The 2008 BFCA Critics’ Choice Awards winners contain one moderate surprise — a formal splitting of the Best Actress trophy between Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married) and Meryl Streep (Doubt), and a third portion of the award going to Kate Winslet by handing the Reader star the Best Supporting Actress award, which was obviously a partial nod to Winslet’s lead performance in Revolutionary Road.

Otherwise it was more of the usual-fine-yawn. Best Picture / Slumdog Millionaire; Best Actor / Sean Penn in Milk; Best Supporting Actor / Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight; Best Acting Ensemble / the Milk gang; Best Director /

Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle; Best Original or Adapted Screenplay / Slumdog Millionaire‘s Simon Beaufoy; Best Animated Feature / WALL*E; Best Foreign Language Film / Waltz With Bashir; Best Documentary / Man On Wire.

The famous Magnolia/”Wise Up” sing-along scene is, in the view of Mental Defective League’s Tim Slowikowski, the all-time second best among a list of 15 great pop-song-in-movie moments. Top dog is the “Tiny Dancer” sing-a-long scene in Almost Famous.

For the last two hours (i.e., since 11 am) Hollywood Elsewhere has been filing from a New York-to-Boston Bolt bus. Complimentary wi-fi and AC plugs. Only $17.50. Except the driver didn’t know where she was going out of Manhattan, took the Tappan Zee Bridge west into New Jersey, realized her error, turned around and came back. We’re now on 84 east of Danbury.

This still from Harold Ramis and Judd Apatow‘s The Year One was posted at least three days ago by Entertainment Weekly. The non-vegetarian, all-meat, animal-skin comedy stars Michael Cera, Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Oliver Platt, David Cross, Christopher Mintz-Plasse…mostly the same old Apatow crew. It opens on 6.19.09.

Jeffrey Ressner has an interview piece with Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow in the current issue of DGA Quarterly. There’s no link to the story as DGA Quarterly puts the magazine online only after its expiration date and the arrival of the following issue. The hell with that. HE is taking exception by offering its own link to a PDF of the piece. All hail Hurt Locker!

Explosions and car crashes are the lowest currency of the action genre. It is actually flattering to call them “useless pathetic peddler stuff,” to quote Oskar Werner‘s Fiedler character in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. The only truly decent one was in Spike Jonze‘s Adaptation (i.e., that out-of-nowhere whamming that Chris Cooper receives as he’s backing out of his driveway). Nonetheless Bilge Ebiri has posted a list of the ten best in New York/Vulture. He actually put it up yesterday but didn’t think to alert me until this morning.

“So much anger. So much terribly inflamed…passion. You’d think these guys were debating the war in Iraq or something. But no. Just about a bunch of statuettes forged from varied semi-precious metals and alloys that every year wind up in a variety of hands, said variety never quite fully satisfying the desires of those who had spent so many months angrily and passionately debating just which hands they ought to end up in. They call it the silly season, but if it’s so silly, why does it drive so many people to such near-homicidal rage?” — Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny on the Oscar-blogging community’s spitball wars.

“Why is January suddenly the month of lame chick-flick romantic comedies about weddings?,” asks Marshall Fine in his review of Bride Wars on Hollywood and Fine.

Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway in Bride Wars

“You’ve got to wonder about the kind of post-feminist message these movies send: that a woman ain’t nothin’ ‘less she can snag herself a man. Not to mention the casual glorification of conspicuous consumption at a level of excess that seems appropriate only for a big-budget network game show.

“Perhaps my complaints about the retrograde sexual politics of these films would be less pointed if the movies were actually entertaining. In that regard, Bride Wars is particularly dismal: They should put up signs at the multiplexes whose screens this movie will be clogging, saying, ‘CAUTION: LAUGH-FREE ZONE.’

“In other words, I wouldn’t give a rat’s behind about the movie’s message if the movie itself wasn’t so abysmally flat. But Bride Wars couldn’t find a joke if it was pinned to the front of its exorbitantly priced Vera Wang bridal gown.

“It’s alarming, in fact, how unfunny Hudson is. And the mix of overbearing bangs and eye make-up that looks like it was applied with a spray-gun with the nozzle set wide open makes her seem hardened and brittle next to the creamy, fresh-faced Hathaway. Hathaway here is good, despite bad material — but this film calls into question whether Hudson can, in fact, act.

“Here’s how humor-challenged the script is: Even Candice Bergen isn’t funny. And she was able to wring laughs out of the weak-tea lines she was given in both The Women and Sex and the City — The Movie. Nobody does haughty and dismissive with more comic flair these days than Bergen. But here? Nothing.

“Bride Wars panders to a female audience while insulting its taste and intelligence at the same time. RSVP regrets only.”

Wells to Fine: Taste and intelligence?

The marketing, I mean. Obviously the content is…I guess I should read some reviews, shouldn’t I? Thanks to Jack Morrissey for passing this along.

Today begins a weekend battle between the widely despised Bride Wars (12% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, a zero rating from the creme de la creme), which is expected to do well anyway because (a) it’s a wedding comedy with Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway and (b) there are many millions of under-30 women out there with zero taste in film, and Clint Eastwood‘s well-reviewed, very fine Gran Torino, which is tracking very well among the over-35s.

Bride Wars will win, of course, but Gran Torino, many are saying, will play better over the long haul. It will ultimately end up with over $100 million , and of course it has the respect and allegiance of the Movie Gods. Bride Wars arrives at theatres already damned — excommunicate and anathema — and has absolutely nothing to look forward to, beyond the mere earning of money. Hudson is the definitive fallen angel of youngish movie actress — a woman who managed to kill all respect for herself by starring in a long series of tedious, close to unwatchable films.

I’ve seen Jonathan Parker‘s (Untitled), which shows tomorrow afternoon (1.9) and early Saturday evening (1.10) at the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival. It’s an underplayed, bone-dry New York relationship comedy with a point to make about the art scene there. Parker and cowriter Catherine DiNapoli are basically saying it’s a kind of cesspool of pretension and phoniness, and that the people who regularly buy and/or support much of what passes for modern art are either deluded or phonies or both, or are simply being flim-flammed.

Marley Shelton, Adam Goldberg in (Untitled).

So it’s anything but a stupid slapstick comedy, and because of that I was more or less favorably disposed. It’s vaguely Woody Allen-esque but without the schtick. I didn’t laugh out loud all that much; I mostly smirked and occasionally chortled, but there’s nothing wrong with that. And I enjoyed staring at Marley Shelton (Grindhouse), whom I hadn’t paid very much attention to before. She believably plays a sharp Chelsea art-gallery dealer, which is to say I bought her projections of cunning, shrewdness and intelligence, however natural or manufactured. Call this a modest breakthrough performance.

The plot is about how Shelton comes to dump a boyfriend (Eion Bailey) whose mediocre paintings are very popular with her corporate clients, and instead begins to see his doleful and bearded brother (Adam Goldberg), a very pretentious anti-musical pianist whose performances are entirely about defying conventional taste, to put it very mildly. Goldberg’s performance is fine — subdued comedy is his forte — but his beard and hair are so bushy you can barely see his face. I know, I know…an anti-musical pianist who kicks buckets and whatnot is precisely the sort of guy who would have too-much head hair.

I don’t know what else to say except that (Untitled) could have used as few more jokes. And a better title. Svetlana Cvetko‘s widescreen cinematography is well-framed and, I’m sure, professionally lit and captured. (The print I happened to see a while back was projected with the wrong digital calibration and therefore looked like a murky VHS.) But it’s an intelligent sit, this film. I felt pleased and settled when the lights came up. That’s not a bad thing. Okay, a good thing.

Vinnie Jones plays a wackjob sculptor with his usual verve turned down a couple of notches.

“The fact that The Dark Knight is looking like a locked-in nominee — and has for a month now — is indicative of a weak field. It’s not a reflection of the film itself, but of the simple fact that a film like that just isn’t what the Academy tends to lean towards. People’s Choice Award? Absolutely. Oscar? Are you kidding?” — MCN’s David Poland in one of his undated Oscar columns posted, I think, a day or so ago.