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“It’s funny, but when you’re in the business, you can tell something in the first minutes of watching, particularly in terms of the actors. And at the start of Frozen River, the first thing I saw I went, ‘Oh! oh!’ I don’t even know the director (Courtney Hunt), but there was such a documentary feel to that performance by Melissa Leo. I don’t know Melissa Leo, but that’s an extraordinary piece of work. There’s not a false moment. I felt she knew it and lived that life.” — Dustin Hoffman, quoted in an an 11.26 Variety posting.

Add this endorsement to Roger Ebert‘s “Deep Vote” endorsement (“Best performance of the year, hands down…the public isn’t sure who Leo is, but she’s been working since 1984 and has 76 film and TV credits…every actor in the business has worked with her, except for Kevin Bacon…if they work together, the Game grows exponentially…actors nominate actors”), and you’re left with a growing feeling that Leo’s stock is rising.

To put it another way, it would be very gratifying to me personally if she didn’t get the blow-off that the Gurus o’ Gold, those Zelig-minded, sometimes-behind-the-curve tea-leaf readers, seem to think may be in the cards, as evidenced by their placing Leo second (under Michelle Williams) on their Dark Horse contender chart.

Tina Brown‘s nomination of Rachel Maddow to host Meet The Press is inspired. She’d be great, she’d keep things lively, she knows how to tapdance but not be overly deferential or softball (like the show’s temporary host Tom Brokaw clearly was last weekend during his Laura Bush interview), and she’d bring in the ratings.

“If Obama is post-racial, Maddow is post-gender,” writes Brown, “divested of hair-frosted femininity in the anchor genre and more appealing because of it. Like him, she’s a calm, unflappable new era phenomenon. Sure, she’s a lefty, and in the past week she’s been swinging away at Obama’s cabinet choices, but I suspect she’s ambitious enough to dial it back if she had to. (She also has that weird TV gene that’s so hungry for air time she’d probably insist on keeping her five-day job at MSNBC. Russert himself was on every show except Project Runway.)”

Brown allows that “maybe this kind of seismic move asks too much of NBC brass.

“NBC seems to be paralyzed by the sense that whomever they chose has to be another Tim Russert. Not so. Russert defined an era, but that era is over. It’s as if in the months since he died the hands of the clock have spun with accelerated speed, leaving us all with a desire for reinvention. There’s been an Obama effect in every sphere of business from General Motors to network TV.

“Meet the Press has to change not just the host but the show itself. It may be successful now, but the winds of change could suddenly engulf it as they have the giants of print.”

I’m not understanding this Gurus o’ Gold Dark Horse chart, which was updated yesterday. Where are the Bright Horses? Is Guru ringmaster David Poland telling us things are too vague and uncertain for Bright Horses to be named? The Gold Derby Buzzmeter crowd (to which I belong) had no problem naming their top-ranked Best Actor and Best Actress picks in their just-posted chart.

Richard Jenkins

I’ll tell you who one of the Bright Horses is — The Visitor‘s Richard Jenkins . His inhabiting of an emotionally tucked-under middle-aged academic who gradually blossoms through his relationship with a small family of immigrants is the crowning performance of his career. And yet the Gurus have him down as the leading Dark Horse. What the holy fuck does that mean? Jenkins is a gifted, charming and resourceful actor — one of the most nimble and dependable artist-craftsmen in the business. And then The Visitor comes along and he hits it out the park, and that’s a Dark thing?

I’ll tell you what Jenkins’ Darkness means. It means that the Gurus believe him to be a worthy outside-shotter because his campaign isn’t being supported by Big Money (i.e., Overture, which doesn’t have the pockets of the major distributors), and because the Bright Horse contenders (whom the Gurus don’t name) are more deeply rooted in the industry’s emotional terra firma — Sean Penn, Clint Eastwood, Leonardo DiCaprio, Frank Langella — or, in the case of The Wrestler‘s Mickey Rourke, because Jenkins isn’t a contrite Comeback Kid looking for absolution.

It’s wrong, wrong, wrong for Jenkins to be saddled with this classification. It’s happened because of safe, tepid, pack-mentality thinking, and the age-old impulse to kowtow to economically and emotionally established celebrity club members. I pick my favorites this way also — let’s be honest — but I’ve near once dreamt of downgrading Jenkins to Dark Horse status. It’s unthinkable. His Visitor turn is too sublime, too full of feeling in a disciplined, carefully measured way.

Jenkins and Visitor costar Hiam Abass.

Every Best Actor lineup needs a less glamorous, lower-wattage, hard-working indie type to round things out — that’s Jenkins. Just as Frozen River‘s attractive and super-talented Melissa Leo needs to fill that slot among the Best Actress nominees.

My top seven choices for Best Actor picks are Jenkins, Rourke, Revolutionary Road‘s DiCaprio, Milk‘s Sean Penn, Che‘s Benicio del Toro, Frost/Nixon‘s Langella and W.‘s Josh Brolin. I can’t make it five yet. My heart won’t permit it. Give me time.

In a just-out Vanity Fair cover story by Maureen Dowd, Tina Fey‘s troll-ish musician-composer husband Jeff Richmond recalls that “when we were first dating [in 1994], some of the guys at Second City said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be a hoot if we go over…'”

“‘…over to the Doll House,”‘ Fey finishes. “‘We’ll go to this strip club ironically.’ I was like, ‘The fuck you will.’

“‘I know how she feels about some things,” Richmond tells Dowd later on. “We never had to deal with any of this but, like, adultery. Just looking at examples from other people’s lives, we know that anything like that, messing around, is just such a complete ‘no’ to her. And she has her principles and she sticks to her principles more than anybody I’ve ever met in my life. Like that whole idea of, if you are in a relationship, there are deal breakers.

“‘There’s not a lot of gray area in being flirty with somebody. She’s very black-and-white: ‘We’re married — you can’t.’ [Richmond] calls their marriage ‘borderline boring — in a good way.’ And Fey concurs: ‘I don’t enjoy any kind of danger or volatility. I don’t have that kind of ‘I love the bad guys’ thing. No, no thank you. I like nice people.'”

People in successful marriages — i.e., the ones that more or less “work” — know this, but it’s not written about or discussed all that much. To be in a stable marriage you have to accept — no, embrace — borderline boring as a day-to-day fact of life. But woebetide the marriage that tips a bit deeper into stasis and becomes draggy or soul-stifling. Or, for that matter, the husband or wife who imagines he or she can get away with a little flirty tingle (or worse) on the side.

Okay, you can for a while, especially if you approach it in the right way (i.e., like a CIA agent in East Germany during the height of the Cold War) but all catting-around comes out in the wash sooner or later.

Marriage can be really tough. If things take a wrong turn it can weigh on your soul. It’s not for sissies or dilletantes. Sometimes I think Tilda Swinton and her husband have a fairly good thing going.

But as many men have said to themselves (particularly when young), “What is life without at least a little risk?” I’m not talking about infidelity. I’m saying that knowing or feeling that your vibrancy or currency isn’t gathering dust on the shelf, that it is valued or sought out by others, can lift your heart and soul up and out in all directions — glowingly, resplendently. And we all need that. We also know that most marriages come up short as far as providing that kind of nurturing or inspiration.

To be in a good marriage you have to either be very passionate and creative about giving this to your mate, or else be very resigned and almost farm-animal-like in the knowledge that you’re just going to have to do without. We know this.

Back from The Seagull and just waking up to Slumdog Millionaire winning big at the British Independent Film Awards, which ended five or six hours ago. Danny Boyle‘s film took the Best Picture and Best Director awards, and star Dev Patel was named Most Promising Newcomer. Steve McQueen‘s Hunger won three also — Best Debut Director award, Best Actor award for Michael Fassbender, and Best Technical Achievement for Sean Bobbitt‘s cinematography.

Sports writer Pat Jordan‘s interview piece on Wrestler star Mickey Rourke in today’s N.Y. Times Magazine starts out fairly rough. In terms of his interview “performance”, he calls Rourke likable but clumsy, lost in his rap, emotionally insincere. In short Jordan isn’t buying the shpiel, which sets him apart from others who’ve written generally flattering profiles of Mickey-the-Comeback-Kid. A departure from the script.

“You meet Mickey, you can’t help liking him,” Jordan begins. “He rescues abused dogs! He cries a lot: over his stepfather’s supposed abuse; the loss of his brother to cancer and his dogs to old age; the failure of his marriage to the actress Carre Otis. He admits he destroyed his own career, because, as he puts it: “I was arrogant…I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough” to deal with stardom.

