Hollywood Elsewhere will not be among the elite press people (including a fair number of fanboy types) who will be attending an IMAX screening this evening of Chris Nolan‘s seven or eight-minute Dark Knight Rises prologue. Reps for Deadline, Indiewire and other mainstream entertainment press will be at the Universal IMAX Citywalk event at 7:30 pm (with a reception to follow), and Nolan is hosting an earlier screening at the same venue at 5:45 pm for filmmaker friends.

I guess Warner Bros. publicists feel I’m not fanboy enough, but where is the logic in that? This wll be tonight’s biggest Twitter conversation and tomorrow’s biggest topic by far on entertainment sites, and how does it benefit their interests to keep someone with a recognized voice out of the conversation? I’ve been an admirer of Nolan’s stuff all along from Memento to Insomnia to Batman Begins to The Dark Knight to Inception. Am I on Nolan’s shitlist because of this June 2010 posting? All I did was summarize the reportings of others.

I know of another guy who’s been told “no-go” on this thing so I’m not the only one. But it’s silly and petty all the same.

The Dark Knight Rises prologue will be shown to the public at several IMAX theatres just before Mission: Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol, which opens on 12.21. But only, apparently, at IMAX theatres.

Here’s a summary provided by Screenrant:

“There are undoubtedly a lot of people who will be paying to see Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in IMAX solely for the purpose of glimpsing the six-minute preview for The Dark Knight Rises.

“Chris Nolan revealed in a recent interview that the footage screened in the preview will cover “basically the first six, seven minutes of the film. It’s the introduction to Bane and a taste of the rest of the film.

“Today we have word from a poster named ‘Rocketman’ over on the SuperHero Hype forums, who claims to have a description of the TDKR prologue footage. Read his version of said footage below (be sure to take a salt grain beforehand) and see how it jibes (or does not) with what Nolan alluded to,” and blah, blah, blah.

In the Gurus of Gold view, the top ten Best Picture contenders are, in this order, these: 1. The Artist; 2. War Horse; 3. The Descendants; 4. Hugo; 5. Midnight in Paris; 6. The Help; 7. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; 8. Moneyball; 9. The Tree of Life; 10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

The Gurus and the Gold Derby gang are continually estimating and revising their predictions, and I must confess I’m starting to weaken as far as the Artist onslaught in concerned. Or at least, I’m feeling weaker today.

The Zeligs have apparently decided where the safe havens are, and the resulting mentality is relentless and appalling.

Another interesting barometer comes from the Broadcast Film Critics Association website, which is the home of the Critics Choice Awards. They’re a fairly good indicator of where mainstream sentiment is, and right now, it appears, they’re thinking a bit differently than the Gurus. Presumably based on votes from the BFCA membership, they’ve assigned numerical ratings to the top contenders, and here, in descending order, is how it reads as of 3:30 pm Pacific:

1. The Descendants — 92 out of 100.

Tied for second place: The Artist, 91 out of 100, and Moneyball, 91 out of 100.

3. The Help — 89 out of 100.

Tied for fourth place: Hugo, 87 out of 100, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 87 out of 100.

5. Midnight in Paris — 85 out of 100.

6. War Horse — 80 out of 100.

7. The Tree of Life — 78 out of 100.

One For The Money (1.27) is obviously another broad, lightweight, formulaic Kathryn Heigel romcom — a perfect late-January release aimed at none-too-bright women. The standout thing, of course, is the casting of a relatively low-profile TV guy, Jason O’Mara, in the Gerard Butler role.

Brian Lowry‘s Variety review of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows says that the upcoming Warner Bros. release “has the significant advantage of featuring Holmes’ preeminent adversary, Professor Moriarty, as played with reptilian charm by Jared Harris. So while director Guy Ritchie‘s excesses and modern concessions — among them a lot of explosions — remain intact, the parts of this second Sherlock Holmes are considerably more rewarding

“For purists, of course, there’s almost certainly too much gunplay and noise (including Hans Zimmer‘s bombastic score), but this is a Holmes designed to appeal as much to the Transformers generation as those steeped in his literary or even past cinematic exploits.”