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.

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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.

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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.

Bert Schneider, the last producer to semi-successfully micro-manage Terrence Malick and keep him from his own self-indulgent tendencies by somehow persuading him to keep Days of Heaven down to a managable 94 minutes, died Monday at age 78.

After Heaven, Malick never made a lean, well-honed movie again. When he returned to filmmaking in the ’90s it was all pretty photography and leaves and alligators and voice-over and scrapping dialogue and expansive running times. Mister, we could use a man like Bert Schneider again.

An avowed leftie, Schneider was a renowned, down-to-business producer of late 1960s and ’70s classics such as Easy Rider (which Schneider reportedly honed into shape when director Dennis Hopper‘s undisciplined editing became problematic), Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. He also won a Best Documentary Oscar in 1975 for Hearts and Minds.

In his landmark book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” Peter Biskind called Schneider “the eminence grise of the American New Wave.”

From Wiki’s account of the post-production of Days of Heaven:

“After the production finished principal photography in ’76, the editing process took over two years to complete. Malick had a difficult time shaping the film and getting the pieces to go together. Schneider reportedly showed some footage to director Richard Brooks, who was considering Gere for a role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

“According to Schneider, the editing for Days of Heaven took so long that ‘Brooks cast Gere, shot, edited and released Looking for Mr. Goodbar while Malick was still editing.’

“A breakthrough came when Malick experimented with voice-overs from Linda Manz‘s character, similar to what he had done with Sissy Spacek in Badlands. According to editor Billy Weber, Malick jettisoned much of the film’s dialogue, replacing it with Manz’s voice-over, which served as an oblique commentary on the story.

“After a year, Malick had to call the actors to Los Angeles to shoot inserts of shots that were necessary but had not been filmed in Alberta. The finished film thus includes close-ups of Shephard that were shot under a freeway overpass. The underwater shot of Gere’s falling face down into the river was shot in a large aquarium in Sissy Spacek’s living room.

“Meanwhile, Schneider was upset with Malick. He had confronted Malick numerous times about missed deadlines and broken promises. Due to further cost overruns, he had to ask Paramount for more money, which he preferred not to do.”

Biskind quoted Brooke Hayward, Dennis Hopper’s first wife, as saying, “Bert was the heroic savior of that movie. Without him, there would never have been an Easy Rider.”

I predicted this, and now it’s spreading like a virus. The lemming mentality has taken hold, and there’s just no stopping regional critics groups from giving The Artist their Best Picture prizes. Too many big-city groups (New York Film Critics Circle, Boston Film Critics Society, New York Film Critics Online) have already tumbled, and everyone wants an easy choice that Joe Schmoe can appreciate. The Las Vegas Film Critics Society is the latest to blindly follow the path of least resistance.

Almost a quarter of a century ago Lethal Weapon used a funny jumping-off-a-building gag. Ragged-edge cop Mel Gibson is sent to the top of a four-story building to talk an unstable guy out of making a suicide leap. Gibson winds up cuffing himself to the guy and jumping off the building, and they’re both falling to their deaths…not. They land on one of those huge inflated tent-sized bags…whomp!…that cops and firemen use to save people. All is well.

Flash forward to another jumping-off-a-building scene in Brad Bird and Tom Cruise‘s Mission: impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol, which I saw last night. An American operative is being chased over a rooftop by baddies in Budapest. He fires some rounds, kills a couple of guys, and then escapes by leaping off the building, continuing to shoot as he falls four or five stories to the pavement below. He’s saved, however, when he lands on a modest air mattress that’s about one-tenth the size of Lethal Weapon‘s tent-sized bag.

Where did this miracle air mattress come from? We’re not told. In what physical realm does a guy leap backwards four stories onto an air mattress that’s a little bit larger than a king-sized bed and live? I’ll tell you what realm. The realm of Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol and its brethren.

Big-budget acton movies have ignored the laws of what happens when you jump or fall from any kind of height for so long nobody cares any more. You can do any stupid thing you want — jump off any building or bridge or moving airplane — and you can land safely, and audiences will still buy their tickets and eat their popcorn. Nothing matters.

Makers of idiotic steroid action films have been ignoring the basic laws of physics for a good 20 years or so, but particularly since Asian action films became popular in the early ’90s. It mainly started with the popularity of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the use of “wire guys” to allow heroes to leap anywhere from anything and land in a cool way like Superman.

In the HE book there is only one way to go with action films nowadays, and that is the path of mostly believable, bare-bones, “this could actually happen in the real world” physicality adhered to in Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive and Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire. All the rest is bullshit and you know it.

“Like most great films, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo gets better with the second viewing,” writes Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, “and probably even better with the third and fourth viewings.” In other words, Stone blew off last night’s IMAX screening of Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol for a second gander at Tattoo. Life is choices.

“The Stieg Larsson books are densely detailed. Once the names settle in and the plot somewhat becomes less complicated, the film breathes. Fincher is well known for his exactitude and one simply cannot get everything that’s going on the first time through — especially some of the more intricate shots, like one in particular of Rooney Mara’s thighs with her hand dangling to one side holding a gun. His films, like Hitchcock’s and Scorsese’s, are made to be studied. He takes so much time with each shot that repeated viewings will always pay you back with one discovery after the next.

“Sure, but listen to critics who write it off because it’s not The Social Network.” That means me, folks! I’m a bad guy because I said it’s first-rate but still second-tier Fincher.

“By the end of the film, the whole point of it comes to life. This is a movie about a girl, all right. Her hard shell finally cut through, as she encounters the one man who cares enough about her to bring her a sandwich for breakfast and stand ten feet back from her, never reaching out his hand so much as to shake hers. As Blomkvist, sweetly rendered irresistible by Daniel Craig, keeps his distance from Salander, so does the girl with the dragon tattoo want to move closer to him.

“To fall in love is to have the most important layer pulled back, and the softest of flesh exposed. It’s a risk Salander has avoided for her own sake for most of her life. But to keep all surfaces protected means to repel everything that comes softly near. And that is an even bigger risk: to never have the sweetest thing.

“I look around this year at the films that are headed for Best Picture and I’m seeing mostly movies about men. Even if Dragon Tattoo wanted to be about about a man it has been overtaken by a girl.”

Late yesterday afternoon Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I lurched from topic to topic, but mostly focused on (a) acting nominations and (b) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Here’s a stand-alone mp3.