This morning I attended a Grauman’s Chinese handprint ceremony for Silver Linings Playbook costar and Best Supporting Actor nominee Robert De Niro. Bobby D is doing all he can to out-promote his main competitor, Lincoln‘s Tommy Lee Jones. (TLJ snagged SAG’s Best Supporting Actor award so watch out.) De Niro’s Analyze This costar Billy Crystal and SLP director-writer David O. Russell offered gracious compliments, and Fandango’s Dave Karger was the emcee.

“Heeyyyy! Wet gunk on my hands! Fuck am I doing here?” Robert De Niro at this morning’s TCL Chinese handprint ceremony — Monday, 2.4, 10:10 am.

De Niro is doing a q & a at Santa Monica’s Aero tonight, and I’ll be at that event also.

Fandango’s Dave Karger deliveriing introductory remarks.

(l to r.) Crystal, DeNiro, DeNiro’s wife Grace Hightower, Silver Linings Playbook director-writer David O. Russell.

Between De Niro’s joke about how “Joe Pesci always told me I’d end up with my feet in cement” and the presence of TCL Chinese co-owners Elie Samaha and Don Kushner, who exude the same kind of flashy ne’er-do-well vibe as Mickey Cohen or Bugsy Siegel but without the class, I was thinking of an old Lenny Bruce routine:

New Jersey guy #1: Say, what happened to your partner?
New Jersey guy #2: He drowned.
New Jersey guy #1: What, in February?
New Jersey guy #2: Yeah.
New Jersey guy #1: What, he couldn’t swim?
New Jersey guy #2: Nah, he couldn’t get out of the car.

The DGA Best Director award going last night to Argo‘s Ben Affleck makes it a 99% certainty that Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln won’t win the Best Picture Oscar. Now that we know the score, I’d like to openly ask all the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby prognosticators who stuck with Lincoln all through December and especially January a simple question: why? What tea leaves told you that there was enough serious passion out there to push this well written, ploddingly paced, passionately performed grandfather clock of a movie into the winner’s circle?

We now know that the passion was never there, not really. And yet for weeks Team Lincoln told us over and over again “it’s the likeliest winner, what other film has the stature?, it has to happen, it’s Spielberg’s best in years, it’s too good a film, it’s about a legendary U.S. President, it’s made well over $100 million” and so on. Even after those Argo wins at the BFCA, Golden Globes and the PGA and especially after Bill Clinton‘s Lincoln plug at the Golden Globes suggested to some of us that the hand had been overplayed, a lot of people still held fast. Why? What vibrations from what insect antennae told you to stick? I’m honestly curious.

Yes, I had Lincoln down as my own Best Picture prediction for a while but I did so with resignation and depression. From the beginning I saw Lincoln as a lazy default choice. It was just sitting there like a lump of mashed potatoes. I couldn’t wait to dump it after sensing a change in the wind.

My pet theory: The downfall of Zero Dark Thirty sealed Lincoln‘s fate. If ZD30 hadn’t been torpedoed by the Stalinists and had held on the strength it had in early December with all the critics awards, it would have taken a lot of support away from Argo, which after all is a more congenial and entertaining version of the same basic story (i.e., a brilliant CIA maverick bucks the bureaucratic tide in order to push through a secret, risky-seeming CIA operation in the Middle East that involves hoodwinking Islamic militants and which ends in delicious success). The Argo and ZD30 votes might have split the faction that is now voting entirely for Argo, and Lincoln might have inched ahead and become the favorite…maybe.

Thoughts?

Dr. Svet Atanasov‘s review of the triple-format On The Waterfront Bluray (Criterion, 2.19) went up yesterday on Bluray.com. The praise is abundant — “simply fantastic…flawless contrast …overwhelmingly beautiful blacks and whites…absolutely no traces of problematic lab tinkering.” But he doesn’t summarize the content of “On the Aspect Ratio,” a six-minute essay that explains why Criterion went with three aspect ratios. One of their reasons, I’m fairly certain, was to placate people like me.

Bluray.com screen capture of white-glove scene.

1.66, or 1.67 if you believe Atanasov.

