Dustin Hoffman‘s Quartet (12.28) is running at 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve been invited to but have missed two or three screenings. And I have the screener on my shelf and I haven’t popped it in. This procrastination ends tonight. I’m sorry for being a dilletante.

“I agree with you that Life of Pi did a beautiful job with 3-D, but after the first 10 minutes, I actually was no longer interested in the 3-D. It didn’t make a bit of difference to me whether it was in 2-D or 3-D. After the first few minutes, I was just annoyed to have glasses on and the decreased luminosity of the screen.” — Francis Coppola speaking to MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz in 12.3 interview.

Earlier today the occasionally brilliant Joe Bomowski wrote the following: “I’ve seen a lot of HE commenters complain about the ‘rom-com cliches’ in the third act of Silver Linings Playbook. So what exactly path would you maestros wish upon it? I think it fully earns that feel-good redemption at the end. It’s sort of what makes the movie. By the time Cooper and Lawrence are circling the dance floor and all the players are there for it, you’re watching basically 1991 Martin Scorsese directing a pretty much perfect character-based romantic comedy.

“But you guys are out there booing and going ‘this is too conventional, this is too easy’? What would be better? Cooper goes insane and slaughters everybody? Lawrence blows that guy at the bar and Cooper kills himself and a big Gaspar Noe title that says ‘FUCK CAPITALISM’ flashes on screen in black-on-white font?

“Why can’t it be a little conventional or feel-good and STILL WORK? I’m sure all you naysayers would still moon over every frantic Howard Hawks screwball with a happy ending and the snappy guy getting the tough dame. What’s with this criteria that post-1981, and more specifically, post-‘negative blog commenter turning 27,’ that absolutely anything romantic or un-cynical or ‘happy’ is automatically weak or bad or bullshit?”

Wells afterthought: There’s a correlation, I suspect, between SLP hate and the lonely-guy or homely-guy lifestyle. Those who haven’t experienced wonderful luck or exceptional fortune in the romantic realm…well, they might be having a slightly tougher time with this kind of film. I myself have known mostly disappointment and frustation and some heartbreak but I remember the lucky days, the randy days & the days of wine and roses and occasional amazement, so I have a place in my head for it. Or my heart, rather. I know, I know — why, then, is Joe Bomowski, the king of L.A. pain, an SLP fan? Because life is full of exceptions and there are no hard and fast rules that apply all the way around the track. But the general blowsy rule is that people who have trouble getting laid are more likely to be against SLP than people who are getting it regularly or score occasionally and are cool with this.

You’ll get no argument from me about the New York Film Critics Circle giving Zero Dark Thirty their Best Picture award; ditto ZDT‘s Kathryn Bigelow winning Best Director. My support of ZDT (which I saw for the second time last night) is as ardent as my love affair with Silver Linings Playbook, and I’m delighted that all the lightweights who’ve been telling me ZDT is too cold and not audience-friendly enough are now going “hmmm, what are we not seeing….is it because we’re too shallow?”

On top of which I predicted the ZDT win four days ago.

There’s absolutely no basis for any complaint about Lincoln‘s Daniel Day Lewis winning the Best Actor trophy. I said from the beginning that despite that Matthew Modine-imitating-Walter Brennan voice, he nails Abe pretty damn well. And yes, I’m feeling a small measure of comfort from the fact that Lincoln has received no Best Picture momentum from this morning’s voting, and that Steven Spielberg wasn’t named Best Director.

Rachel Weisz winning the NYFCC’s Best Actress award for her tragic infidel performance in Deep Blue Sea is, I’m sorry, a seriously odd call. To paraphrase a Spencer Tracy line in Judgment at Nuremberg, “You’re going to have to explain why they gave this award to Rachel Weisz…you’re going to have to explain this very carefully.”

