The shot/cover on the left is my hands-down favorite.

The Lesley Manville issue has been covered two or three times on HE (the last time on 10.27), so there’s no need for overkill. But I spoke a bit with Manville last night at a Sony Pictures Classics gathering on Madison, and she was her usual lovable, attentive, half-smiling, faintly forlorn, straight-shooting, sweetly smiling self, and my heart just goes out to her. She’s the best.

I just hope Manville’s achy-heart performance in Another Year wins the Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle or the L.A. Film Critics Association or…you know, like that. Because as good as she is (and she really is world-class in this film), she might land a Best Actress Oscar nomination. She ought to. But the odds of her beating all her big-time, heavy-duty competitors — Black Swan‘s Natalie Portman, The Kids Are All Right ‘s Annette Bening , Rabbit Hole‘s Nicole Kidman, Winter’s Bone‘s Jennifer Lawrence and Blue Valentine‘s Michelle Williams — are not favoring, let’s face it.

She’s a Brit playing a lonely Brit single with a drinking problem, and that in itself probably shaves a few points when you consider the native-American-identification factor. People know the other characters (Manhattan ballet dancer, hip lesbian mom, Long Island mom who’s lost her son, tough Ozark girl, blue-collar Pennsyvlania girl in a relationship) in a kind of next-door-way, culturally speaking. Any way you cut it Lesley probably doesn’t win.

But in the Best Supporting Actress category, she rules. Animal Kingdom‘s Jacki Weaver would be her only real competition. Amy Adams and Melissa Leo seem fairly evenly matched in The Fighter, but neither kills on Manville’s level. Helena Bonham Carter is entirely pleasing in The King’s Speech, but I don’t believe in the idea of a career Oscar for her at this juncture, and I don’t know why anyone else would either. Rosamund Pike is exceptional in Barney’s Version and Made in Dagenham, but she’s obviously not getting the traction. Get Low‘s Sissy Spacek has the chops and the likability, but the wattage is so-so. Ditto Dianne Wiest in Rabbit Hole.

So maybe people can just politely bypass Sony Picture Classics’ suggestion that Manville should be considered for Best Actress and just write her in for Best Supporting Actress like whatsername who beat Joe Miller in Alaska.

The JFK assassination argument has swung back and forth over the last 47 years, but now conspiracy theorists — seemingly set back in recent years by Warren Commission-endorsing books by Gerald Posner and Vincent Bugliosi — are getting a Hollywood credibility boost from Leonardo DiCaprio. His intention, I mean, to produce and star in a mob-conspiracy flick that’ll be out in 2013 — the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy‘s murder.

The film will be called Legacy of Secrecy, and will be based on a respectably reviewed 2009 book called “Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination” by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann.

The book presents evidence that Carlos Marcello, the Don Corleone of Louisiana and most of Texas, confessed to credible FBI-supported informant Jack Van Laningham that he ordered JFK’s assassination. DiCaprio would play Van Laningham, but let’s eliminate any ideas right now of Joe Pesci or anyone too character actor-ish playing Marcello.

Is the conspiracy crowd indeed back with a vengeance and fresh zeal, and have the reputations of Posner’s “Case Closed” and Bugliosi’s “Four Days in November” been diminishing to some extent? I’ve been feeling this, sensing it. And now DiCpario, picking up where Oliver Stone left off, is stepping up with some Hollywood money to help seal the deal.

Two other formidable conspiracy books are James W. Douglass‘s “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters” and G. Paul Chambers‘ “Head Shot.”

I’m not saying the just-revealed True Grit one-sheet is on the level of that much-derided King’s Speech poster that appeared a couple of weeks back, but it does seem like a bit of a problem in a somewhat similar way.

Like the fake assembly of Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Wright in the King’s Speech poster, the Grit job is a digital grouping of the four leads (i.e., they didn’t pose together), and the only one who looks right is Matt Damon‘s greasy-buckskin gunslinger (i.e., the Glenn Campbell role).

Halle Steinfeld seems slightly stunned and glassy-eyed and just…I don’t know, giving off a certain vagueness of purpose. She looks flat. You look at her and you go “what?” And Josh Brolin, off on the right, looks like a 9 year-old with an adult face. I know he’s supposed to look smaller due to being in the background, but he looks like a midget. (Is that a bad term to use these days? If so I meant “height challenged.”) And Jeff Bridges is just doing the ornery old bear thing. The big-bellied Crazy Heart drunk with a rifle and an eye patch. Ahm gonna sluhr mah words and all….take a little nip now and then…shoot me a buffalo or a coyote…don’t you go a triflin’!…aah got me a home in old Montecito.

The individual posters are much better. They’re fine, in fact. Just lose or re-do the group thing.

There’s something in an 11.18 Hollywood Reporter story by Daniel Miller about the state of the investigation into Ronni Chasen‘s murder that feels more than a bit surreal. It says that Beverly Hills police are going on a “working theory” that Chasen’s shooting death was “not the result of road rage or a carjacking gone awry” but “was planned in advance.”

Planned? Isn’t that what a hit is? The assailant who fired bullets through Chasen’s passenger door window, they’re saying, was following a plan that had been decided upon at some undetermined point earlier in the evening, or perhaps (go for it) even a few hours or days previously? An impulsive killing is one inspired by a sudden adverse emotional eruption of some kind, and the cops, as I understand this story, are guessing that this isn’t what happened.

I’m sorry but as one to another I feel I know/knew Ronni Chasen’s world, and this just sounds ridiculous. I don’t care what the Beverly Hills cops say. Ronni Chasen was not Michael Caine at the end of Get Carter or Tom Wilkinson at the end of Act Two in Michael Clayton. The sadness of this has made my knees buckle, but it also boggles the mind. The non-logic of it ties you up and wrecks you.

