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Freedom Tower (a.k.a., 1 World Trade Center) — Friday, 9.23, 5:05 pm.

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The Best Picture preferences of the Gold Derby team (to which I belong) have been posted, and boy, are some these predictions weird! The percentages were tabulated by including predictions of various “experts” (i.e., columnists like myself) along with editor odds and preferences. Don’t ask me to explain the calculus but at least there are some rankings to start with.

The leading default choice for Best Picture is Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse because of (a) the kneejerk Spielberg kowtow factor (i..e, obeisance before power), and (b) because journalists believe that the film will make people cry. George Clooney‘s The Ides of March is second-ranked, and that’s not going to happen — it’s a very solid adult-angle political drama but it’s not Best Picture material. Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants is third, and that will definitely happen, for sure. Then comes Stephen Daldry‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close…maybe. And then Michel Hazanavicius‘ The Artist…probably.

Clint Eastwood‘s J. Edgar is ranked sixth based on…what? Because no one seems to think that the trailer offers a lot of encouragement. JJ Abrams‘ Super 8 is next…really? It’s a summer genre film with good performances. David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is ranked eighth, and then Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball is ninth with The Help coming in tenth.

My personal predictions (in this order): Moneyball, The Descendants, War Horse (who knows?), The Help, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (ditto), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (ditto) and possibly Midnight in Paris.

Here’s the mp3 of my 9.21 Sony headquarters chat with Moneyball director Bennett Miller. It’s odd but as we were speaking a voice was telling me that Bennett was going too slow and taking too long to articulate this or that response, but listening to it today he sounds fine. He explains it all quite clearly.

Bennett Miller at Sony headquarters at 550 Madison — Wednesday, 9.21, 4:40 pm.

It starts out a little raggedy (audio of my taking his picture, etc.) but I like it that way.

Excerpt #1: “Nobody wants to see a baseball movie, I thought to myself. Outside of this country [the genre is] challenging and even inside….historically they don’t [perform] as well as people might imagine. So I didn’t want to do ‘a baseball movie’, but baseball is an interesting medium by which to tell another story. It’s about Billy [Beane] coming to believe that there was a life that he was supposed to be living, that he wasn’t living. So like a Wizard of Oz or King Arthur story…it’s about somebody who’s displaced or dislocated with the life they have, and they’re a little bit lost, and they’re presented with some kind of impossible challenge, [the deal being] that if you do this thing, be it getting the witch’s broomstick or capturing the Holy Grail, your life will be restored.”

Excerpt #2: “I got a phone call from my agent, Bryan Lourd. I hadn’t really been a baseball fan since I was a kid, not that much, yes and no. And Bryan said, you wanna take a look at this thing? ‘Cause if you’re interested Brad would like to talk to you. So I read everything…the scripts, the book, thought about it…came up with an approach that I thought would be worth the labor of a few years. This is how I see it, I said to Brad. How do you see it?> And we were really compatible. I asked him questions. Why do you want to play this thing? I see it in such a way. If you don’t feel the seme way, no harm, no foul. If we’re all making the same movie, that’s fantastic. But if we’re not, no one’s going to be happy, ever.”

Excerpt #3: “I urge you…I urge you to speak to Mychael Danna, the composer. I think this was the hardest job of his life…one of the most difficult things to get right. He’s very proud of it and I’m in love with it…but it was hard to get to. It’s not literal. It’s not representative in the way that ‘cue’ music often is. The score attempts to conjure a kind of concsiousnes that allow us to observe the story instead of our telling it. The style of this movie is observaitonal. To conjure up a kind of conscousness…movies in which you feel you;re right inside the brain of the filmmaker. There are no fingerprints, but you feel as if you;ve got someone else’s brain in your head. It’s meant to release your own chemicals.”

Apart from being in league with Nazis in Brazil and scheming with his mother to poison Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains‘ Alexander Sebastian — the elegant villain in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Notorious — is a fragile, sympathetic figure. He’s a compulsive romantic who falls head over heels in love with Bergman, and then becomes intensely jealous and possessive. Love runs him and gives him grief.

