There was probably no way, I suppose, for Ricky Gervais to aggressively lambast and offend the way he did during his 2011 Golden Globes hosting gig. Last night’s opening monologue plays slightly better than the second time, for whatever that’s worth. It seemed to me that people laughed a bit more last night — in 2011 a lot of them scowled or looked a bit stunned. The only person Gervais seemed to really piss off was Elton John.

7:54: All hail The Descendants for winning the Golden Globe for Best Drama-yamma-mamma! The cheer inside the Fox Searchlight party was deafening. Good thing for FS, for HE and for all Hawaiians, honorary and otherwise. A counter-surge against The Artist or just a good night in and of itself? Hugged Judy Greer, who was of course delighted.

The Fox Searchlight Golden Globes after-party adjacent to the Beverly Hilton — Sunday, 1.15, 8:50 pm.

7:47 pm: The Descendants‘ George Clooney wins for Best Dramatic Actor. Good one! Gracious speech, kudos to Pitt, Fassbender, etc. Classy guy, as always.

7:37 pm: The Artist wins, naturally, for Best Comedy or Musical, but Meryl Streep‘s Best Actress win is a bit of a shocker, as most of the know-it-alls had Viola Davis pegged. I know that Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone was stunned by this.

7:26 pm : Jean Dujardin wins for Best Actor, Comedy or Musical. Charming fellow, good jawline, nice speech…piffle.

7:18 pm : I drove down to the Beverly Hilton on the scooter, got through security, and am now drinking champagne. No, champagne cocktails! With the jovial Fox Searchlight gang.

7:13 pm: Shocker! Good shocker! Hugo‘s Martin Scorsese wins the Golden Globe for Best Director! What if anything does this signify?

6:47 pm: The Best Supporting Actress Golden Globe goes to Octavia Spencer for her performance in The Help. Which means that Viola Davis is definitely, absolutely winning for Best Actress. Right? They’re both on a roll. Blah speech by Spencer though. She just read names, names, names…nothing from the heart.

6:41 pm: All right, I’m heading down to the Bev Hilton…leaving now. A part of me would rather stay here and just watch & tweet. Eff it.

6:32 pm: The Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language film goes to — yes! — Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation. The film’s male lead, Peyman Moadi, accompanies Farhadi to the stage for acceptance, but nobody points him out. Farhadi thanks Sony Classics co-presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, calls Iranian people “truly loving”…and lets it go at that.

6:21 pm: Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris beats Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zallian‘s Moneyball screenplay? Really? Okay, whatever. I’m not going to put down Allen’s clever screenplay, but it really doesn’t have the spirit or freshness or emotional current of the Moneyball screenplay. Yes, I’m talking about what was written down.

6:18 pm: N.Y. Times reporter Brian Stelter is tweeting that Jon Huntsman is bailing out and “poised to endorse Romney.” The second part is predictable but not very admirable, I must say.

6:14 pm: I agree — the Best Animated Feature Golden Globe going to Tintin is the HFPA saying “sorry, man, but this is the best we can do” to Steven Spielberg in lieu of their inability to raise high the War Horse roof beam,

Tim Robbins‘ silvery gray hair looks really nice with his lean, tanned face against the midnight tux.

6:01 pm: Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy has gone to Michelle Williams for “that hysterical comedy” My Week With Marilyn. (Seth Rogen provided the description.) A mother first, eh?

5:51 pm: Ricky Garvais‘ decision to wear a maroon-and-black tuxedo is, to my eyes, a huge miscalculation. A sartorial nightmare. Maroon jackets, sweaters, socks, scarves, capes…all bad.

5:48 pm: The Artist composer Ludovic Bource has won a Golden Globe for Best Score. And there’s your tipoff about general HFPA Artist sentiments.

5:37 pm: I realize it’s not nice to go where I’m about to go, but…actually, I can’t. I’ve wimped out. The thought concerned Melissa McCarthy. The thought is fairly evident. Sorry but c’mon.

5:22 pm: Nobody in my sphere cares very much about Golden Globe TV awards…sorry. Tens of thousands are paying attention, and that’s fine. No disrespect intended. Wait…Kate Winslet won for Todd Haynes‘ Mildred Pierce? I care about that. Excellent work.