1.85

If you’re not like me (i.e., not invested in “boxy is beautiful” headroom), take a look at the above screen captures and explain to me how it’s better to chop Marlon Brando‘s knees off and to kill the smoggy sky above the peak roofs and chimneys in the background. There really, really has to be something wrong with you to say “yes, that’s good, cut off those knees and fuck the sky.”

Dr. Svet reports that Criterion’s 1.66 version is actually 1.67…what? Why not 1.65, guys? Why not 1.58? Why not 1.50? Create your own personal aspect ratio! Is Atanasov wrong or is Criterion getting perverse? The middle-ground a.r. should be 1.66, period.

The final big smackeroo of the 2013 Santa Barbara Film Festival was Roger Durling‘s on-stage encounter with guaranteed Best Actress Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence. Durling is an open-hearted admirer of the 22 year-old actress and offered much effusive praise, but this tends to make Lawrence glaze over a bit. (What can you say when someone says you’re the greatest? “Yeah, I guess I am”?) But he was knowledgable and polite and gentle with her, and it was all to the good.

Silver Linings Playbook star Jennifer Lawrence, Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling during last night’s tribute — Saturday, 2.2, 8:55 pm.

Lawrence spoke about how she likes to keep her acting fresh and instinctual. She doesn’t like to prepare too much and waits until the day of a scene to memorize her lines.

Her performance as Tiffany in Silver Linings Playbook shows she has great hot-flash instincts and loads of intense primal energy. But — let’ s be honest — this didn’t come through in a vivid and unmissable way until she hooked up with the mesmerizing David O. Russell.

Last night’s message, in short, is that Lawrence is a very fine actress, but only in the right film and under the right director is she wowser. Durling called her the bee’s knees. What he meant was “under Russell she was.”

She was tough and planted — a paragon of backwoods backbone — in Debra Granik‘s Winter’s Bone, and blazingly alive and vulnerable and sometimes gobsmack in SLP, but her other performances (The Beaver, Burning Plain, Like Crazy, X-Men) are just okay — agreeable, sufficient — by contrast.

The clips of Hunger Games that were shown last night reminded me what a lousy film it is, and what a painfully tedious director Gary Ross can be with average or sub-average material, especially when you compare Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen with Tiffany and what Russell got from her.

For me, the best part of the tribute was a collection of clips (which Durling personally assembled) that showed how Lawrence is cut from the same cloth as Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and I forget who else. Everyone got it. Lawrence’s Tiffany belongs to a long tradition of spunk.

Watch this clip for Russell’s imitation of Robert De Niro‘s reaction to Lawrence after they performed their first scene together:

You can call them “homeless” if you want, but to me they’re bums. Bums and rummies. And they’re all over downtown Santa Barbara and squatting on State Street in particular, and a lot of them have dogs. Those poor sad dogs. What a life. Listen to me — I’m almost ready to go out and give a buck or two to the next vagrant-with-a-dog that I see. I don’t give a hoot about bums but I feel genuine sympathy for the dogs…and the bums know that, of course.

Santa Barbara is one of the big bum meccas of Southern California. There are bum hang-outs in the downtown area, bum flophouses. This is what a tolerant, politically correct culture has to accept and put up with. I don’t flinch at bums in Manhattan where you expect to see a little squalor, but bums lying around in groups of two, three and four on State Street with all that affluence and Spanish architecture in the background — somehow that feels like a different deal. There are no bums in Tokyo or Hanoi, or none that I noticed. But boy, do they have them here.

Ben Affleck‘s win at tonight’s DGA Awards will be the last clean-up operation, the final vanquishing. Those die-hard Lincoln supporters, huddling by campfires, can hear the tramp-tramp of General Santa Anna’s army. Laurence Olivier to Tony Curtis: “The night passes slowly…doesn’t it, Antoninus?”

Saturday morning results of DGA poll posted by Brad Brevet’s Rope of Silicon.

If you had told me during last September’s Telluride Film Festival that Argo would win the Best Picture Oscar like the army of Alexander the Great conquering Persia, and that Affleck would ride into the conquered city on a white horse with rose petals thrown at his feet, I would say “what…? It’s a satisfying, well-made film as far as it goes but come on…this can’t be the conquering film of 2012. It’s not artful or majesterial enough.” But it is. This is what it’s come to. This is who and what we are. And all because Affleck was snubbed as a Best Director nominee by the Academy.

