Mark Caro‘s Os-Caro Quiz has been kicking Oscar buffs’ asses for 23 years. I went through it and was irked by all the research I had to do . I like movie quizzes that make me feel like I know everything. This made me feel like I don’t know enough. It vaguely depressed me but not really.

Scott Feinberg‘s Hollywood Reporter interview with Best Actress nominee Emmanuelle Riva has prompted a fresh assessment. I’m as moved by her acting in Amour as the next guy and I respect her body of work. I’ve always felt mesmerized by her erotic aura in Alain Resnais‘s Hiroshima Mon Amour, and I love the idea of an 85 year-old trooper not only being nominated but being spoken of as a possible winner. That, at least, would be a surprise in a ceremony that seems all too predictable right now.

But someone has to speak candidly about Riva’s acting in Amour. She gives a fine, unvarnished, honest-feeling performance, but what is it really? She’s playing a woman of her age going through — sadly, infuriatingly — what almost every 80-something or 90-something person goes through, and therefore in a certain sense she’s just skillfully and honestly delivering what she knows. Which is a bold and true thing. I just don’t find it levitational. To me her performance is a 7.5 or an 8.

What her character, Anne, goes through in Amour naturally invites profound sympathy (we all feel for our parents and grandparents going through similar trials) but Riva’s task is basically about conveying resignation and melancholia and, toward the end, pain, anger, humiliation and resolve.

Boil it down and praise for her performance is essentially a response to the fact that we all personally relate in this or that way, and the likely fact that Riva clearly knows whereof she acts and may quite possibly “be” Anne in this or that respect. (Though I hope not too much.)

I’m not trying to diminish her performance. It’s quite strong and impossible to dismiss. I’m just assessing it from a realistic perspective.

My somewhat hazy recollection of Howard Zieff‘s Hearts of the West (’75) is that (a) it was overly broad, obviously an attempt to engage the rubes, (b) its reliance on crude, on-the-nose behavior diminished the realism and dignity of the characters, and (c) I didn’t believe for one second that Jeff Bridges was any kind of writer — he struck me as an actor with insufficient verbal skills and not much education.

I’m mentioning this because Hearts of the West is playing at a currently running Film Comment film series, which is profiled in a 2.17 piece by N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis.

“Thanks to word leaking out of the New York WGA East show, anyone [at LA’s WGA award ceremony] with a Blackberry or iPhone knew that Argo and Zero Dark Thirty won their respective Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay awards long before the actual winners in Los Angeles even knew,” Deadline‘s Pete Hammond wrote last night. “The announcement of Argo‘s win came fully an hour and a half [before the LA announcement].

“It seems a shame that an awards ceremony has to be run like this,” Hammond laments. “Can’t we keep it a secret until the envelopes are opened on both coasts? C’mon, this is the social media age. Stuff leaks out fast. Let’s fix it.”

Obviously the WGA West and WGA East officers need to coordinate their ceremonies accordingly. But that was apparent with the advent of cell phones. The problem is either the WGA East announcing too early or the WGA West announcing too late. (Or both.) Either way it suggests that WGA honchos on both coasts share the same cluelessness about social media that currently plagues Republican bigwigs, as Robert Draper‘s 2.14 N.Y. Times Magazine article points out.

Going out on a limb, Hammond writes that Argo‘s Best Adapted Screenplay prize “pretty much seals the deal for this film” winning big at the Oscars. “The WGA votes were all in by Friday January 25th, just before the PGA and SAG coronations of Argo were announced…with Golden Globes, Critics Choice Movie Awards, PGA, DGA, SAG, BAFTA and now WGA major wins Argo is in just about as commanding a position as any film could possibly be on the cusp of marching into the Academy Awards.”

Hammond will never say it, but the “sympathy for snubbed Ben Affleck” factor that produced surprise and exhilaration following Argo‘s BFCA/Critics Choice and Golden Globe wins has deflated into a kind of slumbering, heavy-lidded depression.

