Who likes to slosh around in the surf with a thoughtful, pensive look on her face, and then picks up people who happen to be walking by and puts them into her raincoat pocket. Is the ghost mermaid here to resuscitate a buried Wold War II memory? Something to do with a kid who hid in the basement to avoid being carted away to a Nazi concentration camp? Okay, but what’s this to do with a giant phantom who looks like Kristin Scott Thomas?

Larry Karaszewski and Peter Fonda need to understand that I’ll be attending this Aero double bill of The Hired Hand and The Limey on Friday, June 10th, and politely requesting an explanation from Fonda about his Cannes Film Festival statement, quoted in the Telegraph, that he’s “training [his] grandchildren to use long-range rifles….for what purpose? Well, I’m not going to say the words ‘Barack Obama’ but …”

Seven days ago Blake Lively was a fetching actress I was half-aware of in the periphery of my vision but whom I was never, to be honest, hugely interested in. I’d never seen a single episode of Gossip Girl, and I didn’t see The Private Lives of Pippa Lee because I didn’t care to.

Yes, she stood out in Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and yes, she was reasonably persuasive as a barroom floozie in Ben Affleck‘s The Town. And her sassy, sad-eyed features have always had a kind of folksy, arresting quality that said “actress.” But inwardly she never quite projected that special something-or-other that, say, Elle Fanning has in spades. Not in my mind, at least.

But now she’s broken through. Now she’s big-screen. She has my attention and then some. My head will henceforth turn whenever I hear her name. I don’t care if the photos everyone has been passing around are fake or not (although I suspect they’re probably genuine). The point is that she’s now a movie star. She’s a marquee name. She’ll put arses in seats. Tell me I’m wrong.

Five or six days ago Sasha Stone posted a list of films she believes are the most likely contenders for 2011 Best Picture nominations. She began by listing the favorites posted by the mysterious “Peter” at Awards Corner. Sasha and I discussed this during yesterday’s Oscar Poker recording. So I’ve decided to post my own top ten.

HE’s Most Likely 2011 Best Picture Contenders (in this order): 1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (d: Stephen Daldry, screenwriter: Eric Roth); 2. The War Horse (d: Steven Spielberg); 3. The Ides of March (d: George Clooney); 4. The Iron Lady (d: Phyllida Lloyd); 5. We Bought A Zoo (d: Cameron Crowe); 6. God of Carnage (d: Roman Polanski); 7. Young Adult (d: Jason Reitman, w: Diablo Cody); 8. The Descendants (d: Alexander Payne); 9. Moneyball (d: Bennett Miller); 10. J. Edgar (d: Clint Eastwood).

HE’s A-Little-Less-Likely Roster: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (d: David Fincher); Shame (d: Steve McQueen); The Tree of Life (d: Terrence Malick); Win Win (d: Tom McCarthy); Beginners (d: Mike Mills). The Impossible (d: Juan Antonio Bayona); Larry Crowne (d: Tom Hanks); Hugo Cabret (d: Martin Scorsese); On The Road (d: Walter Salles); Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (d: Thomas Alfredson); The Whistleblower (d: Larysa Kondracki); Wuthering Heights (d: Andrea Arnold); In the Land of Blood and Honey (d: Angelina Jolie).

Here’s Peter’s list with my after-comments:

1. David Fincher‘s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. HE comment: It’s a pop genre movie — a creepy thriller, a punk whodunit with shaved eyebrows. It’ll probably be great entertainment but it’s not Oscar material.

2. Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. HE comment: Malick doesn’t make Oscar movies. Damnation by L.A. Times citic Kenneth Turan has probably sealed the deal — the over-50 Academy types will reject it. Parts of Tree are radiant, transcendent. It should make the cut, but it probably won’t.

3. Steven Spielberg‘s The War Horse. HE comment: If this film about a sad hard-luck horse turns out to be in the vein of Robert Bresson‘s Au Hasard Balthazar, a classic about a sad and saintly donkey, then no one will be a more committed supporter than I. But if War Horse turns out to be another cloying and shamelessly sentimental Spielberg film, then it must be stopped at all costs. That’s all I’m going to say.

Thomas Horn, Ton Hanks during filming of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

4. Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar. HE comment: Maybe. The script is a fairly dry thing, a little bit perverse. It may jbe quietly…who knows? But I have my doubts. I’m not feeling major heat.

5. Martin Scorsese‘s Hugo Cabret. HE comment: Never count on a Scorsese film operating outside of the northeast criminal goombah territory to achieve anything too exceptional — there are always problems when he ventures outside this realm. Then again this is a 3D film, etc.

6. Roman Polanski‘s Carnage. HE comment: Terrific play, sure-to-be-knockout performances, the direction of Roman Polanski. A very likely contender.

7. David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method. HE comment: Forget it — Cronenberg doesn’t make Oscar films.

8. Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris. HE comment: A very charming, agreeable and popular film, but it won’t stand up to the fall/holiday competition.

9. Stephen Daldry‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. HE comment: Definitely.

10. Blah-dee-blah‘s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II. HE comment: Definitely.

11. Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants. HE comment: Definitely.

12. Phyllida Lloyd‘s The Iron Lady. HE comment: Probably, but Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) scares me.

13. Mike Mills‘ Beginners. HE comment: Good enough to be among the ten; may or may not make it.

Georeg Clooney in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants.

