“Epic..incredible honor…meansa great deal to me,” etc. Obviously, Kathryn Bigelow‘s remarks at the podium last night upon receiving a Gotham Film Awards tribute trophy sound a little echo-y. That’s hand-held Canon Elph video for you. I was sitting at table #6, struggling to keep the camera rock still, an un-sampled fish and pasta dinner to my left.

“The evidence is indisputable, writes Vanity Fair‘s Leslie Bennetts, “that Meryl Streep, at age 60, has become the industry’s new box-office queen.” Absolutely, yes…for over-35s who go to the movies. Educated couples, singles, women in groups, etc. It’s a different story with most of the under-25 Eloi, of course. They know Streep as the white-haired bitch in The Devil Wears Prada, I would presume, but she’s not of their own and therefore a “meh” in terms of marquee value.

The Eloi are not just another age group — they’re another species.

But yes, of course — Streep matters big-time with older viewers. The mostly grotesque Mamma Mia!, Bennetts reminds, has grossed $601 million worldwide. Prada has earned $324 million around the world. This year Julie & Julia has tallied $121 million. And everyone knows that It’s Complicated is going to clean up.

Streep “broke the glass ceiling of an older woman being a big star — it has never, never happened before,” says director Mike Nichols.

Updated: As predicted last night during the ceremony, The Hurt Locker won the best feature as well as best ensemble award at the Gotham Independent Film Awards, held at Manhattan’s Cipriani Wall Street. And director Kathryn Bigelow was given a career tribute. As if the Summit release needed a further boost for a Best Picture nomination. It’s locked, certified…next?

(l. to r.) Hurt Locker producers producers Nicolas Chartier and Greg Shapiro, director Kathryn Bigelow, costars Anthony Mackie, Brian Gerahty, producer-screenwriter Mark Boal, star Jeremy Renner.

If those ladies I spoke to at the Regency hotel last week or those waitresses at Extra Virgin are reading this, I have a question: have you guys heard of The Hurt Locker now?

Congrats to Bigelow, producer-screenwriter Mark Boal, producers Nicolas Chartier and Greg Shapiro and costars Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Ralph Fiennes, Guy Pearce, David Morse and Evangeline Lilly.

The Gothams’ breakthrough actor award went to The Maid‘s Catalina Saavedra, beaing out The Hurt Locker‘s Renner. Robert Kenner‘s Food, Inc., a Magnolia release, won the best documentary prize. Big Fan director-screenwriter Robert Siegel won the breakthrough director award. And Ry Russo-Young‘s You Won’t Miss Me was handed the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You trophy.

In addition to Bieglow, career tribute honors were presented to actors Natalie Portman and Stanley Tucci and producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.

The emcee was Kumail Nanjiani, a very funny guy whose name no one in the U.S. will ever be able to pronounce, much less spell or remember. He needs to change his name to Donnie Darker or Ken H. Doll (an allusion to CREEP finance guy and Watergate co-conspirator Kenneth H. Dahlberg) or whatever. Or…you know, Homie Kume. I could remember that.

Posted Last Night: Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker has just won the Best Ensemble trophy at the Gotham Film Awards, which is now about halfway through the program at Cipriani Wall Street. This means The Hurt Locker will also win the Best Feature award. Trust me — I know how this stuff works.

On 11.25 James Cameron‘s Avatar had a first choice rating of 10 — today (11.30) it’s gone up to 15. If it keeps going up 5 points every five days it’ll be at 30 by opening day on 12.18. Unaided awareness is now at 10, total awareness is at 82 and definite interest is currently at 40.

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“Sources and friends close to the Bourne 4 project tell us that Paul Greengrass has quit Bourne 4 and walked away from the project,” a Playlist story reported earlier today. “This actually happened more than a week ago, and we’ve been getting our ducks in a row before publishing this report (and again, we’re shocked Nikki Finke or The Wrap didn’t get wind of this yet and way before us).”

“I wept at the idea of a world that can hold so much beauty and so much horror at the same time. This is a significant, powerful film, one that I will revisit soon and often.”

I don’t trust Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny take on The Lovely Bones because of the residual DNA of anyone who was heavily invested in Ain’t It Cool culture (as he was for many years) and the almost contractual requirement that you had to be in the tank (along with Harry) for anything directed or even produced by Peter Jackson.

