HE reader/photoshopper Brad Jones yesterday re-did his Stooges dream cast pic (posted yesterday morning) to include Benicio del Toro.

The orders were so hot and heavy for the 11.5 N.Y.Times Obama issue that the online order page shut down yesterday due to overload. But it’s working this morning.

In his latest “Notes on a Season” column, The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond claims that “at this point the Best Picture frontrunners among members I have talked to are Wall-E , The Dark Knight and Changeling, in that order.”

Changeling? Nobody on my wavelength has considered, much less flirted with, this notion. I guess Hammond’s party-chat friends haven’t been told that Clint Eastwood‘s ’08 Oscar shot is Gran Torino or nothing. Forget Changeling.

“They haven’t seen much else,” says Hammond — what, no Milk screenings? — but Slumdog Millionaire “is slowly starting to be mentioned as well.”

Hammond acknowledges that “unanimous [forecast] among the bloggers, though, is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will win in a rout, even though none of us have seen the Dec. 25 release…yet.”

Hammond is implying there’s a certain b.s. factor at work here. Oscar handicappers presuming or imagining what it is or might be, blah blah. The reason there’s a strong belief in this corner that Button will take the Best Picture Oscar is (a) I’ve read Eric Roth‘s script and believe it to be a sad and moving piece, and (b) the fact that two guys — a respected post-production veteran and a bright fellow who knows a lot of people and hears things — are telling me that middle-aged guys who’ve seen it have gotten all choked up.

The Best Picture contender that makes people cry wins — it’s that simple.

“Almost no one in the academy or the press has seen Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, The Reader, Revolutionary Road, Seven Pounds or Fox’s Australia, which the studio is purposely taking its own sweet time to campaign. Rightly they figure people should see the Baz Luhrmann epic (which likely will be delivered wet to theaters on Nov. 26) before the studio starts touting it for awards. In fact, most people at Fox would probably love to see the heavily under wraps film themselves before shouting its best picture potential to the rest of the world.”

“Meanwhile foreign-language film entries continue to screen at a swift pace, but from what we’ve been told only Germany, Japan and Russia have made any significant impact, with Italy’s Cannes Grand Prix winner, Gomorra, getting predictions that it will be one of the final five, despite mixed response from some who frowned on its generous amount of violence.

“And the Portuguese film Our Beloved Month of August was apparently so poorly received that some members were trying to leave before they could ‘officially’ exit and still receive credit for seeing it.”

The gist of Patrick Goldstein‘s 11.6 Big Picture blog posting is that two journalists on the Hollywood beat — Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger and Variety‘s Anne Thompson — are part of “a gang of daffy, clown-suit-clad Oscar bloggers making endlessly moronic Best Picture predictions.”

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil took offense at this, doubled-down on the anger and posted an argumentative response. He mainly said that when you boil it all down Goldstein is (a) simply resentful of Oscar bloggers for encroaching on his turf, and that (b) he’s made as many moronic or inaccurate predictions as anyone else so whaddaya whaddaya.

I didn’t take the wacky-clown-suit line personally because I know who and what I am — an opinionated, hard-working, Red Bull-sipping eccentric willing to sound a little quirky, deranged or off-balance in order make my points in ways that will penetrate the membrane. What I mean is that I do angry, fickle and obsessive but daffy isn’t my thing. Plus I have a highly developed style sense (especially now that I’m living in NYC-NJ) so clown suits are out. I wear Italian-made loafers already.

What Goldstein is really saying, of course, is that talking up this or that presumed Oscar fave due to some recent or upcoming political mood swing is dopey.

I agree with PG that Karger’s claim that “this week’s election-day results may have a profound effect” on the best picture chances of The Dark Knight is close to absurd. Partly because I don’t feel, as Karger does, that TDK “speaks to the innate goodness of human behavior.” Karger is referring to the finale, and his belief that the sentiment behind it mirrors the feeling which led to the election of Barack Obama. Because Oscar ballots are due on 1.12.09, or eight days before Obama’s inauguration, Karger feels that “most Hollywood types” will be swayed to give awards to the picture.

