It’s one thing for an Academy member with a need for cuddly-bear emotion to vote for The King’s Speech as Best Picture — I get that. But it’s another thing for a hot-shot critic like the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Carrie Rickey to endorse this mushy mindset. Plus she’s wrong in her assessment of Jesse Eisenberg‘s Mark Zuckerberg character.

“Why is The King’s Speech expected to win if The Social Network is The Movie That Speaks to the Moment?,” she asks. “Because while both are about entitled individuals, finally The Social Network is about a guy who doesn’t question his entitlement and The King’s Speech about a guy who is grateful to those who help him maintain his entitlement — and title. The takeaway of Speech is one of gratitude [and] a warmer, fuzzier feeling than the ambiguity of Network.”

Then comes the kicker: “If I were voting, I’d give Speech Best Picture and Network Best Director.”

In other words, Rickey is saying she agrees with the conventional wisdom (which every critic who knows a thing or two has mocked during this Oscar season) that warmer, fuzzier films do deserve the Best Picture Oscar. Meaning…what, that she also approves of Driving Miss Daisy having won the 1989 Best Picture Oscar?

I’ve gotten and agreed with the emotional argument from time to time (like with Titanic), but The King’s Speech doesn’t really kill emotionally — it marginally soothes. As New Yorker critic Anthony Lane wrote last November, “To a large extent, The King’s Speech is…one of those comedies of threatless reassurance [that] revels in the restitution of order.”

And like all geniuses from the beginning of civilization until today, Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg doesn’t question his entitlement (i.e., his vision and intelligence) because he knows what he knows and that’s what all geniuses have as an ace in the hole — supreme confidence. They might be faulty in the friendship and loyalty areas, but no genius worth his or her salt questions the value of his/her intellectual percolation. Anyone who looks at a genius and says “where’s the heart and the soul?” just doesn’t get it. That’s like looking at a racehorse and saying “why can’t he play the piano?”

“Don’t read Jeff Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere rant on Incendies,” MSN’s James Rocchi tweeted about 15 hours ago. “Smug, whiny, spoilers. Actually, end that clause right before ‘rant.'” That’s fired-up emotion talking. When a bright critic falls for a certain film and then somebody trashes it? Rage. (Except I didn’t “trash” it.) Rocchi is a very dapper gentleman (he wears nice suits) and has always been very friendly and gracious in person so I don’t take it personally. And by all means, listen to guys like Rocchi on Incendies. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Because I shovel the straight dope.

According to Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet, the only new elements in Warner Home Video’s upcoming Stanley Kubrick Bluray set (due on 5.31) are the Bluray debuts of Lolita and Barry Lyndon. The rest (Universal Home Video’s “shiny” Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut) have all been released before. But WHV won’t be making Lyndon and Lolita available as stand-alones, although they’ll probably change this policy sometime in the fall. And that sucks. I feel badly for serious Kubrick-heads (i.e., those who’ve been buying Kubrick Blurays all along) who will have to wait.

I can’t get my arms around Ralph Fiennes and John Logan ‘s Coriolanus until I see a trailer, at least. I’m sorry but that’s how it is. Congrats to Harvey Weinstein for picking it up in Berlin. The reviews have been exceptional. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Ray Bennett called it “a bloody delight.” Wait — I don’t like that term. And I don’t like “bloody” used as an adjective.

To go by this mp3 audio of Charlie Sheen doing the Dan Patrick show, the man is still in deep denial. “Get me right now, guys…right now! I’m not in AA, I don’t believe in it…I was bored out of my tree [when I was sober]…a vodka drunk is more linear…I’ve done research in the field…what’s wrong with my brain, Dan?” Sheen hasn’t crossed over and gotten clean. He’s still hanging around on the mad cackle side.

Sheen’s best line comes when he’s asked whether he liked Wall Street 2. “Uhhm…it was interesting. I think it waited too long.”

Robert Duvall‘s Network performance is incandescent. His “CCA hatchet man” Frank Hackett is one of the most entertaining and live-wire bad guys in movie history. I’ve no argument with Jason Robards having won the 1976 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Ben Bradlee, but Duvall wasn’t even nominated.

That’s because Ned Beatty‘s burn-through as CCA chairman Arthur Jensen was, I suppose, but Duvall ruled — he was a huge kick in every scene.

Duvall’s big Network scene (“It’s a big fat, big-tittied hit!”) begins around 5:08 in the above clip. Here’s the isolated scene that I can’t embed. The other ’76 Best Supporting Actor nominees were Burgess Meredith and Burt Young in Rocky (both of them?) and Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man.

I once visited Kenneth Mars‘ North Valley home with three or four actor friends. It was sometime in ’83 or ’84. A nice Sunday afternoon barbecue thing in the back yard with beers and Margueritas. I’ve never forgotten Mars’ greeting at the front door: “Mi casa? Su casa!” Instant relaxation and acceptance. And now he’s gone. And I’m sorry.

Mars was a farceur. His best-known role, of course, was Inspector Kemp in Young Frankenstein, followed by Franz Liebkind in The Producers — both from the gifted brain of Mel Brooks, who was easily Mars’ best friend in a professional sense.

But everyone forgets that Mars played Shirley MacLaine‘s husband in Frank D. Gilroy ‘s relentlessly grim Desperate Characters (’71). I think there may even have been a sex scene of some kind. There are some guys you just don’t want to think about in a sexual context and Kenneth Mars was one of them, but Gilroy went there anyway. And I’m kind of glad that he did now. Because that 40 year-old film kind lends an extra dimension to Mars that we otherwise wouldn’t have.