McWeeny is, of course, his own man and a good guy and a very fine writer and all, but a strong instinct is telling me to regard his positive Bones review with great wariness.

Especially since McWeeny decides to use the word “significant” at the end of the review without saying how significant — i.e., very, somewhat, extremely or whatever. Calling a film “significant” is the same as calling it “interesting.” It means nothing. Well, actually it does mean something. It means that a critic is trying to be gracious without being too generous or specific.

Nor am I persuaded by David Poland‘s serpentine, mixed-positive, perceptive-sounding response. Partly because he spends 15 or 20 seconds zapping other critics for exhibiting “a failure of imagination” before winding and weaving through his here-and-there reactions.

I detect the old Poland generosity here — he loves to be the kindly generous one, the guy who gets what a major director has tried to do when others haven’t, and especially the one critic who feels the emotional current in a film when other critics have rejected it because…you know, critics don’t like emotion.

“I’m not sure where it ranks in the worldview of movies, honestly because I’ve only seen it the one time…it does demand multiple viewings,” he says. (That’s a warning siren right there.) “It’s complex, it is more than one thing at once…each time you get settled into it being one thing it becomes another thing…it is unsettling, but the story is unsettling.”

And then comes the obiter dicta that gives the game away: “I’m not sure if it’s one of the best movies of the year,” he says, “or a middle movie.” Trust me on this when I say that Poland-the-benevolent allowing that The Lovely Bones may be “a middle movie” can certainly be interpreted as a somewhat guarded appraisal.

Sensing that he’s putting out ambivalent signals, Poland then rebounds by calling The Lovely Bones “a very good movie…a fascinating piece of work…something we’ve never seen before, we’ve never had ths experieince…the storytelling is rock-solid…it makes you feel, which is maybe not so great for critics but I think for audiences it’s a pretty terrific thing.”

Get how the system works? If you’re in touch with your emotions and not afraid to feel things, you may be strong and mature and big-of-heart enough to appreciate The Lovely Bones.

“It’s okay…kind of a nice thing, nothing particularly special, a who cares? Not much for Morgan Freeman to work with. If it were not a Clint Eastwood movie, if it were not Oscar season, it would probably be direct to HBO, [and] showing during Black History Month

“I don’t expect that a lot of people are going to want to go see it in a theatre, and I don’t know that the Academy is going to see it as that important.”

What would the last couple of weeks before a new super-costly James Cameron movie be without a Kim Masters article saying “uh-oh…big financial risk…look out!” But her 11.29 Daily Beast piece, titled “James Cameron’s Titanic Gamble,” does introduce an Avatar impression that I’ve never heard before. The Na’vi don’t look like cats but goats, in the view of “a veteran producer of A-list films.”

My initital Na’vi impression, which I posted on 8.14, was that they reminded me of the old Pinocchio donkeys in the 1940 Walt Disney film. Then I switched over to Captain Planet With Cats and then the wide Na’vi cougar noses. But after reading Masters’ piece I can’t get the goat thing out of my head, despite the above photo comparison not lending much support.

The other Masters quote that leaps out is one from a studio chief, who says, “I’m curious to see [Avatar] — I’m not anxious to see it.”

There’s a kind of a spillover effect between comments about the “dead eyes” in the characters populating Robert Zemeckis‘ A Christmas Carol, which under-performed, and the wary expectation comments about Avatar. (I had to read the piece a second time to realize the guy complaining about “dead eyes” was referring to the Zemeckis film and not Cameron’s.) But Masters makes it clear a paragraph or two later that Avatar isn’t expected to look the same or suffer a Christmas Carol fate.

Avatar producer Jon Landau and Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman have both said that the film has the ‘emotionality‘ that previous motion-capture films have lacked,” she writes, adding that Cameron “used tiny cameras mounted on his performers’ faces to avoid the dead-eye look.

“No one has seen a full version of Avatar yet but those who have seen pieces of it say the technique is more immersive than flashy.” But when I visualize goats I don’t think of emotionally expressive eyes — who does?

