I should have linked earlier today to a 1.10 Guardian piece by Joe Uitichi about Artist blowback. Key graph: “Empire‘s Damon Wise believes that most mainstream criticism is nowadays based around finance and marketing rather than the real worth of a film. ‘Is the film commercial, is it awards-friendly, or is it both? Contrarian reviewers imagine themselves to be somehow part of that process, and a film like The Artist is complete bait for that kind of reporter.”

The Salt Lake Tribune‘s Sean Means interviewed me a lonnng time ago about Sundance 2012, and now here it finally is. The piece, I mean. Myself and a few others (David Poland, Jen Yamato, Omar Moore, Peter Knegt, Ray Pride) listing the films they’re most looking forward to when the festival kicks off. Only nine days from now.

All but buried on Deadline is Pete Hammond‘s 7.10 story about the thirteen classic films being restored by Universal to honor its 100th anniversary, and slated for Bluray release between now and the end of the year. Hooray for Universal and shame on those studios who’ve failed to honor their classic films in a similar fashion. Like Paramount, for example, which as far as I know is still refusing to create a Bluray for George Stevens‘ Shane. Dilletantes!

The Bluray kickoffs are Robert Mulligan and Alan Pakula‘s To Kill A Mockingbird (1.31), and Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (2.14).

The other Universal films getting the full restoration and Bluray treatment are both 1931 versions of Dracula (English and Spanish-language), Frankenstein (1931), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates (1941), Pillow Talk (1959), The Birds (1963), The Sting (1973), Jaws (1975), and Out of Africa (1985).

The restoration process for each film took up to six months and cost anywhere from $250,000 to $600,000 a title. Plans are being drawn up to tour the films as well, and the blueprint is to accelerate restorations in the future.

“I would like all of our films to be restored,” Universal honcho Ron Meyer told Hammond. “And hopefully as the years go on more and more of them will be done. I think we need to do more film restoration. All of us need to do it.”

Are you listening, Brad Grey? The ghost of George Stevens is hovering above Paramount as we speak, flipping the bird at you and your Paramount Home Video vision-free underlings.

Here’s the URL for Universal’s 100th anniversary website.

I’ve been led to believe (perhaps unwisely) that this is the new official Iron Lady one-sheet. For what it’s worth I think it’s okay. Any one-sheet that eschews the obvious in favor of a metaphor gets my vote. It’s obviously pitching to independent-minded women. (I think.) Thatcher might have been an elite-favoring conservative, but she stuck to her guns. The blue Asprey bag was some kind of signature thing.

My wifi has all but totally collapsed due to a barely functioning modem. (A replacement will arrive tomorrow morning.) After 45 minutes of swearing and re-booting and calling the Time Warner autobots here are the first five minutes of Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire.

I did a Movieline sitdown with Leonardo DiCaprio at The Grill in Beverly Hills about two years prior to his April 1995 appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. Razor sharp, he was. Crackling energy. And trusting (as many younger guys tend to be.) It’s a little hard to absorb or accept that this happened almost 20 years….whoa. Time moves relentlesly, and does not suffer fools.

Here’s my 1993 Moveline piece. (Thanks to Stu Van Airsdale.)

Ignore George Lucas‘s Daily Show comment (delivered last night) that Red Tails (20th Century Fox, 1.20) is as close as he’ll ever come to making a sequel to Star Wars. The thing to focus on is his claim that Red Tails is essentially a 1942 movie (like the 1951 Flying Leathernecks, Lucas said). The heavily CG’ed look argues with that notion up and down. If it looked and felt like a real 1942 film, I’d be the first one there on opening day.

I wrote the following in a July 2011 piece called “World War II Video Game“: “Could the World War 2 dogfight sequences look any more fake? What a non-pleasure it’ll be to wallow in visual values and terms that have nothing to do with 1940s verisimilitude and everything to do with Lucas wanting to slick this thing up as much as possible.

“Lucas has been struggling with this sucker since filming began in March 2009 and reshoots happened in March 2010. Obviously it’s a troubled and ungenuine enterprise. Failure of this sort couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. The director of record is Anthony Hemingway.

From the Wiki page: “Production began in March 2009. Principal photography took place in the Czech Republic, Italy, Croatia and England. Lucas took over direction of reshoots, in March 2010 as Hemingway was busy working on episodes of the HBO series Treme. Hemingway will have final approval over the footage.”

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I finally got around to last weekend’s podcast last night. The obvious big topics were (a) the surprise inclusion of Dragon Tattoo‘s David Fincher among the five DGA nominees, (b) the surprising DGA shutout of Steven Spielberg and the all-but-certain Oscar demise of War Horse, and (c) Sasha’s feelings about A Separation. Here’s a stand-alone mp3.

War Horse is far from a dead animal. It may be “on its way to the Oscar glue factory”, as an Oscar wag remarked earlier today. But it’s a solid commercial hit with the middle-American family crowd (almost $56 million after two weeks in theatres) and it’s even possible that it’ll land a Best Picture nomination, and that director Steven Spielberg might pull off a Best Director Oscar nomination, despite his having been excluded from the DGA’s list of Best Director nominees.

But given this morning’s DGA announcement and other recent indicators listed today by Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg, the likelihood of its winning the Best Picture Oscar is now almost nil. And the chances of Spielberg being nominated for a Best Director Oscar are clearly diminished, although, as noted, it could still happen.

“I sensed a bit of a bump in the road for War Horse, as reflected in my 1.8 Oscar forecast,” Feinberg wrote today. “Although the film was one of the Producers Guild of America’s 10 nominees, it was also snubbed by the Screen Actors Guild (despite featuring a huge international cast that seemed like a strong option for the best ensemble category), the Writers Guild of America (despite the fact that many of its chief rivals in the adapted screenplay category had been deemed ineligible), and the Art Directors Guild (despite the fact that the film’s production design, coordinated by Oscar winner Rick Carter, is one of its greatest strengths).”

So what were the factors that decisively killed War Horse‘s Oscar chances? Was there a Norbit factor (or two or three) that took it down?

My own oft-repeated view is fact that anyone with a smidgen of taste or perspective knew from the get-go that Spielberg’s film didn’t have the internals that would make it go all the way, and that the only thing it had going for it was the fact that many respectable professionals (including Indiewire columnist Anne Thompson and Fox publicity honcho Bumble Ward) admitted it had made them cry.

I have an odd theory. I could be off-base, but I believe that a particular line of dialogue did a lot to stop War Horse. That’s right — one line.

It was spoken during the no-man’s-land, barbed-wire scene when the British and the German soldier are cutting through the wire that has totally entangled Joey. And they start talking about this and that, and the British soldier says (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “You know, here we are…soldiers from opposing sides, standing in a muddy no-man’s-land at night and helping this poor beast get free of the wire. Heh…you know something? I think we should give him a name. But what could we reasonably call him, given that he’s a horse and we’re in the middle of a war? Wait…I know! I think we could call him ‘war horse.’ It kinda fits, you know?”

I was already slumping in my seat when that scene began. But after the British soldier said it I muttered to myself, “Holey moley! All right, that’s it…no way this thing wins the Best Picture Oscar. In fact, it may not even be nominated.”

I was going to call this article “Joey Goes Down,” but I didn’t want to sound smug or snide.

12 days after Huffington Post contributor Robert Reich suggested an Obama-Clinton ticket with Joe Biden taking over as Secretary of State. N.Y. Times editor-contributor Bill Keller has advocated the same.

“It’s time to take it seriously,” Keller writes.

“I know the arguments against this scenario, and we’ll get to those. But the arguments in favor are as simple as one-two-three. One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.”

My 12.28 comment stands:”It’s a good idea all around. It makes fundamental sense. It would make the Obama ticket seem like a greater sum of its parts than if Biden ran again as vp. Obama needs to upspin things in his favor as much as possible if he’s going to squeak through to victory. Even against empty-haircut Romney.”

Rotten Tomatoes‘ Matt Atchity sounds right on the money to me about the big award contenders, and in particular about The Artist. He kinda thinks it’s fading, or starting to fade, and his Best Picture money is on The Descendants. The basic idea that Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil was looking to explore was whether or not Rotten Tomatoes’ critics scores help to predict winners.

The only regrettable thing about this video is that it’s out of focus. What the eff, Tom?

War Horse is all but finished as a Best Picture contender. This was confirmed this morning, I believe, when the Directors Guild of America stood up like persons of principle and backbone and declined to nominate Steven Spielberg for Best Director. That’s it, game over, throw in the towel.

“The biggest snub on today’s list has to be Steven Spielberg who was overlooked for Dreamworks’ War Horse, an expected Oscar power player that may be slipping back in the pack a bit during the crucial stretch run,” Deadline‘s Pete Hammond wrote a few minutes ago. “Spielberg’s ommission is a crushing blow.”

At the same time there’s something seriously corroded and rotten in the minds of DGA members when they decide to nominate The Artist‘s Michel Hazanavicius for delivering an emotionally simplistic and second-hand silver bauble, and at the same time deny a Best Director nomination to Moneyball‘s Bennett Miller and The Tree of Life‘s Terrence Malick. Ludicrous!

I don’t know about the DGA eligibility rules, but in any kind of fair and just universe A Separation‘s Asghar Farhadi would easily warrant a nomination…easily!

The nominees are Midnight in Paris‘s Woody Allen, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo‘s David Fincher, Hazanavicius, The Descendants‘ Alexander Payne, and Hugo‘s Martin Scorsese (great overspending, Marty!…and good on that 127-minute length!)

I suspect that the Fincher nom is basically an admission of guilt and regret by DGA members for their having given their Best Director award last year to The King’s Speech‘s Tom Hooper instead of to Fincher for The Social Network. They know that was a ludicrous call, and they feel badly about it, and they want Fincher to know that they’re sorry.

The DGA winners will be named at the 64th Annual DGA Awards Dinner on Saturday, 1.28,12, at the Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland.