Whoa…wait a minute. Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson has written in her Risky Business column that “right now, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck are leading the Oscar pack.” In other words, Clooney’s film has the second-highest Best Picture heat factor after Lee’s. I’m not saying she’s wrong and I realize that Clooney & Co. have done a brilliant job of promoting their drama about journalistic ethics and personal courage, but if GNAGL has in fact surged as high as Thompson claims, people — Academy members — are losing sight of the overall. They like it because they fondly remember the ’50s and Edward R. Murrow and the values he stood and fought for, etc., but c’mon: GNAGL is a well crafted, very respected film for what it is within its modest perimeters. It’s basically a solid black-and-white, better-than-mezzo-mezzo drama that was cleverly shot like a Playhouse 90 live broadcast from the 1950s. A very sturdy thing, okay, but how can anyone call it a gusher? For a movie to win a Best Picture Oscar it has to least try to say something profound about the the ground we all stand on and the air we all breathe. (I mean, unless it’s a revolting aber- ration like Chicago.) GNAGL is a passion piece about a very rock-steady good guy who said and did the right things, but it’s very particular and historical and doesn’t strike any universal chords or illuminate anything about life on the street…not the one I live on, at least. It’s about life inside a very elite Manhattan bunker some 60 years ago, which was under very peculiar and particular pressures at the time. I’m not saying it won’t be nominated for Best Picture, and I guess it doesn’t matter if journos proclaim this or that film as the second-hottest contender because there’s only one Best Picture winner at the end…but how Good Night, and Good Luck went from being a respected and competitive Best Picture contender to being first runner-up beneath Brokeback Mountain is a bit of a shocker. I would go so far as to say this has been my biggest what-the-fuck? moment of the day so far.

Remember that recent New York Times piece by Peter Edidin about fickle typeface guys and graphic-arts designers that voiced a complaint about the allegedly incorrect use of Helvetica for a CBS logo seen in Good Night, and Good Luck? Well, it appears that Edidin’s sources were wrong and GNAGL wasn’t. The film’s art director Christa Munro has clarified matters with designer Mark Simonson, who has passed along her comments on his website. The beef was that GNAGL takes place in 1954 but Helvetica wasn’t invented until 1957. But Munro told Simonson that “Helvetica was not used in the film, contrary to what was claimed in the [Times] article. She said, rather, that the sign shown in the example frame was set in Akzidenz Grotesk, a face which predated (and in fact was the basis for) Helvetica, and that this choice was based on extensive research of CBS’s graphic design during the period depicted in the film.”

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil fears that Jon Stewart may turn out to be “the worst Oscar host ever” when he takes the mike on the Kodak theatre stage on March 5th. O’Neil allows that Stewart has an “edgy defiant ‘tude that attracts young hip TV viewers,” but says he’s “a comic assassin” whose tuxedoed material may be too withering and ascerbic and “has the potential of being a catas- trophe of epic Cecil B. DeMille proportions.” As former House speaker Sam Rayburn used to say, “Aww, shit, sonny.” Everyone knows the secret to being a good Oscar host is to maintain an underlying tone of affection, and O’Neill is presuming that Stewart hasn’t figured that out or plans on ignoring it because Chris Rock did last year? I’m with David Thomson on this. He told L.A. Times reporter Rachel Abramowitz for her piece on the Stewart hire that “the Oscars have grown into this appalling circus…and we’re trapped with it, and very often the films are not worthy. I don’t think the host is terribly important, but to the degree that we’re fed up with the show, a new host is fresh meat. A new host can say, ‘I’ll only do it if I can do it my own way.’ That’s the real bargain — whether the real host is given liberty or the academy sits on him. If they give Jon Stewart his freedom, it would be a merciful touch. He’s always against pomp. Maybe he can be fun.”

Either sports-movies-with-plots-you’ve-seen-17-times-before get you or they don’t. They’re almost a genre. But the good ones are always a bit different…they always pay off in some unforeseen way. I was afraid that Remember the Titans would make me nod off, but it didn’t. (And yet…frankly…thinking back upon Remem- ber the Titans, I can’t remember very much.) I thought Friday Night Lights would be the same old stuff, but it had a lot of good actors and that grainy-funky photography and had those bleak Odessa, Texas, backdrops and the team lost the big game at the finale…and it turned out to be fairly exceptional. You could see what Dreamer: Based on a True Story would be from ten miles away, but it was smoothly made and agreeably acted and it didn’t rankle. That said, I haven’t seen Jerry Bruckheimer’s Glory Road (Disney, 1.13) but it’s an African-American Hoosiers set in Texas with Josh Lucas as Gene Hackman. Set in ’65 and ’66, Lucas plays a Texas Western coach named Don Haskins who led the first all-black starting line-up for a college basketball team to the NCAA national championship. The big hurdle was racism. Forty years ago there were virtually no black college players in the South, and with schools that had black players there was an unwritten rule that you could play one black player at a time at home, two on the road, and three if you were losing badly. Anyway, Haskins can’t find any decent white players so he recruits blacks from northern cities and brings them to Texas Western to play basketball and you know the rest. But I hear it’s pretty good (and that Jon Voight has another terrific supporting role a la Michael Mann’s Ali under ten pounds of makeup). Bottom line is that Disney wouldn’t be having a big nationwide sneak this Saturday if the movie wasn’t connecting.

“Jarhead has more in common with Beckett, Sartre and Banuel than it does with Oliver Stone,” in the view of director Sam Mendes. “In America, they assumed I was trying to make an Oliver Stone movie and that I’d failed.” I don’t think that was the problem. The problem was that nothing really happened. Not to sound too primitive, but that was it.

The 21st Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which runs from February 2nd to 12th, will kick off with Oscar-winner Robert Towne‘s Ask The Dust starring Salma Hayek and Colin Farrell and finish with Jason Reitman‘s very sharp and funny Thank You For Smoking with Aaron Eckhardt, Maria Bello, Katie Holmes,Rob Lowe, William H. Macy and Robert Duvall. I don’t recognize the films yet, but there will be discussions with and tributes paid to Towne, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Heath Ledger, Felicity Huffman, Maria Bello and Naomi Watts. The festival will also present the second annual “Attenborough Award for Excellence in Nature Filmmaking” to director James Cameron (who?…wait a minute…didn’t he direct something about eight or nine years ago…?).

Reader Mike Gebert just wrote and said, “The Oscars could be hosted by Jenna Jameson for all I care, but if the Best Picture nominees are Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck and Munich, then haven’t the Oscars basically become the Independent Spirit Awards and completely severed any ties with the main American moviegoing public?” And I replied, “First of all, Munich probably won’t make it. But otherwise…hello?…Brokeback Mountain is on its way to becoming a sizable popular hit (it hasn’t even begun to be seen by mainstream America), and Crash connected very nicely before going to DVD. And Capote, thank goodness, will now be seen by more people as a result of its likely Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Oscar winners have been huge financial hits in the past, but those days are pretty much over because the big studios have all but taken themselves out of the Oscar-contending game. Are you suggesting that the finalists should be picked from among the biggest moneymakers? It’s an old analogy of mine, but as movieogers we all live in a Planet of the Apes nation with movies for the smart chimps and movies for the gorillas. You know this, and yet you say it’s disappointing that there aren’t more gorilla movies among the likely Best Picture nods? The days of big-studio movies like Gone With the Wind, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bridge on the River Kwai, My Fair Lady amd The Godfather are over…but the era of Very Good and In Some Cases Emotionally Riveting Films like the ones that are likely to be nominated is now upon us…and that’s that. I’m not saying it would be impossible for a big studio to finance a Gone With the Wind or Bridge on the River Kwai or The Godfather these days, but obviously those days have all but slipped away. You know it, I know it…get used to it.”

Obviously the best thing about this teaser-trailer for M:I:3 (Mission: Impossible III for those who aren’t into the brevity thing) is Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s acting in the opening seconds of it. He takes some ordinary bad-guy-threatening-the-good-guy dialogue and really makes it sing. You believe him emotionally, and he puts some great English on the final line — “Then I’m going to kill you right in front of her.” Great actor! And the worst thing about it is Ving Rhames embracing star Tom Cruise at the very end and saying, “Welcome back, brother!” Of course, the overwhelming sentiment about Cruise in Ticket-Buying Land right now is one of concern for his emotional stability, if not pity for what he did to himself last year. So dub over that final line and have Rhames say instead, “Meds are workin’, brother!”

Now that I’m back in L.A. and all the tech stuff (microphones, speaker phone, etc.) is plugged in and functioning, “Elsewhere Live” will make its post-holiday return this evening at 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Eastern.

The Paul Haggis surge with this morning’s DGA nomination (on top of the surge for Crash with the recent SAG and Producers Guild noms) is the big story of the morning, and let’s give credit where credit is due. MCN’s Gurus of Gold is about predicting popular industry support, and no one voted for Haggis except for Maxim critic and industry gadfly Pete Hammond. In fact, if it weren’t Hammond’s vote (he listed Haggis as #3 among his five most-likely Best Director nominees) Haggis wouldn’t be on the Gurus of Gold countdown at all. All of these journo know-it-alls (myself included) totally blanked him.

Was I wrong about Munich‘s strength or is this just some corroded political DGA thing? Steven Spielberg has nabbed one of the five Best Director nominations from the Directors Guild of America, and David Poland, one of Munich‘s most die-hard supporters, is now apparently of two minds. Today’s Hot Button is obviously a limited Munich pullback piece on one level, but he also says, incredibly, that “I still believe in my gut that if Munich gets nominated, the month following nominations will see enough people lining up behind the film in this good-not-Oscar-great season for it to win the Oscar.” The reason I believe Poland to be the ultimate Japanese-soldier-holding-out-in-a-cave- in-Okinawa is that I keep hearing there’s no sizable support for Munich among the guilds, so if you ask me (and I’m not the only one) this is just about directors kissing Spielberg’s ass for giving a lot of people a lot of work over the years. The other four DGA nominees (and congratulations to them all) are Capote‘s Bennett Miller (that’s it…Capote is a flat-out Best Picture lock) Brokeback Mountain‘s Ang Lee, George Clooney for Good Night, and Good Luck and Crash‘s Paul Haggis — the beneficiary of the biggest sentiment surge. The DGA winner and the Oscar-winner for Best Director have been the same in 51 of the last 57 years.

I’ve listened and considered and poked at the ground with a stick, and I think I understand what the Jon-Stewart-hosting-the- Oscar-show deal is going to be. The Blue Staters love his tweaky irreverence and are looking very much forward to his wicked bons mots, and the Reds aren’t into him as much (a guy wrote me claiming that people between the coasts and outside the cities don’t even know who he is) and won’t watch as much as they would if someone they felt more comfortable with had been chosen to host. Am I suggesting that the Academy release photos of Stewart waiting in line at a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise while wearing a T-shirt and a baseball hat? Fuck no. But the ratings, I fear, will not…naaah, maybe not. I don’t care about the Oscar show ratings anway. Let ’em fall…what do we care? And besides, as the New York Times “Carpetbagger” David Carr has written, “Mr. Stewart is an enemy of convention, of industrial folkways, of the mannered back-slapping of the entertainment business. Joaquin Phoenix won’t be the only one walking the line on Oscar night.”