The above six-word statement is not one of my wish-upon-a-star fantasies. It’s a direct headline quote from the latest Movieline “Oscar Index” chart, presumably written by Stu Van Airsdale. I’m finally not the only guy standing against the headwind of sight-unseen War Horse praisings. If War Horse surges after it screens, fine. If it wins Best Picture, fine. But at least handicappers have stopped sipping the preliminary Kool-Aid, which is due in part to the sudden surge of Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants.

Carey Mulligan‘s sleek frosty-blonde look, seen at Monday night’s Hollywood Awards, is basically a Baz Luhrman creation as she’s currently playing Daisy Buchanan in Baz’s 3D version of The Great Gatsby. But she’s been looking fairly glammy for a while now, and I was struck this morning by the contrast between these two photos. The left-side shot was snapped by yours truly at Park City’s Egyptian Theatre in January 2009 just after the first screening of An Education; the other was taken the night before last.

Share your impressions by all means, but it seems as if the slightly overwhelmed, vaguely anxious 23 year-old I spoke to in Park City some 32 months ago is…well, we all grow up and become wise to the world, don’t we? It’s just that that this inevitable process has happened very quickly to Mulligan. I’m supposed to do a phoner with her tomorrow or the day after about her crazy-sister role in Shame and other current matters.

Tower Heist star Eddie Murphy has told an anonymous Rolling Stone writer that he didn’t angrily storm out of the 2007 Oscars after losing the Best Supporting Actor trophy to Alan Arkin. A Huffington Post account of the RS interview claims Murphy is saying that it’s “not so” that he left the Oscars. But it sounds to me like Murphy isn’t denying that he walked out — he’s saying he didn’t leave in a pissed-off mood.

If Murphy is claiming he didn’t actually leave the show then his driver, Karlo Ateinza , doesn’t share this recollection. Just after the 2007 Oscars L.A. Times columnist Joel Stein reported that he spent Oscar night hanging at the Hollywood Bowl parking lot with Ateinza and other top celebrity limo drivers, and that at 6:52 pm Karlo’s cellphone rang and he said the following after hanging up: “I have to go right now…I have to pick him up.”

Here‘s what Murphy has told Rolling Stone:

“Alan Arkin‘s performance in Little Miss Sunshine is Oscar-worthy, it’s a great performance. That’s just the way the shit went. He’s been gigging for years and years, the guy’s in his seventies. I totally understood and was totally cool. I wasn’t like, ‘What the fuck?’ Afterward, people were like, ‘He’s upset,’ and I’m like, ‘I wasn’t upset!’

“What happened was after I lost, I’m just chilling, and I was sitting next to Beyonce’s pops, and he leans over and grabs me and is like, [solemn voice] ‘There will be other times.’ And then you feel Spielberg on your shoulder going, ‘It’s all right, man.’ Then Clint Eastwood walks by: ‘Hey, guy… ‘ So I was like, ‘It’s not going to be this night!’ [Mimes getting up] I didn’t have sour grapes at all. That’s another reason I wanted to host the show…to show them that I’m down with it.”

So Murphy left the show early in a really positive mood, feeling great about Arkin’s triumph and just, you know, exuding alpha vibes about everything. Whoo-hoo, this is cool, good for Alan…I’m outta here!

The link to Stein’s story has disappeared off the L.A. Times website, but here’s how the story went:

“A perfect confirmation about Eddie Murphy having left the Kodak auditorium after he didn’t win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar has arrived by way of L.A. Times columnist Joel Stein, who spent last Sunday night hanging at the Hollywood Bowl parking lot with all the top celebrity limo drivers, one of them being Murphy’s driver, Karlo Ateinza, who’s been hauling Murphy around for the last seven years.

“Karlo wasn’t having a great night because Murphy lost early,” writes Stein. “I”m really sad. I feel sorry. He should have won it,’ Karlo said. ‘But Alan Arkin is good.’

