20th Century Fox is pushing the opening of Oliver Stone‘s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps from April 23rd to September 24th. Variety‘s Pamela McLintock is reporting that the decision may be linked to the film getting a slot at the Cannes Film Festival two months hence, which of course will deliver a huge boost for the European openings. And opening it in the fall stateside will, of course, position WS2:MNS as a possible awards-level contender.

20 days ago I ran a positive reaction from a tipster who’d just attended a restricted-attendance screening of the film on the Fox lot. The sequel costars Michael Douglas, Shia LaBeouf. Carey Mulligan and Josh Brolin.

Marshall Fine felt it would be ungracious to cut John Hughes down to size following his passing last August (as I sorta kinda did by re-posting Richard Lallich‘s 1993 “Big Baby“), but he’s taken exception to the Oscar telecast tribute to Hughes, especially considering the concurrent omission of Farrah Fawcett, James Whitmore and Bea Arthur in the death montage.

I agree with many of Fine’s condemnations, but not when it comes to Planes, Trains and Automobiles — leave that film alone!

And you can’t tell me that Walter Matthau‘s pajamas-in-the-bathroom sequence in Dennis the Menace isn’t funny. When he shrieks like a banshee after squirting the spiked nose spray, and then we cut to a long shot of his home with the simultaneous sound of a dog barking in the neighborhood, and then the basin shot as Matthau dunks his head into the water? Sorry, but that’s funny stuff.

“John Hughes? You’ve got to be kidding, right? Yes, yes, I know — he’s a GenX (and even GenY) god, the man who got teenagers. But a lengthy retrospective of clips and a rogues’ gallery of former teen stars singing his praises?

“Hughes was a mediocre director and prolific writer who wrote more than three dozen films and directed eight. And of those, there are about three that stand the test of time: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

“Those are the three films in the Hughes’ oeuvre which, early on, had me convinced for a moment that Hughes was a genuine talent. Then he began repeating himself. And then he turned to cranking out bad comedy after bad comedy – unalloyed trash like The Great Outdoors, Career Opportunities, Beethoven. Worst of all was a remake of Miracle on 34th Street that modernized the original by removing the storyline in which Kris Kringle’s sanity was questioned, substituting instead a charge of pedophilia. Talk about a laugh-getter.

“Of the scripts Hughes wrote, a few had the quality of Pretty in Pink (which he remade two years later as Some Kind of Wonderful). Many more, however, had the scope of garbage such as Curly Sue, Dutch, the numerous Home Alone sequels and Dennis the Menace. The original Home Alone? Lots of laughs – but it also contained a level of sadism usually not seen outside a Looney Tunes cartoon (and which Hughes himself surpassed in the dreadful Baby’s Day Out).

“Uncle Buck and Planes, Trains and Automobiles? Both were an uneasy and highly uneven mix of class-comedy (or, more accurately, low-class comedy) and schmaltzy sentimentality. No matter how mean Hughes was to his characters, he always tried to put a lump in the collective throat of the audience at the end, as though this redeemed the mediocrity.”

Wall Street Journal “Speakeasy” contributor Steven Kurutz has interviewed EW‘s Dave Karger, And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg and myself for a short 3.10 piece called “Oscar Bloggers On the Existential Silence of Post-Awards Season.” I told Kurutz that there’s no silence for me at all — that I never stop and it just keeps on keepin’ on, 24-7 and 365. “I desire to serve God and become rich, like all men.” Who said that? In what film, I mean?

Even by my blunt-talk standards, Howard Stern‘s two-day-old comments about Gabourey Sidibe seemed needlessly cruel. Sidibe will, I expect, find acting work here and there, but not much. She’ll reportedly next play a role in the Showtime series The C Word and then a role in a feature called Yelling to the Sky. But Stern isn’t wrong in saying that her prospects are limited.

Yesterday I was asked to comment about Sidibe by a writer for Turner who believes that Sidibe may have broken through a weight barrier, and is perhaps positioned to strike a blow for other obese girls who ‘ve been discriminated against because of their size, etc. I replied as follows:

“I loved Gabby’s smile and vibe and I don’t want her to not work, but the only roles she’ll have a shot at playing will be downmarket moms and hard-luck girls working at Wal-mart — that line of country. Unless she drops the tonnage she’s facing a very limited future as an actress. No casting director would choose her to play anyone in the upscale executive world because — hello? — no one in the executive world looks like her. No casting director would choose her to play a gym teacher, or a big-wave surfer, or a Washington lobbyist, or a U.S. Congresswoman, or a park ranger, or a fire-fighter, or a soldier (I’ve never seen morbidly obese women in uniform…have you?) or a saleswoman in an apparel shop (no woman would trust her sartorial judgment), or a narcotics detective.

“Could she even play a cab driver? Could a person of her proportion even fit behind the wheel of an average cab? I’m just asking.

“Gabby is as out of the realm of mainstream normality as a seven foot-tall giant or a wheelchair person with polio. She will have serious health problems later in life if she doesn’t lose about half her body weight, at least. Whether we like to hear this or not, she represents a kind of low-rent affliction and a pattern of self-destruction.

