The fact that Tron: Legacy isn’t a very good film will, I presume, have no effect on its earnings this weekend. It made around $18 million yesterday and will finish tomorrow night with $45 to $47 million. Nobody wants to hear about Yogi Bear 3D…get outta here. The Fighter will do fairly well by Sunday night with a likely $12 million in 2500 theatres, but let’s keep in mind that pre-Christmas weekends are always soft with everyone travelling and buying gifts. (Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino assures it’ll hold up very well next weekend.) Nobody wants to know about Narnia 3D…scoot. How Do You Know is a vessel that has sunk beneath the waves — $8.7 milllion in 2483 theatres, dead. Black Swan did well within its 959-theatre exposure, especially with younger women, bringing in a projected $9 million by Sunday night. And nobody cares about the rest.

Note: My apologies to HE commenters, but I was obliged to delete and repost this story, which originally ran Saturday morning, due to a ridiculous server clock/time stamp issue created by the geniuses at Softlayer/Orbit the Planet, which is HE’s internet service provider for the time being. As a result (and I really couldn’t help this) all of yesterday’s comments were wiped out.

Eric Childress‘s 12.17 update of critics awards has The Social Network with 43 wins and 62 nominations, running the table like The Hurt Locker did last year. And Black Swan in second place with 15 wins and 60 nominations. And then comes The Fighter with 13 wins and 66 nominations. And then back in the middle of the line are The King’s Speech (8 wins, 66 nominations) and The Kids Are All Right (4 wins, 33 nominations).

And none of this means anything to the older industry crowd. At all. They are dwelling …how to put this respectfully?….in their own aesthetic reality pocket. Including, to some extent, GenX types. Example: Don Murphy wrote in this space on 12.14 that “critics are to laugh at, not pay attention to.”

Which is why David Poland said on 12.13 that TSN “still isn’t going to win Best Picture from the Academy…unless they’re starting a media branch.” And in yesterday morning’s “Oscar Talk” podcast Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson said Black Swan has screened poorly with the yentas and the farts on both coasts, and is therefore slipping, she suspects, to the bottom of the Top Ten list.

Because (or so the general word-of-mouth suggests) The Social Network is too cerebral and chilly, and because Black Swan is sparking certain negative associations in the minds of older women who would rather not see a female character succumb to insecurity and creative panic and the urgent manipulations of a crazy stage mom and a predatory male ballet director.

We are talking about worlds and mindsets that are light years apart. There is the world represented by columns like HE and Awards Daily and Patrick Goldstein‘s and Scott Feinberg‘s column, etc., and by box-office and top-critical opinion and what you hear active and educated people say on the street and in bars and restaurants all over Manhattan (as well as in Los Angeles and, I’m presuming, Topeka and Orlando and Joliette), and then there’s the planet Neptune…the industry realm, the folks on the hill, happily ensconced, surrounded by a moat and castle walls, a realm of brains and success and urbanity and clubbiness that supports a certain world view, a certain susceptibility to a certain brain enzyme that circulates in response to certain films and results in a kind of mule-like resistance…”not what we want, not what we want, not what we want.”

Note: My apologies to HE commenters, but I was obliged to delete and repost this story, which originally ran Saturday morning, due to a ridiculous server clock/time stamp issue created by the geniuses at Softlayer/Orbit the Planet, which is HE’s internet service provider for the time being. As a result (and I really couldn’t help this) all of yesterday’s comments were wiped out.

Note: My apologies to HE commenters, but I was obliged to delete and repost this story, which originally ran Saturday morning, due to a ridiculous server clock/time stamp issue created by the geniuses at Softlayer/Orbit the Planet, which is HE’s internet service provider for the time being. As a result (and I really couldn’t help this) all of yesterday’s comments were wiped out.

Shared passion = strange bedfellows. I’ve never been that much of a Richard Roeper fan. I like his pugnacious personality and his take-it-or-leave-it opinions, but he almost seems opposed, at times, to metaphorical associations and undercurrents. And he did speak patronizingly to Kim Morgan, etc. Then again he really likes The Fighter. A conundrum. All right, here it is…fine.

Note: My apologies to HE commenters, but I was obliged to delete and repost this story, which originally ran Saturday morning, due to a ridiculous server clock/time stamp issue created by the geniuses at Softlayer/Orbit the Planet, which is HE’s internet service provider for the time being. As a result (and I really couldn’t help this) all of yesterday’s comments were wiped out.

Two days ago in a Gurus of Gold chat thread, a guy named Keil Shults observed that “[some of the Gurus] seem really determined to keep The King’s Speech at #1, despite all the evidence to the contrary.” And then a guy named movielocke explained the factors and the math. Reading it made me want to throw up, but he’s probably not wrong.

“Keil, it is simple math,” he said. “Inception, Social Network and Black Swan have lots of people [who] don’t like them. Toy Story has plenty of Academy members who will even refuse to see it because it is animated and therefore not a ‘real’ film. The Fighter has people who aren’t crazy about it and the director has a reputation for being a horrible person. The Kids Are All Right is gay and seems small in scope. Winter’s Bone and The Town don’t feel like real winners.

“But what really matters is that the voting for Best Picture is Instant Runoff. That means you do NOT win by being the most popular. You win by a combination of two factors — (a) Being well liked enough to last through the first five rounds of vote elimination, and (b) Being well liked enough so that on average you have a higher vote than the other film.

“The math says that no divisive film will never ever win Best Picture, unless there is a year where only divisive films are nominated.

“Every year that instant runoff is used, the film that wins will be the film that the vast majority of academy members just cannot vote lower than 5th. Last year that movie was The Hurt Locker.

“This year, The Hurt Locker slot movie is The King’s Speech. No one will actively dislike the movie enough to vote it lower than sixth, so it is pretty much mathematically impossible that The King’s Speech will lose. Unless a concerted campaign is made to educate Academy members to vote strategically [in order to] vote The King’s Speech down.”

The tech staffers at Softlayer and Orbit The Planet have screwed up the server clock twice in the last seven days, and thereby caused all kinds of reader-posting issues. The site crashed early this morning due to what they said was an “overload.” (Nonsensical.) When they restored service they reset the server clock to nearly three days in the future. When I informed them of this they went “oh” and reset to the correct date and time. But this created another problem.

That’s because between now and late Monday night, all new HE posts (including this one) are going to appear before — i.e., below — the six stories I posted this morning between roughly 7 am and noon. Until I figure something out, I mean. And many of the comments relating to the top six posts (“Weekend Reading” to “Same Foxhole”) won’t show up either because they’re dated as 12.21 and 12.22 posts, and now that the clock is back to the correct date (12.18) and time the system will disregard any comments that are posted before the 12.21 and 12.22 time stamps.

The Softlayer/Orbit guys, in short, are awful — absolutely the slowest, most dull-witted, least problem-attuned donkeys I’ve ever dealt with in my six-plus years of dealing with internet service providers. Softlayer/Orbit is a technical tinderbox. What new problem will happen next?

I never order cheesecake, never buy it in bakeries, etc. A friend pushed a slice on me a few weeks ago and I relented but otherwise, no way. The closest I get is (a) occasionally thinking about it and (b) taking shots like this from time to time.

Somewhere on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea — Thursday, 12.16.

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.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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.