If I could pick the winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar with a wave of my hand, I would give it to either Up In The Air‘s Vera Farmiga or Nine‘s Marion Cotillard. Primarily because they’re not Mo’Nique, but also because they play far more interesting women with greater portions of shading, strength and simple charm.

It’s easy to play two colors, as Mo’Nique does in Precious — i.e., repulsively malicious and boo-hoo-poor-me. It’s much harder to make a performance work without all the eyeball-glaring and emotional grandstanding, which is what Farmiga and Cotillard manage to do.

I admired the steady toughness in Cotillard’s wife-of-Guido performance, but especially the steel in her girlfriend-of-John-Dillinger role in Public Enemies, which of course is equal (if not superior) to her work in Nine. I’ve already noted that her entire Public Enemies performance can be summed up in that “bye-bye Blackbird” scene, and that she nails it cold.

And Farmiga achieves so much more in Up In The Air than Mo’Nique does in Precious….forget about it. The sexy-businesswoman warmth of her early scenes with Clooney, the calm frankness she radiates in counselling the heartbroken Natalie (Anna Kendrick) in that second-act bar scene, and the take-it-or-leave-it aloofness she conveys in her final conversation scene with Clooney. She’s really the greatest in this film, and yet Mo’Nique has the heat because…she’s badass Mo’Nique!

I wrote this morning that the cruelty in Mo’Nique’s Mary character is so malignant and beyond-the-pale that it seems like a perverse reach. What parent or human being with a shred of conscience or humanity wouldn’t recoil at such a fiendish depiction? And who the hell would vote for it? What good can it do to put such an aberrational life form in a movie? Mary is a simple case of evil sensationalism. You might as well feature a parent who kills and eats kittens every day — what’s the difference?

It’s very easy to be “evil.” The trick is to present evil in a way that (a) people recognize as something they’ve known within themselves or people they’ve run into, etc., or (b) has a commanding sense of style and pizazz.

I would also approve Anna Kendrick in Up in the Air — a much fresher and livelier performance with many more ingredients.

The New York Film Critics Circle’s website has announced that the results of today’s voting will not be announced in real time, which has been the standard deal for years. (WTF? Why do a rollback on a perfectly cool policy?) The winners will instead be posted online when voting is complete, or sometime after 1 pm. I’ll be at a Nine luncheon from that hour until 2:30 pm or so, so I guess I’ll just file from there.

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick is “fairly sure” the NYFCC won’t choose The Hurt Locker for Best Picture because “they almost never go along with their Left Coast counterparts on principle. “Precious isn’t looking too good either, he says, due to the” awkward” factor stemming from NYFCC chairman Armond White, an African-American, having condemned Precious as racist. Nor does Lumenick see Avatar winning either, although a little voice is telling me that this could happen.

I know this much — if Up In The Air doesn’t win with the NYFCC, the Best Picture lock factor with the Academy will appear to have weakened. The big story of the next few weeks will be the Up In The Air cool-down factor will be discussed. I’ve already explained that if this happens, it’ll be due to gut-level reactions from pedestrian types who wanted love and hope from the film’s finale…but didn’t get that.

In a fair and just world A Serious Man will win the NYFCC’s Best Picture prize. This brilliant film needs a group like the NYFCC to stand up for it, which could result down the road (maybe) with the Coen brothers film being included among the Academy’s ten Best Picture nominees.

Here are some counter-riffs to Katey Rich‘s assessment on Cinema Blend of what’s happened so far with the critics’ group choices:

1. Rich: “The Hurt Locker is a formidable contender, but critic’s support might not translate at the Academy.” HE: In other words, the Academy will nominate a film for Best Picture, but it may not confirm the Big Win unless it’s made some serious dough (i.e., more than $12 million).

2. Rich: “Don’t mess with Mo’nique and Christoph Waltz, because they are apparently unbeatable.” HE: The critics who are voting for Mo’Nique and Waltz are spineless and easily-led sheep, listening primarily to the blah-blah conventional wisdom of last summer and the fall. I have nothing against Waltz per se, but I know why critics are voting for him — i.e., because he won a Best Actor award in Cannes and because they like to discover and promote a new face, especially a family man in his 40s who has been honest about having had a so-so career thus far.

