The legendary Tom Wicker, who “brought a hard-hitting Southern liberal/civil libertarian’s perspective to his column, ‘In the Nation’, which appeared on the N.Y. Times editorial page and then on the Op-Ed Page two or three times a week from 1966 until his retirement in 1991,” died today at age 85. His obit was authored by Robert McFadden.

“On Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Wicker, a brilliant but relatively unknown White House correspondent who had worked at four smaller papers, written several novels under a pen name and, at 37, had established himself as a workhorse of The Times‘s Washington bureau, was riding in the presidential motorcade as it wound through downtown Dallas, the lone Times reporter on a routine political trip to Texas.

“The searing images of that day — the rifleman’s shots cracking across Dealey Plaza, the wounded president lurching forward in the open limousine, the blur of speed to Parkland Memorial Hospital and the nation’s anguish as the doctors gave way to the priests and a new era — were dictated by Mr. Wicker from a phone booth in stark, detailed prose drawn from notes scribbled on a White House itinerary sheet. It filled two front-page columns and the entire second page, and vaulted the writer to journalistic prominence overnight.”

I thought this was supposed to be screening by now. For guys like me, I mean (and not super early-birds like Pete Hammond). I’d be surprised if it doesn’t show by Thursday or Friday. The Girl With Dragon Tattoo begins screening Monday morning for select press. We Bought A Zoo has its nationwide sneak tomorrow night. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close starts showing on or about Friday, 12.2. Almost everything is being let out of the cage.

If you listen to recordings or newsreels of people speaking to each other during the 1930s and ’40s, they don’t sound like people do today, for the most part. They sound a bit more naive or hee-hawish or more rigid and formal in their phrasings, like they’ve just come out of an elocution class. I’ve heard two or three voice recordings from the ’20s (one of them of Clarence Darrow speaking at the Scopes trial) but I’m presuming it was the same if not more so. A certain starched-shirt, stick-up-your-ass tonality.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire during Sydney-area filming of Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby.

Something tells me you could hear all kinds of tension and constipation and uncertainty in people’s voices back in the days of The Great Gatsby. Mind your manners, know where to put your soup spoon and always dress correctly, etc. The purring be-bop talk of the ’50s (i.e., the way Marlon Brando‘s Johnny spoke in The Wild One) that came out of the post-World War II beats and their struggles to shirk off middle-class uptightness and anxieties was more than 30 years away when Gatsby’s story was happening.

Something also tells me that Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, as Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway, are going to sound like 21st Century guys when they say their lines in Baz Luhrman‘s 3D filmed version. Because they’re not British or RADA-trained, and because they’re native Southern Californians and they both have this way of speaking (particularly Leo) that they want and need, and I can’t imagine them ever sounding like real-deal fellows who lived and side-stepped and clinked champagne glasses 85 years ago. But I do trust that Carey Mulligan, as Daisy Buchanan, will sound exactly right.

And I’m still wondering if Luhrman will have the courage not to go all nutso and wacko with the 3D and just shoot Fitzgerald’s novel more or less straight, and let it be what it is and screw the under-35 ADDs will will (presumably) be twitching in their seats.

Last February the Hollywood Reporter‘s Pip Bulbeck quoted New South Wales (NSW) state government’s Kristina Kenneally projecting that Luhrman’s Gatsby is costing AUD$120 million (USD $118 million), with the shoot expected to last seventeen weeks” (i.e., finishing in early January 2012) “and another thirty weeks to be spent on post-production” or seven months give or take. “A reported 275-person crew will be employed during the pre-production stage with more than 400 cast and crew being employed during principal photography. Another estimated 150 post-production and visual effects crew will also be employed. Filming began on 5 September 2011 at Fox Studios in Sydney.”

This War Horse rave is not just another arising of the Poland curse. Others have told me that Steven Spielberg‘s film choked them up also, and who am I to say that’s lame or invalid? It isn’t wise or considerate to rag on anyone for succumbing to an emotional film. We all have our weak spots. I melt down every time I watch the last acts of Carousel and The Best Years of Our Lives and three or four others I could name.

But I know whore-ish, patently phony, cornball filmmaking aimed at families and kids when I see it. As I summarized yesterday, “War Horse is Darby O’Gill and the Little People go to war with a horse.” And for anyone to say, as Poland has, that War Horse delivered “some very powerful, very real human emotions”….well, I’m speechless. I throw up my hands. Maybe a part of Poland has been opened up by having been a dad for the last couple of years. You let sappy stuff in when you have young kids that you wouldn’t otherwise. I’ve been there; I remember.

“I will admit now that I shed tears watching this film,” Poland said earlier today. “More than I’d like to admit. And I don’t feel like I was manipulated at all. I felt like I was a witness to some very powerful, very real human emotions. And one cannot help but to root for this horse like you would root for any of the great heroes of the movies. He is not anthropomorphic, but he does embody the traits of persistence, courage, and survival that most people would love to feel in themselves and certainly would love to see in those they love.

“And most importantly, you want him to be loved…to not have to show that persistence and courage and survival under fire, even though we know it’s there. This is, really, what all the characters want for themselves and their loved ones in this film…whether the soldiers or the parents or the grandparents or the crowds that gather now and again through the story.”

You know what I hate about girlfriends or close female friends? We’ll be talking about seeing a DVD/Bluray and I’ll mention a really good one and she’ll say “okay, sounds good, I haven’t seen that, let’s watch it” and then I pop it into the player and ten minutes later she says, “Oh, I’ve seen this.”

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley has seen War Horse, and he’s saying “it most certainly can” win the Best Picture Oscar. He also hedges by saying “we’ll have to see if the season is kind to it” and that “critics will be mixed on it, I imagine” — you may be right about that, Kris! — “so it won’t get the boost of their awards circuit, but it won’t need it.

“And really, after last year’s Social Network orgy, can we stop overstating the importance of critics’ awards, at least for films that have an eye toward Best Picture? What matters is how the Academy will gauge the film, and I think this will be right up their alley.”

If you’ve seen War Horse and understand that it’s a sugary, caramel-covered, Hallmark greeting card family movie in the tradition of My Friend Flicka, Black Beauty and The Red Pony (although not as good as any of these three films), those last nine words constitute one of the basest insults to the Academy membership I’ve ever read. Tapley is too intelligent and perceptive a writer not to realize the import. He’s basically saying “the Academy guys are such emotionally susceptible idiots that they have no taste whatsoever and are unable to recognize shameless schmaltz when they see it, so they might well tumble for this one.”

The Academy doesn’t necessarily disagree with critics’ picks regarding Best Picture contenders. They agreed with critical huzzahs on The Hurt Locker, No Country For Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire. They disagreed last year and again in ’05/’06 when the geezer homophobes tipped the scales in favor of Crash over Brokeback Mountain, and they got it wrong horribly when they gave the Best Picture Oscar to Chicago. But it’s rash to suggest that critics and the Academy live on opposite sides of the fence. We’re all cows eating the same grass, for the most part.

Last year most of the industry ignored the obvious quality of The Social Network in order to give the Best Picture Oscar to The King’s Speech, a fine, respectable, well-made film that wasn’t anywhere near the level of David Fincher‘s film but which had a warmer heart. War Horse is not The King’s Speech. It’s simpleton cotton candy delivered with directorial swagger and high technical expertise. A columnist friend who saw it this morning has just confided that he/she isn’t even sure if it’s good enough to be nominated for Best Picture, and that much of it is laughable or groan-worthy. The columnist I saw it with yesterday said the same thing: “Is this even good enough to be on the Best Picture list?”

Tapley ends his piece by saying “at the end of the day, it could be a showdown between three feel-good period crafts showcases: The Artist, Hugo and War Horse.” Wow.

I’m getting sick and tired of HE commenters saying I’m such a Steven Spielberg basher that I have no credibility when I write about his films — that I’m blinded by some blanket aesthetic contempt or whatever. Even Sasha Stone has suggested this. An hour ago I answered a couple of guys who threw this charge at me (“you have zero credibility when it comes to judging a Spielberg movie”) as follows:

I have no credbility because I’m convinced that Spielberg is a high-end journeyman hack with an all-but-incorrigible sentimental streak? There is ample…make that mountains of evidence to back up that view. He’s probably the only hack in Hollywood history with a personal net worth of over $3 billion, but that’s an asterisk, not a disqualifier. He loves what he’s doing and so do tens of millions of viewers, but he’s essentially a showman — an impersonal ringmaster in the Ringling Bros. tradition. He’s not quite the Cecil B. DeMille of our time, but he’s in that realm.

I’ve been grappling with Spielberg and his films for 40 years now (starting with the televising of Duel in ’71) and I feel I really know the man inside and out.

Almost all of Spielberg’s movies have been about the fact that he’s a skilled, highly gifted filmmaker who likes to “get” audiences and sell tickets. The charge that was first thrown at him back in the late ’70s and early ’80s (along with DePalma and Lucas) is that he’s a middle-class, not especially worldly or well-read kid from Arizona who likes to make movies about other movies, and that he’s not exactly swept away or lifted up with great feeling or conviction about the world outside the Hollywood realm.

Spielberg hasn’t really grown out of that. He still lives in his own world. War Horse is the latest of his films to make that abundantly clear.

With the exception of Schindler’s List and E.T. — arguably the only two films in his canon that have delivered truly personal, deep-down convictions and emotions (as opposed to generic sentimentality about family, tradition, the American way of life, the U.S. military during World War II, the paintings of Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, etc.) — Spielberg’s filmmaking passion has mostly been about being nothing more or less than commercially successful filmmaker.

Spielberg’s mission has always been about making Joe Popcorn enthralled and amused and soothed and entertained, and he’s always done this by showing us how happy and soothed and entertained Steven Spielberg is while making a film. He loves wearing that red coat and top hat and shouting “ladies and gentleman!” through a megaphone and bringing out the dancing elephant and the trapeze artists and the lion and the lion tamer with the boots and the whip and the chair.

Few have his naturally strategic directorial eye, or his special compositional instincts and intelligence. He’s always delivered that special mise en scene excitement, that snap-crackle-popcorn, but he’s never been a serious filmmaker who engages with the world he lives in and/or his own personal core issues (other than his love of cinema).

Spielberg never puts any intimate issues and passions into movies, probably because he doesn’t have any intimate issues and passions (other than his love of cinema). He’s about the cinema of impersonal passion and conviction, about his worship of movies that turned him on as a kid and of great influential directors and great classic films, and of solid craftsmanship and cool smash cuts and great rollercoaster chase sequences and all that.

He’s a jumble of talent and pizazz and a grab-bag of influences without any real core of his own. He’s Mr. Americana, Mr. Hook, Mr. Always (“It’s England, man!”), a money machine, and the most successful shallow filmmaker in motion picture history.

And for 13 years I’ve hated, hated, hated the fact that Spielberg cheated when he went in tight on the old grieving man’s eyes in the beginning of Saving Private Ryan and then cut to Tom Hanks and his comrades on the landing craft about to land at Omaha Beach. That was a wildly dishonest cut (or transition), and for me it brought the whole film down a notch or two.

Spielberg was a golden boy and a filmmaking dynamo operating in the exact right moment in time from Duel through E.T./Poltergeist, although I became convinced when I saw 1941 (which included an hommage to Jaws, four years after that film came out) that he was quite the egotist, and that he didn’t have the outside-the-Hollywood-realm experience or bull-headed integrity to be John Ford or Howard Hawks.

And then he resurged with the third Indiana Jones film (which I genuinely love on a chapter-to-chapter basis).

And then he found Schindler’s List, a story and a subject he deeply cared about and brought his core convictions to, and almost a total abandonment of his usual look-at-how-clever-and-enthused-I-am devices (except for the little red-tinted girl in the ghetto) and sentimentality (except for Liam Neeson weeping with guilt at the end).

Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse was indeed “out of the bag” as of 4 pm earlier today, as Deadline‘s Pete Hammond noted at 3:43 pm Pacific. Press/guild screenings were held in LA and New York around the same time today (1 pm on this coast) and lots more are happening tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday (including some public sneaks).

Which means, as I understand it, that it’s now permissible to write about it but not to formally review it. Got it.

Hammond’s headline asked if Spielberg “Can Win Another Oscar?” Yeah, he could. Definitely. Not for this film but he could down the road. Never underestimate the future of an obviously talented director. Spielberg could wake up some day next week or next year and turn his career around like that.

Hammond is more politically correct than yours truly so allow me to stay within the boundaries of the piece he posted earlier today. Hammond talks, I comment….good enough? A robust chit-chat between friends.

Hammond: “What Spielberg has wrought is a stunning looking and highly emotional epic that is Hollywood moviemaking at its best, and seems likely to be the filmmaker’s most Academy-friendly work since his Oscar winners, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.”

Wells comment: Let me put it this way. I sat next to a significant headliner in the Oscar-blogging community during today’s War Horse screening, and after it ended (roughly around 3:25 pm) we both said, almost in unison, “Hammond is crazy…there’s no way this thing wins the Best Picture Oscar.” Okay? No offense. Due respect. Just our opinion. We could be wrong.

Hammond: “Is War Horse old-fashioned? You bet, but in this fast-moving techno culture that may be a welcome thing. Even though some of the Academy’s more recent Best Picture choices, notably No Country For Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire and The Hurt Locker among others, indicate a different sensibility than the kind of once-traditional ‘bigger’, more craft-laden film the Academy once favored, and a category into which War Horse definitely falls.”

Wells comment: As I tweeted late this afternoon, War Horse is a time-capsule movie. Every luscious, immaculate, John Williams-scored frame says ‘this is how Oscar-bait films used to be made…if the director was hungry and utterly calculating.’ It’s analogous, I feel, to Hitchcock’s Topaz. The handprint and the auteurist chops are unmistakable but they have a crusty yesteryear feel. Out of the past.

Hammond: “Spielberg is known to be a great admirer of David Lean, and with its sweeping vistas, deliberate pacing and epic story of one horse’s remarkable journey through the front lines of World War I, the film could almost be a tribute to the great director of such classics as Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

Wells comment: War Horse contains unmistakable tributes to Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory. War Horse‘s best scene is a British attack upon German lines across a blown-apart, puddle-strewn No Man’s Land — very similar to (and in some ways an improvement upon) Kubrick’s classic tracking shot of French troops attacking German positions in Glory. Spielberg also includes an “attack on Aqaba” sequence with sword-bearing, horse-riding British troops attacking Germans and overturning tents and steaming pots of whatever and killing guys with blade-swipes, just like Lawrence‘s original. Spielberg even features a British noncom named Higgins, an apparent nod to the Corporal Higgins in Lawrence who refuses a cigarette to Daoud and Farraj.

Hammond: “There should be some kind of separate Academy Award for the horses [as] they are surprisingly expressive.”

Wells comment: This is true. The horse (or horses) who play Joey are very actorish. And the black horses who play Charcoal, Joey’s best four-legged friend, are no slouch either. I would go so far as to say the horses are almost hams in this thing.

Hammond: “War Horse is probably too emotional and traditional to earn much love on the hardcore, unsentimental critics awards circuit, but I imagine it will fare very well at the CCMA’s , Golden Globes and Oscars.”

Wells tweets w/edits: “Tonally, emotionally and spiritually, War Horse is Darby O’Gill and the Little People goes to war with a horse. And I’m saying this as a fan of Darby O’Gill and the Little People — within its own realm and delivery system it’s a decent, cheerful, sometimes spooky little Disney flick. In any event, welcome to Spielbergland. It’s like no other place in the world. If you can push aside the carnage-of-war stuff, War Horse is essentially a nice Disney family movie. But the concept of restraint is out the window. The King’s Speech is a b&w Michael Haneke film compared to War Horse.”

Hammond: “The King’s Speech triumph last year over the more trendy critics choice of The Social Network might indicate there is still room for less edgy, more ‘traditional’ films in the heart of the Academy voter. We’ll have to wait to see, but the sheer scope of War Horse certainly gives it its own niche against smaller favored Best Pic hopefuls (seen so far) like The Descendants, The Artist, Midnight In Paris and Moneyball.”

Wells comment: War Horse is wonderful, beautiful and very touching…if you’re Joe Popcorn from Sandusky, Ohio or Altoona, Pennsylvania. Or if you feel a nostalgic affinity for “less edgy, more traditional” films and can just roll with what War Horse is serving. I think it’s so shameless it’s almost a hoot, but that’s me. It’s all of a piece and very exacting and lovely and handsomely shot and full of highly expressive emotional performances, but my God! Spielberg!

Anything to distract from the sitting-around-and-eating-too-much-and-watching-TV part of this annual ritual works for me. Steven Spielberg‘s film will sneak here and there at commercial venues on Sunday (including New York City), and be screened for the L.A. stragglers on Monday, 11.28. I don’t know when the review embargo date is, but War Horse won’t open until 12.25 so who knows?

I disagree with Stu Van Airsdale‘s latest Movieline/Oscar Index assessment of the Best Supporting Actress race. The back-and-forth political weathervane stuff is bullshit. All that matters is whether or not a supporting actress’s performance has sunk in…period. Not if she’s been charming or funny or histrionic or anguished, but whether you felt her soul or not. Nothing else.

In this regard the only contenders are Vanessa Redgrave (Coriolanus), Shailene Woodley and Judy Greer (The Descendants), Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs), Jessica Chastain (Take Shelter) and Keira Knightley (A Dangerous Method) for a total of six.

Octavia Spencer has her uppity “shit pie” moment in The Help and I understand that she’ll probably be nominated, but I was more amused than moved, due respect. Berenice Bejo‘s Poppy Flopsy Mopsy Cottontail performance in The Artist is perky and spirited, but she doesn’t really reach in. Melissa McCarthy was great in Bridesmaids, but her performance was more of a personality bust-out than anything else. Mia Wasikowska was too subdued in Albert Nobbs. Marion Cotillard didn’t really stand out in Midnight in Paris. No Sandra Bullock action from Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close until after 12.2.

“I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour — his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear — is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle — victorious.” Take out the “victorious” and boldface the “exhausted” and that’s how I feel at the end of a good column day. And for the skill or luck or divine guiudance that led to my having reached this satisfaction, I give genuine thanks on this day. Thanks to those who helped me along and gave me encouragement, and no thanks to a friend who called me a “failure” when I was 28 or thereabouts.

Actually, hearing that word probably helped, now that I think about it. I was pedalling on a stationary bicycle and I knew it, and this guy said I probably wouldn’t make it. That scared me and stiffened my resolve and led to my life taking a turn for the better a year or two later. So I take that “no thanks” back. Friends who give it to you straight from the shoulder are few and far between. Most “friends” will give you a smile and a back-pat as you swirl down into the toilet bowl, and then hand you a beer and a bag of pretzels. So thanks to all of the straight-shooters. They aren’t much for backrubs or pep talks, but they’re worth their weight in gold.