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Last year Vanity Fair‘s John Lopez floated the idea of AMPAS’s preferential voting system possibly leading to a surprise upset in favor of Inglourious Basterds. Now he’s saying that The Social Network could pull off a surprise Best Picture win by being everyone’s No. 2 choice…or something like that.

“The Social Network [being] the ‘It’ movie of the year makes it the logical No. 2 slot for everyone in the Academy who doesn’t hail The King’s Speech,” Lopez writes. “So Oscar whisperers should be sure to find out from Academy sources who their No. 2 pick is, because this year coming in second might just do the trick.”

I need to inspect a hard copy of Vanity Fair‘s just-out Hollywood issue with a magnifying glass, but this image from the magazine’s website makes the cover spread look like a piss-poor Photoshop job. If all the principals were snapped at the same time at a single photo session, fine — I stand corrected. But it sure doesn’t look that way. Is “bartender” Robert Duvall the fakest-looking of the lot? No, that would be Mila Kunis — she looks like pure cardboard, shaped by an Exacto knife.

The headline of this N.Y. Times/Michael Cieply piece about the surge of The King’s Speech promises a couple of snippy quotes. It delivers nothing of the kind. There’s only a mention of a faintly xenophobic Variety ad for True Grit.

“Since forming the Weinstein Company with his brother, Bob, in 2005, Harvey Weinstein has struggled to regain the hot hand that made him one of the most successful and feared figures in the independent movie business,” writes Media Equation’s David Carr. “An opportunistic bottom feeder with a knack for resuscitating troubled projects, Mr. Weinstein has become one himself. Here at Sundance and elsewhere, people whispered he was a ghost.

(l.) Harvey Weinstein; (r.) David Carr.

“Turns out that he wasn’t starring in The Sixth Sense. He was playing the role of Jason in Friday the 13th, Part 9: biding his time and then striking again.

“As the Oscar nominations demonstrated, Mr. Weinstein is still capable of spotting value. Many people, including me, look at The King’s Speech and see a by-the-numbers film that’s a fine candidate for BBC TV. Mr. Weinstein saw a high-end buddy movie that humanized its royal subject and then he carefully husbanded the marketing resources of the film, enticing consumers to come out and see the film and reminding the academy voters that the carefully crafted dramedy of manners was worthy of consideration. The nominations surprise last Tuesday provided oxygen to the struggling company.

“Yes, his company is a shell of its former self and his partners are out a lot of money, but there is something to be said for relentlessness, a refusal to acknowledge that you are finished, and the will to just keep hacking away no matter what.

“No wonder Bob has had such good luck producing horror films: he grew up with Jason.”

“By standards of quality, the DGA’s choice of Tom Hooper, director of The King’s Speech, over The Social Network‘s David Fincher is indefensible,” writes Time‘s Richard Corliss.

“Hooper manages his principal players (Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter) expertly enough but forces the supporting actors into caricature. His camera style is stodgy, and his handling of a delicate subject lurid but not invigorating. He’ll do anything — peel onions — to make his audience cry. He commits all the sins of omission and commission that Fincher avoids. And this is one more reason The King’s Speech will triumph on Oscar night: if mediocre work wins in Hollywood’s official circles, it tends to keep on winning.

“When The King’s Speech had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September, I pointed out the ways in which, by coincidence or cynicism, the movie followed virtually every rule of a Best Picture winner. It’s a biopic of a real person; it is set on or near World War II, with Hitler’s shadow looming; it dramatizes a man’s heroic struggle over some physical or psychological infirmity; and it’s got oodles of those classy British actors.

“Other Academy watchers noticed the same thing: Steve Pond, resident Oscar savant of industry website The Wrap, predicted a Best Picture win before he had even seen it. And it would be odd indeed if the people the movie was designed for — the senior Hollywood professionals who vote on the Oscars — didn’t go for it.”

Oscar Poker #19 is a discussion between myself, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and Hollywood & Fine‘s Marshall Fine about the stunning Oscar-race turnaround of the past week. Here’s a non-iTunes link. And here’s a bonus link to the first half-hour of yesterday’s Oscar Blogger podcast.

For whatever reason, watching this clip an hour ago just lifted me out of my King’s Speech melancholia. I’ve been living with it for six days now. It’s been like a chest cold only worse. Now, suddenly, I feel like there’s oxygen in my system again. Go figure.

I don’t like or visit ranker.com, but I have to say I liked Kristin Wong‘s “7 Greatest Bill Murray Stories Ever Told,” partly because I’ve never heard two or three of them.

Every time I re-watch my Bluray of Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton, which seems a bit more masterful each time, I feel a little bit worse about not being more enthusiastic when it first came out 40 months ago. I didn’t put enough feeling into my riffs about it. Calling it “never boring,” “a tense adult thriller about some unsettled and anxious people” and “as seasoned and authentic as this kind of thing can be” didn’t get it. I held back and over-qualified. And I’m sorry.

John Barry‘s Oscar-winning Out of Africa score was his masterpiece, I think. And this orchestral, overture-like version of Barry’s Born Free theme is much more moving than the pop song that everyone knows. Something about the vastness of Africa obviously moved Barry, and this, I think, should be his legacy.

The editing is lumpy and clumsy, and there must be quite a few more scenes and lines of dialogue that could be compared. Has someone somewhere done a better job than this?

True Grit: 1969 vs 2010 from Amfidiusz on Vimeo.