I don’t begrudge The Artist its probable win,” says N.Y. Times critc A.O. Scott in a 2.17 chit-chat piece with Manohla Dargis. “It’s a charming, likable movie — a movie in love with movies and its own charm and also full of the genial cosmopolitanism that the Academy tends to like.

“It and The King’s Speech, different though they are, may define what an Oscar movie is today: well made, emotionally accessible and distributed, as you note, by the Weinstein Company. People who see them mostly like them. But the movies people love — both the idiosyncratic, ambitious movies that spark passions and start arguments and the hugely popular, hugely expensive genre movies that are Hollywood’s global cash crop — have become marginal. Which could be why the Oscars seem so small these days.”

For some reason a 2.17 piece in The Week, the Canadian weekly, has used one of my old “steak-eater” quotes to explain how the Oscar system is afflicted with older-white-guy views and ‘tudes.

In a 2.16 Atlantic piece called “The Most Insane, Illogical Award Choices in Oscar History,” Jason Bailey does a good job of explaining the Oscar break-up syndrome. It’s in a portion of the article that laments the Best Picture crowning of Crash in early 2006. The riff follows, but what Oscar moments persuaded HE readers to emotionally disengage or walk away?

I’ve gone through countless breakup moments over the last three or four decades. Except I’ve never signed the divorce papers. Instead I hang around like a pathetic henpecked husband, taking the abuse. Well, not really as I’m doing pretty well with HE but you know what I mean. I’ve been burned and disappointed so many times that I’m numb.

I think my first “what the fuck?” moment goes all the way back to early ’69, when the Best Picture nominees for 1968 were announced and I realized they’d left out 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bullitt and Rosemary’s Baby. The Best Picture nominees were Oliver!, Funny Girl, The Lion In Winter, Rachel, Rachel and Romeo and Juliet. The Lion in Winter is a sturdy film, but who watches the other four these days? No one. All but forgotten.

“Every true film lover can pinpoint the moment when they broke up with the Oscars,” Bailey writes, “when the Academy made a choice so illogical, so upsetting, and so numb-skulled as to blow their credibility forevermore. When you’re young, the Oscars are a big deal, the movie geek equivalent of the Super Bowl; then they blow it, and while you may watch in the years that follow, it’s never with the same enthusiasm or gusto.

“For some, that moment came in 1971, when The French Connection beat out A Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show; for some, it was Gandhi‘s 1982 win over E.T., Tootsie and The Verdict; for others, it was Shakespeare in Love beating Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line in 1998.

“But this writer made it all the way to age 30 before giving up on Oscar, when the biggest award of the night went to Paul Haggis‘ pedantic, contrived, and utterly artless Crash. In going with this simple-minded ‘racism is bad’ tale, Oscar voters passed over Ang Lee‘s revisionist cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain, Bennett Miller‘s masterful biopic Capote, George Clooney‘s enthralling Murrow vs. McCarthy tale Good Night and Good Luck, and Steven Spielberg‘s difficult but rewarding Munich.

“It’s not just that the less-deserving nominee won; at the 78th Academy Awards, the worst nominee (by leaps and bounds) won. Me and Oscar still hang out every once and while, but we haven’t been the same since.”

Paramount publicity will screen Titanic 3D for critics, but not until a week or so before the 4.4 opening (i.e., late March). How, then, did Roger Ebert see it three days ago and (surprise!) trashing it in a just-posted review? Titanic fans in major cities were invited via Facebook to attend special showings last Tuesday, 2.14, and Ebert somehow finagled his way into a Chicago showing.

Ebert didn’t trash James Cameron‘s 1997 film, which he’s long admired. He’s trashed Cameron’s 3D conversion process, which he says (a) adds little or nothing to the film, (b) diminishes the light levels “as much as 20%” and (c) isn’t even used in certain scenes. This comes as a surprise as word on the street, driven by those excerpts shown to press weeks ago, is that Titanic 3D is a couple of cuts above any 2D-to-3D conversion thus far. Maybe not!

“Titanic was not shot for 3D, and just as you cannot gild a pig, you cannot make 2D into 3D,” Ebert writes, “What you can do, and he tries to do it well, is find certain scenes that you can present as having planes of focus in foreground, middle and distance.

“So what? Did you miss any dimensions the first time you saw Titanic? No matter how long Cameron took to do it, no matter how much he spent, this is retrofitted 2D. Case closed.

“But not quite. There’s more to it than that. 3D causes a noticeable loss in the brightness coming from the screen. Some say as much as 20 percent. If you saw an ordinary film dimmed that much, you might complain to the management. Here you’re supposed to be grateful you had the opportunity to pay a surcharge for this defacement.

“If you’re alert to it, you’ll notice that many shots and sequences in this version are not in 3D at all, but remain in 2D. If you take off your glasses, they’ll pop off the screen with dramatically improved brightness.

“I know why the film is in 3D. It’s to justify the extra charge. That’s a shabby way to treat a masterpiece.”