Rains loves with all his heart and soul and is betrayed for it, having been played as a sucker. Hard-ass CIA agent Cary Grant is in love with Bergman also, but he never expresses any caring or tenderness for her during the whole film…until the final scene. Rains is far more emotional and open. Not as tall or good-looking as Grant, but probably a better lover. Or at least a more expressive one.

What movie villain in recent decades has been as short as Rains, or was so refined and well behaved, or begged the hero for his life (“please…please!) at the finale and was turned down?

“One of my favorite movies would clearly be Notorious,” Sigourney Weaver recently told a Movieline reporter. “[Particularly] the scene where Cary Grant visits Ingrid Bergman. Just seeing how ill she is. To me that was such a hard picture. Such a steely picture. And then there’s this amazing soft center in the picture which is that she’s almost dead and he clasps her in his arms and talks to her. It’s like the whole movie turns into a different organism.”

Those Republican debate audience members who last night booed Stephen Hill, the gay soldier in Iraq who asked a question of contender Rick Santorum, are bigoted scum. Santorum said “sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military.” Except Hill, who asked Santorum if he would “circumvent the progress that been made for gay and lesbian soldiers,” wasn’t talking about sex. He was talking about due respect and recognition for military members on his side of the fence.

The Frank PR team hosted a press luncheon at Tao yesterday to promote the Hamptons Film Festival (10.13 to 10.17). My visit last year was bountiful and blissful. I was treated like royalty. And there were a lot of good films, a lot of talent. And I was busted for driving without my tail lights and held at the police station until 3:30 am.

Hamptons Film Festival chairman Stuart Suna, senior programmer Holly Herrick, exec director Karen Arikian, programming director David Nugent during yesterday’s luncheon at Tao.

The films this year will include Michel Hazanavicius‘ The Artist, which will probably end up as a Best Picture nominee, and Drake Doremus‘s Like Crazy. I’m trying to figure out a way to attend as I have a return flight to LA on 10.8. If I return I’ll need to stay clear of the fuzz — that’s for sure.

The big Buddha statue inside Tao is a good 20 or 25 feet tall. I’d really like to take a date to this restaurant some day, but lunch without drinks will set me back $150 plus tip.

Hamptons Film Festival exec director Karen Arikian.

Mexico’s decision to select Gerardo Naranjo‘s Miss Bala as its foreign-language Oscar contender for the 84th Academy Awards is a no-brainer. I’ll be seeing it for the second time on Saturday, 10.1, at the N.Y. Film Festival.

I’m looking at that “never compromise” slogan and thinking how the anti-Obama 21st Century righties would rather pull down the temple than be responsible legislators, and I’m telling myself that’s how all nutbag righties are — no compromise, pure agenda, we’re doing the bidding of the rightwing God. And I’m smiling again at the notion of putting them all into green concentration camps. So no heart-swelling emotional currents for Meryl’s Maggie Thatcher…not from this corner, at least.

And yet I know, perversely, that I’m going to enjoy the hell out of Streep’s performance. I think we all know that.

One of the few subway stops I’ve hung out on recently that didn’t smell slightly of urine. I was grateful. I’m still grateful. Looking forward to more of these…thanks.

Gold Derby‘s experts are weirdly attached to the idea of Leonardo DiCaprio becoming a big Best Actor contender in J. Edgar. Maybe, maybe…but after that dicey J. Edgar trailer I’d be hedging my bets. (In truth I’m sensing a possible fall-off down the road.) Right now the Derby boys and girls have my personal fave, Moneyball‘s Brad Pitt, in third place with 73%. The Descendants‘ George Clooney, the most likely winner of the moment, has 100% and DiCaprio is sitting at 91%. Tinker Tailor‘s Gary Oldman is fourth with 64%.