My own Weisz explanation: On its own terms Weisz’s performance in this murky, submerged drama is quite sad and affecting as far as it goes, but The Deep Blue Sea is something I just wanted to escape from. I’ve felt all along that Terrence Davies‘ film is far too dreary and fatalistic. It’s covered in a kind of amber, candle-lit ’50s murk, as if there wasn’t enough electricity to go around in post war Britain, and this seems to work as a visual metaphor for doldrums and social imprisonment. And the fact that Weisz’s character, a socially respectable married woman in her late 30s or early 40s, has an affair with an unstable military guy with a hair-trigger temper (Tom Hiddleston) lessens sympathy and compassion for her character as you ask yourself. “Why did this basically decent woman choose such a flaming asshole to have an affair with?” So it’s not a matter of Weisz not giving a highly commendable performance. She’s never not affecting or skillful. It’s the pathetic character she’s playing. A vote for a performance is never just a vote for a performance — you’re also voting for how much you identify with a character or recognize him/her in yourself. And so when I heard the news this morning it was like “what the eff?”

Sally Field winning for Best Supporting Actress seems like a huge slapdown for Les Miserables. The consensus over the last week and or so has been that no matter what happens to Tom Hooper‘s film award-wise or commercially, Anne Hathaway — who gives the one Les Miz performance that absolutely everyone has been knocked out by or at least greatly admires — will surely win Best Supporting Actress honors from critics and industry groups alike. But she didn’t today. That means something.

I’m figuring that the NYFCC reaction to Les Miz is so negative or mixed that the backwash surged into the room and drowned the Hathaway support in its crib. How else to explain the Field win? She was fine as the troubled Mary Todd Lincoln — angry, edgy, seething — but I didn’t come out of Lincoln going “holy bejeesus, Sally Field was really amazing!” I came out going “I have to admit that DDL really nailed it and so did Tommy Lee Jones.”

Hooray for Matthew McConaughey winning Best Supporting Actor for his performances in Magic Mike and Bernie.

Do I expect that Academy members will now open themselves up a bit more to Zero Dark Thirty or at least not be so quick to dismiss it? Naaah. They’re mules for the most part, and they’re gonna vote for the movies that talk to them and make them feel good, and to hell with the judgment of history. Do you think all the dead Academy members who voted for Around The World in Eighty Days as Best Picture in early ’57 care that this decision is now regarded as one of the most shameful in the history of world culture? Of couse not. They’re either floating around with angel wings in heaven or roasting on spits down in hell. Either way they don’t care. They can’t.

The bottom line is that the Academy Awards are all about serving the emotional needs and catering to the commercial interests of the community, or a lowest-common-denominator representation of same. And that’s why Silver Linings Playbook, which is easily as accomplished in its own way as Zero Dark Thirty or Lincoln or The Master or Les Miserables are in theirs, will surge with the HFPA and particularly with the Academy, as least as far as nominations are concerned. Oh, wait…it hasn’t taken off the way it should have with Joe & Jane Popcorn. I forgot about that.

SLP is the only Best Picture contender that makes you feel good if not euphoric at the end (unless, of course, you’re one of the haters), and is brilliantly doled out to boot.

Congrats also to Tony Kushner winning the Best Screenplay award for Lincoln, and to Amour for wining Best Foreign Language Film, and to Frankenweenie for winning the Best Animated Feature trophy, and to Greig Fraser for winning the Best Cinematography award for Zero Dark Thirty.

As of 8:30 am Pacific the New York Film Critics Circle had given its Best Documentary prize to The Central Park Five, a fine, sturdy, New York-centric doc that nonetheless bothered me for reasons I’ve explained. (No need to dredge it all up again.) And the Best First Film award went to David France‘s How To Survive a Plague. I’m off to a 9 am appointment and won’t be free until 11 am.

It would appear that JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek: Into Darkness (Paramount, 5.17.13) is enveloped in some kind of apocalyptic wasteland along with a time travel flourish of some kind. It would therefore appear that things are going to be grim, grim, grim all over due to “an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization,” leading Captain Kirk to “lead a manhunt into a war-zone world to capture a one-man weapon of mass destruction,” etc.

