The most frequently cited contender for the just-announced 2010 Gotham Independent Film Awards is Debra Granik‘s Winters Bone, which was nominated for Best Feature, Breakthrough Actor (Jennifer Lawrence) and Best Ensemble Performance. Lisa Cholodenko‘s The Kids Are All Right and Lena Dunham‘s Tiny Furniture received two nominations each.

The 20th annual Gotham Awards’ ceremony will be held on Monday, 11.29 at Cipriani Wall Street. Besides the awards presentations Robert Duvall, Hilary Swank, Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky and Focus Features CEO James Schamus will each be presented with a career tribute.

Best Feature nominees are Black Swan, Blue Valentine, The Kids Are All Right, Let Me In and Winter’s Bone. Wells to Gotham Awards committee: If you decide not to give the award to Black Swan, obviously the finest film in this bunch, please give it to poor little Let Me In, which really needs the attention.

Best Documentary nominees are 12th & Delaware (what’s that?), Inside Job, The Oath, Public Speaking and Sweetgrass. (And the reason that Amir Bar Lev‘s The Tillman Story, Alex Gibney‘s Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Banksy‘s Exit Through The Gift Shop, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner‘s Stonewall Uprising, Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector and Leon Gast‘s Smash His Camera weren’t nominated is….why again? I’m not clear on the criteria.)

Breakthrough Actor nominees include Prince Adu (Prince of Broadway), Ronald Bronstein (Daddy Longlegs), Greta Gerwig (Greenberg), Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) and John Ortiz (Jack Goes Boating).

Tyler Perry‘s For Colored Girls is being promoted today with an online art gallery display designed by Lionsgate marketing director Tim Palen. The idea is to digitally animate eight portraits of Colored Girls actresses by making their eyes, lips and heads move as we hear dialogue from one of their scenes. This is way beyond the realm of Clutch Cargo, but the minimal-movement aesthetic triggered this association.

An actual real-world version of same will show in Manhattan’s Lehman Maupin Gallery (540 West 26th Street) from 10.24 through 10.27.

Palen’s “Living Portraits,” which he conceived of and directed, were shot on 35mm film.

I was surprised to discover that the 1.66 to 1 crop used in the new Criterion Bluray of Paths of Glory feels relatively satisfying. All I can finally say is that it looks “right,” as if 1.66 to 1 was the idea all along. And I sat down with this disc ready to dislike what I might see and totally prepared to complain. But it doesn’t look bad. None of the framings seem cramped or confined.

This is a significant admission for me as I’ve been a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio purist all my life. I wrote in May 2009 that cropping Dr. Strangelove to 1.66, despite the 1.33 aspect ratio providing acres of luscious head-room, was unfortunate. And I’ve said time and again that the new Psycho Bluray is revisionist vandalism due to Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1960 classic having been cropped to 1.78 in order to fit high-def plasma and LCD screens, despite Psycho having been shown on TV for decades at a perfectly pleasing 1.33 to 1 shape.

A part of me would still prefer to see Stanley Kubrick‘s 1957 anti-war classic opened up to a boxier 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio. 1.33 framings are immaculate in my book because of the Hollywood Elsewhere extra-air-space and room-to-breathe headroom principle — i.e., the more space around and particularly above the actors heads, the more pleasing to the eye.

Criteron’s Bluray mastering is superb. It has grainy textures, but they’re acceptable to my eyes. The detail is improved, of course, and the monochromatic range seems greater than any version I’ve seen before (including 35mm projection). Those mild, mid-range grays seem more vivid and robust. And I love the heightened indications of moisture in the eyes of the soldiers, and the fibres on uniforms and overcoats coming through with greater clarity and relief.

Paths of Glory has never looked or felt as good as this. What a sensual bath this Bluray disc amounts to. Watching it is almost like lying on one of those portable fold-up tables and getting a facial.

“We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls,” Maureen Dowd wrote in a 10.17 N.Y. Times column, calling them “grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant.

“These women — Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine — have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama. Whether they’re mistreating the help or belittling the president’s manhood, making snide comments about a rival’s hair or ripping an opponent for spending money on a men’s fashion show, the Mean Girls have replaced Hope with Spite and Cool with Cold. They are the ideal nihilistic cheerleaders for an angry electorate.”

A critic friend told me this morning that he had the same reaction to Chris Morris‘s Four Lions (Alamo Drafthouse, 11.5) that I did — astonishing concept (a suicide terrorist comedy), quite funny at times, but he couldn’t understand a fair portion of the dialogue due to the British working-class accents. They might as well be speaking Farsi.

“It was funny, or at least the parts I could understand,” he wrote. “Apparently they’re not putting subtitles on it, which is unfortunate because those accents were so thick and the sound so muddy as to be virtually indecipherable at times.”

My 1.24.10 Sundance review: “Early last evening I saw Chris Morris‘s Four Lions — an unsettling, at times off-putting, at other times genuinely amazing black political comedy about London-based Jihadists — Islamic radicalism meets the Four Stooges/Keystone Cops. It’s sometimes shocking and sometimes heh-heh funny, and occasionally hilarious.

