Her blazing-crazy Black Swan performance aside, Natalie Portman‘s just-announced pregnancy has to boost her chances as a Best Actress contender, no? Who doesn’t love a pregnant woman at the Oscars? The dad, to whom Portman is reportedly engaged, is ballet choreographer and minor Black Swan costar Benjamin Millepied.

I’m feeling less dispirited about 2011 now that I’ve tallied everything up. I’m looking at 42 films that will almost certainly intrigue and perhaps more than that — 9 from top-grade filmmakers (whose films seem the most likely Best Picture candidates at this stage), 27 that are promising maybes at the least, and 6 that will most likely qualify as “entertaining,” however you want to define that. Here’s hoping that other surprises turn up. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.

Major League (9):

The Descendants (d: Alexander Payne). Cast: George Clooney, Judy Greer, Beau Bridges, Matthew Lillard, Shailene Woodley, Robert Forster, Michael Ontkean, Mary Birdsong. Synopsis: Indifferent husband & father of two girls Matt King (Clooney) considers his past and future when his wife suffers a boating accident off of Waikiki, and debates whether to sell or not sell the family’s land handed down from Hawaiian royalty and missionaries, etc.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (d: David Fincher). Cast: Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, Robin Wright, Joely Richardson, Steven Berkoff. Synopsis unnecessary.

The War Horse (d: Steven Spielberg). Cast: Jeremy Irvine, Tom Hiddleston, David Thewlis, Emily Watson, Peter Mullan, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Kebbel Synopsis: HE War Horse riff posted on 5.4.10.

The Tree of Life (d: Terrence Malick). Cast: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, Jessica Chastain, Joanna Going, Fiona Shaw. Celestial cosmic pondering of the pain and general shittiness of things, considering what brutal fathers do to their sons, etc.

The Ides of March (d: George Clooney). Cast: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Max Minghella, Jeffrey Wright. Synopsis: :Political drama about an idealistic staffer working for a presidential candidate getting a crash course on dirty politics,” etc. Based on the play by Beau Willimon.

Young Adult (d: Jason Reitman, w: Diablo Cody). Cast: Charlize Theron, Patrick Wilson, Elizabeth Reaser, Collette Wolfe, Patton Oswalt. Synopsis: “A divorced writer from the Midwest returns to her hometown to reconnect with an old flame, who’s now married with a family,” etc.

We Bought A Zoo (d: Cameron Crowe, w: Crowe, Aline Brosh Mckenna). Begins shooting in early ’11. Cast: Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Elle Fanning, Patrick Fugit, Thomas Haden Church, Angus Macfadyen, Colin Ford. Synopsis: A father moves his family to the English countryside to own and operate a zoo.

Moneyball (d: Bennett Miller). Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Robin Wright, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chris Pratt, Tammy Blanchard. Synopsis: “The story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s successful attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget, by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players.”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (d: Stephen Daldry, w: Eric Roth). Cast: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Thomas Horn. Synopsis: “A nine-year-old searches New York for the lock that matches a key left by his father when he was killed in the 9.11 attacks,” etc.

Qualified Expectations (27):

Larry Crowne (d: Tom Hanks). Cast: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Bryan Cranston, Nia Vardalos, Pam Grier. Synopsis: “After losing his job, a middle-aged man reinvents himself by going back to college,” etc. A variation of this idea found form as High Time (’60), a Bing Crosby movie about a successful resturateur who decides to go to college at age 51.

Hugo Cabret (d: Martin Scorsese). Cast: Asa Butterfield, Chloe Moretz, Jude Law, Richard Griffiths, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Christopher Lee, Ray Winstone, Michael Stuhlbarg. Synopsis: “Set in 1930s Paris, an orphan who lives in the walls of a train station is wrapped up in a mystery involving his late father and an automaton,” etc.

Nanjing Heroes (d: Zhang Yimou). Cast: Christian Bale. Synopsis: “Chinese sex workers in 1937 volunteer to replace university students as escorts for invading Japanese soldiers,” etc.

Contagion (d: Steven Soderbergh). Cast: Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, Jennifer Ehle, John Hawkes. Synopsis: “Action-thriller centered on the threat posed by a deadly disease and an international team of doctors contracted by the CDC to deal with the outbreak,”etc.

