To me, Universal’s decision to advance the opening of Oliver Stone‘s Savages from 9.28 to 7.6 means (a) they’ve decided it has definite mainstream popcorn potential and (b) they don’t think it fulfills the requirements of a “fall movie” (however you want to define that term) to quite the same degree. I haven’t read the script but it’s basically a drug-dealing movie costarring Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch that’s about saving Blake Lively from Mexican drug cartel kidnappers. Benicio Del Toro, Demian Bichir, John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Emile Hirsch, Mia Maestro and Salma Hayek costar.

“Even The Artist‘s most vocal detractors — who would likely not be vocal at all about it under normal circumstances — would have to confess that the film is not some bloated sop to the Academy, like so many other major studio productions crafted specifically for year-end consideration,” writes AV Club‘s Scott Tobias.

“Its goals are modest, its pleasures refined — not a whiff of self-importance or middlebrow grandeur, no issues more pressing than a general appreciation of love and the cinema, and certainly no ambition to heal a nation a decade after 9/11 or credit white audiences with a behind-the-back, Ricky Rubio-style assist in ending black oppression.

“And yet the resentment is there. Late last year, in a tribute to the absurdity of cinematic riches in 2011, I expanded my Top 10 list to 20 and added another 30 Honorable Mentions. Though even I’m not quite nerdy enough to keep ranking, The Artist would likely fall somewhere toward the back half of the next 50, so quickly did it slip like sand through my fingers.

“But then, the Oscars — and to varying degrees, all awards — are not about greatness, but about consensus. And The Artist is a point of agreement, much like a bill that’s been haggled over, kicked around by powerful special interests, watered down in committee, and passed to the majority’s tempered contentment.”

Martin Scorsese, the most gifted, tireless, prolific and devout Movie Catholic director of our time, sat down last night for a longish (160 minutes, give or take) on-stage interview with Leonard Maltin, and it was some kind of beautiful and sublime to take a surface-level nostalgia trip into Martyland and to revel in 40 years of Marty memories, Marty anecdotes and Marty insights.

Murky, not-quite-focused shot of Martin Scorsese taken by yours truly from my seat.

It happened at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre from 8:20 pm to 11 pm, more or less, as part of a presentation of the American Riviera award. I sat on the right side, about six or seven rows from the front, right next to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.

“Surface-level” because a good three-quarters of Scorsese’s films, spanning over 40 years, weren’t verbally mentioned, much less discussed. This was necessary in order to keep the presentation in the vicinity of two hours, or course, but it felt like a greatest-hits primer for people who have only an ADD understanding of Scorsese’s life and career…no offense.

Maltin told me at the after-party that Scorsese himself chose the clips.

A brilliantly-cut career montage started things off, and then clips were shown from Mean Streets,Taxi Driver, Italian American, Raging Bull, The Last Waltz, Goodfellas, No Direction Home and Hugo.

The best clip was one of Muddy Waters singing “Mannish Boy” in The Last Waltz.

Honestly? The Hugo clip, shown in 3D, was by far the least intriguing one shown. It was all about Ben Kingsley‘s Georges Melies fuming at Asa Butterfield‘s Hugo, and then Hugo being chased by Sacha Baron Cohen and the Doberman through the train station, blah blah. I thought they might take a cue from people like me and show a clip from the glorious third act with those recreations of Mellies’ career, but no.

No clips were shown from Who’s That Knockin’ At My Door, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, New York, New York, The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Color of Money,

The Last Temptation of Christ (one of Scorsese’s absolute greatest), Cape Fear, Casino, Kundun, Bringing Out The Dead, Gangs of New York, Il Mi Viaggio in Italia, The Blues, The Aviator, The Departed, Shine A Light, Shutter Island, Letter to Elia or George Harrison: Living in the Material World.

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, Stone and I had natural notions about chatting with Scorsese at the after-party. But it didn’t happen. This was partly due to Scorsese’s decision to huddle in the back of the room with inner-circle homies (his wife, Hugo costar Ben Kingsley, festival honchos), partly due to our lack of hunger and aggression and partly due to the aggression of others. A trio of super-model blondes barrelled right in there and got their photos.

It was a metaphor for life, in a way — you can’t hang back in the corner and expect things to happen. You have to be direct and willful and even coarse to some extent to get what you want. Tapley, Stone and I were too respectful of Scorsese’s space, and so we missed our shot.

I asked Kingsley about why there’s still no DVD or Bluray of Betrayal, which will observe its 30th anniversary next year. I said that I’d been told it has something to do with the family of Betrayal producer Sam Spiegel refusing to accomodate would-be distributors. Kingsley said he’d heard the same thing. “I’ll look into it,” he said. And I said, “Okay, cool, but…uhm…well, how could I follow up…?” Kingsley smiled like Don “ya ponce!” Logan and said, “I’ll look into it and we’ll run into each other again at another party and we’ll see where it is!”

