Gas lighting “refers to creating of artificial light from combustion of a gaseous fuel, including hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, propane, butane, acetylene, ethylene or natural gas. Before electricity became sufficiently widespread and economical to allow for general public use, gas was the most popular means of lighting in cities and suburbs. Early gas lights had to be lit manually, but later gas lights were self-lighting.” — from Wikipage.

I’ve been saying for years that it’s cool with me if the Motion Picture Academy wants to give Doris Day a Lifetime Achievement Oscar. She was fairly big during the ’40s and huge in the ’50s and early ’60s, and what she stood for — prim, old-fashoned, pure-of-heart virtue in a perky persona — was unmissable in its time and essential for any film scholar or historian to acknowledge today.

But to me Day’s aversion to any suggestion of real sexuality always seemed a bit curious and even weird. I always thought of her as a kind of Singing Nun or Virginal Funny Girl. The hard truth is that in any kind of real-world context, Day played willful, persistent and exceedingly strange women, especially from the early ’50s on. Try watching her labored performance in Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much without wincing. She was so into the Doris Day persona that she reportedly turned down the Mrs. Robinson role in The Graduate

In any event, despite pleas and exhortations by Douglas McGrath and Nellie McKay and Rex Reed and Liz Smith and other Day fans, the Academy never went for the idea. But the Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced today that it has. And that’s fine. Day is 87 and I presume in good health. But why has the Academy never stepped up to the plate and paid appropriate respect?

Day was very, very good in Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, opposite Rock Hudson. She was also commendable in Young Man With A Horn and Love Me or Leave Me, and I remember something true and steady about her performance in Young At Heart, in which she played the love interest of a dark-hearted Frank Sinatra.

And yet it’s hard to think of another living veteran of ’50s and ’60s cinema who is more of an icon for uptight middle-class Truman-and-Eisenhower-era values and zero sexuality. I know I suddenly liked Day a lot more when I heard that rumor about her having had an affair with Sly Stone, but that turned out to be bogus. Day did apparently have a fling with L.A. Dodgers base-stealer Maury Wills.

My problem with Day mainly boils down to her performance in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Here’s how I put it last year: “I love aspects of this 1956 thriller (the murder in the Marrakech marketplace, the assassination attempt in Albert Hall) but Day’s grating emotionalism makes it a very hard film to watch. She cries, shrieks, trembles, weeps. And when she isn’t losing it, she’s acting pretentiously coy and smug in that patented manner of a 1950s Stepford housewife. Or she’s singing ‘Que Sera Sera’ over and over again.”

Michael Cieply 10.28 piece about War Horse director Steven Spielberg, called “What Makes Spielberg Jump?”, will appear in Sunday’s print edition. The invisible subtitle is “Spielberg really wouldn’t mind winning an Oscar for War Horse (Best Picture or Best Director or both), and this is the opening salvo in an attempt to make that happen.”

Here’s the portion that got my attention: “For those who wonder what drives him, money is no object: The Los Angeles Business Journal recently listed Spielberg as this city’s eighth richest person, with a net worth estimated at $3.2 billion.”

Meaning that his liquid worth is…what? With those kind of holdings Spielberg could easily self-finance a $100 million movie and pay for the worldwide marketing without breaking a sweat…no?

“He’s often choosing [which films to do] for emotional reasons,” Spielberg’s longtime producing partner Kathy Kennedy tells Cieply. “I do think that plays a role in what he chooses to do.” As opposed to making a film because he needs the scratch?

Spielberg has always been a bottom-line commercial guy, and like most shrewd players he’s never sunk a nickel of his own money into a film he’s produced or directed. (Or at least not to my knowledge.) But he could play it like Francis Coppola if he wanted to. If he wanted to self-finance he has the absolute freedom to do any film he wants, any way he wants, starring anyone, and costing whatever. Any emotional subject that appeals to him, Spielberg can make a flick about it and get it released. No strings, no impediments.

So why is he directing Robopocalypse after Lincoln?

Let’s say for the sake of argument I’m having this hypothetical conversation with these other guys, and someone asks if there’s a clear Best Picture frontrunner out there now. Let’s imagine this conversation and see where it goes.

“The Descendants has it all,” I would say. “And so does Moneyball. You or yours may not like that idea, but they both mix honest emotionalism (as opposed to cloying sentiment) with smarts and great style and thematic wholeness. They’re the top dogs of the quality-movie fraternity right now.

“The Artist is a lovely homage to Hollywood’s silent, black-and-white past as well as the tradition of A Star In Born and Singin’ in the Rain. It’s a must-see for even half-hearted Movie Catholics. But it’s also sloshing around in cloying oatmeal sentiment. The dog alone takes it out of consideration in my book.”

And this other guy, let’s say, says “not that I agree at all with the idea that The Artist is ‘sloshing around in cloying oatmeal sentiment’, but even if it was, since when would that be an Academy turn-off?”

And then he says there’s a certain comfort in knowing that others beside himself aren’t that much love with The Descendants. It’s Alexander Payne ‘s “least adventurous or affecting film,” he asserts. Beginnings of an anti-Descendants cabal?

And this other guy, let’s say, says he’ll take all serious bets that “there’s no way in hell either The Descendants or Moneyball win Best Picture. They’ll both get nominations but other than possibly Clooney for Best Actor and Best screenplay, Payne’s movie will have to be fine getting nominated but not winning anything.”

And I say that this “no way in hell” proclamation about The Descendants or Moneyball “is precisely why I loathe and despise the industry criteria that everyone associates with a Best Picture Oscar win.

“People want the ‘big thing,’ the lump in the throat that pulverizes, the movie that delivers some profound bedrock truth about our common experience, that makes you want to hug your father or your daughter….and if I ever get to the point that a movie like War Horse (if it follows through on the indicatoions of the trailer and the ads) or The Artist or The Help makes me feel that way, then take me out behind the building and shoot me in the head, twice.”

Somebody says this is an antiquated definition of a Best Picture Oscar winner, and I respond that “i didn’t say people won’t settle for this, that or the other thing when it’s Crunch Decision Time. Obviously they went for something less or different or more granular with The King’s Speech, The Departed, Chicago, No Country For Old Men, The Hurt Locker. But they’re always looking for the “big thing” element at the outset. They always want that comfort, that assurance, that meltdown, that touch of a quaalude high.

And then I add that “when Gabe The Playlist begrudgingly said there ‘wasn’t a dry eye in the house’ toward the end of a recent NY screening of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, I felt a little button-push sensation in my chest. I thinking it might be the one….maybe. He said he’s not a Stephen Daldry or a Sandra Bullock fan and that he didn’t care for the Asperger’s kid, but he still recognized or acknowledged that it delivers the emotional payoff that it set out to deliver. That impressed me.”

And then another guy points out another factor in Extremely Close‘s favor is that the Academy “truly loves Daldry. He’s the only director who has been nominated for every single feature film he’s directed to date.” So it’s looking like Extremely Loud might have an edge at this stage…maybe, sorta kinda, bullshit-wise.

Today’s activities include a small noon lunch thrown by my Savannah Film Festival hosts (which I’m late for as we speak) and some writing/filing this afternoon along with a little bike-riding around the city. There’s some kind of street party this evening along with a screening of The Artist. Maybe James Toback (who’s doing a q & a with Alec Baldwin tomorrow afternoon) will fly in today or tonight, and we can do a little carousing.

Thanks to the Savannah Film Festival and the Marshall House for allowing me to stay in rom #314 (i.e, the one with the desk, pictured last night) and not sending me back to the broom closet.

Breakfast/lunch atrium inside the Marshall House.

Featured in the current print issue of Esquire, but not, apparently, in the online edtion.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone is arriving at the Savannah Film Festival tomorrow. She told me a day or two ago that she heard it might be “cold.” (When women say “cold,” they mean cool, brisk, sweater weather, etc.) Well, I got here about two hours ago and it’s almost like Palm Beach — it’s T-shirt weather, a bit warmer than Los Angeles.

Savannah College of Art and Design theatre on Broughton Street, Savannah — 10.28, 10:05 pm.

I arrived at the Marshall House, the festival’s nerve center, around 9:15 or so, and right away I got into it with the staff about my midget-sized room, but that issue’s resolved now…or at least for the time being.

They tried to put me in a room the size of janitor’s closet. “Fellas, I have to have a desk and a chair,” I said. “That’s why the festival brought me here. To write and file and run photos of the festival from my computer, so I really do need a desk. Really.” It took a little time to get this point across (they hemmed, they hawed, they side-stepped), but they finally relented and gave me a room with a desk. Thank you.

Marshall House, 123 East Broughton Street, Savannah.

Houston airport during the three-hour wait for the Houston-to-Svannah plane — 10.28, 6:25 pm.

HE’s Continental Airlines prolonged agony day continues unabated. I sat in a munchkin-sized middle seat from LAX to Houston, next to a guy eating stinky barbecue Doritos. Awful. My first-class sensibilities don’t synch with flying coach or sitting next to riff-raff. Currently standing next to Gate B75 — “hellgate” — at Houston Airport. Charging phone. No wifi or wall outlets, of course. No massively obese people waiting for the flight, which is good. Flight is delayed 85 minutes and counting. At best I’ll check into Savannah’s Marshall House by 7:30 pm.

Yes, I always favor the earlier, black-and-white version. Whenever, whatever. But I’m also convinced in this instance that the dead-eyed expression on Robert Mitchum‘s face is somewhat scarier and more malignant than the one on Robert DeNiro‘s. Right now the 1962 Bluray version (which costars Gregory Peck in the 1991 Nick Nolte role) is available only from Amazon.co.uk.

Robert Mitchum as Max Cady in J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (’62).

Robert DeNiro as Max Cady in Martin Scorsese’s’s Cape Fear (’91).

“Bloggers and the writers who turn out well-crafted pieces on their own websites are free to write what they want. The best of them, such as Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule or Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun or Farran Nehme Smith at The Self-Styled Siren, give public voice to the way movies function as private obsession.

“Their film knowledge is broad and deep, but they wear that knowledge lightly. They understand that the true appreciation of any art begins in pleasure (and not in the “work” of watching movies). To read them is to read people grounded in the sensual response to movies, in what the presence or look of a certain star, or the way a shot is lit stirs in them. Reading these writers, I often feel that I’m in the presence of people dedicated to the notion of collective cultural memory in an era when instant obsolescence is the rule.” — from a non-linkable Charles Taylor piece about film criticsm in the Fall 2011 issue of Dissent.

I love Morgan and Smith but who the hell is Cozzalio? I haven’t been to Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule once in my life. Not once. Before this evening, I mean.