I could never get past an impression that for all the trippy dandelion-pollen aspects and the close-to-perfect performances, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was too busy and bothered by itself. It tried too hard. HE reader Abbey Normal called it “a bad hipster remake of a Truffaut film.”

Now that I’ve seen Denis Villeneuve‘s Incendies (NY/LA, 4.22), I know that the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race is probably down to a choice between Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful and Susanne Bier‘s A Better World. Because as compelling and anchored and finely chiselled as Incendies is, it’s such an ugly and searing portrait of tribal rage, ignorance, cruelty and sadism that it’s finally one of those widely admired films that you’ll never want to see a second time, or even think about once it’s over.

Most critics have called Biutiful a tough thing to sit through, and it is that in some ways. But Incendies is such a grim march and so committed to the probing of an oppressive and penetrating vision of downer-hood that it would easily whip Inarritu’s ass in a one-on-one gloom match.

The story (based on Wajdi Mouawad‘s play of the same title) is clearly a reflection of the Lebanon horrors (Israeli army plus Christian militia vs. Lebanese PLO and non-combatants) of the ’70s and early ’80s. Aaah, to be immersed in primitive Arab-Lebanese-Christian rage on all sides — idiotic tribal traditions, threats of honor killings, sniper shootings, rural women shunning wronged women, torture, prison rape, machine-gun slaughter, burnt bodies, more torture, prolonged imprisonment…good stuff!

You’re sitting there going “boy, this sure is a good film…I wonder how much longer until it’s over?” I went out to the lobby around the 90-minute mark and asked the guy. He called the projectionist and got off the phone and gave me a look and told me to grim up and hang in there — I had another 35 to 40 minutes to go. Eff me. I really hate it when films thrust me into backward patriarchal societies and then block off all escape routes. What a completely nowhere fundamentalist culture we’re stuck with in this film, a world defined by rock and scrub brush and dust and hills and chained to such ongoing hate.

And to be doubly stuck in a lonnnng quest-for-the-ancestral-truth movie in which clue after clue is sought and uncovered, blah blah. Clue, hint, clue, hint…are we getting closer to finding out what really happened? No? It has to get there eventually, right?

Incendies is about a youngish Canadian brother and a sister whose Lebanese mother has recently died, and who are more less forcibly engaged in a search for their missing father and missing brother. And for all of it to end with a Chinatown-ish resolution that gives new meaning to the term “all in the family”? Which doesn’t really illuminate anything in a real-world sort of way? I don’t know, bro. A very “good” film but if I never see Incendies again it’ll be too soon. And I’ve seen Biutiful three times.

Cheers to Javier Bardem for having last night won the Best Actor Goya award for his performance in Biutiful. The Spanish Oscars were held last night in Madrid. Another gust of wind for the Biutiful sails.

No one will take the Best Actor Oscar from Colin Firth, of course, but if anyone could…

A week and a half ago I did a brief phoner from my Santa Barbara Film Festival hotel room with Biutiful director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. He was on a speaker and so was I, and when I played it back it was all but indecipherable. It was like we talking into tin cans connected by a piece of string. So I kind of went cold on writing it up.

We talked about Biutiful‘s nomination as one of the five foreign-language nominees, and it being an official submission from Mexico, and the fact that Mexico has never won despite being nominated eight times. And how Videocine, the Mexican distributor, is planning a re-release of 150 prints on 2.25, and how a re-release of this type has never been done before in Mexico.

This led to a discussion about what a battleground Mexico has become over the last couple of years and is pretty much what Columbia was in the ’80s and ’90s. “Worse than Columbia,” Inarritu said. There’s some kind of film in it, I said. Perhaps a blend of Brian DePalma‘s Scarface and Fernando Meirelles‘ City of God.

Last night’s big Goya winner was Augusti Villaronga‘s Pa Negre (Black Bread), a family drama in post-Civil War Spain. It won nine trophies.

In honor of Valentine’s Day (i.e., today), New York‘s Intel recently asked readers to “write down all the sex you’ve had and we’ll share it with the world.” Classy! And pretty far away from the spirit of Valentine’s Day. And banal. In 1983 or thereabouts I started counting everyone I’d “been” with and came up with a tally of around 175. I meant it deep down each and every time, but that was the ’70s for you — the greatest era for nookie since the days of the Roman empire. And so what?

Here’s a much better question: “Write a very short story about The Big Love Affair That Got Away.”

The late Sydney Pollack said over and over that happy-ending love stories aren’t that satisfying. What moves people are ones about love affairs that never quite work out. The former lover you can never quite get out of your head or heart, etc. I could tell a story-and-a-half in that regard (an affair with a married journalist that lasted 2 and 1/2 years), but some other time. Or maybe never.

But everyone has a sad story like this. Or two. Valentine’s Day is about the heart, and that usually means The Hurt. And “happily ever after,” by the way, is probably the most dishonest, disconnected-from-reality phrase ever dreamt of in the history of literature. “Moderately semi-contented ever after” is more like it in the case of longterm “happy” relationships. I’d rather reminisce about the Really Great Relationship that never quite came together.

Cue all the HE readers who are extremely happy in their marriages and who pity me for having been unlucky in love and so on. Let me just say in advance that I’m not saying it’s not good to be happy or content, but that it’s more moving to think about the really exceptional man/woman whom you thought was Really The One but then something went wrong.