“Karlo, who drives Murphy only when he isn’t needed by Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock or Colin Farrell (Reeves and Bullock both needed him last year, so they rode together), said he figured he’d be home by midnight. ‘He’s not a party animal,’ Karlo said. ‘Last night, he went to two parties, stayed for 45 minutes and went back home.’ After the Golden Globes, Murphy went straight home. Even though he won.

“Though he was worried about Murphy’s mood, Karlo tried to convince himself that the boss wouldn’t be ornery. ‘When he got the Golden Globe, he just put it in the car and he was the same Eddie Murphy. So maybe he won’t care.’

“Right then, at 6:52 p.m., long before Jennifer Hudson would win her Oscar, Karlo’s cellphone rang. ‘I have to go right now,’ he said. ‘I have to pick him up.'”

Here’s another story about the event.

Warner Bros. and the producers of the currently-filming The Dark Knight Rises have all earned major pussy points for deciding against filming a scene that would have used the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park as a backdrop. Because of this one presumably brief scene TDKR would have been more than just another corporate-money-grab-on-the-back-of-a-comic-book-franchise, but now it’s back to square one.

If director Chris Nolan was more of a man, he would have stood up to his producers and said “no, no…this is important…we have to shoot there.”

A Dark Knight Rises insider has told me that a Zuccotti Park shot was being planned for next week, but

Entertainment Weekly’s Aly Semigran reports as follows: “While Christopher Nolan will begin filming portions of The Dark Knight Rises in New York City over the span of the next two weeks, a Warner Bros., rep tells EW that there are no plans to shoot in Zuccotti Park, the home base for the OWS movement.

“After an open casting call for NYC extras for the project hit the web, rumors swirled that the project could be filming very close to, if not directly in, Zuccotti Park. Last week an anonymous source told the LA Times, ‘Cast members have been told the shoot could include scenes shot at the Occupy Wall Street protests’ and that Nolan could be using ‘the protests as a backdrop or a stand-in for something that already exists in the film,’ but that simply doesn’t seem to be the case.”

I can’t help being impressed by the visual qualities in this video from last night’s tear-gas police attack on Oakland Occupy-ers. It’s all “natural,” so to speak, and it looks like something lighted by Vittorio Storaro in Apocalypse Now. Politically and historically speaking, whatever happened to the basic First Amendment right to peaceably assemble?

Six days ago…six days ago!…this brief interview with Drive sound designer Lon Bender appeared. It takes him two minutes to arrive at the subject, but some people need to meander around a while before getting down to business, and that’s okay. I guess.

In recognition of the ongoing celebration of the 20th anniversary of Sony Pictures Classics as well as the generosity of the current principals, an earnest thank you from Hollywood Elsewhere. I’ll use it this weekend for my trip to the Savannah Film Festival.

Focus Features needs to get the lead out and start selling Tinker Tailor Solder Spy baseball cards with a little rectangle of pink chewing gum inside each package. Sell them at newsstands and at Starbucks and Best Buy stores and 7-11s. Because that’s exactly what these iTunes image profiles look like. There are at least 18 or so characters in Tomas Alfredson’s film, which comes out in December, so it would take a while to collect them all.

I would buy all I can and keep them in a shoebox and trade them with my friends. “I’ve give you two of my extra Jim Prideaux cards if you’ll give me your one extra Peter Gulliam. C’mon…what are you going to do with the extra? Okay, the two Prideaux cards plus $10 bills. You still won’t trade? Jesus…what are you looking for?”

I’ve learned three or four things since posting last Saturday’s story about that uttterly ridiculous fade-to-black mistake contained within the overture sequence in the forthcoming West Side Story Bluray, which will street on 11.15. The error was spotted last week in the British Bluray, which came out on 10.17. It was discussed at length on Home Theatre Forum starting last Friday or thereabouts.

Here’s what I’ve been told so far:

1. Fox Home Video is the distributor of the West Side Story Bluray but it had nothing to do with this recent high-def mastering of this 1961 film. That was the responsibility of MGM Home Entertainment, which owns the rights and handled the mastering and authoring, etc. Update: I’ve since been told that the compression & authoring of the Bluray/DVD was done by Fox Home Video.

