I’ve been a Separation loyalist since Telluride, and I intend to ride it home all the way to the end of the trail. What’s important right now is to launch a respectful but adamant counteroffensive against those Academy schmoes (one of whom I was told about a couple of weeks ago) who have said “meh” after seeing it. These are the same people who said “meh” to Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.

The BBC will produce The Girl, a 90-minute TV drama about Alfred Hitchcock‘s creepily obsessive relationship with Tippi Hedren during the making of The Birds (’63) and Marnie (’64). Too-short Toby Jones will play Hitch and Sienna Miller will play Hedren.

Herdren was an early ’60s personification of the icy blonde type that Hitchcock always had a thing for, going back to Grace Kelly. (“There are hills in that thar gold,” he reportedly said upon spotting Kelly in a gold lame gown.) He spent much time and effort grooming Hedren into a big-name star (at least in his own Universal realm) but he also wanted…how to say it?…a little action on the side. Hedren, appalled, wouldn’t play along, and Hitch more or less smothered her career in revenge.

Julian Jarrold will direct the script by Gwyneth Hughes; Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto will consult. Imelda Staunton will play Hitch’s wife, Alma. Penelope Wilton will play Hitch’s longtime assistant Peggy Robertson.

The BBC factor means this telepic will probably actually get made, which is more than you can say for that Birds remake, a Universal-related, Michael Bay-developed feature that was finally dumped or died of its own accord. Or Number 13, that young Alfred Hitchcock movie set in the 1920s London that was going to star Dan Fogler.

On the other hand Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, which has been in development hell at Paramount for four years (I read the script in ’08), has been adopted by Fox Searchight. Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren will play Hitch and wife Alma.

As Grantland‘s Mark Harris sagely explains, half of the 2011 Best Picture contenders are about faux-nostalgia (sentiment, storybook gauze, the way we were) and the other half are actually about real adults (and particularly parents) grappling with life in the 21st Century…whoa!

The Faux Nostalgies (which I’m calling the Soft Sappies) are The Artist, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, War Horse and The Help. (I don’t agree with Harris’s opinion that The Tree of Life belongs in this group.) And the Slapped-In-The-Face-With-Reality contenders include Moneyball, Margin Call, The Descendants, Contagion, Ralph Fiennes‘ contemporized Coriolanus and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Harris doesn’t include Win Win in the latter group, but obviously it belongs. Ditto Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (even though it’s a ’70s piece) and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

It’s my view that Oscar-race predictors and Academy members who are basically hiders and weak at heart — the ones who take extra-long showers as a way of re-experiencing the warmth and security of their mother’s womb, and who listen to soft classic rock when driving — tend to favor the Soft Sappies while the stronger, sharper and more audacious-minded are the primary fans of the 21st Century Reality flicks. There are wrinkles and exceptions to every rule, but you know that’s how it is out there…you know it.

“The Artist and Hugo, are both being hailed as odes to the early days of cinema,” Harris writes. “But really, they’re not. The Artist tells you everything it knows about the painful transition from silents to talkies in its first ten minutes: It’s an undeniably charming but extremely slight comedy-drama that mimics the most basic elements of silents (they were black-and-white! The screen wasn’t wide!), but seems more engaged by their poignant quaintness than by the visual language, wit, beauty, complexity, or psychological richness of the movies it purports to honor.

“And as enchanting as it can be to enter the glittering, hermetically sealed but vividly three-dimensional toychest-train-station universe that Martin Scorsese has created in Hugo, there is something slightly self-adoring about the story it tells. Hugo is not a valentine to the dawn of movies — it’s a valentine to people who send those valentines, a halo placed lovingly atop the heads of cinephiles and film preservationists. (And, not incidentally, film critics and Oscar voters.)

“I’m all for venerating old movies, and if I’m a bit resistant to the allure of The Artist and Hugo, it may be because they practically grab you by the lapels and order you to feel a childlike sense of wonder, goddammit! But as the plot of a third Best Picture contender, Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris, reminds us explicitly, nostalgia for values you never actually held from an era you yourself didn’t live through isn’t really nostalgia — it’s sentimentality.”

Boiled down, Dave Itzkoff‘s 12.4 N.Y. Times piece about duelling Arkansas murder case documentaries reports how producer Peter Jackson and director Amy Berg‘s West of Memphis, a doc that will screen at Sundance 2012, has muscled in on the investigative territory that documentarians Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky have been mining for 15 years.

Berlinger and Sinofsky have made three docs — Paradise Lost: The Murders at Robin Hood Hills (’96), Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (’00) and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (due to premiere on HBO in January 2012) about wrongly convicted Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., a.k.a., the “West Memphis Three“.

