The National Society of Film critics has given its Best Picture prize to Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis — the second reputable group (after the Toronto Film Critics Association) to see through the melancholia and stand up for this brilliantly sardonic mood-trip whatever. At the same time the NSFC blew off Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street in all categories. A little too radical, guys? Pushes things too far, not enough punishment for Belfort, etc.?

The Coens also won for Best Director, beating out Gravity‘s Alfonso Cuaron and 12 Years A Slave‘s Steve McQueen. Inside Llewyn Davis‘s Oscar Isaac won for Best Actor (Ejiofor and Redford were top runners-ups) and Blue Jasmine‘s Cate Blanchett won for Best Actress. To the NSFC’s credit, Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchopoulos was the first runner-up to Blanchett.

They gave their Best Suppporting Actor prize to Spring Breakers‘ James Franco…the fuck? More so than Dallas Buyers Club‘s Jared Leto and The Wolf of Wall Street‘s Jonah Hill?

This Franco crap has gone far enough, all right? He played that part with his gold teeth and his corn rows and his pumped-up muscles and “mah sheeyit.” Not once did I say as I watched Spring Breakers, “Wow, Franco’s really nailing it here”…not once!

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Sent this morning — two previous requests have been sent over the last week or so: “Please consider chatting with me briefly about The Wolf of Wall Street, Oliver. Your Wall Street perspective alone demands…er, requires this. In a sense you and Gordon Gekko/Michael Douglas fathered Jordan Belfort — he was one of those “greedy little shits” of the late ’80s who got into stockbroking partly because Gekko’s swagger and “greed is good” speech turned him on. C’mon, man — you created him. In a certain sense, I mean. Henry Frankenstein didn’t mean to create Boris Karloff‘s “monster” either, but that’s what happened.

“I also need you to address the view that The Wolf of Wall Street is the new Scarface. (I riffed on this on 12.13). Like Scarface was in ’83, Wolf has been decried by older conservatives, slow-on-the-pickup critics, industry lightweights and in some cases women. Wolf‘s crime, they feel, has been its failure to deliver sufficient payback to Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Belfort, for seeming to enjoy the amorality of its lead characters at the expense of some moral scheme. Or for being too long or too excessive in its portrayal of Belfort’s wild-ass shenanigans. Over-the-top excess is very clearly the point, of course.

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I saw Stuart Rosenberg‘s The Laughing Policeman (’73) in two shifts last night. I bought the DVD at Amoeba earlier in the evening for only $5. I came back, watched the HBO Herblock doc (not bad, good enough, fine) and then popped in the Policeman DVD around 9:30 or so and started to watch. Within 15 or 20 minutes I was out. I woke up a little later, went to bed, couldn’t sleep, got up and watched the Rosenberg again. It’s a character-and-atmosphere film first and a big-city whodunit second. (Or third.) The plot doesn’t add up but it’s a fairly decent film. Realistic mid-range policiers with movie stars haven’t exactly disappeared but when was the last good one? Bruce Dern played his usual grinning or glaring eccentric — half-weird, half-cagey. Either you got Dern or you didn’t. Dern’s detective to an angry back guy in Mission district: “What are you gonna do, eyeball me to death?”

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The movie-producing career of Saul Zaentz peaked three times when One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus and The English Patient won Best Picture Oscars. 20 years at the top with a white beard. He also had something to do with Daryl Duke‘s Payday, one of my all-time favorite Rip Torn movies. For sure, Zaentz lived a rich, accomplished and combative life. A legendary Berkeley-based producer of upscale Oscar-bait movies (The Unbearable Lightness of Being was another) who began in the music business in the ’50s, Zaentz was 92 when he passed yesterday. Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. I’m not saying Zaentz never experienced infancy, youth or middle age. He might well have, but he never appeared to be anything other than that cantankerous but well-spoken old guy with the white beard…that’s all I’m saying. Lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits and threats of lawsuits. Zaentz’s last project was Goya’s Ghost, which I never saw and which you can’t even stream. “Zaentz brought a series of lawsuits against John Fogerty, claiming defamation of character for the lyric ‘Zanz can’t dance but he’ll steal your money.'” — from Zaentz’s Wiki page.

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The only Chris Nolan films that have aged well are the smallish or mid-sized ones — Following, Memento and Insomnia. The dark, brooding, big-wallop films that he began making eight years ago — Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises — don’t play as well as when they first came out. They’re a bit of a slog to sit through. I tried re-watching Inception last summer and I just couldn’t stay the course. And I popped in the Dark Night Bluray last night and…well, I enjoyed Heath Ledger‘s “Joker” performance. (That will never go away.) But it still felt a bit burdensome and…I don’t know, self-regarding or something. All big-concept, corporate-funded entertainments are like this — ecstatic response after the first screening, and then the Bluray collects dust on the shelf.

Heath Ledger, Pete Hammond on stage of Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre — Wednesday, 2.8.06, 8:25 pm.

