Yesterday The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond wrote “there’s a good chance the best animated feature category could jump from three to five nominees for the first time since 2002, the only year to feature more than three contenders since [the category] was created in 2001.” The top three, he says, are Coraline, Ponyo and Up, but you could expand it to five by only selecting two from the following: Mary and Max, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Monsters Vs. Aliens, Planet 51, A Christmas Carol, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs or Wes Anderson‘s The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Three hours ago Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet reported that Rob Marshall‘s Nine has been officially bumped from the currently slated release date of 11.29 to a limited 12.18 release in New York and Los Angeles and will then wide on 12.25. I wrote Weinstein Co. reps about this and haven’t heard back. I just checked the trades and the key sites (MCN, Nikki Finke, The Wrap, In Contention, Movieline, Awards Daily, Indiewire, New York Vulture, The Playlist) and no one’s running with it.

We all know how trailers can flim-flam, but you have to admit that this one for Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (Sony Classics, 12.25) makes it look fairly rich and mad (i.e., the work of a gifted madman) and shimmering and splendorific. It even makes Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell‘s substituting-for-Heath thing seem to more or less merge with the whole.

I don’t get the bird-flock metaphor. God’s creatures flying up toward heaven and…is that it? Which gives us the idea that the little girl is running to some sort of heavenly fate except she can’t fly…right? You do get a spiritual vibe from it (especially from the slogan), but it doesn’t quite come together. A bit of a “hmmm” thing. Maybe this is just a teaser poster? (In Contention‘s Kris Tapley wondered the same thing.)

I don’t exactly live under a rock, and yet somehow the news of the death of journalist Shari Roman, which happened on 9/13 (or right smack dab in the middle of the Toronto Film Festival), eluded me until I read this 10.4 Indiewire report by Scott Macaulay. An excellent lady. Sharp, friendly, always inquisitive. I first met her at a Los Angeles Entertainment Weekly pitch meeting in ’92 or thereabouts. Macaulay’s story doesn’t say what took her; only that it was a “short illness.” Very sorry.

Shari Roman

“We must reform a system that lets my father get better care than yours does, or better care than Mike’s daughter does, because by the accident of life I make more money than he does, or my checkbook can hold out longer than his does, or yours does, as the bills come endlessly like some evil version of the enchanted water buckets in Fantasia.

“The resources exist for your father and mine to get the same treatment to have the same chance and to both not have to lie there worried about whether or not they can afford to live!

“Afford to live? Are we at that point? Are we so heartless that we let the rich live and the poor die and everybody in between become wracked with fear — fear not of disease but of Deductibles? Right now, right now, somebody’s father is dying because they don’t have that dollar to spend. And the means by which the playing field is leveled, and the costs that are just as inflated to me as they are to you are reduced, and the money that I don’t have to spend any more on saving my father can go instead to saving your father. That’s called health care reform!”

As a lifelong fan of Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick“, which came out in ’79 or ’80, I’m naturally keen on seeing Sex & Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll, a British-made biopic with Andy Serkis as Dury. Directed by Mat Whitecross from a screenplay by Paul Viragh, it’ll probably turn up in Cannes next May…although one can always hope for Sundance ’10.

Andy Serkis (I think) as Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll.

If you’ve never heard “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick”, please give it a listen.

I’m actually going to try to speak to Whitecross or Viragh during next week’s Fantastic Mr. Fox London press-junket visit. If they’re around, I obviously mean. (As well as try to see Michael Caine‘s Harry Brown, which opens in London next month but which I missed at last month’s Toronto Film Festival.)

Serkis’s costars include Naomie Harris, Ray Winstone, Olivia Williams, Bill Milner, Toby Jones, Noel Clarke and Mackenzie Crool.

Financed by Prescience, Aegis, the UK Film Council and Lip Sync, worldwide sales are being handled by Odyssey Entertainment.

This guy makes some intelligent points, but his argument about brushing aside Samantha Geimer‘s plea that the Polanski case should be forgotten because the laws are about protecting “we the people” and “for the good of the people” sounds a little wingnutty to me.

The 78 year-old Polanski doing more time will, I realize, make a symbolic statement that justice prevails and no one can ultimately defy U.S. law. But anyone over the age of 10 will see this as hollow moralistic theatre — a play aimed at those who refuse to tune in to the truly serious corruptions and malignancies plaguing the country and the planet, but whose pulses race when someone talks about putting Polanksi’s head on a pike.

Polanski would do well to stop fighting extradition and just see the situation through in the U.S. and do whatever he can to put the case to an end. A 10.9 Thomson Reuters report quotes Polanski’s lawyer as saying his client “is in fighting mood and determined to defend himself” and then “U.S. judicial sources” saying “the complex extradition process could take years, if Polanski challenges it.” In other words, he’s dug in and determined to stay in a Swiss jail for as long as it takes — possibly “years” — in order to prevent the possibility of going to jail in the U.S. for maybe eighteen months but possibly less. Does that make any sense at all?

I wish someone from the “show compassion, put things in perspective and let it go” side of the debate would make a similar video so we can have a good tit-for-tat.

In this discussion with Republican Gomorrah author Max Blumenthal, Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough tries to portray the Glenn Beck/Michelle Bachman/wingnut tea-bagger fringe as acceptable, par-for-the-course manifestations of political dispute. And the acquiescent timidity shown by Mika Brzezsinski and Tom Brokaw, obviously uncomfortable with the concept of calling a spade a spade, is, to me, fairly deplorable.

In a 10.7 posting, Vanity Fair.com’s John Lopez explains how the Coen brothers have been assembling a decade-by-decade cinematic portrait of this country that defines the American century. The 1920s in Miller’s Crossing, the 1930s in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the late 1930s (or early 1940s) in Barton Fink, the late ’40s in The Man Who Wasn’t There, the ’50s in Hudsucker Proxy, the ’60s in A Serious Man, the ’80s in a Coen trifecta of Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men and Fargo, the ’90s in The Big Lebowski, and the 21st Century with Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading.