Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil, writing on the Envelope’s Awards Tracker, says he was “flabbergasted” on 2.10 when a sage Academy member said his Best Actress vote is going to Annette Bening. O’Neil gasped because this guy “has backed all of the underdogs who ended up winning in recent years — Crash, Marion Cotillard, Tilda Swinton.” The wise guy’s other picks: The King’s Speech (Best Picture), David Fincher (director), Colin Firth (lead actor), Christian Bale (supporting actor) and Melissa Leo (supporting actress).

Lee Marvin‘s Kid Shelleen in Cat Ballou (’65) was the funniest movie drunk of all time. I remember my alcoholic father totally losing it when he first saw this otherwise so-so Eliot Silverstein film. Drunks were enjoyable as hell in the ’50s and ’60s, but they stopped being funny sometime between the late ’70s and the time of Iran Contra. Dudley Moore was hilarious in the original Arthur (’81) but seven years later he was dead meat in Arthur 2: On the Rocks.

The main problem with Cat Ballou was that horrible musical accompaniment from Stubby Kaye and Nat King Cole. It grates.

For his brilliant drunkenness, Marvin won the 1965 Best Actor Oscar, an equivalent of a BAFTA award for Best Actor, a Best Actor Golden Globe award and a Best Actor prize from the 15th Berlin International Film Festival.

Consider Kirk Douglas and Cyd Charisse‘s wild car ride through Rome (starting around the 3:13 mark) in this clip from Vincente Minnelli‘s Two Weeks In Another Town (’62). Obviously studio-shot with rear-screen backdrop and a wind machine, it recalls Lana Turner‘s hysterical car ride in Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (’52). And it shouts out a self-disgusted, I’m-really-miserable-and-have-had-it-up-to-here nihilism that I associate with other compromised characters in Minnelli’s best non-musical films.

In a review of this and three other mid-career Minnelli films from Warner Archives, N.Y. Times columnist Dave Kehr describes Two Weeks as basically about Hollywood exiles at Rome’s CineCitta studios. I would describe it also as being about Minnelli’s own life and frustrations, and about the fact that his powers were ebbing when he made it.

Douglas is “a washed-up actor who checks out of a rehab center when he’s offered a job on a film being shot in Rome by the director (Edward G. Robinson) who first made him a star.” Two Weeks in Another Town also features Claire Trevor, Daliah Lavi, George Hamilton and Rosanna Schiaffino.

The film’s Wikipage says the story was seen by some as partially inspired by the early ’50s relationship between actors Tyrone Power (i.e., Douglas) and Linda Christian (Charisse) and producer Darryl Zanuck (Robinson).”

Christian’s fame, it says, stemmed largely from having wed and divorced Power. They were married from 1949 to 1956. Christian later had a dailliance with athlete Alfonso de Portago, and was photographed with de Portago at the 1957 Mille Miglia car race when he later crashed his Ferrari and died, killing at least ten spectators in the process. Power died the following year of a heart attack at the age of 44. Christian was later also briefly married to the Rome-based British actor Edmund Purdom.

In an announcement of Magnolia’s acquisition of Lars Von Trier‘s Melancholia, which the director has described as “a beautiful movie about the end of the world,” a senior exec said something very strange. In an official release, senior Magnolia vp Tom Quinn declares that “as the 2012 apocalypse is upon us, it is time to prepare for a cinematic last supper.”

What apocalypse is this? The Biblical nut end-of-days version? Or the general apocalypse signified by the radical political right? Is Quinn referring to the presidential campaign of Sarah Stillson? Does he see frogs falling from the sky? What film executive has ever alluded to a right-wing wackjob fantasy in order to hype a film?

There is only one apocalypse in this instance, and that is the creative one that has been afflicting Von Trier for the last two or three years. It is/was apparently rooted in the same psychological depression that resulted in Antichrist, easily the most ludicrous film of his career.

The not-yet-completed Melancholia costars Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Alexander Skarsgard, Stellan Skarsgard and Udo Kier. The Wiki page says it “deals with a variety of people trying to cope with the death of the planet as a large foreign body threatens a deadly collision.” Melancholia will most likely play at next May’s Cannes Film Festival.

If and when Chris Nolan manages to adapt Michael Drosnin‘s Citizen Hughes, a history of Howard Hughes‘ reclusive, obsessive-compulsive years, it will be, at best, a commercial disappointment if not a failure. Double guaranteed. Vulture has reported that Nolan wants to film the biopic in late 2012 for a 2014 release.

Nolan wants to do this, I’m presuming, because (a) for whatever perverse reason he personally relates (like Warren Beatty did before him) to Hughes’ Las Vegas agorophobe phase, and (b) he feels artistically watered down and corporately poisoned from working on two superhero movies (directing The Dark Knight Returns, producing Zak Snyder‘s Superman film) and needs to assert his quirk weirdo side.

There are so many problems with the selling/marketing of Atlas Shrugged, Part 1 (4.15) that it’s hard to decide which ones top the list. The absence of stars is obviously concern #1. Concern #2 is that the trailer’s slogan — “Who is John Galt?” — sounds like a rehash of the “Who is Salt?” copy used for last summer’s Angelina Jolie thriller. Concern #3 is that Atlas Shrugged is basically a Ron Paul message movie — an ultra-rightist, get-the-regulators-off-our-backs propaganda film.

The fact that the trailer had its big promotional debut at the just-concluded Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Washington, D.C., tells you everything.

