I haven’t had a nice little music box…ever. This is really very sweet. Real wood, smooth veneer, real simulated velvet. Thanks, Fox Searchlight! But I have to confess that the mirror came loose almost immediately, and that I had to stick it on with Shoegoo.

The Film Comment/Film Society of Lincoln Center cool kidz have selected their Best of 2010 list, and the #1 with a bullet is Olivier Assayas‘ Carlos. I have to say that I agree with almost all…well, many of their choices. David Fincher‘s The Social Network is #2, followed by Claire Denis‘ White Material, Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer, Jacques Audiard‘s A Prophet, Debra Granik‘s Winter’s Bone, Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job, Alain Resnais‘ Wild Grass, Marden Ade‘s Everyone Else, and Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg.

The FSLC list actually encompasses 50 films. Black Swan is ranked in 24th place. Inception came in 30th, Exit Through The Gift Shop made it to position #33, Animal Kingdom is ranked 35th, True Grit is 42nd, The King’s Speech is ranked 44th and Blue Valentine came in at 47th place. Congratulations, Derek Cianfrance — three positions way from dead last!

“More than 100 participants” took part in the poll, the release says. They included Thom Andersen (CalArts professor and filmmaker), Richard Brody (The New Yorker), David Edelstein (New York magazine), Scott Foundas (Senior Programmer, Film Society Lincoln Center), Larry Gross (screenwriter), Molly Haskell (author, From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies), Kent Jones (filmmaker, A Letter to Elia), Glenn Kenny (MSN Movies), Robert Koehler (Daily Variety and film festival programmer), Todd McCarthy (Hollywood Reporter), Don McMahon (Artforum), Paul Schrader (filmmaker, Adam Resurrected), Andrew Sarris, Amy Taubin (Sight & Sound) and Kenneth Turan (Los Angeles Times).

For what it’s worth, I’d pay good money to see the recently discovered 17 minutes of footage that was cut 42 years ago from Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or rather, the 2001 footage that’s being described by Douglas Trumbull as “recently discovered.” Because it hasn’t been.

The 17 minutes of footage has been siting in a salt-mine vault in Hutchinson, Kansas, for eons, I’m told, and its existence was confirmed 20 years ago through the checking of inventory records by film restorer Robert Harris, who’d been asked to check on the 2001 elements by Kubrick.

A lot of the footage, I’m told, is floating-in-space stuff — superfluous, better left trimmed. A portion of it is from the “Dawn of Man” sequence. Apes hopping around, nothing all that special. Some shots of Gary Lockwood‘s Frank Poole character jogging in the centrifuge were removed along with shots of his space walk before HAL kills him. A scene showing HAL severing radio communication between the Discovery and Poole’s pod. Fatty extraneous stuff, in short, that made 2001 better by being taken out.

Would it be interesting to see this footage on a Bluray? Sure. Would 2001 seem like a better or somehow stronger film if the 17 minutes was re-integrated into the 139-minute released version? Probably not. It would most likely make the film seem flabby and longer than it needs to be. Would it be commercial if they put it out on Bluray? Oh, yeah. Because guys like me would pay through the nose to own it.

It’s obvious that Today‘s Matt Lauer doesn’t approve of controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. That or he’s terrified of seeming in any way cordial, lest he be interpreted as being mildly okay with what Assange has been doing.

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I think Assange is more than okay, actually. I think what he’s revealed is righteous, and that Michael Moore and Larry Flynt are good guys for contributing to his defense fund.

I’m also having trouble understanding how anyone can take seriously those charges that Assange raped and molested two women. It sounds to me like a sliver of a thin beef — it basically boils down to his not stopping when a condom broke. But it’s all the Swedish government has, and they’re being pressured to get him any way they can.

The more I think about the differences between James L Brooks‘ How Do You Know and Broadcast News, the more I shake my head in amazement. How could the same guy have directed and written something so smart and true 23-plus years ago and then make two 21st Century flops in a row, Spanglish and now this thing?

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Obviously Brooks, 70, isn’t the same guy today as he was when he researched, wrote and directed Broadcast News, when he was in his mid to late 40s. It sounds cruel to say stuff like this, but most creative types experience peak periods of 10 or 20 years, and then they step off the treadmill. They go soft, age out, lose the mojo. Francis Coppola went through this syndrome. Vigor, vitality and being attuned to the culture don’t come easily at any age, but it’s really tough for older wealthy guys to hang on to it.

I only know that there isn’t a single scene in How Do You Know that’s nearly as good as the one above, and this is a relatively minor moment in Broadcast News . But the way Jack Nicholson slowly turns around and looks at the bespectacled news chief when the latter suggests that Nicholson could save a few newsroom colleagues from unemployment if “you knock a million or so off your salary” is classic.

The thing you just can’t buy in How Do You Know is Reese Witherspoon‘s interest in Owen Wilson‘s big-league pitcher, who’s obviously immature, selfish, a dog and more than a bit of an asshole. Wilson is such an absurdly bad boyfriend choice that Witherspoon’s decision to not only slam ham with the guy but move into his place kills whatever respect and/or empathy the audience might have had for her to begin with.

As I wrote on 12.9, 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 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 and around 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.'”

One reason I feel that Witherspoon’s relationship with Wilson is difficult to swallow is that you don’t believe her character would have hot sex with anyone. That’s because Reese Witherspoon has never seemed believable as a naturally sexual being. To me, anyway.

Just as it’s difficult not to have erotic or sexual thoughts about certain actors and actresses, there are actors and actresses on the other side of the spectrum who seem antithetical to any kind of erotic allure or activity. You not only find it difficult to believe in their characters as sexual beings, but they themselves seem anti-sexual — the idea of any kind of physical intimacy seems unlikely or misguided or ill-considered. There are many, many actors and actresses who fall under the latter category (I always avoided any thoughts of John Candy having sex back in the ’80s), but How Do You Know convinced me that Reese Witherspoon is one of those no-sex-we’re-British types. And that’s fine. Not everyone is obliged to radiate smoldering hotness. It takes all sorts.

Yesterday Oscar co-host Anne Hathaway and the show’s co-producer Bruce Cohen told the school choir for PS 22 — an elementary school in Flushing, Queens — that they’ll be taking the choir to Los Angeles to perform at the Academy Awards on 2.27. 40 cute kids singing on-stage at the Kodak…cool. But why? What’s the connection?

It’s obviously Cohen’s idea because he’s the one stirring the kids up and introducing Hathaway, etc. Did Cohen attend PS 22 as a kid or something? Flying out 40 kids plus a teacher or two plus a chaperone for each kid plus hotels and transportation and meals — that’s a lot of dough to spend ($200,000? 90 to 100 people x how much per person?) for a single musical sequence that’ll be nice to see and hear but — let’s face it — isn’t going to matter all that much to 99% of the viewing audience.

I’m sorry but Cohen just seems like a second-rate Alan Carr type — glamour and tinsel, a gladhander. He and his co-producer Don Mischer both seem this way. One of their first moves was to try and re-hire Hugh Jackman as host (and what, have him sing “Top Hat”?). Their subsequent decision to have Hathaway and James Franco co-host struck most discerning observers as an odd call, to put it politely. I’m just getting all these indications that the Oscar telecast is going to be wildly low-rent in some way.

Update: I realize that for some, these kids are considered a huge YouTube sensation with millions and millions of hits, and that they do covers of songs, etc.

I have my Lesley Manville obsession, and TheWrap’s Steve Pond has a thing about Javier Bardem‘s performance in Biutiful. I feel the same way, actually, as does Ben Affleck and Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger and Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Guillermo del Toro, et.al. Here’s how Pond puts it:

“Every awards season is rife with injustices, but one in particular stands out so far this year. Javier Bardem’s performance in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s haunted, crushing tone poem Biutiful is a towering achievement, a magnificent performance that should comfortably sit on every list of the great acting accomplishments of the year.

“Without saying much – Jesse Eisenberg likely spouts more words in the opening three minutes of The Social Network than Bardem does in the whole of Biutiful — Bardem subtly evokes and embodies a world-weary Everyman living with a ticking clock and the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“Guillermo del Toro has called Bardem’s performance ‘monumental’; Sean Penn said it’s the best thing he’s seen since Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris.

“When I saw King’s Speech, I thought Colin Firth gave the best performance I’d seen in a couple of years,” Ben Affleck told me at a party for The Town a couple of weeks ago. “Then I saw Biutiful.” He shook his head. “Javier is on another level from the rest of us.”

“Memo to Academy members: SAG and Globe voters blew it, badly. Don’t you do the same.”

All these admirers plus the jury at last May’s Cannes Film Festival had no problem seeing Biutiful and recognizing what they’d seen in Bardem’s performance. But this kind of thing, let’s face it, doesn’t play as well with Average Joes. Many if not most American moviegoers (including film industry types) are simply too grief-averse — too married to the idea of a movie lifting your spirits or acting like some kind of friendly quaalude — to summon the character to see Biutiful. Can we be honest? Can we call a spade a spade? “Grief averse” is a polite way of saying “too shallow.”

