MSN critic and Some Came Running jazzman Glenn Kenny graciously agreed to an Oscar Poker chat earlier today. We got into Identity Thief and obesity issues, but I wanted to keep the mp3 shortish so I cut that stuff out. The talk runs about 45 minutes. It starts with me lamenting how the best films are always crammed into the last four months of the year. It ends with a discussion of the On The Waterfront Bluray and the very fine cinematography of Boris Kaufman.

Oscar Poker chat

Hollywood Elsewhere to Academy’s Lincoln and Life of Pi supporters:

It’s getting really repetitious but what can you do? Argo won at the BAFTA awards today/tonight. Best Picture plus Best Director for Ben Affleck. Last night Chris Terrio‘s Argo screenplay won the Scripter Award. Affleck has also won the DGA award, of course, and Argo has also won the Producer’s Guild Award, the SAG Ensemble award, the Golden Globe award for Best Drama and the Critics Choice award for Best Picture.

With all due respect and compassion, Lincoln and Life of Pi can’t possibly win the Best Picture Oscar. You strongly suspected this before; now you know it for sure. It’s not that they aren’t fine, admirable, well-made films. Clearly they are. But at this stage of the game a vote for Lincoln or Pi is effing wasted. I’m sorry to say this but that’s how it is right now. Voting for Lincoln for Best Picture is like voting for Gus Hall for president back in the ’70s and ’80s. Voting for Life of Pi is like throwing a rock into a mine shaft.

The only question now is “are Academy members content to just drift along and nod out and let Argo take the Best Picture Oscar as everyone expects, or do you have it in you to man up, seize the moment and give it to a film that really (or at least arguably) deserves to be called the very Best Picture of 2012 as opposed to giving it to the most likable or mildly pleasing?”

Yesterday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote that “the biggest group [within the Academy] has gathered around Argo and there isn’t a whole lot anyone can do about it. The Silver Linings voters won’t switch to Lincoln. The Lincoln voters won’t switch to Silver Linings. The Life of Pi voters won’t switch to Lincoln or Silver Linings.”

But why stick to your Lincoln or Pi guns at this stage? To what end? So you can say to yourself “I refused to budge!…I stuck by my principles!”? That and $1.75 will get you a bus ticket. If you want to make a difference you need to stand up, man up, give it up and cast your vote for the one movie that has a real chance of stealing the Best Picture Oscar away from Argo.

I wish I could say that film is Zero Dark Thirty. It ought to be as it happens to be the toughest, ballsiest, smartest, coolest, bravest and most intriguingly adult film of the year. Which in my book makes it the best. But it’s in the same can’t-possibly-win boat as Lincoln and Life of Pi, sorry to say. I wish it were otherwise.

If you don’t want 2012 to go down as the year of the nicely sculpted but likably congenial Argo, you have to grim up, suck it in and give your vote to Silver Linings Playbook.

Which is a beautifully made, superbly written, perfectly acted film that works on its own terms and delivers an unmistakable emotional current that really stands alone among all the Best Picture contenders. It may not be your absolute favorite, but you know it’s an ace-level touchdown, and you know that the David O. Russell metaphor — a man who has grown up and opened his heart and put his demons behind him and found a way to work lovingly and Zen-style with the very best people in the business — is one that we all know about and should applaud.

So that’s it. Give up your darlings and vote for Silver Linings Playbook or Argo will take the Big Prize. Do you want that? Do you really want that? If you don’t, you know what to do. It’s easy. Just do it, and everyone’s mind will be blown. Including, perhaps, your own.

From a 9.14.12 HE piece: “Argo is basically a movie designed to enthrall, charm, amuse, thrill, move and excite. It’s a comfort-blanket movie that basically says ‘this was the problem, and this is how it was solved…and the guys who made it happen deserve our applause and respect…no?’ Yes, they do. But above all Argo aims to please. It skillfully creates suspense elements that probably weren’t that evident when the story actually went down. And it throws in two or three divorced-father-hangs-with-young-son scenes, and some CIA razmatazz and a few ’80s Hollywood cheeseball jokes and basically lathers it all on.

“If I was a high-school teacher and Argo was a term paper, I would give it an 87 or 88. Okay, an 89. It’s obviously good, but it’s not constructed of the kind of material that ages well. It is not a film that exudes paralyzing bravery or greatness. Like many highly regarded Hollywood films, it adheres to familiar classic centrist entertainment values…and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s very pleasing thing, but it’s a fucking caper film. Boil it down and it’s Ocean’s 11 set in Washington, D.C., L.A. and Tehran of 1978 and ’89 without the money or the flip glamorous vibe or the Clooney-Pitt-Damon-Cheadle combustion.”

The BAFTA Awards are over and — are you sitting down? — Argo won Best Picture and Ben Affleck won Best Director. Another shocker came when Lincoln‘s Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor. The one actual surprise (and a very agreeable one) came when Amour‘s Emmanuelle Riva won Best Actress. Amour also won the Best Film Not In The English Language award.

