All through the sometimes depressing and occasionally scary fall election season N.Y. Times Fivethirtyeight columnist and stats guy Nate Silver chilled out the entire liberal community from Seattle to Miami, San Diego to Bangor. I slept better because of this guy. He recently projected Obama’s electoral count to be 300-plus, and he was right. Obama won all the swing states except North Carolina, had a “pretty decisive win,” etc. And yet Silver wasn’t that good last year at predicting Oscars.

During last night’s ABC election coverage Diane Sawyer was clearly not her usual self. Tipsy, slurry, feeling no pain, three sheets to the wind. Speaking as an ex-drinker, I think I know the behavior. Look at George Stephanopoulos as she gets into trouble. He’s clearly sensing what’s up.

Does Sawyer not have an assistant who’s seen Flight? What did drunk Denzel do before the big testimony scene at the end? Are you going to tell me Sawyer’s assistant couldn’t call a John Goodman-type character and have him rush over to the studio, etc.?

28 or 29 days after Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln debuted at the NY Film Festival, two days before it opens commercially and with nearly everyone in my realm having already reviewed it, my looksee finally happens Wednesday night.

President Barack Obama‘s re-re-election was called at 8:13 pm when MSNBC declared that he’d won Ohio and gone over 270 electoral votes. A little earlier than I expected. All along I predicted that Obama would squeak through to a victory….nope. Nate Silver’s arithmetic is going to prove prophetic. The popular vote, apparently, will go for Obama also — 51,504,366 (49.4%) vs. Romney’s 51,269,650 (49.1%) as of 10:10 pm Pacific. Romney’s concession speech was classy.

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“The story of this election…is demographics,” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said a little while ago. “The Republican Party has not kept up with the changing face of America. That explains what’s going on in Florida. That explains what’s going on in Colorado. That explains, frankly, what’s going on in Virginia and North Carolina. The Obama campaign was right. They built a campaign for 21st century America. The Republican Party has some serious soul-searching to do when you look at these numbers…they are getting clobbered among non-white voters.”

I voted around 3:15 pm today. I didn’t stride into the 2nd floor polling room at Le Parc Suites like Lee Marvin in Point Blank. Far from it. I walked in slowly and almost cautiously, stopping every few steps to make sure of my bearings. I spoke quietly and clearly and bent forward slightly when speaking with the somewhat elderly volunteers. In the booth I referred to a sample ballot on my iPhone, and I voted straight Democratic Lefty all the way. Back now with my MSNBC pallies. Time to shower and settle in for a fairly long night. Biggest pain-in-the-ass slowpoke states: Ohio, New Jersey (excused due to Hurricane Sandy), Florida.

The missing portion of the Lawrence of Arabia “balcony” scene, never seen by anyone, is viewable on disc #3 of the new Lawrence of Arabia 50th Anniversary “Collector’s Edition” Bluray, which will set you back $65 bills on Amazon. Here’s a brief taste of that scene. Jack Hawkins‘ dialogue was dubbed by a guy who didn’t sound much like Hawkins.

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I haven’t seen Crossfire Hurricane but I’ve fallen in love with the Bluray of Charlie Is My Darling, a 1965 black-and-white Rolling Stones-touring-in-Ireland movie that runs only 65 minutes but is, I feel, a perfect capturing of a fascinating moment in time — concise, unforced and almost mild-mannered. This is the marijuana calm before the storm, before the ’60s went mad. It’s been beautifully restored with surprisingly punchy, thumping sound.

Thanks to the guys at ABKCO for sending it along. I wasn’t expecting all that much but wow. I could watch it again and again.

Jay Bulger‘s Beware of Mr. Baker may or may not screen in Los Angeles and other pulsing cities, but it’s definitely set for a run at Manhattan’s Film Forum (11.28 to 12.11). It’ll soon screen for NY press. LA screenings are still being figured out. I always got a bigger charge out of Keith Moon‘s pounding and crashing than I did from Ginger Baker‘s, great as he was and is. Partly because Moon was crazier. But also because Moon’s snare-drum hits always struck me as metronomically and microscopically more highly charged (and occasionally even more precise) than Baker’s…just by a tad. To me great drumming isn’t about being a wild man from Borneo…it’s about hitting the beat exactly dead center, exactly right.”

Here’s an E.T. teaser of a preview of an advance trailer of an official non-trailer hors d’oeuvre for the severely troubled World War Z, the Brad Pitt/Marc Forster CG zombie movie. Reshoots, rewrites, multiple screenwriters, Damon Lindelof, hair-pulling, etc.

A Les Miserables TV spot ran this morning on MSNBC. Vivid, special — it woke me up. The finely textured 19th Century atmosphere and the exquisite, carefully composed, grimy-beautiful visual scheme is clearly top-of-the-line, but the emotional atmosphere seems to be (duhh) largely about pain, anguish and affliction more than anything else. Which isn’t necessarily what the film finally is, or what it will finally feel like.

It was observed three weeks ago that the Les Miserables material is familiar and classic and not exactly thrilling in and of itself, and that the stage musical is over 25 years old and quite traditional and retro-defaulty by today’s standards, and that Tom Hooper‘s innovation of having the actors sing live on the set is (this was a Glenn Kenny riff) doesn’t necessarily mean that the film will work splendidly. Live singing may seem to some like an exciting new approach to shooting movie musicals, but what will finally matter is whether or not Les Miserables works altogether…whether the entire working mechanism harmonizes in a way that inspires “wow, that was truly exceptional!” or “that was an entirely respectable rendering of a classic musical that was all the rage in London and Broadway back in the ’80s.”

If the latter impression dominates and Les Miserables becomes merely one of the Best Picture contenders then we’ll have an uncertain and perhaps even mysterious Best Picture race on your hands — an egalitarian race without a frontrunner or heavyweight contender, a competition among jacks and knaves and outliers without a big gorilla (or gorillas) that everyone’s looking to beat.

Yesterday Bleeding Cool‘s Brendon Connelly posted a list of 91 Regal theatres in the U.S. that will be Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbitt in HFR 3D — i.e., 48 frame-per-second and in the best-looking 3D your eyes have ever beheld — trust me. Regal is the first cinema chain to so announce.

The only L.A. location I’m spotting is downtown’s LA Live.