14. Blah-dee-blah‘s My Week with Marilyn. HE comment: Doubtful, from what I’ve been told. Possibly Michelle Williams‘ Marilyn Monroe performance for Best Actress, but Kenneth Branagh, I’m hearing, is truly exceptional as Laurence Olivier, and in fact steals the film.

15. Andrea Arnold‘s Wuthering Heights. HE comment: Maybe.

Sasha Stone’s Awards Daily projection:

1. War Horse; 2. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; 3. Midnight in Paris; 4. The Iron Lady; 5. J. Edgar; 6. The Descendants; 7. Harry Potter, etc.; 8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; 9. Super 8; and 10. The Artist.

Celluloid Junkie‘s Patrick von Sychowski tweeted a little while ago that he’s “seen [the] French thriller Point Blank at Hospital Club…pure adrenaline…I predict a Hollywood remake within 18 months.”

Magnolia Pictures acquired North American rights to Fred Cavaye‘s thriller, “billed as an action film in the vein of Tell No One,” last February. Gilles Lellouche stars “as a man racing against time through the streets of Paris to save his pregnant, kidnapped wife,” etc.

The Lawrence of Arabia Bluray doesn’t come out until next year so Sony Home Video can say “50th anniversary” on the packaging. So N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott is getting the jump or doesn’t care about timing or…oh, I get it: the Arab spring parallel.

Okay, so Rep. Anthony Weiner was dumb enough to tweet the bulge photo. That’s what I can’t get over — the rank stupidity of it. When Mr. Happy steps into the room, intelligence flies out the window. Thank goodness, at least, we have Andrew Breitbart and the professional right-wing hypocrite machine to remind us that sexual indiscretion is mainly practiced by liberals.

Regular, industrious, mild-mannered middle-class parents churn out mass murderers all the time…right? Totally routine, there but for the grace of God, Harris and Klebold’s parents had nothing to do with it, luck of the draw, etc. Bullshit.

Millennium’s Shadows & Lies, a Martin Donovan-James Franco crime drama, streets tomorrow on DVD & Blu-ray — stills, trailer, DVD box art, Bluray box art.

With nothing else to write about and to accompany a trailer I hadn’t paid any attention to until a Donna Daniels p.r. person alerted me, I’m posting for the third time my three basic observations about Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood‘s Magic Trip (Magnolia, VOD 7.1, theatrical 8.5). They were originally posted on 5.10.

One, Magic Trip is basically about new footage of the 1964 Merry Pranksters bus trip — that and very little else that illuminates.

Two, there’s no mention whatsoever of Tom Wolfe or his book that almost single-handedly sculpted the Kesey/magic bus legend, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” How do you make a doc about the bus without at least mentioning Wolfe’s book, a definitive account in the same way that John Reed‘s “Ten Days That Shook The World” told the story of the 1917 Russian revolution?

And three, there’s only one mention of the word ‘enlightenment’ in the whole film and no down-deep discussion at all of what LSD did to and for people during the early to late ’60s. The latter strikes me as borderline surreal. How could Gibney not explore to at least some degree the currents churned up by LSD, which was indisputably the biggest influence upon artist-youth-spiritual seeker culture of the ’60s in a thousand different ways and wound up influencing damn near everything?

Imagine some magical circumstance by which images of Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples had been visually captured or rendered in some verite, first-hand way and then preserved and assembled for a documentary, and then the filmmaker decided to more or less ignore the fact that what these thirteen men did and said just over 2000 years ago in Judea resulted in a minor little thing called Christianity.

Slate‘s Christopher Beam and Jeremy Singer-Vine have used a database of post-1985 Rotten Tomatoes ratings to create a search engine called the Hollywood Career-O-Matic. What it basically says about career trajectories (other than re-posting the steady downward slump suffered by M. Night Shyamalan since The Sixth Sense) is that over time directors are more likely to experience critical upswings than actors.

“What does the average Hollywood career look like?,” Beam and Singer-Vine ask. “In the Rotten Tomatoes database, more than 19,000 actors and 2,000 directors had their first film released in 1985 or later. The average actor’s critical reception gets slightly worse over the course of his first few movies, then plateaus. The average score for an actor’s first film is about 55 percent. By his fourth movie, that score slides to about 50 percent, where it hovers for the rest of his career.

“Directors’ careers follow a different trajectory. Like actors, a director’s first movie averages a Tomatometer rating around 55 percent. But the average ratings for the next few movies don’t drop much at all, never falling below 54 percent. Then, between the average director’s seventh and eighth movie, the Tomatometer ratings jump dramatically, from 55 percent to nearly 63 percent. That score stays steady for the average director’s ninth through 11th films and then jumps again to the 80s and 90s for the rest of his career.

“These trends seem to make sense. Most actors have to appear in good movies early in their career. Those who don’t risk being flushed out of the business. Once they’ve established themselves with a good film or two, they can safely make some bad ones. But all in all, they don’t have nearly as much control over film quality as directors do. Directors’ scores spike over time, presumably because only the best ones stick around long enough to make so many films.”

Slate‘s Hollywood Career-o-Matic tool can “map the career of any major actor or director from the last 26 years,” Beam and Siner-Vine explain. “You can also type in more than one name to plot careers side by side. For example, Paul Thomas Anderson vs. Wes Anderson vs. Pamela Anderson. Mouse over the data points to see which movies they represent.” Beam and Singer-Vine have “included only actors and directors who’ve released least five films between 1985 and March of this year, according to the RT data, to filter out thousands of bit-actors you’ve probably never heard of.”