Les Miserables‘ Anne Hathaway won for Best Supporting Actress…again. David O. Russell won for Best Adapted Screenplay…yes! And…whoa, wait…what? Django‘s Quentin Tarantino won for Best Original Screenplay? And Django‘s Christoph Waltz won for Best Supporting Actor? That’s kind of ahead-scratcher given the competish from SLP‘s Robert De Niro and Lincoln‘s Tommy Lee Jones, but whatever.

The next one will really knock you down: Searching For Sugar Man won Best Documentary. Seriously — when hasn’t this won in the Best Doc category so far?

The Best Original Film Score prize went to Skyfall and Thomas Newman…fine. Life of Pi‘s Claudio Mirando won for Best Cinematography. Les Miserables‘ Eve Stewart and Anna Lynch-Robinson won for Best Production Design. Argo‘s William Goldenberg (who also cut Zero Dark Thirty) won for Best Editing.

Nobody cares about the rest of the BAFTA awards. Okay, yes, some probably care but I don’t. Well, I kind of do as I geninely respect all high-end achievements in motion pictures. But I don’t care enough to paste and re-format them down. Sorry.

As a freelance reporter in the early ’90s I was obliged to deliver the tart, punchy, sometimes adversarial attitude that my Entertainment Weekly, N.Y Daily News and L.A. Times employers wanted in their Hollywood news and trend stories. Everything that I felt and knew about the film industry deep down — all the personal quirky passion stuff that I try to put into Hollywood Elsewhere — was not what sold, and so out of necessity I had to occasionally deliver hardcore “gotcha” stories.

This made me less than radiantly popular with some of the publicists at the time, and one result was that I occasionally had problems in getting one-on-one interviews with movie stars. This became a major problem in late 1993 when, as a weekly Sunday columnist for the N.Y. Daily News, I tried to arrange a Tom Hanks interview during the Philadelphia junket. The always-friendly Tristar publicists said they couldn’t fit me in — nothing personal, strictly a scheduling issue — but I knew I’d been zotzed, probably by the publicist who represented Hanks directly.

I tried again with the publicists, assuring them that my piece would be fair and respectful and non-gotcha and that I just wanted to deliver a nice Hanks piece for my Daily News bosses. “Jeffrey, it’s not you,” they repeated. “It’s Tom’s crazy schedule. We’ve had to tell a lot of people no. Please don’t take it personally.”

So I went to Tristar chairman Mike Medavoy, whom I’d spoken to on background for two or three stories and whom I knew slightly in a social context. I told him my situation and asked if he could help. “I’ll get back to you,” he said. A day or two later he called and said, “You’re off the shit list.” I thanked him profusely. “But do the right thing,” he added. I never intended to do the “wrong” thing but I said “yeah, of course, I get it….and thanks very much, Mike.” And so I was allowed to speak to Hanks at the junket and the piece I ran was fine. No big deal.

All to say that knowing and liking the big guys and being liked or at least respected by them helps enormously in this town. I’ve never published this story before, but I’m figuring it’s okay to tell tales after 19 years. And thank you again, Mr. Medavoy. It meant a lot.

During last night’s USC Scripter Awards Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg spoke with former U.S. Rep. Jane Harman about Zero Dark Thirty, and she gave it a ringing endorsement, calling it “magnificent” and saying she’s seen it four times.

This sorta kinda means something with Harman having served on three House committees linked to national security — six years on Armed Services, eight years on Intelligence, four years on Homeland Security. “I know a ton about the material in the movie,” she said. “There are some things [in the film] that are not accurate, but it’s a movie! And, as a movie — at least from this unscientific vantage point — it’s fabulous.”

Feinberg asked if Harman feels ZD30 endorses torture, as the Stalinists have claimed. “I wouldn’t say so,” Harman replied. “I don’t endorse torture, and I was outspoken when I was in Congress about that. I think depicting some things that happened is not unfair.” Did torture produce the information that led the U.S. to the courier who led them to Osama bin Laden? “I think some people think that,” Harman said, “But that is not accurate.”

This last claim of Harman’s differs from what former CIA director Leon Panetta has recently said. On Sunday, 2.3, he told Chuck Todd on Meet The Press that “some of [the information” that led to Osama bin Laden] “came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used” — alluding to torture. “But the fact is, we…we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that.”

But you know what? ZD30 is still too chilly and real-world and ambiguous and there’s no humor to speak of (and certainly no inside-Hollywood humor, which we love) so let’s give the Best Picture award to Argo.

I’ve run variations of this most eagerly waited films of 2013 list a couple of times since December. The count is now at 58, although I’ve deleted some titles and added four or five. But things evolve and clarify as time moves along so it can’t hurt to go over it once more. As usual, please point out any mistakes or anything I’ve missed.

(l. to r.) Bruce Dern, Will Forte, Alexander Payne during filming of Nebraska.