I’m sorry but this is horseshit. To my knowedge no legit BHO echoes have been acknowledged outside of TDK geek chat boards.TDK is going to get a Best Supporting Actor nom for Heath Ledger plus the usual tech noms. And that’s it.

There is merit, however, in the belief by Variety‘s Anne Thompson that the passage of Proposition 8’s gay marriage ban “could actually boost” Milk‘s Oscar chances, saying that “the fact that California did not defeat the ban could energize the largely liberal academy base” and make voters realize “that we have not come far enough.”

This doesn’t sound crazy to me. Thompson didn’t say that industry anger about Prop Hate’s passage would guarantee an Oscar or two or three for Milk — she merely said that the climate could “boost” its chances. That’s an entirely conceivable scenario.

Something snapped the other day when I happened to watch that Changeling trailer on the tube for what felt like the 26th or 27th time. To my surprise, I laughed. I’ve heard Angelina Jolie tearfully wail “I want my son back!” so often that the film’s generally affecting emotional poignancy has been made to seem garish and even tacky. Which Clint Eastwood is constitutionally incapable of being. That ad has blanketed everything.

I guess I’ve been so in love with Crowe-as-Moe that I didn’t “hear” the reports about Benicio del Toro having the inside track to play the role in the Farrelly brothers film. (I heard them physiologically but psychologically I flinched.) In any case, maybe Nashville-residing HE reader Brad Jones, who’s sent along an improved Photoshop image of the New Stooges, would consider doing a new one with Moe del Toro.

“I love the inspired casting choices you have mentioned for the new Stooges movie,” Jones wrote, “but yesteday’s photoshop image was for shit (as you noted). I couldn’t help but work one up this evening to get a little more accurate portrayal.

“But as I was inserting the different actors (brilliant choice with Crowe and Philip Seymour Hoffman), I kept seeing a different face for Larry. There’s no doubt that RDJ could pull it off, especially after his sardonic turn in Tropic Thunder, but I kept coming back to Paul Giamatti.

“Now before you dismiss take a look at the pic, remember the work he did in American Splendor, and forget that he’s been cast in every other movie over the last two years. He just fits, doesn’t he?

“No matter the Larry choice, the Farrely’s had better not puss out and go with the likes of Seann William Scott, Jason Biggs or anyone of that ilk.”

A week or two ago James Lillis created this image for a t-shirt that’s being sold for $25.94, blah blah. He created this sometime in late October? Why didn’t he wait until next April? I’d be all over this if I was a Warner Bros. vp running Heath Ledger‘s Best Supporting Actor campaign.

I got into a disagreement with a fellow columnist after last week’s screening of John Patrick Shanley‘s Doubt. He didn’t have a problem with the acting or the writing or the general thrust of it, even, but he felt it “wasn’t visual enough.” I gathered that he wanted to see Doubt meets Children of Men. Something swoopier, fiercer, crazier…whatever.

The irony for me is that the visual delivery in this film (and I don’t just mean the beautifully muted fall-winter colors in Roger Deakins‘ cinematography) is just right. Shanley’s direction serves the holy grail of the text and lets the performers — Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Viola Davis, Amy Adams — do their stuff. They do that and more. And when it’s over you know you’ve bitten into something, or it’s bitten into you.

There’s so much to be said for a contained and compressed high-pedigree drama that does exactly what it intends to do, and is very content with this. A film without lunging, stumbles or missteps. Doubt doesn’t waste a frame or a line or a single shot, and it leaves you hanging in just the right way. That is to say it disturbs and agitates without resorting to easy catharsis. A play this well served isn’t just a play well served. It morphs into something else — a dramatic life form of its own.

This is why I feel it’s Best Picture material. The chops and the content serve the whole and vice versa. And, like I said last week, when you throw in Deakins’ cinematography it’s even more of a feat. Doubt is a smallish film — a story about ambiguity and uncertainty among a small group of people in two or three rooms with a hallway and a park thrown in — that acts and in fact becomes “big” because of its sharpness and discipline. There’s really no way to assail it that cuts any ice with me.

