Drive‘s awards consultant on the “seemingly monumental oversight” that resulted in Albert Brooks not being included among SAG’s the Best Supporting Actor nominees, by way of Movieline‘s (and more particularly Oscar Index’s) Stu Van Airsdale: “Thank you for all of your shout-outs to Albert Brooks on Twitter and in your analyses of the SAG nominations in regards to his not being recognized today. We remain confident that the Supporting Actor race still boils down to a two-man showdown between Albert and Christopher Plummer.” In other words, calm the fuck down.

Update: This isn’t working. The Globe producers took forever to finally get started and the cab for my flight is waiting outside. But the most nominated contender is apparently George Clooney with multiple Ides of March noms on top of his expected Best Actor nom for The Descedants.

The Ides elbow apparently resulted in the Best Motion Picture, Drama nom tally rising to six instead of the usual five. The six are The Ides of March, The Descendants, War Horse, Moneyball, The Help and Hugo.

And I’m pretty sure I heard Rooney Mara‘s name mentioned this morning.

My Virgin flight leaves at 7:40 am and arrives at JFK…something like 4 pm or thereabouts. Wifi all the way plus a viewing of Margaret.

This Fandor video — produced, written and cut by Kevin B. Lee — explores a persistent Steven Spielberg signature that has been used, over and over and over, for close to 40 years. For me it provides an understanding of a kind of hacksmanship. I fell in love with Spielberg’s awe-face when I first saw Close Encounters in ’77 — we all did — but after a decade or two I got sick of it. Haven’t we all by now? No, argues Lee — “Spielberg face” is our own.

Note to chronic complainers: Lee’s video was uploaded yesterday and I thought it was worth kicking around…that’s all.

The top-of-the-page reaction to this morning’s SAG nominations from The Guardian‘s Sarah Hughes: “The Screen Actors Guild exists in an entirely different reality from the rest of the world. This is the only explanation for their frankly bizarre nominations. [The organization] seems to be going out of its way to reward the mediocre or well-known at the expense of the interesting.”

Megan Fox: “A ruby? Is this is a joke? Am I a Kardashian?” Sasha Baron Cohen’s bearded dictator: “Of course not — you’re much less hairy.”

Fox Searchlight’s L.A. publicists didn’t invite me to their recent Margaret screenings on the lot, and they’re not sending out screeners and it’s not playing theatrically in New York or Los Angeles but somehow or some way I’ll eventually see it. Hey, Kenneth Lonergan — I’m in NYC from 12.15 (tomorrow) through 12.26. Let me know if you hear of any showings.

Everyone knows the background but for those who don’t, here’s a just-posted Margaret summary from N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis: “To recap briefly, Mr. Lonergan had a difficult time finishing the movie; received editing help from [Martin] Scorsese; entered into legal wrangling; and a 2 hour 29 minute cut — not Mr. Lonergan’s longer preferred cut — received a cursory, perhaps contractually obligated theatrical release by Fox Searchlight.

“It was reviewed, somewhat favorably, if often with hesitations and qualifications, and then disappeared after four weeks only to become the subject of a passionate campaign to have it reshown to critics for awards voting.

“I saw the movie finally a few weeks ago and was surprised by how much I liked it, despite its unevenness. I really admire its ambition. It makes such a stark contrast to so much American independent cinema, less in terms of budget and production scale than in its towering ambition toward that most fascinating subject: another human being. Part of what Mr. Lonergan has in mind is nothing less than the inner life of a teenager, Lisa (Anna Paquin): not just her boy problems and mother troubles but the entirety of her being at a certain moment in post-Sept. 11 time on the Upper West Side, New York, the United States, the World, the Universe.

A.O. Scott: “Margaret is most certainly a movie that fights, like its young heroine, to free itself from received wisdom and genre conventions. It tries to take account of that feeling of bigness, of mystery, that lurks within ordinary experience. I’m afraid it scores, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. There are scenes as wild and insightful as anything on screen this year: the fatal bus accident that sets the story in motion; the awkward, funny, ruthlessly serious sex scene involving Ms. Paquin and Kieran Culkin; the angry, precocious classroom political debates.

“But then, after about 90 amazing minutes, it all falls apart. The writing becomes more shrill, the scenes choppier, the themes at once hectically muddy and overemphatic. And a story that seemed so wonderfully expansive dwindles back into anecdote.”

Yesterday the Richmond Times Dispatch posted a Thomas Hoffman photo of Daniel Day Lewis in costume and makeup as Abraham Lincoln, walking on or near an outdoor Lincoln set with director Steven Spielberg. The shot was taken near the Richmond state capitol on 12.8.

Slashfilm‘s Russ Fischer posted the same earlier today.

The new 100th anniversary Paramount logo uses the same old Paramount mountain, of course, except at a much higher altitude, as indicated by extra clouds hovering at the base. It’s now a remote K2 or Everest-like peak surrounded by sub-arctic air, accessible only to professional climbers. The previous incarnation indicted a similar realm but with higher oxygen levels. The Gulf & Western logo of the ’80s was a mountain you could climb and maybe have a nice picnic on the way up the slopes.

What does it say about the awards-prognostication racket when nobody except yours truly (and, okay, Sasha Stone and Kris Tapley to some extent) was even toying with the possibility of A Better Life‘s Demian Bichir winning any kind of official Best Actor recognition, and then all of a sudden the Screen Actors Guild hands him a Best Actor nomination this morning?

