It’s a melancholy moment for all of us, but the Best Picture Oscar campaign for Memoirs of a Geisha seems to be dead in the water, along with any hopes of its director, Rob Marshall, being thought of in a half-serious way as Best Director. What tells me this? Five things. One, strong insect-antennae readings that people are agreeing more and more with my personal conviction that costumes and production design do not a Best Picture make. Two, a 70ish director regarded by yours truly as a harbinger of Academy sentiment is letting it be known he’s no Geisha admirer. Three, a producer I know told me today he “had great expectatons for Geisha going in but I was really bummed [afterwards].” Four, Envelope guy Steve Pond is reporting that the applause at the end of an Academy Geisha screening last Saturday afternoon was “very strong” for Ziyi Zhang and various below-the-line contributors, but that Marshall and pic’s screenwriter Robin Swicord “didn’t draw much applause.” And five, Movie City News’ David Poland is detecting that Geisha‘s Best Picture chances are “fading a little” and commenting that it’s “almost time to drop [Marshall] off the list” of Best Director contenders.” (Poland asks in the same breath, “Will fellow directors vote for a fashion show?”) Even Geisha‘s tireless publicity team (including the gracious and passionate Flo Grace, Lisa Taback and Murray Weissman) must be feeling the dying of the breeze. It’s over for three reasons, if you ask me. One, Geisha feels like a phony cultural hodgepodge (set in Japan, shot in California, spoken in English by Chinese actresses). Two, it simply isn’t good enough to be considered as a Best Picture contender (sometimes the equation really is that simple). And three, the Gods have declared that Marshall must suffer for his glossily dreadful Chicago winning the Best Picture Oscar nearly three years ago. That was a terrible Black Moment in Oscar history (the much more deserving The Pianist should have won), but now revenge is at hand. Or, as they say in Sicilian, “Nun si l’havi a ghiuttiri.”

New Yorker critic Anthony Lane’s review of Brokeback Mountain is one of the most insightful I’ve read so far, and one of the best for Heath Ledger’s chances for being nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. “”In the end, this is Ledger’s picture…[it is he] who bears the yoke of the movie’s sadness,” Lane concludes. “His voice is a mumble and a rumble, not because he is dumb but because he hopes that, by swallowing his words, he can swallow his feelings, too. In his mixing of the rugged and the maladroit, he makes you realize that Brokeback Mountain is no more a cowboy film than The Last Picture Show. (Both screenplays were written by Larry McMurtry, the earlier in collaboration with Peter Bogdanovich, this one with Diana Ossana.) Each is an elegy for tamped-down lives, with an eye for vanishing brightness of which Jean Renoir would have approved, and you should get ready to crumple at Brokeback Mountain‘s final shot: Ennis alone in a trailer, looking at a postcard of Brokeback Mountain and fingering the relics of his time there, with a field of green corn visible, yet somehow unreachable, through the window. This slow and stoic movie, hailed as a gay Western, feels neither gay nor especially Western: it is a study of love under siege. As Ennis says, ‘If you can’t fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it.'”

A friend from London named Grant Kempster just wrote and said, “Just got back from seeing King Kong this morning, and in a word…’Wow!’ Looks like Spielberg could do with learning a thing or two from Jackson when it comes to making blockbuster event films. I’d love to know what you think, but I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it. It’s not flawless, but a damn entertaining movie that works magnificently considering it’s a ‘pet project.'”

Richard Schickel’s Time magazine cover story about Steven Spielberg’s Munich is now online, but you can’t read it unless you’re a Time subscriber. It’s called “Spielberg’s Secret Masterpiece” on the cover (along with Spielberg’s bearded puss), but the page title is “Spielberg Takes on Terror.” It begins with this graph: “The first and most important thing to say about Munich, Steven Spielberg’s new film, is that it is a very good movie — good in a particularly Spielbergian way. By which one means that it has all the virtues we’ve come to expect when he is working at his highest levels. It’s narratively clean, clear and perfectly punctuated by suspenseful and expertly staged action sequences. It’s full of sympathetic (and in this case, anguished) characters, and it is, morally speaking, infinitely more complex than the action films it superficially resembles — pictures that simply pit terrorists against counterterrorists without an attempt to explore anyone’s motives and their tragic implications.”

There’s a new Best Supporting Actress contender in town…10 year-old Georgie Henley, the soul and natural light-beam of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Disney, 12.9). She came out of nowhere (i.e., chosen out of a general cast- ing call in England), but she’s Drew Barrymore in E.T. without the cloying I-know-I’m-cute-and-you’re-going- to-adore-me attitude. Henley’s serene little-girl aura…her beauty, obvious intelligence, cultured British accent, etc…plus the generosity of feeling from within make for a potent combination.

King Kong — the brute with a case on a certain blonde, a big guy with an even bigger heart, an ape who isn’t afraid to really express his feelings (unlike most males) — will have its AMPAS debut this evening at 7 pm at the Academy theatre. The word from last week’s New York junket screening is that Peter Jackson’s film is not only thrilling but quite the emotional ride. I know it’s going to be a hell of a visual show, but wait…wait…a distribution guy from Europe has seen it and he’s not on Baz Bamigboye‘s train. “It’s too long and boring for my taste,” he begins. “Actually I have a theory that King Kong is a manifestation of Jackson…a kind of dedication and self-tribute from and by Jackson to…himself! It’s a total vanity project. On its own terms the story should unfold in less than two hours, so at least one out of the picture’s three hours is just jacking off. There is one reel containing absolutely no dialogue — just Naomi Watts screaming her lungs out. Jackson knows how to create visual excitement, yes, but he’s too busy proving to the world that he’s the greatest director ever. This is finally a film about emotionless emotion..grand but empty, big but cold.”

Here is one of the funniest and most outrageously brilliant TV ads I’ve seen in a very long time. It’s Spike Jonze’s “Pardon Our Dust” piece for The Gap, and it’s supposed to be about the coming of a new design for all the Gap stores, but it’s obviously about some- thing much more than that. With the music of Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt Suite” playing on the soundtrack, it’s about rebellion, revolution… rage against corporate cultural domination. I’m frankly surprised that the Gap people approved it because the piece is clearly a Fight Club thing that says “rise up against corporate suppression of your souls!…assert yourselves as individals…stop submitting!” Amazing. Inspired. And by the way: if you want to see the horribly scored deballed version of this same ad…deballed and trivialized because the “Peer Gynt Suite” has been replaced by a goofy-sounding VH1 pop anthem….an anthem that basically says “something really wacky is going on…woo-hoo!”…if you want to suffer through this de-Spiked corporate compromise version, here it is.

USA Today‘s Scott Bowles talks to David Poland, Sasha Stone, Tom O’Neill, myself and Rob Alarcon (of Cinema Confidential) about the leaders in the Best Picture Oscar race. Alarcon has the money quote about King Kong, which he saw Wednesday night: “I came [to the screening] thinking, ‘No way in hell.’ But I was really impressed with the quality across the board. It had everything you would be looking for.” Wow…sounds terrific, Rob!

Here’s the Jewish Journal version of that Munich piece from Ivor Davis…the other version, which was posted earlier this afternoon, is running at Movies.com. Davis says there was a line in his draft of the Jewish Journal piece saying that some [operatives] in the movie dress up as women — lipstick, bras, fake boobs, etc. — in order to carry out a killing. It’s apparently in the movie, but was cut from my story for reasons unknown.”

“I love you, Kong, and I don’t know to say except that I can’t be with you and it’s breaking my heart, just as it’s breaking yours. The wind chill factor feels like icy serrated steel 89 or 90 stories above Manhattan in the dead of winter with snow on the streets, and little me wearing only a sheer white evening dress. But I’m not thinking about my physical comfort or how soggy and stinky your palm feels against my skin, but how you must be crying in your heart, and how similar our bond is to the one Jessica Lange had with that guy in the ape suit in Dino de Laurentiis’s 1976 crap-level Kong film. It’s the same sentimental shit, basically, and all I want to to is let go and let the tears run down my cheeks.”

20th Century Fox has decided against sneaking The Family Stone the weekend after next (i.e., the one before its 12.16 opening), and that means they’ve basically decided that as good as it is, they don’t believe that the film will sell itself to the ticket-buying public out there and their only chance at spiking the interest levels is to try and land some Golden Globe acting nominations for costars Diane Keaton and Sarah Jessica Parker. If I were the Fox guy in charge of selling this film, I would definitely sneak it…but that’s because I really like it and can’t imagine anyone not feeling the same way. Is it unfair to say that Fox marketing’s attitude towards The Family Stone seems a little bit cooler than mine?

“Elsewhere Live” (which will broadcast live today at 6 pm Pacific instead of the usual 7 pm) is now on the home page for the iTunes Music Store. It’s listed on the top row of the “New and Notable” podcasts.