I understand that it’s my lot in life to mostly suffer through the winter and spring, nibbing whatever morsels I can find, and then succumb to numbing fatigue and occasional nausea during the May-July blockbuster season and then, finally — finally! — get a little satisfaction come early September and some serious nutritional soul food in late October, November and December.

It’ll never happen, but I wish the quality stuff could be spread out a bit more. A very small portion of these films will open in the spring and summer and two or three might not come out until 2014 (especially those directed by Terrence Wackadoodle), but if the vast majority are in fact going to open in 2013, the accepted industry practice of only releasing the goodies only between Labor Day and Christmas means that something close to 45 or 50 will have to open within a four-month window, or roughly 12 per month or three per week.

That’s a lot to absorb and process, and that’s not even counting the crap popcorn stuff. So we’ll all be looking at a very full fall-holiday season, and the game will begin six and half months from now. Get some rest.

(1) John Wells‘ August: Osage County.

(2) Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska.

(3) Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity;

(4) George Clooney‘s Monuments Men (a.k.a., cousin of The Train).

(5) Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips.

(6) Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street.

(7) Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day.

(8) Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis.

(9) Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher.

(10) John Lee Hancock‘s Saving Mr. Banks.

(11) Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor.

(12) Spike Lee‘s Oldboy.

(13) Luc Besson‘sMalavita.

(14) Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave.

(15) Baz Luhrman‘s The Great Gatsby (which might have issues).

(16) Spike Jonze‘s Her.

(17) Anton Corbijn‘s A Most Wanted Man, based on a John le Carre novel and costarring Willem Dafoe, Rachel McAdams, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright.

(18 & 19): Terrence Malick‘s two ventures — the Austin-based film formerly known as Lawless (who knows what it’s called now?) plus the relationship vehicle Knight of Cups with Christian Bale and Natalie Portman. It could be that neither will be released until 2014 or 2015. You know Malick. (2)

(20) Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton and Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham, Jude Law, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton, Harvey Keitel, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Mathieu Amalric, Owen Wilson.

(l. to r.) Meryl Streep, Ewan McGregor, Julia Roberts during filming of August: Osage County.

(21) James Gray‘s Nightingale, a New York-based period drama w/ Jeremy Renner, Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix.

(22) Guillame Canet‘s Blood Ties, a 1970s cops-and-criminals drama w/ Marion Cotillard, Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldana, James Caan, Noah Emmerich.

(23) David O. Russell‘s Abscam movie (once known as American Bullshit — starts shooting in March so might not be ready this year…who knows?

(24) Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha (seen & praised at Telluride 2012 — definitely worth its weight).

(25) Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight (a major Sundance 2013 highlight and an all-but-guaranteed Oscar contender for Best Original Screenplay).

(26) Stephen Frears‘ Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight.

(27) Sofia Coppola‘s The Bling Ring.

(28) Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac.

(29) Wong Kar Wai‘s The Grandmaster — I don’t want to know from this film as all Asian combat/martial-arts films will be instantly ignored in this corner from now until the day I die. I will not go there under penalty of death, fines and imprisonment.

(30) Pedro Almodovar‘s I’m So Excited (all things Pedro!),

(31) Joe Swanberg‘s Drinking Buddies (Anna Kendrick, Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson).

(32) Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s The Young and Prodigious Spivet (Judy Davis, Helena Bonham Carter, etc.).

(33) Peter Landesman‘s Parkland.

(34) Diablo Cody‘s untitled film (which was called Lamb of God when I read the script last year).

(35) Brian Helgeland‘s 42 (Jackie Robinson biopic w/ Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford).

(36) Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s Diana (Princess of Wales biopic/love affair with Naomi Watts).

(37) Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past.

(38) John Michael McDonagh‘s Calvary.

(39) Paolo Sorrentino‘s La Grande Bellezza.

(40) Hossein Amini‘s The Two Faces of January.

(41) Francois Ozon‘s Jeune at Jolie (an apparent riff on Luis Bunuel‘s Belle du Jour).

(42) Terry Gilliam‘s The Zero Theorem.

(43) Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine.

(44) Roman Polanski‘s Venus in Fur.

(45) Danny Boyle’s‘s Trance, a crime thriller w/ James McAvoy, Vincent Cassel, Rosario Dawson. (Fox Searchlight, April).

(46) John Crowley‘s Closed Circuit.

(47) Susanne Bier‘s Serena — a period reteaming of Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper.

(48) Errol Morris‘s The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld.

(49) Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale — the big hit of Sundance 2013, acquired by the Weinstein Co.

One could also include Ben Stiller‘s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Only God Forgives, Ron Howard‘s Rush, David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars. Neill Blomkamp‘s Elysium, Joseph Kosinski‘s Oblivion, Robert Schwentke‘s R.I.P.D., Sam Raimi‘s Oz: The Great and Powerful and Guillermo del Toro‘s Pacific Rim (9).