Tonight the Santa Barbara Film Festival will honor Martin Scorsese with its American Riviera award, starting at 8pm. Two hours of clips, chatter and showing obeisancr. A cool-cats-only afterparty will follow. If only Michel Hazanavicius, director of The Artist, had been shut down at last weekend’s DGA awards, and if Marty had won instead.

Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre — Monday, 1.30, 5:05 pm.

Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet posted earlier this afternoon about reactions to the ending of Joe Carnahan‘s The Grey, so I thought I’d kick it around also. SPOILERS AHEAD!

Some have reportedly complained about the finale being unclear, but it’s obvious that Liam Neeson gets killed by the wolves. A guy reciting macho poetry to himself (“Once more into the fray…live or die on this day”) as he faces a growling threat is surely toast. Carnahan chooses not to show anything, but its a bit like Gary Cooper anticipating death at the end of For Whom The Bell Tolls, and feeling half terrified and half exhilarated.

This is obviously a ballsy finale because it defies conventional expectations about the dominant alpha male always surviving, and I admire that. I thought Carnahan was finished after The A-Team, and then he comes back with this…impressive. Almost too impressive. Because at the same time the Grey ending is faintly irksome and unfulfilling because there’s no particular payoff or satisfaction in watching an alpha male go down. I’d become used to death, you see, with all the other plane-crash survivors getting their throats torn to shreds so it was kind of a so-whatter.

We know how survival tales play out. Black and Hispanic guys never make it to the end. Sensitive dads and brainy types also have to die. Ditto old guys. But the strongest male always makes it to the finish and gets to exhale and savor the victory against nature and the elements. So I’m asking myself what exactly is interesting about Neeson being slaughtered at the finish? And I really can’t come up with an answer.

We all want to survive and fend off predators and live another day. We understand that we’ll eventually lose the battle and die, but in stories like this we all want the tough alpha male to make it through somehow. Because if he doesn’t make it, it means that fortitude and strength and canniness are meaningless. It means that survival is mainly about luck. And a movie that tries to sell this idea is not doing anything arresting or stirring. It’s just telling me, “Well, his string ran out, and tough shit.”

By prior arrangement a cat sitter is living in my apartment until next Sunday so I won’t be able to watch these five Blurays (not to mention Amazon-purchased Blurays of The Apartment and Cleopatra) for a while. So from my room at the Hotel Santa Barbara I’ve been looking to experience these Blurays by proxy, and John Nolte‘s Big Hollywood piece on The Apartment Bluray is the best I’ve come across so far.

This is the only time in my life that I’ve felt any sense of values-based kinship with Nolte, whose conservative political views have often appalled me. But it’s never difficult to find common ground on movies with problematic people. Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was an admirer of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Foreign Correspondent, so by that standard I could probably have a nice chat with him if we could somehow meet. John McCain likes Shane, George Bush loves High Noon, etc. I’ll bet Pol Pot liked some of my all-time favorites.

What I don’t get is how an unhinged rightwing loon like Jon Voight could point to his work in Coming Home, Deliverance, Midnight Cowboy and Runaway Train and say, “That was good, I’m proud of those films, they’ll always be part of me” and still think like he does.

What world-famous director could Slate‘s Bill Wyman be talking about? Excerpts: (a) “He can’t do comedy”; (b) “He has a surprisingly weak record when it comes to eliciting great performances”; (c) “He never commits to a worldview that doesn’t ultimately have a sunny patina”; (d) “The scares, the drama, the emotional ups and downs [in his films] feel hackneyed and even mannered”; (e) “His lack of interest in narrative coherence is one of his hallmarks“; and (f) His career has ultimately become “an arc of failed promise.”

This week’s New York is largely devoted to a collection of short articles by Claude Bodesser-Akner about celebrity money. Shorter Brodesser-Akner: They make more but they have loads of expenses, the smart ones exhibit restraint, and most of them funnel their earnings through tax-friendly “loan-out” corporations. Oh, and Brangelina’s combined portfolio is worth about $270 million. And Zooey Deschanel lives reasonably .

I didn’t file last night about the SAG winners because (a) I genuinely love and worship great filmmaking and revel in the celebration of same, and therefore (b) I don’t care at all whether Pleasing But Overpraised Movie #1 (i.e., The Artist) now has a slight chance of losing the Best Picture Oscar to Pleasing but Overpraised Movie #2 (i.e., The Help).

The Spirit of 2011 (as represented by the final Oscar favorites) is virulently opposed to the Spirit of 1999 — I know that much. The two-headed Artist/Help shrek gollum isn’t fit to shine the boots of Election, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, The Insider, American Beauty, The Matrix, etc.