Haywire (d: Steven Soderbergh, w: Lem Dobbs). Cast: Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, Mathieu Kassovitz . Synopsis: “A black ops super soldier seeks payback after she is betrayed and set up during a mission,” etc.

Straw Dogs (d: Rod Lurie). Cast: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsg√•ard, James Woods, Dominic Purcell, Willa Holland. Synopsis: Remake of Sam Peckinpah‘s 1971 classic, this time about an “L.A. screenwriter relocating with his wife to her hometown in the deep South” where a brewing conflict with locals turns creepier and scarier. Endlessly delayed.

The Beaver (d: Jodie Foster). Cast: Mel Gibson, Foster, Jennifer Lawrence, Anton Yelchin. Synopsis unnecessary

Water for Elephants (d: Francis Lawrence). Cast: Robert Pattinson, Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz, Hal Holbrook. Synopsis: “A veterinary student abandons his studies after his parents are killed and joins a traveling circus as their vet,” etc.

On The Road (d: Walter Salles). Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Sam Riley, Amy Adams, Steve Buscemi, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Terrence Howard, Alice Braga.

A Dangerous Method (d: David Cronenberg). Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) vs. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Costars: Keira Knightley, Vincent Cassel.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (d: Thomas Alfredson). Cast: Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Stephen Graham, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ciaran Hinds, Christian McKay. Synopsis: “In the bleak days of the Cold War, espionage veteran George Smiley is forced from semi-retirement to uncover a Soviet agent within MI6’s echelons,” etc.

Jane Eyre (d: Cary Fukunaga). Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell, Judi Dench, Imogen Poots, Sally Hawkins. Synopsis: “A mousy governess who softens the heart of her employer soon discovers that he’s hiding a terrible secret,” etc.

My Week With Marilyn (d: Simon Curtis). Cast: Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, Judi Dench, Dougray Scott, Julia Ormond, Dominic Cooper, Derek Jacobi. Synopsis: The experience of Colin Clark (Redmayne), an employee of Sir Laurence Olivier’s, about the tense interaction between Olivier and Marilyn Monroe during production of The Prince and the Showgirl,” etc.

The Whistleblower (d: Larysa Kondracki). Cast: Rachel Weisz, Monica Bellucci, Benedict Cumberbatch, Vanessa Redgrave, David Strathairn, David Hewlett. Synopsis: “A drama based on the experiences of Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska cop who served as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and outed the U.N. for covering up a sex scandal,” etc.

Wuthering Heights (d: Andrea Arnold). Cast: James Howson, Kaya Scodelario, Nichola Burley, Oliver Milburn, Steve Evets, Amy Wren. Synopsis: Cathy, Heathcliff, Emily Bronte, etc.

The Skin That I Inhabit (d: Pedro Almodovar). Cast: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Eduard Fern√°ndez, Barbara Lennie, Fernando Cayo. Synopsis: A plastic surgeon on the hunt for the men who raped his daughter, based on Thierry Jonquet‘s novel ‘Mygale’,” etc.

We Need To Talk About Kevin (d: Lynne Ramsay). Cast: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller, Siobhan Fallon. Synopsis: “The mother of a teenage boy who went on a high-school killing spree tries to deal with her grief — and feelings of responsibility for her child’s actions — by writing to her estranged husband,” etc.

Rampart (d: Oren Moverman). Cast: Steve Buscemi, Robin Wright, Sigourney Weaver, Woody Harrelson, Ben Foster, Brie Larson. Synopsis: “Veteran police officer Dave Brown struggles to take care of his family, fights for his own survival,” etc.

Source Code (d: Duncan Jones) Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright. Synopsis: “Soldier who wakes up in the body of an unknown man, discovers he’s part of a mission to find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train,” etc.

Midnight in Paris (d: Woody Allen). Cast: Rachel Mcadams, Michael Sheen, Marion Cotillard, Owen Wilson, Alison Pill, Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates. Synopsis: “Romantic comedy, family visiting Paris for business, young engaged couple dealing with quality-of-life issues,” etc.

Take This Waltz (d: Sarah Polley). Cast: Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Sarah Silverman, Aaron Abrams, Luke Kirby. Synopsis: “A woman struggling to choose between two different types of love,” etc. Whatever that means.