Update: Moneyball‘s 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating (as of 10:20 am on 9.23) is just a notch behind The Social Network‘s final tally of 96%. But the latter reviews are warmer and more affectionate and…grateful? Elite critics are having a ball with Bennett Miller ‘s film. You can feel the elation. Finally a movie with a fresh game…one to write about with real feeling and spirit…a sports film that’s not a sports film so how to describe it just so? And there’s the fun.

Bertrand Blier‘s Going Places (’74) is one of the most curiously seductive films ever made about loutish, anarchic, groin-driven swagger. Gerard Depardieu and the late Patrick Dewaere are a pair of easygoing counter-culture brutes who fall into a series of sloppy impulsive adventures, and yet never act in what you’d call an especially harsh or cruel manner. They’re dopey animals in a sense, and in another a couple of social adventurers looking to see what they can get away with.

Let’s steal this or fuck that…anything we want. We’re young and brash and can always get it up, etc. What else matters? We’re bulletproof. What does her underwear smell like? Aaahh…she’s very young!

They steal scooters or cars or food or money, and are constantly on the hunt for poon. They’re careless cads and improvisational jerkoffs, kicking around to kick around and see where the day takes them. And yet they’re boyishly innocent and nowhere near smart or mean or ambitious enough to become serious criminals. They’re just playing it by ear. They love sex and chasing after women, but they don’t have the first clue what women are really about or what they want. And, being boobs, everything these guys get into either backfires or turns out unexpectedly or delivers some kind of fake-out surprise.

The film itself is like Depardieu and Dewaere, ambling along without seeming to have any particular plan, and in so doing it gradually charms you into taking their side or least not wanting to see them get caught. It gives you an idea of what a hooligan high can feel like, to break the law and laugh and not give a damn. It’s quite a trick. I don’t think any American film about small-time bad guys has ever managed the same kind of mood or chemistry.

Lorber Films has a new Going Places Bluray and DVD coming out on 11.1 (a month from now), and for some reason the N.Y. Times has run a review (written by Charles Taylor) today.

“I have never seen Bertrand Blier’s raucous, lyrical road comedy Going Places without noticing at least one audience member stalking out in disgust,” Taylor writes. “In a way that’s an honest reaction. Mr. Blier means to rough you up, just as his two loutish heroes rough up the people they encounter. It’s not bullying, more like someone telling you not to worry if you get grease on your pressed shirt or dirt under your nails. Mr. Blier means to make us feel more alive, more in touch with simple, sensual, irresponsible pleasure.

“Gerard Depardieu’s Jean-Claude and Patrick Dewaere’s Pierrot are dirty enough for Henry Miller, but they also could be offspring of D. H. Lawrence‘s happy idiot. In their dumb, brutish way they revere the familiar mystery of sex and are in awe of nature.

“Working from his novel, Mr. Blier follows the two buddies as they steal and fight and rut their way across France. Mr. Depardieu and Dewaere are a Neanderthal comedy team with hot pants and rocks in their heads.

“Mr. Blier understands that the self-justification in the pair’s anti-establishment talk is just a ruse to see how much they can get away with. But he also challenges the mechanized alienation of the world that shuns them, nowhere more so than in Jeanne Moreau‘s devastating cameo as a woman just released from prison who tells the men how the cold, unnatural experience of being incarcerated stopped her menstrual cycle. It’s as if this society has developed the power of freezing out nature.

“What the movie’s detractors missed is that everything Jean-Claude and Pierrot do backfires on them, right up until the sleek black joke of the final shot. When they come on like studs, determined to give the zonked beautician (Miou-Miou) they’ve picked up the time of her life in the sack, she lies there compliant and bored as they work overtime showing off.

“Going Places harks back to the plein-air tradition of ’30s French films, like Jean Renoir‘s Day in the Country, and farther, to Renoir’s father, Auguste. Watching the film is like seeing what Renoir pere’s rosy-cheeked picnickers got up to after the country dances and the food: the grease on their cheeks, the grass stains on their knees.”