A couple of hours ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg posted news that the Oscar chances of Beasts of the Southern Wild have been compromised by the Screen Actors Guild on a technicality. The Fox Searchlight release “has been ruled ineligible for the Screen Actors Guild Awards because it was not made under the terms of SAG Low Budget Feature Agreement, which mandates the use of professional actors.

“Out of financial necessity (he had a budget of just $1.3 million) and a desire for the greatest possible sense of authenticity,” director Benh Zeitlin “used locals who had never acted before and therefore were not SAG members,” Feinberg reports.

Feinberg calls this “a small roadblock” in front of the film’s Oscar chances “because the SAG Awards sometimes mirror the Academy’s selections” but I don’t know. I think this is more of a mid-sized to significant roadblock. This is a movie, remember, that was being called an “iffy” contender already. I think it should definitely be a Best Picture contender plus a Best Actress for whatsername…Quvenzhane Wallis…for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress. Forget the guy who plays her dad…too much yelling and boozing.

David Poland, a fan of Anna Karenina, too often takes things in a glib, chit-chatty, hoo-hoo direction, but this sitdown isn’t too bad. I’m seeing it again next Tuesday night, and after all the fighting I can’t wait to re-encounter.

Last Friday morning I posted a shot of the new Zero Dark Thirty one-sheet, but later that day a Sony rep asked me to take it down because of an exclusivity deal they have with Yahoo! Movies. Sure, I said, but if you don’t want people to discuss a new poster don’t hang it in the lobby of the Jimmy Stewart building.

Zero Dark Thirty is the second end-of-the-year film that explains how a possibly dodgy secret operation involving the hoodwinking of Islamic militants was pulled off. The first film in this vein is/was Argo. We had a goal, we put one over, they didn’t see us coming and wham!…we nailed it.

Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci has posted a lively, defiant and probably necessary response to Andrew O’Hehir‘s 9.28 Salon piece titled “Is Movie Culture Dead?” and subtitled “The era when movies ruled the culture is long over. Film culture is dead, and TV is to blame.”

“I think what’s bugging O’Hehir is that the ‘chattering class’ isn’t made up of the same people as in 1977 ],” Faraci writes at midpoint. “I get the mourning for a lost niche, for a specialization democratized out of existence. It’s happening with geek culture right this very minute. All of a sudden liking the third highest-grossing movie of all time makes you ‘a geek.’ That sucks. It sucks seeing the doorman overwhelmed and losing your special place in the world.

“What O’Hehir is missing on a larger scale, though, is that the era of big, centralized culture is over. The culture is fragmented in a zillion pieces, and there’s nobody leading the way anymore. There’s very little that unites us around the water cooler. Even the biggest TV hits bring in a fraction of the ratings of old shows. The same goes for movies.

“I’m not sure that there ever will be another driving cultural force the way that movies were in the 1970s. So yes, I’ll give O’Hehir the point that film was more culturally central in the 70s than it is now. Yes, to be intellectually hip you had to see the smart movies, the foreign movies, the interesting movies. But unless you long for a culture of poseurs, who cares? And beyond that, there is no cultural center anymore.

“The fracturing of the culture comes as a result of the digital revolution; now we’re living a la carte entertainment lifestyles.

“I complain about the internet a lot, and I’m not the biggest proponent of virtual democratization, but I like the way the web has taken the conversation out of the hands of the elite and let everybody have a say. Not everybody’s say is worth listening to, but just because someone was at the right cocktail parties in Manhattan also doesn’t make their say worth hearing. I think that maybe O’Hehir should try listening to those outside of the New York Film Festival crowd, though, before writing them off as ‘fanboys.’

Another worthwhile Faraci observation: “Frankly, any year that has Holy Motors and Cloud Atlas in it is the wrong year to call time of death on film culture. I know we’re going to see thrilling discussion coming from those films. I can’t even find a mention of The Master in [O’Hehir’s] piece.”

Wells to Faraci: I don’t want to hear any bitching about how I’ve excerpted too much of your piece. I’ve posted maybe 25% of what you wrote, if that.

Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg and I talked for an hour last night about everything. Scott and I talk the same language so it was a good fit. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link. We talked about End of Watch, early screeners being sent out (Arbitrage screeners should be mailed ASAP), Silver Linings Playbook pushback (which Scott may or may not be a part of) and yaddah yaddah.

I guess I’m being extra-assertive about posting Oscar Poker chats in order to assert that I almost feel liberated without Sasha because now I don’t have to sidestep the fact that she hasn’t seen this or that new film because she had to do something with her daughter.

My sound-editing skills are obviously nothing to shout about, but I probably have the ability to learn a thing or two. (Sasha really has her skills down in this regard, and her taste in music is far more sophisticated than mine.) I still haven’t figured out how to upload to iTunes but I’ll get that down eventually.

I hit my local WeHo Pavilions last night for provisions, and in less than five minutes I had donated my iPhone 4S (which I’d just bought a new battery for at the cost of $60-something bills) to some aisle-wandering sociopath. I do stuff like this. I’ll place an item of value on a shelf or a tabletop while distracted by some fleeting, absent-minded-professor thought, and then I’ll walk away and it gets stolen or it doesn’t. Most of the time the item will get turned in and everything’s cool, but not last night.

I ran anxiously and somewhat angrily from aisle to aisle in search of the damn thing, of course…pant, pant. Within three or four minutes I had asked the Pavilions manager to call my number in hopes that I might hear the distinctive ring (20th Century Fox fanfare) but no dice.

I went out to my car to see if I’d left it on the seat, and on my way back in I noticed a swarthy. greasy-looking homeless type on his way out without groceries. Who goes into a Pavilions and leaves from the entrance door without bags of food? No-accounts looking to gnosh on whatever they can find in the deli department, right? An instinct told me to stop this guy or ask him to empty his pockets (or even tackle him and search his pockets) but that would have made me look bad with the cops being called so I let it go, but I’m guessing there’s at least a 50% or 60% chance that he was the guy.