Wait…”if you saw an ordinary film dimmed [by 20%], you might complain to the management”? Has Ebert ever sat with a paying audience when something has clearly gone wrong with the projection or sound? I’ll tell you what they do when this happens. They sit there like sheep. It always falls to someone like me to get up and complain.

Ebert is often given carte blanche treatment by the studios, so it seemed possible that Paramount might have eased him into its Chicago Valentine’s Day screening. So I double-checked with a few calls, and boy, did I get the cordial run-around! From the office of Kyle Bonnici to Michael Agulnek to Paramount field publicity’s Alicia Wyld to marketing exec Colleen Yacka and back to Katie Martin Kelly in Los Angeles. Nobody knew anything, but they were happy to push me onto another person. Whatever.

Update: Certain press people were invited to the LA Valentine’s Day screening in Burbank. MCN’s David Poland posted a review himself last night. I’ve been lied to by certain persons in the Paramount publicity chain, in addition to being kept off the invite list, despite three or four pleas to be invited to any Titanic 3D press screenings that come along. Much appreciated, Michelle Alt and Katie Martin Kelley. Anything I can do in return.

By tweeting “uh-oh, I liked it,” Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet is acknowledging that he’s committing a form of cultural heresy by writing a half-supportive review of This Means War, which seems to be 2012’s most despised film thus far.

Brevet is not alone. Others who haven’t slammed and have even winked at McG’s action comedy include Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum, Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny, Detroit News critic Tom Long, Jam! Movies’ Liz Braun, Alonso Duralde and MediaMikes’ Michael A Smith. Even N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis gave it half a pass, calling it “perfectly acceptable [if] watched on the back of an airline seat or at home while you’re doing housework.”

I hate to say this due to my respect and admiration for director Terence Davies, but I have a very serious issue with The Deep Blue Sea (Music Box, 3.23), which Davies directed and adapted from a 1952 play by Terence Rattigan. The issue, I regret to say, is with Florian Hoffmeister‘s cinematography.

In his 11.26.11 Guardian review, Phillip French says that look of The Deep Blue Sea is coated “with the brown varnish of postwar austerity.” But that’s under-describing it, really, for The Deep Blue Sea has one of the dispiriting and suffocating visual schemes I’ve ever seen in my life.

We all know & respect the celebrated dps who’ve worked wonders with shadows and darkness (Gordon Willis, Vittorio Storaro, Andrezj Bartkowiak, etc.) but Hoffmeister’s images are on another planet entirely. Sea isn’t just shadowy, and not just underlighted. It’s like every scene has been covered in a kind of gauze or scrim. Make that a very thick gauze or scrim. Or some kind of special digital vaseline that softens the image and makes every shot look swathed in hazy fog.

I’m trying to think of other films that have delivered this level of murk and grimness, this stifled atmosphere. I recall a 1971 King Lear, directed by Peter Brook and starring Paul Scofield, that had this kind of vibe.

This must be what it’s like when you’re succumbing to blindness due to disease or old age, I told myself. Everything starts to get darker and murkier and less detailed, and then finally you can see nothing. Obviously Davies and Hoffmeister were trying to “paint” an unhappy, buttoned-down world of proper manners and emotional constipation, but what a ghastly viewing experience! It’s suicidal to have shot a film with this kind of visual “value,” if you want to call it that.

I asked the screening-room projectionist if there was any possibility that he might not be delivering the proper light levels (i.e., foot lamberts) on the screen. He said nope, and that “the darkness is in the print.” I’ve asked to see The Deep Blue Sea on a screener to double-check.

On top of which the screening room I saw The Deep Blue Sea in what felt like a room adjacent to a burning furnace. It was bright and cool outside, and the screening room was warm, airless, suffocating. I complained and the engineer said it was fine, but it wasn’t.

This is an allegedly newish (or at least newer than the previous) trailer for Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus (20th Century Fox, June 8). I’ve been looking for that dead-giant-elephant-skeleton space jockey to return for a long time now, and he’s finally back in a four-second clip.

“The best sequence in Marley, Kevin Macdonald‘s sprawling, 2 1/2 hour chronicle of Bob Marley’s legacy, arrives at the very end,” says Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn. “While the credits roll, Macdonald shows Marley fans around the world singing his greatest hits. The diverse cultures and appearances, united by Marley’s lyrics and good vibes, speak to the singer’s global effect — as well as its lasting appeal today.

“It’s enough to make the fairly conventional overview of his career preceding the finale look comparatively tame. Despite its breadth, Marley delivers little more than a well-crafted overview sure to please diehard fans while leaving others unmoved.

“However, Macdonald’s approach gives a definitive feel to Marley, from its earliest moments tracking the singer from his impoverished Jamaican roots through the apex of his stardom and final days of a losing battle with cancer. Macdonald’s massive list of talking heads includes close relatives, childhood friends, former bandmates and producers, each of whom contributes to the movie’s fluid structure. It’s easy to get swept up in the Marley fever when virtually every subject has something overly kind and even worshipful to say about Marley’s legacy.

“However, this also creates a certain padding around the titular figure, not unlike the issue plaguing Martin Scorsese‘s equally detailed George Harrison: Living in the Material World last year: The ‘authorized’ stature challenges the movie’s authority over the topic. Rather than deconstruct the legend, Macdonald accepts it unquestioned, if only because the interviewees control the tenor of the narrative. Instead of peeking behind the curtain, Macdonald marvels at its surface.”

I have a 2 pm screening of Terence Davies‘ The Deep Blue Sea, a film about an illicit affair and not about a killer shark, and then there’s this evening’s Westwood premiere of Wanderlust followed by an after-party. I’m not drinking or eating much these days so I’m not sure how I feel about socializing.

Filing from Berlin, Cineuropa.org’s Fabien Lemercier has posted a speculation piece about Cannes 2012. Possible American entries, he says, include Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, Andrew Dominik‘s Cogan’s Trade with Brad Pitt, Wes Anderson‘s Moonrise Kingdom, Woody Allen‘s Nero Fiddled, Terrence Malick‘s Voyage of Time (the IMAX-y flow-of-time documentary component to Tree of Life) and possibly James Gray‘s Low Life.

Other likely-maybe’s include Michael Haneke‘s Love, Ken Loach‘s Angels Shares, Walter Salles‘ On the Road, David Cronenberg‘s Cosmopolis, Carlos Reygadas‘s Post Tenebras Lux, Abbas Kiarostami‘s The End, Pablo Trapero‘s Elefante blanco, Wong Kar Wai‘s The Grandmaster, Matteo Garrone‘s Big House and Jacques Audiard‘s Rust and Bone.

Possibly more serious contenders are Olivier Assayas‘s Something in the Air, Sergei Loznitsa‘s In The Fog, Michel Gondry‘s The We and the I, Ulrich Seidl‘s Paradise trilogy, Hong Sang-soo‘s Another Country, Im Sang-soo‘s The Taste of Money and Xavier Dolan‘s Laurence Anyways.

It’s no secret that millions of Americans care a lot more about their relationships with pets than with other humans, and that any public person known to have been heartless with a pet is going to incur their disdain. Mitt Romney‘s Seamus-on-the-roof story is really going to hurt him in the general election — seriously. Dog cruelty is only slightly less deplorable than child abuse in the eyes of tens of millions. Here’s the Dogs Against Romney site and its corresponding Facebook page.

From my 1.4.12 piece about the Seamus incident: “Anyone who would put a dog inside a carrier strapped to the roof of a car moving 70 mph for hours and hours is one cold fuck of a human being. I would never do that to a dog, even to some stray I’d just found on the side of a road. Seamus is a social-political metaphor, all right.”

Captain! Captain! German U-boat sighting off the port bow! Torpedos heading this way! Hard left rudder, man! Harder! Do you want this ship to sink?

Disney’s $250 million John Carter, a sci-fi fanboy adventure pic that opens in three weeks (Friday, 3.9), is in some kind of trouble, and maybe worse than that. A couple of hours ago Deadline‘s Nikki Finke reported that it’s all but dead due to soft tracking. (“Dead” in relation to the huge cost and prospective return, I mean.) There’s even concern, voiced by a rival studio exec, that “this could be the biggest write-off of all time.”

Maybe it’s as bad as all that or maybe not, but the situation obviously isn’t good .

“Our world is dying,” a female voice says on the Carter trailer. “You may be the only one who can save us.” I hear awful dialogue like that and I look at the blatantly CG-ish effects, and I just turn away. Pathetic.

The marketing exec who would be tickled pink if Carter goes down says that tracking is “2 unaided, 53 aware, 27 definitely interested and 3 first choice.” I’m not a tracking expert, okay, but I know enough about it to know that these numbers are not what anyone would call encouraging. A second studio guy tells Finke that the tracking report “just came out [and] women of all ages have flat out rejected the film.”

Captain! Water pouring into the engine room! Tell the crew to put on lifejackets and prepare to evacuate! Brrnnng! Brrnng!

Slashfilm’s Peter Sciretta tweeted last night that “the first big press screening of John Carter happened tonight but no one is allowed to tweet their reactions.” Does that mean it blows or…? If John Carter is taking on water and possibly in danger of foundering, wouldn’t Disney publicists at least want some spirited geek buzz flying around to help raise the stock?

Calling all geeks and fanboys! John Carter needs your help! Sciretta! Devin Faraci! Katey Rich! All the freeloaders attending the John Carter press junket in Carefree, Arizona…we need you! Wait…is Ed Douglas there?

“Disney is nervous, really nervous, but trying to hold out some hope,” Finke writes. “‘We know that we have a long way to go,’ a Disney insider confides. ‘It’s still four weeks out, and the bulk of the media hasn’t hit yet. Our Super Bowl ad did what we intended it to do: have a pop of awareness. On Sunday we launch a full campaign with 90% of all of our media ready to go.”