Here’s another ’06 contender: Milos Forman‘s Goya’s Ghosts, a Saul Zaentz production with Javier Bardem and the luminous Natalie Portman in a double role. Synopsis: “In 1792 Spain, the revolution has sent neighboring France into turmoil and the Spanish church decides to restore order by bringing back the dreaded Inquisition. A key orchestrator is the enigmatic and cunning priest Lorenzo (Bardem), a man who seeks power above all. Lorenzo’s friend is Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgaard), Spain’s most famous artist and portraitist to kings and queens. When his beautiful model Ines (Portman) is unjustly imprisoned and tortured by the Inquisition their friendship is put to a test as Goya begs Lorenzo to spare the poor girl’s life.” Kinda sounds like rough-going to me, but reader Darren Buser suggests that Bardem “could wind up a Best Actor contender. As could Natalie Portman, who is playing two roles (the muse and her daughter), in the modes of beautiful and sad-ugly-pathetic

I have to drive up to Santa Barbara today around noon and get myself set up at Fess Parker’s Doubletree hotel before ambling over to a gathering across from the Arlington theatre (an hour or so before the 8 pm debut showing of Robert Towne‘s Ask the Dust) for festival director Roger Durling, so the column will be down for a few hours…

“The Bagger” (i.e., N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr) has a pretty good rundown about who’s got the edge (and why, and what might overtake them) in the various Oscar categories. But he’s wrong when he says that Brokeback Mountain “has no mono- poly on social relevance. If anything, Crash has a more contemp- orary lilt on a more chronic, widespread issue.” What…roadside racism? That doesn’t hold a candle to what Brokeback is funda- mentally about, which, as I tried explaining in mid-December, “is the terrible price of letting a good thing go… the tragedy of a person feeling love or passion for something (a relationship, a career ambition, a creative dream) and not doing anything about it.” Such spiritual cowardice is everywhere across America, in every small town and family and festering in at least half of the nation’s office cubicles…and it’s one of the biggest reasons for the drinking and the Vicodin-taking and the arguments between lovers and marrieds from Bangor to Capistrano. There is nothing sadder or more debilitating than to be a citizen of Del Mar Nation. I lived there when I was in my 20s, and I know.

I read Henry Bean and Leora Barish‘s script of Basic Instinct 2 four or five years ago…and although it’s nicely-written hack job it’s still an empty programmer because it’s about absolutely nothing. Nothing, that is, except the task of mounting a sequel to a hit 1992 film. Sharon Stone was 33 when she made the original — she was 47 when the Michael Caton-Jones follow-up was filmed last year. And somehow the idea of Michael Douglas‘s San Francisco cop character (i.e., “Shooter”) having been ice-picked sometime after the close of the ’92 film and before the start of ’06 version…well, I didn’t like that. N.Y, Daily News columnists Rush & Molloy are reporting that “Sony execs have been going back and forth with the ratings mullahs over Stone’s various postures in Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction…we’re not sure what they thought of the early scene in which a man is pleasuring Sharon while she’s speeding along a cliffside road. But the MPAA did get hung up on some scorching orgy scenes. At first, it slapped an NC-17 on the flick. But after some snipping by director Michael Caton-Jones and editor John Scott, the ratings board deigned to give it an R.” I admire Stone for having shot steamy sex scenes at her age, and without a body double, but if a movie isn’t “about” anything that matters to you or me or Henry Bean then it’s crap, and crap is crap is crap…and it doesn’t matter how hot the dopey sex scenes are.

I spoke to Liam Neeson twice last summer at a couple of post-movie-premiere parties, and he said that the plan was for Steven Spielberg’s Abraham Lincoln movie, in which he’ll play the title role, to start shooting sometime around March ’06. Forget it — Spielberg’s spokesperson Marvin Levy told me yesterday the Lincoln project (which will be based in part upon Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s recently published book about Lincoln) won’t roll anytime soon and is basically up in the air.

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick says that “an era has ended with the closing of Loews State, the last movie theater operating in Times Square, once the nation’s premier moviegoing district.” I’ve been in NYC dozens of times over the last 20 years (I lived there from ’78 to ’83) and I didn’t go to this low-rent basement-level theatre once…not once. Lumenick says that the State — a modest four-screen multiplex tucked into a sub-basement of the Virgin Megastore on Broadway at 45th Street — was the final holdout in an area that once housed more than a dozen movie palaces along Broadway and Seventh Avenue between 42nd and 47th streets.” First, there were precisely twelve Times Square theatres in the old days — the Paramount, Astor, Victoria, RKO Warner, the Rivoli, Leow’s Capitol, the Roxy, the DeMille, the Trans-Lux, RKO Palace, Leows State and the Criterion — and second, they went from 42nd to 51st Street. The National wasn’t a classic Times Square movie palace…got started in the mid ’70s, so it was too “new” and didn’t count. And I’ve never heard of the Strand.

Here’s an L.A. Times story by Mary McNamara about expected low ratings for the March 5th Oscar telecast because average movieogers (i.e., mostly youths) haven’t yet paid to see most of the Best Picture nominees in sufficiently large numbers: “There is no Titanic this year…there is no Lord of the Rings,” Oscar producer Gil Cates observes. “The creative community has chosen to honor films that are different from those the rest of the country is seeing.” By “the rest of the country” he means, for the most part, the marginally educated under-25 red-staters…giggly girls, teenaged guys travelling in packs, people of ethnic disparity with lowbrow tastes, etc. The fact is that four of the nominees — Brokeback Mountain ($51 million), Crash ($55.4 million), Munich ($40.6 million), and Good Night, and Good Luck ($25.1 million) — have earned fairly decent coin in urban blue-state areas. (Capote is the only lowballer so far with just $15 million in the till.) The problem is that the bubbas haven’t responded…but then smart and sensitive quality-level stuff has never been their cup of tea, so shut ’em out and be glad for it. The Oscars are for the staid and unadventurous blues, for the most part, and the People’s Choice Awards are for the loutish hormonally-driven reds. I say write ’em off…scale down the budget, tailor the Oscar show ad rates, fire Gil Cates…modify the whole thing and face the truth of it. We live in a era of Culture Wars, and today more than ever the marching slogan is straight out of the mouth of Blanche DeBois: “Don’t hang back with the brutes.”

Just a reminder for those who don’t scroll down that Oscar Balloon ’06 is up and running, and that any and all suggestons as far as additions, deletions and whatnot from all four corners of the globe are welcome. Our journey of a thousand miles and 365 days starts here…

The New Bond flick is looking like a wipeout before it gets rolling. Despite filming having begun on the Daniel Craig-starring, Paul Haggis-authored Casino Royale in Prague a few days ago, the producers still haven’t signed anyone to play the Icily Sophisticated, Cold-Hearted Villain in Perfect Physical Shape as well the Tough, Spirited, Independent-Minded, Fated-to-Sexually- Submit Bond Girl. “They’re talking to three to four [women] right now,” Haggis recently told a reporter. “Every week I read there’s a new Bond girl, and I call them and they say, no, you idiot.” Let’s just spit it out so we don’t have to step over the elephant: they can’t get a Bond girl because the agents for the hottest actresses are telling their clients not to do it because they don’t think Craig has the right kind of studly savoir faire and that the series may well be on its last legs, and also because no one wants to work with those Irving Thalberg-level Bond producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. Rachel McAdams would be great to cast, but the only reason she’d accept would be a need for a whopping down payment on an expensive new home. An insider has confided that “the casting of the villain is much further along than that of the female star.”

Sony Pictures Classics’ Capote is moving into 1,500 screens this Friday (2.3) to try and make a little moolah out of those five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Originally released on 9.30.05, the highest number of screens for the upscale biopic was 348 (as of 1.20), resulting in earnings of $15 million so far. “There was a difficulty in getting a people to know who Truman Capote was,” SPC co-honcho Tom Bernard recently told Variety reporter Gabriel Snyder, “but [the Oscar nominations have] put us in the mainstream of American attention.” Did everyone read that? There was a “difficulty” with Average Joe’s not knowing who the most famous literary figure of the ’60s and ’70s was…a guy who was constantly on talk shows and in magazine articles and gossip columns. Here’s to the English teachers in America’s high schools. In Cold what? Good work, guys.

Here‘s Chicago Tribune critic Mark Caro’s new blog, called Pop Machine.

Hold on a sec: I’ve just figured a way for the fourth Indiana Jones movie, which has been in and out of development since the early ’90s, to work despite the Harrison Ford aging problem. One glance at Ford in that Firewall one-sheet and your first thought is how old and grandfatherly he seems. How do you write a dashing, thrilling Indy 4 adventure flick when the star is going to be 64 in July and looks every day of it? Conventional solution: turn him into Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade…cast him as the dad/mentor figure opposite some young buck actor who’ll handle all the heavy-duty action moves. But I say “no” to that. You can cast a younger guy alongside Ford, fine…but the running joke is that old, bent-over Indy is stronger, tougher, braver and in better shape than the much-younger guy. In short, ignore the age issue. In fact, go in the other direction. Have Ford do all the grueling action sequences he did in Raiders of the Lost Ark and then some…fake it, CG it, push it, but don’t let him be Grandpappy Amos. That’s it…that’s the fix.