Hey, Tom O’Neil, Sasha Stone, Kris Tapley, Stu Van Airsdale, Scott Feinberg, et. al.! The Oscars are happening only eight days hence. Are there any more articles or polls or predictions or sideline pieces we can run with over the next few days? You know, just to keep the suspense and excitement going?

HitFix/In Contention‘s Roth Cornet posted one of the finest assessments of Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball that I’ve read this year:

“Many traditional sports movies either overtly or inherently deliver the message that our worth can be discovered, confirmed or solidified in one moment of victory and/or within the framework of a shiny, easily identifiable skill — even if that skill is simply strength of will.

“Moneyball presents an image of the human experience that feels far more reflective of life, one in which we are, as Brad Pitt said in an interview with The Guardian, ‘a series of successes and failures,’ who must make choices based on multiple and nuanced factors.

“The other message of many sports films is that our worth ought to be reflected by outside markers to the degree that a loss of the prize in question would be an insurmountable tragedy. Moneyball reminds us of the times that we hit a home run and are so focused on the wrong thing that we don’t even know it.”

What kind of a woman’s name is “Roth”? It has a very cool ring but I’ve never once heard it used before.

Ceasar Must Die, a reportedly not-great, less-than-commercial documentary by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, the 80-something Italian filmmakers who creatively peaked 35 years ago with Padre Padrone, has won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Indiewire‘s Peter Kneght reports that “many had pegged Christian Petzold‘s Barbara or Miguel Gomes‘ Tabu as the likely winner, as both received considerable critical acclaim.”

“Mixed reviews out of Berlin and an experimental production method may hold Caesar back from much of a wide release,” Eric Kohn wrote in his Indiewire review, “although it has enough unique appeal to make its way to an alternative release or perhaps a solid television deal.”

A jury led by Mike Leigh looked at the doc, a portrait of prison inmates putting on a performance of William Shakespeare‘s Julius Ceasar, and apparently decided the following before making their announcement: “Giving the prize to the Taviani brothers is not just a vote of approval for their latest film but also a way of honoring their past works and particularly the cinema of the ’70s and ’80s. We will also be saluting creative endeavor by artists of advanced years, which is something we all need to honor and support because we’ll all be there before you know it. This award will also be perceived as a metaphorical renunciation of the lamentable tendencies of the present.

“So it will be the right thing to do all around, and when it’s done we can all go home and smile at ourselves in the bathroom mirror.”

A guy I speak to from time to time went to last night’s Sleigh Bells concert at Manhattan’s Terminal 5. Which is obviously fine but he also “dropped,” if you catch my meaning. Can you imagine being in this kind of sensory-onslaught environment and going “whoo-hoo!” and raising your pointed index finger in tribute while tripping?

I wrote the guy back this morning and asked, “Sorry to sound like I’m sounding but have you ever thought about looking at LSD the old-fashioned way — as a chemical additive that opens the doors of perception and leads to a parting of the clouds and, for the true seekers, spiritual satori?

“I don’t need to remind you that thousands if not tens of thousands of lives were profoundly affected by LSD during the latter half of the 20th Century. LSD changed a portion of the Harvard University faculty in the early ’60s as well as the music of all the best rock bands of the mid to late ’60s (‘I know what it’s like to be dead’), and it triggered the great spiritual awakening of the late 1900s (roughly 1965 to the late ’70s) and…let me get this straight…you’re dropping it in order to ‘party’ and go whoo-hoo at a Sleigh Bells concert?

“Have you ever heard of Jay Stevens‘ “Storming Heaven,” the book I’ve written about in the column?

“I’m only saying that LSD opened things up spiritually and perceptionally for a whole lot of people in the ’60s and ’70s and gave them a taste of the mystical and sublime, the kind of Eastern enlightenment God-head that had previously been known only to a very select crowd (Aldous Huxley, Hermann Hesse, earnest readers of “Bhagavad Gita” and “Siddhartha,” the mystics of India, Cary Grant, Timothy Leary).

