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You’ll get no argument from me about the New York Film Critics Circle giving Zero Dark Thirty their Best Picture award; ditto ZDT‘s Kathryn Bigelow winning Best Director. My support of ZDT (which I saw for the second time last night) is as ardent as my love affair with Silver Linings Playbook, and I’m delighted that all the lightweights who’ve been telling me ZDT is too cold and not audience-friendly enough are now going “hmmm, what are we not seeing….is it because we’re too shallow?”

On top of which I predicted the ZDT win four days ago.

There’s absolutely no basis for any complaint about Lincoln‘s Daniel Day Lewis winning the Best Actor trophy. I said from the beginning that despite that Matthew Modine-imitating-Walter Brennan voice, he nails Abe pretty damn well. And yes, I’m feeling a small measure of comfort from the fact that Lincoln has received no Best Picture momentum from this morning’s voting, and that Steven Spielberg wasn’t named Best Director.

Rachel Weisz winning the NYFCC’s Best Actress award for her tragic infidel performance in Deep Blue Sea is, I’m sorry, a seriously odd call. To paraphrase a Spencer Tracy line in Judgment at Nuremberg, “You’re going to have to explain why they gave this award to Rachel Weisz…you’re going to have to explain this very carefully.”

My own Weisz explanation: On its own terms Weisz’s performance in this murky, submerged drama is quite sad and affecting as far as it goes, but The Deep Blue Sea is something I just wanted to escape from. I’ve felt all along that Terrence Davies‘ film is far too dreary and fatalistic. It’s covered in a kind of amber, candle-lit ’50s murk, as if there wasn’t enough electricity to go around in post war Britain, and this seems to work as a visual metaphor for doldrums and social imprisonment. And the fact that Weisz’s character, a socially respectable married woman in her late 30s or early 40s, has an affair with an unstable military guy with a hair-trigger temper (Tom Hiddleston) lessens sympathy and compassion for her character as you ask yourself. “Why did this basically decent woman choose such a flaming asshole to have an affair with?” So it’s not a matter of Weisz not giving a highly commendable performance. She’s never not affecting or skillful. It’s the pathetic character she’s playing. A vote for a performance is never just a vote for a performance — you’re also voting for how much you identify with a character or recognize him/her in yourself. And so when I heard the news this morning it was like “what the eff?”

Sally Field winning for Best Supporting Actress seems like a huge slapdown for Les Miserables. The consensus over the last week and or so has been that no matter what happens to Tom Hooper‘s film award-wise or commercially, Anne Hathaway — who gives the one Les Miz performance that absolutely everyone has been knocked out by or at least greatly admires — will surely win Best Supporting Actress honors from critics and industry groups alike. But she didn’t today. That means something.

I’m figuring that the NYFCC reaction to Les Miz is so negative or mixed that the backwash surged into the room and drowned the Hathaway support in its crib. How else to explain the Field win? She was fine as the troubled Mary Todd Lincoln — angry, edgy, seething — but I didn’t come out of Lincoln going “holy bejeesus, Sally Field was really amazing!” I came out going “I have to admit that DDL really nailed it and so did Tommy Lee Jones.”

Hooray for Matthew McConaughey winning Best Supporting Actor for his performances in Magic Mike and Bernie.

Do I expect that Academy members will now open themselves up a bit more to Zero Dark Thirty or at least not be so quick to dismiss it? Naaah. They’re mules for the most part, and they’re gonna vote for the movies that talk to them and make them feel good, and to hell with the judgment of history. Do you think all the dead Academy members who voted for Around The World in Eighty Days as Best Picture in early ’57 care that this decision is now regarded as one of the most shameful in the history of world culture? Of couse not. They’re either floating around with angel wings in heaven or roasting on spits down in hell. Either way they don’t care. They can’t.

The bottom line is that the Academy Awards are all about serving the emotional needs and catering to the commercial interests of the community, or a lowest-common-denominator representation of same. And that’s why Silver Linings Playbook, which is easily as accomplished in its own way as Zero Dark Thirty or Lincoln or The Master or Les Miserables are in theirs, will surge with the HFPA and particularly with the Academy, as least as far as nominations are concerned. Oh, wait…it hasn’t taken off the way it should have with Joe & Jane Popcorn. I forgot about that.

SLP is the only Best Picture contender that makes you feel good if not euphoric at the end (unless, of course, you’re one of the haters), and is brilliantly doled out to boot.

Congrats also to Tony Kushner winning the Best Screenplay award for Lincoln, and to Amour for wining Best Foreign Language Film, and to Frankenweenie for winning the Best Animated Feature trophy, and to Greig Fraser for winning the Best Cinematography award for Zero Dark Thirty.

As of 8:30 am Pacific the New York Film Critics Circle had given its Best Documentary prize to The Central Park Five, a fine, sturdy, New York-centric doc that nonetheless bothered me for reasons I’ve explained. (No need to dredge it all up again.) And the Best First Film award went to David France‘s How To Survive a Plague. I’m off to a 9 am appointment and won’t be free until 11 am.

