Schmaltzy Neil Patrick Harris in a glitter tux…? Totally gay, totally Vegas. But Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin‘s entrance is perfect. “And this is Alec Baldwin!” Good material. Hey, there’s Ethan Coen! “Pr ecious is the one film that really lived up to its video game.” Cloooney’s hair looks good. “And [Cameron] reciprocated by sending her…a Toyota!” Good stuff. “You are so naive.” These guys are great!

I went to a 2-D screening of Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland last night at 11:15 pm at the Lincoln Square. For 17 minutes they ran a series of excruciating trailers for some awful-looking family-friendly films (the absolute worst being Roger Kumble‘s Furry Vengeance) before starting the main feature. I was ready to leave because of the trailers alone. The family market is a sludge depository — a genre that attracts mediocre talent like a magnet.

And then Alice finally began. Because the tint of Burton’s talent is ten times more appealing than Kumble’s, I felt initially relieved. And then I began to gradually pull back. And then I became distracted. And then bored. But I made it through to the end, which in my realm is saying something.

I didn’t despise Alice, but I didn’t care for it much either. I should be more explicit and say that I didn’t hate it altogether. A lot of it looks…well, quite expensive. It diverts with some lovely CG renderings. It’s clearly been made by a first-rate artist-professional with an obviously developed visual signature. Some aspects were visually appealing enough (the rasberry-popsicle helmet hair worn by Helena Bonham Carter‘s Red Queen, Johnny Depp‘s luminous green eyes and pumpkin-colored coif) to make me nod in appreciation.

But it was awfully hard to hear the dialogue. Partly because it was so whispery (I twice begged the staff to turn the sound up), and partly because of the primly Victorian British accents that for some reason just weren’t easily decipherable. I understood some of what was being said, but only about 50% to 60%, I’d say. I’d hear a word or phrase and then piece it together. But I didn’t give a damn about the story in the least. My task was to sit through it without giving up in disgust, and I did that. There’s enough high-end fantasy art to keep the eyes sated or filled like tanks of gas..

But the energy levels in the one-third filled house (which looked to me like mostly Hispanic Eloi) were completely flat There’s no way Alice won’t drop by at least 60% or 65% next weekend. It just wasn’t playing all that well.

Eight years ago I walked out of Roger Kumble‘s The Sweetest Thing at the six-minute mark. I could see in a flash it was a reprehensible confection. Last night I saw the trailer for Kumble’s Furry Vengeance (Summit, 4.30). It may not be the most infuriatingly awful film of the year thus far — trailers can deceive — but I feel I know Kumble’s brushstrokes, and that I’m right to believe that he’s a menace.

I briefly spoke with Fox’s Gerald Rivera on his Geraldo At Large show last night around 10:10 pm. The subject was all the recent negative stories about The Hurt Locker (articles about the film’s lack of authenticity, Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver‘s lawsuit based on his claim that he was the basis for Jeremy Renner‘s character, the Nicolas Chartier snafu), and whether this might impact the Best Picture race.

I was asked to contribute, I gather, because Geraldo or one of his researchers saw Eric Ditzian‘s 3.4 MTV.com article (“Will ‘Hurt Locker’ Controversy Affect Its Oscar Chances?”) in which I was quoted saying that the Hurt Locker attacks were “obviously coordinated…these things don’t happen at the last minute on their own.” What I meant was that they were coordinated — initiated, researched, reported on — by like-minded editors and reporters looking to portray a last-minute tightening drama in the Best Picture race.

Geraldo said during our on-air chat that he’d been told by a source that “a producer of Inglourious Basterds” had allegedly fired a press torpedo or two directly at the hull of The Hurt Locker. He obviously wanted me to say “yeah, I’ve heard that also…probably true!” Except I don’t know or even suspect that so I naturally declined to point the finger at anyone connected to Basterds (i.e., Harvey Weinstein). No one’s even whispered there’s anything to this — zip

So I said what I basically think, which is that certain journalists and editors sensed a great dramatic potential a few weeks ago in the prospect of a Hurt Locker reversal-of-fortune, especially after the BAFTA and Eddie Award wins created a front-runner status, and so some decided to research and write articles that might introduce a cliffhanger element into an already thrilling David-vs.-Goliath scenario.

That scenario was waay too complex for Geraldo At Large, of course, so the conversation ended soon after, the show went to a break, Geraldo said “thanks, man” and I said “sure, likewise” and scooted off.

