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Beowulf has been approved by the Academy’s animation committee as one of the twelve animated features eligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar! I’ve confirmed this twice with an Academy spokesperson…amazing news! Robert Zemeckis, Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman‘s film now stands an excellent chance of taking the prize because it’s such an eye-filling mind-blower — a truly revolutionary step in the delivery of 3D thrills and animated envelope-pushing.

What this decision really means is that it’s now down to a contest between Beowulf (emblematic of the new realms and wonders of mo-cap digital animation that are now upon us) and Ratatouille (a perfectly respectable and in fact beautifully rendered example of ’90s style animation). What makes this extra significant is that one of the old-guard voices who opposed Beowulf‘s Oscar- qualification is Pixar animation chief John Lasseter, who executive-produced Ratatouille.

So it’s a mano e mano between the rat vs. the dragon slayer. And as much as I hate to say it, given how touching, beautifully written and superbly made as Ratatouille is, HE feels that the rat needs to lose.

Not because it lacks anything as a film (far from it), but because Lasseter needs to be slapped around for trying to impede the forces of the brave new digital world. Let this be a lesson to all older fuddy-duds everywhere. If you try and block or discredit the new thing (whatever that thing may be), you are inviting the wrath of the forward thinkers of the world, and you may pay a price for this.

The other qualified titles are Alvin and the Chipmunks (semi-qualified pending viewing by the committee), Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, Bee Movie, Meet the Robinsons, Persepolis, Shrek the Third, The Simpsons Movie, Surf’s Up, Tekkonkinkreet and TMNT.

As I wrote to Beowulf producer-writer Roger Avary last week, “[Your] film is obviously animated through and through. It deserves the Best Feature Animation Oscar, bar none. I don’t care what anyone says — this is not live-action except in the most rudimentary sense of the physical acting aspects, which represent, in my view, a relatively small portion of the whole.”

“Parents who empower their children” sooner or later discover that “ultimately their children leave,” Youth Without Youth director Francis Coppola has told Vanity Fair writer Bruce Handy.

“But you can be satisfied, you can be happy you did that,” Coppola explains, because having kids like this is “better than kids who are hanging around, sort of dependent on you or something. My kids are not like that.”

Coppola’s wife Eleanor, he says, “always tells me that, because I lament, ‘Where are my kids? Where are my grandkids?’ And my wife says, ‘Well, you gave them a wonderful thing. Aside from everything else you’ve given them, you’ve given them the livelihood that they can go and pursue their own lives.'”

Youth Without Youth is having its first press screening tonight. I’dd like to attend, of course — it’s Coppola, after all, and a long-awaited effort — but the reviews out of the Rome Film Festival have been dispiriting, to say the least. Not to mention the general “forget it” buzz that I’ve been hearing since last spring. The result is that I’m looking for ways to avoid seeing it. There is only one film I’d rather see less, and that’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Is that a fair-minded way of looking at things? No, but it’s the honest truth.

The only thing that scares me about Roman Polanski‘s intention to direct an adaptation of Robert Harris‘s “The Ghost“, a just-published political thriller, is a statement given to Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel by Harris that “most of the story takes place in an oceanfront house during the middle of winter,” which Harris called “classic Polanski territory.”

What Harris means, I suspect, is that an oceanfront home is precisely the same kind of setting Polanski used in Death and the Maiden (1994), a well-written parlor drama that ranks in everyone’s memory as a respectable but middling, and even a touch boring. Note to Polanski and Harris: minimize the oceanfront home scenes and take the story elsewhere. I don’t care if it’s a bathroom in a freeway pit-stop gas station — just don’t resuscitate Death and the Maiden….please!

The Amazon description of Harris’s book: “Adam Lang [read: Tony Blair] has been Britain’s longest-serving and most controversial prime minister of the last half century. And now that he’s left office, he’s accepted one of history’s largest cash advances to compose a tell-all (or at least, tell-some) memoir of his life and years of power.

“As pressure mounts for Lang to complete this magnum opus, he hires a professional ghostwriter to finish the book. As he sets to work, the ghostwriter discovers many more secrets than Lang intends to reveal — secrets with the power to alter world politics, [and] secrets with the power to kill.”

An Amnazon reader reports that “the primary setting for ‘The Ghost’ is Martha’s Vineyard in the winter.”

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There’s plenty to get into each and every day about the Writers Strike, but every time I start to investigate an avenue or tap something out there’s a voice inside that wonders if anyone outside the industry cares all that much. I care about fairness and decency and about the plight of writers everywhere so I want to stay on it. On top of which a reader guilt-tripped me yesterday about being a slacker about this. But I know deep down if I hadn’t run into Diablo Cody yesterday the interest in my little Paramount Studios Bronson gate visit would have next to zilch.

Here are a couple of YouTube clips — clip #1 and clip #2 — that seem to just cut through the crap and spell out the strike situation clean and plain. The cleanest and most Sesame Street-y, posted on 11.5, is a primer about what the writers want and what the studios are offering/not offering in response.

On the DVD front, it basically says that writers get 4 cents from the sale of a $19 or $20 retail DVD, and that what they’re looking for is 8 cents per DVD. Of course, the studio profit margin off that $19 or $20, after expenses and skimmings, is about $5 per DVD. But 8 cents out of five bucks isn’t much. It’s reasonable. You could even call it modest to a fault.

And yet on the AMPTP website, producers’ negotiator Nicholas Counter has written that “no further movement is possible to close the gap between [producers and writers] so long as their DVD proposal” — 8 cents rather than 4 cents per DVD — “remains on the table.” Counter then equates traditional DVDs with electronic sell-through — i.e., internet downloads. Shouldn’t the music download percentages afforded to songwriters be the model?