It would appear that JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek: Into Darkness (Paramount, 5.17.13) is enveloped in some kind of apocalyptic wasteland along with a time travel flourish of some kind. It would therefore appear that things are going to be grim, grim, grim all over due to “an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization,” leading Captain Kirk to “lead a manhunt into a war-zone world to capture a one-man weapon of mass destruction,” etc.

Paramount’s The Guilt Trip (12.19), a road comedy about a 60ish widowed Jewish mom (Barbra Streisand) and her downbeat inventor son (Seth Rogen), was snuck Sunday afternoon at the AMC Century City. No reviews until later but it wasn’t half bad — adult laughs, low-key tone, character-driven, no vulgarity, not classic but likable and entertaining and occasionally heartfelt. Pic was exec produced by Rogen and Streisand, directed by Anne Fletcher (The Proposal) and written by Dan Fogelman.

Rogen and Streisand showed up after the screening and did a live q & a that was close-circuited to other theatres. The crowd was packed with impassioned, eager-beaver fans of Streisand’s albums and particularly of Yentl.

Rogen plays an inventor, Andy Brewster, who’s trying to sell a natural-elements cleaner to the big chains without much success. When he discovers that the beloved ex-boyfriend of his widowed mom, Joyce (Barbra Streisand), is living and working in San Francisco, he invites her to join him on a cross-country trip as he tries to sell his cleaner (which has a really hard-to-remember name that kinda sounds like Science Cleaner but is actually Scioclean or something like that) so they can wind up in San Fran and reunited with the old boyfriend. And yet the way Joyce nags and nudges pisses Andy off and puts him in a bad mood half the time.

Silver Linings Playbook helmer David O. Russell is the possible weak sister among the projected Best Director Oscar nominees? I really, really don’t think so despite Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan having concluded that Ben Affleck, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hooper are “already absolute locks…aren’t they?” No, they aren’t. Not all three, I mean. Buchanan is reading two-week-old leaves.

Affleck, yes, but Hooper? Surely Buchanan has heard of the Les Miz blowback by now. And Spielberg? Why, because Lincoln is his best film since Schindler’s List and he needs to be rewarded for not succumbing to his usual instincts? Or because he and Jaunusz Kaminski went completely whole-hog on that milky white light flooding through the non-existent windows in the U.S. House of Representatives chamber? Or because he’s worth $3 billion and Academy members will receive a kind of goodwill dividend if they nominate him?

In last night’s Zero Dark Thirty riff I didn’t mention the eerily riveting score by Alexandre Desplat. It conveys appropriate doses of menace and anxiety, but in a way that perfectly suits or matches the film’s low-key, docu-drama-ish authority. Ironically the music in this clip is one of the few portions that seem a bit rote. Desplat also did the score for Argo.

“Basically I prepare for a role in the same way every time,” Chris Walken tells The Guardian‘s Sean O’Hagan in a 12.1 interview. “I take the script, I stand in my kitchen and I quietly mumble it to myself. Over and over. I keep doing that until I hear something in there. I was trained as a dancer and that stuck with me, so I’m essentially looking for a rhythm. For me, acting is all to do with rhythm. When I figure stuff out, it has to do with finding the rhythm. Always.”

“Walken grew up in Astoria, Queens, the kind of second-generation, melting-pot neighbourhood that has long since vanished in New York,” O’Hagan writes. “He once told an interviewer he ‘grew up listening to people speaking broken English…and I probably speak English almost as a second language.’ This may be the real key to his strange, almost stilted, delivery, alongside the fact that he made an early decision as an actor to wilfully disregard punctuation when reading his lines, a quirk that he guessed rightly would set him apart.”

O’Hagan misspells “willfully” in that last sentence, using only one “l” instead of the two preferred by Merrian-Webster.

Correntin Charron‘s Un petit plat pour l’homme is hereby dedicated to a friend, editor-screenwriter David Scott Smith, for reasons he’ll immediately recognize. I guess I should co-dedicate the link to MSN’s James Rocchi, who’s also a bit of a foodie. The English title is One Small Dish for Man.

For $14.98, you can now pre-order a forthcoming Bluray of Michael Mann‘s The Insider. It ships on 2.19.13, or two and a half months hence. I’ll take it, thank you, beggars can’t be choosers. But there’s something demeaning about this great 1999 film being sold to the public via Walmart. I’m asking around as we speak, but if there’s a God it will contain some decent extras. If any film cries out for a deluxe Criterion release, it’s this one. The 2000 Touchstone DVD was strictly bare bones.

The headline implies that I’ve noticed saliva spray coming from the great Al Pacino in the midst of one of his anti-corporate tortious interference rants. Not true. It’s just that I’ve never forgotten the flying missiles when I caught his lead performance of American Buffalo at a downtown Manhattan theatre 30-odd years ago. Nor have I forgotten a critic writing about same during a performance of Richard III, and quoting a line from that play in the bargain: “Why dost thou spit at me?”

