You don’t want to hear about the lethargy and gloom affecting Sasha Stone and myself during today’s Oscar Poker recording. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond attended Monday’s Oscar Nominee luncheon, and noted in his report that Max Von Sydow, Best Supporting Actor nominee for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, got the biggest applause of all when he walked to the podium for his certificate of nomination. An indication of a possible upset victory over the favored Christopher Plummer, or a gesture of respect for a 50-year veteran?

The next two biggest-applause winners, says Hammond, were The Help‘s Best Actress nominee Viola Davis and A Better Life‘s Best Actor nominee Demian Bichir. I’m 94% convinced that Davis has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag, but Bichir’s applause, I’m guessing, was about two things — admiration for his performance and a backslap for having landed a nomination grass-roots style (i.e., on the cheap). I’ll do backflips if Bichir wins. He probably won’t, but what a nice dream.

Update: I’ve heard some disagreement about the level of Von Sydow’s applause. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg puts it as follows: “By my ear, the loudest applause of all went to The Help‘s best actress nominee Viola Davis and best supporting actress nominee Octavia Spencer, both of whom were already regarded as the favorites in their respective categories.

“Also greeted particularly loudly: Albert Nobbs‘ best actress nominee Glenn Close and best supporting actress nominee Janet McTeer; best actor nominee Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy); best actress nominee Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), best supporting actor nominee Nick Nolte (Warrior) and best original song nominee Sergio Mendes (Rio).”

Viola Davis is always playing characters defined by their work — social worker, CIA agent, bad mom, domestic maid, space engineer, nurse, cop, policewoman. Her next two roles will be (a) a librarian helping a couple of kids deal with hauntings in Beautiful Creatures and (b) a genius recruited by the government to help defeat an alien insect race in Ender’s Game. In short, she’s in a rut.

The solution is that she needs to play a woman defined by emotion, preferably by sex and passion. Davis is 46 and if she’s going to play a role of this type, she needs to do it soon.

I mentioned this to Sasha Stone a couple of hours ago as we recorded another Oscar Poker, and it hit me that a great opportunity would be for Davis to play the maid — a sexual maid — in an American remake of Too Beautiful For You. The 1989 French original, directed by Bertrand Blier, is about a BMW car dealer (Gerard Depardieu) cheating on his beautiful wife (Carole Bouquet) with his ordinary looking temporary secretary (Josiane Balasko).

The American remake could star Brad Pitt as the car dealer, Angelina Jolie as the wife and Davis as the maid. The idea wouldn’t be that Davis is “ordinary looking” as much as an attractive but unconventional choice as an extra-marital romantic interest, certainly by classic standards.

From the director whose name is synonymous with soulless flashbang filmmaking of the lowest order, a romantic action-comedy in which Reese Witherspoon has to choose between two hot-shot suitors who happen to be spies. On the left is good-looking smoothie Chris Pine (i.e., Captain Kirk) and and on the right is Tom Hardy, a subtle and intelligent actor who’s nonetheless played three famous animals so far — Bane, Bronson and a hulking MMA fighter in Warrior.

Who is cuter? Who will be the better provider? The better dad?

Does Reese test-drive them both, so to speak, or is this a film about windowshopping? Apart from all the action crap, I mean. Does Witherspoon have it in her contact that her character will only windowshop in films of this nature? She’s a woman and a mom who’s invested in upstanding values so I wouldn’t be surprised. But what kind of traditional-values woman goes out with two guys at the same time?

This Means War opens in only eight days, and on a Tuesday — 2.14 (i.e., Valentine’s Day). I’ve asked about a screening, but it’s unlikely that anything positive could come from my seeing it. I hate all things McG.

“Sam Worthington was attached to star in This Means War, but dropped out and was replaced by Hardy,” the Wikipage says. “Bradley Cooper was also attached to star in the film, but left the project. Seth Rogen also turned down a role.”

One of the most historic red-carpet interviews of all time happened when Bert Parks, a glad-handing showbiz whore, interviewed director Joseph L. Mankiewicz before the June 12, 1963 premiere of Cleopatra, and got these three quotes: (a) “You must know something I don’t” (in response to Parks calling the film “a wonderful, wonderful achievement”), (b) “Everything connected with Cleopatra is beyond my control at the moment” and (c) “I feel like the guillotine [is] about to drop.”

The music used for this Act of Valor trailer is a problem. It tells you that the movie is some kind of amplified power-pop thing aimed at the multiplex Guidos. It suggests insubstantial realism. The film opens on 2.24.

Somebody tell me what Clint Eastwood is actually saying here. Let’s stand up and pull together? Not with the Tea Party nutters coloring the conversation. Clint has been an Eisenhower conservative almost all of his life and I respect that, but there can be no coming together with the wacko Cantor right — they’re demonizers and toxic liars and shills for the corporate malignants who have all but crippled this country.

I’ve written plenty about the problems afflicting Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Cleopatra. But the multi-region British Bluray is visually beautiful, and if you can somehow make yourself ignore the film’s elephantine, glacially-paced, dialogue-driven nature and just focus on the lavishly expensive Todd-AO splendor and the large-format clarity, it’s a nice high-def bath.

And as always, the highly intelligent “making of” doc, Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood, is more than worth the price.

I’ve been susceptible to the perceptions of UCLA film professor Howard Suber since the mid ’90s, which is when I first listened to his incisive commentary on the Criterion Collection laser discs of The Graduate, High Noon and Some Like It Hot. Three months ago I asked Suber for specially burned DVDs of these. When I returned from Santa Barbara this morning I found discs of Suber’s Graduate and High Noon commentaries laid on top of the films. Here’s a small portion of the Graduate disc:

I chose this portion because Suber points out the highly significant contributions of The Graduate‘s production designer Richard Sylbert with the black and white wardrobes and interior design, etc. There’s a lot more to this 1967 classic than just story, dialogue and performances. It’s really quite an integrated audio-visual tour de force.

The Graduate images in the clip are a third-generation dupe of an old laser disc so naturally it doesn’t hold a candle to more recent DVD and Bluray versions. I don’t know what the reason is for the skips and the speed-ups.

Suber’s latest book is called Letters to Young Filmmakers.

Leaving aside my oft-vented feelings about the Oscar worthiness The Artist, I succumbed to the charms of Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo during Saturday night’s appearance at Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre. Their visit was my final Santa Barbara Film Festival event, and it was probably the most pleasant. The word is actually “fizzy” — they gave off a kind of contact high. I sat down in my seat thinking “oh, God, here we go” and left with a very different attitude.

Tweet #1: “What I got from Dujardin and Berenice Bejo tonight was something along the lines of ‘we’re Europeans…all the praise & hoopla is fine but what do you expect us to do?’ Tweet #2: “It’s very nice to be loved and applauded, but this is all bullshit, no? It’s fine & we like it but can we get real? No?” When a reader expressed astonishment, I replied that “I’ve never said Dujardin or Bejo or The Artist aren’t likable or charming. It’s the excessive Oscar adulation I can’t stand.”

I was driven back to Los Angeles early this morning by Brigade’s Adam Kersh. We left SB at 4:30 am. I was dropped off at the corner of Riverside and Coldwater at 6 am. (Kersh had a 7 am plane to catch.) West of Memphis principal Mark Byers shared the ride.

I caught Joe Berlinger‘s Under African Skies, an okay doc about the history and legacy of Paul Simon‘s Graceland, at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. And I liked…well, went with it for the most part. But I couldn’t settle into the substance for a reason that some might find superficial. But I don’t think so.

Under African Skies has two narratives — the making of Simon’s landmark 1986 album and a 2010 South African reunion with the original musicians, and Simon coming to grips with the political blowback to Graceland. Simon was criticized for having swooped in and exploited a South African sound (and the musicians he hired to play it) for selfish or myopic careerist ends, and for ignoring a United Nations-enforced boycott against the apartheid government of South Africa.

Berlinger’s film is a decently constructed recollection and exploration as far as it goes. I felt myself drifting from time to time as the talking heads (South African musicians, engineer Roy Halee, Quincy Jones, friends and flunkies) all seemed to be reading lines from the same script, lines that recalled the elation and excitement of recording Graceland 25 years ago and the delight in everyone getting back together for some new performances, etc. The review of the political climate 25 years ago felt sufficient but rote. A sense of familiarity (we’ve all seen docs like this before) and orchestration began to gather around me like a shroud. But it played well enough. I stayed with it as much as I could.

The fact is that a factor completely out of left field kept interfering with my concentration. I don’t mean to sound cruel or cutting, but the honest truth is that Simon’s curious appearance kept messing with my head. He’s clearly had work done, and there’s something “off” and unnatural about his eyes — something faintly Asian — and his face in general, especially the area under his chin. It just doesn’t look right, and for this reason I was unable to fully settle into the film. Lord knows we all get older but there’s always some kind of rapport between a person’s appearance at age 44 or 45 (i.e., Simon’s age when Graceland was released) and 70, which Simon turned last October. He just looks oddly different, and this fact keeps competing with the other stuff. The result is an off-balance sensation. I kept telling myself to focus on the creative and spiritual, but it was a battle all the way.

Earlier today I sat down with West of Memphis director Amy Berg, former West Memphis 3 defendant and currently free-as-a-bird Damien Echols and wife Lorri Davis. We sat at an outdoor table behind Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre for a little more than 20 minutes. Echols and I talked mostly about right now and what’s coming, and only a little bit about the past. I’ve posted five or six riffs about Berg’s film since Sundance so I’ll let the mp3 speak for itself.

(l. to r.) West of Memphis director Amy Berg, Damien Echols, Lorri Davis.