Straightforward, back-to-basics rock ‘n’ roll — no bullshit lyrics, unaffected delivery + guitar, bass and drums. Lou Reed‘s Dirty Boulevard (off the 1989 New York album) was one of the songs that got me high and sustained me through many, many car trips in the ’90s. The kids and I used to sing it together.

Last night I watched the first two episodes of David Fincher and Kevin Spacey‘s House of Cards on Netflix, or more specifically on my iPad3 as I laid flat-ass on a big bed in a Santa Barbara hotel room. I found it familiar but pleasurable like a good juicy steak or my favorite flavor of popsicle. Was I staggered by it? Was I doing cartwheels in the hotel hallway? Awe-struck, open-mouthed? No, but I felt taken care of. It was like sinking into a womb with a drink in my hand, and I don’t drink.

Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright in David Fincher’s House of Cards.

If I was partly or mostly satisfied, my plan would be to watch the remaining 11 episodes of Season #1 on a piecemeal, catch-as-catch-can basis. But I intend to binge when I return to L.A. tomorrow afternoon. I want all of it, all of it, not just some of it but all of it.

House of Cards is about Spacey’s Frank Underwood, the House Minority Whip, going on a revenge tear after a promise that he’ll be appointed Secretary of State is reneged upon by a new U.S. President. It’s essentially Richard III — reptilian ruthlessness, breaking-the-fourth-wall asides, etc. — in our very own Washington, D.C. Subtle maneuvers, inflicting pain and really loving it. This is default Spacey, what he’s best at, yah-yah.

Honestly? I didn’t really believe that Rep. Underwood would devote himself this fully to destroying two nominated cabinet members. (Lord knows what he’ll do in episodes #3 to #13.) Because revenge is for suckers. What goes around eventually comes around and sooner or later the aroma of vengeance leaks out. So if F.U.’s agenda is sure to be discovered (as he surely realizes deep down) why go there in the first place?

Simple — because it’s fun for us, sitting out there in Netflix-land, to watch F.U. stick the knife in time and again, and then wink as he slides it back into the sheath. Jaded, darkly amused, half-bored. But c’mon…this kind of behavior is fairly whacked, and even on a sociopathic level it argues with the way things actually work out there.

The hunchbacked Richard III — bitter, self-loathing, barked at by dogs — gave himself to evil because he had no other pleasures. Better a king in hell than a peasant in heaven. But Rep. Underwood has a high position, wealth, power and a 40ish, moderately hot Lady Macbeth-type wife (Robin Wright)…just not enough to satisfy him at this stage in his life, or so he tells himself.

The bottom line is that Spacey’s Machiavellian monster is amusing to watch but you can’t root for the guy, not really, so watching House of Cards becomes an arm’s length, heh-heh experience. No investment or empathy. But that’s okay.

I had a big white pillow sitting on my chest with the iPad 3 resting on it, and I was just pigging out, man. Swimming in that shit. But I think I’ll catch the rest of the series on my 50-inch Vizio. Because it bothers me to keep holding the fucking thing upright with my fingers.

Note: The last line in the second paragraph is from a Lou Reed song.

Hollywood Elsewhere to Dylan Wells, director-writer of this ad: “I know it’s a plug for Digilant Do Better Advertising. I’m not entirely sure what’s being said, but IT DOESN’T MATTER because the ad is socially critical. It’s saying that the ad world (or the world at large) is filled with faceless boxhead drones, and Digilant is offering a possibly liberating alternative. What matters is that it’s stylistically distinctive in a William S. Burroughs-ian vein. Very clever. Really cool.”

HE prediction: Every last Oscar hotshot predicting a Lincoln Best Picture win at the Oscars — Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, L.A. Times contributor Mark Olsen, Toronto Star‘s Pete Howell and MCN’s David Poland — will fold and turn tail after Argo‘s Ben Affleck wins the top Directors Guild award tomorrow night.

Spielberg blew it with the Clinton endorsement at the Golden Globes. He overplayed his hand and exposed his hunger. That was the thing that tore it.