From a Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight posting on the N.Y. Times site this evening at 6:33 pm, called “Sarah Palin’s Nomination Chances: A Reassessment.”

HE is offering a pat on the back to Jamie Stuart‘s for his big “Idiot With a Tripod” triumph. I was one of those to whom Stuart sent his blizzard video last Monday. It was Roger Ebert‘s enthusiastic response, of course, that launched it.

It’ll be midnight in Paris in about two hours, so I guess it’s time to post my usual “the hell with New Year’s Eve” sentiments. 2010 was a very good year movie-wise, and a fairly terrible one politically. But I have few complaints, and I hope that others are feeling as good these days, or are feeling at peace. This is the best era of my life. It’s a good time to be happy. Raise a glass, hug someone, smile, etc.

That said, there’s nothing fills me with such spiritual satisfaction as my annual naysaying of this idiotic celebration of absolutely nothing.

I love clinking glasses with cool people at cool parties, but celebrating renewal by way of the hands of a clock and especially in the company of party animals making a big whoop-dee-doo has always felt like a huge humiliation to me. Only idiots believe in the idea of a of a midnight renewal. Renewal is a constant. Every morning…hell, every minute marks the potential start of something beautiful and cleansing, and perhaps even transforming. So why hang back and celebrate a rite that denies this 24/7 theology, and in a kind of idiot-monkey way with party hats and noisemakers?

I would feel differently if I was in Paris or Prague or Rome. It’s another thing over there. Three years ago I wrote that “my all-time best New Year’s Eve happened in Paris on the 1999-into-2000 Millenium year — standing about two city blocks in front of the Eiffel Tower and watching the greatest fireworks display in human history.

“And then walking all the way back to Montmartre with thousands on the streets after the civil servants shut the subway down at 1 a.m.” That couldn’t have happened eleven years ago. Must be a mistake.

Stanley Kubrick was one of the reigning cinematic geniuses of the 20th century, but the defining behavioral trait of the last 30 years of his life was an increasing tendency to lead a hermetic, hidden-away life. I’ve long felt that this isolation made his films seem more and more porcelain and pristine, and less flesh-and-blood. I mentioned this once to Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother in law, and he didn’t disagree. “That was the man,” he said. I feel that Kubrick became a kind of cautionary tale.

I wouldn’t imply that Sofia Coppola has become an artistic equal of Kubrick’s, but she does know, as Kubrick did, about fashioning cinematic realms with great care and exactitude, and so it’s fair, I think, to ask if she’s going down the Kubrick path in other ways. Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson seems to think so. Yesterday she scolded Somewhere‘s director-writer for succumbing to a kind of isolationist lifestyle and mentality, and urged her to “open up to other collaborators and voices.”

It’s been widely observed that Coppola has focused too often on passive, well-off characters indulging in aimless doodling and wandering inside swank abodes (hotels, palaces). And that she’s enacted too many “daughters and fathers, passive female figures and powerful men” stories. She’s obviously drawing upon her life as Francis Coppola‘s priveleged daughter. But the main reason reason, said Thompson, is that Coppola is “living inside a protected, hermetic world of friends, family and Coppolas, producer-father Francis and brother Roman.”

Thompson’s opinion seems to have emerged from (or been partly shaped by) an interview she recently did with producer Scott Rudin. Her Coppla piece noted that Rudin “had a project for her to consider, but when he tried to reach her, he couldn’t get close.”

A producer has told me the same thing. If you have a project you want to discuss with Coppola, you “can’t get past the agent…nobody can. You can’t get a meeting and you can’t float something to her. You only can submit a script with an offer.”

All artists have to taste experience and expose themselves to as much life’s push-pull as possible, but I wonder how many other directors have operated (and arguably done well) out of a carefully controlled, hermetically sealed place?

Ten or eleven years ago I wrote how Eyes Wide Shut was a fascinating stiff that essentially portrayed Kubrick’s decline. I referred to Eyes Wide Shut as a perfect white tablecloth but also one that feels stiff and unnatural from too much starch.

“If you want your art to matter, stay in touch with the burly-burly. Keep in the human drama, take walks, go to baseball games, chase women, argue with waiters, ride motorcycles, hang out with children, play poker, visit Paris as often as possible and always keep in touch with the craggy old guy with the bad cough who runs the news stand.”

A few days ago someone inserted an idea that The Fighter‘s Best Picture headwind has somehow diminished because it hasn’t done True Grit-level business. Okay, it hasn’t astonished. But since opening wide on 12.17 on roughly 2500 theatres, David O. Russell‘s film had made about $34 million as of 12.29, and boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino is projecting $44 million by Sunday evening.

“So I’d say it’s performing on track,” Contrino said this morning. “If anything, it might be getting hurt by how well True Grit is doing.”

Do you think it’s doing well in terms of per-screen average? Where do you see it ending up? Are others wrong in saying that it’s under-performing?