Todd McCarthy‘s Variety review aside, I loved Streep’s performance as Sister Aloysius Beauvier. She’s the very model of a pinched and joyless crone, an old- school harridan with a habit — the kind of nun that used to try and “beat an education” into Marlon Brando‘s Terry Malloy. The fact that she’s a kind of mythical beast and that Streep is expert at letting you know precisely what’s going on in her hard and damning head is, for me, a trip. She’s almost Mommie Dearest, and I mean that as a genuine compliment.

If I still got high I would get royally blitzed next month and go see Doubt with friends and quietly chuckle at every gesture.

And I don’t mean she tries for comedy. The genius of Streep’s performance is that you can take her work as dead straight drama component or a hoot, depending on your mood or attitude. What counts is that you can sit there and read her each and every second. There’s never any doubt what she’s thinking, intuiting, suspecting.

Set in the Bronx in 1964, inside a grim Catholic school called St. Nicholas, Shanley’s play is basically about Sister Beauvier’s growing suspicions that Father Flynn (Hoffman) has gotten a bit too intimate — perhaps more than that — with an African-American altar boy named Donald (Joseph Foster II).

But it’s not just an “is he or isn’t he?” thing. Shanley’s play is clean and precise in the way the themes of the piece are made unmistakable from the get-go. “What do you do when you’re not sure?” Flynn asks in his opening-scene sermon. And yet Streep is sure — she doesn’t allow for any overt uncertainty because she damn well knows. And she may be right, we come to realize as things move along.

But is she in fact that? Is Hoffman’s priest a born diddler — a Johnson-era manifestation of a malignancy that has turned the Catholic church’s rep into a sick joke over the last decade or two? Or is he being steamrolled to some extent? Or maybe a little bit, at least?

Doubt‘s dramatic peak comes when Sister Aloysius has a frank conversation with Donald’s mom (Davis) about what may in fact be going on. The scene is harrowing because of what Davis does with it. Streep pretty much listens and reacts and slowly becomes more and more appalled as she considers the mother’s rationalizations — her fear of going into this realm, knowing or believing as she does that it’s not Father Flynn as much as…well, let’s not spoil.

The scene lasts only ten or twelve minutes, but Davis’ performance is Beatrice Straight great — and if you have to ask what that means, forget it. It’s a bulls-eye performance that everyone but everyone is going to have to acknowledge.

Hoffman’s Flynn delivers…how to say it? A pervy but earnest ambiguity. Your gut tells you he’s probably a pederast, certainly in terms of latent desire, but at the same time something tells you he may not quite be. He may finally be a straddler, and that in itself is not a punishable offense.

Adams plays a kindly young nun who senses the undercurrents and cross-currents as clearly as Streep does, but whose function is mainly to emotionally telegraph all this to the slower folks in the audience.

There’s no coming out of Doubt and going “meh.” There’s nothing amiss about any of it. Okay, it’s not madly David Fincher or Alfonso Cuaron but it is like a kind of perfect moral swiss watch, and such things are very hard to sculpt in just the right way. Anyone who sees it and shrugs is looking into some kind of cavern of their own soul. Every move is nailed down tight in this thing. And class, focus and discipline can’t be faked. Either a film has these things in abundance or it doesn’t. There’s no ambiguity here.

That too-long-in-the-works Barack Obama documentary from directors Amy Rice and Alicia Sams — the doc that began shooting in ’06 and may not be finished until sometime next fall (or so I read earlier this year) — will air on HBO, according to an exclusive report by Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez.

This thing should be out in the world concurrent with or just after Obama’s inauguration. By next fall all kinds of headaches, heartaches and downturns will have kicked in and the vibe won’t be the same. The world demands a fast turnaround these days. It’s being edited by Sam Pollard . Filming will keep on through Inauguration Day.