In Straight Time, Dustin Hoffman‘s Max Denbo explains the difference between being in prison and being free on the streets of Los Angeles: “Inside it’s who you are. Out here it’s what you have in your pockets.” Same analogy today. In New York City I had an image of refinement and accomplishment, based partly on my professional rep but also my personal appearance. Now I’m back to being a guy who drives a semi-beater, or what my son Jett calls a “ghetto car.” No valet parking, always parking two or three blocks away for fear of anyone identifying me as the owner of this thing, etc. Humiliating.

Monday, 2.21, 3:05 pm.

After attempting to attract unwashed Eloi moviegoers (i.e., those who wouldn’t know Joe Swanberg or Noah Baumbach from a giraffe) with an assurance that the cast of Arthur (Warner Bros., 4.8) is safe and familiar, WB marketers have stuck

their necks way out by admitting that Greta Gerwig has the lead female role. Or, in short, that she’s Liza Minnelli.

(l.) the Arthur teaser poster with Jennifer Garner, Russell Brand and Helen Mirren that was unveiled on or about 2.16.11; (r.) Gerwig added to the current version.

The original teaser poster, however, remains on the film’s website.

The Social Network “is shrewdly perceptive about such things as class, manners, ethics, and the emptying out of self that accompanies a genius’s absorption in his work. It has the hard-charging excitement of a very recent revolution, the surge and sweep of big money moving fast and chewing people up in its wake.

“From the first scene to the last, the film hints at a psychological shift produced by the Information Age, a new impersonality that affects almost everyone. After all, Facebook, like Mark Zuckerberg, is a paradox: a website that celebrates the aura of intimacy while providing the relief of distance, substituting bodiless sharing and the thrills of self-created celebrityhood for close encounters of the first kind.

“Karl Marx suggested that, in the capitalist age, we began to treat one another as commodities. The Social Network suggests that we now treat one another as packets of information. Zuckerberg, as interpreted by this film, comes off as a binary personality. As far as he’s concerned, either you’re for him or you’re against him. Either you have information that he can use or you don’t. Apart from that, he’s not interested.” — written four and a half months ago by New Yorker critic David Denby.

This had to be posted one last time, and I don’t care if anyone comments. The game is over either way.

Sorry, but I expected a little more from an ad directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Natalie Portman and Alden Ehrenreich. I think it’s the music that throws me. Yes, there’s a nice erotic vein in two or three shots.

I do. Really. Listen to the Oscar telecast co-host singing “You Haven’t Seen The Last of Me” from Burlesque. It doesn’t matter if he’s naturally dreadful or if he’s doing an Andy Kaufman thing. Awful is awful. “They pulled this from the Oscar show,” Franco tweeted. “Damn it.”

Any way you slice it, bad singing is torture. Decent singing is about being able to (a) hit notes and to (b) phrase — to use your voice, however good or mediocre it is, to its best advantage. During her Velvet Underground days Nico, who had a fairly mediocre voice, sang within her limits very nicely.

I would never go within 75 feet of a karaoke bar, but I can sing “Be-Bop Baby” and “Your Smiling Face” in a reasonably competent way, mainly because they don’t challenge my abilities and because I can perform half-decent imitations of the original Ricky Nelson and James Taylor recordings.

“If I were still doing ‘If We Picked the Winners’ with Gene Siskel, my preference for best film would be The Social Network,” Roger Ebert wrote about 12 days ago. “It was not only the best film of 2010, but also one of those films that helps define a year. It became the presumed front-runner on the day it opened, but then it seemed to fade. Oscars often go to movies that open after Thanksgiving. It’s called the Persistence of Memory Effect.

“There’s another factor. A lot of academy voters don’t choose the ‘best’ in some categories, but ‘the most advantageous for the movie industry.’ Hollywood churns out violent crap every weekend and then puts on a nice face by supporting a respectable picture at Oscar time. I mean that not as a criticism of The King’s Speech, which is a terrific film, but as an observation. A British historical drama about a brave man struggling to overcome a disability and then leading his people into World War II looks better to the academy than a cutting-edge portrait of hyperactive nerds.”

“If The Social Network wins Screenplay, Editing, Directing but then loses Best Picture it will join the ranks of only two movies in Oscar history to do so: A Place in the Sun and Traffic.” — Sasha Stone, Awards Daily, sometime last night. The film that beat George Stevens‘ Sun, along with Elia Kazan‘s A Streetcar Named Desire, was the very pleasant and colorful An American in Paris. Shameful.

This clip reminds that Anne Hathaway will be absolutely guns blazing as Judy Garland. In that 2013 or ’14 Weinstein-produced adaptation, I mean, of Gerald Clarke‘s “Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland.” Glorious, manic-nutso, Oscar-calibre…the whole shot.

Garland in her downswirl phase, that is, starting with the making of A Star Is Born in ’53/’54 and ending with her death in 1969 at the ripe old age of 47.

It was reported last December that production on the Garland biopic “has been pushed back to allow the actress and movie executives extra time to deal with the ‘sensitive project,'” whatever that means. “Work on the movie has yet to begin and Hathaway reveals production may not start until late 2012, to make sure the film correctly portrays Garland’s life story.

“Speaking on BBC Radio Four’s Front Row radio show, the actress says, ‘It’s a very sensitive project and there have been so many stories told about her life that we’re really trying to get it right. So we’re taking our time with it. I know it seems like it’s sort of an endless process but it’s very, very slow incremental steps. I had a meeting about it a couple of weeks ago and we’re all very motivated.’

Hathaway added that “I certainly don’t sing like Judy Garland…but I think people might cry murder if they don’t get to hear Judy’s beloved voice so the talk is for me to sing but I don’t know if that’s exactly what will happen.” Forget it — just use Garland’s voice and everyone will be down with that. Just because Hathaway has phenomenal pipes doesn’t mean she has to do her own singing. And she’s right — people will scream bloody murder if her Garland tunes don’t sound exactly right.

In a recent interview with the Huffington Post‘s Patricia Zohn, The King’s Speech screenwriter David Seidler “has gone far beyond the original misrepresentation and falsification that lie at the heart of the film, and has become a propagandist for the Munich faction,” in the view of Slate‘s Christopher Hitchens.

“As I wrote [on 1.24], The King’s Speech is an excellently made movie that features (with the awful exception of Timothy Spall‘s Churchill) generally first-rate acting. Oscars should go to those who entertain and amuse. But if the academy gives an award to Seidler, a man who absurdly fancies himself subject to persecution when confronted with the historical record, it will have conferred approval on something, and someone, extremely shabby.”

It was sunny and clean today in Los Angeles. Not “warm” but certainly pleasant jacket weather. It’s hard not to say to yourself “life is better out here — greener, cleaner, prettier and less taxing in some respects” when you’ve just come from a cold and windy New York City with garbage scraps strewn over the sidewalk near my Brooklyn building. I’ll always be a New Yorker (or a Parisian or a Roman) in spirit, but I had these thoughts regardless.

Fairfax near Melrose — Monday, 2.21, 8:55 am.

Display in foyer of French Quarter restaurant, Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood — Monday, 2.21, 8:20 am.

Menu of Village Idiot on Melrose — Sunday, 2.20, 9:45 pm.