2. I’m told that Fox Home Video knows about the issue but will not recall the title. it will instead implement what’s being called a “running fix.” This means that if anyone wants to send their West Side Story Bluray back Fox Home Video will accept it and send them a corrected disc down the road. “We are looking to fix the issue on future discs,” is what I was told.

3. MGM Home Entertainment senior vp publicity Michael Brown declined to respond to calls and emails, but one person at that company who is at least partially responsible for the error is Yvonne Medrano, vp technical services. She also declined to respond to calls and emails. I explained to her and to Brown what I understood to be the history of the situation and asked if they could illuminate further or explain any errors or misunderstandings. Silencio.

4. As I understand it, the high-def scanning of West Side Story was done by HTV Illuminate CEO Jim Hardy. Update: In the comments section restoration guru Robert Harris has stated a belief that the fade-to-black problem happened during the high-def scanning phase, indicating that Hardy is the likely culprit. Here are some recent comments that Harris posted on HTF.

5. Mistakes happen, of course, but it’s mind-blowing to consider that each and every MGM Home Entertainment staffer who was involved in the delivery of the West Side Story Bluray didn’t catch the error. It was a matter of simple ignorance, and not just on the part of Ms. Medrano. No one who looked at it before sending to the duplication plant knew that the overture isn’t supposed to fade to black at any point…ever.

This is what happens when you let monkeys run the factory.

Here’s how HTF member Adrian Turner described the problem last weekend. “There is a complete fade-to-black [during the overture] just before the pull-out to reveal the main title,” he writes.

“The overture plays from the start as it should do and the Bluray image is very sharp. At the climax of the overture, the moment when the music changes tempo and the color should switch to blue and the zoom-out, there is a quick fade to black.

“And then we get the final section of the music and the blue image. This image is very fuzzy indeed and then it clears and becomes sharp with the zoom-out to reveal the title WEST SIDE STORY. The dissolve from the Saul Bass design to the live shot of New York is just as it should be.

“I don’t know why [the parties responsible] have chosen to alter the film and have ruined this most dramatic moment. It’s a total travesty.”

Bluray.com’s Josh Katz ran a linked summary of these developments on 10.26.

Given what I’ve been hearing for years about widespread ignorance among GenX and GenY’s about American history, the possibility that a significant percentage of under-40s or certainly under-30s not having clue #1 about who J. Edgar Hoover was doesn’t sound like a huge stretch. So I would guess Warner Bros. marketing is facing a slight hurdle in selling Clint Eastwood’s biopic to this demographic.

Once upon a time the brainiacs out there might have assumed that J. Edgar Hoover founded the Hoover Vacuum company back in the ’20s, but…well, maybe some do think that.

The Leonardo DiCaprio-starrer opens on 11.9.

Don’t kid yourself — more and more citizens living outside the big cities don’t know shit from shinola when it comes to basic historical data.

Ask Jay Leno about this. I saw him do a question segment with people on the street on the Tonight show a few years back, and he asked a young girl to give the last name of a recent U.S. president whose first name was “Jimmy.” She didn’t know. “He used to be a peanut farmer…” Leno hinted. The woman still didn’t know but she took a stab. “Jimmy Peanut?”, she said.

In a survey conducted in 2008, about 25% of 1,200 17-year-olds “were unable to correctly identify Adolf Hitler as Germany’s chancellor during World War II, instead identifying him variously as a munitions maker, an Austrian premier and the German Kaiser,” according to N.Y. Times piece that I’ve lost the URL for.

A CBS News story by Francie Grace noted that “allmost three out of four fourth-graders could not name which part of government passes laws. Most students thought it was the president. (It’s Congress.)

“About three out of four fourth-graders knew that July 4 celebrates the Declaration of Independence. But one in four thought it marked the end of the Civil War, the arrival of the Pilgrims or the start of the woman’s right to vote.

“More than half of 12th-graders, asked to pick a U.S. ally in World War II from a list of countries, thought the answer was Italy, Germany or Japan. (The correct answer was the Soviet Union.)”