On 1.29 a National Public Ratio “Weekend Edition” interview between Rachel Martin and Awards Daily Sasha Stone aired. (And was posted.) It’s a short piece about the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, and about as simple-minded as an interview of this sort could possibly be without attempting to satirize.

We all think of NPR as a haven for bright and informed conversation, but this piece was assembled for the slowest ADD person in the room. I guess the NPR motto has always been “keep it simple and peppy and above all not too long.” (Kim Masters‘ pieces are like this too.) After all, they don’t want to lose any eighth graders who might be station-surfing and stopping on NPR for a few seconds. Really, listen to this thing. Audio clips, audio clips and more audio clips. Keep the commentary down to the bare minimum. Assume your listeners are borderline idiots and you can’t go wrong.

Stone elaborated today on what she was trying to convey to Martin…if Martin had any interest in discussing the subject at any length.

Key point #1: “It surprised host Rachel Martin that the screenplay race, it turned out, wasn’t so much about the individual screenplays as it was about the Best Picture category. Key point #2: “She was also surprised to hear that those voting for adapted screenplay don’t have to have seen all of the films nominated. Heck, the year Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash many Academy members came out and admitted they didn’t see the movie. This year, if you polled Academy members I bet you’d find that there are those voting members who still haven’t seen all nine of the nominees.

“Voting is buzz and perception. When you fall in love with a pretty girl across the room not only do you not see anyone else but you don’t even want to look at anyone else. Such is the conundrum of choosing ‘best.'”

This is why I spit on the 2011 Awards Season consensus picks among many of the critics groups, the guilds, the HPA and the Oscars. In terms of Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, I mean. I don’t mind that people have crushes on this performance or that film. I find nothing wrong with a little swooning from time to time. I do mind when the most popular kid in the room is by far the shallowest and most smiley and superficially charming without any corresponding depth or intrigue or complexity.

I used to hate guys like this in high school. Hunky jocks and grinning student council officers in their fucking slacks and loafers and Brooks Brothers shirts. They had next to nothing going on upstairs — certainly none of the depth or wit or soul that I was secretly harboring — and yet all the pretty girls loved them because they were cute and charming and “sincere” and…I don’t know, comforting or whatever. I’ve had the last laugh, of course. Right now many of those guys are enduring lives of comfortable middle-class tedium and boredom while I’m galavanting around Hollywood and Cannes and rubbing shoulders with hot girls and schmoozing with all the cool people. But I still hate them for all the “like” they received in our junior and senior years.

“Brad Pitt‘s performance [in Moneyball] is an almost old-fashioned, movie-star one,” the narrator says in this 2.9 Press Play “Should Win” essay. Nope, not “almost” — it is a movie-star performance, and an intimate and revealing one at that. On the level of George Clooney‘s vulnerable anguish in The Descendants, and way, way beyond what Jean Dujardin delivers in The Artist.

“In another universe, one could imagine Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant taking the part,” the narrator continues.

Yeah, Stewart of the early ’50s could have strode around in Billy Beane’s shoes. Or William Holden or James Garner. But not Grant. When it comes to baseball, Cary Grant is strictly a spectator. (I’m recalling how he seemed slightly out of place when he took in a N.Y. Yankees game with Doris Day in That Touch of Mink.) In Moneyball you believe right away that Pitt has baseball in his blood. He sells that when he throws his radio out of his car, and then gets out and walks over and repeatedly stomps on it. Cary Grant does the horse-whinny thing and gets angry, but he doesn’t stomp on things.

“[Pitt] brings to the role an assured quality of overzealous, yet understated, lust for ultimate success that was forged in the fires of years and years of failure,” the narrator goes on. “He’s charming and cheeky and funny, and very good looking (despite the hideous early naughties’ haircut and lumbering fashion sense). Pitt brings a subtle comedic take to what could have been a rather boring central role; his various dealings with other managers, his scouts and players, betray genius-level timing and mimicry.”

You know who also delivers genius-level comic timing? Without having any conventional laugh lines to work with? Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe. His shining moment happens in Act Two when Pitt knocks on his office door and says “Art, got a minute?” Hoffman registers three or four emotions in the space of three or four seconds — rage, indigestion, depression, resignation — before grunting “Yeah, what’s up?” I laugh at this each and every time I’ve watched this scene, and I’ve watched it a good ten or twelve times.

