Yesterday morning Sasha Stone and I recorded a special post-Toronto, where-is-the-Oscar-race-now? Oscar Poker with Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil. Apologies to Tom for our dominating the conversation in the early stages, but we got into everything and particularly The Silver Linings Playbook, what do “real” critics like Manohla Dargis know that we don’t? and beware-of-Lincoln. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

Here’s O’Neil talking to Pete Hammond about the same. Key Hammond quote: “I wouldn’t bet the farm” on Beasts of the Southern Wild getting a Best Picture nomination.

Universal has bumped the opening of Tom Hooper‘s Les Miserables — one of the five presumed Best Picture contenders that haven’t been seen — from 12.14 to 12.25. The other Four Big Unseens are Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight (11.2), Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty (12.14), Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi (11.21) and Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln…but I wouldn’t bank on Lincoln if I were you.

These guys are basically putting on a show together. Jack Kennedy is the star-director and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley are essentially the obedient knaves. Different era, different values. If footage emerged of Anderson Cooper, say, letting Barack Obama have a do-over, his journalistic credibility would be severely damaged.

The candidacy of Mittens Romney died yesterday. He was on the ropes anyway, down three points with likely voters, but the “47% of Americans are deadbeat freeloaders” video has put an end to it — not because he says anything shocking on it, but because he says what everyone has always suspected are his core beliefs about the people who are basically deadweight. He’ll totally be on the defensive during the presidential debates and he just can’t recover.

Oh, and incidentally? Most people are basically deadweight. They’re sheep. The life of any culture or economy or revolution or what-have-you is always the dynamic 10% or 15%. So I agree with what he said, but I’m still a hardcore Obama man because Romney is a clumsy, clueless doofus and an absolute animal because he believes that the deadweighters have made their own fates. Which of course they haven’t. We’re all trying to keeps our head above water in heaving seas. To live by Romney’s vision is to embrace a form of inhumanity. Corporations are not people — they’re sociopaths.

I saw David Ayer‘s End of Watch (Open Road, 9.21) in Los Angeles just under three weeks ago, but never wrote a review. Apologies for that. This isn’t Training Day as it has no charismatic, self-destructive madman at the forefront. The leads (Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena) are just likable young hot-dog cops. But it’s good resourceful Ayers stuff — a gripping, adrenalized ride in an LAPD black-and-white through South Central, and God help them both.

Gyllenhaal and Pena are basically doing that uniformed Cops thing — a young white guy and a young Latino guy all trained up and following a tradition established decades ago by The Blue Knight and New Centurions…the old mean streets, shit-happens, never-a-dull-moment routine.

The difference here is the Mexican cartels, man. The cartels play by a whole different set of rules. They cut off heads…whoa. They bring in wetbacks and store them in shitty bungalows. Their guns and AKs are blinged up the wazoo. And about halfway through they decide to take out our young heroes. But Gyllenhaal and Pena are just doing their jobs and banging around. Just a coupla go-go guys in a black and white. If Gyllenhaal or Pena had, let’s say, had inappropriate sex with a 16 year-old kid sister of some cartel guy then you’d have a personal revenge element, but they’re just aggressive cops who discover a house full of wetbacks…what?

It’s the crazy Latinos, dawg. Big Evil (“My evil is big”) and his homies and bitches who shout “fuck!” and “fuckin’!” every four seconds and who walk around like wolverines, like serpents with flicking tongues who haven’t a thoughtful or fair-minded molecule in their entire bodies. There’s a scene with a brother saying to another brother, “Ten years ago the guy on the corner was selling fried chicken…now he’s got a taco stand.” Or words to that effect. Crazy, cranked-up macho essays.

I had heard initially that End of Watch would be all POV video footage — front seat cop-car videos, chest-cam, hand-held videos, etc. Not so. The coverage is all over the place. Master shots, helicopter overhead shots, inserts, POV shots that nobody involved could possibly deliver. And that’s a good thing. What Ayers does is plant the idea that it’s all being shot by individual videocams, and then he ignores that rule. And that’s cool.

I have a problem with the ending. It looks like somebody’s dead and then, to our surprise, they’re not. I’m not going to spoil anything, but if you’re going to shoot somebody in the chest and give them a sucking chest wound and have blood coming out their mouths, we all know what this means. And then they’re lying on the ground and several dozen more rounds are fired in their general direction (actually at somebody else but same difference) and they’re not going to catch another two or three stray bullets in the chest or the head or the gut? I didn’t buy it, man.

And if gang-bangers have just blown a couple of guys away (no hints, no allusions) in an area sure to be swarming with cops in a matter of minutes, why the hell would they take their time as they leave the scene, sauntering down an alley and patting each other on the back? They’re not stupid. If you want to hit somebody, you do it out of the blue and then scram. You don’t do it in a cops vs. bad guys war zone.

I didn’t know what “watch your six” meant at first. I assumed right off it was a variation on “watch your back,” but it refers to a clock face. 12 o’clock is straight ahead, 3 o’clock is to your right, 9 o’clock is to your left, and 6 o’clock is behind you.

The opening bit is pure cop-car POV footage of a high-speed pursuit, cut for efficiency but otherwise raw and narrated by Gyllenhaal, explaining the ethos and the commitment of a street cop…who we are and what we do. The rest of the film is between good, very good and excellent, but this opener is perfect. Open Road should be using this as a teaser.

The End of Watch costars — Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Pena, Anna Kendrick, Natalie Martinez, America Ferrera, Cody Horn — sat down last night (probably for the last time) for a Pete Hammond q & a following last night’s SAG screening at L.A.’s Downtown Independent theatre on Main Street. The premiere happened at L.A. Live. (More photos and videos after the jump.)

“I guess I’m a little bit confused,” In Contention‘s Kris Tapley wrote today. After being told up one side and down the other to beware Robert Lorenz‘s Trouble with the Curve, I found myself liking it just fine.

“It’s a bit unruly in spots and amateurishly conceived in others, but never to detriment. And even Clint Eastwood‘s grizzled performance, threatening to make good on the promise of Gran Torino (i.e. that he’ll be in the self-parody business from here on out) didn’t strike the sour chord I expected it to.

“Then as the movie went along, I realized the framing — my framing — was all wrong. This isn’t Clint Eastwood’s movie. This is Amy Adams‘s movie. And she’s great. Coupled with The Master, her work here further shows a dynamic range for the actress, who by the way landed three Oscar nominations in just six years, for those keeping score at home. And if you’re still not convinced, have a look at On the Road where she shows up out of nowhere and gives a unique if brief take opposite Viggo Mortensen.”

It occured to me that all the people who loved and wrote about The Silver Linings Playbook in Toronto are helping it now, yes, but in the long run they might be hurting it. Too much effusive praise always leads to second-wavers or ticket buyers expecting the moon, and when they don’t get that they get pissed off and complain it’s been over-praised. There’s nothing better than to see a really good movie cold. It almost never happens at film festivals, but it did with Silver Linings. I told Sasha Stone during our Oscar Poker podcast this morning that I had probably spoiled Silver Linings for her, and that I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.

I returned to my home last night to suffocating heat and a dead air conditioner. I asked the lady who stayed here and fed my cats during my Telluride-Toronto-NYC travels, and she said the old living-room Fedders (one of those 21″ by 14″ models) gave up the ghost four or five days ago. It didn’t occur to her to alert me. If she had I could have made an appointment last Wednesday or Thursday for a fix-it guy to come today. I made an appointment today and the guy can’t come until Wednesday afternoon. So I’ll be living in a turkish bath until then. Thank you, cat lady!

I’m in hell. I slept on the couch in front of a fan last night, and I barely slept for the heat. I have to buy a new unit. Good wall-mounted air conditioners cost $300 or $400. I’ve been online and on the phone half the morning and into the afternoon about this. I’ve just agreed to buy a Friedrich air conditioner that will fit inside my wall box. I’m buying it from a guy from Anaheim name Ricardo. He’s agreed to me at the Citadel shopping center, three or four miles southeast of downtown, at 4:15 pm.

“Friedrich air conditioners are a superior product built from high grade materials and components that deliver dependable operation for years after the sale. As a leading pioneer in energy efficiency, their partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Star program was a natural continuation of their devotion to the development of products that conserve energy and help protect our environment. And, by designing energy efficient products, they help save money on your electric bill.”

In the view of HE reader Mike Bonifer, Tom Hanks‘ eulogy for Michael Clark Duncan “gives a sneak preview of what he’ll be like in John Lee Hancock‘s currently filming Saving Mr. Banks, a making-of-Mary Poppins movie. “Ignore his impression of MCD,” Bonifer says. “The twangy, folksy way he’s talking to the congregants, the haircut and the moustache are all hints at how he’s playing Walt. Have to be. Because he’s not talking in his regular Hanks voice.”