we talking into tin cans connected by a piece of string. So I kind of went cold on writing it up.

We talked about Biutiful‘s nomination as one of the five foreign-language nominees, and it being an official submission from Mexico, and the fact that Mexico has never won despite being nominated eight times. And how Videocine, the Mexican distributor, is planning a re-release of 150 prints on 2.25, and how a re-release of this type has never been done before in Mexico.

This led to a discussion about what a battleground Mexico has become over the last couple of years and is pretty much what Columbia was in the ’80s and ’90s. “Worse than Columbia,” Inarritu said. There’s some kind of film in it, I said. Perhaps a blend of Brian DePalma‘s Scarface and Fernando Meirelles‘ City of God.

Last night’s big Goya winner was Augusti Villaronga‘s Pa Negre (Black Bread), a family drama in post-Civil War Spain. It won nine trophies.

In honor of Valentine’s Day (i.e., today), New York‘s Intel recently asked readers to “write down all the sex you’ve had and we’ll share it with the world.” Classy! And pretty far away from the spirit of Valentine’s Day. And banal. In 1983 or thereabouts I started counting everyone I’d “been” with and came up with a tally of around 175. I meant it deep down each and every time, but that was the ’70s for you — the greatest era for nookie since the days of the Roman empire. And so what?

Here’s a much better question: “Write a very short story about The Big Love Affair That Got Away.”

The late Sydney Pollack said over and over that happy-ending love stories aren’t that satisfying. What moves people are ones about love affairs that never quite work out. The former lover you can never quite get out of your head or heart, etc. I could tell a story-and-a-half in that regard (an affair with a married journalist that lasted 2 and 1/2 years), but some other time. Or maybe never.

But everyone has a sad story like this. Or two. Valentine’s Day is about the heart, and that usually means The Hurt. And “happily ever after,” by the way, is probably the most dishonest, disconnected-from-reality phrase ever dreamt of in the history of literature. “Moderately semi-contented ever after” is more like it in the case of longterm “happy” relationships. I’d rather reminisce about the Really Great Relationship that never quite came together.

Cue all the HE readers who are extremely happy in their marriages and who pity me for having been unlucky in love and so on. Let me just say in advance that I’m not saying it’s not good to be happy or content, but that it’s more moving to think about the really exceptional man/woman whom you thought was Really The One but then something went wrong.

Daniel Day-Lewis fully deserved the 1989 Best Actor Oscar for his performance in My Left Foot — no dispute. But Academy voters were way wrong in denying Nicolas Cage a Best Actor nomination — at least that! — for his hilarious landmark performance in Vampire’s Kiss.

Tom Cruise killed that year as Ron Kovac in Born on the Fourth of July, and fully deserved a nomination. Ditto Robin Williams for his wise-teacher performance in Dead Poet’s Society, and Kenneth Branagh‘s electrifying turn in King Henry V of England. But who today would argue with a straight face that Morgan Freeman‘s performance in Driving Miss Daisy deserved a nomination as much as Cage’s?

Last night Scott Feinberg didn’t agree with Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and yours truly that it’s better to live in a state of denial about The King’s Speech cleaning up on 2.27 than to accept it, and to cling to a slender reed of a pathetic pipsqueak hope that The Social Network has any chance in hell. We all realize with a heavy sigh what’s happening out there, but Feinberg’s response is more adult-minded than mine or Sasha’s.

After I while I said, “Can we stop obsessing about this Oscar race stuff — it’s over, people are sick of it — and talk about something else here and there?” — but Sasha swatted me down. We did, however, talk about (a) Cannes accomodations and (b) the likely winners of the upcoming Spirit Awards. The iTunes link is above; here’s a non-iTunes link.

Who wasn’t assuming that True Grit‘s Roger Deakins would take the big kowabunga prize at last night’s American Society of Cinematographers awards? It was understood and accepted. The fix was in. If you’d called around last Friday and asked motorcycle mechanics in Palmdale, pharmacists in Norwalk, Chinese restaurant chefs in Monterey Park and licensed massage therapists in Newport Beach, to a man they would have said “gotta be Deakins.” So how to explain Inception‘s Wally Phister scoring an upset win?

TheWrap‘s Steve Pond called Phster’s win “a bit of an upset.” A bit? It was a 5.5 earthquake. Faint cries were heard in the canyons. Chandeliers swayed in the foyer. DVD collections fell onto the floor.

Just before Pfister’s triumph, Deakins had been honored with the ASC’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which followed his winning a Best Cinematographer BAFTA award in London.

Pfister also defeated Black Swan‘s “Matty” Libatique, The King’s Speech‘s Danny Cohen (strictly a coattails nomination) and The Social Network‘s Jeff Cronenweth.

Scott Feinberg was predicting that Pfister will take the Best Cinematography Oscar over Deakins even before last night’s ASC stunner. His reasoning, according to a piece he put up this morning, is that (a) “most voters will not realize that Deakins was the cinematographer on True Grit when they fill out their ballots” because no cinematographer’s name appears on the actual AMPAS form, and (b) Average Joe Oscar voters “won’t care one way or the other.”

Feinberg’s lament: “It has always struck me as bizarre that Academy members are only considered to be qualified enough to vote for the nominees in their specific field, but somehow ‘become’ qualified enough to vote in every category during phase 2 of voting. This, to me, offers a clear explanation for why people like Deakins (who was nominated for two different films in the best cinematography category three years ago but failed to win for either of them) and Kevin O’Connell (a sound mixer who has been nominated for a sound-related Oscar a record 20 times without actually winning) get nominated so frequently but never win: their peers appreciate the magnitude of their accomplishments, but the rest of the Academy does not and instead votes rather ignorantly.

“For these reasons, I’m inclined to predict that the Best Cinematography Oscar will, once again, go to someone other than Roger Deakins, most likely Pfister for his fine work on Inception, or, if Academy members really, really like The King’s Speech, to Danny Cohen.”