Banksy‘s Exit Through The Gift Shop “is a terrific piece of work, involving and evolving at the same time,” says director-screenwriter Rod Lurie (Straw Dogs). “But is it a documentary? I left it with the distinct impression that much of it was a put on — a sly joke was staged and pre-planned.

“I’m no expert on this, but it struck me that the movie itself is a hoax — Banksy’s ultimate performance art. If that’s the case then would mean it’s scripted, so is it disqualified from the documentary category? Or should it be? Would Banksy laugh his ass off if the film was indeed nominated as a ‘documentary’ when, in my view, it’s almost a narrative film in the spirit of, say, Spinal Tap?”

With the Writers Guild of America having disqualified Another Year, Biutiful, Blue Valentine, The King’s Speech, The Ghost Writer, Toy Story 3, Winter’s Bone and The Way Back, their just-announced nominations seem a bit diminished in stature. Many of the winners have to be wondering if they made the cut only because eight heavy-hitters weren’t competing, so in some cases you have to take these noms with a grain of salt. It’s a little like wining a Best Actor Oscar after two of the nominees have suddenly died from the Black Plague.

We’re all presuming that Inception will win for Best Original Screenplay, The Social Network will take the Best Adapted Screenplay award and Inside Job will land the trophy for Best Documentary Screenplay. Still…

The Best Original Screenplay noms went to Black Swan (screenplay by Mark Heyman and Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin; story by Andres Heinz); The Fighter (screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson; story by Keith Dorrington & Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson); Inception (written by Christopher Nolan), The Kids Are All Right (written by Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg) and Please Give (written by Nicole Holofcener). The surprise nominees are obvious.

Winners will be honored at the 2011 Writers Guild Awards held on Saturday, February 5, 2011, at simultaneous ceremonies in New York and Los Angeles.

The Best Adapted Screenplay nominees are 127 Hours (screenplay by Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy; based on the book Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston); I Love You Phillip Morris (written by John Requa & Glenn Ficarra; based on the book by Steven McVicker); The Social Network (screenplay by Aaron Sorkin; based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich); The Town (screenplay by Peter Craig and Ben Affleck & Aaron Stockard; based on the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan); and True Grit (screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen; based on the novel by Charles Portis).

Are you going to look me in the eye and tell me that The Town would have been nominated if The King’s Speech, The Ghost Writer and The Way Back had been in the running for Best Adapted Screenplay?

Cheers and back-slaps for two underdog Hollywood Elsewhere documentary favorites, Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? and The Two Escobars, being nominated for Best Documentary Screenplay. Nilsson was written by director John Scheinfeld; The Two Escobars was written by co-directors Michael Zimbalist and Jeff Zimbalist.

The other Best Documentary Screenplay nominees are Enemies of the People (written, directed, filmed and produced by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath; Freedom Riders (written, produced and directed by Stanley Nelson); Gasland (written and directed by Josh Fox); and Inside Job (produced, written and directed by Charles Ferguson; co-written by Chad Beck, Adam Bolt).

The Social Network is a specially seasoned grade-A ribboned steak served in a top-ranked Cambridge restaurant. Or maybe it’s just a plate of roast herbal chicken served in a nice, inexpensive Cambridge cafeteria, filling and nutritious. Black Swan is a breakfast of grapefruit and one lightly-boiled egg. The King’s Speech is a well-prepared meal of roast duck and rice pudding served at Rules on a Tuesday night. Winter’s Bone is an organic vegetable salad, except the person eating it is unshaven and only showers twice weekly and is wearing a flannel shirt and has a bad smoker’s cough. The Town is an admittedly tasty (for some) hamburger with sauteed onions and large fries with a little paper cup of mayo on the side. Others?

Well, so much for the Winter’s Bone Best Picture surge. This morning the Producers Guild announced their ten nominations for the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures, and there were three mild surprises.

One, the shafting of Winter’s Bone, a presumed indicator of reduced steam as far as a Best Picture Oscar nom is concerned. Two, the nomination of 127 Hours, which has been declining over the last three or four weeks, almost to the point that some were predicting it might not make the cut. And three, the nomination of The Town, which began to lose its headwind in mid-to-late November when people finally realized that the Best Picture talk was mostly coming from easily impressed Academy members along with a smattering of non-pros (i.e., diner employees, Manhattan Con Ed workers, etc.) with unsophisticated taste buds and a lack of perspective.

The Zanuck nominees are 127 Hours (produced by Danny Boyle, Christian Colson), Black Swan (produced by Scott Franklin, Mike Medavoy, Brian Oliver), Inception (produced by Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas), The Fighter (produced by David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman, Mark Wahlberg…hey, what about Ryan Kavanaugh?), The Kids Are All Right (produced by Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, Celine Rattray), The King’s Speech (produced by Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, Gareth Unwin), The Social Network (produced by Dana Brunetti, Ce√°n Chaffin, Michael De Luca, Scott Rudin), The Town (produced by Basil Iwanyk, Graham King), Toy Story 3 (produced by Darla K. Anderson), True Grit (produced by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen and Scott Rudin).

The “bad” call in the documentary competition was the blow-off of Banksy ‘s Exit Through The Gift Shop. And I haven’t even seen Earth Made of Glass, which was produced by Reid Carolin and Deborah Scranton. Has anyone? Cheers to the other doc nominees: Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliiot Spitzer (awaiting final producing credit determination, but directed by Alex Gibney), Inside Job (produced by Charles Ferguson, Audrey Marrs), Smash His Camera (produced by Linda Saffire, Adam Schlesinger), The Tillman Story (produced by John Battsek) and Waiting for Superman (produced by Lesley Chilcott).

This redband trailer for Ivan Reitman‘s No Strings Attached (Paramount, 1.21) is funnier than the green one because of the blue material. (The only bad parts are the head-crashes-onto-the-dinner-plate bit — pure Reitman! — and the “yeah, I’m definitely gay” line.) It reminds me it once was an admired Blacklist script by Liz Meriwether called Fuckbuddies. A voice is telling me it’s no Norbit.

Academy voters are basically sheep — a herd. The shepherd just has to show control and point the way, and unless his/her suggestion is nonsensical and/or unwise almost all of the sheep will follow. The shepherd (i.e., Paramount marketing) has made it clear that True Grit‘s Hailee Steinfeld is a Best Supporting Actress contender. That’s because her fiercely intelligent performance can’t overpower a basic human tendency to regard 14 year-olds as entertaining but marginal figures. The only choice, obviously, is the Best Supporting Actress route. It doesn’t matter how large or central her role is — she’s 14.

To hell with the Keisha Castle Hughes precedent pointed out by Scott Feinberg. That was then, True Grit ain’t Whale Rider, etc.

Steinfeld having received Best Supporting Actress nominations from the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Screen Actors Guild Award settles it. Whatever the Hollywood Foreign Press kumquats did or didn’t do means nothing.

On top of which it would it would be wrong, wrong, wrong if Steinfeld (whose spirited and highly willful Mattie Ross, don’t get me wrong, is a complete delight) were to push aside Blue Valentine‘s Michelle Williams, as EW‘s Dave Karger has reported, because “some voters I’ve talked to are turned off by the film’s darkness.” (AMPAS Newsflash: films about the breakup of marriages are only dark if they’re doleful and depressing and covered in fake-behavior sauce, which Blue Valentine clearly is not.) And while I’ve disagreed with Sony Classics decision to push Another Year‘s Lesley Manville in supporting category, she still gave the performance that she gave, and anyone who’s still talking about sending her to the showers because “not everyone has even seen that late-year release”….c’mon! At this late date?

So Karger’s 1.3.11 EW piece is singing the wrong tune….sorry.

And Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas (who was completely blind on the Lesley Manville issue, claiming that she had to be a Best Actress contender because the size and depth of the role demanded it) is wrong also. There’s no basis for category confusion with Steinfeld. The HFPA is composed of marginal whores and their opinion means nothing — they simply provide a popular TV show. But Douglas is right about one thing: “The lead actress category is already fairly jam-packed, [so] there’s a good chance Steinfeld will get snubbed [in that category] despite having a SAG nomination precursor.”

Feinberg notes that 15 first-timers have been nominated for Best Actress, but the only kid who made it was Whale Rider‘s Keisha Castle Hughes, and that performance was extra-extraordinary, I believe, due to Whale Rider touching people on much deeper and more primal level than True Grit, no offense.

First came this, and then this (around the 1:40 mark) and now this.

Anne Francis, an actress of the ’50s and ’60s who knew all about mascara and pizazz, passed on yesterday at an assisted living facility in Santa Barbara. Forbidden Planet, Blackboard Jungle, The Hired Gun, The Crowded Sky, etc. But who ever saw The Girl of the Night (’60)? One of her sassiest, most come-hither supporting performances was in John Sturges‘ Bad Day at Black Rock (’55).