5:09 pm: To no one’s surprise and everyone’s approval (except for the hardcore Drive geeks), Christopher Plummer has won the Best Supporting Actor award for his performance in Beginners. And incidentally, the NBC cameras have so far delivered two shots of the Sony Classics table, and I didn’t see Corey Stoll.

The day has so far included a little writing and researching, and then a four hour hang-out at West Hollywood’s The Grove with Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone , Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas (including a recording of a one-hour Oscar Poker), and then back to the pad to bang out two articles before preparing to hit the Fox Searchlight Golden Globes viewing party at the Beverly Hilton.

Except now it’s 4:29 pm and the show starts at 5 pm so maybe I’ll hang here and watch Ricky Gervais‘s opening monologue and then head over to the party. Everything always takes more time than you figure it will…every time.

Frank S. Nugent was the reigning New York Times film critic from 1936 to 1940, and a fairly young one — 28 when he landed the job and 32 when he left it. He gradually segued into screenwriting and wrote 21 film scripts until his death in 1965 at age 57. (Obviously something befell him.) 11 of those scripts were for director John Ford, including The Quiet Man, Mister Roberts and, most notably, The Searchers.

Last night I turned to Nugent’s March 1940 review of Rebecca to get the Tooze effect out of my head, and it hit me all over again that Nugent could write like Joe DiMaggio could hit, and that he really knew the world that he lived in, and was as knowledgable about the language of film and the nature of powerful, talented types and the ins and outs of Hollywood poltics as anyone else, Manny Farber or Andre Bazin or anyone in that high-falutin’ realm included.

Savor this, and note how Nugent felt obliged to define the word “cineaste”:

“Before getting into a review of Rebecca, we must say a word about the old empire spirit. Hitch has it — Alfred Hitchcock that is, the English master of movie melodramas, rounder than John Bull, twice as fond of beef, just now (with Rebecca) accounting for his first six months on movie-colonial work in Hollywood. The question being batted around by the cineastes (hybrid for cinema-esthetes) was whether his peculiarly British, yet peculiarly personal, style could survive Hollywood, the David O. Selznick of Gone with the Wind the tropio palms, the minimum requirements of the Screen Writers Guild and the fact that a good steak is hard to come by in Hollywood.

“But depend on the native Britisher’s empire spirit, the policy of doing in Rome not what the Romans do, but what the Romans jolly well ought to be civilized into doing. Hitch in Hollywood, on the basis of the Selznick Rebecca at the Music Hall, is pretty much the Hitch of London’s The Lady Vanishes and The Thirty-nine Steps, except that his famous and widely-publicized ‘touch’ seems to have developed into a firm, enveloping grasp of Daphne du Maurier‘s popular novel. His directorial style is less individualized, but it is as facile and penetrating as ever; he hews more to the original story line than to the lines of a Hitch original; he is a bit more respectful of his cast, though not to the degree of close-up worship exacted by Charles Laughton in Jamaica Inn.

“What seems to have happened, in brief, is that Mr. Hitchcock, the famous soloist, suddenly has recognized that, in this engagement, he is working with an all-star troupe. He makes no concession to it and, fortunately, vice versa.

“So Rebecca — to come to it finally — is an altogether brilliant film, haunting, suspenseful, handsome and handsomely played. Miss du Maurier’s tale of the second mistress of Manderley, a simple and modest and self-effacing girl who seemed to have no chance against every one’s — even her husband’s — memories of the first, tragically deceased Mrs. de Winter, was one that demanded a film treatment evocative of a menacing mood, fraught with all manner of hidden meaning, gaited to the pace of an executioner approaching the fatal block. That, as you need not be told, is Hitchcock’s meat and brandy.

“In Rebecca his cameras murmur ‘Beware!’ when a black spaniel raises his head and lowers it between his paws again; a smashed china cupid takes on all the dark significance of a bloodstained dagger; a closed door taunts, mocks and terrifies; a monogrammed address book becomes as accusative as a district attorney.

“Miss du Maurier’s novel was an ‘I’ book, its story told by the second, hapless Mrs. de Winter. Through Mr. Hitchcock’s method, the film is first-personal too, so that its frail young heroine’s diffident blunders, her fears, her tears are silly only at first, and then are silly no longer, but torture us too. Rebecca’s ghost and the Bluebeard room in Manderley become very real horrors as Mr. Hitchcock and his players unfold their macabre tale, and the English countryside is demon-ridden for all the brightness of the sun through its trees and the Gothic serenity of its manor house.

“But here we have been giving Mr. Hitchcock and Miss du Maurier all the credit when so much of it belongs to Robert Sherwood, Philip MacDonald, Michael Hogan and Joan Harrison who adapted the novel so skillfully, and to the players who have re-created it so beautifully. Laurence Olivier‘s brooding Maxim de Winter is a performance that almost needs not to be commented upon, for Mr. Olivier last year played Heathcliffe, who also was a study in dark melancholy, broken fitfully by gleams of sunny laughter. Maxim is the Heathcliffe kind of man and Mr. Olivier seems that too. The real surprise, and the greatest delight of them all, is Joan Fontaine‘s second Mrs. de Winter, who deserves her own paragraph, so here it is:

“Rebecca stands or falls on the ability of the book’s ‘I’ to escape caricature. She was humiliatingly, embarrassingly, mortifyingly shy, a bit on the dowdy side, socially unaccomplished, a little dull; sweet, of course, and very much in love with — and in awe of — the lord of the manor who took her for his second lady. Miss du Maurier never really convinced me any one could behave quite as the second Mrs. de Winter behaved and still be sweet, modest, attractive and alive. But Miss Fontaine does it — and does it not simply with her eyes, her mouth, her hands and her words, but with her spine. Possibly it’s unethical to criticize performance anatomically. Still we insist Miss Fontaine has the most expressive spine — and shoulders! — we’ve bothered to notice this season.

“The others, without reference to their spines — except that of Judith Anderson’s housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, which is most menacingly rigid — are splendidly in character: George Sanders as the blackguard, Nigel Bruce and Gladys Cooper as the blunt relatives, Reginald Denny as the dutiful estate manager, Edward Fielding as the butler and — of course — Florence Bates as a magnificent specimen of the ill-bred, moneyed, resort-infesting, servant-abusing dowager.

“Hitch was fortunate to find himself in such good company but we feel they were doubly so in finding themselves in his.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at Gary W. Tooze‘s just-posted DVD Beaver review of MGM’s Rebecca Bluray (out 1.24). I respect and value the capability of Bluray to capture and deliver celluloid texture, and I know that grain is a natural component of this. But you’d have to search far and wide to find a more obsessed grain fetishist than Tooze. You can almost feel a certain erotic tumescence as he writes about grain, grain, glorious grain.

Judith Anderson, Joan Fontaine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.

I don’t want to see Rebecca DNR’ed, Gor forbid, but I’m not queer for grain either. I can guarantee you that Rebecca producer David O. Selznick and director Alfred Hitchcock never once spoke to each other excitedly about the delightful graininess of the footage they were capturing. No golden-age Hollywood cinematographer or director or producer ever did…not once. Because there was nothing to say. Grain was simply a technical, professional fact of life, and they accepted it the way Londoners accept fog and rainshowers and polar bears accept ice and snow.

I’m very much looking forward to the film-like appearance of the Rebecca Bluray — terrific. And I know that grain is what that movie is “made of”, in a very true and particular sense. But if there was some magical way to capture every last detail in Rebecca and at the same time reduce the grain somewhat, at least to the extent that the Bluray viewer wouldn’t be reminded of the fact that Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier, Judith Anderson and George Sanders are smothered in a swarm of billions of silver mosquitoes…well, that would be a preferable way to go. Because Selznick and Hitchcock weren’t aware of said mosquitoes — only Bluray viewers are. Because Bluray makes these critters seem vivid and pronounced like they never did in the old days. And I, apparently, am the only one who laments or even acknowledges this.

If either Woody Allen or Sony Classics co-presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard are reading this, please do the right thing and get Midnight in Paris costar Corey Stoll a seat at tomorrow night’s Golden Globes awards. At today’s Spirit Awards luncheon Stoll told N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” columnist Melena Ryzik that he’s been excluded from the Sony Classics table inside the Beverly Hilton ballroom.

Midnight in Paris costar and Ernest Hemingway inhabitor par excellence at today’s Spirit Awards luncheon at BOA Steakhouse. I interviewed Stoll in Manhattan a little more than three months ago.

Guys…really? Stoll is the standout supporting performer in this, one of the most successful films in the history of Sony Classics and a hallmark in Woody’s career. His Ernest Hemingway is perfect and succinct and beautiful in a way — one of the main reasons for the personal charisma and magnetism in this film. If I had anything to say about it Stoll would be one of the Best Supporting Actor nominees at the Globes and the Oscars. Ryzik, myself and dozens of others have interviewed him and praised his work. This isn’t right….c’mon.

I happened to glance earlier today at a blowup of jacket art for Paramount Home Video’s forthcoming Chinatown Bluray, and for the first time in my life I noticed that the artist gave Jack Nicholson‘s J.J. Gittes the face of a zombie. Look at those ice-cold cat eyes. He could be an alien looking to feast on flesh. All the artist had to do was insert dark green where Nicholson’s pupils are, but he deliberately went for a night-vision predator look. I’ll never be able to look at this famous image the same way again.

The Bluray’s principal commentary track sounds like a humdinger — Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne and director David Fincher.

Film Independent, the non-profit arts organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival, announced the winners of its four Spirit Awards filmmaker grants earlier today at its annual Spirit Awards Nominee Brunch held at BOA Steakhouse in West Hollywood. What does BOA stand for? Nobody knows. Best guesses: “Best of Argentina” or the initials of the restaurant chain’s secret owner whose name could be “Benicio Oscar Alvarez.”

Focus Features’ James Schamus, who at this very moment was reminding myself, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond and In Contention‘s Kris Tapley that there’s a major romantic triangle at the core of Tinker Tailor Solider Spy — Gary Oldman’s Smiley, Smiley’s wife Anne and Karla, who has urged the “mole” to have an affair with Anne in order to misdirect Smiley’s attentions.

Artist helmer Michel Hazanavicius, the presumptive winner of the 2012 Best Director Oscar, at today’s Spirit Awards event, whom interviewed in Manhattan a little more than three months ago.

Mark Duplass (whose performance I recently enjoyed in Larry Kasdan‘s Darling Companion) and Sarah Paulson hosted the event and handed out the honors.

Director-screenwriter Larry Karaszewksi, who on Thursday, 1.19, will be hosting an American Cinematheque screening of Frank Perry’s Last Summer, with Barbara Hershey dropping by for a post-screening q & a.

The Artist costar Penelope Ann Miller, her 11 year-old daughter Eloisa May. I know this shot would be bad and that I should have activated the flash to compensate for the overhead sunlight, but I didn’t. I slacked off and look what happened. Entirely my fault and not cool. Apologies.

Artist composer Ludovic Bource, who composed a good 90 minutes worth of original music vs. the six minutes of Bernard Herrmann music that Kim Novak was so pissed off about.

Winners for the remaining categories will be revealed at the 2012 Film Independent Spirit Awards, which Seth Rogen will serve as emcee. The event will happen under the big white tent on a parking lot at the beach in Santa Monica on Saturday, 2.25.12. The awards ceremony will premiere later that evening at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on IFC.

I was hoping to get Paramount chairman and CEO Brad Grey‘s attention at last night’s Golden Globes party on the Paramount lot. I wanted to shake his hand and say “thanks” for approving funding for the Shane Bluray, which, as I reported the other day, is about two-thirds of the way through to completion. But I wasn’t aggressive enough. It’s a push-push-push world out there, and you can’t just enjoy the vibe and talk to friends if you want to get things done. You have to be Johnny-on-the-spot.

The best line of the evening was from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kim Masters, who was watching Grey and his homies as they sat on a couple of couches and chit-chatted. And then suddenly they all got up and left “as one,” Masters said. A group doing things in unison is standard corporate behavior if a Top Dog is among them. He/she gestures every so slightly, and everyone in his/her peer group instantly “apes” this gesture in order to show obeisance.

I’m not judging this or being in any way snide here. I’m just as ready to follow or imitate the behavior of those who are more powerful than I and whose favor I curry as much as anyone else. As evidenced by my 11.13 food court post, I understand and concur with jungle law.

I was loving the lighting at this event. Kevin Costner was there, and I was told Jack Nicholson showed up also but I didn’t personally see him.

So my 12.23 post about the Weinstein Co.’s planned adaptation of Tracy Letts‘August Osage County possibly being in limbo with presumed costars Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts having flown the coop does not reflect how things really are, I’m pleased to report.

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond wrote a day or so ago that “the Weinstein Company’s David Glasser [says that] the long-awaited screen version of August, Osage County should be getting underway around September as both Streep’s and Roberts’ schedules seem to be clearing for then. John Wells is going to direct and Glasser said the script by playwright Tracy Letts is fantastic. Another Weinstein Oscar contender for 2013?”

So a 2007 play is going to finally hit screens in 2013…maybe. But a little voice is telling me that the Weinsteiners might have waited too long.

Because of the delicate and always volatile shifting of the zeitgeist and the general reordering of things that happens on a continuing cosmic basis, the right kind of film adaptation of a Broadway play always hits screens within three to four years (like Mike Nichols‘ 1966 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff arriving four years after the original Broadway play). If the movie version arrives five or six or seven years later something is always lost on some vague level. The things in the cultural ether that led to the writing of the original play have dissipated and floated away like pollen, or have otherwise been transformed.

I was sitting in an an orchestra seat on opening night of the 1984 Broadway production of David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross, and I can tell you it was electric and vital as blood — a play about rapacious greed just as the Reagan era Wall Street boom was kicking in. It had no fucking steak knives and it was fucking perfect. But the Al Pacino-Jack Lemmon-Alec Baldwin movie adaptation didn’t come out until 1992, at the dawn of the Clinton era. It’s a fairly good film and will always be an excellent play, but too many years had passed. The sands had shifted and it just wasn’t the same. You should’ve been there with me for that 1984 Glengarry debut. People were levitating out of their seats.

What’s the M for? The middle initial has always been H. I hope he (or should I say He?) continues to post on a wide array of topics. I’m thinking, of course, of Max Von Sydow‘s line in Hannah and Her Sisters…you know the one I mean.

I’ve never forgotten a quote that Moneyball star Brad Pitt gave to the L.A. Times last May (and which reporter Steven Zeitchik referenced in a 9.9.11 article), to wit: “I think the making of [Moneyball] is just as interesting as the movie itself.”

He was referring to the project’s prolonged and at times traumatic development, beginning with the purchasing of the rights to Michael Lewis’s book in 2003 by producer Rachael Horovitz to the shooting that finally happened seven years later under director Bennett Miller. But Pitt was mainly alluding, surely, to Sony’s June 2009 decision to abruptly pull the plug on a somewhat different version of Moneyball that Steven Soderbergh was about to direct, and how the project had to assemble all over again with Scott Rudin producing and Aaron Sorkin rewriting versions by the previously hired Steve Zallian (and then vice versa), and then Miller pulling it all together.

It’s always been a complex and challenging task to assemble a first-rate film, and some productions are more arduous or volatile than others but that’s what make a good “making of” story, right? Moneyball wasn’t easy and at times the creative principals didn’t know if it would come together or fall apart, but the various components finally kicked in and now everyone’s really proud of how it turned out, etc.

But you’d never know this angle from watching the “making of” documentary on the Moneyball Bluray, which I finally took a look at a couple of days ago. There’s no mention of Soderbergh’s name or input whatsoever — he’s the Man Who Never Was. And on some level I’m scratching my head about that.

I totally understood why no one wanted to talk about the Soderbergh chapter when Moneyball opened last fall. They wanted to sell the film they’d made and not get into the film that might have been but never was…fine. But “making of” docs on a Bluray/DVD are for posterity and history to a certain extent, and it seems strange that the Bluray Moneyball doc doesn’t just ease up and relax and just say “okay, this is how it happened…Soderbergh was on this project for a while and it didn’t pan out but he’s okay and we’re okay and everything probably turned out for the best. But it’s an interesting story.”

For all I know Soderbergh’s attorney might have told Sony that he doesn’t want his client’s involvement in Moneyball to be mentioned in the doc because it might make him look bad on some level…who knows? I just know it feels weird and incomplete to try and tell the story of the film’s production and not even mention the Soderbergh chapter.

I’ve heard that if the real story of how Moneyball came together was to be told in a documentary (or in an Indecent Exposure or Final Cut-type book) that it would be a good deal more than something “just as interesting as the movie,” as Pitt says. It would be, one insider says, “something you could go to school on…a case study in the Bonfire of the Vanities…something that only Eugene Ionesco or Paddy Chayefsky could do justice to.”