“To be a consistently strong Oscar prognosticator — someone like Fandango’s Dave Karger, Deadline’s Pete Hammond, The Wrap’s Steve Pond, InContention’s Kris Tapley or me — you have to watch everything (dozens if not hundreds of contending films), know your history (familiarizing yourself with lots of older movies and the dynamics of past Oscar races), show up everywhere (there are rubber-chicken dinners and awards ceremonies almost every week), build relationships (with talent, awards strategists, publicists, voters) and know what and who is and isn’t worth factoring into your projections. It’s a full-time job, though it doesn’t look as if ESPN’s Nate Silver, with his expanding empire, intends to treat it as such.” — Hollywood Reporter Oscar-season columnist Scott Feinberg in 7.22 piece.

On 2.9.13 I posted a review of Peter Landesman‘s script of Parkland (Open Road, sometime in mid November). With Landesman’s film apparently confirmed to play the 2013 Toronto Film Festival (and with Hurt Locker dp Barry Ackroyd handling the photography), here are excerpts from my six-month-old assessment. My basic opinion is that the script is “a sturdy, convincing, well-structured effort.”

I either knew or half-suspected that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity, John Wells‘ August: Osage County, Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, Justin Chadwick‘s Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Bill Condon‘s The Fifth Estate, Ron Howard‘s Rush, Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyer’s Club and Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day would turn up at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival. I didn’t predict this, of course, but I was secretly presuming. And yet for whatever reason I never had it in my head that Peter Landesman‘s Parkland (script reviewed by yours truly on 2.9.13) would be shown there. But it will be apparently.

I just want to be cool, is all. I just want to be free. I just want to think and breathe and speed-walk and imagine for myself. And I’m just saying in part that I agree with Sasha Stone that very few people are going to call the forthcoming Lee Daniels’ film about a White House butler who served under seven presidents (which the Weinstein Co. will release on 8.16)….very few people outside of A.O. Scott and the trade critics are going to reverently and straight-facedly call it Lee Daniels’ The Butler. They’re going to call it The Butler. But I like The Bee better, you see. No biggie is I’m all alone on this, but if those who feel as I do can clap your hands, we can all call it The Bee…and before you know it, that’s what it’ll be.

“In a way…the special effects is just the way of the process. The film itself is not ‘a special effects film.’ In many ways it’s a film that required so many special effects just to make it look like a Discovery channel documentary.” – Gravity director Alfonso Cuaron speaking last weekend to a Fandango interviewer. This quote also: “Like a ballerina who has to be so precise so she can not think about [technique] and just convey emotion…? This was pretty much what [Sandra Bullock] was required to do.”

In the view of Variety‘s Peter Debruge, James Mangold‘s The Wolverine (which I’ll be seeing today at 3 pm) is “an entertaining and surprisingly existential digression from [the] usual X-Men exploits” of the buffed-up, mutton-chopped, “adamantium-reinforced” superhero.