3. Rich: “Despite the stellar reviews, Up in the Air isn’t the awards season steamroller it had the potential to become. That doesn’t mean it won’t win, though.” HE: This is because certain comfort-seeking critics have felt a bit deflated by the downish finale — by the fact that Up In The Air isn’t finally selling the kind of warmth and assurance that many people go to movies for.

4. Rich: “With the exception of Carey Mulligan, everyone seems to have forgotten that An Education ever happened — it wasn’t even in NYFCO’s top ten films.” HE: The NYFCO reflects geekish online culture, and An Education has a classy traditionalist vibe that’s a little outside the hip-dweeb barrier. But what’s going on with Mulligan losing to Meryl Streep and Yolande Moreau among the Boston and LAFCA groups? Has she peaked? Are journos rebelling against having heard over and over that Mullligan is the year’s big discovery, the new Audrey Hepburn, etc.?

5. Rich: “With the exception of Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’nique, everyone seems to have forgotten that Precious ever happened — it had scattered support for Best Picture and Best Director at NYFCO, but nothing too substantial.” HE: Good! Keep that ball in the air!

6. Rich: “Some people seem to still remember In the Loop — it won NYFCO’s Best Ensemble prize– and hooray for that.” HE: Agreed — a good thing.

7. Rich: “The Messenger didn’t take any major prizes among the critic’s groups, but it made AFI’s Top Ten and made it pretty deep into the voting rounds for several NYFCO prizes. It may only result in a Best Supporting Actor nod for Woody Harrelson, but there’s a lot of support for this film that’s being underestimated.” HE: Good for Woody, etc., but he was better in Zombieland.

The Hurt Locker was obviously the weekend’s big critics-group winner with three Best Picture wins from the Los Angeles Film Critics Associaton, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the Alliance of Women Journalists. But the relationship between The Hurt Locker and female moviegoers is the source of three regrettable ironies.

The AWJ win is ironic given that the main reason for Kathryn Bigelow‘s Iraq War film having only made $12 million is the fact that most women have refused to see it (or, as I’ve detected in recent Manhattan conversations, have claimed not to have even heard of it).

If Bigelow wins the Best Director Oscar it will be doubly ironic that a film by a female pioneer has been largely shunned by her own gender. No film outside of The Cove has gotten the shaft from female moviegoers like The Hurt Locker.

The third irony is that due to Hurt‘s underwhelming box-office Academy voters may be reluctant to vote it Best Picture. It’s a staple of industry thinking, of course, that a film deserving of being chosen Best Picture perhaps shouldn’t be chosen if it hasn’t made a decent amount of dough. So women moviegoers, in effect, will be the ones responsible for The Hurt Locker not winning the top prize, if and when. Proud of yourselves, guys?

Last night I asked a brilliant female friend and writer if she’s seen The Hurt Locker, and she immediately looked at the floor and said, “No, no…I have trepidations.” But it’s really not that violent, I replied. It’s mainly about tension and uncertainty — an existential razor’s edge thing. She was unmoved, and this is a woman who’s seen and loved The Cove!

Force-of-nature big shot Harvey Weinstein was the big winner this morning with the announcement that Nine and Inglourious Basterds had won 10 nominations each (including one each for Best Picture) from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, which does out the Critics Choice Movie Awards. The Weinstein Co. is the principal producer/distributor of both films.

But while Basterds helmer Quentin Tarantino received a Best Director nomination, Nine‘s director, Rob Marshall, was left out in the cold.

The numerous nominations accumulated by Nine/Basterds is partly due to the addition of several below-the-line craft categories.

The other BFCA Best Picture nommies are Avatar, An Education, The Hurt Locker, Invictus, Precious, A Serious Man, Up and Up in the Air.

