I’ve always been respectful of Tony Kushner‘s Lincoln screenplay, and have been presuming all along he’d win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, at least as consolation for Lincoln not winning Best Picture. Sasha Stone predicts otherwise: “Kushner won’t win. Chris Terrio‘s Argo screenplay is going to win tomorrow at the WGA Awards and Kushner will lose the Oscar to Terrio.”

At least Kushner’s intelligence and perception is his own. He said the following on Charlie Rose the night before last:

“You could argue that Barack Obama faced in ’08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.

“The fact of the matter is that when you’re elected president of the United States rather than king of the United States, you have to work with a very cumbrous, unwieldy machinery. Obama has made a very determined and conscious effort to keep saying over and over again: ‘Government is not the enemy. Government is an expression of the better angels of our nature.’

“You have people like these Tea Party people protesting government, and then asked if they really want to give up their Social Security payments and they don’t seem to know that that’s actually part of what government is. There’s this rejection of this sort of basic idea of human community.

“Now that we’re facing challenges like climate change that absolutely demands a global, collective response…we have no hope for survival as a species if we continue down the path of this kind of psychotic individualism.”

Stone again: “Argo is a film you can get all in one viewing — the jokes, the theme, the plot. It doesn’t require you do any of the work.”

On the strength of the trailers alone, Diego Rougier‘s Sal seems like the most visually striking of all the films playing in the upcoming First Time Fest (Friday, 3.1 through Monday, 3.4). A present-day Chilean western inspired by the widescreen stylings of Sergio Leone, etc. Which isn’t to dismiss the other entries. This is simply the grabbiest.

The Grand Prize winner of this nascent Manhattan-based festival will open theatrically via Cinema Libre Studio “in at least one major city (New York or Los Angeles) with the option for the expansion,” etc. Why not both cities? A movie doesn’t really open theatrically without playing on both coasts.

Several New York-based filmmakers will attend the festival — Darren Aronofsky, Sofia Coppola, Chrstine Vachon, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Nancy Savoca. Aronofsky (now in post-production on Noah) will accept the John Huston Award for Achievement in Cinema at the festival. The Players Club will host the social portion of the festival, but the films will screen at the Loews Village plex on Third Avenue and 11th Street.

FTF founders are Johanna Bennett, the actor and philanthropist daughter of Tony Bennett, and producer Mandy Ward (Palestine Blues).

My first reaction to this Oblivion (Universal , 4.12) trailer was “here we go with another dystopian sci-fi action theme-park ride.” This time with Tom, the Weathered Energizer Bunny. I chortled when Morgan Freeman‘s character turned up and told Cruise “it’s time for you to hear the truth” or words to that effect. About how the game is rigged by the bad guys and we’re all screwed?

Oblivion was directed, produced and cowritten by the 38 year-old Joseph Kosinki. Before Tron came out I heard he might be “the new James Cameron.” That doesn’t seem like a valid observation any more. At best Kosinki is, right now, a complacent flash-bang CG hustler — clearly content to operate within video-game fantasy realities in an ongoing attempt to satisfy the ADD appetites of the under-40 generation.

And honestly? I’m not saying I had trouble telling Olga Kurylenko and Andrea Riseborough apart, but in this futuristic setting they look fairly similar. In the realm of this trailer, at least. It’s fine to cast one “off”-beautiful actress with opaque features, but two in the same film?

“What this year was greatly missing was any kind of strong critical voices. Stu Van Airsdale left his post at Movieline and Mark Harris left Grantland for the year and that left us with objective Oscar coverage and advocacy. We still have the Carpetbagger [and] David Poland, but Jeff Wells has turned into a one-man take-down machine which has rendered his voice as useless as my own.” — from Sasha Stone’s latest Awards Daily Oscar-race-assessment piece, dated 2.15.

Response: I reviewed all the major films last year with as much soul and passion and exactitude as I was able to find or bring, and I was very pro-Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook, Anna Karenina and No, of course, and also, after my initial encounter in Cannes, Amour. Not to mention dozens of other films I liked or found worthy in this or that way. I got into everything and what I ended up really liking, I ended up really liking. I respected Lincoln after a fashion but I found it laborious and tiresome in some respects and certainly over-praised, and while I felt very strongly, as always, about Spielberg industry kowtowing manifesting as Best Picture hoo-hah…ahh, I’ve said all this before.

But I am hardly “a one-man takedown machine.” That is grossly unfair. I try to absorb and wrestle with the whole realm, with everything, every day and doubly on weekends. Awful movies, cool movies, classics, Blurays…all of it. Not to mention every film festival I can squeeze in or afford to visit. Every significant or semi-significant or interesting looking film that comes out (including those on HBO, AMC, Netflix and Showtime), I see and settle into and grapple with. You really have to get off my case and stop bashing me just because everyone (apart from people like myself and David Carr) liked or respected poor Lincoln but didn’t sincerely love it. Your dream dog made money but it didn’t have the stamina or the horses to score in the awards race. Let it go and stop slapping me around for this.

I wanted the portentous Lincoln to lose, yes. The idea of another Spielberg coronation with films like War Horse, Tintin, Always, Amistad and The Color Purple under his belt seemed intolerable. And yes, I pushed this viewpoint with a compulsive vigor but that shouldn’t be a damning or libelous offense. What about the haters (of which you were one) who ganged up on poor Silver Linings Playbook like African wild dogs tackling an antelope? And what about the Soviet apparatchik assassins of Zero Dark Thirty? Now, those were takedown campaigns!

SLP is one of the most nimble witted and emotionally rooted romantic dramedies ever made, obviously not a film of epic scope or classic dramatic gravitas but a confection of real beauty and a kind of transcendence even, and look what happened — elbowed out of consideration as a possible winner by the handicappers and now even poor Jennifer Lawrence is on the ropes. You and yours (and the relentless commentariat on HE and elsewhere) helped to kill its Best Picture chances as surely as you’re reading this letter, and you’re calling me a takedown machine?

Sasha is nonetheless spot-on with this: “The Oscar race is all over but the shouting. History will be made one way or another. [But] history had already been made once the Academy pushed their [nomination] ballot deadline to occur before the big guilds announced. That one little move forever altered the race, throwing it into complete chaos.”

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond and Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil are better at divining the tremors and handicapping the Oscar contenders than I. Their latest racetrack chat is spot-on as far as it goes, but where’s the real-deal undercurrent? Oddsmakers have to be analytical and dispassionate, but without sounding too glib. I love these guys but they could use a little of my attitude. What I wouldn’t give to hear Hammond say “here we are about to give Best Picture to another audience-pleaser that isn’t the best,” etc.

The best parts, I suppose, are about O’Neil challenging Hammond on his latest predictions (Emmanuelle Riva wining Best Actress, Robert De Niro taking Best Supporting Actor).

Because he has an admiration for Naomi Watts, Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams is describing Anne Fontaine‘s Two Mothers as “interesting.” Did he read the Sundance reactions? Did he read about Fontaine’s confession to an Eccles audience that she was surprised at their guffawing, that she didn’t know she’d made a kind of comedy?

Two Mothers “is a rank embarassment,” I wrote on 1.20. “It’s middle-aged female-fortified soft porn without the soft porn (which at least would have been something), and with atrocious dialogue. I think it might have worked better if it had been spoken in French (i.e., Fontaine’s native tongue), but that would be absurd for a film set in Australia. I walked out after…what, 35 or 40 minutes? Way too much smiling, good-vibing, sensitivity. I don’t want to hear another actor or actress say to their son or daughter ‘are you okay?’ ever again.

Millions. I’m presuming, are about to see A Good Day to Die Hard. Perhaps waiting in long lines in Manhattan as we speak. Overheard: “I don’t care how shitty this latest installment may be — I have to see it anyway.” For Joe Popcorn quality is not the thing — it’s the return of a comfort brand. Any New Yorker with any kind of investment in seeing good movies or who knows or cares anything about the world in he/she lives will pay to see No this weekend.

Marshall Fine found a moment of clarity in his review:

“By the point Bruce Willis’s John McClane gets to this fifth outing, he’s like Roger Moore in one of those early 1980s James Bond abominations, like Octopussy or For Your Eyes Only: carried along by the conventions of the form and commenting on them, rather than simply being part of them. Suddenly he’s a guy who goes looking for people to kill, instead of fighting for his life.”