The Chicago Film Critics Association had the good taste and sound judgment to hand Another Year‘s Lesley Manville one of their five Best Actress nominations, so backslaps and “howdy hey” for that. Otherwise they gave eight nominations to David Fincher‘s The Social Network — Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, etc. — and six noms each to Black Swan, The King’s Speech, Winter’s Bone and True Grit.

The final round of voting for the CFCA awards will conclude at 5:00 pm Central on Sunday, 12.19. The winners will be announced on the morning of Monday, 12.20.

Blue Valentine‘s Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams were nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively, and both Amy Adams and Melissa Leo were nominated for Best Supporting Actress for their performances in The Fighter.

Hey, what about Mother‘s Kim Hye-Ja and A Prophet‘s Niels Arestrup?

Social Network director David Fincher and star Jesse Eisenberg sat for a 30-minute q & a last night at the Leows AMC 34th Street with moderator Spike Jonze. This followed a magnificent digital 4K screening of the film. I slipped into the theatre during the last 20 or 25 minutes and it was like “whoa!”…an extra-large screen, razor-sharp focus, perfect projector lighting, magnificent sound. I’ve seen TSN five times but this was incredible.

Social Network star Jesse Eisenberg flocked by fans after last night’s q & a at the Leows AMC 34th megaplex.

Fincher and Eisenberg said a lot of same stuff I was recording last September (naturally), but I liked a comment from Eisenberg about how the lines, characters and appearances they came up with (like Fincher’s complete lack of interest in Eisenberg dying his hair red to match Mark Zuckerberg‘s follicles) is “probably what makes [the film] a more interesting true story than a story of accuracy.” [Here’s an mp3 file containing this remark.]

Exactly! Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Network script stays very close to the recorded facts behind the formation of Facebook, but the interpretive flourishes that he and Fincher and the others applied is what makes it an incredibly alive film.

I also liked this comment from Fincher: “For directors it’s very simple…the enjoyment you get out of reading a script is over the second you’ve read it, so everything from that moment becomes about getting back to that feeling of not knowing what the next page [or] scene is going to be.” [Here’s an mp3 file containing this remark.]

And this other one from Eisenberg, in which he says, in effect, that the socially alienated and/or isolated character of Mark Zuckerberg was a good fit because he himself is cut from a similar cloth: “I’ve only been in movies [in] an age in which people have written everything they think about movies on the internet….I wish I were older,” he said, sounding rather Woody Allen-esque in an analyst’s couch sense of that term.

“And I feel like…in a way that the [main Social Network] characters are isolated or they feel alienated from normal socialization. I isolate myself from any popular culture. I don’t see movies, I don’t have a TV, I don’t even have a DVD player….[and] I make an effort to isolate myself [in part] because I feel so innovative just by virtue of being in these films occasionally…it’s very strange.”

Eisenberg added, “I was on the subway and there was this guy holding an [iPhone] near my face and I knew he was taking a picture,…it was just mortifying.” [Here’s an mp3 file containing these and other remarks.]

Fincher is in the States for a holiday break from filming The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in Sweden. He told me after the session that he’s completed about 40 days of shooting with another 70 or 80 left to go. (That sounds like he won’t be done before the Oscar telecast on 2.27.)

“So everyone is going to be speaking English with Swedish accents?,” I asked. Fincher said he’s run into a lot of Swedes who speak English without any accent at all. He met a driver, he said, who’d learned his flawless English from watching South Park. He mentioned something about costar Christopher Plummer speaking English in a relatively uninflected way.

Yeah, okay, but obviously most Swedes speak in their native tongue. I just don’t get why they didn’t set the whole thing in Vancouver and blow off the crazy-descendants-of-Nazis villains and use American nutters instead.

I asked Fincher and Zuckerberg during the q & a whether they’d read the current Time magazine story about their decision to name Zuckerberg “man of the year.” Fincher corrected me: “Person.” Huh? “Person.” The significance is that the story barely mentions The Social Network, and that it only comes up around the twelfth or fifteenth graph and then they drop it and move on. Jonze repeated the question so the audience could hear it and then said to Fincher in a playfully goading tone, “What do you think of that?” Fincher’s reply: “Shameful!” [Here’s an mp3 file containing this exchange.]

I’m calling it the dullest, least imaginative, most generically nothing Oscar poster in history. These things don’t have to be busy or nervy or nutso, but they have to do something…c’mon. Deco moderne? This could have been designed by the art-school cousin of the head of the DMV in Sacramento.

Matt Shapiro‘s Cinescape summary is significantly better than that other one. More emotional, a bit more thematic…and I love that roomful of overlapping dialogue at the very beginning. But the Killers’ “Dustyland Fairytale” begins to feel obnoxious after a while, and the piece itself, like the other one, is a little too whizflashbang.

I think it’s finally time to admit that Sony Classics, no offense, flubbed Lesley Manville‘s Oscar chances by putting her up for Best Actress. I’ve been arguing for weeks that the aching heart of Another Year should have been pushed as a Best Supporting Actress contender, but Sony Classics thought otherwise and now it looks like her goose may be cooked.

Another Year‘s Lesley Manville.

Manville won the National Board of Review’s Best Actress award, great, but she hasn’t even been nominated in that category by the Critics Choice, Golden Globes or SAG, which suggests she has a possible outside shot, at best, at an Oscar nomination. I’d love to be proved wrong, but I think it’s highly unlikely that she’ll make it. And if she does, there’s no way in hell she’ll win. But if she’d been put into Best Supporting Actress contention, she’d be a likely Oscar nominee since she would have probably made the cut with the Golden Globes and SAG and BFCA, and there’d be a reasonably good chance that she might actually win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. What a shame, what a sadness.

This morning I asked some journalist pals if they believe Manville has any kind of shot at a Best Actress Oscar nomination at this stage, and if they believe she might be in a better position if Sony Classics had taken my advice and put her into Supporting instead. Here’s what some said:

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson: “Manville is clearly a leading actress, so I don’t think [putting her up as] supporting would have made any difference. In the case of [Another Year director/writer] Mike Leigh, the Academy actors take him seriously and check out his films. It’s amazing that he’s landed as many nominations as he has over the years, and for such unlikely candidates as Brenda Blethyn in Secrets and Lies and Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake. Yeah, Sally Hawkins was overlooked but it was a crowded category, as it is this year. The question is, will the Academy voters watch the Another Year DVD? I think the Academy is a classier, tonier group that will also be more likely to watch Blue Valentine, btw.”

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil: “Lesley Manville can uncork a bottle and get blotto with self pity because she ain’t getting nommed at the Oscars — that’s now clear. That lead race is just too packed with A List divas giving big grandstanding roles, pushing Manville out. But I don’t think the Globes would’ve fallen for a ploy of category fraud if Sony Pictures Classics had tried to place her role in supporting. The HFPA eligibility committee is getting tough these days. But at the SAG Awards, the actor decides which category they’re going into. If SPC had entered Manville into supporting, that might’ve worked. Yes, she might’ve gotten nommed and that, in turn, might’ve positioned her for Oscar recognition. That was her only hope. Turns out you were right, Jeff.”

Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet: “My faith in her getting an Oscar nomination has dwindled to the point she may be the last one in. So that would be a ‘no’ to the win. Yes, yes, yes — she should have been in supporting, which is what I wrote about in October. It’s a tragedy in Oscar terms, but at least most everyone I read still continues to talk about her and the performance every time she’s overlooked. So that’s, at the very least, a plus.”

TheWrap‘s Steve Pond: “It’s still possible that the Academy will fix this and nominate her, but are enough voters going to even watch the movie now? I doubt it. I think it really needed some awards and nominations to move it further up in those piles of screeners. Yes, Manville would have been better off in supporting. And unlike the case of The Kids Are All Right, where it would have betrayed the movie to campaign Bening for lead and Moore for supporting, Sony could have made a completely reasonable argument for Manville in supporting. I agree that they blew it here — but let’s face it, the voters are the ones who really blew it. And not just in Manville’s case.”

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone: “Fox Searchlight is, quite simply, a better publicity machine than Sony Pictures Classics. I predicted [Conviction‘s] Hilary Swank shortly before the announcement because I figured that Searchlight would have stopped at nothing to make that happen. On top of which Swank is very popular in the SAG. And that voting body doesn’t do well with foreigners: Andrew Garfield, Jacki Weaver, Lesley Manville. Keep in mind that they have a huge membership. They randomly select a ‘nominating committee.’ But they do this in such a fashion that it can’t possibly account for taste. Any old person with a SAG card votes on these. Oscar is much more exclusive and selective. Therein usually lies the difference. But it does show how the acting categories this year are kind of all over the map.”

All I know for sure is that it’s an outrage that Hillary Swank got Best Actress nominated by SAG for Conviction, and not Manville. Congrats to Fox Searchlight for doing a slambang job in getting Swank nominated, but right is right and Manville, I feel, has been cheated out of a completely justified moment in the Oscar sun.

I asked Sony’s Michael Barker and Tom Bernard if they wanted to say anything, but they passed. If I were them I would have said something along the lines of “we loved Lesley Manville’s performance so much that we just couldn’t think of it as anything other than a lead performance. It’s too strong, too penetrating. She’s the essence of that film. Whatever happens Oscar-wise, were enormously proud of her and the entire team behind Another Year.”