L.A. Times reporter John Horn wrote yesterday that he’s recently spoken with “two Oscar voters [who have] privately admitted that they didn’t see 12 Years a Slave, thinking it would be upsetting…but they said they voted for it anyway because, given the film’s social relevance, they felt obligated to do so.” The morning after the Oscars I wrote the following: “[Academy voters] felt in the end that they had to go with a film that mattered, that said something, that was strong of heart. But I’ll bet a lot of people just voted for it without having seen it. They trusted, based on the strong Slave passions they’d heard or read about, that they were doing the right thing.” How representative of the Academy voters are Horn’s two sources? Two blades of grass usually suggests there’s at least a patch nearby.

Aaahh, to be a wandering American journalist in Eastern Europe in the early ’30s, running short on cash and optimism, and then to suddenly luck into a job at an English-language daily called the Trans-Alpine Yodel. And to be charged each day with reporting the occasionally threatening news of the day, to work in a large newsroom filled with the clatter of Olivetti and Underwood typewriters, to crack wise with the constantly-smoking and occasionally booze-sipping staffers and printing-press guys…what a life, never to be lived, only dreamt of.

“Writer-director Steven Knight’s Locke (A24, 4.25) is basically just Tom Hardy driving a car while making a bunch of phone calls, and yet this ingeniously executed study in cinematic minimalism has depth, beauty and poise. A finely tuned showcase for Hardy’s exceptional acting skills, Bluetooth-enabled dashboard displays and the dynamic range of the Red Epic camera, the pic tracks a dark night of the soul for a construction-site manager en route from Birmingham to London.” — from Leslie Felperin‘s 9.2.13 Venice Film Festival review in Variety.

Last weekend the Spirit Awards gang should have handed a special indie passion trophy last weekend to Jeff Lipsky‘s Adopt Films. The New York-based outfit is distributing two admired but markedly similar West Bank thrillers — Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (opening 3.7) and Hany Abu-Assad‘s Oscar-nominated Omar. Lucid, taut and suspenseful, they both regard the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a filter of double-agenting, family ties, anxiety and betrayal. And they both end in a sudden burst of violence. You have to see them both. They don’t compete with each other as much as form a greater sum.

Remaking West Side Story for the screen is a bad enough idea on its own. The original Oscar-winning 1961 original is easily accessible, and with more and more of the viewing today happening on big-screen TVs who needs to see a new musical version in a megaplex when the old one will more or less suffice? And is the world clamoring for a Stephen Sondheim-Leonard Bernstein musical version of Baz Luhrman‘s Romeo + Juliet (’96)? True, the ’61 version seems stiff and lacquered and overly theatrical by today’s standards. The challenge, I suppose, would be to make a version that feels a bit looser and more “street” verite, and set it against a real-life culture where gang warfare, turf battles and racial animosity are regular facts of life. But of all the directors in all the world who could possibly pull this off without causing major embarassment or nausea, Steven Spielberg would have to be at the bottom of the list. Helming a new West Side Story would arouse every treacly, gooey, sentimental impulse in his system. The result would be a disaster. And yet Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that a Spielberg West Side Story is an actual possibility if DreamWorks’ Stacey Snider winds up taking the reins at 20th Century Fox.

I’ve seen Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel (Fox Searchlight, 3.7) twice now. (Here’s the rave review I filed from Berlin.) I’d love to see it a third time at tonight’s special members-only screening at Santa Monica’s Aero but I’m told there are no seats. I should have attended Monday’s screening of Rushmore, and in the bargain said hello to Matt Zoller Seitz, who’s been making the rounds to promote “The Wes Anderson Collection,” a four-and-a-half-pound, 336-page tribute & evaluation book. I’m hoping to lay my hands on a copy tomorrow or the next day.

Scott Johnson has posted a 3.4 Hollywood Reporter piece about the decisions and circumstances that led to the violent death of Midnight Rider camera assistant Sarah Jones on 2.20. It places the blame squarely on the apparent recklessness of director Randall Miller. No permission from the railroad, no medic, no production coordinator, no safety instructions, no nothing. Miller decided to cut corners and roll the dice so he could get his dream-sequence shot with a bed on the train tracks, and then suddenly the death train was approaching at 60 mph. And now Miller is the new John Landis.

Johnson doesn’t discuss the two most obvious precautions which were also apparently ignored (which I brought up in my 2.20 piece about the tragedy, called “Railroad Chicken“) — i.e., failing to obtain a reliable estimate of when trains would be expected to pass, and failing to place two production assistants with cellphones or long-range walkie-talkies a couple of miles in either direction to give early warning about rogue trains.

My first reaction when I first heard about Jones’ death was “why didn’t she just drop everything and jump off the bridge into the Altamaha River?” That’s what I would have done, no question. To hell with the equipment. I would simply gone over the railing, Butch & Sundance-style.

A pair of films about compulsive gamblers are currently shooting — Missisippi Grind and The Gambler. Both are remakes of a pair of renowned gambling films released in 1974, and both are looking at early 2015 release dates. Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden‘s Grind is a loose re-imagining of Robert Altman‘s California Split, and it costars Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn, possibly in the roles played by George Segal and Elliot Gould in the Altman film. Rupert Wyatt‘s The Gambler, a remake of Karel Reisz and James Toback‘s The Gambler, stars Mark Wahlberg as James Caan, Brie Larson as Lauren Hutton, John Goodman as Paul Sorvino and Jessica Lange as Wahlberg’s mom. Toback’s largely autobiographical Gambler script for the ’74 version has been rewritten by William Monahan (The Departed). It partly adheres to the original and partly not. Toback is an executive producer of the remake but has no creative input. But he has a certain level of input in Mississippi Grind — he recently performed a cameo in which he belted Mendelsohn. Grind also stars Sienna Miller, Analeigh Tipton and Alfre Woodard.

“So let’s say — just as a hypothetical for instance — you are an 81-year-old star whose last movie was in 1991 and who hasn’t been to the Oscars in many a long year. Not that you were ever nominated for one in the first place; you were, after all, a sex symbol for most of your career. As the evening approaches, the anxiety sets in. Harsh lights, you think. High-definition cameras. And a public that remembers you chiefly as the ice goddess whose beauty once drove James Stewart to the brink of madness.

I don’t blame Kim Novak — I blame the plastic surgeon. He (no woman would do this to another woman) should be brought up on charges. I honestly felt that her face looked a little bit like John Merrick’s. I’m sorry but I felt humiliated for her.

“And even back then, when you were 25 years old, you worried constantly that no matter how you looked, it wasn’t good enough.

Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Americanization of Emily (’64) is about as intelligent and savvy as an adult political satire can get. (I’ve always loved the phrase “positively clanking with moral fervor.”) It’s nowhere near the class of The Hospital or Network or even Altered States. Too much speechifying. And there’s no way an anti-war Naval officer like James Garner‘s Charlie Madison would exist in the middle of World War II, even as a London-based “dog robber.” His philosophy is pure mid ’60s. But I love ’60s black-and-white films, and so I’d buy the forthcoming Warner Archive Bluray in a second. But I’ve already bought Vudu’s HDX version, and I can’t imagine it looking any better.

Arie Posin‘s The Face of Love (IFC Films, 3.7) is a mostly mediocre love story. The performances aren’t half bad and at times touch bottom or are good for a chuckle, but the ghastly, on-the-nose script (by Posin and Matthew McDuffe) sucks the oxygen out of the room. The film is basically about how a well-off 50ish widow named Nikki (Annette Bening) poisons a promising relationship with Tom (Ed Harris), a nice, middle-aged artist, by lying her ass off. She’s attracted to Tom because he’s an absolute dead ringer for her deceased husband, Garrett (also played by Harris), who drowned five years ago. But instead of copping to that simple fact, she lies and lies and lies and lies all through the film. The only reason Nikki/Bening gradually opens up is because she’s forced to. Needless to add she’s a total drag to hang with.

Grantland‘s Mark Harris has ripped into yours truly in a 3.3 piece about the Oscars. In paragraph #8, to be precise. [See below] So here are replies to some of his assertions, which, summed up, basically pat the Academy on the back for a job relatively well done. Not perfectly (in part because they gave their Best Supporting Oscar to Dallas Buyer’s Club‘s Jared Leto, whose performance didn’t ring Harris’s bell) but good enough.

Harris statement #1: “Academy voters turned to a tough, sad, hard film about our own bad past made by a black Englishman and said, ‘This was the best of the year.’

Wells response: No, they didn’t do that, Mark. A relatively small portion of the membership did. Probably a third or a bit less. Nobody will ever know the exact percentage but this was almost certainly no landslide. Harris knows full well there was a very strong concern among many award-season pundits that quite a few Academy members either didn’t like 12 Years A Slave enough to vote for it or hadn’t even popped the screener in (or had skipped through the brutal parts if they had). I’m certain that Harris also suspects, like everyone else, that 12 years A Slave barely squeaked through to a win, and that if the Best Picture race had been a mano e mano between Slave and Gravity, the Academy would have definitely given the Best Picture prize to Alfonso Cuaron‘s space ride. Dollars to donuts Steve McQueen‘s film was saved because the anti-Slave vote split between Gravity, American Hustle and to a lesser extent Philomena.