The six Best Director nominees include Tarantino, Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Lee Daniels (Precious), Clint Eastwood (Invictus), Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) and James Cameron (Avatar).

The BFCA consists of 235 television, radio and online film critics. The Critics Choice Movie Awards will occur on Friday, 1.15, at the Hollywood Palladium while going out live on VH1.

“The next time you want to talk some trash about what a provincial city Houston is, or how we all deserve to get blown away by a hurricane, consider this. And then consider this: In 2000, Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush in Houston. And in 2004, John Kerry got more votes than George W. Bush here. So there.” — Variety critic and author Joe Leydon, sent to yours truly this morning.

Wells to Leydon: I never called Houstonians provincial. I certainly wouldn’t in the wake of their having elected the openly gay Annise Parker their new mayor. I simply said that Hurricane Ike’s hitting Houston in September 2008 was a case of oil karma — i.e., a city living by the sword and suffering by the sword, that’s all. It’s Biblical.

As I wrote on 9.12.08, there are some situations in which you can’t be truthful because the viewers (or readers) simply won’t have it. Drawing a corollary between the oil industry, global warming and the Hurricane Ike devastation in the Galveston area was a no-brainer. Any climatologist would note the same thing if he/she were among friends and felt free to be honest. Anyone with a minimal understanding of the factors causing global warming would have quietly nodded if Al Gore had drawn this analogy, let’s say, on a radio talk show.

In a gathering today at Manhattan’s Walter Reade theatre, the NYFCO (New York Film Critics Online) voted on the following awards: Best Picture — Avatar (20th Century Fox….LITTLE BIT OF A GEEKY CHOICE BUT WE’RE TALKING ONLINE HERE…FINE); Best Actor — Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart); Best Actress — Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia…WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU GUYS?); Best Director — Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker…GOOD MOVE).

Plus Best Supporting Actor — Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds…ZELIGS!); Best Supporting Actress— Mo’Nique (Precious…GOATS PRODDED BY SHEPHERD’S STAFF…baaaah); Best Screenplay — Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino; Best Documentary — The Cove (Roadside Attractions); Best Foreign Language –The White Ribbon (Sony Classics); Best Animated feature — Up (Disney/Pixar).

I chatted last night with legendary director Whit Stillman, who’s been living in Manhattan and writing screenplays for the last several months after an extended expat period in Barcelona and Paris. The occasion was a screening at the 92YTribeca of Metropolitan (1990), which will have a 20th anniversary showing at next month’s Sundance Film Festival. Sometime during the first weekend, I was told, with a social gathering to follow. Calling all Stillman heads!

Stillman and Metropolitan star Chris Eigeman did a q&a after the screening, and then everyone hit the bar and drank beer.

My favorite Stillman film is Barcelona by far, but Metropolitan (which came out on a Criterion DVD in ’06) is still dryly amusing and faintly bizarre in its weird and chuckly anthropological way. It’s a carefully ordered tale of some Bush-era rich kids that has some of the sharpest (and at times almost surreal) young-person dialogue ever written.

In a certain sense Metropolitan is arguably a more interesting film now than it was in 1989/90. Because it shows more than ever that Stillman is Wes Anderson‘s uncle. (Or older brother, older cousin or whatever.) Because they both make/have made films about brilliant, curiously charismatic people who breathe rarified air and live on their own clouds. Stillman is a little more in the UHBs (urban haute bourgeoisie) than Anderson, but it’s a similar line of country.

Stillman and Anderson are also somewhat similar in the sense that they shoot with an exacting visual aesthetic. (Anderson a little more so). Plus they both dress nicely and have both lived in Paris (Stillman previously, Anderson currently) and probably share several other similarities. And yet they’ve never met, Stillman told me last night. Weird. (Hey, Wes? If you’re reading this get in touch and I’ll hook you guys up.)

Metropolitan/Barcelona/Last Days of Disco director Whit Stillman, Metropolitan star Chris Eigeman — Saturday, 12.12, 9:25 pm.

