Last Friday (1.23) Notes on a Season columnist Pete Hammond, HitFix awards blogger and editor Gregory Ellwood, Hollywood Reporter and Gold Rush blogger T.L. Stanley, Feinberg Files blogger Scott Feinberg and Gold Derby maestro Tom O’Neil sat down to discuss the nominations for the 81st Academy Awards. Where are the friggin’ embed codes? I hate it when they don’t provide these.

Any list of the worst movies ever nominated for Best Picture that doesn’t include Dr. Doolittle, Around The World in Eighty Days, and The Greatest Show on Earth just isn’t paying attention. Many other Best Picture nominees from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, I’m sure, belong in this category.

Sorry but I don’t agree with a fair-sized portion of this list. Just because Ordinary People beat out Raging Bull for Best Picture doesn’t mean it’s a bad film — it actually works very well for what it is and what it shoots for. I loved most of what Million Dollar Baby delivered — it’s easily one of Clint’s all-time best. Dances With Wolves may have seemed forced and hackneyed here and there, but had a naturalistic ethos and a certain emotional integrity. And Scent of a Woman is probably Martin Brest‘s best film ever, and it has a rousing finale that “works.”

During last night’s Clint Eastwood tribute at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre — a two-hour chat that started about 25 minutes late. 45% of the discussion covered Eastwood’s beginning years in the ’50s and ’60s, 25% to 30% focused on the early ’70s and his beginnings as a director, and 25% was devoted to his output of the ’80s, ’90s and 21st Century.

(l. to r.) In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, L.A. Times/Feinberg Files columnist Scott Feinberg, Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling at Eastwoood reception at Cafe Luck.

Feinberg, Eastwood height disparity is less than it would have been five or ten years ago. Anyone with an elderly parent knows that inches give way as people they get into their ’70s and beyond.

Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

I was cupping my ears when Clint Eastwood spoke last night about his Nelson Mandela biopic-slash-sports drama, which will begin filming in March with Morgan Freeman in the title role and Matt Damon as rugby player/coach Francois Pienaar. And I didn’t hear Clint say that the title will be The Human Factor, which is what the IMDB thinks it will be.

Eastwood said it might simply be called Mandela or — this is much better — Playing the Enemy, which is the name of John Carlin‘s book about how then-president Mandela’s wily strategy of using a sporting event — the Sprinkboks rugby team in the 1995 World Cup — to try and heal South Africa’s racial divisions.

Eastwood’s pattern of being pretty quick on the turnaround suggests that the Mandela pic will be released sometime at the end of this year for Best Picture contention. Maybe.

Interviewer Leonard Maltin didn’t ask Eastwood about his post-Mandela plan to direct Hereafter, a supernatural thriller in the vein of The Sixth Sense that’s based on a script by Frost-Nixon scribe Peter Morgan.

I was told last night at the Eastwood reception party that Clint may be looking to shoot it sometime next fall, or perhaps in early ’10.

ClintEastwood2 from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo.

When are people going to stop saying “two thousand and…”? It all stems from the cultural dictatorship of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey . We’re now in the year twenty-oh-nine and next year should be referred to twenty-ten. I don’t want to hear that it’s two-thousand ten. Enough of that.

The Guardian has posted a diary-like Sundance recollection by In The Loop‘s Armando Iannucci. Excerpt: “Next day, I team up with James Gandolfini and Mimi Kennedy, two of the U.S. cast. They play a Pentagon general and a US state department politico doing their not-very-best to stop a war happening. Mimi is hilarious and James is always charming and generous, and very patient with the press.

“Which is just as well. The first interviewer is from the L.A. Times. That’s an important newspaper so we all have to be on our best behavior. The reporter places a small mobile phone on a tripod. We look at each other, and get ready for the smart and incisive questioning. We are asked, ‘If you had to lose one body part to frostbite, what part would it be?” Somewhere out in the digital ether, there’s footage of the three of us all looking at each other thinking, ‘What in arse’s name has happened to the L.A. Times?'”

Update: What journalist pitched this question? Falco Ink says it was a woman named Gaynor Flynn “but she doesn’t write for the L.A. Times. She’s an international journalist, based in LA and Australia. In fact, Armando didn’t talk to the L.A. Times at all — not sure where he came up with that. First Sundance and maybe a little overwhelmed?”

“This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us as editors and reporters.” — San Francisco Examiner‘s David Cole speaking in a 1981 KRON news report about a then-primitive technology.

Clint Eastwood didn’t arrive at this evening’s tribute event with any pomp or airs. A friend simply drove him up and dropped him off a block south of Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre. Clint walked up the sidewalk and into a cluster of fans waiting behind metal barriers. Realizing he’d boxed himself in, he climbed over the temporary fence (with the help of said fans) to cheers and guffaws. This just happened about 25 minutes ago. I hope someone took a shot.

“As President Obama spreads his New Testament balm over the capital, I’m longing for a bit of Old Testament wrath.” — from Maureen Dowd‘s 1.27.09 N.Y. Times column, titled “Wall Street’s Socialist Jet-Setters.”

If Milk is in the midst of a come-from-behind, last-race-at-Hollywood Park surge that will overtake Slumdog Millionaire, it’s news to me. And this the first time I’ve heard of any symbolic linkage between a Milk win and the Brokeback Mountain loss that happened three years ago. Nothing can ever erase that injustice, that homophobic gravy stain upon the Academy’s rep.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich “says, ‘walk a mile in his shoes.’ Well, if I were innocent and I were in his shoes, I would have taken that witness stand and I would have testified and I would have told you why I was innocent. The governor didn’t do that.” — comment about today’s action that removed the Illinois governor from office.