“He is candid about the people he has crossed paths with: Nicole Kidman is “an ice cube”; Michael Cimino, the director of Heaven’s Gate, “is crazy” and “nuts”; and the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. is “a liar.”

“So what if he cries at the same moment in the same story in every interview? So what if his candor sometimes sounds like the bad dialogue from one of his many bad movies (“I have no one to go to to fix the broken pieces in myself”) or that his self-deprecation seems culled from the stock stories of so many fading actors (“I was in 7-Eleven, and this guy says, ‘Didn’t you used to be a movie star?'”)? So what if he seems disingenuous, at best, when he says he can’t remember that critics nominated him one of the world’s worst actors in 1991 (“I probably would have voted with them”) or even making a terrible movie that went straight to video, Exit in Red, in 1996 — despite the fact that the love interest in that movie was then his wife?

“Mickey Rourke is, after all, an actor. The roles he has played and the life he has lived have so blurred one into another in his mind’s eye that even he doesn’t seem to know when he’s acting or when he’s being real. He has spent his entire adult life playing not fictional characters but an idealized delusional fantasy of himself.”

I don’t know if this piece is going to do much for Rourke’s Best Actor chances. I suspect that the die is cast on Rourke being nominated (i.e., it’ll happen) and this or that article isn’t going to change things in this regard.

“Sober intelligence goes only so far in crafting an effective bigscreen version of the international bestseller The Reader,” says Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. “German author Bernhard Schlink‘s succinct, widely admired 1995 novel uses a late-1950s affair between a former concentration camp guard (Kate Winslet) and a teenager half her age (David Kross) to explore both generations’ difficulty in coming to terms with German war guilt. Stephen Daldry‘s film is sensitively realized and dramatically absorbing, but comes across as an essentially cerebral experience without gut impact.”

It’s raining and cold — not quite cold enough for snow, but right on the edge — and I have to leave soon for a 3 pm performance of The Seagull. And I can’t find my umbrella. I’ve been waiting to see this for a long time, particularly from anticipation for Kristin Scott Thomas ‘s performance. I last saw The Seagull in the early ’80s with Chris Walken as Trigorin, who’s played in the current production by Peter Sarsgaard.

In his debut column for the ’08-’09 Oscar-season, N.Y. Times guy David Carr – a.k.a., “the Bagger” — says that “seven or eight films have a shot” at the Best Picture Oscar. “The consensus, in no particular order — well, okay, in a little bit of a hierarchy — includes The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Revolutionary Road, Milk Doubt and The Reader.”

Uhm, no. Not The Reader. Ixnay on the Eader-ray. (God, that sounds facile! Can you imagine pouring your heart and soul into a film for 18 months and then reading “ixnay on the Eader-ray”?) Sorry but that’s the verdict I’m hearing. Intelligent, well written, handsomely shot, doesn’t deliver emotionally.

“And a surprise may be waiting in the wings,” Carr goes on. “Clint Eastwood, a durable crush object of the Academy, has a habit of swinging out of the trees late in the game, as he did two years ago with Letters From Iwo Jima so keep an eye on Gran Torino.” The early rumble is that it’s more of a Clint performance film than a Best Picture contender, but sure, yeah, I’d love to keep an eye on Gran Torino . No Manhattan screenings are currently set, of course. (That I know of.) Tomorrow night there’s an L.A. press screening with a wine–cheese-and-Clint after-party.

“With almost three months to go, a great deal can happen,” says Carr. “The chemistry of Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in Australia may bring to mind oil and water, but the Academy may swoon over the epic intent of the director, Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet).” Forget it. No way.

“The Walt Disney Company is carpet-bombing voters with DVDs to argue that the robotic glories of WALL*E should not be pigeonholed into animation alone.” That’s a no-go also. WALL*E‘s excellence has never been in question, but animated films need to stay on their side of the Rio Grande.

“And there’s always a chance that smaller films like Rachel Getting Married, with a searing performance by Anne Hathaway, or The Wrestler, featuring the muscular return of Mickey Rourke, might sneak in.” Nope. Rachel was written off weeks if not months ago.

And The Wrestler isn’t playing well with the over-50s. It’s a sharp and ballsy film, but when you hear about older people walking out of screenings because of the metal-staple scene and booing the mention of its name the following week, you might as well throw in the towel. Rourke is in good shape for a Best Actor nomination, though.

A Slumdog Millionaire issue has been gnawing away since I fell for it in Toronto nearly three months ago. I was wowed by this film — throttled. The injections of extreme verve and jolt-cola pizazz by director Danny Boyle are impossible to resist or dismiss. But I couldn’t believe in the world of the story, partly due to the fever-like sell going on all through it, and partly due to the undercarriage of the main character, Jamal (who’s mostly played by Dev Patel). And that’s a bit of a nag.

Talk to a Slumdog fan and they’ll probably tell you that the hyperness is part of the enjoyment — you don’t buy it but you love the intensity of the Bollywood-ish ride and particularly where it takes you at the conclusion. Slumdog is a show, but as much as it thrills and excites I feel that a truly formidable Best Picture contender needs to finally be unconcerned with the sell and confident enough to just “be.”

This isn’t to say that the presentation of Slumdog isn’t a kick-ass thing, or that the people who love it are somehow misguided in believing it has more Best Picture juice than any of the other hotties out there. LAFCA and NYFCC critics may or may not give it their Best Picture awards, but the Oscar rumble isn’t wrong. As things seem now, it will probably take the prize.

I’m still down with Slumdog for the most part. If it wins I won’t go into convulsions like I did when Chicago beat The Pianist. I love the life-force of it, the fusion of third-world squalor and the classic chops of Charles Dickens , the go-go swirl, the Boyle-ness of it. What other major director would have thought to make such a film in such a way?

It’s just that I couldn’t shake an awareness that every step of the way I was being subjected to a romantically simplistic blitzkreig — a steroid Dickens fable with a hero I very much liked and felt for but couldn’t finally accept.

How can anyone watch Slumdog and not be down with Jamal’s enormous dignity, strength of spirit and intelligence? And I understand (or think that I do) that Jamal’s life story is primarily a device that allows Boyle to dramatize the evolution of Mumbai chaos-culture over the past 15 or 20 years.

But I just can’t believe that a kid who’s been subjected to such relentless cruelty and brutality his entire life — slapped, beaten, exploited, betrayed, booted, whipped, shat upon and made to suffer like a homeless dog day after day, year after year — would end up with this much patience and resolve and focus. Treat an actual dog like this and he’ll be incapable of showing anything but his canine teeth.

Nor did I believe that the beautiful Freida Pinto‘s Latika wouldn’t be soiled and corrupted by her upbringing also, or that she’d stay emotionally loyal to and in love with Jamal through thick and thin. Things change, people grow up and move on, life is hard, get what you can whenever you can, and nobody will save you but yourself. I know, I know…surrender to it, believe in love.

But the cruelty in this film is relentless. Ugly behavior reigns through the first two acts. Except for the cop (Irfan Khan) who interrogates Jamal throughout the film, nearly every male character in Slumdog Millionaire is a cutthroat Fagin or Artful Dodger. Snarling, feral, pitiless.

And all through Slumdog I was muttering to myself how much I hate the Mumbai overload — the poverty, the crowding, the noise, the garbage landscapes, the public outhouses, the ugly high rises…the whole squalid cornucopia of it. I’ve never been especially interested in visiting urban India, but Slumdog settled things once and for all. If someone slips me a first-class Air India ticket from JFK to Mumbai, I’m trading it in for passage to Vietnam or China or Kampuchea or Katmandu.

I was amused by what HE reader arturobandini2 said yesterday: “Don’t look for Slumdog to take top critics’ honors. But if SAG strikes, I predict it’ll be the Academy’s Best Picture winner. Mainly as a fuck-you gesture to actors from the rest of Hollywood.” Spot-on, love it. SAG members will deserve a hearty eff-you if they go on strike.

Slumdog may also triumph, he feels, “because it has a feel-exuberant finish, which the other contenders don’t have. The Academy fogies cream their Depends over that kind of ending, especially in a recession. I don’t particularly like the movie, but I witnessed the fever spreading in the theater like turbo-bacteria. The momentum seems undeniable.”

My deep-down suspicion after seeing Slumdog in Toronto, one that I kept to myself, was that the Academy bluehairs might back away somewhat because of the total absence of local talent. This doesn’t seem to have kicked in at all, however, and that in itself is very cool. In this spirit a Slumdog win could be seen as kindred to the election of Barack Obama. Black president, brown movie.