Could I suggest something? Put Patton Oswalt into the one-sheet. He’s the funny guy in this film…the anchor guy, the bullshit-deflating reality-check guy, the deserves-to-be-nominated-for-a-Best-Supporting-Actor-Oscar guy. All this one-sheet is saying right now is “fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!” Which is cool for people like me and Charlize Theron fans, but I don’t know about Joe Popcorn.

It turns out that the Wikipedia-supplied running time of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12/23) is pretty far off the mark. It’s not 90 minutes but roughly 124 minutes, according to a Fox source. That’s not an official running time, but it’ll be in that general vicinity (i.e., maybe a bit shorter) when all is said and done.

Yesterday I should have posted Xan Brooks’ Guardian comments, dated 11.14, on Meryl Streep‘s “astonishing, all-but-flawless” performance as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (Weinstein Co., 12.30). He also notes that while the film “prints the legend,” it “keeps the dissent on spartan rations…it’s a movie that gives us Thatcher without Thatcherism.”

Streep’s performance is “a masterpiece of mimicry which re-imagines Thatcher in all her half-forgotten glory,” Brooks writes. “Streep has the basilisk stare; the tilted, faintly predatory posture. Her delivery, too, is eerily good — a show of demure solicitude, invariably overtaken by steely, wild-eyed stridency.

“The film provides glimpses of a blustering Michael Foot, and archive footage from the poll tax riots. At one stage angry protesters slap on the window of the heroine’s limo to tell her she’s ‘a monster’. Yet there’s little sense of the outside world, the human cost, or the ripple effect of divisive government policies.

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd from an Abi Morgan script, The Iron Lady “opts for a breezy, whistle-stop tour through the unstable nitroglycerin of Thatcher’s life and times. The tone is jaunty and affectionate, a blend of Yes Minister and The King’s Speech, fuelled by flashbacks that bob us back through authorized history.”

It means absolutely nothing…okay, it means a little something but next to nothing, really, that seven Gold Derby “Oscarologists” — Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Fox News‘ Tariq Khan, WENN’s Kevin Lewin, Yahoo Movies‘ Matt McDaniel, the Village Voice‘s Michael Musto and GD’s Tom O’Neil and Paul Sheehan — are intuiting that War Horse is the most likely Best Picture winner.

One of the above might have seen War Horse, maybe, but I’d rather not think about that.

11 Oscar-watching hotshots (myself among them) are standing by The Descendants, and that means something because everyone’s seen it. Eight are picking The Artist and one has chosen Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. And that’s the way it is on Monday, November 14th, 2011.

Robert Weide‘s Woody Allen: A Documentary arrived today. Tomorrow or the next day Criterion Blurays of Twelve Angry Men and Rushmore will be delivered. The L.A. press day for The Descendants is tomorrow afternoon, and the Academy screening that night. Wednesday night is either the Breaking Dawn all-media or my second attempt with Michael Roskam‘s Bullhead. A chat with David Cronenberg and a screening of W.E. are on Thursday; interviews with Olivia Colman and Michael Shannon on Friday.

Tyrannosaur star Olivia Colman is here in Los Angeles for a week, doing interviews and whatnot. Two significant articles about Tyrannnosaur/Colman ran yesterday in the LA Times (written by Mark Olsen) and NY Times (written by Dennis Lim).

Quote #1 from Olsen’s piece: “‘This is not social realism,” director Paddy Considine said at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “I’m saying, ‘Here are these people. These are their circumstances. There are the worlds they are from, and this is a love story about the people you walk past in the street. Those people you see at the local shop have got a story.'”

And quote #2: “It never felt like we were unsafe — it never felt like we were doing anything other than pretending,” said Colman, best known in Britain as the star of television comedies, on the phone from her home in South London. ‘But I’m very pleased if it looks real and upsetting to people.'”

You want upsetting? I was upset…well, a bit surprised when Colman declined my invitation to bring her to tomorrow night’s Academy screening of The Descendants. I’d envisioned snapping a shot of her with George Clooney. Ah, well.

I’m looking around for a PDF of The Longest Cocktail Party, Jesse Armstrong‘s screenplay adaptation of Richard DiLello’s 1973 book about the gradual breakup of the Beatles from ’68 to ’70, otherwise known as the Apple downswirl period. Michael Winterbottom will reportedly direct it sometime next year. Actors who don’t really look or sound like John, Paul, George and Ringo will most likely be cast.

It was during a Toronto Film Festival gathering for Albert Nobbs that I casually mentioned to costar Janet McTeer that her performance as Hubert the house painter is more commanding and magnetic than Glenn Close‘s titular performance. McTeer stiffened and said nothing, and so I shifted over to another topic. It felt impolite on some level to step on Close’s toes.

But now Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson has flat-out said the unmentionable in a headline: “Janet McTeer Talks Stealing Albert Nobbs from Glenn Close.” So I guess the cat is out of the bag now. The only problem is that you can’t really hear McTeer in Thompson’s two YouTube clips.

Yesterday morning Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino and I kicked it all around — Tintin, Oscar-Ratner debacle, Descendants, etc.. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

The new Entertainment Weekly says there are 56 significant films yet to be released this year. By my count there are 37, and if you further whittle the list down by the likelihood of a film (or a creative contributor to that film) being award-worthy, you’re left with 25. Here’s my list with the letters AW signifying award-worthy:

November 16 (1): The Descendants (AW).

November 18 (4): Another Happy Day (AW); The Lie (limited); The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1; Tyrannosaur (AW).

November 23 (6): A Dangerous Method (AW); The Artist (AW); Hugo (AW); The Muppets; My Week with Marilyn (AW); Rampart (AW).

December 2 (6): Coriolanus (NY, LA one- week Oscar run; wider on 1.20.12) (AW); Knuckle; The Lady; Outrage; Shame (AW); Sleeping Beauty.

December 9 (4): Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (AW); W.E. (NY, LA: one-week Oscar run — Feb. 3rd wide); We Need to Talk About Kevin (AW); Young Adult (AW).

December 16 (4): Carnage (AW); Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel; Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (IMAX; wide on 12.21); Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

December 21 (4): The Adventures of Tintin; Albert Nobbs (AW), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (AW); Pina (AW).

December 23 (2): In the Land of Blood & Honey (AW); We Bought a Zoo (AW…maybe…that Disney-family vibe is worrisome).

December 25 (2): Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (wide on 1.20) (AW); War Horse (AW).

December 28 (1): Pariah (AW).

December 30 (2): A Separation (AW); The Iron Lady (AW).

December TBA (1): The Flowers of War (possibly AW).