I was interviewing Another Happy Day star Ellen Barkin and director-writer Sam Levinson at the Sunset Tower from 1:15 pm to 3 pm or thereabouts, and then we said our goodbyes and I was walking down to my car and I pulled out the phone and learned that Billy Crystal will be hosting the Oscars…wham.

My first thought was “okay, I get it…safe choice.” Producer Brian Grazer had to land an experienced pro who knew the lay of the land and who would hit the ground running. My second thought was “what happened to reaching out to younger Genx and GenY?” Crystal is a boomer whose movie career peaked in the late ’80s and ’90s. But he’ll be funny and rascally. I guess the youth reach-out will have to wait until the 2013 show.

The only concern I have is that Crystal has gained a little…actually more than a little weight over the last decade or so. All movie stars have big heads, but Crystal’s is the size of a medicine…I mean, a basketball.

Besides acknowledging that Occupy Wall Street has obviously tapped into something, Brad Pitt, speaking a day or two ago in Japan, said that specifics are the thing. Occupy-ers need to hammer the points that Matt Taibbi‘s 10.12 Rolling Stone article spelled out: “Break up the monopolies. Pay for your own bailouts. No public money for private lobbying. Tax hedge-fund gamblers. Change the way bankers get paid.”

More computer-generated World War II flying-negro, orange-flameball, video-game poison from Darth Lucas. “Top Gun with black pilots” — Terrence Howard quoted in an 8.9.11 article. Directed by Anthony Hemingway, and opening on 1.20.12.

This is an agreeably low-key, on-target poster. It doesn’t quite erase my memory of that saccharine trailer (which I just re-watched) or that nightmarish association I have in my head with last month’s Ohio wild-animal massacre or that subsequent PETA letter urging director Cameron Crowe to post a warning on the closing credits about the danger of keeping exotic animals as pets. But the poster works — it’s the first positive spin that We Bought A Zoo has had in a long while.

“If only he’d prepared!,” N.Y. Times columnist Gail Collins wrote this morning. “I can see him now, jogging in the morning, his coyote-killing pistol tucked precariously into his sweatpants, chanting: ‘President Perry knocks off three: Commerce! Education! Energy!’ all the way down the trail. Really, it would have made all the difference. Rick Perry, we hardly knew ye. Farewell.”

Memo to Brian Grazer: Nearly six years years ago I suggested a moderately nervy Oscar-hosting idea. “What offbeat comic team has performed the most consistently funny and inventive bits on previous Oscar telecasts and generally been the most out-there and in-front-of-the-crowd? Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Now let’s go one better…make the Oscars into a three-way gig between Stiller, Wilson and Wilson’s Wedding Crashers partner Vince Vaughn. Are you kidding me? These guys would kill, and again they’d get the younger viewers. Think of the level of the writing! Think of the nerve element!” Think of Stiller’s Na’vi bit, the ’09 Joaquin Phoenix parody, that great bit he did years ago with Wilson…he gets it, he’s cool, they all do.

De-ball, soften, sand it down. Last April Sony Classics, director Roman Polanski and producer Said Ben Said decided to remove “God of” and just call their film Carnage. Now the Sony Classics marketing team has apparently decided that selling Polanski’s (and playwright Yasmina Reza‘s) dark comedy (opening on 12.16) as a chaotic or discordant experience will be bad for business. Could they have presented this film in blander terms? They’re clearly trying to soothe prospective viewers, but to what end?

(l.) Sony Classics’ new domestic-market poster for Carnage; (r.) French poster.

It seems to me that this poster argues with everything that Reza’s play — a piece about the thin line between good manners and animal aggression — ever was or hoped to be.

“As Freud tells us in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents,’ we have to repress our infantile aggression in order for civilization to survive,” New Yorker critic John Lahr wrote in March 2009. “But it’s worth paying top dollar to see those feelings acted out by an expert ensemble. And no bleating about the cruelty of farce, please. As [playwright Yasmina] Reza knows and so gleefully shows, without a killing there is no feast. ”

That’s precisely what this poster does. In a roundabout way it bleats about the cruelty of farce by suggesting that the film contains no cruelty or farce or ferocious jungle behavior whatsoever.

Six weeks ago I called Carnage “wonderfully tight and concise, and acted to perfection…not just a film about bile and self-loathing and lacerating words and puke, [but] about artful chiseling and razor-sharp precision…beautifully timed and cut (congrats to Herve de Luze), exquisitely framed within a widescreen aspect ratio…and no jiggly hand-held shots! Everything shot is captured from a tripod or a super-smooth steadycam.”

Deadline‘s Nikke Finke is calling J. Edgar‘s opening-day, five-city gross of $59,000 “strong” and “good enough.” Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino doesn’t disagree, but feels “the negative reviews are really going to hurt. J. Edgar is aimed at moviegoers looking for an Oscar juggernaut — and they’ll find plenty of reasons to believe that it’s not. It also looks like a downer. There’s no emotional uplift to this historical biopic, and, let’s face it, you need that to make the big bucks. That’s why Moneyball hit $70 million and not $100 million. We’re going with a $12.5 million opening weekend — good by Clint’s standards, weak for Leo.”

It was announced this afternoon that producer Brian Grazer will step in for Brett Ratner and produce the Oscars. The Academy had to find someone right away and I’m sure there was a vibe of desperation on the other end when Grazer took the call and considered the offer. I’m presuming he said yes because he know they were in a jam and he wanted to help in their hour of need. Good fellow.

You know who would be good as a host if his weight is in check? Vince Vaughn. It would be great if Vaughn could come out on stage and be could be the jabber-mouth from The Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up and The Dilemma. But he can’t be too fat.

Grantland‘s Mark Harris has joined the Gold Derby prediction gang, and he’s saying that the most likely Best Picture winner is The Help, followed by The Artist, War Horse and The Tree of Life. I’m sorry but apart from Harris’s choices being incredibly bland and hugely depressing, he’s way off.

The Help has awards heat because (a) it’s enormously popular with women and (2) because Viola Davis is the presumptive Best Actress front-runner. But it has never had genuine Best Picture heat and never will have genuine Best Picture heat because no one of any perception or integrity thinks it’s any kind of four-star achievement. It’ll probably be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar but solely because it made a lot of money. Even if the Oscar goes to the most popular film without regard to quality, Harris seems to be forgetting that a majority of Academy members are male. There are no beer-sipping, Cosby-sweater-wearing, baseball-bat-swinging guys out there who think The Help is any kind of great film…none.

Secondly, The Artist is going to start fading the more people talk about it, and especially if anyone sees it a second time, as I did at the Savannah Film Festival. “I felt under-nourished and bored…despite feeling mostly pleased and charmed when I saw it in Cannes five and a half months ago,” I wrote. “It’s too cloying and simplistic — too much of a peanut- gallery pleaser — to stand up to a second viewing.” And keep in mind what Brett Easton Ellis said anout eight days ago: (a) “Just walked out on L.A. screening of The Artist and wondered: am I a Grinch or is it just an unbearably cute flyspeck?” and (b) “Michel Hazanavicius‘ The Artist makes Mel Brooks‘ Silent Movie (1976) look like a masterpiece, and in their way The Weinstein’s are very smart.”

War Horse will probably be nominated for Best Picture. And it may indeed win. But Disney’s “show it to hinterland audiences first” strategy is probably indicative of issues that may amount to a problem down the road. And Harris surely understands this potential.

Finally, I will be surprised if The Tree of Life is even nominated. Nobody is questioning its merits, at least as far as the first hour goes. But older critics and viewers have had issues, as we all know. And if a Best Picture contender doesn’t have boomer-aged critics like Kenneth Turan and Marshall Fine singing its praises, it’s got trouble.

The general feeling among those who attended last night’s special Westwood screening of Wim Wenders‘ Pina, a beautiful ballet doc shot in 3D, is that dance comes wonderfully alive when viewed with stereoscopic depth. Germany’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar is not just sublime in its own right, but proof that 3D is most transporting when it captures life in natural proportion, and not when the camera is going for large brawny spectacle.

Wim Wenders during last night’s Pina after-party in Westwood.

There are two reasons why Alfred Hitchcock‘s Dial M For Murder is one of my favorite 3D films. One, the scale couldn’t be smaller or more intimate, the entire thing taking place within a modest one-bedroom London apartment. And two, there are only two 3D pop-through shots — the scissors and the latch key. I’d love to see David Jones‘ Betrayal remastered in 3D with the same high-quality precision that James Cameron has reportedly put into the 3D remastering of Titanic.

I asked Wenders at the Pina after-party when The American Friend (’78), my favorite of all his films, will be out on Bluray. Next year, he said, via the Criterion Collection. It will be part of a series or a box set, apparently. I couldn’t hear as well as I wanted to but I think he said the package will include four of his films.

From Joe Morgenstern‘s mini-review of Pina in the Wall Street Journal: “Pina is a wondrously surreal evocation of the work of choreographer Pina Bausch. (She died two years ago, before she could see the finished film.) It’s also a fascinating–and successful–marriage of dance and technology. The 3-D process, deployed with restraint, gives weight and presence to the dancers’ bodies, yet keeps the camera at sufficient remove to preserve the impression of a performance on a theater stage.

“Images of joy, loss and pain succeed one another: a dreamscape of rock and water in a driving rain, a wordless drama aboard an urban monorail car, perilous exertions on the edge of a huge mining pit. Dancers throw themselves at each other with seeming indifference to the danger. Pina brings new meaning to the notion of a leap of faith, and new immediacy to filmed dance.”

Movieline‘s Julie Miller has described George Clooney‘s harmless little anecdote about his first sensation of strong sexual arousal when he was six or seven years old as “skin crawling.” It happened, says Clooney, when he was “climbing a rope.” Well, the exact same thing happened to me, Julie, when I was eight or nine. And it’s probably happened to tens of millions of other boys over the centuries…big deal.

If Miller is reading this, she’s invited to explain how and/or why this minor Tom Sawyer-ish recollection triggered such profound disgust.