A recent reader comment stopped me short. He mentioned my oft-referenced analogy between Sidney Lumet‘s 12 Angry Men and the changing predictions of Oscar handicappers in recent weeks, and asked if I realized that I, and not David Poland, have been Lee J. Cobb all along? A muffled grenade exploded in my chest.

I’ve been on the side of the Movie Godz with an accurate historical perspective (is there anyone arguing that The King’s Speech is not Driving Miss Daisy in the royal British realm?), and yet I kinda have been Cobb, haven’t I? Sneering and sweating and bellowing with my sleeves rolled up and pulling out photos from my wallet and tearing them into little pieces. And I’m sorry. I know it hasn’t been an attractive spectacle. I’ll try and restrain myself from here on. Well, to some extent.

Can we presume that Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris isn’t one of his wipeouts, and perhaps may even be one of his back-in-the-saddle resurgence films? I’m thinking that Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Fremaux, who’s announced that Allen’s latest will open his festival on 5.11…what am I saying? This doesn’t mean jack. Fremaux just wanted a glammy Woody with movie stars (Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody) plus French president Nicolas Sarkozy escorting wife-costar Carla Bruni-Sarkozy on the red carpet.

Midnight in Paris costars Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard during shooting last summer.

Most Allen films over the past decade or so have felt like first drafts that should have gone through another couple of passes. For all we know Midnight could be on the level of Whatever Works or Scoop or Hollywood Ending . But Allen’s pattern has been to dribble for three or four years between jump shots. His last swish was ’08’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, so maybe.

Fremaux has described Midnight in Paris, which he’s apparently seen in some form, as “a wonderful love letter to Paris.” That in itself gives me the willies. It suggests that Allen will portray Paris in picture-postcard terms, and that we’ll be seeing many, many scenes of Wilson and Cotillard strolling and talking and cafe-sitting in the usual romantic locales.

Fremaux also called it “a film in which Allen takes a deeper look at the issues raised in his last films: our relationship with history, art, pleasure and life.”

Midnight in Paris will open commercially in France on the same day it shows at the Grand Palais. For some reason that sounds like another mild “hmm, really?” Sony Classics, the U.S. distributor, hasn’t announced a domestic release date. Figure on late summer or early fall.

I love Sasha Stone‘s statement in her Awards Daily announcement piece: “I have to say that after the soul-crushing experience that Oscars 2010 has been, I so look forward to Cannes where the thing really is the movie. Daring, visionary films shown many times a day, every day. There is nothing quite like Cannes.”

I love the way Sidney Lumet, the director of this 1982 courtroom drama, holds on the master shot for a fairly long time before finally going in on Paul Newman. Very nice. I also love Andrzej Bartkowiak‘s inky blacks during the opening beer-and-pinball credits sequence.

Until today I never knew that Bruce Willis had a non-speaking extra part as a “courtroom observer.”

The Santa Barbara Film Festival Blogger Panel video, taken last Sunday afternoon, has finally been posted on YouTube. It looks dark, muddy and quite hazy, like it was captured by a Bill Clinton-era camera on 8mm videocassette. Well, at least you can listen to it. It comes in six portions: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6.

A video companion to a profile of Guillermo del Toro‘s most intriguing monsters, written by New Yorker writer Daniel Zalewski.

One of my many encounters with Del Toro happened at the end of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. It was the year of Pan’s Labyrinth, of course, which I’d seen at the Star Cinema on the rue d’Antibes. Near the end of our chat I took this photo of his workbook:

“The King’s Speech is an anesthetic movie, The Social Network an invigorating one — and their scripts’ departures from the historical record serve utterly divergent purposes,” wrote New Yorker/”Front Row” critic Richard Brody earlier today. “The inaccuracies in The King’s Speech and The Social Network are as different in kind as the movies are different in quality.

“The tale of royal triumph through a commoner’s efforts expurgates the story in order to render its characters more sympathetic, whereas the depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lonely and friendless genius (when, in fact, he has long been in a relationship with one woman) serves the opposite purpose: to render him more ambiguous, to challenge the audience to overcome antipathy for a character twice damned, by reasonable women, as an ‘asshole.’

“Imagine if George VI, working to overcome his stammer, were seen at his balcony endorsing Neville Chamberlain‘s Munich agreement (as, in fact, happened), or had expressed a preference, as N.Y. Times Review of Books‘ Martin Filler writes, for ‘the appeaser Lord Halifax to Churchill as [Chamberlain’s] replacement.’ It might have made the movie more surprising and more complex than the pap that’s currently enjoying an outpouring of undeserved honors.

“P.S. My colleague Nancy Franklin tweeted a link to a recording of King George VI’s actual speech of September 3, 1939. It shows up the bland prowess of Colin Firth’s performance. Listen to the exotic, perhaps now-extinct tang of the actual king’s vowels, and his hint of vibrato, and compare them to Colin Firth‘s dulled-down inflections. There’s as little flavor to his speech as to the movie itself.”

In a 2.1 Vanity Fair posting about big-time Hollywood salaries, contributing editor Peter Newcomb reveals that (a) “by the time Avatar plays out on broadcast television, James Cameron will make close to $350 million” (and he’ll be making two more Avatar sequels for creative kicks?), (b) Johnny Depp pocketed a third of a $150 million “profit pool” from Alice in Wonderland (or roughly $50 million?) and was paid $35 million for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean — $85 million total; (c) Vince Vaughn got paid $17.5 million for The Dilemma; (d) Michael Bay got paid over $100 million in 2010.

That’s over $550 million paid to four guys with Vaughn getting the pauper’s slice.

I’ll definitely be attending and covering a “Reel Oscar Talk” forum at the 92nd Street Y on Tuesday, 2.8 at 8 pm. Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf will mix it up with N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, film critic and author Molly Haskell, “Pictures at a Revolution” author Mark Harris and 42West co-chief of entertainment marketing Amanda Lundberg.

I nearly forgot about my acidic King’s Speech stomach during last night’s Santa Barbara Film Festival Geoffrey Rush tribute. I’ll never be able to watch Quills again, and Rush’s over-acting in the HBO Peter Sellers biopic (which he was too old for) and the Pirates films is a tough thing, but he’s just about perfect in Tom Hooper‘s high-end buddy flick.

Last night reminded that Rush is a wise, cultured and very eloquent fellow. He made an excellent impression all around. And he looks good as Mr. Clean. If he wins the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, as Sasha Stone suspects he might, I will not twitch or shudder in my seat. His Lionel Logue is a first-rate inhabiting.

King’s Speech costars Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter dropped by atr the end of the tribute along with director Tom Hooper,

Rush and moderator Pete Hammond — Monday, 1.31, 7:35 pm.

Like many in her realm, Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum is close to apoplectic (“gobsmacked”) over last weekend’s DGA triumph by The King’s Speech helmer Tom Hooper. But perhaps, she adds, Hooper does merit exceptional recognition for his clever use of classical music in four important scenes.

“What were those DGA voters thinking?,” she writes. “My conclusion: They weren’t thinking; they were feeling. And they were feeling because of incalculable help provided to the director by two geniuses ineligible for an award in this or any other year to come. I’m talking, of course, about Ludwig van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Without them, The King’s Speech would be filled with much emptier words.”