“If one is talking Oscars with a film like Invictus then it’s worth considering that even fans of the piece couldn’t possibly, credibly consider it one of Eastwood’s top tier works,” writes In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. “An expanded Best Picture category and enough traditionalist voting methods will likely secure it a spot in the field, and Morgan Freeman has enough gravitas to coast to a most undeserved nomination, but beyond that, nothing rings true.

“Best Director? It would be surprising. Best Supporting Actor? The acting branch would be voting on autopilot. Below the line? Not enough frills.

“But away from the black hole of awards considerations, it’s difficult not to see Invictus as a warning that Eastwood could be on the precipice of a Woody Allen-like plunge following a very commendable late-career burst. Every one of Allen’s films as of late, throughout his career, have been about something. But the craft has worn thin (save for last year’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona). That’s where I’d say Eastwood finds himself, despite what critical apologists might say. A few moments away from the fray might do him good.”

Alllen’s Match Point was thin? Not according to my yardstick.

Eastwood can’t take a few moments away from the fray because if he did he’d lost his momentum. He’s following a plan — keep moving, stay limbre, keep ’em coming at a price — and he’s on a clock. As Christopher Plummer‘s Mike Wallace says in the third act of The Insider, “What do I say at this point? That in the future I’d like to do this or that? Future…what future?”:

I love the podcast moment when In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson are discussing Invictus and Tapley presses her to say if she thought it was “flat” or not and she says yeah, she sorta did find it flat, and yet she found it moving all the same.

If there’s one description that applies to Thompson as a film critic or commentator it’s “diplomatic.” She knows the film world over under sideways down, but butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And yet I felt for her this time because I expressed a somewhat similar view in my own review, which went up on 11.27. I didn’t call Invictus moving, although I did equate it to good pasta.

“I almost admire [director Clint] Eastwood for keeping it as simple and straightforward as it is,” I wrote. “It’s nice to see restraint and centeredness in a director, and there’s something very elegant about the way he steers Invictus along at 35 mph without cranking things up for the sake of cranking things up.

“I know, I know — a satisfying plate of pasta doesn’t have to be ‘brilliant.’ It just has to be carefully prepared and well seasoned and made with love. Invictus is a very pleasant and mildly stirring bowl of fettucini with a highly agreeable lead performance by Morgan Freeman.”

Oh, and Eastwood really did arrive in South Africa only a couple of days before shooting started on Invictus. And he finished eight days ahead of schedule.

So now it’s even more certain that Inglourious Basterds will wedge its way onto the list of ten Best Picture nominees because all the December releases are falling short…is that it? That’s more or less how In Contention‘s Kris Tapley expressed it over the Thanksgiving holiday in his podcast chat with Anne Thompson.

I’m sensing that Quentin Tarantino may have called his agent, Mike Simpson at William Morris, sometime last week to kibbutz.

Tarantino: “You’re hearing what I’m hearing, right? Nobody’s seen Avatar but all the other December releases are, like, good or pretty good or whatever but nothing’s really going through the roof so they’re…they’re, whatever, likely Best Picture contenders but at the same time they’re soft so…like, we’re in! ”

Simpson: “I’ve never had a moment’s doubt but now I know we’re good. Cat’s in the bag…”

Tarantino: “Done deal!”

Simpson: “Congrats, Quentin. Really, man.”

Tarantino: “We’ve been strong all along because…you know, Basterds fans are adamant or enthused whereas Nine or Invictus seem to be….well, you know, people like them…I mean, I loved Nine and Harvey knows this, but we’ve got the truly passionate following. And now that Brothers has been seen and Lovely Bones is…well, I guess it’s pretty much dead.”

Simpson: “You saw it?

Tarantino: “No, but the word hasn’t been…you know…”

Simpson: “Yeah, I know.”

Tarantino: “Except for one guy, Kris Tapley…he called it ‘dangerously close to a masterpiece‘ or some shit. He’s probably alone given what I’m hearing but even if Bones experiences a turnaround, we’re still good. The people that like us really like us, so we’re good no matter what. What I really want, as you know, is Best Original Screenplay…wait, are we Adapted or Original? I’ve forgotten. But that’s what matters along with Best Picture. Anyway…”

Simpson: “We’re good so we’re good.”

Tarantino: “Woo-hooo!!!”