BEST PICTURE / HE Prediction: The Hurt Locker. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: The Hurt Locker. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: Avatar.

BEST DIRECTOR / HE Prediction: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Bigelow. 100% Confident Suspicion That The Winner Will Be: Bigelow.

BEST ACTOR / strong>HE Prediction: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Colin Firth, A Single Man. 100% Confident Suspicion That The Winner Will Be: Bridges.

BEST ACTRESS / HE Prediction: Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Carey Mulligan, An Education. Nagging Suspicion That The Wild-Card Winner May Nonetheless Be: Gabby Sidibe, Precious.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR / HE Prediction: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: The Movie Godz don’t care about this one. 100% Confident Suspicion That The Winner Will Be: Waltz.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS / HE Prediction: Mo’Nique, Precious. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Vera Farmiga, Up In the Air. 100% Suspicion That The Winner Will Be: Mo’Nique.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY / HE Prediction: Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner for Up in the Air (consolation prize for getting elbowed out of the Best Picture race). If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: The In The Loop guys. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: Reitman, Turner.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY / HE Prediction: Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Boal. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds.

BEST ANIMATED FILM / HE Prediction: Up. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Up. 100% Confident Suspicion That The Winner Will Be: Up.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM / HE Prediction: The Cove. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: The Cove. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: Food, Inc..

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM / HE Prediction: The Secret In Their Eyes (totally bowing to Scott Feinberg on this one — I know absolutely nothing). If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: A Prophet or The White Ribbon. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: The Secret In Their Eyes.

BEST ART DIRECTION / HE Prediction: Avatar‘s Rick Carter, Kim Sinclair, Robert Stromberg. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Avatar. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: Avatar.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY / HE Prediction: The Hurt Locker‘s Barry Ackroyd. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: The Hurt Locker or The White Ribbon‘s Christian Berger. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: Inglourious Basterds‘ Robert Richardson.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN / HE Prediction: Bright Star‘s Janet Patterson. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Bright Star or Nine‘s Collen Atwood. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: The Young Victoria‘s Sandy Powell.

BEST FILM EDITING / HE Prediction: The Hurt Locker‘s Bob Murawski, Chris Innis. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Bright Star or Nine‘s Colleen Atwood. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: Avatar‘s Steven Rifkin, John Refoua, James Cameron.

BEST MAKEUP / HE Prediction: Star Trek‘s Barney Burman, Mindy Hall, Joel Harlow. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Il Divo‘s Aldo Signoretti, Vittorio Sodano. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: Star Trek.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE / HE Prediction: Avatar‘s James Horner. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: Fantastic Mr. Fox‘s Alexandre Desplat. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: Up‘s Michael Giacchino.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG / HE Prediction: Crazy Heart’s‘s “The Weary Kind” (Ryan Bingham, T-Bone Burnett). If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: No opinion. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: Crazy Heart/”The Weary Kind.”

BEST SOUND EDITING / HE Prediction: Avatar‘s Christopher Boyes, Gwendolyn Yates Whittle. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: The Hurt Locker‘s Paul N.J. Ottoson. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: the Avatar guys.

BEST SOUND MIXING / HE Prediction: Avatar‘s Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson, Tony Johnson. If The Movie Godz Controlled The Vote: The Hurt Locker‘s Paul N.J. Ottoson, Ray Beckett. Nagging Suspicion That The Winner May Nonetheless Be: the Avatar team.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS / HE Prediction: Avatar‘s Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, Andrew R. Jones. No variations or suppositions — Avatar all the way.

BEST SHORT FILM (ANIMATED) / HE Prediction: A Matter of Loaf and Death (Nick Park) — no clue on this category at all — totally leaning on Scott Feinberg.

BEST SHORT FILM (DOCUMENTARY) / HE Prediction: The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert) — ditto.

BEST SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION) / HE Prediction Miracle Fish (Luke Doolan, Drew Bailey) — ditto.

I’ll be attending the Movieline Oscar party at 92Y Tribeca and live blog as it’s all happening. Commentary, snaps, videos. I wish there was some way to do an occasional live video “broadcast.” The time has technologically come for that option to happen, I think.

I’ve been saying for the last three or four years that it’s not the win-or-lose aspects of the Oscar race but the award-season arguments that define why people want this or that film or filmmaker to win — that’s where the pleasure and the uplift lie. An annual Socratic dialogue about who and what we are, and why. That and pushing the films and filmmakers that I strongly believe in. Who could stand writing about this stuff day after day if it was just monkey chatter about who’s gonna win?

This is the HE calling. This is the task. I am swallowed by it as surely as Gregory Peck was by his great 1956 obsession. Is Ahab Ahab? Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm?

The inspiration, tenacity, toil and achievement that go into winning any Oscar will always warrant honor and admiration, but the practice of Oscar-winner-picking is a doodle exercise, for the most part. I wouldn’t equate it to movie-watching and magazine-reading on a coast-to-coast flight, but it’s in that general ballpark. And yet it propels things along and brings advertising to Hollywood Elsewhere. The pickings, in any case, are more the specialty of those who are seriously into it — i.e., Scott Feinberg or Sasha Stone or Pete Hammond or Dave Karger.

I play these games because I must or should or need to. For if the great sun moves not of itself but as an errand boy in heaven, how then can this one small brain think thoughts unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I?

But my heart and head are two different entities, and I’ll simply never be able to reconcile my diminishing ability/interest in picking Oscar winners (other than the ones everyone else has decided upon…Hurt Locker, Bigelow, Bridges, Bullock, Waltz, Mo’Nique) and my personal prefs and admirations. And because the real joy, to repeat, is in wrestling over the cultural-political issues that are brought to the fore by Oscar-contending films.

I’ve picked my picks and will post them in an hour or two, but I’m sick of it, sick of it, sick of it, sick of it! Phase Two will be two or three weeks shorter next year, right? The Winter Olympics will somehow not be the delaying factor that they were this year for whatever reason?

However it shakes down, Anne Hathaway — mark these words and this post — will be a Best Actress contender for her performance as a Parkinson’s disease sufferer in Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs, as I half-predicted on 2.27.

And yet — and yet! — watching the Hurt Locker team bounding up to the stage to accept the Best Picture Oscar is going to be truly glorious. I’ve been a hammer for that film since my first viewing at the September ’08 Toronto Film Festival, so in a sense I’m coming to the end of a journey myself. It’s lasted a little less than 18 months.

If The Little Movie That Those Clueless Waitresses at Extra Virgin Never Heard Of wins the Big Prize, I’m going to pay those Extra Virgin ladies a visit tomorrow with my camera and digi-recorder, and put them through a very polite Regis Philbin-styled Judgment at Nuremberg. It’ll be very loose and friendly, but this is a completely fair warning.

Unless Avatar wins, of course, in which case…well, okay. This won’t be the “wrong” call or anything. It’s an amazing ride, that film, and one of the greatest pieces of left-wing, tree-hugging, anti-corporate propaganda — wonderful propaganda! — ever made. On top of which the tradition has always been that the film with the strongest emotional undertow wins the Best Picture Oscar, so if that rule holds The Hurt Locker will lose because…well, I don’t recall reading any articles about people being depressed upon realizing they preferred the world of The Hurt Locker to their own lives.

Everyone will ascribe The Hurt Locker‘s loss, if it happens, to those recent Hurt Locker-fragging articles generated by the Los Angeles Times and that Paul Rieckhoff Newsweek piece and so on.

L.A. Times/Big Picture columnist Patrick Goldstein recently tried to explain how it’s not fair that his newspaper has become the designated “bad guy” in this affair. He offers some reasonable-sounding explanations as to why this impression is unfounded. I nonetheless believe that in mid-February certain journalists and editors sensed a great dramatic potential in the prospect of a Hurt Locker reversal-of-fortune, especially after the BAFTA and Eddie Award wins created a front-runner status, and that some decided to research and write articles that might introduce a cliffhanger element into an already thrilling David-vs.-Goliath scenario.

The Brooklyn air outside smells fresh and clean. I’m ready to breathe it in and take a nice long speed-walk this morning. Okay, this afternoon sometime. Jesus, it’s already 11:30 am. All I know is that everyone is feeling a sense of great impending relief that it’s all going to be over in a few hours, and that we can finally get going with 2010 — all to the good. Until this same feeling of engulfment by great overpowering forces surges again, as it does every year.

We are turned round and round in this world, and fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky and this unsounded sea!

As Carmichael, a man without a left hand in Martin McDonagh‘s Behanding in Spokane, Christopher Walken is “a scrofulous wonder to behold,” says N.Y. Times theatre critic Ben Bantley. He is “an actor’s actor of fabled eccentricity,” and his “signature arsenal of stylistic oddities has seldom been more enthralling.