We all want something electric to happen at the Oscars, the prime example being the surprise wins by The Pianist at the end of the 2003 Oscar ceremony. But that possibility is now almost completely out the window. Where is the exhilaration in Ang Lee winning Best Director? The only possible jolt would be Robert DeNiro overcoming the apparent advantage held by Lincoln‘s Tommy Lee Jones following his SAG win by taking the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

Hammond pooh-pohs Mark Boal’s WGA Original Screenplay win for Zero Dark Thirty, as a harbinger of Oscar success “since WGA rules banned Oscar-nominated scripts like Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained and Michael Haneke‘s Amour, both front-running Oscar entries. This is still a wide open race at the Academy Awards but the WGA imprimatur gives Boal a nice boost.”

If Amour wins the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, okay….c’est la vie. But a Tarantino/Django win would be, from my perspective, appalling.

Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty screenplay has won the Writers Guild of America’s award for Best Original Screenplay. This may or may not have been intended as a rebuke to the Stalinists who tried to take ZD30 down with charges that Boal and Kathryn Bigelow‘s film endorses torture, but it feels like one from this corner. This is the kind of recognition that this film needed and richly deserved. Congrats to Biggy-Boal, Megan Ellison and everyone else who gave their all to this film. Presumably this paves the way for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar win.

Earlier: Chris Terrio‘s Argo screenplay won the WGA’s Best Adapted Screenplay award. Jesus, this is boring. In the wake of this Bilge Ebiri tweeted the following: “Congrats, Hollywood award-givers. In a year with so many amazing films, you’ve managed to form a consensus around the merely okay yet again.” Kris Tapley replies: “It’s so silly to expect otherwise. ‘Generally agreeable’ wins in a competition where so many are polled.”

On 11.15.12, The Independent‘s Anthony Quinn wrote the following: “A film called Amour sounds like a date movie, and I suppose Michael Haneke‘s drama could be one — but only if it were your very last date on earth.” After Sasha Stone told him that Amour was her idea of a date movie, Jett took his girlfriend, Caitlin, to see it. You can imagine the effect it had.
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I have three…no, four responses to “The Feel of the Year,” Jon Weisman‘s 2.15 Variety piece about the Oscar-season obsessions of myself and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.

One, thanks to Weisman for the attention. He describes me as an impassioned neurotic, but it’s nice to be described.

Two, he’s sidestepping a fundamental fact, which is that I file five or six times daily — riffs, rants, reviews (original or counter-punch), personal-foible pieces, photos, nostalgia, Bluray or DVD reviews, aspect-ratio and grainstorm commentary. This is part literary composition, part copy-spitball-and-reshuffle, and part jazz. I go with whatever’s happening at the moment, which often includes whatever’s been posted that particular day or whatever has ignited in my head. I obviously don’t want to bore anyone, but if I were to stop and say “wait, hold on…didn’t I post something vaguely similar to this six or 20 days ago?,” the process would grind to a halt. It’s all part of the stream. In this sense nothing is “fresh” and yet everything is. If you meet a friend at a local diner for breakfast every Friday morning, 52 weeks a year, he/she is going to say familiar things, over and over. You’re going to get used to their patter. Now, imagine if you had breakfast with this person every damn morning.

Three, Weisman says I’ve written that “there’s something wrong with you if you don’t share [my] view on a given film. At Hollywood Elsewhere, it never seemed possible to simply like Silver Linings, as I did — if you didn’t love it, you might as well have hated it. If you found elements too expository or the ending to be too tidy or what have you — if you didn’t think it was the absolute best — you not only were anti-cinema, you were life-challenged.” If I’ve conveyed this, I apologize for throwing too many logs in the fire. I have never asserted the absurd view that people have to feel exactly the same way about SLP as myself. Because it’s not people who disagree with me that I’ve taken to task. It’s the outright haters who’ve sought to dismiss SLP as romcom fluff or an outright failure — ludicrous. Haters are not figments of my imagination. It’s also that I tell myself that I have a modest ability to peer into the hidden emotional folds and psychological fissures of certain commenters, and from this I can sense when their judgments are impulsive, slapdash and/or less than fully considered. Do I make mistakes or overplay my hand from time to time? Yeah. But I trust my instincts.

Fourth and finally, Weisman writes that “the cumulative effect of the writing of Stone and Wells gives the impression that they believe there’s an objective leader in a subjective field — even beyond what the 6,000 members of the Academy come to decide. Ultimately, that nagged me.” He’s right in one sense and I take his criticism as valid…as far as it goes. Everything is subjective. Nonetheless, I can hear a certain ringing of a bell when a movie is really doing it right in a classic or eternal way. I’ve heard it over decades, and I’ve come to trust that sound. In other words, I’m saying that I hear movie “voices” in a non-religious, non-denominational Joan of Arc sense. Go ahead and make fun, but I believe in those omens and signals.

The Lincoln accuracy issue about Connecticut’s 13th Amendment voting was first raised by Connecticut Rep. Joe Courtney on Tuesday, 2.5. I ran my first riff on 2.6 and summarized Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner‘s response on Friday, 2.8. Today N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd threw in her two cents, and she’s pretty much in Courtney’s corner.

She also includes an account of the script-editing process in which Kushner says — naturally, no surprise — that it was Spielberg who decided to “leave the scene [in which two Connecticut reps vote nay on the 13th Amendment] unchanged.” And she quotes Kushner as saying that the Connecticut mistake won’t be corrected on the Lincoln Bluray/DVD. Don’t like it? Tough.

A key concern of Spielberg and Kushner was to convey that the vote for the 13th Amendment, which happened in the House of Representatives chamber on January 31, 1865, was a very close one. A nail-biter. And yet, As Dowd reminds, history “shows that the first two votes cast were ‘Nays’ by Democratic congressmen from Illinois, Lincoln’s own state. Wasn’t that enough to show the tension?”

“Harold Holzer, a Lincoln historian attached to the film, pointed out the mistake to Spielberg and Kushner, telling them that voting in those days was done alphabetically by lawmaker.

“But Kushner said the director left the scene unchanged because it gave the audience ‘place holders,’ and it was ‘a rhythmic device‘ that was easier to follow than ‘a sea of names.’ They gave fake names to the Connecticut legislators, who were, he said, ‘not significant players.’

“Yet The Wall Street Journal noted, ‘The actual Connecticut representatives at the time braved political attacks and personal hardships to support the 13th Amendment.” One, the New London Republican Augustus Brandegee, was a respected abolitionist and a friend of Lincoln. The other, the New Haven Democrat James English, considered slavery ‘a monstrous injustice’ and left his ill wife to vote. When he said ‘Aye,’ applause began and the tide turned.

“I’m a princess-and-the-pea on this issue,” Dowd writes, “but I think Spielberg should refilm the scene or dub in ‘Illinois’ for ‘Connecticut’ before he sends out his DVDs and leaves students everywhere thinking the Nutmeg State is nutty.

“Kushner says that won’t happen, because this is a ‘made-up issue’ and a matter of ‘principle.’ But as Congressman Courtney notes: ‘It was Lincoln who said [that] truth is generally the best vindication against slander.'”

I should have mentioned earlier that Hollywood’s Arena Cinema (1625 No. Las Palmas, just south of Hollywood Blvd.) is screening Michael Apted‘s 56 Up twice today — Saturday, 2.16, at 5 and 7:45 pm. After the first screening Richard Botto will moderate a discussion with Apted.

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning “is the most exceptional movie of 2012 in part because it has no right to be as good as it is,” writes Paris Review‘s Nick Antosca. “I begrudge nothing to films like Silver Linings Playbook and Django Unchained (which I loved and saw three times) when I say that, given their extraordinary pedigrees and healthy budgets, they had at least a fair shot at being excellent.

“On the other hand, all [director] John Hyams had to do was get Jean Claude van Damme and Dolph Lundgren in the same place at the same time and string together a few coherent fight scenes, and he would have exceeded expectations. Yet somehow he made a strange, haunting, sometimes even beautiful odyssey that lingered with me more than any American movie in recent memory.

“Despite a few surprised critical notices (like this and this), it was too disreputable to be talked about during awards season, but that’s okay. Anything this unusual deserves its own conversation.”

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, which opened on 11.30.12, has a 50% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

A summary by N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith: “An intensity of purpose and a patient, suspenseful directing style make the B-movie Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning superior to most of the big-budget action films I’ve seen lately.”