“Look, I don’t hate Dances With Wolves,” Grantland‘s Brian Koppleman wrote yesterday. Hah! We all know what’s coming, right? But we all agree emphatically with what’s about to be said and we’re already on our feet and cheering in the stands. Let ’em have it, Brian!

“Unlike most of my film-snob friends, I actually have a soft spot for [Dances]. I remember watching it in the theater and being moved enough to want to see it again. I cheered when the tatonka finally showed up and Kevin Costner‘s Lieutenant Dunbar got to ride to the American Indian camp and rouse them to the hunt. And speaking of Costner, I really like him, too. From Silverado to Company Men to the vastly underrated Thirteen Days, Costner’s appearance on screen always brings a smile to my face. And he directed the film with craft and artistry. So I have no problem with Dances With Wolves (and Costner himself) getting nominated in 1990.

“But if you’re asking me to be okay with the fact that both the film and Costner beat Goodfellas and Martin Scorsese? The answer would have to be: Go fuck yourself. Because that is undoubtedly the greatest travesty in Oscar history.”

In her favorable review of Pablo Larrain‘s No (which I’ve been raving about since catching it at last year’s Cannes Film Festival), N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis says that anyone who doesn’t challenge brute cops who are hurting a loved one is a coward. Inside a police station? Under a brutal South American dictatorship?

“As it is, Rene [Gael Garcia Bernal] is one of those compromised characters whose obvious virtues run a tight race with his flaws. In one early scene he doesn’t just stand by when [his ex-partner and mother of his son] Veronica is beaten by cops; he also recoils from the violence. It’s unclear if Rene is a garden-variety coward, afraid of physical harm, or whether his fear is a manifestation of a deeper moral stain.”

If you’re afraid of getting punched or kicked or clubbed you’re a candy-ass? Everybody recoils from violence. I’ve been there and the first reaction is always to flinch and withdraw. You have to push past that and do the stand-up thing, of course, but I’m not sure that being “afraid of physical harm” constitutes cowardice.

We all like to think that we’d all “do something” if someone near and dear is being shoved around by the bulls, and I agree that anyone who cowers in fear in such a situation lacks intestinal fortitude. You need to rush forward and gesture and say or shout something — “Hey, leave her alone! Get the fuck off her!” But a guy who dives right into a group of cop thugs who are shoving and beating their captives…? I’ve tasted this. Anyone who’s been in the immediate vicinity of brutality knows what I’m talking about.

A single meteorite or a cluster of meteorite fragments slammed into earth a few hours ago. It happened about 50 miles west of Chelyabinsk, adjacent to Russia’s Ural mountains, around 9:20 am. (Which is what…2:20 am NY time?) Decent video captures. It hit at a shallow angle, which seems curious if you don’t know anything about air density and the tendency of any brute missile entering the atmosphere to plane and be deflected. But that’s how it works, I think.

I’d love to hear recordings of the impact, which these videos don’t really deliver. No one was killed, but more than 700 people were hurt by flying glass shards. Chelyabinsk is about 950 miles east of Moscow. Who would ever want to visit, much less live, in a place like this? Bartender, pour me a double right now.

If Steven Spielberg used this occurence in a movie, he’d show Russians looking up at the meteorite with their “awe faces” as a white Kaminski light flares up the exposure.

“The Vegas odds will tell you exactly what the Gold Derby odds are telling you,” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote earlier today. “There is no difference because they’re all drawing from the same thought pool. The way things are going now, though, I wonder if there will ever be any surprises again.

“I don’t think a movie like The Godfather or The Godfather Part II could run the gauntlet today and win [Best Picture]. It couldn’t overcome the giant guilds picking what they Facebook-liked over a masterpiece. Nor the nastiness we saw in this year’s race. Can you imagine?”

Translation: Sasha is still crestfallen about her eloquent and masterful Lincoln having lost in this year’s race, and about the takedown jabs (including what seemed to me like a crucial anti-Lincoln Sweet Spot observation from N.Y. Times columnist David Carr) that might have had some marginal effect. But I wonder if either of the Godfather flicks might indeed have trouble winning in today’s environment. Thoughts?