At-Swim-Two-Birds (d: Brendan Gleeson). Cast: Cillian Murphy, Michael Fassbender, Colin Farrell , Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Brendan Gleeson, Gabriel Byrne. Synopsis: “A playwright’s life begins to mingle with the fictional characters he’s created,” etc.

Dream House (d: Jim Sheridan). Cast: Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts, Marton Csokas, Claire Geare, Taylor Geare. Synopsis: “Soon after moving into their seemingly idyllic new home, a family learns of a brutal crime committed against former residents of the dwelling,” etc.

The Help (d: Tate Taylor). Cast: Emma Stone, Jessica Chastain, Bryce Dallas Howard, Mike Vogel, Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, Viola Davis. Synopsis: “’60s period drama, small southern town, three courageous women who strike up an unlikely friendship,” etc.

Albert Nobbs (d: Rodrigo Garcia). Cast: Glenn Close, Aaron Johnson, Mia Wasikowska, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Brendan Gleeson, Brenda Fricker, Janet McTeer. Synopsis: Cross-dressing drama, late 19th Century Ireland, etc. Shooting this summer, possibly not ready until 2012.

This Must Be The Place (d: Paolo Sorrentino). Cast: Sean Penn, Frances McDormand, Harry Dean Stanton, Shea Whigham, Judd Hirsch, Kerry Condon. Synopsis: “A bored, retired rock star sets out to find his father’s executioner, an ex-Nazi war criminal who is a refugee in the U.S.,” etc.

One Day (d: Lone Scherfig). Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Patricia Clarkson, Jodie Whittaker, Georgia King. Synopsis: A reworking of the old Same Time Next Year concept? “Dexter and Emma, who first meet during their graduation in 1988 and proceed to reunite one day each year for the next 20 years,” etc.

Elite Popcorn (6):

Cowboys & Aliens (d: Jon Favreau). Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Noah Ringer, Paul Dano, Ana de la Reguera, Clancy Brown, Keith Carradine. Synopsis: “A spaceship arrives in Arizona, 1873, to take over the Earth, starting with the Wild West region…a posse of cowboys are all that stand in their way,” etc.

Paul (d: Gregory Mottola). Cast: Simon Pegg, Jane Lynch, voice of Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Sigourney Weaver. Jason Bateman, Blythe Danner, Bill Hader. Synopsis: “Two British comic-book geeks traveling across the U.S. encounter an alien outside Area 51,” etc.

Red Riding Hood (d: Catherine Hardwicke). Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Lukas Haas, Gary Oldman, Virginia Madsen, Michael Shanks, Julie Christie. Synopsis: “Set in a medieval village that is haunted by a werewolf, a young girl falls for an orphaned woodcutter, much to her family’s displeasure,” etc.

Hobo With A Shotgun (d: Jason Eisener).

Super 8 (d: J.J. Abrams). Cast: Elle Fanning, Noah Emmerich, Amanda Michalka, Kyle Chandler, Ron Eldard, Zach Mills. Synopsis: Some kind of spooky creepy neo-Spielbergean thing.

Hanna (d: Joe Wright). Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana, Olivia Williams, Tom Hollander. Synopsis: “A 14-year-old who was raised by her father to be a cold-hearted killing machine connects with a French family who look to help ease her into a more conventional life,” etc.

Metro-North trains aren’t running (“temporarily suspended“) so I’m stuck in Connecticut. The snow has stopped but the wind chill is around ten degrees and the 40 mph to 50 mph winds are painful and blinding. It’s Klondike time. You could die out there. I’m dying of boredom in here. I left my Keith Richards autobiography in Brooklyn. I’m DVD’d and Bluray-ed out. But the roads are semi-negotiable so there’s always the exploration aspect.

The usual intriguing conversation, except the tech snuff wasn’t up to snuff. I was in a bedroom in Fairfield, Connecticut, and talking into a 1997 cordless phone. Phil was in his usual spot. And Sasha was handling her end from her mother’s place in Ojai, California. No intro or close-out — Sasha couldn’t figure out how to record one with the laptop she had. Sound, face it, is bad all around. You know how it goes — we reach for perfection and don’t reach it.

Brooks Barnes has written a post-Xmas N.Y. Times piece about how big-studio crap doesn’t float anymore, and how movies have to be sharp and dynamic and pushed along these days by social-network organs (and conversation-starters like HE?) or it’s hasta la vista, baby. Slick sludge ain’t doin’ it no more. Which explains this weekend’s modest success of Little Fockers.