Dennis Lim‘s dismissive little dissertation about the campy nature of Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan (“Is it anti-camp? Post-camp? Failed camp?”) expresses so completely what I despise about the ingrown toenail culture of too-cool-for-school film critics. It was posted on Slate on 12.29, but I only read it yesterday.

Aronofsky has made a ballet film with a ballet-performance and ballet-production attitude — gasping, highly theatrical, consumed, emotionally grandiose, contorted, half-hysterical — and with a clearly stated intention to echo the story of “Swan Lake.” What is there to misunderstand? It’s not calculus. Everything in the film is plain as day and yet arch and heightened and horror-film screwy, and all of a piece in a sort of mad-Polanski way. Either you levitate or you don’t.

I can just imagine Lim watching it in a theatre with a sour-faced, scrunched-up expression and wondering whether to call it “a dubious milestone in the mainstreaming of camp” or to state that it lacks the “tenderness” of camp, or to write “eew, what kind of camp is it? Is it ‘camp in quotation marks’ or ‘camp about camp’?” Or maybe to write all of this and go from there.

“Hardly naive and in no way coded,” Black Swan “is willful, overt, strenuous,” he writes. “It’s a high-profile movie that strains for respectability, a barefaced Oscar grab. Despite some diva catfights and lesbian sex, there’s not a queer bone in its body: Its derisive view of female ambition, its crude linking of art and madness, and the leering frenzy of its girl-on-girl fantasies are as familiar and banal — as straight — as can be.” [The italics are Lim’s.]

Wait — no “queer” bones? Unmistakably “straight”? Oh, I get it. I think. Wait…do I?

From Christopher Rosen‘s 1.3.11 Movieline piece, “Say What? Assessing the Vocal Ticks from True Grit“:

Vimeo is hosting a report from London’s ITV on Jamie Stuart‘s Idiot With A Tripod. Stuart has also launched a special Idiot page on his Mutiny Company site. The Oscar producers should hire Stuart to capture the preparation for the big show (meetings, rehearsals) and the concurrent boola-boola around Los Angeles, and then run his video on the AMPAS site as a year-round promotional thing.

New York Blizzard – ITV Daybreak VT from dantv on Vimeo.

My French Film Festival (January 14th through 29th) is a low-cost online film festival of ten French-produced films that haven’t a prayer of getting theatrical play in the States. Such a festival could play at MOMA or the Film Society of Lincoln Center, of course, but filmgoers aren’t nearly as queer for French films as they were in the ’60s and ’70s so online makes sense, and it’s brassy to offer these films not just to New Yorkers but the world.

The festival is the brainchild of uniFrance, and is being called a co-venture between uniFrance and Allocine with the support of the Centre National de la Cinematographie, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Alliance Francaise.

I’ve looked at all ten trailers , and it’s obvious that at least four have something extra: (a) Christopher Thompson‘s Bus Palladium, an ’80s rock-tour romantic drama that may have been influenced by Cameron Crowe‘s Almost Famous ; (b) Frederic Mermoud‘s Partners (Complices), winner of a best fiction film at the Chicago International Film Festival; (c) Leah Fehner‘s Silent Voices (Qu’un Seul Tienne Et Les Autres Suivront), which had a Venice Days slot in 2009; and (d) Patrick Mario Bernard & Pierre Tridivic‘s The Other One (L’Autre), a 2008 Venice Film Festival entry that won Dominique Blanc a Volpi Cup for Best Actress.

Manhattan’s Alliance Francaise will launch the festival with a screening of Bus Palladium on Thursday, 1.13, followed by a q & a with Christopher Thompson.

The trailers for the other films suggest either comme ci comme ca material or formulaic commercial lungings. The Eloi virus has spread throughout Europe, Asia…it rules so much of world cinema.

The how of My French Film Festival is fairly simple. Viewers will stream directly from www.myfrenchfilmfestival.com with no link to You Tube or Netflix or any other platform. It will all come directly from that site. You can choose individual films or the whole program. The site will be live in the next day or so, I’m told, with tons of extras; interviews, clips, trailers, etc. The trailers are on YouTube for promotional purposes and that’s all.

There’s some kind of fee structure for individual films but the festival as a whole is only 20 dollars for more than…what, 20 films? I thought it had ten. Whatever. Nice deal.

Charlotte Rampling in a still from All About Actresses.