People repeating the “Annette Bening is finished” card need to chill down and recalculate the odds. I include myself in this equation. Because she’s not totally done. She won’t win, but she’ll bounce back when the Broadcast Film Critic and Golden Globe noms are announced, and when the SAG Award nominees are revealed.

I was saying to a friend a couple of hours ago that I personally can’t imagine The King’s Speech winning a Best Picture trophy from the New York Film Critics Circle or the L.A. Film Critics Association. I mean, I’d fall right out of my chair if that happens…but it can’t…right? Anyway, when and if the King’s Speech myth of inevitability has fallen away, a healthy percentage of MCN Gurus are going to say to each other, “Oh, my…what to do? Where to go? What safe winner can we flock around now?”

And then, I’m guessing, they’re going to start moving over to The Fighter. Especially if it gets lucky and wins with either the L.A. Film Critics Association (voting Sunday) or the New York Film Critics Circle (voting Monday). Not that I think this will happen — I fully expect The Social Network to win with both groups. But you never know…

“It has been common wisdom as this awards race moves into full gallop that Best Picture Oscar may come down to The Social Network and The King’s Speech,” Deadline‘s Pete Hammond wrote yesterday morning. “But after this week, I believe we may be adding a new heavyweight contender if mounting buzz is any indication. Academy members who are starting to see Paramount/Relativity’s The Fighter, particularly after Monday night’s premiere, are starting to talk in ways that make Oscar consultants for rival films nervous.

“‘It’s a great movie, it really is,’ one major writer/director told me last night. An exec close to the film’s campaign says the studios are starting to hear this a lot and points out one director branch member who came up after the film and told her, ‘I think I’ve just seen the Best Picture of the year.’ This exec says, ‘I know I should be drinking coffee but I am starting to drink my own Kool Aid. I think this thing is really starting to take off.'”

David O. Russell‘s The Fighter (Paramount, 12.17) has strong but not AAA (i.e., Social Network-level) Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic scores. And yet it’s igniting serious emotional excitement — perhaps more so than any other Best Picture contender so far. The passion of the big guns who are with it — N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir, among others — is deep and true.

I’m feeling something here, something that might result in a Best Picture win with the New York Film Critics Circle or the Los Angeles Film Critics Association…who knows? I’ll never back off from my worship of The Social Network, but anyone can see that The Fighter is a way out of the Social Network vs. The King’s Speech impasse. I’m not saying this will happen, but it certainly could. My insect antennae is sensing earth tremors, a certain rumble, whatever you want to call it.

“The entire audience for The Fighter will know that ‘Irish’ Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), lovable palooka of Lowell, Mass., is going to get that title shot and reunite his brawling, hopeless family,” O’Hehir writes. “The magic of The Fighter is all in the telling, in the fact that Russell has taken a tale of mythic American redemption and one of those Hollywood screenplays with four credited writers and somehow made a movie so rousing, so real and so full of complicated emotions that it all feels brand-new.”

This echoes what I said on 11.12, to wit: “I really couldn’t understand how a movie about a boxer could possibly add something to the table that I hadn’t seen before in 20 or 30 other boxing movies, but The Fighter‘s focus on family feuds and crack addiction and delusion and the necessity of facing brutal truths and looking people you love in the eye and telling them they’re history unless they clean up their act…this is what real families do, and why this movie feels like it’s doing it plain and straight every step of the way.”

Back to O’Hehir: “Several other movies this year have tried to tackle working-class American reality (at least in its Caucasian, New England form), including Ben Affleck‘s self-indulgent thriller The Town and the tedious Hilary Swank vehicle Conviction. Russell’s jazzy, ruthless, affectionate and funny film outshines them all, and is a terrific date movie to boot: It’s a boxing flick with bone-jarring action scenes for the guys, and a family-and-relationship comedy for the gals!

“I’m just glad to get Russell back, because he makes movies with tremendous soul, as much of a cliche as that may be. Marvelously shot and edited, The Fighter has high style but is never showy, blends history and fiction in fascinating fashion, and includes several of the year’s best performances. Oscar voters may well end up weighing The Fighter against Black Swan, made by Russell’s friend and producer Darren Aronofsky — a similar fable, told in vastly different fashion — but no matter who wins, nobody loses. Taken together, these movies demonstrate that there’s still passion in American cinema.”

Writing in a deliberately cliched fashion, Scott says The Fighter “is quick on its feet and packs a mighty punch. With solid bodywork, clever feints and tremendous heart, it scores at least a TKO, by which I mean both that it falls just short of overpowering greatness — I can’t quite exclaim ‘It’s a knockout!’ — and that the most impressive thing about it is technique.

“This is yet another tale of an underdog battling long odds and stubborn adversity in search of a shot at the big time. It is also a love story, a family melodrama and the chronicle of a close and complicated fraternal relationship. The love of a good woman (the unaffectedly lovable Amy Adams), the rivalry and camaraderie between brothers, the battered face, bruised knuckles and wounded pride — The Fighter has it all.

“But the inevitable comparisons arise only in retrospect, when it settles down into the company of Rocky and Raging Bull and other very good (and Best Picture-nominated) boxing pictures. Mr. Russell, a restlessly — sometimes recklessly — inventive filmmaker, does not try to subvert the genre, but rather, as Clint Eastwood did in Million Dollar Baby, to refresh it, to find new insights and angles of vision within the parameters of the tried and true.

“Mr. Wahlberg, for his part, leans back against the ropes and watches, underplaying so gracefully and with so little vanity that you almost forget that the movie is supposed to be about Micky. Everyone else seems to do a lot more fighting than the ostensible title character. But the brilliance of Mr. Wahlberg’s quiet performance is that it so effectively mirrors the deep logic of the story, which is finally about the paradox of a man in a violent profession who is fundamentally passive and who must learn how to find some distance from the people who love and need him the most without abandoning them or betraying himself.

Another sample quote from my 11.12 review: “The simple fact is that The Fighter is alive, really alive. It’s a rugged little blue-collar thing that (I know this sounds like a cliche) pulses with grit and real feeling and emotional immediacy. It’s loose and crafty with a hurried, shot-on-the-fly quality. Which makes it feel appropriately ‘small’ and local-feeling. To watch it is to be in it.

And another: “Hollywood has made good films about Massachusetts blue-collar people, but for me they felt ‘acted’ (like The Town and, no offense, The Departed). But Russell and Wahlberg, shooting almost entirely in Lowell on a fast 33-day schedule, have made some kind of real-deal thing here.

“Ten minutes into [the] screening and I was saying, ‘Wait…this is good…this is good…this feels right.’ The acting is great from every player, especially from Bale (he’s got the big showy part) but also Wahlberg, Amy Adams and fierce Melissa Leo as the headstrong mother of Walhlberg, Bale and five or six of the gruntiest-looking family of blue-collar sisters you’ve ever seen in your life, let alone a film. And George Ward and several others are also on it. They all say what they mean and mean what they say, dammit. Nobody’s playin’ fuckin’ games here.”

If Hollywood Reporter investigative hot-shot Kim Masters is reporting about the curiously high cost of making James L. Brooks‘ How Do You Know (i.e., $120 million not counting marketing), you can bet she’s not focusing on this 12.17 Sony release just to pass the time of day. She’s circling because she smells blood.

Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon in James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know.

It’s a Kim Masters “uh-oh” story, in other words, because this romantic dramedy has only just begun to be shown over the last few days (delaying press exposure is always a sign of concern), and because chattering naysayers are guessing that the probable box-office tally will be in the realm of Spanglish ($55 million worldwide) rather than that of Nancy Meyers‘ It’s Complicated ($220 million all in).

Why did this occasionally deft, not terrible, sometimes amusing but strangely artificial film cost $120 million? Talent. Reese Witherspoon got $15 million, Jack Nicholson pocketed $12 million, Brooks and Owen Wilson both earned $10 million (with Brooks expected to receive extra “backend” bucks for writing, producing and directing) and poor, bottom-of-the-totem-pole Paul Rudd took home a lousy $3 million.

Costs also mounted due to Brooks being a “slow and meticulous” worker, according to a production source, as well as a decision to reshoot the beginning and end of the film.

In short, it was apparently unwise of Sony honchos to have approved spending this much dough to make How Do You Know. The term that might best describe their reasoning might be “inexplicably detached.” As I watched the film, my feeling was that as charming as it sometimes is, How Do You Know is clearly not going to be an across-the-board hit and probably should have been brought in for under $50 million, and even then it might not have broken even.

The word to all the agents and managers should have been “we love Brooks and are committed to keeping his flame burning, but it’s not the ’80s or the ’90s any more and we have to face facts and work within the realistic financial realm that his movies now reside in — they’re now labors of love. James L. Brooks used to be a gold-seal brand, but he’s no longer the person he once was. None of us are. The fact is that Jim has, financially-speaking, become a kind of hand-to-mouth indie-level guy, in a sense. GenY and younger GenX audiences don’t know or care who he is, and Spanglish was a turd. So if you love and believe in Jim, as we do, accept back-end participation deals with next to nothing upfront, and then we can all hug each other and move forward and make this movie and hope for the best. Oh, and Jim? That goes for you too.”

I need to underline again that while much of How Do You Know feels oddly inert and sound-stage artificial, it does deliver here and there and is not, by my yardstick, calamitously bad. As I said yesterday, I can see a portion of the critical community being okay with it. But Brooks is clearly holding on to a compositional shooting aesthetic that used to be and no longer is. The world has moved on and he has not. Because of this older-filmmaker, shot-on-a-sound-stage, key-lighted-to-death quality, How Do You Know is going to be rejected, I’m presuming, by the under-40s and play only with the older GenX and boomer women and couples, if that.

Anyone who still says Hugh Jackman is half-gay deals with me. I don’t care if he’s twice my size!

I just differed with a guy about James L. Brooks‘ How Do You Know (Sony, 12.17). He says it isn’t a problem movie like others have said, and claims to know someone who feels it may be Brooks’ best film since Broadcast News. This isn’t a review (I’ll be waiting until early next week), but that’s horseshit, what that guy said.

How Do You Know has some lines and little moments that work very nicely. It’s not my idea of a disaster — I can foresee a portion of the critics saying it’s okay — but my main impression was that of a very bizarre, strangely un-life-like film. The writing is simultaneously clever and constipated, and the lighting and the cinematography seem overly poised and prettified. It looks and feels like a play at the Lucille Lortel, in a sense. Or certainly like it’s happening in some kind of Hollywood fairyland that feels a lot like a sound-stage set (i.e., one that’s meant to simulate certain indoor settings in Washington, D.C.).

It seems as if Brooks has entered his formalist, out-of-time, older-director phase. The look and tone and pacing of How Do You Know reminded me of the look and tone and pacing of Alfred Hitchcock‘s films after The Birds — the increasingly rigid and old-fogey-behind-the-camera feeling of Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Family Plot, etc. (Some believe that Frenzy was an exception; I don’t.) I’m talking about a phase in which a director is not only repeating the kind of brush strokes that felt fresher and less constipated 20, 25 or 30 years earlier, but emphasizing them so as to say “I know this may seem unnatural to some of you out there, but this is how I like to do things, no matter how stylistically out-of-touch this film may seem. This is me, take it or leave it.”

The casting of Clint Eastwood‘s Hoover is getting loonier still. It was nutty enough that the six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered, Germanically-featured Leonardo DiCaprio was cast as the short (5′ 7″), bulldog-resembling, perpetually middle-aged J. Edgar Hoover. But now The Social Network‘s Armie Hammer, who stands 6’5″, has been cast as Hoover’s lover, Clyde Tolson. As the photo below (initially used by Award Daily‘s Ryan Adams) seems to indicate, Tolson was two or three inches taller than Hoover, or maybe 5’10”.

So proportionately, DiCaprio and Hammer are a kind of fit. But otherwise they seem way off the mark. These are two young, well-built, relatively imposing glamour boys playing a couple of pudgy, modestly-proportioned dorks who apparently didn’t have the courage to fuck each other. One solution, a la Marion Cotilard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, is to make DiCaprio-Hammer seem shorter with large-size furniture, extra-high door frames and other props that will simulate men of a shorter height.

It just feels bizarre that a couple of exceptionally handsome, almost model-pretty guys with basketball-player frames and the usual glamour-swagger are going to play a couple of closeted bureaucratic assholes whose features were dull and rigid, or at least cautious — faces that seemed to exude the very antithesis of ease and glamour. I know, I know — Warren Beatty bore almost no resemblance to Clyde Barrow, but this kind of casting discrepancy used to be the exception.

I’ve noted before that the long-standing Hollywood law of casting famous-person roles with actors who bore at least a faint resemblance to the people they were playing (Henry Fonda as Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln, Broderick Crawford as Hoover in Larry Cohen‘s 1977 biopic , Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson in The Buccaneer, James Stewart as Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis) is pretty much out the window these days. Anyone of any size, shape or ethnic heritage, it seems, can play anyone of any size, shape or ethnic heritage. Nothing matters. The Greek-Italian Gwen Stefani playing the milk-fed and totally Midwestern-looking Jean Harlow in Martin Scorsese‘s The Aviator was a sloppy joke, and yet representative of the current casting norm. Anything goes for the most part. Kelsey Grammer as William Shakespeare, Madonna as Eleanor Roosevelt, Pee-Wee Herman as Thomas Jefferson…why not?

Last April I reported about Dustin Lance Black‘s Hoover script. “The scenes between Hoover and FBI ally/colleague/friendo Clyde Tolson (whose last name Black spells as ‘Toulson’) are fairly pronounced in terms of sexual intrigue and emotional ties between the two,” I wrote. “Theirs is absolutely and without any qualification a gay relationship, Tolson being the loyalty-demanding, bullshit-deflating ‘woman’ and Hoover being the gruff, vaguely asexual ‘man’ whose interest in Tolson is obviously there and yet at the same time suppressed.

“The script flips back and forth in time from decade to decade, from the 1920s (dealing with the commie-radical threat posed by people like Emma Goldman) to the early ’30s (the focus being on the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping case) to Hoover’s young childhood to the early ’60s (dealing with the Kennedy brothers), the mid to late ’60s (Martin Luther King‘s randy time-outs) and early ’70s (dealing with Nixon’s henchmen). Old Hoover, young Hoover, etc. Major pounds of makeup for Leo, I’m guessing.”

The night before last I experienced the most surreal rest-room experience of my life. It happened in a small, spartan, darkly lighted facility on the top floor of The Standard, the high-style, high-design hotel in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. I need to put this discreetly, but when you “sit down,” so to speak, you’re looking at nothing but pure floor-to-ceiling glass and beyond that the nighttime splendor of Manhattan. I’m talking total exposure, or what certainly feels like being on full display in front of the greatest city in the world.

The glass is presumably tinted on the outside to prevent photography, but it’s hard not think as you’re sitting there that if someone in a nearby tall building had the right kind of telephoto-lens camera with night-vision capability, they could snap a fairly bizarre shot.

All I can say is that it’s an astonishing thing to regard the dazzling lower Manhattan skyline with your pants down. It’s something that needs to be sampled at least once by any visitors to Manhattan with an appreciation for the unusual and the perverse. I intend to re-experience it tomorrow night (i.e., Friday, 12.10) during the after-party for The Fighter following a special screening at the School of Visual Arts theatre.

That 12.6 report about a ballistics test indicating that Harold Smith‘s suicide gun wasn’t the one that killed publicist Ronni Chasen has been debunked or erased or whatever. Now they’re saying it is the same gun, and that Smith acted alone in some kind of half-assed robbery attempt, and that Smith was riding a bicycle.

I was in London when John Lennon was shot exactly 30 years ago this evening. I was there to do a GQ interview with Peter O’Toole, for a piece about his performance in The Stunt Man. I was crashing on a couch in some guy’s apartment in Stockwell, adjacent to Brixton, and was woken up with the news on the morning of December 9th. I’d had a few pints hours earlier and was on the groggy side. “Holy shit,” I remember saying. “Really?”

I told Paprika Steen during a lunch earlier today that she seems to have moved beyond “acting” in Martin Pieter Zandvlier‘s Applause (12.3), about a brilliant but half-unhinged alcoholic actress. She performs the part, of course, but I didn’t fully believe that Steen (a Danish dogma star best known for Susanne Bier‘s Open Hearts and Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Celebration) was 100% acting. Deep down I was persuaded that she was mostly playing herself.

Applause star Paprika Steen outside Italian joint on West 4th and 10th Street — Wednesday, 12.8, 1:10 pm.

I’m not saying that she was, but that I believed as much. That, in my book, is acting of a very high and unusual order.

“Uh-oh,” she replied. “Maybe that’s not so good, people might think I’m a problem alcoholic.” No, no, I said — it’s a very good thing if people really understand, as I think I do now. For the record Steen, who’s on the tallish side, looks and seems un- addicted in most respects. She speaks perfectly fluid English without much of an accent. She has a exotic, vivacious smile and a magnificent mane of blonde hair and absolutely no trace of the somewhat puffy, boozy complexion she has in the film.

In short I thought she was okay and vice versa. We’re both Scorpios, etc. She seemed to enjoy my resemblance to Chris Walken. I taped our conversation, of course, and will run some of our conversation sometime tomorrow.

ditto.

“Ms. Steen doesn’t just surpass herself in Applause — she gives one of the best screen performances of the year,” wrote Karen Durbin in the N.Y. Times on 10.29.

“[She] plays Thea, a famous theater actress fresh from a lengthy stint in alcohol rehab who is eager to regain at least partial custody of her two young sons. Applause intercuts the tense drama of her troubled present with pungent flashbacks to Thea triumphant as the drunken Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? We see that she was not only great but, once offstage, viciously abusive to her young dresser.

“Playing an alcoholic has been known to bring out the scenery chomper in the best of actors, Ms. Steen never puts a foot wrong, even though she’s playing two alcoholics, wild Martha with the meat-cleaver mouth and the more alienated, calculating Thea.

“There are no melodramatics in the latter portrayal, just a silent, simmering rage at everyone but her children, a tormented sense of being forever on the outside looking in, and a self-destructiveness so willful that when her ex-husband lets her take the boys on an outing near a lake, it’s impossible not to think she’s going to drown them.

“To say that Ms. Steen commands this film is no exaggeration. She’s in every scene, with Thea’s drink-ravaged face often shot in unforgiving close-up. There is even a single eerie, fleeting moment when we can’t tell if she’s Martha or Thea: Ms. Steen is that good.

“Thea’s story is harrowing. Yet for all the pain she depicts, Ms. Steen is delving so deep and with such unerring precision into the human psyche, not even for a moment do we want to look away.”

Just before my 4 pm screening of How Do You Know, Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that the MPAA has overturned the NC-17 rating previously given to Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine and decided on an R. The problem was reportedly a man-on-woman, Ryan Gosling-on-Michelle Williams oral sex scene. Presumably the MPAA guys read the various posts asking why Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan had been given an R rating despite a girl-on-girl oral sex scene, etc.

Blue Valentine Michelle Williams at last night’s gathering at Manhattan’s Standard Hotel following a MOMA screening. An American Cinematheque tribute will happen on Saturday at L.A.’s Aero theatre at 7:30 pm. Timothy Blake will moderate a discussion with Williams as well as show include clips from her numerous films. A screening of Blue Valentine will follow.

Blue Valentine director-writer Derek Cianfrance (r.) at same gathering — Tuesday, 12.7, 10:45 pm. (Apologies for being unable within my usual tight time frame to find the name of Derek’s wife. I asked two publicists…zip.)

Weinstein Co. honcho Harvey Weinstein “personally argued his position in today’s hearing,” Fleming reports,” adding that he’s “been told the appeal board’s decision was unanimous.” This whole thing couldn’t have worked out better for the Weinstein Co. The NC-17 rating jacked up the film’s profile, and now it’ll benefit from all the attention without having to deal with the ad restrictions that would have hindered the films’ release if it hadn’t been overturned.