Once again, another “cold open” SNL skit that’s very knowing and sharp and news-following, and yet not in the least bit funny. Flat bordering on dead. And yet my ratio of enjoyment to mezzo mezzo was/is about 70-30. Gov. Chris Christie (on the jump page) was too obviously reading his lines, but he was somewhat better nonetheless.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil: “I ran into Anne Thompson and Sasha Stone the other day, and as I walked up to them they were were talking about Lincoln and saying the Best Picture race is already over…it’s won…and I said…oh, come on!” Me: “Aggh! Completely off the beam. Do you think they really believe that or…?” O’Neil: “No, they really meant it.” Here’s the key portion and here’s the whole conversation.

Me: “People don’t really feel turned on by this thing, I’m tellin’ ya. I trust my instincts, I trust the invisible insect antennae coming out of the back of my head and I’m not talking about ‘feel-good’ but something that turns you on and really gets you going, and that’s not happening with Lincoln…not really, not chemically.”

Before all the poison-enzyme, Alien acid-blood assholes start complaining about my bringing up Lincoln again, it was O’Neil who raised it, not I. He was being persistent and I just responded to his questions, and then I decided during editing that I kinda liked how this this part of the conversation turned out so I’ve highlighted it…big deal. Nick Filliponi is banned, but I hope he’s reading this, the dick.

This is Oscar Poker #102, incidentally.

Can you believe those fluttery, 14-year-old-female fangasms the geeks were having last April and May after catching The Avengers? One of the proudest moments of my life happened (or happened to me, as I’m only a conduit for expression and not truly and finally “the author”) when I called it “corporate CG piss in a gleaming silver bucket.”

Second proudest Avengers assessment: “The problem is that Joss Whedon and the Marvel honchos and the other corporate whores who made The Avengers are too tied to corrupt, pre-realized geek-faith ‘reality’ jails and way too invested in maintaining and fortifying revenue streams. If they were truly free of heart and spirit they might…just pull out all the stops and go full whacko.”

Third proudest Avengers assessment: “No comic-book fanboy has ever explained to me the appeal of watching superheroes duke it out as such battles ALWAYS deliver the same back-and-forth. One superhero will assert temporary superiority by pounding the other and then throwing him/her backwards through a wall or a plate of glass or whatever, and then this briefly humbled combatant will recover, shake it off and pound his/her opponent and then throw him/her through a wall or a plate of glass or whatever. Repeat ad infinitum. This is all that ever happens. Have the people who write and make these films descended to the level of dumb beasts?

Tim Goodman‘s Hollywood Reporter review of Lindsay Lohan‘s Liz and Dick, posted Friday morning and ignored by HE for roughly 30 hours, is an exuberant piece of writing. And I guess you have to hand it to LIfetime because now I really want to see this piece of shit. The only problem is that I don’t drink.

“It should come as no great surprise that Lifetime’s Liz & Dick movie starring Lindsay Lohan is spectacularly bad…Lohan is woeful as Taylor from start to finish,” Goodman states.

“But, whatever you do, don’t miss Liz & Dick. It’s an instant classic of unintentional hilarity. Drinking games were made for movies like this. And the best part is that it gets worse as it goes on, so in the right company with the right beverages, Liz & Dick could be unbearably hilarious toward the tail end of the 90-minute running time.

“By the time Lohan is playing mid-’80s Taylor and it looks like a lost Saturday Night Live skit, your body may be cramped by convulsions.”

“For a short film on two long lives, Liz & Dick truly drags. Luckily, you can’t take your eyes off of Lohan playing Taylor, which the producers clearly thought would work because they share similar backstories. Except for the part about Taylor being a gigantic movie star and Lohan not being one. Not even a star bright enough to transport you at least halfway to believing she’s Elizabeth Taylor. There is not one minute in this film where Lohan is believable.

“The film gets into Taylor’s weight issues without really bloating Lohan up that much. There’s a ‘Cleo-Fat-Ra’ headline that makes her cry. Richard Burton (Grant Bowler) says, ‘I will love you even if you get as fat as a hippo.’ Seriously, he says that.

“The best moment, apparently, happens after “Burton dies and the late-era Taylor is unveiled for the first time. The moment Lohan appears in this get-up, it’s impossible not to laugh. It really does look like SNL. She can’t really pull off the young, sexy Liz with much believability, so the mid-’80s look is awkward squared. She gets the news of Burton’s death and faints — a straight drop to the floor — that also somehow seems inadvertently hysterical.

“Stunt casting rarely works. But in Liz & Dick it works by accident or for all the wrong reasons. Lohan as Taylor was a bad idea in the dramatic sense, but it’s pure genius both for marketing and for belly laughs and drinking games.”

The 11.16 N.Y. Times “Sweet Spot” (i.e., A.O. Scott and David Carr chit-chatting and sometimes interviewing Times staffers) is about guilty non-pleasures — art forms and entertainments that you’re supposed to like but you just can’t. And the most persistent non-pleasure of the Times newsroom? Lincoln. Scott admits this in so many words. Here‘s the mp3. See what I mean, Glenn Kenny? DDL is in good shape award-wise, but problems with Times staffers indicate trouble with like-minded Academy members.

Boxoffice.com reports that the official Friday estimate for Breaking Dawn — Part 2 is $71.2 million [with] Summit estimating “in the range of $135 million” for the weekend. That’s almost exactly the same amount earned by The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part I, which took in $138.1 million domestic.

“A lot of people have dropped off the Twilight bandwagon,” Phil Contrino maintains. “The last installment of a major franchise should be the biggest, but that didn’t happen here….it’s htting the base only, and even some of the base has grown up and moved on.,..$71.2 million for the domestic weekend,…worldwide will be the thing.”

Contrino also informed this morning that Silver Linings Playbook is off to something of a slow start — $120,416 in 16 theatres for an average of $7526 on Friday. That’s to be expected with two other popular, well-established adult flicks, Skyfall and Lincoln, competing for ticket dollars, not to mention all the low-information viewers flocking to Breaking Dawn.

The long line of cars clogging the Arclight garage last night was ridiculous. I took one look and said “fuck that” and drove off. Effing Twihards and their boyfriends.

People are traditionally very, very slow to pick up on special-quality-type films before or concurrent with a limited opening. People need big familiar concepts (i.e., franchises, right-down-the-middle genre films, comic-book origins), big names and familiar big-movie elements. I wrote in early September that “serious romcom fans allegedly like stupid and sappy, so maybe the girly-girls who like Kate Hudson movies will hold back just a bit because Silver Linings Playbook is too smart and probing and raggedy-jaggedy, but I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t make at least $100 million.”

An SLP guy expects that the film “will do better than estimated as the word-of-mouth will be super strong. The reviews are gangbusters. The audience will find this movie, even if we have to annoy them all the way to the Academy Awards — we will get them. It’s just too great of a picture to ever ever give up on.”

In his 10.2.12 New Yorker piece called “Whatever Happened To Movies For Grown-ups?“, David Denby asked the following: “Have you ever noticed the faces of people streaming out of a good movie? They are mostly quiet, trancelike, zombie-like. They are trying to hold on to the mood, the image, playing the picture over and over in their heads.”

This is not the vibe I was sensing as I stood in an Arclight lobby the other night (i.e., just before the Anna Karenina premiere screening) as a crowd that had just seen Lincoln walked past me. They were a bit glummed out; their faces seemed a little somber and even haggard. No faint smiles; no looks of calm or serenity. Most seemed to be saying to themselves, “All right, that‘s over…where can we eat? In fact, let’s just get a drink.”

Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino went to a public screening of Lincoln last night, and he says “they weren’t going with it…the mood was ‘why are we watching this on a Friday night? People clearly respect Lincoln but they don’t necessarily love it or are really enjoying it. They’re going to tell their firends that Daniel Day Lewis is good and it’s a good movie…but a lot of people will be seeing it almost out of a sense of duty…like a homework assignment.”

