It’s all about the present and the future now — no more looking back. Awards Daily ‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino and I talked this morning about Rango, that American Idol idea for the Oscars, Matthew McConaughey and The Lincoln Lawyer, Battle: LA, Charlie Sheen and I forget what else. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

“Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

“Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

“Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer bailout of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’etat, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

“And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we’d have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic — and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.”

I’ll be seeing Gore Verbinski‘s Rango in an hour or two. Partly because Phil Contrino mentioned earlier today that it has several Chinatown echoes. David Poland has written that “it’s a western homage ranging from High Noon to Star Wars with plenty of Budd Boetticher in the mix…[it] freely steals from every corner of film and culture.” And yet, according to Contrino and others, it’s gotten a lousy C-plus grade from CinemaScore audiences. Adults, in particular, didn’t enjoy the ride, with 25-and-overs giving it a C. What’s going on here?

The naysayers, I’m guessing, are parents who brought their kids expecting something a little less referenced and more kid-friendly. I’ll know more in a few hours.

I was told this morning that the Hollywood blogerati have seen Battle: LA (Sony, 3.11), but are review- embargoed. The L.A. all-media happens on Tuesday. I’m presuming it will at least rank as a passable alien-invasion flick with suitable, or possibly better-than-suitable, CG. The presumption about content, on the other hand, is that it’s going to be a thought-free, spook-cut, herky-jerky wankathon that will spin your brain and eyes and leave you vibrating. I thought Aaron Eckhart might make a difference, but this is a Harvey Dent payday.

I’m a bit skeptical (forgive me) knowing that director Jonathan Liebesman (Killing Room, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) has shown no signs thus far of being invested in the James Cameron approach to audience movies, which is to do the heavy lifting on the script (developing a theme, sharpening the dialogue, creating well-motivated characters) before jumping into the visual power-punch stuff. Will it be better than Skyline? That’s all I have to ask.

“If Charlie Sheen had an Air Force, he would be Qaddafi.” — Gloria Steinem on the most recent (i.e., currently airing) episode of Real Time with Bill Maher.

Six days ago Time‘s Richard Corliss reprised a suggestion originally made by Jamie Stuart (posted as a Hot Blog comment on 9.1.09) that the Oscar show “needs to adopt a Top Ten, American Idol-like framework, gradually counting down from #10 to #1 throughout the program to create suspense.”

We all know why this idea will never fly with the Oscar-show producers. One, the makers of the films to be eliminated early on would feel insulted (despite the obvious honor of being Best Picture nominated in the first place), and two, the Academy would be indicating proportionate vote tallies by staging a preferential countdown, and they never indicate anything. And I hear that.

But at the same time this is why the Oscar show as we’ve known it is dying on the vine. However they tweak it to try and reach under-30 viewers, it is basically (and always will be) an older person’s presentation of pomp — a stately, hide-bound, proscenium-arch event produced each year with an amiable mule-like mindset and an instinctual deference to the-same-but-slightly-different. They may deny it, but the people running that show have always felt a responsibility on some level to never let the Oscars become a show that the ghost of Bob Hope wouldn’t recognize.

Corliss is right — a Best Picture elimination scheme would “add welcome suspense” and perhaps be “too entertaining.”

The vast majority of moviegoers out there see going to the movies as akin to visiting a theme park. Just as the vast majority of producers working for the big studios see their job as producing theme-park-like entertainments. There’s obviously a slot for this kind of thing, and there’s obviously an economic necessity to keep this kind of crap coming. But too many people go to movies looking only for cheap highs and jerk-off diversion. And these people — hear my call and mark my words — are the problem, and the only way to properly regard and produce the friggin’ Oscar telecast is to tell these people to get off the Oscar lawn.

Academy honcho Tom Sherak needs to man up, Clint Eastwood-in-Gran Torino style, and say the following to everyone within earshot: “Movies are a religion, and whether some of you get this or not, going to see the best movies — not the Battle: Los Angeles-type films that happen in the late winter, spring and summer but the end-of-the-year quality stuff — is the same thing as going to church and, in a manner of speaking, taking Holy Communion. They’re about values (philosophical or otherwise) and emotion and contemplation and quality of life and spirit. And that’s what the Oscar show needs to be — superficially a muscle-car thing about discipline and smarts and non-draggy pizazz, but primarily a deep-water thing about spirit and soul.

“Everything that happens on the show, including the funny stuff, has to be some kind of reflection of the satori aspect. The Oscar show needs to be the biggest Unitarian movie-church service of the year, and if that means that not as many atheists and agnostics will watch, good. But they will watch, you see. Because even the shallowest people out there understand that the best movies contain and in fact propel notions of spirit and emotion and profound transcendental recognition.”

For the last couple of years I’ve been using a Canon PowerShot SD 1400 IS for fine-quality 14 megapixel stills and 720p video. But I’ve been waiting all along for the next one with 1080p video, and now it’s here — the Canon PowerShot 300 HS. It has 12.1 megapixels but with a slightly more sensitive processor, a high-speed burst capability when taking stills, a zoom capability while shooting video, and slow-motion video. It’ll ship in less than two weeks.

The better films will sometimes wait until the last few minutes to allow a flawed character to redeem himself in some way. The unusual (and I think great) thing about this scene is that Anthony Quinn‘s redemption comes too late to matter, and all that’s left is devastation. I’ve said this kind of thing 100 times, but you couldn’t end a film today with the lead character finally realizing that he’s been a thundering asshole and has totally screwed himself. The last film to try this was Woody Allen‘s Sweet and Lowdown.

One of the best riffs ever written by Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams: “One reason [Oscar co-host James] Franco fell flat is because he was already in postmortem mode, doing an instantaneous mental autopsy of his onstage oblivion, already seeing his tiresome lines shrivel and wither on the vine…before bothering to prop them up with any game-face grinning facade.”

“No matter how many flashy autotune gimmicks the producers concoct to drag the Oscars into the 21st Century, it’s all just slapstick lipstick on a 3D pig without re-tuning the writing to bring it up to date. No matter how ‘fresh’ the presenters’ physical appeal, until the Oscars wise up and realize their writing staff is stale, the hosts can’t help but stink up the joint.”

Question: Why do certain guys transfer TV shows to YouTube without delivering decent sound?

Nine years after opening in theatres, John Lee Hancock‘s The Rookie arrives on Bluray on 3.29. You can count the number of G-rated, family-friendly films that are as good as this on one hand. “Remember the Titans was entertainment, using every trick and ploy to stir the emotions, ” I said in my original review. “The Rookie works its magic without seeming to milk, shovel, or pull anyone’s chain.”

It’s obviously tragic when a good and gifted man takes his life, especially when alcohol has played a part. This is what happened with poor Phil Ochs, the folk-and-protest troubadour who composed and performed famously in the ’60s but gradually lost the thread and then his reason for living. He hung himself in 1976, at age 35. Partly because of bipolar affliction and depression and booze, but also because he couldn’t find his way out of disappointment with how ’60s activism evolved, and because he failed to find a new musical groove that worked for his audience.

I’ve always respected Ochs — he cared deeply and his music had its rhyme and place — but I’ve never felt much ardor. I’ve always thought of him as a one-trick pony who ran out of luck and favor. He was fine at what he did when the winds of history and culture filled his sails, but he wasn’t much of a stayer.

In his heyday Ochs would literally flip through the N.Y. Times or the Village Voice and write a song about something that had riled him up. This fit the times when peacenik social protest and activism ran like a river through everything. But eventually street radicals took the stage, Nixonian repression kicked in, the “We” spirit waned and Ochs couldn’t adapt to the “Me.”

Ochs’ Wiki page quotes one of his biographers: “By Phil’s thinking, he had died politically in Chicago in 1968 in the violence of the Democratic National Convention; he had died professionally in Africa a few years later, when he had been strangled and felt that he could no longer sing; [and] he had died spiritually when Chile had been overthrown [in 1973].” In his 1969, at the age of 29, Ochs released an album (his sixth) called “Rehearsals for Retirement.” What kind of 29 year-old even flirts with such a notion?

Ochs tried to do more than just sing about social issues, true, but somewhere along the way the Gods stopped assisting.

Kenneth Bowser‘s There But For Fortune, which opened yesterday in LA, the Valley and Pasadena, tries to change the impression I mentioned earlier, or at least make Ochs’ story seem more layered and textured.

It covers Ochs’ activist-singer period in the manner of several other ’60s docs, which is to say rotely. Too many other films (including Martin Scorsese‘s masterful Bob Dylan: No Direction Home) have delivered similar material. Anyone presenting yet another doc about ’60s culture in 2011 needs to figure some way of doing it differently. I only know that when Bowser’s doc began, I said to myself, “Here we go again.”

Bowser’s doc gathers force when it charts Ochs’ decline, but you’re still left with a residue of a guy whose life became stuck in first gear.

Bowser mentioned some mitigating factors when we spoke a couple of days ago. From the late ’60s through the early ’70s, Ochs was “riding a wave of manic depression,” he said. “Going in manic and coming out depressed.”

It wasn’t just Ochs’ bipolarism or alcoholism or defeatism that led to his suicide, Bowser said, but also the fact that his audience that “wasn’t willing to accept him outside of the political protest realm.” This despite some interesting musical excursions (performing a Carnegie Hall concert in a glammy gold suit in 1970, getting into African music “ten years before Paul Simon“) and two noteworthy non-protesty albums (“Pleasures of the Harbor” and “Gunfight at Carnegie Hall“).

For me, one of the most telling moments in Bowser’s film comes when Gaslight Cafe manager Sam Hood calls Bob Dylan, whom Ochs deeply admired, a “prick.” The implication is that Ochs, for all his failings and weaknesses, was a nicer guy. Maybe so. But survival and winning and genius aren’t necessarily married to “nice.” I immediately thought that Ochs might have made it through the ’70s and into a longer or happier life if he had a little more Dylan in him, and I don’t just mean his vision or talent.

I didn’t disagree with Arianna Huffington‘s recent remark about unpaid Huffington Post contributors threatening to strike, which was basically “go ahead…no one will notice.” At the same time I couldn’t help chuckling at the similarity in tone between this and a line spoken by Oscar Werner in Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold: