I began reading Stu VanAirsdale‘s latest Oscar Index article in a state of profound excitation. An upset is coming? Really? Or may be coming at least? O joy! But my heart began to sink when I got to the third or fourth graph and I realized that VanAirsdale is just blowing confetti out of his ass and/or doing an air-guitar riff. Fake out! And back came the gloom.

John Madden‘s The Debt, an espionage thriller, will be distributed for Miramax by Focus Features and Universal Pictures International. Focus will open it in the U.S. on Wednesday, 8.31, and UPI will release the film internationally.

I could run this announcement as a boilerplate thing or fill things in with my opinion of the film. I just flipped a coin and it came up heads so here’s my 9.15.10 Toronto Film Festival review of The Debt‘s first 40 minutes:

“By the time I left, John Madden’s The Debt had administered several self-inflicted wounds. Bruises, scratches, cuts, scrapes — they kept coming non-stop. The biggest wince was realizing early on that all the actors — principally Sam Worthington, Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciaran Hinds, Jessica Chastain, Martin Csokas — had been urged to ‘act.’ There wasn’t a moment in the portion that I watched in which they didn’t seem to be (a) speaking lines and (b) using every thespian trick in the book to let us know how their characters are feeling. There’s nothing that kills a movie faster than this.

“I especially hate it when actors exchange ominous ‘looks’ in a scene. Looks in which actor says to another, ‘Are you sensing the same vibe I’m sensing?’ Or ‘I’m getting concerned about how things are going — how about you?’ Scenes in which an actor conveys his/her feelings about another by looking at them longingly or angrily or coldly or playfully are, for me, mute nostril agony.

“And I think it should be carved in stone that you can never have an older actor or actress be portrayed in a younger incarnation by another younger actor/actress, or vice versa. It never works, and always kills the movie in question.

“In this film — a thriller about three young Israeli Mossad agents who captured an Adolph Eichmann-like Nazi war criminal in mid 60s East Berlin, and their older selves dealing with lingering consequences — we are asked to believe the following pairs: (a) Worthington aging into Hinds — ridiculous, absurd; (b) Chastain aging into Mirren — laughable, in a pig’s eye; and (c) the 44 year-old Csokas, speaking with his usual bizarre New Zealand-by-way-of-Hungary accent, aging 40 years hence into the 61 year-old Wilkinson, his speech patterns utterly devoid of the Csokas patois.

“I felt angry and insulted. My feelings wouldn’t have been any different if Madden had come up to where I was sitting during the showing and urinated on my leg. There’s no getting over this aspect. It alone kills The Debt, although there were may other assists in this regard. I could describe four or five others but I’d just be describing variations on the same sprawling green lawn composed of identical blades of shit grass.”

As I said in early January, “Not every subway movie poster gets trashed but some do, and I’ve come to suspect that it means something when a certain poster gets the treatment. Spooky but true.” How concerned should Universal be that antisocial budding-criminal-class Manhattan teenagers have a problem with The Adjustment Bureau (3.4)? Perhaps it’s not even worth thinking about, but only certain posters seem to get defaced in the NY subway system, and there’s always a reason.

For what it’s worth, I can faintly sympathize with Nikki Finke‘s reportedly extreme discomfort with having a present-day photo of her circulated by Rupert Murdoch‘s The Daily. Last week I sat down with Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil and Paul Sheehan for an Oscar race discussion. When I saw the first portion of the video yesterday I almost fell out of my chair.

All I can think when I watch it is how I really have to (a) start up with 24 Hour Fitness again when I get back to West Hollywood and (b) drive down to Mexico for some affordable plastic surgery to fix those godawful bags under my eyes and and for my appalling turkey neck. It just sends me into a tailspin of depression. That bloated fuck in the video is not the guy I see in the bathroom mirror. Why can’t I age like Cary Grant did? Why can’t I at least look more like Todd McCarthy? I’m starting to resemble Albert Finney, for God’s sake.

I shared my sense of horror with O’Neil, and he told me to knock it off and that I look fine and that I’m paranoid, and that he should have told me sit up straight because my slumping created the illusion of a turkey neck I really don’t have, etc. It was nice of him to try and cheer me up.

I could’ve seen Peter Mullan‘s Neds at the Marrakech Film Festival last December, but a bad-wifi mood pocket interfered. Now I really want to see it due to Neds having defeated The King’s Speech to win the Best Film prize at the Evening Standard‘s British Film Awards in association with the London Film Museum.

Andrew Garfield won the org’s Best Actor award for his work in The Social Network and Never Let Me Go, and Kristin Scott Thomas won the Best Actress prize for her lead performance in Leaving.

Neds (i.e., “non-educated delinquents”) “draws on Mullan’s own experience of Glasgow’s gang culture,” says a British newspaper account. “[It has] a gritty realism which has sparked genuine clashes among rival gangs in Scottish cinema audiences.

“Presenting the award at a star-studded ceremony, actress Emily Watson — who has just made Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse with actor/director Mullan — said Neds was ‘raw and unflinching and very difficult to watch.’

“She urged Mullan, whose last film as director, The Magdalene Sisters, was released eight years ago, not to wait so long until his next.”

This happened last weekend in the state of Washington. The thief may simply be a skilled actor or perhaps even a sociopath. But he seems to me like one of the nicest felons ever.

It’s interesting that the trailer never shows us the predator’s face. Prior to the Toronto Film Festival I read an idiotic and misleading synopsis of David Schwimmer‘s film that mentioned security and a dad obsessing about how to protect his family and blah, blah, blah. Never once mentioned false cyber relationships or a violation of a young girl.

Columnist Scott Feinberg has very plainly and eloquently put the whole Melissa Leo self-financed ad brouhaha in its place, and taken a swipe at Deadline‘s Pete Hammond in the bargain. Read it and tell me Feinberg hasn’t put this issue to bed and then some. That rash-minded boob who told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tim Appelo that “she’s lost my vote” needs to consider all the angles and pro-Leo arguments that Feinberg has voiced.

If you listened closely to what was said at tonight’s Oscar panel at the 92nd Street Y — called “Reel Predictions: Countdown to the Oscars” — you heard several subtle, polite and deftly worded putdowns of The King’s Speech. So subtle that I can’t offer (i.e., remember) a single money quote, but the sound of Tom Hooper‘s drama being needled throughout the evening for being too pat and tidy, too “safe,” and not all that interesting was music to my ears.

Quite possibly the blurriest and/or least distinct photo anyone has ever taken of N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott (l.) and Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf (r.), either together or separately.

These and other light-fingered reprimands were voiced by Columbia University Film Professor Annette Insdorf, the discussion’s moderator, and at least two of the four panelists — N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and author/film journalist Mark Harris. Remarks by author and essayist Molly Haskell didn’t exactly flatter The King’s Speech, but they didn’t downsize it either. Or so I recall.

42West marketing director Amanda Lundberg restricted herself to explaining how award season marketing is basically a process of monetizing client assets and that line of country. My mind glazed over.

Harris briefly brought up the Melissa Leo brouhaha about her self-financed ads, but nobody else had anything to add and before you knew it Insdorf had changed the subject.

Insdorf is one of the brightest and most knowledgable film mavens on the planet, but at times she plays, I feel, the gracious diplomatic card to a fault. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth when it comes to voicing any sort of negative judgment, or encouraging it in others. And so it seemed to me that she too often led the discussion in directions that were more college-classroomy than critical or exploratory or…whatever, Bill Maher-ish.

If you ask me there were entirely too many clips of Oscar-nominated films shown. The evening would have been much more interesting, in fact, if Insdorf had just tossed them altogether. It’s February, after all. Haven’t we seen the same clips from the same films over and over and over?

(l. to r.) 92 Y Oscar panelists Amanda Lundberg, Mark Harris, Molly Haskell and A.O. Scott; host Annette Insdorf.

Insdorf noted that while personal loyalty is a strong and consistent behavioral trait in many of the year’s Best Picture contenders — certainly in The King’s Speech, The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right, Toy Story 3, True Grit and Winter’s Bone — it is absent from The Social Network in the behavior of Jesse Eisenberg‘s Mark Zuckerberg, and that perhaps this was a factor in the industry’s choosings. Scott and Harris quickly jumped in and said that Eisenberg’s capacity for betrayal didn’t affect their enjoyment of The Social Network one iota; indeed, it made the film all the more intriguing.

I wanted to ask my question of the moment, to wit: “Why after choosing three tough films with tough subjects for Best Picture — The Departed, No Country For Old Men, The Hurt Locker — has the Academy, like a lapsed alcoholic, gone back to favoring a very good-but-not-great, lump-in-the-throat, comfort-blanket movie like The King’s Speech?” But I candy-assed out and didn’t raise my hand. I guess I’ve lost the fire in the belly. February 27th can’t get here soon enough.

There was also a certain element of suspense in my trying to take photographs of the panelists without getting busted by the 92nd Street Y ushers. The place has a strict no-photography rule. That’s to keep flashbulbs from going off, I’ve always presumed, but how could a non-illuminated snap or two from my little 14 megapixel Canon Elph be a problem? But it was. At one point I thought I was about to get heave-ho’ed. My inability to get close enough to the stage and/or sufficiently focus, in any event, resulted in the worst shots I’ve ever captured of a public event.

Stick with the longish Brad Bird tribute, which showed at last weekend’s Annie Awards, until the 4:30 mark for a very funny bit. I should have snagged this when it first went up yesterday afternoon but I didn’t and so what?

It’s important to remember what Submarine director-screenwriter Richard Ayoade told me prior to the Toronto Film Festival, which is that his romantic dramedy (costarring Craig Roberts, Noah Taylor, Sally Hawkins and Paddy Considine) is more of a Mike Nichols-meets-Wes Anderson thing than just an Anderson-y thing about quirky young love. The Nichols aspect alludes, I gather, to the anguish and heavy heartache thing that has turned up in various Nichols films, including The Graduate.

This is a way of saying that despite opportunities in Toronto and Sundance, I still haven’t seen Submarine. But I’ll get there.

And Pete Hammond and Tom O’Neil and Sasha Stone and Kris Tapley all the other Oscar pulse-takers. Because the 2011 Best Actress race is all but settled as of this moment. Or at least, it has an obvious front-runner in the star of The Iron Lady. Look at her! And imagine her Margaret Thatcher accent….are you kidding? With Academy members being the suckers they are and always will be for lofty-realm British drama?

The only thing that can screw things up is if the film itself turns out badly, which is certainly possible given that Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia) is directing.

There’s also a slight complication from the Streep’s post-Iron Lady role, a sure-to-be-knockout performance as the chain-smoking Violet Weston in John Wells‘ film version of August: Osage County, which the great Harvey Weinstein is distributing. If Streep takes the Best Actress Oscar for playing Margaret, it’ll be just a bit tougher for Harvey to land her an Oscar nomination as Violet because people might be feeling a wee bit Streeped out. So it would suit Harvey’s game if The Iron Lady turns out to be not so hot. Just sayin’.