If you ask me Stillman laid the foundation, built the house and then moved to Europe, and then Anderson moved in and remodelled and made it his own. Anderson obviously has his own thematic signature that has manifested in many different ways, but I can’t help but think of Stillman’s three films (including The Last Days of Disco) when I think of Anderson’s. The linkage is unquestionable.

Anyway, it would be great to see Stillman get out of Director’s Jail and get back on the horse and start composing more films about witty rich oddballs who needs to find their souls. I would kill to see a Whit Stillman film about the Goldman Sachs culture — it’s a subject that has his name on it. Maybe if Anderson really and truly doesn’t feel that he wants to direct The Rosenthaler Suite (which I think he should), producer Brian Grazer could discuss it with Stillman, who’s one of the few directors who understands the ironic quirk character of uptown Manhattan realms.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has given its Best Picture award to The Hurt Locker with Up In The Air coming in second. Hurt Locker‘s Kathryn Bigelow won for Best Director with The White Ribbon‘s Michael Haneke right behind.

Jeff Bridges won LAFCA’s Best Actor award for Crazy Heart, edging out A Single Man‘s Colin Firth. And Yolande Moreau won Best Actress for her performance in Seraphine, nudging out An Education‘s Carey Mulligan.

The first phase included The White Ribbon dp Christian Berger winning for Best Cinematography. LAFCA rolled over for Mo’Nique‘s Precious performance in the Best Supporting Actress category. (And why not? Why should any other actress even be considered?) And Inglourious Basterds‘ Christoph Waltz, the other winner of the Best Supporting Actor Zelig vote.

Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner‘s Up in the Air won for Best Screenplay, beating out Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci and Tony Roche‘s screenplay for In The Loop. Crazy Heart composers T-Bone Burnett and Stephen Burton beat out Fantastic Mr. Fox composer Alexandre Desplat for Best Musical Score. District 9‘s Philip Ivey beat Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg‘s work on Avatar for Best Production Design.

The Best Documentary prize was split between The Cove and The Beaches of Agnes.

The Boston Film Critics dropped the ball with their Best Actress award by handing it to Meryl Streep instead of Carey Mulligan, but otherwise today’s Beantown voting was a four-star triumph for The Hurt Locker. Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Iraq-war thriller was named Best Picture, Bigelow won for Best Director, Jeremy Renner was named Best Actor for his Sgt. James portrayal, and Barry Ackroyd won for Best Cinematography.

What’s it going to take to get critics to stop reflexively handing Mo’Nique their Best Supporting Actress awards for her Precious performance? Will some of them please get a grip and show a little ornery backbone and say no this performance, please? (God!) Going with Inglourious Basterds Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor is…aahh, let it go, whatever. Joel and Ethan Coen won the Best Screenplay award for A Serious Man. And hail to The Cove, winner of the Boston Film Critics award for Best Documentary.

An Up In The Air spoiler was posted by an HE talk-backer a while ago. I got rid of it, but not before considering what the guy was saying, which is that an audience he saw it with was a bit deflated by the downish finale and not applauding at the end, etc. Well, I don’t think audiences applauded at the end of The Godfather, Part II either.

George Clooney’s last shot in Up In The Air; Perkins’ in Psycho.

Up In The Air is a close-to-the-bone thing to anyone who’s struggling in the job market, or who lives in an overly-protected emotional space. I know it isn’t intended to end on a note of celebration or exuberance. It’s not a movie for snack lovers. It’s on the Eloi-repellent side.

That doesn’t mean that the above-described audience didn’t feel they’d seen something emotionally or spiritually complete. The fact that Up In The Air ends on a note of wistful melancholy — director Jason Reitman doesn’t dwell on George Clooney‘s expression at the very end, but it’s almost as arresting in its own way as the skull on Anthony Perkins‘ face in the final seconds of Psycho — is what makes the film so unusual. The film is selling a kind of comfort food, yes, but an oblique kind that can’t help finding satisfaction in the sending of mixed messages. It’s not selling the kind of comfort that many people go to movies for, I know that. This is why I respect it.