Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger handled things quite nicely as the moderator of the Virtuosos Award ceremony at the Lobero last (i.e., Friday) night. The honorees were Another Year‘s Lesley Manville (funnier and looser than she was before the Oscar nominations), Winter’s Bone‘s John Hawkes (relaxed, funny, self-deprecating), Animal Kingdom‘s Jacki Weaver and True Grit‘s Hailee Steinfeld (much taller than she seems in the film).

(l to. r.) John Hawkes, Lesley Manville, Hailee Steinfeld, Jacki Weaver, Dave Karger — Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre, 4.4.11, 9:15 pm.

Hailee Steinfeld

This afternoon’s tweet relates to yesterday’s Anne Thompson/Indiewire story about Queen Elizabeth II saying flattering things about The King’s Speech.

Toronto Star critic Peter Howell has put on his straw hat and white bucks and red-and-white sport jacket and done the old soft-shoe about how the Gurus of Gold don’t dictate or act as tastemakers — “we just predict.” That’s their claim, yes, and to some extent it’s true.

But the Gurus know full well (and David Poland most of all) that when they vote for a certain film as the likeliest Best Picture nominee or winner it becomes a beacon for the Zeligs out there, for all the Academy members who aren’t sure where to turn and are basically just looking for warmth and assurance and the safety of a crowd.

And that is what people all over the globe want more than anything else — not to stand tall and alone and be “right” (whatever that means), but to know the balm of acceptance and companionship and bon ami and the embrace of brothers and sisters.

The urge to blend in and belong is a very strong one. It exists, I would imagine, in about 80% or 90% of the human population. The rebel, iconoclast and independent thinker club (to which I belong) constitutes, at best, 10% of humanity, and perhaps even less. And the Gurus know this, and yet they pretend that they’re just idly sitting on the sidelines, watching the action in the center arena like hockey fans and calling it as best as they can, and they are so full of shit I can barely stand it. They are kingmakers and they know it.

Howell puts it thusly: “A fellow [Sundance] traveller looks up at me from beneath his snow-fringed toque and exclaims, ‘Hey! Aren’t you one of those Gurus o’ Gold?’

“‘I am indeed,’ I replied, proud at my first street recognition as a Guru, but also a little wary. I noticed with relief that he had no shotgun. Utah is part of the Wild West, after all.

“‘Why are you guys bailing on The Social Network?’ my transit inquisitor continued. ‘Why are you following the other sheep and promoting The King’s Speech?’

“I sighed deeply and began the critic’s speech I’ve given many times on this topic. I love The Social Network, but it’s my sworn duty as a Guru o’ Gold to predict what the nearly 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are likely to choose for Best Picture and other Oscars,” and that’s all.

That’s the ostensible duty, all right, but the final effect is something else entirely.

I’m asking myself if I should book a flight to Moscow to catch the 3.31 theatrical opening of Bruce Robinson‘s The Rum Diary. This isn’t the loneliest, saddest and most unloved Johnny Depp film of all time (that would be 1997’s The Brave), but it’s certainly the loneliest of this century. The $65 million film (according to IMDB Pro) is also slated to open in Sweden on 9.23.11.

Posters copied from a UK site called theshiznit. The font on the Black Swan re-do is too small; ditto The Kids Are All Right.

In the view of Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, a personally-funded FYC Oscar ad, like the one Melissa Leo recently ran for a few days, can be a politically risky thing.

To me, Hammond seemed to be suggesting that the only politically acceptable form of award-season advertising is the kind created and funded by distributors and their highly paid marketing gurus. Heaven forbid that someone like Leo, the Fighter costar who’s a near lock to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, might want to elbow her way past the refusal of magazines to put over-45 ladies on their covers by taking some glammy shots of herself and booking a few website ads to show them off.

The ads half-alluded to the fact that Leo is superb in The Fighter, of course, but also to the fact that she’s highly spirited and attractive.

Ads are always judged in terms of style, class and tone, and Leo’s now-disappeared ads, I feel, got it right. They were fine. She looked great. No harm done. We’ve all been so trained to squint our eyes and arch our backs whenever an individual takes out an ad of any kind. Only corporations and major companies can do this!

Hammond’s view is primarily due to faint but lingering memories of the notoriously self-generated Chill Wills Alamo ad campaign of 1960, which sought to generate support for Wills’ Best Supporting Actor-nominated performance. It was widely seen as an embarassment, and it failed to boot — Peter Ustinov won for his performance as Lentulus Batiatus in Spartacus.

Leo told Hammond that she “did hear a lot of very positive comments, particularly from women of a certain age who happen to act for a living and happen to understand full well the great dilemma and mystery of getting a cover of a magazine. I also heard there were negative comments, but no one said them to my face, sadly. I like to hear what people think. I could explain myself.”

Here’s an engaging At The Movies segment in which mirrorfilm.org’s Kartina Richardson delivers her Four Faces of Nina explanation of Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan, and about how the film is essentially about opposing identities at war.

Kartina Richardson of mirror.org

The four psychological components of Natalie Portman‘s ballet dancer, Richardson explains, are the imp, the baby, the housekeeper and the center. But the main-event battle is between the imp, the nihilist spreader of chaos, and the fretting housekeeper. The center laments as the imp “sabotages,” the baby wails and the housekeeper “cleans up the mess.” Meanwhile “the bathroom is Nina’s only escape from public scrutiny,” Richardson notes.

Here is Richardson’s prose rundown of same.

The At The Movies video is also worth watching if you haven’t caught co-host Iggy Vishnevetsky, the brilliant Russian wunderkind critic, in action. He has a smooth voice and manner, but has been instructed to read copy and behave exactly like all movie talk co-hosts have read and behaved since the beginning of time, and so he comes off as having been constrained and almost half-neutered.

When Iggy informs co-host Christy Lemire that he doesn’t agree with her praise of Black Swan, you can feel the both of them furiously projecting “calm” and “gracious” and mellow-yellow glide patterns. I’m sorry, Roger, but as bright and stimulating as this show has been so far Iggy and Christy are, in a McLuhanesque sense, just two more Stepford co-hosts.

I wrote a year or two ago that the only way to break through this robot bind (and overcome the demands of those experienced TV producers who always make everyone sound and behave exactly the same) is to introduce drinks on the set. Glasses of wine or light beer, I mean — no hard stuff. And allow/encourage Iggy and Christy to imbibe and get gently bombed during taping. And show the glasses of cheer as they speak. Not to make them slurry or sloppy or rude but irreverent and happy and a little more impulsive.

It’s very nice that Queen Elizabeth has seen and approved of The King’s Speech , as Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson reports. The 84 year-old monarch called it “moving and enjoyable” and “was clearly amused by some of the lighter moments.” Well, what’s she gonna say? She’s invested every which way. Thompson ends by saying “that’s one more for team King’s Speech…your move, Social Network.”

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

I bought this All About Eve Bluray at Laser Blazer about two hours ago. And as I was leaving I remembered, of course, that it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1950. And this led me to wonder what today’s cuddly-bear Academy voters would think of this Joseph L. Mankiewicz classic if they were transported back 60 years.

Cuddly-bear voters are the ones who are drawn to movies that provide the kind of warm, reassuring comfort-blanket emotions that are found in The King’s Speech and who therefore aren’t voting for The Social Network because it’s too chilly and arcane and there’s no one likable to root for.

So if the Cuddlies were to be transported one by one in Rod Taylor‘s time machine back to February 4, 1951, their general sentiments about All About Eve would probably go as follows:

“It’s a very good film, but I just didn’t care about anyone, and it’s all happening within this narrow little world of theatre people. Yeah, great dialogue, but witty banter only goes so far. Where’s the heart? And nobody seems to learn anything. Everyone in this film except for Thelma Ritter, Celeste Holm and Gary Merrill is unstable or scheming or generally unpleasant. Bette Davis is a bitter insecure meltdown case and screeching all the time, Anne Baxter is positively reptilian and George Sanders is one of those poison-pen critics with ice water in his veins. And what happens at the end? Okay, just desserts — Baxter is going to get hers. But emotionally I just felt…I don’t know. It didn’t reach me.

“I’m not putting All About Eve down, mind. It’s fine, it’s a good film, very well directed. But I like Father of the Bride better. I can’t help it but I love it. You don’t watch that film — you feel it. Poor, stressed out, economically suffering Spencer Tracy! Losing his daughter and also gaining a son, and going through hell the whole time. You just feel for him.”

There are many cultural similarities between Manhattan and Los Angeles, but one thing you never see in Manhattan are tan, balding 60ish guys driving really nifty, new-looking Bentleys with obviously younger (by at least 20 or 25 years) pretty women riding shotgun. Just before I spotted this guy I noticed another 60ish (or perhaps 70ish) guy driving down Olympic is a red Beemer convertible, also tan and a little jowly, wearing a perfect white T-shirt and what looked like a pair of brown Ray-Bans, his white-silvery hair and sideburns whipping in the wind. I looked and muttered to myself, “Only in L.A.”

I’m typing this in a Starbucks near the Malibu Canyon exit off the 101 north, and there are two female shriekers sitting two tables away, throwing their heads back and laughing riotously at whatever the fellow they’re sitting with, another balding older guy in a white T-shirt (and also a vest), is saying. The women appear to be laughing really loudly in order to please and flatter the older guy. Because to go by the look of this guy, whatever he’s saying, trust me, it’s not that funny.

I’ve given them three dirty looks so far; they’re ignoring me, of course. That goes with being a shrieker. You don’t care what anyone else is thinking or feeling, ever. You’re just going with your ectstatic flow, and eff everyone else.

I need around five or six hours straight to file the six or seven items/riffs/stories that I try to post each day, and if that gets interrupted all the eggs in the air fall to the floor — glop, yolk, eggshell bits. Today is one of those days, and l don’t know what to do here except grim up and stick to the plan.

From 7 am this morning I’ve been caught up in more plannings and preparations for my return to LA on or about 2.20. I have to drive back to Santa Barbara around noon and file some more stories (including a scheduled Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu phoner) before this evening’s Virtuosos Award ceremony at the Lobero at 8pm, honoring Lesley Manville (Another Year), John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone), Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom) and Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit).

Hey, what about The Social Network‘s Andrew Garfield?