The final indignity came when SAG gave its Best Actor prize to The Artist‘s Jean Dujardin over The Descendants‘ George Clooney. Lord knows it’s not easy to smile and grin and tapdance like Dujardin did in The Artist, and then turn on a dime and exude anguish and depression and grow a seven-day beard as his character’s movie career goes downhill. What are Clooney’s expressions of 21st Century grief, uncertainty, vulnerability and fear in the face of death compared to that?

None of my faves are in play here, and we are in the last throes of one of the weakest, shallowest and most profoundly embarassing Oscar years in motion picture history. Did last night’s SAG wins by Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Greatest Show on Earth indicate a real possibility of it beating Mike Todd‘s Around The World in Eighty Days for the Big Prize, or is this just a fool’s dream? Either way you can bet your boots that Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil is keeping track of every last shift in intuition and sentiment among key prognosticators.

I just want to find a nice bucket at a nearby hardware store and keep it with me just in case.

This morning Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale posted the following: “I don’t have much outrage left about this year’s Oscar class, but just watching another goddamn tired Albert Nobbs clip and seeing Tilda Swinton‘s gracious recognition of her own SAG nomination and thinking about Swinton and Charlize Theron and Kirsten Dunst and Elizabeth Olsen and at least three or four other actresses more worthy of Close’s Oscar nomination and what could have been had me so irretrievably embittered all over again. What a bunch of bozos we’ve built this beat around. Or maybe we’re the bozos. Either way, it’s a waste.”

I’ve heard all the tales about certain old-time Hollywood stars preferring same-sex encounters that everyone else has. Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Cole Porter, Montgomery Clift, Randolph Scott, George Cukor, etc. But I’d never heard, frankly, that Walter Pidgeon and Spencer Tracy played in this pool, and I never knew that Vivien Leigh may have been somewhat lezzy.

(l. to r.) Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Walter Pidgeon, Spencer Tracy.

There are many such stories, in any case, in a new Old Hollywood tell-all book called “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars,” which was profiled in a 1.29 N.Y. Times story by Brooks Barnes. (It was also described in a 5.20.11 Entertainment Weekly piece by Adam Markovitz.)

Based on the recollections of 88 year-old Scott Bowers, a one-time arranger of sexual services (some straight but mostly gay) from the late ’40s to the early ’80s, and written by Lionel Friedberg, the memoir is being published by Grove Press and is set for release on 2.14.

The last book to explicitly spill in this fashion, to my recollection at least, was Kenneth Anger‘s “Hollywood Babylon,” which was published in 1981.

“A lot of what Mr. Bowers has to say is pretty shocking,” Barnes writes. “He claims, for instance, to have set Hepburn up with ‘over 150 different women.'”

The book sounds like it might be credible. Barnes quotes Vanity Fair writer and documentarian Matt Tyrnauer (Valentino: The Last Emperor) saying the following: “If you believe him, and I do, he’s like the Kinsey Reports live and in living color.” Barnes himself writes that “perhaps it’s hard to look at Mr. Bowers today — an elderly man with sloped shoulders and a shock of unruly white hair — and believe that a half-century ago he was sought out by some of the most handsome men to have ever strutted through Hollywood. But after some time with him, the still-sparkling blues and the impish smile help convince you that he could have definitely had seductive powers.”

Bowers’ story “has floated through moviedom’s clubby senior ranks for years,” Barnes writes. “Back in a more golden age of Hollywood, a guy named Scotty, a former Marine, was said to have run a type of prostitution ring for gay and bisexual men in the film industry, including A-listers like Cary Grant, George Cukor and Rock Hudson, and even arranged sexual liaisons for actresses like Vivien Leigh and Katharine Hepburn.

(l) 21 year-old Scott Bowers in 1944, and (r.) the 88 year-old 2012 version.

“A $20 bill, given as a tip, according to Mr. Bowers, bought his services in the beginning. That was 1946, and he was 23. As Mr. Bowers tells it, he stumbled into his profession by accident. Newly discharged from the Marines after fighting in the Pacific during World War II, Mr. Bowers got a job pumping gas at the corner of Van Ness Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, not far from Paramount Pictures.

”’One day Walter Pidgeon (Mrs. Miniver) drove up in a Lincoln two-door coupe, according to the book, and propositioned Mr. Bowers, who accepted.

“Soon, word got around among Pidgeon’s friends, and Mr. Bowers, from his base at the station, started ‘arranging similar stuff’ for some of Bowers’s more adventurous friends.

“Mr. Bowers writes that, in addition to his gay clients, he also gained a following among heterosexual actors like Desi Arnaz, who used him as a type of matchmaking service. Mr. Bowers, who says he personally ‘prefers the sexual company of women,’ says he never took payment for connecting people like Arnaz with bedroom partners.”

Here are some Amazon-provided excerpts from the opening pages: