Jeffrey Wells

The Best Actress locks are Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman, Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right (no Julianne Moore unless Focus takes Scott Feinberg‘s advice and pushes Bening and Moore together) and Jennifer Lawrence for Winter’s Bone. There are three prime contenders for the two remaining slots — Anne Hathaway for Love and Other Drugs , Michelle Williams for Blue Valentine and Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole (a.k.a. The Griefersons).

No offense, but the guys who posted this Movieline Best Actress chart on 10.20 didn’t quite understand all the ramifications and considerations that I’ve pointed out in today’s piece.

Lesley Manville needs to play it smart and go for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Another Year — she’ s a near-cinch to win if she does this. Sally Hawkins‘ Made in Dagenham performance doesn’t match the quality of her work in Happy Go Lucky — let’s face it. When Naomi Watts (portraying Valerie Plame) is outed as a CIA agent in Fair Game, she goes into a strange gopher hole of denial that doesn’t feel all that compelling or admirable. And whatever fervor may have existed for Diane Lane‘s Secretariat performance has gone away due to ebbing box-office, I’m afraid.

One of the oldest award-season prejudices is to deny consideration to any film that feels the least bit romcommy — anything that feels a little too fast or frothy or up-moody. And especially a performance in a film that dances to this kind of tune. This thinking might well be intensified, I’m thinking, in the case of an “emotional comedy” that isn’t exactly romcommy as much as a hybrid of romcom + earnest emotionalism + relationship anguish + grappling with a debilitating disease.

But throw it all together and you have the mule-like refusal of some award-season handicappers to even consider the idea that Anne Hathaway‘s performance in Love and Other Drugs might be Oscar-worthy, even as a speculative who-knows? type deal, which is what at least half of the flotations out there are composed of. This is presumably due to the belief that to qualify for an acting award you have to solemnly suffer and pour your heart out in a somewhat doleful and non-pizazzy way (like Annette Bening does, for example, in The Kids Are All Right).

Also working against Hathaway thus far has been the fear-of-Ed Zwick factor, but that, as noted in my recent review, is not a concern this time around.

I’ve been passing along ecstatic reader reviews of Love and Other Drugs for several months now and some of the awards handicappers won’t bite. A few days ago I saw Love and Other Drugs and earnestly praised Hathaway’s performance, but apart from Gurus of Gold voters Pete Hammond and Suzie Woz and two or three others, awards handicappers aren’t biting.

Two exceptions are Scott Feinberg and In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. Both have short-listed Hathaway — fine.

But to my knowledge Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil haven’t touched notions of Hathaway with a ten-foot pole. And what about USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican? You’ve gotta watch that guy, Breznican. Because he’ll pull a fast one if you’re not careful.

And don’t give me that “oh, we haven’t seen the film yet” stuff. Who really knows if Christian Bale‘s performance in The Fighter has the chops to compete in the Best Supporting Actor race, but that hasn’t stopped certain handicappers from saying “Bale looks like a comer!”

There’s one aspect of Paranormal Activity 2 that’s at least semi-noteworthy. The two lead females, Sprague Grayden and Katie Featherstone, look like actual married suburban moms with their somewhat pudgy, unspectacular, slightly droopy bodies — pot-bellied and sway-breasted with no particular evidence of arduous workout regimens. These are the kinds of female shapes you see all the time in the malls, but almost never (or certainly rarely) in mainstream films.

This observation obviously doesn’t apply to the teenage daughter, played by Molly Ephraim, although it can be safely assumed that if she adheres to typical suburban eating and workout habits she’ll resemble Grayden and Featherstone in a few years’ time. But it does apply in a lumbering-dork male sense of the term to Brian Boland.

I came upon this 1950s cereal-box promotion for Guy Madison‘s Wild Bill Hickock character, and I thought to myself, “That poor guy…couldn’t act a lick but he got a 20-year career out of being hunky.” Who qualifies on this level today? Guys of ambivalent persuasion who can’t act to save their lives but are doing pretty well by virtue of their genes and will probably lead relatively comfortable lives. Or have we reached a point where hunkiness doesn’t last like it used to?

“In 1944, while visiting Hollywood on leave from the Coast Guard, Madison’s boyish good looks were spotted by a talent scout from David O. Selznick‘s office and he was immediately cast in a bit part in Selznick’s Since You Went Away. Following the film’s release in 1944, the studio received thousands of letters from fans wanting to know more about him.

“He was signed by RKO Pictures in 1946 and began appearing in romantic comedies and dramas but his wooden acting style hurt his chances of advancing in films. In 1951, television came to the rescue of his faltering career when he was cast in The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, which ran for six years.

