The kindly back-patting gesture of giving a Best Picture nomination to the final film in a highly successful franchise is over. It was a purely political, kowtowing-to-profits gesture when Return of the King was so honored, but the new Best Picture nomination rules don’t allow for gimmmes and softies. You have to have the serious goods or forget it.

I heard the expected-but-welcome news today from the Toronto Film Festival guys about being press credentialed. I’m still stuck for a good place to flop (i.e., I never stay at hotels) but something always turns up. Toronto 2011 (9.8 through 9.18) is looking like a hummer. Like everyone else I’m expecting George Clooney‘s The Ides of March, Roman Polanski‘s Carnage, Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball, David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method and Martin Scorsese‘s George Harrison: Living in the Material World to show up. What else?

I’m presuming that Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Focus Features, 11.18) and Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants (Fox Searchlight, 11.23) are circling and flirting. I’m also thinking that TIFF 2011 might be the right way to launch Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar, which opens in October.

Here’s that Gordon-lying-in-a-hospital-bed teaser for The Dark Knight Rises. The one that appeared online for a few minutes last week before being taken down, I mean. “If you make yourself into more than just a man…if you devote yourself to an ideal…then you become something else entirely.” Wait a minute…Gordon? The trailer is obviously about Bane (Tom Hardy) so why is it wrong to presume it’s him behind the oxygen mask?

HE’s congratulations to Sony Classics for steering Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris to the highest dollar tally of any Allen film ever — $41,793,000. This clever little fantasy time-trip movie has been in theatres for two months and is still in the top ten. The word-of-mouth train will probably keep it going through August, and a possible surpassing of $50 million.

Annie Hall is still Woody Allen’s biggest all-time grosser, if you adjust for inflation.

The real measure of an all-time theatrical hit, of course, isn’t dollar grosses but number of tickets sold. And if you’re comparing present-tense dollars to the past, you naturally have to adjust for inflation.

So if you calculate the value of dollars in the ’70s and ’80s (Allen’s box-office heyday) into 2011 greenbacks, the all-time Allen champs are actually, in this order, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters and then Midnight in Paris.

Hall, Allen’s first big hit, took in $38,251,425 in 1978. But according to Dollar Times’ inflation calculator a 1978 dollar is worth $3.53 in 2011. So Annie Hall‘s 2011 gross expands to $135,027,530.

Allen’s Manhattan earned $39,946,780 in 1979. By today’s calculator (the ’79 dollar being worth $3.24 in 2011) that figure comes to $129,427,567.

Allen’s second-highest grosser after Midnight in Paris is 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters, which took in $40,084,041. But with the 1986 dollar worth $2.01 in today’s market, Hannah‘s re-calculated gross is $80,568,922.

Then again today’s ancillary markets are more vigorous and plentiful than they were in the ’70s and ’80s so you have to calculate this also.

This was supposed to be one of the all-time worst driving weeks in West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, West Los Angeles and Santa Monica due to Carmageddon, and it turned out to be one of the most pleasant. There are very few cars out there. I can’t think of the last time I drove around town with such ease.

I was out with a friend from about 9 am through brunch hour today in Beachwood Canyon, Hollywood, Beverly Hills and along Sunset Blvd. into Brentwood, and traffic was definitely lighter than on a typical Sunday. Brunch and going-to-the-beach trafffic in the Brentwood area of Sunset around 11 am on Sunday is usually murder. The warnings obviously got around via incessant news reports and social media, and almost everyone just said “screw it” and stayed home. It’s amazing, lovely. I wish the traffic could always be like this. It was like driving around L.A. in 1937.

All Quiet on the Western Front — Santa Monica Blvd. heading east around 11:55 am.

I decided a long time ago that silver-gray cross-training shoes are grossly unattractive. Especially the ones that have a kind of woven-stitch texture and a slight color accent, like pink or violet. There’s just something about this color combo that grates on the soul and immediately lowers the value of the stock of the person wearing them. There are so many types of exercise/workout shoes that look fine (white, red, red-and-white, black, dark blue). Why would anyone freely choose gray-silver? I can’t be the only one who feels this way.

I wish I could figure some way to explain my repulsion without sounding like a gut-instinct crank. I only know that whomever is wearing these dreaded shoes, they immediately look bad when they go out on the track or the street and start jogging around. The dark-gray ones look like a form of leprosy. If and when I see friends in these things I immediately go to work on them, trying this or that argument or strategy to get them to buy a new pair.

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, Part 2 is a satisfying, well-made, above-average film that concludes a highly successful franchise — fine. But what’s so great about it having made epic truckloads of cash this weekend — a reported $289 million global — other than the fact that it’s broken a lot of records? As Cary Grant said in To Catch A Thief, “It’s only money, Houston, and not even yours at that.”

Does this box-office triumph brighten my life in some particular gleaming way? Has anyone’s life (other than Warner Bros. stockholders) been changed? No. Has the end of World War II just been declared? Has the Taliban disbanded? Has cancer been cured? Have the Red Sox won the World Series? Has the national debt been forgiven by the Chinese? Are we watching the scene in Giant when James Dean‘s oil well comes in and he drives over to Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor‘s home and stumbles out of his truck and says, “Mah well came in, Bick”?

Like I said a couple of days ago, I don’t get it. I’m not any richer, and you’ll never convince me that DH2 has a chance in hell of being Best Picture nominated so who cares at the end of the day?

Some indie filmmakers radiate such a curious obsessive energy that you just can just about figure what their films are going to be like without seeing them. This needn’t result in any kind of conscious decision not to see their films, mind, but it does seem to manifest a strange and concentrated inner force that blocks any attempt to do so. It makes the decisions like a stern parent. My head says “hmm, yeah, I think I’ll see this flick” but the force steps in and says “nope, forget it…you don’t want to go there.” So don’t blame me.

I don’t know why”the force” has kept me from seeing Miranda July‘s films. Or maybe it’s my own determination. I don’t know. I know early on I could sense the ethereal, foo-foo vibrations coming off the posters and trailers and reviews the way a proverbial old-timer can feel approaching rain in his bones.

It first hit me when July’s You and Me and Everyone We Know played at the ’05 Cannes Film Festival. I had it on my list, intended to see it, etc. But I was no match for the higher power.

It happened again when Manhattan-based publicist Susan Norget enthusiastically described July’s latest film, The Future (Roadside, 7.29) , prior to last January’s Sundance Film Festival, where it had its world debut. The second she began talking about it, I just knew. Nobody works harder for or cares more about quirky-weird indie films than Norget, but Norget + July + a little Silverlake movie about a couple thinking about adopting a cat who talks…case closed.

But forget me or “the force” or The Future. Forget all of that. All you need to know about July, I believe, is contained in this short video clip of her doing a kind of whirling stumble-dance on the beach. (The clip accompanies the online version of Katrina Onstad‘s 7.17 N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine profile of the 37 year-old filmmaker.) On one level her dancing is appalling, but on another level it’s brave because true artists never worry about looking foolish — they just dance to their tune and let the chips fall. The dancing tells me July is no poseur. She’s the genuine sum of her parts.

The other thing that provides significant information about July are the leather broad-buckle shoes she’s wearing in the clip. I’ve been around the planet long enough to know that aside from the usual exceptions-to-the-rule, women who wear this kind of footwear are generally not the kind you want to hang with for very long. They may be intelligent and perceptive or even exceptional artists, but they tend to brandish a certain flighty, fickle, tangled-up quality, and are therefore best encountered in small, modest doses. 97% of guys find broad-buckle shoes a massive turn-off. They’re the 21st Century equivalent of those lace-up witch shoes worn by older women who taught elementary school in the ’60s. Women like July know this, of course, and that’s partly why they wear them.

Which is cool — don’t get me wrong. Let your freak flag fly, etc. I’m just saying that those shoes are a blade of grass repping the entire July universe.

But that fucking cat…wow. That and the idea that adopting a cat requires some degree of emotional preparation.

The paragraph that got me in Onstad’s profile reads as follows: “[July] has also become the unwilling exemplar of an aggravating boho archetype: the dreamy, young hipster whose days are filled with coffee, curios and disposable enchantments. ‘Yes, in some ways Miranda July is living my dream and life, and yes, maybe I’m a little jealous,’ wrote one Brooklyn-based artist on her blog. “I loathe her. It feels personal.”

“To her detractors (‘haters’ doesn’t seem like too strong a word) July has come to personify everything infuriating about the Etsy-shopping, Wes Anderson-quoting, McSweeney’s-reading, coastal-living category of upscale urban bohemia that flourished in the aughts. Her very existence is enough to inspire, for example, an I Hate Miranda July blog, which purports to detest her ‘insufferable precious nonsense.’ Or there is the online commenter who roots for July to be exiled to Darfur. Or the blogger who yearns to beat her with a shoe.”

Jane Fonda has complained in a 7.16 Wrap article about QVC having cancelled an appearance today on the network to promote “Prime Time,” her book about aging and fitness. She says QVC has caved in to right-wing pressure.

“The network said they got a lot of calls yesterday criticizing me for my opposition to the Vietnam War and threatening to boycott the show if I was allowed to appear,” Fonda writes. “I am, to say the least, deeply disappointed that QVC caved to this kind of insane pressure by some well-funded and organized political extremist groups. And that they did it without talking to me first.

“Most people don’t buy into the far-right lies,” she states, adding that “the bottom line” is that “this has gone on far too long, this spreading of lies about me! None of it is true. NONE OF IT! I love my country. I have never done anything to hurt my country or the men and women who have fought and continue to fight for us.”

Lies and exaggerations have, I gather, been pushed by Fonda’s right-wing antagonists. But the thing that created the strongest anti-Fonda sentiments is a photo taken of her sitting at the controls of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, and not over Fonda’s general opposition to the Vietnam War. What she said in a statement she read from Hanoi was, by my sights, humane and compassionate and correct and prophetic. But the photo is what stuck in people’s mind. Posing for it, Fonda has said, was not a wise thing.

Fonda’s Wiki bio recounts what she said about this in a 1988 interview with Barbara Walters: “I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I’m very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families. I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft gun, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes. It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanized such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless.”

Here’s a transcript of a statement she made while visiting Hanoi in August 1972.

On the Catch 22 commentary track, Mike Nichols tells Steven Soderbergh that there’s something to be said for flamboyance and showing off, and perhaps even for vulgarity. “The funniest thing about movies is that they don’t like good taste. They don’t like austerity. All the things…you’ll see…the things that you’re a little embarassed about, the show-off things. Those are things that are most alive 20 years later. It’s one of the most interesting things about movies. It’s that they like showing off. It’s life, it’s vitality. Austerity and classicism just lie there.”

Or to put it more concisely, “Starkist doesn’t want tunas with good taste. They want tunas that taste good.”

I’m not saying Mike Nichols was wrong or incorrect when he began to regard his static, long-take style of shooting as “affected” (i.e., sensing that these shots were beginning to seem more about themselves than anything else) but I do love that style regardless, and I miss it. I wish somebody — anyone — was into shooting films this way today. Wait, has there been a recent film (or two or three) that has used this style?