In his 9.3 assessment of the growing influence of Telluride Film Festival and the gradual concurrent diminishment of the Toronto and Venice gatherings, Peter Debruge states that coverage of Telluride by Oscar-focused columnists like myself has been a game-changer. The obvious implication is that impassioned jottings by Hollywood Elsewhere, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet, Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan have become a highly significant factor in the awards race. Thank you. Noted.

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Since Cannes my attitude toward Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska has been one of…uhm, muted respect. And that’s not a putdown. It’s certainly worth seeing (especially for Bruce Dern‘s performance, which he and his Paramount backers are doggedly calling a lead, and Phedon Papamichael‘s black-and-white photography). I figured Nebraska might get a Best Picture nomination (what the hell) but it’s not among the creme de la creme of Payne flicks so maybe not. But during Telluride I kept hearing how much people like it (along with Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day). And I began to imperceptibly slump and resign myself to the fact that we’re all stuck with it. Nebraska is going to snag a Best Picture nomination and go all the way to March.

In a two-day-old Variety piece called “Can Telluride Continue to Steal Venice and Toronto’s Thunder?,” Peter Debruge suggests that Nebraska is actually faring better than Labor Day as we speak. “Benefiting from a new score and some tiny nips and tucks since Cannes, where it met with mixed reviews, Nebraska hit the sweet spot with Telluride crowds,” he writes. “Three months ago, I wouldn’t have factored it into the Oscar race; now, it’s clearly a contender.”

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At a party tonight for Toronto-based film journalists Canadian director-actress Sarah Polley urged me to wear a “Free Tarek and John” button. I put it right on, and then did my research when I got home. On 8.16 Dr. Tarek Loubani and filmmaker John Greyson were arrested by the Cairo police for some bullshit reason. Nobody’s had any direct contact but they’re apparently (or at least might be) “okay.” Polley is seriously committed to getting them out of custody. At my suggestion Polley, Toronto Sun film writer Bruce Kirkland (r.) and a nice 20something guy whose name I’ll eventually learn (l.) posed with the buttons.

A “Free Tarek and John” guy whose name escapes, Sarah Polley, Bruce Kirkland.

Randall Miller‘s CBGB will be viewable starting tomorrow on DirecTV Video on Demand. “There were two kinds of people who caught shows at CBGB,” I wrote on 4.29. “The first kind looked at the ‘CBGB and OMFUG’ sign and said, ‘Yeah, sure…stands for Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers.’ Which is what Kristal had in mind when he created the acronym. The second kind just went with the sound of CBGB and presumed that OMFUG was a uniquely New York mantra that combined the meditative ‘ohhhhm’ with FUG, which naturally associates with The Fugs (Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, “I couldn’t get high, oh no no!”).

If that Radar story is true about Jack Nicholson having quietly retired from acting because his ability to memorize lines has gone south, there’s a simple solution. Idiot cards. The entire second half of Marlon Brando‘s career was helped along by them. Brando didn’t have memory issues — he just couldn’t be bothered to memorize lines so he scrawled his dialogue on cards and taped them here and there on the walls of the set and just read his lines. This didn’t seem to damage his career all that much so why can’t Nicholson do the same? Plus he could use digital earbud prompters. Jack can’t retire. Retirement is death. It’s a way of saying to yourself and your community and God, “I’m done, the joy is over…now I’m just waiting for it.”

Three months ago I posted the following about Brad Furman‘s Runner Runner (20th Century Fox, 10.4), which has posted a new trailer: “This is basically Oliver Stone‘s Wall Street (’87) meets Ben Younger‘s Boiler Room (00) + Robert Luketic‘s 21 (’08). It’s Justin Timberlake as Charlie Sheen/Bud Fox and Ben “Batfleck” Affleck as Michael Douglas/Gordon Gekko, more or less. Furman’s The Lincoln Lawyer (’11) was sturdy and satisfying, but we’ve definitely seen Runner Runner before.”

Nothing whets my cinematic appetite like the prospect of hanging with a grossly pot-bellied 60something Norwegian guy with hairy flabby breasts. From the TIFF program notes: “A corrosive look at contemporary Norwegian society, Lars Daniel Krutzkoff Jacobsen‘s The Immoral may be one of the funniest, most provocative comedies you’ll see this year. Cutting across class lines and rampaging through notions of good taste, it sketches a harsh portrait of a society completely dominated by unleashed, insatiable ids.” On top of which Jacobsen has one more name than Short Term 12‘s Daniel Destin Cretton.

This video clip was taken on Pulaski Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant district around 11:15 pm last night. You work hard, you’re starting to wind down, maybe crash around midnight…actually, no. Because there’s a free “concert” going on outside, put on by a local entrepenuer who wants to someday be a professional deejay and is probably figuring he needs a little practice. Earlier in the evening I walked by this guy and his heavily-amped speaker system, which was mounted on a wooden table. Tallish, 16 or 17, beefy, pot belly. Backwards baseball cap, T-shirt, long shorts, basketball shoes..the usual outfit. Remember the good old days in the ’70s and ’80s when ghetto blasters provided endless musical merriment in all the parks?

Nobody remembers or cares about John Avildsen’s Neighbors (’81), a John Belushi vs. Dan Aykroyd comedy which played fast and loose (to put it mildly) with Thomas Berger’s same-titled novel, described on the Wikipage as “a satire of manners and suburbia, and a comment on emotional alienation with echoes of the works of Franz Kafka.” Everyone called it lowbrow and not that funny. But compare the tone of the trailers for the Avildsen vs. the upcoming Nicholas Stoller film with Seth Rogen, Zac Effron and Rose Byrne. The former almost seems like an Ernst Lubitsch film compared to the newbie, which seems like a metaphor for the downmarket mongrelization of mainstream comedy.

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Variety‘s Peter Debruge has gone apeshit for Ron Howard‘s Rush, which will have its big debut at the Toronto Film Festival. “Too often Howard has played it safe, but here his choices are anything but obvious. He embraces the power of music to heighten the experience, but goes the opposite direction that one might expect with it, using Hans Zimmer’s cello-driven score to steer things to a deeper place. The same goes for the story itself: Who else would have imagined Formula 1 as an appropriate conduit for existential self-examination? And yet, you’ve seldom felt more alive in a movie theater than you will experiencing Rush.”