“Following his television series, Madison appeared in several more films, mostly westerns, before leaving for Europe, where he found greater success in spaghetti westerns.”

Madison died of emphysema in 1996 (most likely due to smoking), and is buried in Forest Lawn cemetery in Cathedral City.

In a 10.24 Washington Post article called “Gauging The Scope of the Tea Party Movement in America,” reporter Amy Gardner, drawing upon a herculean effort to canvass and quantify “hundreds of local Tea Party groups,” says that the Tea Party “is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.

“The results come from a months-long effort by the Post to contact every Tea Party group in the nation, an unprecedented attempt to understand the network of individuals and organizations at the heart of the nascent movement.

“Seventy percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year. As a whole, they have no official candidate slates, have not rallied behind any particular national leader, have little money on hand, and remain ambivalent about their goals and the political process in general.

Midway through the piece she writes that “the Tea Party has been accused of racism by its political opponents” due to “comments from some prominent members and signs at several major rallies this year that attacked President Obama for either his race or the false belief that he is a Muslim.

“At [Tea Party] rallies, organizers have kicked out questionable members and have sought to project a more tolerant image,” she writes. “But the [Washington Post] interviews found that Obama’s race is, in fact, important in more than one in 10 Tea Party groups.

“Andy Stevens, 68, a video producer and a founder of the Tea Party Patriots in Anacortes, Wash., said he described Obama’s race and and religion as ‘somewhat important’ to members of his group because they remain troubled by what they see as the president’s un-American and un-Christian behaviors.

“In Stevens’s view, those include Obama’s ‘socialist’ policies and intentional failure to mention ‘the creator’ when talking about inalienable rights.

“There are questions that don’t get answered, like citizenship and his birth certificate,” Stevens said. “I don’t know why questions keep popping up all the time. If something is irrefutable, the questions wouldn’t keep popping up.”

It’s 6:45 pm, and that laptop on the counter underneath the hanging lava lamp on the far right is mine. And that’s my quota for the day.

A good number of people have now seen Paranormal Activity 2. I agreed with the booers at my Thursday-night screening that the ending is too cryptic. And I disliked angry-douche-dad-with-glasses because he never faced the situation and spent all of his time denying or firing the maid or being elsewhere. I had no problem with the waiting-for-it. But why did they bring up the idea of a demon contract (i.e., sacrificing your first born as repayment) without hinting if angry-dad cut such a deal or not?

Levi Johnston is a nice-enough guy, but he’s coasting. And that’s one thing you really don’t want to do when you’re young. You need to struggle, suffer, test your limits, fail, search around, feel lonely and eat shit. That’s how you find out who you are. Coasting gets you nothing.

The King’s Speech is one of the best of the year, but it’s not as hot now (in late October) as it was pre-Toronto, and as lame as this sounds a little voice is telling me that Harvey and his team need to re-invigorate the hype. I don’t know what that means exactly. I just have this tingly sense that the sand is leaking out, granule by granule, and the Weinstein Co. needs to jazz it up on some level. Not now but next month, I’m thinking.

HE commenters who dissed Tony Scott yesterday need to do some back-up and re-think moves. A tough and respected critic saw Unstoppable a day or so ago and says it’s not only “a pretty good film” but one of Scott’s best, in part because there’s “no super-malevolent villain” this time (i.e., no Travolta-in-Pelham) and so that oh-fuck-here-we-go-again feeling is absent.

Unstoppable, he more or less said, is just a good, rock-solid, technical-challenge-for-Denzel Washington-and-Chris Pine flick with a loudmouth corporate jerkoff screwing things up and Rosario Dawson assigned to handle most of the exposition. (“When Scott realizes he’s gotta have somebody handle the exposition because somebody has to do it, his thinking is ‘okay, at least let’s have a really hot chick do it”) It’s just a good old “how do we fix this really bad-ass crazy choo-choo situation?” thing.

All Scott haters bow, scatter, or run for the hills. Or apologize right now — your call. And next time think first before shooting your mouth off.

It’s 9:50 am, and I’m writing this on a Secaucus-to-Suffern train. That’s Suffern, New York, where the old-timey Lafayette theatre is kicking off its 2010 rep season this morning with an 11:30 am showing of the recently restored The Bridge on the River Kwai. I’m attending at the invitation of Glenn Kenny, who’s friendly with Nelson Page, the owner and runner of the place, and Peter Aprussezze, who wrangles the prints and handles the projection. Call it a little get-out-of-town Saturday adventure.