“What form does LSD come in now? Tablet, capsule…? How long does it last? For me the first two or three hours would be ecstatic — ‘elevator in the brain hotel’ — and then it would gradually level out and sink down after eight or ten hours.

“‘Elevator in the brain hotel‘ is great, but there’s SO MUCH MORE to be had from that drug….words fail.”

Why would I want to buy a Bluray of a 1948 black-and-white film that, according to Bluray.com’s Jeffrey Kauffman, (a) “isn’t up to the incredible standards of some of the other Warner classics of this era”, (b) was “sourced from a print and not a fine grain master positive or original negative,” (c) suffers from “minor emulsion issues (the opening few seconds are the worst), [and] occasional white flecks and scratches,” (d) could have provided “richer blacks,” and (e) includes “a few scenes are noticeably softer than the bulk of the film”?

The only interesting psychological undercurrent in Fort Apache is that Henry Fonda is playing a facsimile of the cold, heartless prick that Jane Fonda said he was in real life, when she and younger brother Peter were kids. He undoubtedly used this aspect of himself to play his Fort Apache character, an arrogant, George Custer-like general.

And as long as we’re discussing yet another John Ford Monument Valley film, consider once again my post about the utter idiocy of anyone living in Monument Valley in the mid to late 1800s (or the early 1900s even) due to the complete lack of life-sustaining minerals and elements. Ford’s Monument Valley is the biggest truckload of scenic bullshit ever dumped in the lap of the ticket-buying public. Monument Valley is only a slightly more hospitable environment than the surface of the moon, by which I mean it has oxygen and prettier scenery.

About a week ago Bill Murray told his CNBC hosts that personal responsibility is lacking in this country, and that those who can’t man up and cut the mustard are going to stay in place or become “compost” — essentially a conservative sentiment. And on the other hand he says that super-partisans in Congress who are only trying to take the other guy down and make him look bad (obviously a reference to Boehner, Cantor & the wacko right) are destructive forces who are destroying hope.

This is a very inhumane, non-lefty, Big Hollywood thing to say, but Murray’s compost remark led me to imagine the following: if the government was to announce that in 30 days all homeless people will be rounded up in order to be used as meat filler for dog food, a healthy percentage of homeless people would suddenly be looking for a job or would at least be volunteering their energies for some socially helpful cause. Their ranks would be thinned significantly.

TheWrap‘s Tim Kenneally reported a couple of hours ago that Wanderlust star Jennifer Aniston recently persuaded director David Wain and/or producers Judd Apatow, Ken Marino and Paul Rudd to digitally and editorially cover her naked breasts in a comedic topless scene, despite the precise point of the scene being that Aniston’s character bares her breasts in front of a local TV news crew.

Notice Theroux’s arm across Aniston’s shoulder. Implied statement: “I’m not only playing a charismatic Mel Lyman-ish hippie clan leader who seduces Aniston’s married character, but I’m also her boyfriend in real life, which means that her naked boobs are for my private pleasure alone…is that understood?”

Kenneally writes that Aniston “pleaded for an alternate version due to her blossoming relationship” with Wanderlust costar Justin Theroux, whom she met during filming and with whom she’s now living.

I have three things to say about this.

One, there’s nothing lamer than an actress saying she wants to water down a scene for a reason that has nothing to do with the integrity of the film. If you change a scene you do it for one reason and one reason only — i.e., to make the scene better on its own terms, and to make sure that the scene more successfully serves the picture as a whole. Only lame-o’s, non-artists and other people with pedestrian mentalities futz around with a scene for personal, non-artistic reasons. The conclusion, no offense, is that the shoe fits, and Aniston is wearing it.

Two, the story makes Theroux sound woefully insecure. Aniston wanted her boobs not shown in the film (and they have been covered up and cut around — I saw Wanderlust last night) because, in Kenneally’s view, she “decided it just wouldn’t be right to share her naked breasts with anyone except her new beau.” In other words Aniston was persuaded that Theroux would feel better about his live-in lady being modest or extra-devotional, or would feel less threatened or insecure or whatever. In other words, Theroux, to his possibly eternal discredit, may have complained and/or pressured her to make the change. If so (and even if he didn’t), what a unstable little wuss! Theroux is threatened by his girlfriend’s boobs being flashed in a totally non-erotic way in a big-studio comedy? What would Pablo Picasso or Ernest Hemingway have said if they were in Theroux’s position? This is the end of Justin Theroux as an actor who can play men of consequence in films. There’s only one way to regard him henceforth — as a wee man, a whiner, a guy who frets.

Three, Wain has demonstrated to the industry that he’s a director with no balls whatsoever. He’s a pushover, and can henceforth be depended upon to give on each and every artistic argument that arises during the making of any film he directs in the future. He has shown his colors, and is now regarded worldwide (or at least industry-wide) as a candy-ass. Ditto producers Apatow, Marino and Judd. They’d all rather comfort and indulge and pet their lead actress than make the film right…or not right. To them the concept of mellow relationships is all.

It would have been one thing if Wain had decided to cut the scene from the film entirely because Aniston’s sudden attack of modesty would make the scene seem ungenuine or half-assed or glossed-over. That I would understand. But agreeing to keep the scene while resorting to editing and digital cover-ups of Aniston’s boobs shows what kind of guy Wain is — a go-alonger, a guy who folds.

Update: Read how the lame-os at E! Online (and more particularly reporter Bruna Nessif) are covering this.

I won’t be attending today’s Bingham Ray memorial gathering (being held from 4:30 to 9:30 pm at Busby’s East at 5364 Wilshire, near La Brea) until 6:30 or 7 pm. But I’ll be there. What the prolonged Tim Russert memorials were to NBC staffers and reporters, the Ray memorials are to the indie film community.

I don’t begrudge The Artist its probable win,” says N.Y. Times critc A.O. Scott in a 2.17 chit-chat piece with Manohla Dargis. “It’s a charming, likable movie — a movie in love with movies and its own charm and also full of the genial cosmopolitanism that the Academy tends to like.

“It and The King’s Speech, different though they are, may define what an Oscar movie is today: well made, emotionally accessible and distributed, as you note, by the Weinstein Company. People who see them mostly like them. But the movies people love — both the idiosyncratic, ambitious movies that spark passions and start arguments and the hugely popular, hugely expensive genre movies that are Hollywood’s global cash crop — have become marginal. Which could be why the Oscars seem so small these days.”

For some reason a 2.17 piece in The Week, the Canadian weekly, has used one of my old “steak-eater” quotes to explain how the Oscar system is afflicted with older-white-guy views and ‘tudes.

In a 2.16 Atlantic piece called “The Most Insane, Illogical Award Choices in Oscar History,” Jason Bailey does a good job of explaining the Oscar break-up syndrome. It’s in a portion of the article that laments the Best Picture crowning of Crash in early 2006. The riff follows, but what Oscar moments persuaded HE readers to emotionally disengage or walk away?

I’ve gone through countless breakup moments over the last three or four decades. Except I’ve never signed the divorce papers. Instead I hang around like a pathetic henpecked husband, taking the abuse. Well, not really as I’m doing pretty well with HE but you know what I mean. I’ve been burned and disappointed so many times that I’m numb.

I think my first “what the fuck?” moment goes all the way back to early ’69, when the Best Picture nominees for 1968 were announced and I realized they’d left out 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bullitt and Rosemary’s Baby. The Best Picture nominees were Oliver!, Funny Girl, The Lion In Winter, Rachel, Rachel and Romeo and Juliet. The Lion in Winter is a sturdy film, but who watches the other four these days? No one. All but forgotten.

“Every true film lover can pinpoint the moment when they broke up with the Oscars,” Bailey writes, “when the Academy made a choice so illogical, so upsetting, and so numb-skulled as to blow their credibility forevermore. When you’re young, the Oscars are a big deal, the movie geek equivalent of the Super Bowl; then they blow it, and while you may watch in the years that follow, it’s never with the same enthusiasm or gusto.

“For some, that moment came in 1971, when The French Connection beat out A Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show; for some, it was Gandhi‘s 1982 win over E.T., Tootsie and The Verdict; for others, it was Shakespeare in Love beating Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line in 1998.

“But this writer made it all the way to age 30 before giving up on Oscar, when the biggest award of the night went to Paul Haggis‘ pedantic, contrived, and utterly artless Crash. In going with this simple-minded ‘racism is bad’ tale, Oscar voters passed over Ang Lee‘s revisionist cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain, Bennett Miller‘s masterful biopic Capote, George Clooney‘s enthralling Murrow vs. McCarthy tale Good Night and Good Luck, and Steven Spielberg‘s difficult but rewarding Munich.

“It’s not just that the less-deserving nominee won; at the 78th Academy Awards, the worst nominee (by leaps and bounds) won. Me and Oscar still hang out every once and while, but we haven’t been the same since.”

Paramount publicity will screen Titanic 3D for critics, but not until a week or so before the 4.4 opening (i.e., late March). How, then, did Roger Ebert see it three days ago and (surprise!) trashing it in a just-posted review? Titanic fans in major cities were invited via Facebook to attend special showings last Tuesday, 2.14, and Ebert somehow finagled his way into a Chicago showing.

Ebert didn’t trash James Cameron‘s 1997 film, which he’s long admired. He’s trashed Cameron’s 3D conversion process, which he says (a) adds little or nothing to the film, (b) diminishes the light levels “as much as 20%” and (c) isn’t even used in certain scenes. This comes as a surprise as word on the street, driven by those excerpts shown to press weeks ago, is that Titanic 3D is a couple of cuts above any 2D-to-3D conversion thus far. Maybe not!

“Titanic was not shot for 3D, and just as you cannot gild a pig, you cannot make 2D into 3D,” Ebert writes, “What you can do, and he tries to do it well, is find certain scenes that you can present as having planes of focus in foreground, middle and distance.

“So what? Did you miss any dimensions the first time you saw Titanic? No matter how long Cameron took to do it, no matter how much he spent, this is retrofitted 2D. Case closed.

“But not quite. There’s more to it than that. 3D causes a noticeable loss in the brightness coming from the screen. Some say as much as 20 percent. If you saw an ordinary film dimmed that much, you might complain to the management. Here you’re supposed to be grateful you had the opportunity to pay a surcharge for this defacement.

“If you’re alert to it, you’ll notice that many shots and sequences in this version are not in 3D at all, but remain in 2D. If you take off your glasses, they’ll pop off the screen with dramatically improved brightness.

“I know why the film is in 3D. It’s to justify the extra charge. That’s a shabby way to treat a masterpiece.”

Wait…”if you saw an ordinary film dimmed [by 20%], you might complain to the management”? Has Ebert ever sat with a paying audience when something has clearly gone wrong with the projection or sound? I’ll tell you what they do when this happens. They sit there like sheep. It always falls to someone like me to get up and complain.

Ebert is often given carte blanche treatment by the studios, so it seemed possible that Paramount might have eased him into its Chicago Valentine’s Day screening. So I double-checked with a few calls, and boy, did I get the cordial run-around! From the office of Kyle Bonnici to Michael Agulnek to Paramount field publicity’s Alicia Wyld to marketing exec Colleen Yacka and back to Katie Martin Kelly in Los Angeles. Nobody knew anything, but they were happy to push me onto another person. Whatever.

Update: Certain press people were invited to the LA Valentine’s Day screening in Burbank. MCN’s David Poland posted a review himself last night. I’ve been lied to by certain persons in the Paramount publicity chain, in addition to being kept off the invite list, despite three or four pleas to be invited to any Titanic 3D press screenings that come along. Much appreciated, Michelle Alt and Katie Martin Kelley. Anything I can do in return.