The other must-see YouTube clip is a pre-strike statement by WGA member Howard Gould. Very well said, well phrased — a statement of seriously manly conviction. (I searched for Gould on the IMDB and came with only a Howard Michael Gould — is this guy and the guy speaking on the clip one and the same?)

MTV’s Josh Horowitz: “Francis Ford Coppola recently told Esquire he doubted how hungry you are for roles anymore. Did those comments upset you?

Jack Nicholson: “He called me. I’ve known Francis for a long time. I didn’t even bother making him explain it. I just told him if anybody in the world understands being burned by an interview, I do. Don’t give it a second thought. [But] if that’s what he said, and that’s what he meant, and now he feels he said something he shouldn’t have, that’s fine by me [also]. I’m hungry in the sense that I always was. Do I have to work? I haven’t had to for quite a long time. Am I as hungry? I don’t know that I’m as hungry, but I’m as vicious about the meal as I ever was.”

A classic sequence from The Train, the very last big-budget action film shot in black and white. I know that your average dipstick action fan doesn’t want to know from monochrome, but it would be a great innovation in today’s market to make a hard-core, black-and-white action flick. You could make it more of a wow if you shot it in 3D. Talk about a visual must-see event. Black and white didn’t hurt Sin City…why not an action or adventure film?

There’s a good-vibe antidote to the bad-vibe quote in that 11.4 N.Y. Post piece by Susannah Cahalan in which the real-life Richie Roberts said that American Gangster depictions of Frank Lucas — Denzel Washington‘s Harlem drug-dealer — “as a family man are ludicrous…to make him look good and me look bad.”

I’m speaking of last Friday’s Charlie Rose Show discussion between Roberts, Lucas, New York writer Mark Jacobson and American Gangster exec producer Nick Pileggi.

The Post piece made it sound like Roberts was pissed and taking swings at the film. That is not the impression he gives during the Charlie Rose chat.

Jonny Greenwood “was really one of the first people to see There Will Be Blood. And when he came back with a bunch of music, it actually helped show me what his impression of the film was. Which was terrific, because I had no impression.” — TWBB director Paul Thomas Anderson explaining the genesis of the score to Entertainment Weekly‘s Chris Willman in a piece that’s mainly a q & a.

I spoke to famed producer-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (1408, Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt) and Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody (a.k.a. “the new Tarantino”) during my early afternoon visit to the Paramount Bronson gate entrance. They and maybe 25 other picketers were doing what they could to visualize and perhaps energize the Writers Guild’s resistance to the greed and bluster shown so far by the studios and the producers.

Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody outside Paramount Bronson gate — Wednesday, 11.7.07, 12:55 pm

Neither had much to say about the WGAW goals except to repeat what everyone understands (or at least has heard or read), which is that writers aren’t looking for a whole lot — just a fair percentage of new-media pie, and to redress the lopsided terms of the 1988 agreement. (“Why are picketing by the gate? Because we got screwed in ’88”) And they didn’t say much about the major studios’ reported decision to suspend several long-term deals with TV production companies. “They’re just cutting overhead,” Karaszewks remarked.

“During the ’88 strike, there were a lot of writers fighting among themselves,” he added. “it sounds like a cliche but there’s a feeling today that we’re very together on this one, and very justified.”

It’s awesome to stand with the strikers and just listen to those obnoxious car honkers driving by on Melrose. Every third or fourth car was just leaning on it and making a huge racket. It was so noisy it was hard to talk, but the energy felt good. Average Joes definitely seem to be with the writers. If the producers were to try and drum up sympathy for their side of the argument by chanting and holding signs in the same spot, drivers would most likely go “booo!” and given them the finger or the thumbs-down.

Producer-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, ditto — Wednesday, 11.7.07, 12:40 pm

I apologized to Cody for missing a Juno two-for-one interview session six or seven weeks ago (during the Toronto Film Festival) with herself and director Jason Reitman. She said she was in a slightly awkward position because she’s still promoting to promote Juno (i.e., helping the enemy make money), but that she’d gotten permission from the WGAW to do so. This is what all writers with movies coming out soon are doing — i.e., making sure it’s cool to talk to the press.

Cody was definitely the coolest-dressed picketer of all. Lots of black set off by red and pink — a Nightmare on Elm Street T-shirt and black skirt and boots, red socks with red tassles, a red-and-green leg tattoo, a red “key” pendant hanging from her neck, a reddish-pink phone, pink heart-shaped glasses, and shortish jet-black hair.

Again — here’s the mp3 file.

Karaszewski’s specially-made red T-shirt

About 90 minutes ago I was soaking up some WGAW strike vibes at the Paramount Pictures’ Bronson gate. Some guy brought along a boom box and was playing some Motown, and some of the female picketers were doing a slow slinky shing-a-ling as they held their signs aloft and went “whoo-hoo!” to the cars that kept driving by and honking out their support. (Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski was calling it “the funky Bronson gate.”) Here are two slow-loading videos — one of the Bronson gang, the other of the picketers at the main Paramount gate.

Bronson gate WGA picketers — Wednesday, 11.7.07, 12:35 pm

With all the late-night talk shows doing re-runs because of the WGA strike, movie marketers are losing out on the big promotional bumps that come from celebrities visiting Leno, Letterman, O’Brien, Ferguson and Ellen DeGeneres. No way you can’t call that a signficant hurt factor. But the Oprah Winfrey show isn’t affected by the strike (it’s technically regarded as a news show, like Larry King‘s) and so the attention she’ll be giving to The Great Debaters (Weinstein Co., 12.25), which she’s one of the producers of, will be unaffected also. I’ve been told that research screenings have been “through the roof.” One report said that the number of people checking the top two boxes (very good or excellent) were in the low 90s, and that the “definite recommend” factor was 84%.