There is more move-magic wonder and transportation in those three or our seconds than in all the grinning and tap-dancing and dog tricks and exaggerated mugging in the entire 100-minute length of The Artist.

Ali Arikan, chief film critic of Dipnot TV, wrote the piece. Dave Bunting, Jr. did the narration. Ken Cancelosi cut it together.

“The contemporary Oscar economy runs entirely on charm,” Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale wrote late today. “Your movie can make $1 million or $1 billion, be a polarizing scourge or smothered in plaudits and acclaim. You can place ads everywhere, send thousands of DVD screeners and engineer a fortune’s worth of publicity. But by the time nomination ballots are mailed in late December, if you haven’t found a way to charm a vote out of an Academy member, then you and your film are about as long for the awards race as Angelina Jolie is for a burger-eating contest.”

I’m sorry but I’m not getting the same sense of ironic hooligan satire from Goon (2.24) that I did from the Hanson Brothers drawing blood in George Roy Hill‘s Slap Shot. But I’ll bet that the Goon guys (director Michael Dowse, screenwriters Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg) took their inspiration from the Hanson Brothers.

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Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin‘s Undefeated (Weinstein Co., 2.17) is a deeply touching 90-minute doc about Memphis’s Manassas Tigers, an African-American high-school football team trying to up their wins. But it’s mainly about various team members toughing it out with personal struggles. And it really sinks in.

The first half is somewhere between good enough and not bad — very nicely shot and smoothly cut but still a familiar portrait of a rural underdog football team. Kinda seen it before. But the second half…whoa. That’s when all the threads pay off and the seeds sprout, and it really gets you. I started to choke up a bit during one scene, but I coughed and kept it in check. “Shit…this is affecting,” I said to myself.

The life of the party is Bill Courtney, a dogged, red-haired lumber mill owner who donates his time as coach of the Tigers. He’s really quite an educator and an orator and an inspirational father to his players. He really gets into their lives and gets them to deal with their temporary setbacks, foibles, challenges.

It covers a wide range but focused on three main “characters.” “Money” Brown, a right tackle who suffers a torn ligament halfway through his senior season. An angry junior named Chavis Daniels who did time in a youth jail during his sophomore year. And O.C. Brown, a 280-pounder (he reminds you of the kid in The Blind Side) who has the best shot at a college football scholarship but who has problems getting decent grades.

It’s basically a slice of a real-life Blind Side (as far as O.C. is concerned) mixed in with Peter Berg‘s Friday Night Lights but without the wackjob parents.

It even ends on a similar note to Berg’s film. It isn’t the winning or the losing, but how you play the game and whether or not you’ve given your all and stood tall in a proud way, etc. The doc isn’t really about football as much as character, intestinal fortitude, manning up, etc. And caring, really caring. Put a little love in your heart.

“You think football builds character. It does not. Football rreveals character.”

The Undefeated gang at Austin’s SXSW film festival in mid March 2011.

The L.A. all-media screening for Daniel Espinosa‘s Safe House happens tonight at 7 pm. Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds bagging a paycheck for a standard action thriller — i.e, a variation of the Training Day formula set in South Africa, CIA operatives instead of L.A. cops, same old same old, blah, blah explosions, etc.

Many critics have already seen Safe House and reviewed it and, according to Rotten Tomatoes summary, given it a failing grade. Universal’s request that reviews be held until Friday seems….well, odd in light of this.

Is Reynolds ever going to star in a really good commercial film? Buried was riveting as far as it went, but it burned the audience at the finale. Adventureland was the only other pretty good film that Reynolds has costarred in. Otherwise the man has built a career out of starring in nothing but paycheck movies.

Daniel Espinosa, the new Tony Scott, is Swedish.

Vera Farmiga did the work and cashed her check and put some of the money in her kids’ college fund. Brendan Gleeson did the work and cashed his check and put some of the money into home renovation. Sam Shepard did the work and cashed his check and put some of the money into dental work. Ruben Blades did the work and cashed his check and put some of the money into building a music studio.

Here’s a reminder that Robert Weide‘s Woody Allen: A Documentary will begin streaming gratis starting tomorrow (i.e., Thursday, 2.9) “for a limited time,” whatever that means. There will also be an encore broadcast on PBS CoCal on Saturday, 2.18 at 9 p.m. Here’s my review from mid November 2011.

