Youth in Revolt didn’t open all that strongly last weekend, coming in ninth with $6,888,334. The Weinstein Co., I realize, is having a tough enough time without me piling on. I’m mentioning this merely to note that Michael Cera hasn’t exactly grown into a semi-reliable box-office attraction, and that nothing has happened since Superbad to grow or even fortify his brand.

The full “How To Make a Michael Cera Movie” chart is on the jump

Fourteen months ago I suggested that he might be “two or three steps from being over, which is to say two or three years from being completely done.” Nothing has changed since, and things have in fact gotten a little worse. Paper Heart was deadly. The Year One didn’t connect. There’s another “Michael Cera fillm” coming out this year — Scott Pilgrim vs. The World ( about a guy who “must defeat his new girlfriend’s seven evil ex-boyfriends in order to win her heart”) — but how long can this go on?

Cera isn’t catching fire. At best he’s simmering; at worst the fire is already out. Whatever heat Cera might have had in September 2007, there seems to be less of it now. Is there anyone in the film industry more famous for being a one-trick, one-attitude pony who sorta kinda doesn’t like being famous?

The solution is in facing facts. Cera is not a leading man, and he never will be. He’s very dry, droll, passive, low-energy. He needs to team up with Jonah Hill (or someone who’s got that same neurotic-and-mouthy in an anxious, high-energy way deal going on) in order to get that Superbad thing back. Without a doppleganger Cera is incomplete. Dean Martin without Jerry Lewis, Stan Laurel without Oliver Hardy, Bud Abbott without Lou Costello, etc.

“I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of The Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction.

“There has been speculation about my going to another network but, to set the record straight, I currently have no other offer and honestly have no idea what happens next. My hope is that NBC and I can resolve this quickly so that my staff, crew, and I can do a show we can be proud of, for a company that values our work.

“Have a great day and, for the record, I am truly sorry about my hair; it’s always been that way.” — a statement from Conan O’Brien, posted by N.Y. Times reporter Bill Carter today at 3:10 pm.

No offer from anyone else? From Fox, for instance? What Conan means, I suspect, is that no formal offer has been delivered to his agent.

I’ve never suffered from a condition known as the Avatar blues, which is described pretty well in this 1.11 CNN Entertainment piece by Jo Piazza. You know what depresses me? When a fat guy sits next to me with a warm pizza box in his lap, and then proceeds to eat eight or ten slices, chewing and smacking his lips and stinking up the area around him.

When a lion hooks up with a lioness he plans to mate with, he always kills her cubs. And so it is at Disney with production president Oren Aviv, the last cub left over from the reign of the departed Dick Cook, having “resigned.” He was in fact pushed out by Rich Ross, the Disney chairman who succeeded Cook last October.

The L.A. Film Critics Association has named David Lynch‘s Mulholland Drive as the best film of the first decade of the 21st Century. This illustrates in a nutshell why Joe Popcorn doesn’t trust critics — i.e., because their tastes are too dweeby, too arcane, too referenced, and not populist enough.

I loved Mulholland Drive when I first saw it. I knew it was Lynch’s best since Blue Velvet. But I don’t own it and there are reasons for that. Parts are a bit downish and laborious and a tad overbearing with the dark spooky stuff, and it’s a bit too taken with its middle-class-hating, “are you hip enough to get this?” art-noir aura. I could have put Mulholland Drive on my 42 best films of the decade list, but I forgot to for some reason. I probably should have. But a voice is telling me it’s more of a great L.A. film than it is a plain great film.

I sure as shit don’t think Mulholland Drive is a finer, fuller or more layered thing than any of my Top Ten of the Decade — Zodiac, Memento, Traffic, Amores perros, United 93, Children of Men, Adaptation, City of God, The Pianist and The Lives of Others.

LAFCA’s Top Ten of the Decade are as follows, in this order: Mulholland Drive, There Will Be Blood, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Brokeback Mountain, No Country for Old Men, Zodiac, Yi Yi , 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Lord of the Rings (WHAT?), Spirited Away, United 93 , Y Tu Mama Tambien and Sideways.

Early this morning I had one of those nightmares that are so bad they wake you up. I was being led by an athletic, fair-haired, hiking-boot-wearing young guy around a Pandora-like jungle. At one point we started climbing up the big super-tree (i.e., the one that comes crashing down 9/11-style in Avatar) and realized very quickly that African lions were climbing all over. They were swatting at me and biting my hand like my cats do, but they were big and snarly and smelly and dangerous.

We were maybe halfway up the tree — hundreds of feet off the ground — and it was lions, lions, lions. Roaring and scratching and scampering up the trunk with their damn tails. I was getting bloody gashes and fang-tooth and nip marks on my legs, ribs, arms. It was obvious we’d be killed and eaten sooner or later.

The guide motioned me to walk out on a couple of very thin branches with an overhanging thin branch that we could hold for stability. The branches bent and buckled and wobbled with our weight but they didn’t snap . Two lions followed us out and lost their balance and fell. The last image in the nightmare was of the two lions falling and falling and falling, crashing into branches on their way down, and watching their insides rupture and splatter when they hit the rocks below.

That Inception CG shot of a huge chunk of Paris rising miles into the air and folding over on itself like a book cover is a knockout. Chris Nolan‘s film lives on the other side of the planet from the worlds of Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich. This is clearly going to be the most commercial Eloi-upgrade movie of summer 2010…you can feel it. You know it’s going to be complex and brainy and breathtaking in a 1999 Matrix-y sort of way.

Apology, Update: I could have sworn I had the Inception script sent to me last summer, but now I can’t find it. I guess I don’t. If anyone can send me a copy, please do.

It wasn’t Aziz Ansari‘s complaint about insufficient thread counts that got my attention. It’s the difference between the size of his head and Conan O’Brien‘s. Jesus, the latter’s bison-sized head is at least 50% to 60% larger. This plus that queasy-jittery manner he slips into whenever a guest voices a liberal political view tells me he belongs on Fox, where things are a little freakier. He’s about to bail on NBC and take a Fox deal, right?

A somewhat fickle decision by New York Film Critics Circle chairman Armond White to rescind an invitation to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to present the Best Original Screenplay award to In The Loop costar James Gandolfini at last night’s NYFCC award ceremony resulted in Olbermann getting hugely pissed. I’ve asked White and two publicists to comment but no replies as we speak. Here’s how it was told to me:

(l. to r.) Armond White, Keith Olbermann, James Gandolfini.

The invitation to Olbermann went out last week via 42West. The initial plan was for the show to start exactly on time at 7:30 pm, and for Olbermann to present the award toward the end of the evening. The MSNBC commentator told the agency that he could be at the awards ceremony by 9:15 pm after taping his show. He later told 42West he would tape a segment of his show in advance so he could arrive even earlier.

But after this was arranged, White had second thoughts. He expressed his view that Best Original Screenplay was a minor award and therefore shouldn’t be presented too late in the evening, or no later than approximately 8:30 pm, give or take. Olbermann’s arrival plans were therefore too late for White’s timetable. He also decided that only past NYFCC winners should present awards, which deep-sixed Olbermann also. This led to 42West re-contacting Olbermann last Friday with a “thanks but no thanks.”

Olbermann was naturally offended. He’s a political celebrity, after all, which would have fit perfectly with an award for a political comedy. He had taken the time to watch In The Loop on a screener (and loved it, I’m told) and had arranged for that segment pre-taping. Olbermann allegedly responded with “this is the rudest thing I’ve ever [dealt with]” and “I hope this organization likes publicity.”

But of course, the NYFCC award show didn’t start at 7:30 pm. It started about 8:30 pm. At 7:45 or 7:50 pm White took the stage and essentially said “sorry for the delay but we’re going to delay even further.” (That’s how I heard his remarks, at least.) The 8:30 pm start, in any event, meant that Olbermann’s 9:15 pm arrival would have worked just fine. The final upshot was that Us critic Thelma Adams was asked to present the award. Which she did, and very robustly.

White’s concept of using only past winners as presenters led to another odd decision in which 1984 NYFCC Best Supporting Actress winner Christine Lahti (for Swing Shift) presented George Clooney with his Best Actor award. She and Clooney have a history, apparently, but the general reaction was “why is Lahti presenting this again?” Clooney’s people, I’m told, were at the front of the line with this question.

The bottom line, my source informs, is that White’s mercurial or impolitic ways of handling the presentations irked other agencies besides 42West.

Atom Egoyan‘s reportedly better-than-decent Chloe, which I didn’t have a chance to see in Toronto, will be released by Sony Classics on 3.26.10. Married woman (Julianne Moore) hires a professional (Amanda Seyfried) to lure her husband (Liam Neeson) into an affair in order to assess his character, etc. “Can I borrow your sugar?” is too cliched — it should have been “can you spare one of your Equal packets?” And the panting at the end is too much.

First we have Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow accepting her Best Director award at last night’s New York Film Critics Circle awards, and then George Clooney delivering a sardonic rib-poking introduction for Best Animated Film winner Wes Anderson (for Fantastic Mr. Fox), and then Anderson himself.

I had a great time at this event (thanks to Jeff Hill!). Food and drink were actually served to observing journos like myself despite the limitations I’d been told about earlier. I watched the whole thing from a nearby balcony. Apologies for my non-existent video-editing skills