“The Fighter‘s per-screen average is fine,” he repeated, “considering that it has to compete with True Grit, which is getting the steak-eaters, Black Swan and its under-35 females, and The King’s Speech apparent hold over the older, traditional-minded conservative types. It looks like it could hit $55 to $60 million all in.

“People panic when a film doesn’t break records during its opening weekend, but we still live in a world where great flicks can hang around in theaters for a while based on positive word-of-mouth. The Fighter will earn its money in slow-burn fashion.

But The Fighter isn’t a pretty good movie — it’s real, it’s exceptional, it has great performances, it’s about families and drug addiction, etc. Why are people more eager to see bearded Jeff Bridges draw his big ole six-shooter and stumble around and go “arrhhrrg-gaahhrrg” that watch Wahlberg, Bale, Adams and Leo mix it up in real-deal Lowell? I mean, a movie like The Fighter should be looking at a higher overall take, no? More like $70 or $80 million?

“The problem is competition, not the quality of the film,” he replied. “Take True Grit and Black Swan out of the equation and it would easily hit $70 to $80 million.”

What demographic is The Fighter not reaching out to or doing as well as it should with? Older women? I’ve read that some over-35 females feel that The Fighter portrays working-class women (i.e., Melissa Leo and the seven sisters) with too crude and coarse a brush. Is that the issue?

I would have edited out the portion in which I get on the L train, but it should be noted that the elderly bum lying sideways on the seat like a dead seal (i.e., briefly glimpsed) smelled of rank intestinal substances, which is why no one was sitting near him. Thank God the aroma was diluted somewhat by other bodies and scents, but this, ladies and gentleman, is the New York subway system at times. The smellies do what they want.

Tyler and Cameron, the Harvard Connection guys, have spoken to the N.Y. Times. Same old tune, we want more money than what we got…waahhh. “It shouldn’t be that Mark Zuckerberg gets away with behaving that way,” “They didn’t fight fair,” “Mark stole the idea,” “What we agreed to is not what we got,” etc.

Tyler Winklevoss (l.), Cameron Winklevoss (r.).

A.O. Scott‘s 1.2.11 N.Y. Times piece on Black Swan, “a leading candidate for the most misunderstood film of 2010,” and especially Natalie Portman‘s lead performance makes for very stirring reading. He seems to really get into the scheme of it, the duality and the conflict in Darren Aronfosky‘s melodrama of meltdown.

Add this to Manohla Dargis‘s 12.3 review and two of my own riffs — “Effing Brilliant,” my Toronto Film Festival review, and an early December piece called “Swans and Fables” — and there’s plenty to kick around.

Portman, says Scott, seems “to be participating in the invention of a new kind of screen performance. In its various iterations, the Method has been about using voice and gesture to express a character’s deep psychological truth. Ms. Portman, like other young actors working with filmmakers who emphasize the visceral and the immediate, seems almost to reverse this process. Nina’s psychological state is evidently part of the artifice of Black Swan, but her body, subject to unimaginable (and sometimes unreal) mutations and mutilations, is the film’s ground zero of authenticity.

Portman “succeeds in erasing the boundary between reality and fantasy…by hurling herself, with reckless conviction, into Nina’s world and becoming both the monster and the victim in this horror movie.

“Which is another way of saying that she is both the black swan and the white, both the perfectly controlled performer and the pure creature of instinct. We can assure ourselves that Nina does not really turn into a bird. We also know, being sane and disciplined moviegoers, that Ms. Portman — pregnant and engaged (to the movie’s choreographer) and happy in the wake of her latest professional triumph — is not Nina Sayers. But we also know, on the irrefutable evidence of our own eyes, and the prickly sensation of our skin, that she is.”

Talk to the yentas! They don’t feel they’re misunderstanding Black Swan at all. They feel on some gut level that they understand it all too well. Which they don’t or can’t. Not really, I mean. Which is too bad. Because I for one would be at peace if Black Swan beat out The Social Network for Best Picture. I know this can’t and won’t happen. But what a shame. Because Black Swan has the leaping emotion that The Social Network lacks — it’s a full emotional boat, the kind of thing that rises and crashes and washes over like great wave.

I’ve been wrestling with Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma for 10 months, or since I first read an October 2009 draft of Allen Loeb‘s script, which was initially called Your Cheating Heart, a.k.a. Untitled Cheating Project. I didn’t agree with the basic set-up, which is that a semi-mature male in his 40s would be on the fence about whether to tell his best friend that his wife may be playing around. Friends always wise each other up. Anyone who would dither and/or procrastinate about levelling with a pal is no pal — it’s that simple.

The Dilemma shot last summer in Chicago and is now about to open on 1.14.14, or two weeks hence. Last October’s “gay” terminology dustup is over and done with, but no one’s seen the film yet…to my knowledge.

Right now I can say only one thing for sure, which is that Vince Vaughn and Steve James look a lot slimmer in the Dilemma one-sheet than they do in the film. They play a couple of extra-beefy auto designers who’ve hooked up with two svelte brunettes — James is married to Winona Ryder and Vaughn is living with Jennifer Connelly. (That’s believable, right?) Anyway, Vaughn seems to be somewhere between his Wedding Crashers and Swingers appearance, and James hasn’t been this slim since high school.

Vaughn and James “will play Chicago-based engine designers Ronnie Valentine and Isaac Backman,” I wrote last February. “Their significant others are Connelly’s Beth (Ronnie’s live-in girlfriend) and Ryder’s Geneva (Isaac’s wife). The central tension is about Ronnie accidentally discovering that Geneva is playing around on Isaac, and the anxieties and trepidations that stem from his not knowing what to do. Should he just blurt out the bad news to Isaac, his business partner and longtime best friend? And if he does, will Isaac somehow blame him for Geneva’s betrayal? Or should he mind his own business and stay out of the lives of others?

“I was immediately repelled by Ronnie’s response because — hello? — there’s only one thing to do. In such a situation his loyalty would be to his longtime friend, not the wife, and so one way or the other he’d have to share what he suspects. No right guy would have to think about this. He’d start out by stressing to his pal that he doesn’t really ‘know’ anything but that he’s seen something disturbing and that maybe something’s up and maybe not. And then he’d suggest that the friend might want to hire a shamus to learn the facts or whatever. But come what may you must share what you’ve seen and/or suspect.

“The fact that jabbering Ronnie — a guy who’s in denial about almost everything, and who fibs all the time like Alibi Ike and has trust issues with everyone — hems and haws throughout the story is infuriating. By my sights the guy has no convictions or cojones, and who wants to spend 110 minutes with a 13 year-old who mostly goes ‘homina-homina-homina’ when faced with a serious issue?”

The Dilemma is junketing in Chicago next weekend. I’m told that the first Chicago junket screening is on Thursday, 1.6. The first New York media screening is reportedly set for Tuesday, 1.11.

David Poland isn’t saying True Grit is beginning to pose a strong threat to The Social Network‘s presumed dominance as a Best Picture favorite. He isn’t saying it’s elbowed aside The King’s Speech and/or The Fighter to become TSN‘s main challenger. He isn’t saying it’s now poised to overtake TSN. He’s saying True Grit “has muscled its way into the frontrunner slot to win Best Picture.”

Because, you know, he’s been talking about Grit‘s Best Picture inevitability for a while now but primarily because the gnarly Coen brothers western is expected to make $90 million domestic by the end of the holidays.

Poland needs an “anything but The Social Network” movie to champion, and he’s given up on The King’s Speech‘s ability to stay the course (as well as the other alternate contenders) and True Grit‘s surprisingly strong revenues have convinced him that this is the horse to ride. That’s all that’s going on here. Poland being Poland and attempting a last-ditch TSN takedown.

This will be the second time during the 2010 Oscar season that the Poland Curse has struck, the first being when MCN’s founding rabbi stuck a shiv into Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go by calling it “a masterpiece…smart and demanding and emotional and rigorous and profoundly artful.” That, as most of us instantly knew, was the end of that. And now True Grit, its Best Picture chances almost certainly diminished by this.

True Grit‘s box-office may well result in a Best Picture nomination along with a Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nom for the Coens, and possibly even a Best Director acting nomination for Jeff Bridges (“arrrrghh gaahrrr muuhrrrarrg”). But as Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas wrote this morning, Grit “will lose screenplay to TSN‘s Aaron Sorkin and directing probably to David Fincher and acting to Colin Firth…its best bet right now is to finally give Roger Deakins his much-dserved cinematography Oscar.”

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley has also noted that True Grit hasn’t much hope on the Best Picture front Not “without a SAG ensemble nod…tough one to overcome.”

The best response to Poland’s piece came from “Loyal” at 10: 29 am: “I think a more likely scenario is that True Grit‘s financial success splinters the ‘I like this film more than The Social Network‘ vote even further and actually helps The Social Network win. You now have the Black Swan camp and the Toy Story 3 camp and the Inception camp and The King’s Speech camp and the True Grit camp all vying for the same piece of the pie and trying to topple The Social Network. It far easier to chose between two films than it is six films.”

Bertie and Elizabeth: The Reluctant Royals played on Masterpiece Theatre in ’02 and came out on DVD in ’05. It acknowledged Bertie’s speech impediment but didn’t, to judge by reviews and comments, make a big deal of it. It was more about a couple that wasn’t exactly cut out for Buckingham Palace being thrust into it by fate and circumstance. It’s on Netflix Streaming. I suppose this one time I can put aside my dislike of watching films on my Powerbook.