Tony Gilroy‘s The Bourne Legacy (8.3.12) got a boost from Jeremy Renner‘s standout performance in Mission Impossible 4. That movie explained to the primitives (i.e., those who couldn’t be bothered to see The Hurt Locker) that Renner is solid and cool. The second best thing is this trailer, which makes it clear that Legacy is a Renner-for-Matt Damon substitution thriller with many of the same players (Joan Allen, Albert Finney, Scott Glenn ) as before.

The only thing that gives me a moment of pause, frankly, is the August 3rd release date — obviously a hedging-our-bets-but-hoping-for-the-best strategy. To me it amounts to Universal saying the following: “Renner is not Damon, and so we can’t go up against the big fat whopper titles in May, June and July. It’s better and safer to go with early August, which isn’t really a dog-day opening like mid-August or late August. As far as we’re concerned, August 3rd is the same as late July. August is generally regarded as a dump month, okay, but not in our minds, and certainly not in the case of this film.”

A Better Life‘s Demian Bichir was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar due to quality of performance, word-of-mouth and pressing the flesh at industry events. When I returned from Santa Barbara last weekend I asked about running some FYC ads to help things along, but was told it was too late in the Phase Two cycle to construct ads because it would take too long. This didn’t seem to make sense as a full two weeks remain before the balloting dealdine.

So yesterday afternoon I turned to freelance art director Dylan Wells and asked if he could throw together some Bichir ads overnight. “No problem,” he said. Dylan worked on two variations (A Better Life Bichir, GQ Bichir) in four ad sizes until 2 am this morning, and when I woke up they were all in my inbox. Some minor changes were implemented today, and now they’re ready to go.

I know that in all my years of dealing with online ads I’ve never heard of any ad creator delivering two sets of ads in four sizes in a matter of hours. It always takes a few days.

“The title role in Albert Nobbs goes to Glenn Close, who played it Off Broadway thirty years ago and has striven ever since to bring it to the screen. She co-wrote and co-produced the film, and is seldom out of our sight. But what do we see? Albert is a woman dressed as a man, in the Ireland of the late eighteen-hundreds, yet what Close serves up is neither man nor woman, flesh nor fowl, but a strange hieratic hybrid of no discernible identity.

“She walks as though freshly risen from the dead, patrolling the streets and corridors in a stiffened glide, with those dark, deep-sunk eyes of hers staring hard ahead. Albert is a waiter in an upmarket Dublin hotel, and the uniform adds starch to her otherworldliness: grief-black suit and tie, snowy shirt, and, for outdoors, a rolled umbrella and an ill-fitting bowler hat. What you feel, watching Close, is not that you are watching gender being bent into new, absorbing shapes but that you might as well have stayed home and leafed through a book on Magritte.” — from Anthony Lane‘s 2.6 review in The New Yorker.

Grantland‘s Mark Harris admires Meryl Streep‘s “old Maggie” acting in The Iron Lady, but he has difficulty with the other two-thirds of the film because it “lets its subject down by insisting that the most — no, the only — interesting thing about Prime Minister Thatcher is that she was a woman in a world of male power.

“There’s a campy scene in Mommie Dearest when the widowed Joan Crawford tells off an all-male Mad Men-era boardroom by bellowing, ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo!’ That’s a fun idea for a moment, but not for a whole movie. And for a subject as complex as Thatcher, it’s fatal.”

God, I love this moment. Faye Dunaway tapped into being fearsome in a ferocious, bigger-than-life way when she made Network, but this style of acting, for her, reached its ultimate manifestation in this scene.

I was one of the first to see Mommie Dearest in the late summer of 1981. It was an evening showing in Manhattan — at the Paramount headquarters screening room above Columbus Circle — and afterwards I remember sharing an elevator down to the lobby with four or five gay journalists, and how tickled they were by Dunaway’s butch-boss scenes (the afore-mentioned Pepsi Cola boardroom scene plus “no wire hangers EVER!”) Being kinda youngish, I remember putting it together around that time why gay guys feel an affinity with tough women. I also remember realizing that I never wanted to get into any kind of dispute with an angry gay guy…ever.

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, etc. I would rather face a pack of drunken rednecks with baseball bats. Gay guys are wolverines when they get mad. Don’t even think about it.