David Poland, whom I am gracious enough to recognize and whose opinion matters from time to time, wrote last night that “the audience that really cares about this story are people who knew Ronni… and it is seriously irresponsible to take one tiny piece of information (the the gunfire came from another car that pulled up next to Ronni’s car) and a working theory (that this was planned) and to spin it into a headline much more salacious than the facts.”

Why is it that every single guy I see these days has a two-week bristle beard? Everyone, that is, with any apparent reaching-for-style (or reaching-for-fashion) sense who’s under, say, 45 (i.e., not too gray or just a little salt-and-peppery) or who’s starring or co-starring in a movie. I didn’t care or even think about this for the last year or two, and now it’s beginning to really bother me. Now when I see some guy at a party or a screening with a two-week bristle beard I have to suppress an urge to give him some shit about it. Because bristle beards, I feel, have become pretentious. They were okay before but the guys wearing them now are just a little bit phony, I’ve decided. They’re posing. Not egregiously, but no more carte blanche cool factor. The jig’s up.

The following conversation actually happened about three hours ago. I didn’t record it, but this is a fairly precise recollection. It was between myself and a Manhattan p.r. guy who knows everyone and everything and has been around the track dozens of times.

Graph stolen from latest Movieline race-assessment chart, which is primarily informed by handicapping commentary from Stu Van Airsdale.

Hollywood Elsewhere: I think the inevitability of Annette Bening thing is over. For now, at least. It could come back but right now all I feel — and I admit this is coming out of the recent Black Swan surge out of Los Angeles — is Natalie Portman, Natalie Portman, Natalie Portman.

N.Y.-Based Publicist: And look what they’re doing to Annette! They’re running Julianne Moore for Best Actress right alongside her, and they’re going to cause Annette to lose all over again.

Hollywood Elsewhere: But they’re not really running Julianne. I mean, they “are,” sort of, but not really.

N.Y.-Based Publicist: Of course they are! They’re running them side by side. Annette and Julianne.

Hollywood Elsewhere: Well, the thinking — and I understand this from a political sense — is that they don’t want to offend or alienate either party. Bening and Moore are equal costars, after all, with the same weight and pathos in that film, and so they’re running them as equals.

N.Y.-Based Publicist: Look, do they want to win the Oscar or not? If they don’t make it a pure Annette thing, you watch as Natalie Portman just gets stronger and stronger. And you can feel it out there. It’s happening right now.

Hollywood Elsewhere: I’m just worried about Lesley Manville. I realize it’s too late and they’ve made their decision to run her for Best Actress, but if she was running for Best Supporting Actress she’d wipe the floor.

N.Y.-Based Publicist: No, she wouldn’t.

Hollywood Elsewhere: Whaddaya mean?

N.Y.-Based Publicist: Helena Bonham Carter.

Hollywood Elsewhere: Oh, come on! She’s gonna coast in on the coattails of The King’s Speech, you mean?

N.Y.-Based Publicist: That and her history. Howard’s End, Fight Club, Sweeney Todd, A Room With A View, the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland.

Hollywood Elsewhere: I see. A career-tribute Oscar. Because…you know, she’s very dry and fine in The King’s Speech, but in and of itself her performance is nothing to do handstands over.

N.Y.-Based Publicist: Doesn’t matter.

Hollywood Elsewhere: It should. Because in a one-on-one between these two on the strength of performance alone, Lesley Manville would take it hands down.

Marshall Fine has suggested “one final marketing idea” for the Harry Potter franchise, to wit: “Once Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 runs the course of all its platforms (theatrical, pay-per-view, DVD, TV), Warner Bros. should release both films on YouTube along with some rudimentary editing software – and hold an editing contest for everyday moviegoers.

The idea, of course, would be to “see who can best reduce the overlong segments of the two-part film into one coherent final movie. Then put that one out in theaters and all the other platforms. And include it in the inevitable completist’s box set of all the “Harry Potter” films when that becomes a stocking stuffer of the future.”

I turned the sound down after a minute or so, and then turned it off at the two-minute mark. What an awful sound. I’m not sure why I’m even posting this, but Film Drunk‘s Oliver Noble has a strong tolerance.

This is a very minor clip from Banksy’s Exit From The Gift Shop, which has just made the cut as one of the 15 short-listed. The doc is mainly about Thierry Guetta, a free-spirited Frenchman based in Los Angeles, and his obsession with becoming a street artist in the vein of Banksy and/or Shepard Fairey. And so they release a clip of an altercation between Fairey and the fuzz near the Hollywood sign?

Congrats to the 15 feature-length docs that have been short-listed by the Academy: (1) Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, d: Alex Gibney; Enemies of the People, d: Rob Lemkin, Thet Sambath; (3) Exit through the Gift Shop, d: Banksy; (4) Gasland, d: Josh Fox; (5) Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould, d: Michele Hoze, Peter Raymont; (6) Inside Job, d: Charles Ferguson; (7) The Lottery, d: Madeleine Sackler; (8) Precious Life, d: Shlomi Eldar; (9) Quest for Honor, d: Mary Ann Smothers Bruni; (10) Restrepo, d: Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger; (11) This Way of Life, d: Thomas Burstyn; (12) The Tillman Story, d: Amir Bar-Lev; (13) Waiting for ‘Superman’, d: Davis Guggenheim; (14) Waste Land, d: Lucy Walker; (15) William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, d: Emily Kunstler, Sarah Kunstler.

Lamentable Omissions (possibly due to technicalities or whatever): Errol Morris‘s Tabloid, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner‘s Stonewall Uprising; Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector; Werner Herzog‘s Cave of Forgotten Dreams; Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg‘s Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work; Don Argott‘s Art of the Steal and Leon Gast‘s Smash His Camera.