In and of itself, the Libertarian/Objectivist philosophy that inspired Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel has a kind of beauty, certainly if regarded in an ivory-tower sense. Government big or small has always had a bureaucratic tendency to hinder or smother genius and stifle innovative risk-taking. But in today’s context, the movie is obviously made for and playing to the super-selfish deregulatory uglies — those who value the freedom and power to be SUV-driving, gated-community superstuds above all other things — and to the general anti-progressive, leave-us-alone, stop-Obama Tea Party community.

The thing that sold The Fountainhead, the most successful and/or legendary film adaptation of an Ayn Rand novel, was the throbbing sexual current between costars Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal (who were off-screen lovers during filming). I’m not getting anything like this from Atlas Shrugged costars Taylor Schilling (as Dagny Taggart) and Grant Bowler (as Hank Rearden).

The film’s innovator-financier-producer-and-screenwriter is John Aglialoro. The Wiki history says that Howard and Karen Baldwin “obtained the rights while running Phillip Anschutz‘s Crusader Entertainment. The Baldwins left Crusader and formed Baldwin Entertainment Group in 2004, taking the rights to Atlas Shrugged with them. Michael Burns of Lionsgate Entertainment approached the Baldwins to fund and distribute Atlas Shrugged. A two-part draft screenplay written by James V. Hart was re-written into a 127-page screenplay by the conservative-minded Randall Wallace, with Vadim Perelman expected to direct. Potential cast members for this production had included Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe and Brad Pitt,” etc.

“Brian Patrick O’Toole and Aglialoro’s screenplay is reportedly set in the year 2016, with a dystopian United States suffering economically amid greater calls for collectivism and calls for increasing government intervention.

“Though Stephen Polk was initially set to direct, he was replaced by Paul Johansson nine days before filming was scheduled to begin. Principal photography began on June 13, 2010, beating out the reversion of the film rights set to expire on June 15. Shooting took five weeks and came in on a budget north of $5 million.

The film is obviously doomed.

Within the next two or three days, I’ll become the very last guy in the column-writing, Bluray-reviewing realm to savor Criterion’s brand-new version of Alexander Mackendrick‘s Sweet Smell of Success (2.22). DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze says it “offers superiority” over the previous DVD “in every area…significantly smoother [with] distracting artifacts removed, scratches greatly minimized, contrast vastly improved…[and] quite a bit more information in the frame on all four edges…a magnificent transfer.”

“The wonderful commentary [from] film scholar James Naremore is typically professional, insightful and informative…one of the best I have heard in this early year…he knows his stuff.”

This is an opportunity to re-post something I ran two years ago — a portion of screenwriter Ernest Lehnan‘s recollection of working with Sweet Smell of Success producer-star Burt Lancaster and his producer-partner Harold Hecht, as recounted in a Sam Kashner piece in Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates and the Wild Stories Behind the Making of 13 Iconic Films (Penguin).

The Telegraph‘s Philip Sherwell, Robert Mendick and Nick Meo are reporting that during his last 18 days in power, deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubrak “is understood to have attempted to place his assets — more than 3 billion pounds, although some suggest it could be as much as 40 billion — out of reach of potential investigators.

“On Friday night Swiss authorities announced they were freezing any assets Mubarak and his family may hold in the country’s banks while pressure was growing for the UK to do the same. But a senior Western intelligence source claimed that Mubarak had begun moving his fortune in recent weeks.

“We’re aware of some urgent conversations within the Mubarak family about how to save these assets,” said the source, “And we think their financial advisers have moved some of the money around. If he had real money in Zurich, it may be gone by now.”

In his 2.10 review of Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project, Toronto Star critic Peter Howell says director Barry Avrich “didn’t just pick a hostile target [but also] a moving one, which makes his film both very timely and somewhat the victim of circumstance.

“This time last year, everybody was playing taps for the career of Weinstein, whose Miramax Films had redefined the indie landscape in the 1980s and 1990s, with such hits as Pulp Fiction, The English Patient and Shakespeare In Love. By 2010, Weinstein was beset with debts for his struggling post-Miramax firm The Weinstein Company and deemed to be yesterday’s mogul.

“Now it’s 2011 and Weinstein is very much back in the fray, with a leading 12 Oscar nominations for his current smash The King’s Speech and a recent round of aggressive deals from Sundance.

“How does a filmmaker keep up with all of these fast-changing developments? Avrich’s answer is not to pretend to be the last word on the subject but instead to do a solid job telling the back story, not just about Weinstein but about the rise of independent film in general.

“Having explained Old Hollywood with 2005’s The Last Mogul, his doc on power player Lew Wasserman, he now does the same with Weinstein’s New Hollywood environs.”

“Harvey’s this fantastic enigma, this larger-than- life man,” Avrich recently told CBC News’ Margo Kelly. “He’s huge, he comes from a tough background, the exterior is extraordinarily gruff but he has the sensitivity of a swan when comes to making some of the great monumental foreign and indie films ever.”

“I’m not making this film as a hatchet job,” Avirch states. “It’s called unauthorized not because it’s scandalous — it’s called unauthorized because he didn’t participate. This is a film for people who love Hollywood and Hollywood stories.”

Avrich’s documentary will soon screen on HBO Canada. IFC Films has the U.S. rights, and will presumably offer an on-demand option.

What life’s natural process does to all of us in the end, even the luckiest and most beautiful and most magnificently endowed, is fairly horrific. It was the love of Elizabeth Taylor‘s life, Richard Burton, who came up with the above nickname during the shooting of Cleopatra.