Nolan needs to scale it down and do something more intimate and mid-rangey for his next project. I’m presuming that Interstellar is going to be more of the same.

But Ledger, man…I still think about the guy. I was thinking how things might have gone for him if he was alive and crackling today. What films he might have made, what roles he might have stolen from whomever actually played them. He died about two weeks shy of six years ago. I was covering Sundance ’08 but I’d came down with a 48-hour fever. I was my second year at the old “cowboy hat” establishment (i.e, the Star Hotel). Unable to sleep because of muscle ache but unable to relax…lying on a couch in a state of depressed delirium.

Then the news broke and I knew I had to write something. I couldn’t blow it off. Had to post as soon as possible. I was only able to bang out two or three graphs before collapsing on the couch for a breather, and then another two or three. I could barely think, much less write.

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Writers Guild nominees were announced today, and once more (in the wake of yesterday’s Producers Guild nominations) the screenplay for Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis got the back of the hand. Original Screenplay noms: American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, Dallas Buyers Club, Her, Nebraska. Adapted Screenplay noms: August: Osage County, Before Midnight, Captain Phillips, Lone Survivor, The Wolf of Wall Street. Documentary Screenplay noms: Dirty Wars, Herblock — The Black & The White, No Place on Earth, Stories We Tell, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks.

New Yorker film critic Richard Brody has written another eloquent explanation-and-defense of Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street. Read the whole piece, of course, but my favorite paragraph is at the end: “The movie’s detractors will, in the light of history, look as ridiculous as those who, in the early nineteen-thirties, decried Howard Hawks’s Scarface, requiring that it be released with a didactic prologue, a didactic insert, a didactic ending, and a subtitle (‘The Shame of a Nation’).”

There are several producers and distributors who are true Movie Catholics — who really believe in movies as a delivery device for excitement, opening minds, spreading wisdom, spiritual transportation, etc. Two of the best, surely, are producers Scott Rudin (Inside Llewyn Davis, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Captain Phillips, Frances Ha, Margaret, Moneyball, The Social Network) and Annapurna’s Megan Ellison (Her, American Hustle, Foxcatcher, Zero Dark Thirty, Killing Them Softly, Spring Breakers, The Master). These two have to be regarded as Kings of the Hill.

Down half a notch are Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner (Rush, Les Miserables, Anna Karenina, Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, A Serious Man, United 93).

Production and distribution-wise, of course, there’s the Weinstein Company (August: Osage County, Killing Them Softly, Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained, 20 Feet from Stardom, Fruitvale Station, The Butler) and Fox Searchlight (Birdman, 12 years A Slave, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Sessions, The East, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Dom Hemingway), Sony Classics, IFC Films, Magnolia and so on.

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As I noted a couple of days ago, there are seven 2014 releases with a high-profile pedigree: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice, Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher, Ridley Scott‘s Exodus, Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes, David Fincher‘s Gone Girl, Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar. I guess I should add Jean Marc Vallee‘s Wild (i.e., the Reese Witherspoon hiking drama), Matt Reeves‘ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel for an even ten.

I’m going to re-scramble the Next Tier of Promising Films in order of highest quality (presumed or expected): George Clooney‘s The Monuments Men, Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah, Richard Shephard‘s Dom Hemingway, Ted Melfi‘s St. Vincent, Craig Gillespie‘s Million Dollar Arm, Doug Liman‘s Edge of Tomorrow, Clint Eastwood‘s Jersey Boys, Andy and Lana Wachowski‘s Jupiter Ascending, Phillip Noyce‘s The Giver, Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken (adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen), Jason Bateman‘s Bad Words. (11)

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The fact that John Wells‘ August: Osage County has won four awards at the just-concluded Capri Film Festival probably means something. Maybe not in a Scott Feinberg statistical sense but it’s probably an omen of some kind. Maybe. David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook was the big winner there last year and it became one of the three hottest contenders for the Best Picture Oscar. (It also snagged a few Spirit Awards.) The Capri jurors handed awards to the Weinstein Co. release for (a) Best Film of the Year, (b) Meryl Streep as Best Actress, (c) Best Ensemble Acting (Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Dermot Mulroney, Julianne Nicholson, Sam Shepard, Misty Upham) and (d) a Life Achievement Award for Cooper.

Again — I’m not saying this necessarily means something but it definitely might. Spirits swirling around, voices of the sirens, community mood swings, etc. I’ve never felt that August: Osage County was anything less than a very well-written, well-acted adaptation. I’ve seen it with an Academy audience. It “plays.” You never know.

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The Smoking Gun has posted a Los Angeles coroner report that says Roger Rojas, the financial advisor and car-shop owner whose faulty driving killed Paul Walker on November 30th, was driving over 100 mph. Not on a highway but on a two-lane public road where the speed limit was something like 45 mph. In a high-torque Porsche notorious for being difficult to handle at high speeds. Rojas was different, you see. He was special and cool, a God at the wheel, an immaculate reincarnation of Steve McQueen. Brilliant. Enjoy eternity, pal.