“Even after a relentless, decade-long pursuit that leads to the daring midnight raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound, even as she unzips the body bag to verify that the bloody corpse inside is indeed that of the slain al-Qaida leader, Jessica Chastain‘s Maya, a CIA officer, is defined primarily by her femininity in this male-dominated world.

“It’s probably a phenomenon Kathryn Bigelow unfortunately is acquainted with herself, being the rare woman in Hollywood making muscular action movies — including 2009’s The Hurt Locker, winner of six Academy Awards including best picture and director, the latter being a first for a woman. And so even as Zero Dark Thirty takes an aesthetically stripped-down look at a hugely dramatic event, it shines with the integrity and decency of its central figure: a fierce young woman who’s both dedicated and brainy, demanding and brazen.” — AP critic Christi Lemire.

In other words, Zero Dark Thirty is as personal for Bigelow and as much a piece of self-portraiture as Vertigo was for Alfred Hitchcock.

Six hours and 15 minutes ago I drove over to the Directors Guild building for a 6 pm screening of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty, which I loved. Hard as nails, a tension opera, the real details, lean and mean, cinema verite, the confidence to “get there” in its own way, and when it does it pays off like a slot machine. I believed every line, every scene, every frame.

No one is a bigger admirer of The Hurt Locker than myself (I was one of the first fans out of the gate,) but Zero Dark Thirty delivers on a more precise, exacting and muscular level — it’s dry and fierce and austere and Day of the Jackal-ish (minus the sex) and much more exacting and verite than even I expected. And yet it builds and delivers like a great melodrama, or a great melodrama according to Biggy-Boal’s new rules.

And then I saw Django Unchained…a total spur-of the-moment thing. There was a big crowd inside the DGA lobby waiting to get into a 9 pm screening, and a filmmaker friend suggested that I join them so I did (what the hell) and nobody stopped me at the door…wham!

I don’t want to break the rules by riffing or reviewing, but it’s a complete Tarantino wankathon, a ’70s spaghetti western “southern”, about as un-period as it could possibly be, pop tunes on the soundtrack (including Richie Havens‘ “Freedom”), 2 hours and 45 minutes long (and a really talky second hour that has to be experienced to be believed), sadistic and blunt, semi-“thoughtful”, comedic and smirking and about as cinematically sincere as an SNL skit, pockmarked with occasional fast-zoom shots, incredibly impressed with itself, howlingly funny at times, silly, stupid, undisciplined, simultaneously Mandingo-esque and an anti-Mandingo, tedious, a hoot, astonishing at times and too effing long. But at least it’s not three hours, which it allegedly was a while back.

A lot of people are going to love Django Unchained. But forget any awards action. Okay, maybe Leonardo DiCaprio or Christoph Waltz for supporting, but I doubt it.

I don’t have time to do a full-on review of Zero Dark Thirty but it’s a great film for delivering a real drama (i.e., one disguised a a procedural) on its own terms and without going “Hollywood” except for one line that includes the word “motherfucker”, and I swear to God the guy who said it’s basically a long episode of 24 has a major blockage going on.

To me Zero Dark Thirty felt like dessert — like fresh strawberries and poundcake under a mound of Reddiwip.

Jessica Chastain gives one of the great hard-boiled performances of all time, and yet you can read her thoughts and feelings every inch of the way, clear as a bell. I still think the Best Actress Oscar belongs to Jennifer Lawrence, but I worshipped Chastain’s steely minimalism to such a degree that I’m really glad I rsvp’ed to see it a second time late tomorrow afternoon. Now I can go there again.

Don’t even talk about ZDT not being a Best Picture contender, and I don’t want to hear Tom O’Neil giggling about it in the elevator going down to the garage. Best Director for Bigelow, Best Original Screenplay for Boal. And Chastain is a Best Actress nominee, of course. And I really loved Jason Clarke as a CIA torture guy.

It’s 12:44 am now and I have to crash before long, but here I am sitting here beaming with pride that I’m not one of those Academy flabby-bellies who’ve been kvetching about how Zero Dark Thirty is too cold or unemotional. This kind of “cold” and “unemotional” turns on my spigots like almost nothing else. Thank you, God, for giving me the genes and the luck and life experience that didn’t make me into one of them. Thank you for letting me see through to the nub and heart of things, and the ability to recognize the cinematic equivalents of the freshest, best prepared foods and the chemistry of Hostess Cupcakes.

It may not warm the cockles of your heart, but for me Zero Dark Thirty is Bigelow’s masterpiece. And big cheers in particular for Boal’s screenplay, which nails right through and hones it all down, scene after scene after scene.

Incidentally: A friend said he saw Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity on 11.12 and that it’s really good. Roughly 90 minutes long, tightly fused, unfolds in real time (or something fairly close to that), a good story about a way out of a horrific situation, has fantastic 3D and a knockout opening — something like 20 minutes without a cut.