All right, Twitter followers…if anyone can come up with a question about 2 Fast 2 Furious, Catch That Kid, 3:10 to Yuma, Wanted, The Double and the forthcoming Overdrive, I’m yours for the next…it took three minutes to compose this…57 minutes!

The nominees for the 2011 Darryl F. Zanuck Producer of the Year Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures were announced two hours ago: The Artist — Producer: Thomas Langmann; Bridesmaids – Producers: Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel, Clayton Townsend; The Descendants — Producers: Jim Burke, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor; The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — Producers: Cean Chaffin, Scott Rudin; The Help — Producers: Michael Barnathan, Chris Columbus, Brunson Green; Hugo — Producers: Graham King, Martin Scorsese; The Ides of March — Producers: George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Brian Oliver; Midnight in Paris — Producers: Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum; Moneyball –Producers: Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz, Brad Pitt; War Horse — Producers: Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg.

The winner will be announced at the PGA awards gala at the Beverly Hilton on 1.21. I would jhave posted this earlier but I was asleep earlier this morning, having awoken at 4:15 am and written for two or three hours.

No matters what happens with this morning’s Producer’s Guild nominations, the 2011 awards well has been poisoned by the persistent default prominence of The Artist as the reigning Best Picture favorite.

The rising of The Artist to the top of the flagpole is a reminder to one and all that 2011 wasn’t a very strong year, although any fair-minded observer would at least call it an unusually spirited, original-thinking year if — if! — films like A Separation, Moneyball, Drive, Tyrannosaur, Take Shelter, The Tree of Life and The Descendants are factored in.

The problem or wrinkle is that too many critics and guild members have chosen to elevate and celebrate an enjoyable little black-and-white trifle that amounts to very little in the grand scheme, and call it the year’s best. Shame on them for degrading the 2011 awards season and sending almost everyone with an inkling of taste into a pit of slumber and indifference. Among people I know and speak with the response to The Artist has been a collective shrug. Nobody is jumping up and down about it, and yet it won’t go away on the awards circuit

“This year you can mostly forget the critics,” Sasha Stone wrote yesterday. “Advocacy was never really their thing but it is even less their thing this year, after what happened last year.” But many if not most of them have advocated The Artist as their 2011 champ, and this has apparently had some kind of collateral effect.

“For all of the bitching the top-tier critics do about the Oscar race, and the people who cover it, from where I sit, the Oscar race is the only place where the celebration of real movies is still alive and kicking,” Stone said. “It’s the only place where a film like The Descendants, Moneyball or The Artist really matters. It’s the old guard, preserving what we’ve had for eight decades. But they can’t really do it alone. If Oscar buzz only drives a limited section of the general public to the multiplex of what use is it, ultimately? It’s been steadily becoming less relevant as the years progress, but that’s mainly because the general public is so dumbed down now compared to twenty years ago.”

Yes, the taste of the general moviegoing public reflects, as always, a community of cretins and simpletons. But at least they’ve rendered a kind of judgment on The Artist, which has only $5,398,000 in the domestic till so far.

Marshall Fine has more or less dismissed It’s All About You (NY 1.4, LA 1.6), a doc about John Mellencamp by Kurt and Ian Markus. I did the same during last March’s South by Southwest in a review called “Need Mellancamp Doc That Won’t Drive Me Crazy.”

I was told four years ago about an HE quote used in German-language posters and trailers for Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage; never saw the trailer until this morning. Very cool font, brown-parchment backdrop.

The Upside Down Wiki page says this French-produced sci-fi romance, written and directed by Juan Diego Solanas for $50 millon with Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst, began principal photography in Montreal in February 2010 (!). Hollywood finance partner[s] declined due to “cultural differences.” Opening later this year.

That kid singing the national anthem again…

I saw A Separation for the third time this evening. A hefty crowd attended the 7 pm show at West LA’s Royal. Word-of-mouth has obviously gotten around. I could feel the concentration in the room, and they applauded the closing credits. I felt just as riveted as I did my first time four months ago.

Anyone attending the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for the first time is advised to avoid a restaurant called 350 Main. Here’s how I put it last year in a piece called “Butch Boss“: “What defines a must-to-avoid ‘townie’ restaurant in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival? The host has a suspicious, guard-at-the-gate attitude when you walk in and say you’d like to hang at the bar, as I did last night at 350 Main.

“No well-mannered restaurant host in Manhattan would dare adopt a look of faint alarm and a confrontational tone and say ‘do you have a dinner reservation?’

“I was about to say ‘no, but I’ve got 15 minutes to kill and thought I’d chill’ but the hostess was a mixture of Faye Dunaway in Network and a barkeep in a Sean O’Casey play and the confrontational vibe was like a Queen lyric — ‘We will, we will stop you!’ Things went downhill from there.

“I’ve always gotten this attitude from 350 Main staffers. ‘Are you riff-raff or are you here to sufficiently spend?,’ they seem to be saying. ‘You don’t much look like a skiier and that worries us. Don’t come in here with any sort of journalistic-swagger attitude because we have a business to run, bub.’

“The bartenders are like this too. They’ll ignore and ignore and ignore you, and then they’ll finally serve you after you’ve tried to catch their eye for 12 or 15 minutes. The entire staff is poison in this sense. They’re really bad people. Ugly, I mean.

“I know that Sundance attracts crude simian types to Main Street and I don’t blame any high-toned establishment for wanting to keep out the flotsam and jetsam, but townie eateries always overdo it.

“Another Park City establishment that I wrote off years ago for having this ‘hold it, fella!’ attitude is the Grub Steak, located across from Prospector Square.”

January is mostly about dumps. Which is why the Palm Springs and Sundance film festivals are welcome diversions. Commercially there are four standouts: Miss Bala (1.12, limited, highly recommended), Coriolanus (1.20, limited), Haywire (1.20, highly recommended), and Declaration of War (good, honest true-life French-made film about parenting and illness). I can’t honestly recommend We Need to Talk About Kevin (1.20, NY& LA). I haven’t seen Contraband, The Grey or Man on a Ledge.

The implication in this tweet is that Rupert Murdoch got around to seeing The Descendants, a film funded and distributed by a division of Newscorp and which was viewable by all senior Fox execs many months ago, only recently. Or is he just throwing this out there for something to say or to up the stock value? I love his statement about Alexander Payne‘s film “maybe” being Oscar-worthy.

N.Y. Times guy Brian Stelter reports that “Murdoch IS tweeting himself, according to News Corp’s top spokeswoman, Teri Everett. When I asked if it’s really him, she wrote, ‘Oh yes.'”

With no screenings happening this week (which only lasts three days since I’m heading out to Palm Springs on Thursday), I’ll be settling in and watching tomorrow night’s Iowa caucus returns. Whatever happens, we all know Romney more or less has the nomination in the bag. (Here’s Nate Silver.) If I was a Republican I’d be voting for Huntsman.