The phone was probably in reach and reclaimable, in short, but my inner Lee Marvin wimped out. In a sense this is the story of my life.

I did the tracking thing with that iPad3 “find your lost iPhone” software, but the phone has to be using wifi to be located and so far it hasn’t shown up. At least the thief (possibly that icky-looking greaseball) is smart enough to know you have to turn off a stolen phone so it can’t be tracked. I could go on Craig’s List today and respond to every new ad for a used iPhone 4S with a Westside phone number, I suppose, but the odds are not in my favor.

Now I’ll have to buy a new one so I guess I’ll get the effing iPhone 5, which I hate the idea of because I’ll have to buy three charging connectors besides. I have to have three so I don’t have to switch off between my three computers. I feel angry like Elvis Costello in the late ’70s.

I responded to the news about Seth MacFarlane hosting the 85th Oscars with a “who? Oh yeah, yeah, right…Ted director, Family Guy guy….got it.” It was a little more exciting than if Todd Louiso had been named to host but somewhat less exciting if, say, Judd Apatow or David Gordon Green had been chosen. No, take that back — McFarlane is better than Green. But he’s less enticing than Jon Stewart or David Letterman.

McFarlane was hired because Ted (which he directed, produced, co-wrote and voiced) made $434 million worldwide. He’s a noodnik voice actor and sometime impressionist-comedian (he was moderately okay on SNL a while back and is always terrific on Real Time with Bill Maher), but he’s basically a behind-the-camera guy — let’s be frank. If you ask me he’s more of a hip and irreverent conversationalist than a “performer” per se. If you were rolling in the aisles as you watched Ted, you might be down with this. A voice is telling me that Hitfix guys Kris Tapley and Drew McWeeny are levitating with delight…no?

This is about as GenX and GenY-friendly a choice as you can imagine. McFarlane is the un-Billy Crystal — a no-offense-but-fuck-you choice for all the squares and boomers out there who’ve never watched Family Guy.

I was going to call this post “Irreverent, Buttfuck-Approving, 9/11 Lampooning Atheist To Host Oscars” but I thought better of it.

McFarlane was booked on the first flight that hit the South Tower on 9.11 (i.e., the one that Berry Berenson was on). A Family Guy plot came out of that:

Bill O’Reilly: “This guy is a hater…I think you gotta call him out”:

I believe his line about refusing to ever leave the Republican party, but not about his having not finally decided who to vote for in the Presidential election. If he’s a diehard Republican than else is there to do except vote for Romney? Why am I even talking about this? He won’t matter until he makes a good film again. Which is highly unlikely.

Michael Tolkin‘s The Rapture will have a one-night engagement at Hollywood’s American Cinematheque on Thursday. It’s a thinking-man’s horror flick, and one of the most chilling and profoundly creepy films ever — a perfect bitchslap directed at Godfreaks and the religious right.

“The Rapture weirded me out on a level that I didn’t fully comprehend at first,” I wrote a year and a half ago. “So much so that I’ve only watched it twice. It’s not what you’d call a ‘pleasant’ film, but it sinks in and spreads a strange malevolent vibe — a profound unease, disquiet — into your system.

“Mimi Rogers hit her absolute career peak playing a telemarketing swinger-turned-convert who (a) sends her daughter to God with a bullet in the head and then (b) tells God to shove it when He/She is levitating Rogers up to Heaven during the finale.

“David Duchovny and Will Patton costarred. I was so taken by Patrick Bauchau‘s performance as a libertine that I sought him out at a party sometime in the late ’90s and wound up interviewing him at his Hollywood home.”

Sasha Stone and I have decided to go our separate ways, and poor Phil Contrino has been left high and dry. I won’t go into details, but Sasha and I have different intrepretations of the classic Phoebe Ephron line (which was later used by her daughter Nora) “everything is copy.” A couple of hours ago I did a solo with Marshall Fine about Life of Pi, generation gaps between critics, Anna Karenina, Manohla Dargis and related topics.

Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link. I haven’t yet figured out how to upload to iTunes so forget that for now.

“When candidates debate each other, they should debate each other. In a real debate, the participants engage, they grapple, they get into each other’s hair (metaphorically, of course). Without that clash of ideas and personalities, there’s no point in getting the two sides together on one stage.

“But in the presidential debates over the years, the rules have bizarrely permitted the candidates to ‘debate’ without actually addressing each other. Some have spent the entire night studiously avoiding eye contact.

“Their escape mechanism is the moderator, the one person on stage whom both candidates must address, in a weirdly triangulated conversation, as they work through the questions the moderator poses. So it becomes those questions, and not the candidates’ ideas or personalities, driving the discussion.

“It feels hollow. It feels forced. There’s a simple fix for this: Make these candidates talk to each other.”

“Looper felt to me like a maddening near-miss: It posits an impossible but fascinating-to-imagine relationship — a face-to-face encounter between one’s present and future self, in which each self must account for its betrayal of the other — and then throws away nearly all the dramatic potential that relationship offers. If someone remakes Looper as the movie it could have been in, say, 30 years, will someone from the future please FedEx it back to me?” — from Dana Stevens‘ 9.28 Slate review.

“The biggest disappointment, for me, is that the great haunting concept of an older guy (Bruce Willis) being able to give counsel to his younger, stupider, less wise self (Joseph Gordon Levitt) has been almost completely ignored, and that’s really a shame.” — from my 9.6 review, titled “Looper Dooper.”

Notice I didn’t say this potential was completely ignored; I said it was “almost completely” ignored. It was toyed and fiddled with but not really developed.