The National Board of Review has given its Best Picture trophy to David Fincher‘s The Social Network. Plus awards to Fincher for Best Director and to Jesse Eisenberg for Best Actor. Nice! I’d like to think it’s an omen of some kind, and maybe it is. An NBR seal of approval doesn’t mean very much in the overall scheme — let’s face it. But wasn’t everyone predicting that The King’s Speech had this in the bag? (Tapped out in back of a cab on my way to JFK.)

It’s 12:49 pm, and I have to be at JFK in three hours to catch a 5:45 pm Royal Air Maroq flight to Casablanca, and then a short flight to Marrakech. I’ll be at the 10th annual Marrakech Film Festival for six days and then back home. I’m seized with dread about leaving. Why am I doing this? Way behind on so many movies and stories and things to get to, trying to keep up, haven’t taken the garbage out, have clothes to clean, bills to pay. My stomach is in knots.

At least it’s warmish over there — 50s, 60s. Mid to high 40s in the evening.

I got into a little mudball fight with some online columnists late this morning, and I ended my contribution by saying that The King’s Speech is essentially Driving Miss Daisy in a British royal realm — a story about an unlikely commoner enriching the life of a person of wealth, property and social standing. Geoffrey Rush is Morgan Freeman, and Colin Firth is Jessica Tandy.

I basically said that as good as it is (and as much as I personally enjoyed it), Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech winning the Best Picture Oscar will be seen in some under-40 quarters as a kind of generational nail in the coffin of the Academy and the whole Oscar tradition, for that matter. It’ll be seen as a Triumph of the Farts.

The Oscar generation gap is alive and raging. The younger crowd loves The Social Network and Black Swan and the doddering elders aren’t so hot on either of these, and the old farts love The King’s Speech and The Kids Are All Right. (Kids is a relatively fresh-feeling thing, but The King’s Speech could have been made 20 or 30 years ago.) Giving the Best Picture Oscar to The Kings’ Speech will be seen as a huge metaphorical backslide…a triumph of a bland sensibility in the form of a very well-made, entirely respectable, very well acted film that’s about upholding tradition and manning up and doing what’s required….WOW, HOW EXCITING!

I was somewhere between charmed and delighted when it hit me that Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere (12.22) is a fairly close facsimile of an early ’60s Michelangelo Antonioni film. It’s not about imitation, but the unhurried meditative mood is striking, intriguing. For this and other reasons, I fell right into Somewhere‘s game. I think it signifies a huge breakthrough for Coppola, regardless who agrees or disagrees or how many Average Joes pay to see this Focus Features release.

Somewhere director-writer Sofia Coppola with Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning at last September’s Venice Film Festival.

So I leapt at the chance to speak with Coppola last night, even though it meant hanging out in the apartment at 8:30 pm and having to blow off the premiere of All Good Things.

Somewhere is about a form of spiritual depletion — a kind of nothingness not unknown in wealthy movie-star realms. It’s not the same flatline syndrome that afflicted Antonioni’s characters in L’Avventura, L’Eclisse, La Notte and Blow-Up, but it’s in the same general ballpark. You can sense a subtle poisoning in the air. An affluent lethargy of some kind. A downswirl vibe. I love that Coppola refuses to spell it out or give it a name.

Nobody in Coppola’s league has had the vision or the guts to make a film like this, a film in which the main character, a rich but starting-to-fade Hollywood actor named Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), does very little and says even less as he drives his black sports car around and resides at West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont and gets laid a lot and basically just…plotzes. Very little happens, but there’s a whole lotta stuff going on beneath.

Okay, something does happen. Johnny’s 11 year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) is dropped off at the hotel by her mom for whatever reason, and Johnny is asked to take care of her for a couple of weeks (or at least more than two or three days). Nobody says anything, no speeches are spoken, but bit by bit the self-absorbed Johnny begins to revel in the mood between himself and his daughter, and you can sense a kind of opening up beginning to happen. But it never goes beyond that. Nobody declares or demonstrates anything. Not overtly, I mean.

Our conversation was okay. I could hear Sofia, but not all that well, frankly. I think the mp3 recorder has trouble as well. She said something about being cool with meeting in Manhattan in a week or so. She and her two children and her musician-boyfriend Thomas Mars lived in Paris for three or four years (longer?), but they’re in New York these days. I sound like a kiss-ass at times, but that tone just slips in when I’m talking about a film I really like.

I’m already feeling perplexed…okay, pissed off…by certain critics who are questioning the mad theatrical flamboyance and fatalistic delirium of Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan (Fox Searchlight, 12.3), and their particular focus on the increasingly agitated mood-quakes that torture Natalie Portman‘s ballet dancer character, Nina Sayers.

This was Aronofsky’s intention, guys. It’s the idea. The film and the famous ballet it’s half based upon are supposed to be seen as intertwined and flowing into each other. It’s a psychological disturbance drama as myth and vice-versa…right? Mixed in with several dabs of The Red Shoes and laced with Repulsion, etc. Not hard to figure.

But it is, apparently. Marshall Fine and EW‘s Owen Gleiberman have complained about the nutso stuff. The hallucinatory spells and fable-like madness spasms are a bit much for them. “Why didn’t Aronofsky dial it down?,” they’re basically saying. “Why didn’t he give us…you know, a somewhat calmer, more psychologically intimate, older-guy version of Black Swan without all the emotional leaps and delusions and shattered glass?

“At some point, [Aronofsky’s] horror-movie shocks turn a little silly,” Fine writes. “His choices don’t ramp up the stakes but, too often, undermine them…[he] defies you to take the ride seriously.” Slant‘s Ed Gonzalez has written that “the overall effect is ostentatiously calculated, ill-fitting, and emotionally aloof.”

I know Fine and Gleiberman, and I know they went to college and generally don’t miss a trick so I don’t get it. The backdrop of Black Swan concerns preparations for a New York City Ballet production of Swan Lake, and is obviously intended to be a kind of plot-mirror of Peter Tchaikovsky‘s legendary Russian ballet, and a tonal echo of it. Gonzalez, at least, considers at the end of his review that “perhaps Black Swan, like Swan Lake, is meant to be seen itself as an opera, a fusion of synergic sound and movement — albeit a very filmic one.”

Boiled down, Swan Lake is about an evil sorcerer who’s transformed several young girls into swans, and their parents’ grief has formed a lake of tears — i.e., Swan Lake. The principal figure in this realm is Odette, the Swan Queen. The curse afflicting Odette can only be broken if a man vows undying love for her. A young prince tries to save her, but he and Odette achieve a release only in death — they jump into the lake and, having drowned, rise up to the heavens.

The first lines spoken by Vincent Cassell‘s ballet-director character, Thomas, in Black Swan recount the Swan Lake plot, ending with a line that the Swan Queen “finds release through death”…or words to that effect.

Cassell’s Thomas — hello? — is the evil sorcerer who turns Portman’s Nina into the Swan Queen. Portman’s highly neurotic stage mom, played by Barbara Hershey, has been crying tears of frustration for years over having failed to make it as a ballet dancer in her youth, and it is her lake that Portman’s Nina is clearly drowning in. It’s obvious what’s in the cards. Mila Kunis‘s Lily character is the scheming Black Swan. Winona Ryder‘s Beth Macyntire character, an older ballet dancer bitter about retiring, is referred to in the IMDB credits as “the dying queen.” There’s no great romance or young prince in Black Swan — it is strictly about Nina vs. Lily vs. her mother vs. Thomas — but the handsome Benjamin Millepied plays a young ballet dancer who could be the prince if Aronofsky had wanted to to go in that direction.

It just seems so clear to me, so unmistakable. Black Swan is supposed to affect you like the original Russian folk tale inspired the original authors of Swan Lake. It’s supposed to be fanciful, passionate, wacko, extreme, imaginary, loony. It wants to get into your blood.

If the latest fatal turn in the Ronni Chasen murder investigation had been inserted into a screenplay about Chasen’s bizarre death, it would be dismissed as poor plotting — a mystifying, incomprehensible occurence that adds nothing and leads nowhere.

TheWrap and the L.A. Times are reporting that late yesterday afternoon an ex-convict transient named “Harold” was approached at a transient hotel (i.e., the Harvey Apartments on the 5600 block of Santa Monica Blvd.) by Beverly Hills detectives as a “person of interest” in the Chasen killing. (In the parlance of Zodiac, the cops “liked” him — i.e., regarded him as a possible suspect.)

And then what happened? Harold “backed away, pulled out a handgun and shot himself” to death. Rewrite!

It gets worse or better, depending on your perspective.

L.A. Times reporter Abby Sewell spoke to a guy named Brandon Harrison, a “neighbor” of Harold’s who knew him slightly and described him as a “very strange” ex-convict who’d done time over drugs and weapons charges. Sewell reports that Harold “told” Harrison “several times [that] ‘If it ever came down to me going back to prison, I would die first.'” The inference is that Harold, apparently convinced that the bulls were going to take him back to jail for something or other, made good on his pledge.

Sewell further reports that Harold told Brandon Harrison “he was supposed to be getting $10,000, at one point saying it was for a job he did and on another occasion saying it was from a lawsuit.”

That sounds like b.s., of course. Nobody pays losers living in East Hollywood transient hotels sizable sums to do anything. But of course, right away your mind leaps to the obvious implication and/or nonsensical conclusion, which is that somebody may have paid Harold ten grand to shoot Ronni Chasen. This is awful, awful writing. It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s like something out of Cop and a Half, the 1993 Burt Reynolds flick.

Here’s some more bad writing. As Harold is dying on the floor from the gunshot wound, one of the detectives (i.e., the one not calling for an ambulance) crouches beside him and says, “Harold! For God’s sake, Harold…did you have something to do with shooting a woman on Sunset Blvd. a couple of weeks ago? C’mon, Harold…spit it out. Don’t die with a lie…cleanse yourself…tell the truth.”

In Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton, George Clooney tells Sydney Pollack that Tom Wilkinson‘s apparent suicide is a big “why?,” that it makes no sense at all. Pollack’s reply is borderline irate: “Why? Because people are fucking incomprehensible…that’s why.”

I love Guillermo del Toro‘s Cronos as much as the next guy, perhaps more so. But $33 and change is too much to ask. I know, I know — buy it online. But there’s a special charge from an impulse buy. I would go $20 or $22 and change, but that’s my limit. To think that Cronos is nearly 18 years old.

With Noah Baumbach‘s legendary Greenberg nominated for three Spirit Awards — Best Film, Best Actor (Ben Stiller) and Best Actress (Greta Gerwig) — I’m kind of wondering that as long as the spigot was on, why didn’t Rhys Ifans land one for Best Supporting Actor? Because he was, y’know, more or less perfect as Roger Greenberg’s somber (secretly depressed?) band buddy from the ’80s.

And she understands every word, of course. I’ve done this at parties, laughing along without having a clue. We all have. The difference is that Ms. Roberts was reportedly paid $1.5 million.

There are few if any filmmakers with austere rock-star chops like Joel and Ethan Coen, but you can’t call a movie a home run just because it’s smartly assembled. Craft only gets you so far. The film has to be about something that matters to many if not most people. And I am telling you that True Grit, while beautifully made with some deliciously formal old-west dialogue (much of it straight from the Charles Portis novel, I gather) and a smart, spunky debut performance from Hallie Steinfeld, is essentially a cold and mannered “art” western that matters not.

Every now and then the Coens, despite their immense talent and heavy-osity, drop the clay jug on the kitchen floor. True Grit has now joined The Ladykillers, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Hudsucker Proxy and (I know this is a minority opinion) O Brother, Where Art Thou? on the list of wrong-turners.

There’s one exceptional scene in the beginning — a bargaining scene about money and stolen horses — between Steinfeld and Dakin Matthews that’s pretty close to superb. For my money Matthews delivers True Grit‘s best male performance, hands down.

I’d be willing to argue with fans of this film, but not all that passionately. It’s indisputably solid and grade-A as far as those attributes go, but all it seems to say is “yep, life in the Old West was harsh and brutal, all right, but people of sand and character stood up and demanded that evil-doers be captured and punished, and 14 year-old Mattie Ross ” — i.e., Steinfeld’s character — “was surely one of these.” Yeah….and?

And nothing. People of serious moral fibre sometimes get hurt or even killed in trying to see justice done, and drunks will always be drunks, and the evil-doer sometimes is just a bearded dog-like degenerate, and a whole lotta fellers wind up gettin’ shot and maimed and sometimes their bodies aren’t even buried — they just lie there and rot. And the living get older and come back to the scene of the adventure, to so speak, and are told that a guy who was old and fat to begin with has “moved on,” so to speak

Mattie hires the renowned Ruben Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), a boozy, gravel-voiced, beer-bellied bounty hunter, to hunt down her father’s killer, a hired hand named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), and Cogburn naturally tries to keep her from joining the hunt but is eventually won over by Mattie’s moxie. They’re joined by a Texas Ranger named La Boeuf (Matt Damon) who’s also after Chaney for murdering a Texas senator, and lah-dee-lah-lah-lahh. I’m sorry but I knew where it was going and I didn’t much care, and Bridges’ affected gravel-gut voice felt annoying.

I know that Henry Hathaway‘s 1969 version with John Wayne, Kim Darby and Glenn Campbell went with a more upbeat storyline and that the Coens have stuck quite closely to the Portis novel, downbeat ending and all (and added a flash-forward ending, I think). And I’m sitting there in the screening room going, “Uhhm…okay. Gritty stuff, you bet. But can someone tell me what this is supposed to mean to a fella like myself? ‘Cause I don’t get it.”

The Coens are obviously cream-of-the-crop fellows but I didn’t care. Yes, I love the dialogue and don’t want to see Steinfeld get hurt but other than that, I just don’t give a hang about any of it. It has a certain historical charm and color but it feels too dry and cold, and it’s nowhere near as amusing as I’d heard it would be. Yes, Marshall Cogburn shows some sand of his own at the end and does a fine and noble thing, and I just sat there and looked at my watch and said, “Okay, things are wrapping up.”

You want funny? Javier Bardem‘s Anton Chigurh was a barrel of monkeys compared to Bridges, Damon and Brolin. I’m serious. Bardem was my idea of funny here and there. That scene in the little gas station with the terrified older man and the quarter? Odd and creepy and yet darkly funny at the same time? There’s nothing in True Grit that comes remotely close to that scene.

Watching a drunken old lardbucket try to shoot stuff in the air and miss…what is that?

It’ll be fine with me if True Grit lands one of the ten Best Picture nominations. The combined rep of the True Grit team — the Coens, producer Scott Rudin, costars Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin — could rope that steer and bring it to market. But if this material was made by unknowns, I doubt anyone would notice. Well, maybe.

Here’s how I put it yesterday in an email to a friend: “True Grit obviously deserves respect, but it’s a problem. It’s stylistically polished, period authentic, ‘good’ as far as it goes, admirable in portions (there’s a nighttime showdown between Damon and three or four guys on horseback that’s quite brilliant), and a clear example of absolute authorial ownership. But it’s going to die almost immediately when it opens.

“Superb chops just ain’t enough. No Country for Old Men was about a kind of alien poison and madness taking root in the country. A Serious Man said God doesn’t care about your happiness or well-being. True Grit says that life was tough and gnarly in the Old West. Big deal. It’s just a purely rendered, dialogue-eloquent, very realistic, warts-and-all adaptation of the Portis novel with a whole lotta corpses and guys gettin’ all shot up. It’s an artistic exercise piece about harsh and rugged and sometimes grisly events amounting to…what?

“Kick it to the curb, I say. I don’t need it, want it…it’s very good, very high-level, and I don’t give a damn about anyone or anything in it except for Hallie. And Dakin Matthews, who’s perfect.

“What was that gravel-gut voice Bridges was using? I figured he had to use another voice or he’d sound too much like the boozy country-singer he played and won the Oscar for in Crazy Heart. So he borrowed a little Wallace Beery in Jackass Mail and a little Nick Nolte in 48 HRS. and came up with an old snarly gunslinger voice. No interest. You can have him.”

Focus Features hosted a press soiree early Tuesday evening for The Kids Are All Right, more particularly for director-co-writer Lisa Cholodenko and costars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. Moore’s costar (and likely Best Actress nominee) Annette Bening was in town but didn’t show for reasons that could be discussed…but let’s not. And Glenn Kenny and Armond White were there…schmoozing distance!

At last night’s Kids Are All Right party at Bottino (l. to r.): Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, director-cowriter Lisa Cholodenko.

Suffice that Bening is talking directly to SAG members on both coasts and bypassing, for the most part, press persons like myself. It’s basically about wanting to maintain family privacy, which everyone understands. Either way it’s a safe bet she’ll be nominated, and that older women (as well as the general over-50, uncomfortable-with-Black Swan, King’s Speech-favoring contingent) will be her primary base of support.

I spoke to Ruffalo about that March ’09 version of Julianne Moore‘s climactic speech-to-the-famiily that Scott Feinstein posted on 8.7.10. The significance was that this speech, an admission that the affair she and Ruffalo had was selfish and hurtful, cut his character, Paul, a little slack. “That’s how I see it,” Ruffalo said last night, meaning that he doesn’t see Paul as a predatory ogre but a somewhat immature guy who made a mistake and copped to it and…you know, move on and comme ci comme ca.

Paul “isn’t blameless,” Moore’s character said in the 3.09 script, but “he’s a good guy. [And] if I’m gonna be honest about it, the person who really pushed it was me.” In the rewritten version that was used in the film, of course, Moore doesn’t defend Paul (or say anything about him pro or con), and he’s more or less tossed out like used coffee grounds at the finale.

There’s the slight symbolism of the hat, I realize, with Mia Wasikowska heading off to college at the finale and significantly keeping a hat that Paul had given her. As Ruffalo said in an interview last summer, “That was a real subtle way for the filmmaker to say it’s changed, it isn’t the way it was. Maybe it’s become a more mature relationship, but this man is gonna be in at least Joanie’s life.”

I brought the same point up in a chat with Moore, but she seemed either unfamiliar with the earlier version of the speech or didn’t feel it worked as well as the final version…or something along those lines. We just kind of batted the ball around, touching on this and that. I didn’t say to her that when guys have affairs they’re basically being their usual dog selves, but that’s the way it is, for the most part. But when women have affairs, Moore said, they “tend to be looking to affect a change.” Agreed.

I told her I felt exceptionally pleased and fulfilled after seeing her and Bill Nighy in David Hare‘s The Vertical Hour on stage in early ’07.

You have to be careful when speaking to a famous face and voice at a party to really listen to what they’re saying and not retreat into an inner head-mantra in which you repeat to yourself, “Jesus, this is real…I’m talking to this actor/actress and it feels unreal on some level.” You have to stay on topic, as if you’re talking to an East Hampton cop who’s giving you a ticket for not having your lights turned all the way on.

When guys have affairs they’re basically being their usual dog selves, I feel. But when women have affairs, Moore said, they “tend to be looking to affect a change.” Agreed. I told her I felt exceptionally pleased and fulfilled after seeing her and Bill Nighy in David Hare‘s The Vertical Hour on stage in early ’07.

The party happened at Bottino (246 Tenth Avenue, b’twn 24th and 25th).

I heard Black Swan at tonight’s Zeigeld premiere screening like never before. The big-screen speakers blasted and trumpeted Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, lifting me up and over and out…fuhgedaboutit. It was my third viewing of Black Swan, and I was blown away yet again…over the falls. This film is a masterwork, a symphony, and 97% of the ticket-buying audience will never appreciate how great it can sound and feel because they’ll be seeing it at some shitty-ass megaplex with the sound turned down so the theatre owner can save on maintenance.

Black Swan star and dead-certain Best Actress nominee Natalie Portman, director Darren Aronofsky at post-premiere after-party at Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel — Tuesday, 11.30, 10:40 pm.

Black Swan‘s breakout star Mila Kunis — Tuesday, 11.30, 11:45 pmn.

Black Swan costar, Mesrine superstar Vincent Cassel.