A Better Life‘s Demian Bichir at a Los Angeles Film Festival party last summer, and as the “illegal” tree surgeon in Chris Weitz’s drama.

I’ll tell you what it means. It means that the Oscar-predicting smarty-pants set (i.e., the “Oscarologists,” as Tom O’Neil calls them) aren’t as attuned to the underlying currents as they’d have you believe. Their insect antennae has obviously been on-target a good percentage of the time, but they’re basically talking to themselves and sniffing each other asses. At the very least the Bichir nomination proves that they’re not getting out there and sniffing the asses of SAG members a la shoe-leather reporting.

Update from Sasha Stone: “Both Kris Tapley and I both were championing him. I predicted him to win in a last minute ‘no guts no glory’ on my site last night. Anyone reading it would have seen that. I’ve been campaigning for him for a while now to get attention.” Wells response: I apologized eariler today in advance for any overlooking of anyone who was on the Bichir train. “I try to read everything and everyone all day long and I didn’t see jack, but maybe I’m wrong,” I wrote. “I’m ready to amend this piece at a moment’s notice.”

I wasn’t expecting Bichir to be nominated this morning. Not a chance. I said a few days ago that a Best Actor Spirit award was probably his best shot. But the bottom line is that I don’t care that much about taking the pulse of the town and trying to predict this or that. In all modesty I believe that the town should be taking my pulse and giving serious consideration to my favorite contenders, and not the other way around.

I kept Demian Bichir’s name in my Oscar Balloon box (as a “special dispensation”) all these weeks because I think Bichir is an exceptional actor and a really nice guy, and because I felt all along that he’d delivered an exceptionally moving performance — a portrait of a disenfranchised laborer who nonetheless has dignity and resolve.

I just think there’s something a little bit lacking in the observational abilities of the Oscar prognosticators to have not even said “maybe….maybe this guy has a shot.”

This morning’s Screen Actors Guild nominations delivered ecstatic career boosts to a few surprise nominees (especially A Better Life‘s Demian Bichir…a longtime HE guy!) as well as to the highly deserving Jonah Hill for his supporting performance in Moneyball. Hooray! Hats in the air! But the noms also delivered stunning setbacks to critically favored contenders who were presumed to be all but locked.

Drive‘s Albert Brooks was blown off for a Best Supporting Actor SAG nomination and yet Armie Hammer and his seven or eight pounds of old-man makeup in J. Edgar got in? Hammer’s performance as Clyde Tolson was actually steady and convincing in Clint Eastwood‘s film, but where are the priorities? What was the SAG membership thinking in ignoring Brooks? Punish him because his toupee-wearing character stabbed too many guys?

Same thing with Kenneth Branagh getting a Best Supporting Actor nomination for playing Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn. A decent performance, for sure, but not exactly worthy of cartwheels in the lobby or going into convulsions. When Branagh is eulogized at his funeral 30 or 40 years from now no one is likely to say, “And my God, what a moment of shining glory when he played Sir Laurence Olivier! The clouds parted!”

And Nick Nolte gets nominated for saying “c’mon…c’mon…gimme a chance….another chance, c’mon…I’m sorry…I don’t drink anymore….let me be your dad again” over and over and over and over again in Warrior?

And that assessment about Glenn Close getting weaker and “skating on thin ice” is out the window now with her Best Actress SAG nom. Clearly, the membership believes she’s due the honor of a nomination despite the fact that there hasn’t exactly been a torrent of praise for her Albert Nobbs performance. This is almost entirely a “we love you, Glenn” thing, and that’s fine.

We all knew SAG would ignore Andy Serkis‘ brilliant performance in Rise of the Planet of the Apes because they’re afraid of mocap performances the way the apes in 2001 were initially afraid of the monolith. They also blew off Patton Oswalt‘s supporting performance in Young Adult…a shame.

SAG members are basically middle-of-the-road milquetoasts. They go with their like-dislike instincts and rarely praise “challenging” performances. Michael Shannon‘s critically praised performance in Take Shelter was ignored because SAG members are unsettled by loony-tune types. And they blew off Charlize Theron‘s performance in Young Adult because she played a deranged and hateful bitch and they don’t want those vibes in their head…end of story. Michael Fassbender‘s Shame performance was snubbed because he played a chilly, diseased Martian sex addict.

Or maybe it was because Theron and Shannon and Fassbender didn’t work the party-and-screening circuit as much as they could have…who knows?

I have to add that the preponderance of SAG nominees from The Help and The Artist (as indicated by the Best Supporting Actress nomination for The Artist‘s Berenice Bejo…a definite coattails thing) made it depressingly clear that a significant portion of the industry is once again looking to embrace feel-good emotionality as the top criteria in determining Best Picture.

The Best Picture Oscar going to The King’s Speech last year was a variation in a sequence of smarter, edgier, real-world Best Picture winners (The Hurt Locker, No Country for Old Men, The Departed, Slumdog Millionaire) in recent years. That adult and semi-sophisticated judgment criteria, it appears, has been discarded. The King’s Speech win was not some freakish anomaly — it signalled a new paradigm of complacency and succumbing to easy emotional default. We are back in the grip of an ignoble Best Picture selection mentality in which emotionally affecting but irrefutably second-tier films can ascend to glory — cheers and salutations tonight, guilt and embarassment the morning after and forever more.