There were plenty of 2010 films “clinging to the tried and true in 2010,” Barnes writes. “Humdrum remakes like The Wolfman and The A-Team; star vehicles like Killers with Ashton Kutcher and The Tourist with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp; and shoddy sequels like Sex and the City 2. All arrived at theaters with marketing thunder intended to fill multiplexes on opening weekend, no matter the quality of the film.

“But the audience pushed back. One by one, these expensive yet middle-of-the-road pictures delivered disappointing results or flat-out flopped.

“Meanwhile, gambles on original concepts paid off. Inception, a complicated thriller about dream invaders, racked up more than $825 million in global ticket sales; The Social Network has so far delivered $192 million, a stellar result for a highbrow drama.

“As a result, studios are finally and fully conceding that moviegoers, armed with Facebook and other networking tools and concerned about escalating ticket prices, are holding them to higher standards. The product has to be good.” Or at least it can’t blow chunks. And it really helps if a new movie is, you know, really something. Yep, things sure are different these days.

Early this evening a friend and I were among the few who dared navigate the country roads of Fairfield, Westport and Wilton during the Great Blizzard of ’10, which is still going as we speak. “The totals in some New York areas could pile as high as 20 inches, forecasters said, [with] gale-force winds whipping in excess of 50 miles per hour,” the N.Y. Times reported.

In today’s 12.26 N.Y. Times, Michael Cieply offers a cursory profile of Concept Modeling guru Winston Peretz.

“In a business as ephemeral as the entertainment industry, it’s easy to lose track of what you’re really selling,” Peretz says. “The truly great ideas are built on concept” because filmmakers need to “get beyond plot and dialogue” and into “the essence of a movie, a video game or an entire film-based franchise.”

Peretz isn’t wrong in identifying plot and dialogue as secondary elements, and saying that movies tend to sink or swim because of things within that resonate with people due to their own personal reasons. But marketing people who try to simplify the mystical process of movie-creation and movie-selling always seem intellectually smug. In itself the phrase “get beyond plot and dialogue” is enough to make my blood boil, but what really sets me off is Peretz’s assessment of the James Bond franchise.

Bond “is not a cold-blooded killer but “a cool-blooded one who must temper every assassination with a joke,” Cieply summarizes. But “when Bond became too serious in Quantum of Solace,” Peretz reportedly believes, “the entire franchise was put at risk because it wandered off-concept.” (This despite “healthy worldwide ticket sales of $586 million,” Cieply notes.) The killing-with-a-wry-joke thing goes back to Dr. No, and it was the staleness of this attitude or behavior that led to Quantum taking things into an angrier, more visceral direction.

Meet The Parents was conceptually popular because we’ve all been grilled and assessed and perhaps unfairly judged by families of boyfriends or girlfriends. But the second and third Fockers didn’t connect, in part, because misjudgments tend to be early and temporary and the basic truth of things tends to prevail after a while, so it made no sense that Ben Stiller‘s Greg Focker would continue to suffer except for the persistence of asshole-ism, which is not restricted to families. The second and third films were made in order to make money, plain and simple.

Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides, a PBS/American Masters documentary airing on 1.12.11, is apparently a standard ass-kiss thing. Surely a wonderful talent and great fellow! Didn’t Bridges get enough adoration last year during the Crazy Heart parade?

I initially thought the focus of this 90-minute doc might be about Bridges and the Coen brothers and The Big Lebowski . That I’d love to see. They could call it “Jeff Bridges: Don’t Pee On My Rug.”

N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich has written a “death of reasonable economic proportion in America” piece in today’s edition. He contrasts the old-time theology of Robbins Barstow, a Connecticut family man who believed in 1956 (along with everyone else) in an essentially fair American system that offered bountiful or pot-of-gold fortunes to any enterprising American, with today’s corrupted Inside Job reality.

Barstow’s Eisenhower-era faith was reflected to some extent in some “family goes to Disneyland” home movie footage that he shot in ’56, He edited it all together and then added music and sound narration for a 1995 short called Disneyland Dream, which was admitted to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2008. Here are part 2 and part 3.

“How many middle-class Americans now believe that the sky is the limit if they work hard enough?,” Rich asks. “How many trust capitalism to give them a fair shake? Middle-class income started to flatten in the 1970s and has stagnated ever since. While 3M has continued to prosper, many other companies that actually make things (and at times innovative things) have been devalued, looted or destroyed by a financial industry whose biggest innovation in 20 years, in the verdict of the former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, has been the cash machine.

“It’s a measure of how rapidly our economic order has shifted that nearly a quarter of the 400 wealthiest people in America on this year’s Forbes list make their fortunes from financial services, more than three times as many as in the first Forbes 400 in 1982. Many of America’s best young minds now invent derivatives, not Disneylands, because that’s where the action has been, and still is, two years after the crash. In 2010, our system incentivizes high-stakes gambling — ‘this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place,’ as Calvin Trillin memorably wrote last year — rather than the rebooting and rebuilding of America.

“In last week’s exultant pre-holiday press conference, President Obama called for a ‘thriving, booming middle class, where everybody’s got a shot at the American dream.’ But it will take much more than rhetorical Scotch tape to bring that back. The Barstows of 1956 could not have fathomed the outrageous gap between this country’s upper class and the rest of us. America can’t move forward until we once again believe, as they did, that everyone can enter Frontierland if they try hard enough, and that no one will be denied a dream because a private party has rented out Tomorrowland.”

Here are part 2 and part 3 of Disneyland Dream.

In mid November Disney Studios chairman Rich Ross told Deadline‘s Pete Hammond that “we have the biggest and best reviewed film of the year in Toy Story 3 [so] we’re going for the Best Picture win…if not this year and not this movie, when?” Disneyland Resort hotel workers have a response: “Some other year, pal. Your Disney corporate colleagues are trying to screw us out of health benefits, so you and Toy Story 3 can symbolically share the blame.”

The facts do seem to suggest that Disney is not treating its employees fairly. But is it fair to link the Oscar fortunes of Toy Story 3 to this dispute? The Pixar guys who created Toy Story 3 are, of course, blameless. But if I was an activist for the Disneyland Resort hotel workers, I would be making this same point, unfair as it may seem. Disney is Disney and all corporations are sociopathic in nature. Eff Mickey.

On 12.31 a “remember Inception?” trailer will be shown in “key” movie theaters around the country (i.e., not located in Waco, Tallahassee and/or Dubuque) and will appear online. The purpose will be to remind folks that Chris Nolan‘s film, which has been available on DVD/Bluray since 12.7, “is every bit the artistic achievement that its rivals are, and that it deserves to be part of the Oscar conversation,” writes Popeater‘s Jeff Labrecque.

The trailer tells me the following: (1) The highest-ranked honor that Inception can hope for is a Best Original Screenplay Oscar — it’s also a shoo-in for VFX, score (Hans Zimmer), sound design/editing, etc; (2) Nolan looked like a Best Director lock last summer, but right now the likeliest finalists are David Fincher (The Social Network), Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan), David O. Russell (The Fighter), and Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) — Nolan might squeak in ahead of Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right); (3) Many of the more dazzling visual mind-benders were created on a sound stage with real organic elements, and it doesn’t matter because nobody trusts what they see in a film these days; (4) Tom Hardy is a much more interesting actor playing quiet and contained than when he’s bare-chested and bellowing and flexing his muscles.

Sunday Update: Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas is reporting that Little Fockers has “made $34 million just over the weekend, $48 million in five days. It’s going to do over $100 million easy and probably around $130 to $140 million total, if not more. Just because people didn’t rush out to see it didn’t mean they didn’t want to see it. Sure, it’s a failure compared to Meet the Fockers but they were lucky to get another movie out of the franchise. Hopefully they’ll end it there and not embarass themselves further.”

Yesterday I wrote an assessment based on Friday’s earnings that was incorrect. I made a mistake due to haste, a lack of sufficient research about Christmas Eve tendencies and previous Focker film incomes, and (I admit) a personal longing or dream that Fockers‘ initial earnings might be reflected throughout the weekend. Wrong. The Wrap‘s Daniel Frankel has reported that Little Fockers “undershot tracking by more than $10 million, with pre-release expectations coming in at around $60 million.” Nonetheless, it’s fair to say that a terrible film has opened fairly well.

An L.A. Times report says that “three people close to the film said [Little Fockers‘] budget was between $130 million and $140 million, though a spokeswoman for domestic distributor Universal said the final cost was about $100 million.”