“And you’re not doing Gabby any favors by coddling her with approving profiles and patting her on the back and saying ‘you go, girl’ — she’s got a serious problem. And you’re also telling other morbidly obese young women that it’s okay to be that way. It’s not — it’s bad for the health. Only in a country like ours in which the population is as addicted to crappy fatty foods as heroin addicts are to the needle.”

Okay, now bring on the hate and call me a terrible person for being insensitive, etc.

When I first heard the news about Corey Haim’s drug death I reminded myself right away that it wasn’t Corey Feldman, who used to be friendly with Julia Phillips, whom I knew and loved and cared for throughout the ’90s. This is the other guy whom I never knew or cared about or paid attention to…sorry. (They were called “the Two Coreys.”) Life is hard and wounding, but either you stand up and man up at a certain point or you don’t. Sic semper druggies and party animals.

Since MCN’s David Poland never posts the final roster of Gurus of Gold Oscar tallies, I’m doing so as a public service. The big winner was In Contention‘s Kris Tapley; the runner-up was Envelope columnist Pete Hammond.

This is out of 21 Oscar categories, mind. The Gurus don’t survey Live Action Short, Animated Short , or Documentary Short. Tapley missed all three of these in his official predictions at In Contention while Hammond got two out of three right at The Envelope. If these had been included Tapley and Hammond would have tied for first with 19 correct each, so call it even.

Tapley, as noted, was first with 19 out of 21. Hammond got 17 right. Then came EW‘s Dave Karger (17), USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna/”Suzie Woz” (17), Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone (17), Poland (17), The Wrap‘s Steve Pond (17), Hitfix‘s Greg Ellwood (16), Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell (16), Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson (16), L.A. Times‘ Mark Olsen (16), USA Today‘s Scott Bowles (15), Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez (15), USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican (14) and EW‘s Sean Smith (13).

A two-week-old theatrical neck stabbing in Lancaster, California, was reported in today’s L.A. Times. A guy had complained about a woman talking on her cell phone during a 9 pm Saturday showing of Shutter Island at the Cinemark 22. The woman and two guys left the theatre, and then the two guys returned minutes later and stabbed the complainer in the neck with a meat thermometer.

What would Detective Columbo make of this? Let’s see….well, the first deduction would be that the assailants were blue-collar mongrels of some kind, possibly employees of a nearby California slaughterhouse or meat-packing plant. The assailants were probably young, and most likely of Swedish, Danish, Norweigan or German descent. They are also presumed to be highly educated, as most California meat-packing plant workers have either liberal arts degrees or business school diplomas.

The most likely motivation for the stabbing was to avenge the female cell-phone-talker’s honor, and particularly to teach the victim a lesson — i.e., that either girlfriends or sisters of Danish/Norweigan/Swedish/German men can talk all they want during a film, and anyone who vocally complains will have to pay the price.

The attackers are reportedly still at large. Anyone with information on the attack, or who is familiar with anyone from the Swedish/Danish/Norweigan/German community in the greater Lancaster area, is asked to contact the Lancaster sheriff’s station at (661) 948-8466.

There are probably a few reasons why The Hurt Locker took the Best Picture Oscar over Avatar, but Notes on a Season columnist Pete Hammond believes it came down to one thing — i.e., “the actors branch, dummy.”

1,205 Academy members. Three times as many as any other peer group. Freaked by performance capture. Voted their pocketbooks. Said “hell no” to the Na’vi.

“With few exceptions, most of the actors I asked [about the Oscar race] thought that Avatar’s advanced performance capture technique was threatening their career future,” Hammond writes. “I remember sitting next to JoBeth Williams (Poltergeist) at a Lovely Bones lunch event in December, and she said she worried it had the potential to eventually put actors out of work.

“Heavily involved with the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, she said then that SAG was forming a committee to investigate the process.” What — like HUAC looking into industry-wide commie subversion?

“Avatar producer Jon Landau told Film Drunk shortly after the film was snubbed by the SAG acting nominations that ‘I blame ourselves for not educating people (actors). We made a commitment to our actors that what they would see up there on the screen is their performance, not somebody else’s interpretation of what their performance might be.’

“James Cameron said performers were confusing it with animation but that the ‘creator here is the actor, not the unseen hand of the animator.’

“That message clearly wasn’t heard by most of the actors I talked to last Sunday. Aside from sensing a heavy Hurt Locker vibe in the room, many, while acknowledging the technical prowess of the film, didn’t believe Avatar was their sort of film, at least when it comes to Academy Awards.”

The mood-style of this She & Him music video is similar to that much-loved Joseph Gordon Levitt musical number in (500) Days of Summer. Ironically kitschy, of course — a late 1950s sensibility but “in quotes.” It doesn’t embrace the schmaltzy flavorings of The Pajama Game, but it winks at this. So much of pop music these days has been feminized, lightened up — that classic Lou Reed guitar-bass-and-drums thing is out the window.

This is the first time I’ve really responded positively/favorably to Lady Gaga doing anything. I’ve been asleep on her until this moment. And I would have been totally down for this version rather than the one that Tim Burton chose to make. And so would the Hispanic Eloi, I’m betting, with whom I saw Alice last weekend.