I’ve only seen the latter, but all three delve into the 1994 murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, and cast doubts about their guilt and the credibility of witnesses and evidence.

And yet Jackson, Itzkoff reports, has been following the case of the trio since 2005, and financed (along with wife Fran Walsh) an investigation that “yielded new findings that might have led to a new evidentiary hearing or even a new trial” if not for a plea deal accepted by Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley that resulted in their freedom. So it’s not like Jackson has no territorial rights in this matter, so to speak.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo director David Fincher spoke this morning with Miami Herald critic-reporter Rene Rodriguez about David Denby‘s embargo-busting review of his film in the current edition of The New Yorker. Tattoo producer Scott Rudin responded by banning Denby from future press screenings of his films, including “the Daldry.”

“I think Scott [Rudin]’s response was totally correct,” Fincher said. “It’s a hard thing for people outside our business to understand. It is a bit of a tempest in a teapot. But as silly as this may all look from the outside — privileged people bickering — I think it’s important. Film critics are part of the business of getting movies made. You swim in the same water we swim in. And there is a business to letting people know your movie is coming out. It is not a charity business — it’s a business-business.

“This is not about controlling the media. If people realized how much thought goes into deciding at what point can we allow our movie to be seen, they would understand. There are so many other things constantly screaming for people’s attention. I started shooting this movie 25 days after I turned in The Social Network. We have been working really hard to make this release date. And when you’re trying to orchestrate a build-up of anticipation, it is extremely frustrating to have someone agree to something and then upturn the apple cart and change the rules — for everybody.

“Embargoes…okay, if it were up to me, I wouldn’t show movies to anybody before they were released. I wouldn’t give clips to talk shows. I would do one trailer and three television spots and let the chips fall where they may. That’s how far in the other direction I am. If I had my way, the New York Film Critics Circle would not have seen this movie and then we would not be in this situation. I would be opening this movie on Wednesday Dec. 21 and I would have three screenings on Tuesday Dec. 20 and that would be it.

“That’s where [Rudin] and I get into some of our biggest fights. My whole thing is ‘If people want to come, they’ll come.’ But they should be completely virgin. I’m not of the mind to tell anybody anything about the movie they are going to see. And that kind of thought is ridiculous in this day and age. But by the same token, when you agree to go see something early and you give your word — as silly as that may sound in the information age and the movie business — there is a certain expectation. It’s unfortunate that the film critic business has become driven by scoops.

“Ultimately, movies live or die by word of mouth anyway. All that other stuff doesn’t matter. Nothing against film criticism. I think film critics are really valuable. But the most valuable film critics are usually those people who come see a movie with their Blackberry and then text their friends ‘It sucked.’ or ‘It’s awesome. You should see it.’ You know what I mean?”

There’s nothing like seeing a movie “completely virgin,” or almost virgin. In the pre-internet days of the early ’80s, when I was based in New York, I was fortunate enough to catch long-lead screenings of films I knew relatively little about. What a great thing…but those days are long gone.

In the view of Michael Morpurgo, author of the ’80s War Horse children’s novel, Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse delivers “a wonderfully paced story.” He admits to N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Melena Ryzik that “it’s quite slow to begin with, and I’m sure it will be criticized for that. But it should be, because you have to establish the relationship between the boy and the horse, the boy and the landscape.

“And then you find, rather like the walk of a horse, the story begins to trot. And it trots when the horse joins the army and goes off to war, and then when the action starts, it begins to canter, and then you have the terrible gallop at the end.”

Honestly? That sounds pretty good. But then Morpurgo is only talking about structure and narrative pacing.

“Wow! I’m shocked, shocked that the elections in Russia are a fraud. That’s so much worse than an election where, with the complicity of the Supreme Court, a moron was put into the White House. And certainly worse than a group of corporate-owned candidates who are each trying to prove he or she can out-hate the others.” — “Markk” from Seattle, responding to David M. Herszenhorn‘s 12.6 N.Y. Times story about reported election-rigging by the Vladimir Putin gang. The story is titled “Jailing Opposition Leaders, Russia Moves to Quell Election Protests.”

Sandbagged again by another militant liberal! Elijah isn’t projecting from the diaphragm when he speaks to Representative Bachmann, but he’s saying that his mom is gay and she doesn’t need fixing.

Gary Oldman‘s performance as George Smiley, John LeCarre‘s legendary British intelligence maestro, in Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Focus Features, 12.9) is, I submit, a classic less-is-more performance. Oldman is muted and subtle and keeps his range of facial expressions to a minimum, but his silences and contemplations and (very) occasionally raised eyebrows are beautiful.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy star Gary Oldman — Monday, 12.5, 3:05 pm.