“Morris uses a verbal helter-skelter quality reminiscent of In The Loop, and yet the subject is appalling — a team of doofuses who dream of bombing and slaughtering in order to enter heaven and taste the fruit of virgins. It’s amazing and kind of pleasing that a comedy of this sort has been made, but I don’t want to think about the reactions in Manhattan once it opens.

“At times it felt flat and frustrating (I couldn’t understand half of it due to the scruffy British accents) and at other times I felt I was watching something akin to Dr. Strangelove — ghastly subject matter leavened with wicked humor.

“An agent I spoke to after the screening said, ‘I don’t know if the American public is ready for this film.’ He’s probably right, but Four Lions is an absolute original — I’ve never seen anything like it, nor have I have ever felt so torn in my reactions. I’d love to see it again, but with subtitles.”

As some may have seen, there was a two-minute piece on David O. Russell‘s The Fighter that ran during Sunday night’s Mad Men finale. Here are link #1 and link #2 to the 1080 encodes.

Chewing over the four categories and the competitors as they now stand — Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Listeners take note: our discussion lasts over an hour, and all to the good. Is it posted to iTunes yet? I don’t know.

Jeff and Michael Zimbalist‘s The Two Escobars, which I finally saw last Thursday at the Tribeca Cinemas, tells an incredibly sad and tragic story. But it’s mainly a phenomenal sports documentary because it’s so much more than just a doc about guys kicking a ball around a field.

Director Jason Reitman, a major supporter of the film who moderated the post-screening discussion, feels that The Two Escobars the equal of One Day in September and When We Were Kings, and while I’m no sports fanatic I can think of no reason to disagree. The above is a response by Michael to my question about how Columbia seemed plagued by a kind of poison during the big drug years.

The Two Escobars played on ESPN last summer, and will have a brief theatrical opening soon. I’m calling it essential viewing, and not just for soccer fans.

An 8.27.10 San Francisco Chronicle review of The Two Escobars called it a “shrewdly told portrayal of Colombia during the darkest days of narcotrafficking, detailing the last years of two famous Colombians named Escobar, who weren’t related by blood but by their connection to a sport. That sport was soccer, and the nation’s cocaine kings were as deeply involved in it as in every other facet of Colombian society.

“One of the Escobars is Pablo, the notorious head of the Medellin cartel, who seems to have been a genuine soccer fanatic, which led him to buy the national team that, through Pablo’s boundless resources, became the odds-on contender to win the World Cup in 1994. Of course, the team also provided a handy way to launder dope profits, and Pablo wasn’t the only Colombian drug king to buy into the sport.

“The other Escobar is Andres, captain of Pablo’s team, a straight arrow and an incredibly talented player motivated by love for soccer and genuine patriotism — he wanted to prove on a worldwide stage that the nation was more than just an inferno of drugs and violence.

“The Zimbalist brothers interweave the two stories using scenes selected from hundreds of hours of news and private footage they acquired. They add some compelling interviews, including revelations from ‘Popeye,’ one of Pablo’s enforcers who claims to have ‘killed or dismembered’ 250 people. He seems tickled to be a part of the movie.

“There is much discussion of Pablo’s astounding and corrupt lifestyle, which brings to mind Caligula, say, or Nero. Pablo’s was a bloody regime — for a time, Colombia had the highest murder rate in the world. Nevertheless, Pablo was able to make himself into a folk hero among the poor by funding housing, clinics and soccer fields. Perhaps the movie pushes this Robin Hood theme harder than the facts will bear.

“The filmmakers establish a relentless and mounting sense of dread as the situation in Colombia, and for the players, becomes intolerable. Pablo is eventually hunted down and killed by a vigilante coalition with ties to other drug dealers (and with U.S. involvement).

“Andres also meets a violent end, back in his beloved homeland 10 days after he accidentally kicked a goal into his own team’s net during the World Cup, eliminating his team. Andres’ death was a national tragedy, and possibly one element prompting the Colombian government to finally take a stand against the drug lords. By general consensus, the nation has made real progress in the continuing battle.”

The fourth Oscar Poker podcast, which Sasha Stone and I finished recording about two and a half hours ago, focused on the strongest acting nominees. It should be posted to iTunes sometime this evening.

The only thing we disagreed on was a bizarre idea initially floated (or so Sasha recalled) by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson about Natalie Portman‘s brilliant Black Swan performance. Thompson has intimated that Portman’s performance might be a problem with some women because her ballet-dancer character doesn’t convey enough in the way strong or courageous positivism. By this standard a Best Actress nominee has less chance of winning if she portrays a character beset by any form of weakness or anxiety or rampant insecurity, as Portman’s character certainly is.

In other words, women in the film industry are so insecure that they have issues with any less than admirable female character because this would send out “the wrong message.”

