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This statistic-driven article posted today by And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg, called “WILL THE ACADEMY REVEAL ITS (COLOR) BLIND SIDE?”, conveys the root of the general thinking behind the Precious and Mo’Nique praisings by dutiful Hollywood liberals. It also underlines my repeatedly-stated point that if Precious was about a white-trash Tennessee girl being horribly abused by her low-rent hillbilly mom, it wouldn’t have been paid the slightest attention by anyone, much less the award-bestowing critics and Academy members.

If Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man fails to land a Best Picture nomination tomorrow morning (which is somewhere between a likely and more-than-likely scenario) but Todd Phillip‘s The Hangover does, there will be “so great a cry throughout the land,” as Charlton Heston once put in Ben-Hur.

It will be a lamentation for 21st Century movie culture, for the provincial thinking of the Academy types who failed to value the humor in the Coens’ misanthropy, for those who constantly fail to consider the Movie Godz perspective, for the failure to understand the difference between a generally pleasing film and an exceptionally worthy one, etc. It’ll be a terrible thing, and it had better not happen…just sayin’.

I had a moderately enjoyable time with The Hangover , and especially Ed Helms‘ performance, but please show some restraint and perspective. And this is no slag on Phillips, a very sharp and crafty guy who knows exactly how to do what he does best.

I don’t know if the 2009 Razzie nominations were announced today or over the weekend or whenever, but here are links for Worst Picture, Worst Actor, Worst Actress, Worst Supporting Actor, Worst Supporting Actress, etc.

The physical and stylistic differences in the baseball players and outfits in these two stills express a thousand words worth of cultural deterioration. Early ’60s pro players had a kind of classic studly cool (reasonably trim bods, tailored uniforms, knee socks, black leather shoes with cleats) while today the homie look has taken over (pot bellies, pajama pants, sneakers). Go ahead and throw darts, but players had a much more attractive look during the Kennedy administration.

Mickey Mantle (far left) and Roger Maris (far right) in publicity still for That Touch of Mink; latter-day professional wearing typical 21st Century baseball outfit.

“In many respects, Sundance is always the same. Movies you expect to be good, disappoint; the films you shy away from because they sound bad on paper turn out to be wonderful. Half the time you feel as of you’re in the wrong theater. That said, I thought the mood this year was high. Positive, not poisonous like last year. People seemed upbeat, invigorated, inspired.” — Best quote in Eric Kohn and Sharon Waxman‘s 1.31 Sundance 2010 sum-up piece.

I’ve just been invited to a February 8th press day for Adam Kane‘s Formosa Betrayed, a drama about an attempt by a 20-something real-estate shark to lease the legendary but ailing Formosa Cafe for the covert purpose of turning it into a Burger King franchise. It’s kind of a Mike Judge-type dramedy about the extermination of pre-1950s architectural traditions in Los Angeles…something like that.

Formosa Betrayed actually tells the story of an FBI Agent (James Van Der Beek) investigating of the murder of a Taiwanese-American professor on U.S. soil. With the help of an FBI colleague (John Heard) and a Chicago police detective (Leslie Hope ), Van der Beek discovers…well, whatever. But Taiwan footage is definitely part of the visual package.

During my first day at Sundance I tapped out a piece for Fandango called “Confessions of an Oscar Blogger.” It’s q & a thing between myself and a Park City priest. Here’s an excerpt:

Priest: “Do you believe in God?”

Me: “The question is, does God believe in me? I do believe that at their best movies allow for a kind of God discussion — a profound communion with all dreams and faiths and spiritual longings. And that the winning of an Oscar amounts to a kind of sanctifying of the dreams and longings that a given movie contains.”

Priest: “What is it you wish to confess? You said you’ve sinned.”

Me: “I’ve been guilty of the sin of pride, Father. I’m proud of some of the stuff that I’ve written; movies that I’ve helped push into the Oscar realm to some degree, movies or actors I’ve helped to demean or degrade to some extent.”

Priest: “But God teaches us to show only love and tender mercies, my son.”

Me: “Well, I couldn’t do that when they nominated Eddie Muphy for Dreamgirls.”

In all modesty, that “kind of sanctifying” paragraph many be the cleanest and most concise explanation of the meaning of Oscar awards that I’ve ever written.

I stole the “does God believe in me?” line, of course, from Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita (it’s spoken by James Mason‘s Humbert Humbert) , or perhaps from the original Vladimir Nabokov novel. I wouldn’t know, never having read it.

What a luxuriously hellish, repetitively empty, medieval-prison-cell existence Sam Raimi must be enduring now. Let’s see…I’ve made millions and could make many millions more by continuing to make super-hero movies that aren’t Spider-Man. Iconic guy, lonely lone-wolf attitude, distinctive outfit, derring-do, savior mentality, etc. Hey, what about The Shadow?

This would be the same old CG megaplex crap and a manifestation of the same old agent-pleasing, kid’s-college-fund affluent quicksand. If Raimi does this his soul will slip through his fingers like water and seep through the cobblestones. He needs to man up and direct another film in the vein of A Simple Plan — his finest ever — and never make a super-hero movie ever again.

And never cast Bruce Campbell in anything ever again. Why should regular-Joe moviegoers be asked to contribute to the keep-Sam Raimi‘s- friends-from-the-old-days-in-financial-clover fund? This is clubby sentimental indulgence of the lowest order.

Mike from Milwaukee, the famous Phantom Menace reviewer with the really weird deep-dorky voice, nails various Avatar shortcomings but misses the transporting aspects. I think he wanted another shot of attention and figured an Avatar trashing would do better than a praising — simple as that.

With reader assistance I’ve located a slow-loading online trailer for Julio Medem‘s Room in Rome, which CHUD’s Devin Faraci wrote about on 1.19. The quality of Medem’s Sex and Lucia indicates that Room in Rome will have a mitigating touch of class. IFC will open it domestically later this year.

Almost anytime an American film shoots in Rome, they get it wrong by doing everything they can to gloss and tidy it up. Medem apparently shot most of Room in Rome in Madrid except for a few exteriors. Thinking about Rome put me in a mood to run one of my own pics, shot in June of ’07.

The “wall of Romulus” is one of three ancient walls surrounding Rome. This may be it, or it could be one of the Servian walls builit in the ninth century.

A 1.28 Hollywood Reporter story about an HBO project called Emergency Sex caught my eye because it reminded me of (a) the 9.11 “terror fucking” syndrome that was observed in Manhattan, and (b) the heated romantic triangle in Iraq involving CBS News correspondent Lara Logan that was reported about during the summer of 2008.

Emergency Sex will star Maria Bello, is being written by Slumdog Millionaire writer Simon Beaufoy, and will be executive produced by Bello, Beaufoy and Russell Crowe.

Inspired by the book “Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell on Earth,” by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson, the project “revolves around the larger-than-life exploits of expatriate nongovernment-organization workers who find their sanity tested in the face of atrocities, loneliness and primal desires,” the story says.

The book chronicles the real-life experiences of Cain, Postlewait and Thomson, who met in Cambodia during the 1990s as members of a UN peacekeeping mission.

Eighteen months ago I wrote that Logan’s story “would make for a good filmed drama. The considerate way to go about it would be to use the facts (romantic Baghdad triangle, emotions at a fever pitch, divorce proceeding, bullets whizzing past lovers’ heads, IEDs exploding) but with made-up names and perhaps a slightly fictionalized story line just to blur things up.

In early July ’08 Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz wrote that “while some may accuse [Logan] of tawdry conduct, what happened to her is an all-too-familiar tale of someone consumed by a career and needing a partner who understands the peculiar pressures involved.”

Those pressures being reporting from an intense war zone where violence, bodies and bomb blasts are part of the daily drill. As I put it a few days before, “There’s always something strangely erotic in the air when there’s a lot of random death and danger floating about…the more ghastly or threatening the surroundings, the more likely it is that like-minded professionals of a certain age are going to get down in the heat of the moment.”