(l. to r.) Christopher Walken Zooey Kazan and Anthony Mackie in Martin McDonagh’s Behanding in Spokane, which opened at B’way’s Schoenfeld theatre on 3.4.

“Some people have become allergic to his familiar panoply of tics and quirks, but seldom does [Walken] only glide on surface mannerisms. There’s highly intelligent method in his madness. Or should we say Method? Mr. Walken is directly descended from Method acting’s most celebrated practitioner, Marlon Brando. And like Brando he has a turn of phrasing that makes even the most generic sentences sound worthy of serious analysis.

“Pauses pop up when you least expect them, entirely shifting the weight of the words around them. Inflections rise upward when normally they would curve down. A single clause can slalom from ennui to anger. These idiosyncrasies of delivery surprise you into close attention and, ultimately, into feeling you can trace the thoughts of the man speaking.

“For Carmichael that train of thought feels singularly lonely, propelled by a logic only he can understand. Variously abstracted and abruptly, frighteningly focused, he is unquestionably a man obsessed. He’s like a small-time, loopier and more selfish variation on the revenge-starved vigilantes played by Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood.

“But Eastwood and Bronson never let us into their characters’ heads the way Mr. Walken does here. ‘Step into my mind,’ he seems to be saying, as he stammers or curls his lip or blinks catatonically. If Mr. McDonagh hasn’t provided the kind of exhilarating, nasty fun house we have come to expect of him, we are at least allowed to spend shivery time in that shabby, scary labyrinth that exists behind Carmichael’s glassy forehead.”

“Thirty years ago, the CEOs that are in Undercover Boss were making 30 times as much as their working people,” Arianna Huffington said last night on Real Time with Bill Maher. “Now, they’re making 300 times as much! We’re about to become Venezuela or Brazil, you know, where the people at the top are basically behind their gates with guards to protect their kids from kidnapping.

The result, she said, is that “the middle class is crumbling and that’s the country we’re going to become…if we don’t fundamentally change where we’re going.” To which Maher replied, “Going to become?”

The Tea Party movement, she later stated, is “about that fact that what is happening is not fair, that the fix is in, that the system is rigged, and that people who are working hard are not really getting rewarded. And the people at the top who brought us to the financial brink were actually bailed out by the taxpayers.”

Brooks Barnes has written a 3.5 N.Y. Times article about the party-circuit stress that has affected Hurt Locker producer-screenwriter Mark Boal over the last several months. It’s especially interesting to me in that it provides a roundabout explanation why Boal subtly flipped me the bird when I took his picture at a Manhattan Hurt Locker party on 2.23.

It wasn’t a hostile flip-off. It wasn’t even a stand-up gesture but one semi-camouflaged by a book cover. If a smart guy you know, like and respect gives you the finger, he’s (a) fooling around and (b) offering a kind of trust that you won’t interpret it the wrong way. But I do think Boal was saying, perhaps in a subconscious way, “I’m starting to really tire of all this Oscar-contention chit-chat crap, and this is my way of quietly conveying that to you and…what the hell, your readers also.”

This is one of several mock movie posters posted yesterday afternoon by College Humor‘s Tom Philips. The fundamental beef about A Serious Man wasn’t that Michael Stuhlbarg‘s Larry Gropnik character is boring — there’s no such thing as a boring Coen brothers film — but that he seemed to have only wimpy responses to the cruel manifestations that resulted from God’s decision to curse his life.

The Wrap‘s Daniel Frankel is reporting that Tim Burton‘s 3-D Alice in Wonderland took in $39.4 million yesterday, and that it will probably wind up with nearly $110 million by Sunday night, according to studio estimates.

Frankel notes that Disney officials “were reluctant to predict even a $70 million opening going into the weekend,” but that’s standard politics — you always predict a number that’s lower than what you think your film will really gross.

Alice is playing in 3,728 theaters, including 188 IMAX 3D showings. Alice‘s weekend tally will easily top Avatar‘s first-weekend earnings of $77 million. Well and good for Disney, except there’s a problem. The problem is that for many if not most discerning moviegoers, Alice in Wonderland is a problem.

Not that a film having such a reputation has ever given a single moment’s pause to the American middle-class when they want to see something. All they know or care about is that Alice is (a) fancifully visual, (b) kid-friendly, (c) 3-D eye-candy and (d) IMAXed. That’s all they information that they’re capable of processing. Make that two tubs of whale-fat popcorn and three…no, four gallon-sized containers of sugar-bombed Coca Cola with tons of ice.