Received last night from HE reader “Beenie“: “I just got out of Silver Linings at [Manhattan’s] Lincoln Square. This is the kind of movie that pressure-tests itself. The writing, acting, editing etc. are sublime, but the little moments, the scenes within scenes, are so far above just about anything I’ve seen all year. There were four moments of spontaneous applause in a packed screening, and applause at the end. I saw Argo at the same theater and the appreciation was great but was 50% less in intensity. Keep up the exceptional advocacy. Movies like Silver Linings deserve it.

In a piece called “Dr. Feelgood — The Case for Silver Linings To Win Best Picture,” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone offers her usual sage analysis along with a dab or two of historical perspective. But her core feelings about David O. Russell‘s antsy-brilliant screwball comedy overpower any pretense at neutrality. Her description of Silver Linings as “the little movie that could, can and does make people feel good” is an old and familiar tactic known as “patronizing with faint praise.”

Stone’s obvious point is that while credit may be due to a highly intelligent, well-crafted piece like Silver Linings, there are few things lamer than a movie that wants to make audiences feel blissed out. Films like this are fine, but they don’t belong at the grown-up’s table. So forget the dark undertows and serious threats that permeate every corner of Silver Linings — the manic mindsets, mental instabilities, emotional woundings, meds, traumas, face-slaps and fistfights. And forget the grounded performances, the skillfully woven ensemble acting and high-throttle narrative drive, Stone is more or less saying. For this is essentially a winky-dinky happy thing with green face paint (i.e., the Philadelphia Eagles version of Clarabelle-the-clown makeup) trying to give you a nice back rub.

And some of you, Stone is implying — the less wise or perceptive, the more emotionallly susceptible, the simplistic of mind, the comfort-seekers, the easy lays — love this confection like you loved your little comfort blanky when you were 18 months old. And that’s fine as far as it goes, she adds. But a film has to do more than just dispense feel-good vibes to win the Best Picture Oscar. If the Silver Linings recipe tickles your fancy, great. But sit at that little fold-up card table over there. The one with the little stools and paper plates and crayons and drawing paper and the little coffee-cup saucers with complimentary dosages of Klonopin and Trazadone.

Understand this: the real lame-itude is dismissing or marginalizing a film because it’s buoyant and screwball-intense and furiously spirited and is all about want and need and dealing with recognizable demons, and is therefore not the equal of more steadily (or more slowly) paced solemn-attitude Best Picture contenders that are about real pain, real loss and are therefore truly serious.

What could be more momentous than patiently and strategically bringing about the end of slavery with Janusz Kaminski‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind-like white light flooding through the windows? What could be more fundamentally rooted and universally appealing than a smart, satisfying caper film about hoodwinking the Iranian Islamics of 1979 and ’80 into believing that a group of American embassy workers are filmmakers? And what can reach deeper into our souls and make us understand what truly matters than a musical about the cruel inequality inflicted upon the suffering poor in early 1800s France?

Stone excerpt: “At the helm of the Silver Linings Oscar effort is Lisa Taback, maybe the most savvy of all Oscar strategists, who knows the Academy better than they know themselves. A film only needs to be perceived as the underdog to make audiences and voters want to root for it because they root so hard for the scrappy characters. This worked last year and it worked the year before and it worked for Slumdog Millionaire on top of that, and it could very well work again this year.

“The best thing that can happen to this movie is to repeat last year and the year before — Oscar pundits, save Fandango’s Dave Karger and Jeff Wells, are underestimating it. If it were number one across the board it would have a harder time being perceived as the scrappy underdog. Slumdog is the model for this type of Oscar win: the little movie that could, can and does makes people feel good.”

What’s the point of “illusionists pulling off bank heists and then rewarding the audiences with money,” as the synopsis goes? Don’t the illusionists have mortgages and monthly car payments? Why share their hard-earned dough with the audience? Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, Mark Ryffalo, Isla Fischer, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Mélanie Laurent, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas costar. There is, I feel, reason for concern about the guiding hand of director Louis Leterrier (Clash of the Titans).