Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that the English-language version of Angelina Jolie‘s In The Land Of Blood And Honey will not be released in English-speaking territories or anywhere else for that matter. Instead FilmDistrict will release the version that Jolie shot in the language once known as Serbian-Croatian and now called Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian .(It’s also called Bosanski/Hrvatski/Srpski or BHS. It’s also known as Splotnee-Gloob-Glooby-Slobonik, if you’re from the part of the world.). The film, slated to open in NY and LA on 12.23, will obviously carry subtitles. Which means that the subtitle-averse brainiacs out there are going to take a pass…right?

“Between you and I (please don’t publish my name with this): I’ve seen War Horse, and the Best Picture sentiments are spot on,” writes a big-city critic. “The only thing that could derail it is The Artist, and only if Weinstein pulls off his usual manipulation. Also, keep in mind that 90 percent of the cast and crew on The Artist came from Hollywood. The movie was also shot there. So we could another Crash situation here.” Wait…what? I’m not getting the analogy.

“But as far as traditional Best Picture winners go, you won’t find a better match than War Horse. And on its own terms the movie is sensational — really great, rousing, moving stuff. Think Saving Private Ryan minus the gore, and with a horse instead of Matt Damon. That horse can act!”

A 10.30.11 N.Y. Times story by Michael Cieply states that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences “has taken in roughly $80 million a year from the Oscars, which account for perhaps 90 percent of its revenue, while spending about $30 million to produce the [Oscar telecast].” So the total revenue is around $88 or $89 million, and then you subtract $30 million to produce the show and you’re left with $58 or $59 million. Subtract the usual usuals (overhead, salaries, screenings, advertising) and you’re still looking at a lotta dough left over, and then the process repeats itself the next year and another $88 or $89 million rolls in. That’s a good business to be in.

The unfolding of the predicament of George Clooney‘s Matt King “is surprising, moving and frequently very funny,” says N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott in his review of The Descendants. “Director Alexander Payne — immeasurably aided by a dazzlingly gifted, doggedly disciplined cast — nimbly sidesteps the sentimental traps that lurk within the film’s premise. He somehow achieves the emotional impact of good melodrama and the hectic absurdity of classic farce without ever seeming to exaggerate.

“There are times when you laugh or gasp in disbelief at what has just happened — an old man punches a teenager in the face; a young girl utters an outrageous obscenity; Mr. Clooney slips on a pair of boat shoes and runs, like an angry, flightless bird, to a neighbor’s house — and yet every moment of the movie feels utterly and unaffectedly true.

“A lively and complicated mesh of plots and subplots takes shape” within The Descendants, “but the most striking and satisfying aspects are its unhurried pace and loose, wandering structure.

“In most movies the characters are locked into the machinery of narrative like theme park customers strapped into a roller coaster. Their ups and downs are as predetermined as their shrieks of terror and sighs of relief, and the audience goes along for the ride. But the people in this movie seem to move freely within it, making choices and mistakes and aware, at every turn, that things could be different.

“Each person who shows up on screen, even for a minute or two with nothing especially important to accomplish, has an odd and memorable individuality. The Descendants seems to unfold within a vast landscape of possible stories. [And] Mr. Payne, with a light touch and a keen sense of place — this Hawaii is as real and peculiar as the Nebraska of About Schmidt or the California wine country of Sideways — has made a movie that, for all its modesty, is as big as life. Its heart is occupied by grief, pain and the haunting silence of [Matt’s comatose wife] Elizabeth, whose version of events is the only one we never hear. And yet it is also full of warmth, humor and the kind of grace that can result from our clumsy attempts to make things better.

“To call The Descendants perfect would be a kind of insult, a betrayal of its commitment to, and celebration of, human imperfection. Its flaws are impossible to distinguish from its pleasures. For example: after what feels as if it should be the final scene, a poignant, quiet tableau of emotional resolution and apt visual beauty, Mr. Payne adds another, a prosaic coda to a flight of poetry.

“Without saying too much or spoiling the mood, I will say that I was grateful for this extra minute, a small gift at the end of a film that understands, in every way, how hard it can be to say goodbye.”

Could I suggest something? Put Patton Oswalt into the one-sheet. He’s the funny guy in this film…the anchor guy, the bullshit-deflating reality-check guy, the deserves-to-be-nominated-for-a-Best-Supporting-Actor-Oscar guy. All this one-sheet is saying right now is “fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!” Which is cool for people like me and Charlize Theron fans, but I don’t know about Joe Popcorn.

It turns out that the Wikipedia-supplied running time of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12/23) is pretty far off the mark. It’s not 90 minutes but roughly 124 minutes, according to a Fox source. That’s not an official running time, but it’ll be in that general vicinity (i.e., maybe a bit shorter) when all is said and done.

Yesterday I should have posted Xan Brooks’ Guardian comments, dated 11.14, on Meryl Streep‘s “astonishing, all-but-flawless” performance as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (Weinstein Co., 12.30). He also notes that while the film “prints the legend,” it “keeps the dissent on spartan rations…it’s a movie that gives us Thatcher without Thatcherism.”

Streep’s performance is “a masterpiece of mimicry which re-imagines Thatcher in all her half-forgotten glory,” Brooks writes. “Streep has the basilisk stare; the tilted, faintly predatory posture. Her delivery, too, is eerily good — a show of demure solicitude, invariably overtaken by steely, wild-eyed stridency.

“The film provides glimpses of a blustering Michael Foot, and archive footage from the poll tax riots. At one stage angry protesters slap on the window of the heroine’s limo to tell her she’s ‘a monster’. Yet there’s little sense of the outside world, the human cost, or the ripple effect of divisive government policies.

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd from an Abi Morgan script, The Iron Lady “opts for a breezy, whistle-stop tour through the unstable nitroglycerin of Thatcher’s life and times. The tone is jaunty and affectionate, a blend of Yes Minister and The King’s Speech, fuelled by flashbacks that bob us back through authorized history.”

It means absolutely nothing…okay, it means a little something but next to nothing, really, that seven Gold Derby “Oscarologists” — Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Fox News‘ Tariq Khan, WENN’s Kevin Lewin, Yahoo Movies‘ Matt McDaniel, the Village Voice‘s Michael Musto and GD’s Tom O’Neil and Paul Sheehan — are intuiting that War Horse is the most likely Best Picture winner.

One of the above might have seen War Horse, maybe, but I’d rather not think about that.

11 Oscar-watching hotshots (myself among them) are standing by The Descendants, and that means something because everyone’s seen it. Eight are picking The Artist and one has chosen Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. And that’s the way it is on Monday, November 14th, 2011.

Robert Weide‘s Woody Allen: A Documentary arrived today. Tomorrow or the next day Criterion Blurays of Twelve Angry Men and Rushmore will be delivered. The L.A. press day for The Descendants is tomorrow afternoon, and the Academy screening that night. Wednesday night is either the Breaking Dawn all-media or my second attempt with Michael Roskam‘s Bullhead. A chat with David Cronenberg and a screening of W.E. are on Thursday; interviews with Olivia Colman and Michael Shannon on Friday.

Tyrannosaur star Olivia Colman is here in Los Angeles for a week, doing interviews and whatnot. Two significant articles about Tyrannnosaur/Colman ran yesterday in the LA Times (written by Mark Olsen) and NY Times (written by Dennis Lim).

Quote #1 from Olsen’s piece: “‘This is not social realism,” director Paddy Considine said at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “I’m saying, ‘Here are these people. These are their circumstances. There are the worlds they are from, and this is a love story about the people you walk past in the street. Those people you see at the local shop have got a story.'”

And quote #2: “It never felt like we were unsafe — it never felt like we were doing anything other than pretending,” said Colman, best known in Britain as the star of television comedies, on the phone from her home in South London. ‘But I’m very pleased if it looks real and upsetting to people.'”

You want upsetting? I was upset…well, a bit surprised when Colman declined my invitation to bring her to tomorrow night’s Academy screening of The Descendants. I’d envisioned snapping a shot of her with George Clooney. Ah, well.

I’m looking around for a PDF of The Longest Cocktail Party, Jesse Armstrong‘s screenplay adaptation of Richard DiLello’s 1973 book about the gradual breakup of the Beatles from ’68 to ’70, otherwise known as the Apple downswirl period. Michael Winterbottom will reportedly direct it sometime next year. Actors who don’t really look or sound like John, Paul, George and Ringo will most likely be cast.

It was during a Toronto Film Festival gathering for Albert Nobbs that I casually mentioned to costar Janet McTeer that her performance as Hubert the house painter is more commanding and magnetic than Glenn Close‘s titular performance. McTeer stiffened and said nothing, and so I shifted over to another topic. It felt impolite on some level to step on Close’s toes.

But now Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has flat-out said the unmentionable in a headline: “Janet McTeer Talks Stealing Albert Nobbs from Glenn Close.” So I guess the cat is out of the bag now. The only problem is that you can’t really hear McTeer in Thompson’s two YouTube clips.