What else did we say? There’s no disputing that Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) is the Best Actor front-runner with Jesse Eisenberg, James Franco, Robert Duvall, Sean Penn, Javier Bardem, Jeff Bridges and Ryan Gosling also in play. And that the smart play for Another Year‘s Lesley Manville is to go for Best Supporting Actress and not Best Actress, which is looking like a big duke-out between Portman, Annette Bening, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicole Kidman and possibly Naomi Watts. And that Rosamund Pike is a serious comer in the Best Supporting Actress competition a la Barney’s Version.

An HE reader named “Webster” wrote the following this morning: “I saw James L. Brooks‘ How Do You Know at a screening in Orange County last week. (No end credits at the screening — still being massaged.) What I saw started a little slow, but really picks up steam midway through and ends strong. In a five-slot race I wouldn’t give it much chance at a Best Picture nomination, but with 10 slots…who knows?

“The guy who delivers the goods is Paul Rudd. This will raise his profile to the A-list. This is a guaranteed Best Supporting Actor nomination.” Really, Webster? Good for Rudd. I like hearing that.

“Reese Witherspoon is a little hard to warm to at first, but is fine; and Owen Wilson plays to his strengths, although I never really bought him as a $14 million-a-year pitcher — we never see him on the mound. And Jack Nicholson is Jack–with one huge laugh-out-loud Jack moment in the movie’s ‘money’ scene inside a hospital room.

“All in all, if I’m grading on a curve, I’d give it an A-minus. I liked it much more than As Good As It Gets, but not as much as Terms of Endearment or (my favorite Brooks film) Broadcast News.”

Jett didn’t want to know about watching a five hour and 30-minute film, but after being urged to see Carlos over and over (even Todd McCarthy told him to re-think his reluctance during a New York Film Festival party) I managed to drag him to the IFC Center last night for a 7 pm screening. Director Olivier Assayas spoke with us briefly in the lobby, and then delivered some opening remarks before the crowd.

Carlos director Olivier Assayas at Manhattan’s IFC Center prior to 7 pm show — Saturday, 10.16, 6:50 pm.

The truth? We caught three and three-quarter hours’ worth (i.e., Parts 1 and 2) but felt too whipped to make it through part 3. (We would have been there until 1 am, give or take, if we’d gone the distance.) I loved Carlos just as much as when I first saw it inside the Grand Palais in Cannes, but that was a midday screening with all kinds of juice and pizazz. The sound and projection levels at the IFC Center are totally fine but it’s just not the same, and I start to fade concentration-wise around 11 pm after being up and working hard since 7 am.

I took two videos of Assayas at the mike (clip #1 and video #2). The second one suffers from cruddy sound.

You know what would be adventurous and cool? For a major critics group or two (like the NYFCC, say) to give Carlos its Best Picture award.

Criterion’s recent confirmation that they’ll release a Bluray/DVD of James L. Brooks‘ Broadcast News in January 2011 suddenly reminded that I haven’t felt any How Do You Know intrigue in a while. I mean, the trailer is okay (although it does make the film seem a little thin and sitcommy) and it’s coming out on 12.17 but it’s just kinda lying there. I’m not hearing a drumbeat that says “hey, we’ve got something really awards-season special here.”

Will the Broadcast News Bluray, arriving with a motive right in the midst of Oscar balloting, remind people what a masterful director-writer and emotional button-pusher Brooks still is, or what he used to be in the ’80s and early ’90s before his game went soft? Will How Do You Know earn a place alongside Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets, or will it be another Spanglish?

An HE reader named “Webster” wrote the following this morning: “I saw How Do You Know at a screening in Orange County last week. (No end credits at the screening — still being massaged.) What I saw started a little slow, but really picks up steam midway through and ends strong. In a five-slot race, I wouldn’t give it a chance for a Best Picture nomination, but with 10 slots…who knows?

“The guy who delivers the good is Paul Rudd. This will raise his profile to the A-list. This is a guaranteed Best Supporting Actor nomination.

“ Reese Witherspoon is a little hard to warm to at first, but is fine; and Owen Wilson plays to his strengths, although I never really bought him as a $14 million-a-year pitcher — we never see him on the mound. And Jack Nicholson is Jack — with one huge laugh-out-loud Jack moment in the movie’s ‘money’ scene inside a hospital room.”

Brooks never shows Wilson throwing a few from the mound? Why?

“All in all, if I’m grading on a curve, I’d give it an A-minus. I liked it much more than As Good As It Gets, but not as much as Terms of Endearment or (my favorite Brooks film) Broadcast News.”

The Broadcast News Bluray will feature (a) a restored high-definition digital transfer, (b) audio commentary rom Brooks and editor Richard Marks, (c) deleted scenes and an alternate ending, (d) a “new documentary” on Brooks’s career, (e) a “new video interview with veteran CBS news producer Susan Zirinsky, one of the models for actress Holly Hunter’s character and an associate producer on the film, and (f) a booklet featuring an essay by Philadelphia Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey.