Fahrenheit 9/11 may get nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (or not), but director Michael Moore has decided against submitting it as a Best Feature Documentary hopeful. Hoping to turn as many swing voters against President Bush as possible, Moore has declared on his website he’d like his film to be shown on broadcast TV before the election, even though he admits that Fahrenheit 9/11‘s DVD distributor, Columbia Tristar Home Video, probably won’t allow this. He’s saying it’s “more important to take that risk and hope against hope that I can persuaded someone to put it on TV, even if it’s the night before the election. If there is even the remotest of chances that I can get this film seen by a few million more Americans before election day, then that is more important. Having a second [Best Documentary Oscar] would be nice, but not as nice as getting this country back in the hands of the majority.”

Nikki Finke’s disturbingly funny take on suited Hollywood’s sensitivity to the recent Presidential poll turnarounds is a half-echo, half-lament that the Swift Boat Veterans for Bullshit strategy (along with those ads playing Kerry’s testimony about U.S. soldiers committing atrocities in Vietnam) is working with the undecided’s. It also reminds how quickly currents can change. I’m presuming things will turn back again in Kerry’s favor, especially after he and Dubya lock horns in debate, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling hugely deflated by those polls. Is Kerry an incarnation of the high-minded Henry Fonda character in Gore Vidal’s The Best Man? A candidate who’s too effetely principled to hit back in ways that really matter when the rough-and-tumble demands it?

Nothing terribly new about Laura Holson’s report about the ongoing negotiations between Disney and Harvey Weinstein. Just the same stories that have been rumbling around for the past few weeks, etc.

Strange that this didn’t pop up earlier, but EW critic Owen Gleiberman’s remark in last week’s issue about how Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate should have concluded is brilliant. If Candidate “had been a truly audacious update of the original, [Demme] would have shown the government sectretly in league with al-Queada.”