The “Easy Rider, Raging Bull” days were in full bloom. Shampoo had just wrapped, and film rights to the unpublished All The President’s Men had just been bought by Robert Redford. The air was awful. (Catalytic converters had only just been invented a year earlier.) El Cholo and Lost on Larrabee were hip restaurants. The Microsoft Corp. was eight or nine months away from being hatched by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And LexG was…what, four years old? (Photo tweeted by Shawn Levy.)

Sunset Blvd. near Chateau Marmont, June 1974.

For what it’s worth, FilmJerk odds & number-cruncher Edward Havens is predicting a George Clooney win over Jean Djuardin and the other three. And Viola Davis over Meryl Streep. Beyond that I don’t think we need to hear any more Artist talk.

The 2012 Spirit Awards did the wrong thing today by giving four awards to the Big Oscar Inevitable known as The Artist — Best Feature, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Cinematography. The worst kowtow was giving Jean Dujardin its Best Actor prize instead of, say, A Better Life‘s Damien Bichir or Take Shelter‘s Michael Shannon. It wasn’t an indie thing to do — it was a “we want to be the Oscars too!” thing. Extremely bad form, dark day, etc.

Random Tweet #1: “Spirit Award for Best Actor goes to…Jean Dujardin? At the Spirits? People in the press tent going ‘eewww!” What a drag. Not Bichir?” Random Tweet #2: “Is it because I’m not drinking that the 2012 Spirit Awards are feeling so…I don’t know, rote and meh and under-energized & not-enoughy?” Random Tweet #3: “Not even light munchie food in Spirit Awards press cantina. No celery sticks, no carrots, no nothin’ — just empty, scarfed-up food boxes.” Random Tweet #4: “AT&T 3G is ridiculously slow in press tent. Too many people tweeting in too dense a space. No wifi for MacBook Pro and no celery sticks.”

Best Female Lead Spirit Award winner Michelle Williams — Saturday, 2.25, 2:55 pm.

I have to get over to the 2012 Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, which Seth Rogen will be hosting. The show begins at 1:30 pm, but the best part is the 90 minutes of schmooze time before it kicks off. Most of the indie community shows up every year. For me it’s a picture- and video-taking orgy. As long as the weather isn’t chilly and blustery like last year, everything’ll be jake.

Now that Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh‘s critically-dismissed Act of Valor has emerged as the weekend’s #1 film with an expected $27 million, and now that at least some HE readers have seen it, did the “real Navy SEALS shooting real ammo” aspect do anything for anyone? From the get-go haven’t people been bracing for the expected shortcomings in the acting end of things? And how could live rounds mean anything to anyone? What detectable versimilitude could possibly occur from this?

And I’m a little surprised that eighth-place Wanderlust is an instant DOA. People just didn’t want to see it. Which is about the concept, I suppose, as well as a referendrum on the drawing power of Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston. People saw the poster, reminded themselves that Aniston almost never makes A-level movies, read the story about her pixellated breasts (and how she insisted on the boob coverup as a gesture of deference to boyfriend/costar Justin Theroux) and figured it’s a Netflix download, plain and simple. Plus people…what, aren’t into comedies about hippie communes?

What a disconnect between the 2.16 Wanderlust premiere screening and what I was feeling (i.e., moderate amusement) as I watched and the brutal reality of the box-office. I thought it might have a moderately okay weekend and then descend the following weekend and disappear.

Visual effects (including special makeup) can be “imaginative, even astonishing, but [they] are ultimately there to sell a world, a character or a moment,” writes Press Play‘s Aaron Aradillas for a two-parter about horror and makeup. “One of makeup’s greatest triumphs is 1981’s An American Werewolf in London, which became the first film to win an Oscar for makeup in regular competition. Overseen by Rick Baker, who supervised all of the film’s makeup effects, it shows a man changing into a werewolf in real time…right in front of your eyes.”

And the first time I saw this I felt mildly deflated. For me it was a time-out, a prosthetic musical number, a demo reel showing everyone how necessary it would be to hire Baker when and if they made a horror film. For me werewolves were always half-wolves and half-men, so why did we have to do the big trans-species transformation? I didn’t care if David Naughton could grow a real wolf snout and wolf ears, and in fact would have much preferred him becoming a two-legged, Lon Chaney-style werewolf running around in a snarly, feral mode and half-resembling himself. It’s all a metaphor anyway so who needs prosthetics that turn him into a generic four-legged hairball with fangs?

Landis and Baker and all those dug-in, highly-paid special-effects industry guys had to do better. They had to do more. They had to show off, and most horror fans, being the low-lifes that they are, loved this. Gradually horror films, especially with the advent of the digital era, became defined by narrative and thematic coherence getting nudged aside by the effects themselves. It was during the ’80s that effects became the films.

The best parts of American Werewolf were (a) the backpacking section with Naughton and Griffin Dunne, (b) “dead”, torn-apart and progressively rotting Dunne coming back to chat with Naughton, and (c) Jenny Agutter‘s scenes.