“Answering the Oscar red carpet query ‘Who made your dress?’ with ‘Probably some underage Vietnamese guttersnipe’ would be a nice change.” — Steven Weber on witsream.com/oscars (about an hour ago).

N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported this morning that she recently “made the mistake of taking my eyes off the [high-speed] road for more than 1.5 seconds, which is the danger zone, according to technology experts at Ford headquarters.” It is routine, of course, for actors at the wheel in movies to take their eyes off the road for three, four or even five seconds so they can convey meaningful eye contact with their front-seat passenger, especially if they’re romantically involved with same. Nothing infuriates me more. Directors who allow or encourage actors to ignore the road for such periods need to be put into wooden stockades.

“The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against this or that resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny,” journalist John Pilger wrote this morning. “A tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day.

“The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

“How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? ‘It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed,” observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, “[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centered egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it’s what they do feel.”

“Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks.

“Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.”

I need to post something more than the usual ass confetti during this evening’s Oscarcast liveblog. A journalist friend says, “I don’t really care about what Sasha and Poland and Pete Hammond have to say…I’d rather hear something funny and searing.” So (a) I’ll trying to be my usual searing self but (b) will also aggregate the best comedian twitters — Sarah Silverman, Steve Martin, Bill McCuddy, Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Patton Oswalt, etc. Along with samplings from witstream.com.

“It’s not hard to see why films such as The King’s Speech, The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love play so well in Peoria. They work as pure escapism, presenting American audiences with a world that seems at once reassuringly familiar (people speak English) and excitingly different (they like drinking tea and hate talking about their feelings). For two hours, they allow us to forget the messy anxieties of the present and wallow in an idealized, romantic past.

“The silver screen Britain is a courteous, orderly place. Women wear dresses. There is no crime. Everybody is white. The political and social conflicts that marked Britain’s history — the strikes and demonstrations, the suffragettes and socialists — are entirely absent. It’s like Tolkien’s Shire, only with worse weather and stodgier food.

“The Britain of Colin Firth and Helen Mirren is the Britain of the imagination, a world of half-timbered cottages and country pubs, draughty palaces and foggy skies: an exact opposite, in other words, of modern-day America.” — Dominic Sandbrook, a proper Englishman, in yesterday’s N.Y. Daily News.

With no reported change in AMPAS attitude/policy since yesterday, it appears as if Deadline‘s Michael Fleming‘s Oscar-covering press credential ban is being upheld. Nikki Finke revealed early yesterday afternoon that Deadline‘s press pass had been revoked over Finke having posted a spoiler-heavy rundown of the show’s schedule.

“There’s a long history of entertainment journalists besides us publishing multiple scoops about the show during the week leading up to the Academy Awards broadcast, including this year,” Finke claimed. “But none of those news outlets were banned from coverage. True, until now, no media outlet has ever published so many scoops as Deadline did yesterday. The fact that we did our reporting job too well put the Academy on tilt.”

Finke speculated that the revoke order was apparently due to the particular ire of AMPAS exec administrator Ric Robertson. I’m guessing that Robertson didn’t pop his cork entirely over Deadline‘s scoop (although that was obviously the main reason), but also because Finke prefaced the rundown by saying “what’s confirmed at this point looks to be yet another snorefest…the highlights or lowlights depending on your point of view when it comes to the overly long and usually boring Oscar telecast.”

The au natural honesty of Spirit Award winner James Franco‘s press tent q & a was highly appealing. I described a similar vibe on 1.30 after Franco’s appearance at the Santa Barbara Film Festival: “Zen and relaxed and articulate in a kind of shoulder-shrugging way…didn’t try to turn on the charm or win anyone over…’I’m easy, I’ll talk, sure…no worries.'”

Notice the tent material rippling and buckling from the almost gale-force winds. It was by far the chilliest, most assaultive, least physically pleasant Spirit Awards ceremony ever.

Yours truly at gallery viewing of Black Swan-inspired sculpture & paintings at Regen Projects on Almont, just south of Santa Monica Blvd., in West Hollywood — Friday, 2.23, 6:35 pm.

Photo by Svetlana Cvetko

4:17 iPhone filing: Black Swan has won the Spirit Award for Best Feature. Four of the top five awards nabbed by Aronofsky/Portman/Libatique & Co.

4:09 iPhone filing: I was expecting Annette Bening to win the Best Actress Spirit Award for The Kids Are All Right, but nope — Natalie Portman has won it for her work in Black Swan. The winner of Sunday night’s Best Actress Oscar is so decided.

3:56 iPhone filing: Black Swan‘s Darren Aronofsky has just won the Spirit Award for Best Director. Affirmative!

3:47 pm: The Kids Are All Right‘s Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg have won the Spirit Award for Best Screenplay.

3:34 pm: I’ve been working off the laptop battery since 2:15 pm or thereabouts, and I’ve got about 20 minutes left. Thanks, Toshiba! I just plugged into an outlet and the laptop won’t charge so I’m dead. I’ll have to file from the iPhone. This plus the cold blustery winds buffeting the tent…forget it.

3:31 pm: I had to get some food and then answer nature’s call. As I stepped back into the tent John Hawkes had just won the Best Supporting Actor award for his Winters’ Bone performance. Before that The King’s Speech won the Best Foreign Film award. (British is “foreign”?)

3:04 pm: Banksy‘s Exit From The Gift Shop has won the Spirit Award for Best Documentary.

2:44 pm: James Franco has won the Best Male Lead Spirit Award for his performance in 127 Hours. Franco kept that film humming from start to finish, but I was pulling for a win by Ben Stiller‘s somewhat braver and more layered performance in Greenberg.

2:44 pm: Aaron Schneider‘s Get Low has won the Spirit Award for Best First Feature.

2:30 pm: Dale Dickey has just won the Best Supporting Actress Spirit Award for her performance in Winter’s Bone. Before air-time Tiny Furniture‘s Lena Dunham won for Best First Screenplay, and Black Swan‘s Matty Libatique won for Best Cinematography. (The show won’t air until 10 pm tonight, so this is newsy stuff.)

2:26 pm: I’m in the Spirit Awards press tent, and it’s no one is especially comfortable due to the blustery cold winds. This has been the coldest Spirit Awards ever. People are huddling, shivering, wishing they’d worn a sweater.