Oldman and I sat down for about 19 minutes late this afternoon at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. Here‘s the mp3.

I’ll be seeing Oldman again at tomorrow night’s Tinker Tailor premiere and at the after-party, and then at a Wednesday press luncheon.

Either you love minimalist acting or you don’t, but everyone understands that it has to be done just right. Oldman from the get-go knows exactly what he’s doing. He barely moves but oh, how he delivers! The stillness of him is sublime.

In some ways Oldman plays Smiley like Alec Guiness played him in the 1979 British-produced Tinker Tailor miniseries — dryly, carefully, studiously. But he uses his own voice (which he says he took from Le Carre, a.k.a. David Cornwall) and his own set of facial and body gestures, and his own quiet humor.

Oldman’s Smiley is now in the company of previously honored minimalist performances — Al Pacino in The Godfather, Part II, Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You For So Long, Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles and Tom Horn, Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain.

Who’s locked into the Best Actor race? The Descendants‘ George Clooney and Moneyball‘s Brad Pitt, for sure. And then Oldman, I believe, because of the subtlety, authority and precision. And then Michael Fassbender, I suppose, for his well-hung ice man in Shame, although I think his performance is somewhat narrow and repetitive and imprisoned, in a sense. (I know that’s the point but I still found it limiting.)

I’m not a believer in Jean Dujardin in The Artist because I found the broadness of his performance (necessary, obviously, because he’s in a silent film) a bit tiring. If you ask me the fifth slot is between Rampart‘s Woody Harrelson and Take Shelter‘s Michael Shannon. Leonardo DiCaprio‘s J. Edgar Hoover was intense and absorbing as far as it went, but the movie…I don’t know. My dream nominee is A Better Life‘s Damian Bichir, but his Spirit Award Best Actor nomination is probably as far as he can get.

Last September I called Tinker Tailor “a furrowed-brow spy film, cautious and probing and undashing, submerged in a world of half-clues and telling looks and indications…London fog and brain matter and ’70s technology…it’s just atmospherically dead-on. And that’s certainly pleasurable in itself. It’s simultaneously ambiguous and clean and masterful in the manner of a slowed-down pulse.

“Oldman’s Smiley isn’t hiding himself in the slightest, but his manner is naturally circumspect and cerebral and analytical. As a matter of professional purpose and demeanor he’s chosen to be this way, and there’s something gassy about this from an audience perspective.”

In the old days the star of a film was sometimes introduced by stealth. The camera would show a portion of his/her anatomy — a behind-the-head shot or an insert of his/her hands or a shot of walking shoes, say — but the face wouldn’t be revealed until 10 or 20 or even 30 seconds had elapsed. This told the audience, of course, that the person being concealed was at the very least a major costar, and most likely a romantic figure. And they wanted to know more.

Sean Connery was introduced this way at the beginning of Dr. No, his first 007 film. Ditto Farley Granger and Robert Walker in the opening seconds of Strangers On A Train. Vivien Leigh‘s face was partially obscured for four or five seconds during her first scene as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind.

But no one ever kept a star’s face from being shown as long as Alfred Hitchcock did during an early scene in Notorious. For a full 93 seconds he showed audiences only the back of Cary Grant‘s head. To prolong the who-is-this? effect he had costar Ingrid Bergman speak three lines to Grant, who was shown sitting down and drinking at a small party at Bergman’s home, and with Grant saying nothing in return, and not even gesturing in some way.

It’s still fascinating today. Bergman pours him a drink, sizes him up and asks if she knows him. Nothing. Then she says, “That’s okay, I like party-crashers.” And a woman dancing nearby says, “He’s not a crasher — I brought him.” And you’re thinking, “Okay, but who is he?” You’re also wondering why doesn’t he at least offer some mild little pleasantry when Bergman says, “You know something? I like you.” Does he smile or wink? No telling. All we see is the stillness and the shiny black hair. And yet it’s obvious he’s Mr. Cool. Finally the dangle ends after a minute and 33 seconds, and in the next scene the camera finally introduces that familiar cleft chin and the cow eyes and all the rest.

Here’s the clip. The back-of-the-head shot lasts from 3:06 to 4:39.

I’m mentioning this for two reasons. One, MGM Home Video is releasing a Notorious Bluray on 1.24.12. And two, stealth introductions like Grant’s in Notorious are over and done with. Ones that last a long time, I mean. Unless I’m forgetting something.

Congrats again to Tyrannosaur‘s Olivia Colman for winning the Best Actress award at the British Independent Film Award ceremony the other night, and apologies for never getting around to posting our chat at L.A.’s Hotel Standard, which happened on 11.18. Time flies and I’m sorry, but here it is.