Paramount’s The Guilt Trip (12.19), a road comedy about a 60ish widowed Jewish mom (Barbra Streisand) and her downbeat inventor son (Seth Rogen), was snuck Sunday afternoon at the AMC Century City. No reviews until later but it wasn’t half bad — adult laughs, low-key tone, character-driven, no vulgarity, not classic but likable and entertaining and occasionally heartfelt. Pic was exec produced by Rogen and Streisand, directed by Anne Fletcher (The Proposal) and written by Dan Fogelman.

Rogen and Streisand showed up after the screening and did a live q & a that was close-circuited to other theatres. The crowd was packed with impassioned, eager-beaver fans of Streisand’s albums and particularly of Yentl.

Rogen plays an inventor, Andy Brewster, who’s trying to sell a natural-elements cleaner to the big chains without much success. When he discovers that the beloved ex-boyfriend of his widowed mom, Joyce (Barbra Streisand), is living and working in San Francisco, he invites her to join him on a cross-country trip as he tries to sell his cleaner (which has a really hard-to-remember name that kinda sounds like Science Cleaner but is actually Scioclean or something like that) so they can wind up in San Fran and reunited with the old boyfriend. And yet the way Joyce nags and nudges pisses Andy off and puts him in a bad mood half the time.

Silver Linings Playbook helmer David O. Russell is the possible weak sister among the projected Best Director Oscar nominees? I really, really don’t think so despite Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan having concluded that Ben Affleck, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hooper are “already absolute locks…aren’t they?” No, they aren’t. Not all three, I mean. Buchanan is reading two-week-old leaves.

Affleck, yes, but Hooper? Surely Buchanan has heard of the Les Miz blowback by now. And Spielberg? Why, because Lincoln is his best film since Schindler’s List and he needs to be rewarded for not succumbing to his usual instincts? Or because he and Jaunusz Kaminski went completely whole-hog on that milky white light flooding through the non-existent windows in the U.S. House of Representatives chamber? Or because he’s worth $3 billion and Academy members will receive a kind of goodwill dividend if they nominate him?

In last night’s Zero Dark Thirty riff I didn’t mention the eerily riveting score by Alexandre Desplat. It conveys appropriate doses of menace and anxiety, but in a way that perfectly suits or matches the film’s low-key, docu-drama-ish authority. Ironically the music in this clip is one of the few portions that seem a bit rote. Desplat also did the score for Argo.

“Basically I prepare for a role in the same way every time,” Chris Walken tells The Guardian‘s Sean O’Hagan in a 12.1 interview. “I take the script, I stand in my kitchen and I quietly mumble it to myself. Over and over. I keep doing that until I hear something in there. I was trained as a dancer and that stuck with me, so I’m essentially looking for a rhythm. For me, acting is all to do with rhythm. When I figure stuff out, it has to do with finding the rhythm. Always.”

“Walken grew up in Astoria, Queens, the kind of second-generation, melting-pot neighbourhood that has long since vanished in New York,” O’Hagan writes. “He once told an interviewer he ‘grew up listening to people speaking broken English…and I probably speak English almost as a second language.’ This may be the real key to his strange, almost stilted, delivery, alongside the fact that he made an early decision as an actor to wilfully disregard punctuation when reading his lines, a quirk that he guessed rightly would set him apart.”

O’Hagan misspells “willfully” in that last sentence, using only one “l” instead of the two preferred by Merrian-Webster.

Correntin Charron‘s Un petit plat pour l’homme is hereby dedicated to a friend, editor-screenwriter David Scott Smith, for reasons he’ll immediately recognize. I guess I should co-dedicate the link to MSN’s James Rocchi, who’s also a bit of a foodie. The English title is One Small Dish for Man.