Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas and I recorded two installments a couple of hours ago for Oscar Poker #98, but the second was much better so I threw out installment #1. And I was in such a hurry to get this done that I didn’t even add intro music or fade-ins — this is unrefined. We went for a good hour and covered most of the top Oscar contenders as they currently stand. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

The big boxoffice story of the weekend, Douglas said, is that in its second weekend Argo only dropped about 15%. That means word-of-mouth has caught on big-time.

Nine months after its Sundance ’12 debut, I finally saw Ava Duvernay‘s Middle of Nowhere last night, and I’m completely on board with Sasha Stone and all the Rotten Tomatoes critics who’ve given it high praise. It’s perhaps a bit too slowly paced for some, perhaps a shade too plodding, but this, for me, is as good as low-budget naturalism and carefully measured, emotionally dug-in performances get. I wasn’t sure at first but within 10 or 15 minutes I’d succumbed. Clean, straight, no b.s., truth.

This is a simple, baldfaced plug for James Rocchi‘s The Lunch, a podcast that has been going since last May or thereabouts. I’m mentioning it, crassly enough, because Rocchi recently invited me to record an upcoming installment. I should add that at a recent Academy premiere, Rocchi wore what looked to me like an aubergine-tinted brown suit.

During today’s Oscar Poker chat Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas said he was a big fan of Zen of Bennett, which opens at the IFC Center on 10.24 and in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Palm Desert and Santa Barbara on 11.2. Doc was directed by Unjoo Moon, produced by Danny Bennett and Jennifer Lebeau, and shot by the highly respected Dion Beebe. But the distributor, Abramorama Entertainment, has dropped the ball in LA with no press screenings. Or none that have come to me, at least.

Update: It turns out the MRC’s Brooke Blumberg invited others to an LA press screening that happened last Tuesday. If there’s another between now and the 11.2 opening, I’d love to attend.

“‘Mitt does not express great love, and he does not express hate,’ said one Republican strategist who knows him well. ‘Ledger sheets don’t hate.'” — from Maureen Dowd‘s 10.20 N.Y. Times column, titled “Pampered Princes Fling Gorilla Dust.”

Yesterday HE reader Markus Ponto claimed that James Stewart‘s suit in Vertigo “was NEVER brown….it was always brownish violet or brownish purple.” This shot was directly scanned from a 1958 dye transfer print with zero color correction. You can’t really savor the true color of any fabric unless you see it in sunlight, but I can discern no eggplant/aubergine tint of any kind.

The brown suit that launched a thousand ships.

Ponto allowed that while Stewart’s suit is not brown, his hat is. Got that, film students? Celebrated wardrobe person Edith Head, who always knew exactly what she wanted, decided that Stewart’s hat should very faintly clash with the suit. Costumer: “But Miss Head, I can make an aubergine-tinted brown hat as well…really, it’s not a problem.” Head: “You’re not listening, Paul. I want audiences to feel off-balance while watching this film, and one of the ways I’ve decided to implement this feeling is to make sure that the brown hat slightly disagrees with the suit.”

My first reaction to the death of George McGovern, 90, was “this was a good and principled man of honor, rock solid to the end.” Then I recalled how McGovern was always great in front of a mike — he always had his facts down and his patter was always sharp. Then I remembered the comfort after briefly chatting with him in ’05 when he attended a Laemmle’s Music Hall screening of Stephen Vittoria‘s One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern.

McGovern, then 83, “seemed to be in excellent health — tanned, trim — and he told the crowd he wants to live to be at least 100,” I wrote. “He needs that much time, he said, to accomplish all his goals, which include doing what he can to eliminate hunger in third-world countries.”

Here’s the piece in its entirety:

Every now and then you need to take a break from all the Hollywood crap, and I got a really nice one last Saturday from an encounter with former U.S. Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern. In so doing I felt an emotion that I haven’t had much contact with lately. I felt a kind of familial love.

The occasion was an early-Saturday-evening showing at Laemmle’s Music Hall of Stephen Vittoria‘s One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern, which I’ve been trying to catch since last July or so, when I happened to see a poster for it in the lobby of Manhattan’s Quad Cinema.

I’ve always admired McGovern, the longtime South Dakota liberal who’s mainly known for his honorable but catastrophic run against President Richard Nixon. Hurt by a campaign that was chaotically managed and also unlucky, McGovern got less than 40% of the vote and took only two states, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

Stephen Vittoria, director of One Brief Shining Moment, and George McGovern in lobby of Laemmle’s Music Hall — Saturday, 11.19, 8:23 pm.

I’ve long respected McGovern for having theoretically guided the last plain-spoken, genuinely liberal Democratic Presidential campaign. But my affection has mainly been about a long-held feeling that profound currents of decency and compassion run within him.

It sure felt that way as he spoke to a middle-aged crowd that had just seen Vittoria’s film around 7:30 pm, and later as he posed for photos and signed autographs and whatnot in front of the theatre on Wilshire Blvd.

He’s been the World Food Program’s first global ambassador on hunger since ’01, and before that served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agencies, based in Rome, Italy, from ’98 to ’01.

He said that his favorite line in Vittoria’s doc is when Gloria Steinem says that looking back on the ’72 campaign, the McGovern loyalists have a lot more to be proud of than do the supporters of Nixon’s campaign, who have all that Watergate-related skullduggery to contend with.

Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir recently wrote than “when the long lens of history finally focuses on McGovern’s contentious era, he’ll appear in the main text, named as a prophet, while Nixon will be a twisted king consigned to the footnotes.”

But when asked last Saturday evening what he thinks about the George Bush, McGovern said he’d rather have Nixon there.

Nixon, he pointed out, was fairly practical and forward-thinking on domestic issues and the economy. He created the Environmental Protection Agency, advocated gun control, imposed wage and price controls, and believed in a federal health-care system. And he wasn’t indebted to the neocons and their absolutist agendas.

The talking heads in One Bright Shining Moment include McGovern, Steinem, Gore Vidal, Warren Beatty, Howard Zinn, Dick Gregory, Gary Hart, Frank Mankiewicz, Jim Bouton, Rev. Malcolm Boyd and Ron Kovic.

Vittoria’s film is, for my money, a little too admiring, strident and one-sided. I wish he’d talked to some conservatives and maybe even a former enemy or two. It would have given the film some added intrigue without compromising McGovern’s image.

Some liberals still flinch at the memory of the ’72 campaign, but when a man has lasted as long as McGovern has and consistently stood for caring and compassion in public affairs, what’s not to admire? We’re speaking of one of the most steadily principled men to succeed in big-time politics in the 20th Century.

McGovern and admirers on sidewalk in front of Laemmle’s Music Hall on Wilshire near Doheny — Saturday, 11.19, 8:25 pm.

The Village Voice‘s Michael Atkinson has complained that Vittoria’s doc is filled with “exactly the sort of starry-eyed, bullet-spraying hyperbole that drains credibility from any brand of political discourse,” adding that it “may be useful as home-front history, if only it didn’t rant, yowl, and wet its pants so much.”

Still, it’s a good thing to have a film out there that doesn’t just train your attention on who George McGovern really is and was, and what his campaign was all about, but which pays the proper respect.”

If only the yahoos had the wisdom to elect McGovern instead of Nixon 40 years ago. In a pig’s eye.

For a politically-themed issue of DGA Quarterly, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond sat down with Jay Roach, director of Game Change and Recount, for an in-depth discussion of Elia Kazan‘s A Face in The Crowd (’57), one of the most politically and culturally prescient films of all time.

“This movie, to me, was extremely influential in showing how somebody like Sarah Palin captures [hinterland] adulation,” Roach says. “It really takes that notion of populism as a superpower, and turns it into a pretty strong indictment of the gullibility of the population to be won over by the anti-intellectual and anti-elitist.

“It’s a satiric statement about our desire, especially in chaotic times, for a charismatic person to step up and become someone onto whom we can project all our hopes and dreams. And then that person is bound to be caught up in the glow of affirmation, so you get a kind of co-dependent relationship between the needy audience and the person who will happily keep taking all that adulation.”

The 2012 upside is that Sarah Palin is writing a fitness book, which is a fairly bald admission that she’s completely discredited herself as a political figure and is all but totally over in terms of any ability to swing votes.

Speaking as one who sometimes shares misanthropic feelings when indications arise of the intelligence and awareness levels of too many average Americans, it is comforting to note that others park their cars in this garage.