It wasn’t Aziz Ansari‘s complaint about insufficient thread counts that got my attention. It’s the difference between the size of his head and Conan O’Brien‘s. Jesus, the latter’s bison-sized head is at least 50% to 60% larger. This plus that queasy-jittery manner he slips into whenever a guest voices a liberal political view tells me he belongs on Fox, where things are a little freakier. He’s about to bail on NBC and take a Fox deal, right?

A somewhat fickle decision by New York Film Critics Circle chairman Armond White to rescind an invitation to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to present the Best Original Screenplay award to In The Loop costar James Gandolfini at last night’s NYFCC award ceremony resulted in Olbermann getting hugely pissed. I’ve asked White and two publicists to comment but no replies as we speak. Here’s how it was told to me:

(l. to r.) Armond White, Keith Olbermann, James Gandolfini.

The invitation to Olbermann went out last week via 42West. The initial plan was for the show to start exactly on time at 7:30 pm, and for Olbermann to present the award toward the end of the evening. The MSNBC commentator told the agency that he could be at the awards ceremony by 9:15 pm after taping his show. He later told 42West he would tape a segment of his show in advance so he could arrive even earlier.

But after this was arranged, White had second thoughts. He expressed his view that Best Original Screenplay was a minor award and therefore shouldn’t be presented too late in the evening, or no later than approximately 8:30 pm, give or take. Olbermann’s arrival plans were therefore too late for White’s timetable. He also decided that only past NYFCC winners should present awards, which deep-sixed Olbermann also. This led to 42West re-contacting Olbermann last Friday with a “thanks but no thanks.”

Olbermann was naturally offended. He’s a political celebrity, after all, which would have fit perfectly with an award for a political comedy. He had taken the time to watch In The Loop on a screener (and loved it, I’m told) and had arranged for that segment pre-taping. Olbermann allegedly responded with “this is the rudest thing I’ve ever [dealt with]” and “I hope this organization likes publicity.”

But of course, the NYFCC award show didn’t start at 7:30 pm. It started about 8:30 pm. At 7:45 or 7:50 pm White took the stage and essentially said “sorry for the delay but we’re going to delay even further.” (That’s how I heard his remarks, at least.) The 8:30 pm start, in any event, meant that Olbermann’s 9:15 pm arrival would have worked just fine. The final upshot was that Us critic Thelma Adams was asked to present the award. Which she did, and very robustly.

White’s concept of using only past winners as presenters led to another odd decision in which 1984 NYFCC Best Supporting Actress winner Christine Lahti (for Swing Shift) presented George Clooney with his Best Actor award. She and Clooney have a history, apparently, but the general reaction was “why is Lahti presenting this again?” Clooney’s people, I’m told, were at the front of the line with this question.

The bottom line, my source informs, is that White’s mercurial or impolitic ways of handling the presentations irked other agencies besides 42West.

Atom Egoyan‘s reportedly better-than-decent Chloe, which I didn’t have a chance to see in Toronto, will be released by Sony Classics on 3.26.10. Married woman (Julianne Moore) hires a professional (Amanda Seyfried) to lure her husband (Liam Neeson) into an affair in order to assess his character, etc. “Can I borrow your sugar?” is too cliched — it should have been “can you spare one of your Equal packets?” And the panting at the end is too much.

First we have Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow accepting her Best Director award at last night’s New York Film Critics Circle awards, and then George Clooney delivering a sardonic rib-poking introduction for Best Animated Film winner Wes Anderson (for Fantastic Mr. Fox), and then Anderson himself.

I had a great time at this event (thanks to Jeff Hill!). Food and drink were actually served to observing journos like myself despite the limitations I’d been told about earlier. I watched the whole thing from a nearby balcony. Apologies for my non-existent video-editing skills

Meryl Streep‘s remarks last night after receiving her New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actress in Julie and Julia. The word somehow hadn’t gotten out that the p.a. system wasn’t the greatest, on top of which nobody except Streep and critic Thelma Adams and George Clooney put much effort into the old exceptional-enunciation, speaking-from-the-diaphragm thing.

I guess the only surprise among the WGA nominees today is the Best Original Screenplay nom for James Cameron‘s Avatar. This, I presume, was a recognition of good story bones — the well-configured structure and the way it all pays off like a slot machine in the fourth act — more than the dialogue, which few seem to admire.

The other mind-bender was nominating Jon Lucas and Scott Moore‘s script of The Hangover in the same category.

Otherwise congrats to nominees Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker), Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (A Serious Man), Scott Cooper (adapted screenplay nominee for Crazy Heart), Nora Ephron (Julie & Julia), Geoffrey Fletcher (Precious), Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Star Trek) and Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner (Up in the Air).

Eric Rohmer, the celebrated, meditative and peculiar French director whose films were once famously dismissed by Gene Hackman‘s private detective in Arthur Penn‘s Night Moves (1975) as “sorta like watching paint dry,” died several hours ago at age 89.

I read the news around 2:15 pm or so, as I was leaving the Monkey Bar lunch for The Messenger. “Another great one gone,” I muttered. A legend, a major-league auteur, a pantheon guy. But I didn’t feel all that much because I’ve never felt much for his films. I’ve always respected them, but have never felt much rapport.

I can honestly say I’ve never rented or re-watched Claire’s Knee, The Marquise of O, The Aviator’s Wife, Perceval, Chloe in the Afternoon or My Night at Maud’s. after seeing them theatrically (or at a screening). They’re all worth the time, of course. I wouldn’t want to dissuade. I’ve just never been a huge fan. Is that permissible?

Others can wet themselves over the just-announced restored Bluray/DVD of John Huston‘s The African Queen (Paramount Home Video, 3.23). But not me. Not until I see it, I mean. You can’t trust anyone these days, and you definitely can’t trust anyone putting out a restored version of a three-strip Technicolor film that’s nearly 60 years old.

The portions of The African Queen with genuinely rich and bountiful colors are those that were shot on a London sound stage. The African location footage portions are great for authenticity and verisimilitude but they”re grainy and desaturated and nothing to write home about. So don’t get too excited. The film is only going to look as good as it’s going to look, or as good as it looked on theatre screens in 1951, which wasn’t any kind of drop-your-pants Technicolor orgasm experience to begin with.

The Bluray Queen may turn out to be a more luscious and detailed rendering than anything seen before, and I’ll be delighted as anyone else if this happens. Or it may turn out to be a very decent-looking, not-bad, in-and-out version covered with billions of digital mosquitoes (on top of the actual mosquitoes that Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn have to cope with on the Ulanga).

All I know is that I’ve been burned before and you can’t trust Bluray technicians to do the right thing. Not necessarily because they might be grain Jihadists. Or maybe original dp Jack Cardiff, who was shown the restored digital version and signed off on it before he died, was a grain fanatic. You never know. You can’t trust anyone. Grain monks will not go quietly into that good night. If by clapping my hands three times I could make them disappear, I would clap my hands three times.

All of the different Queens (Bluray, single disc, boxsets) will feature a doc called Embracing Chaos: Making The African Queen, featuring interviews with Martin Scorsese and others. The box sets will also include an “audio disc recording of the original Lux Radio Theater broadcast of The African Queen, a reproduction of Katharine Hepburn’s out-of-print memoir “The Making of The African Queen or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind,” a Senitype film frame reproduction and postcard reproductions” of images from the film.

Yesterday the N.Y. Times online guys posted a fascinating interactive map-graph of Netflix viewing habits in 12 major cities — N.Y., L.A., Miami, Boston, Seattle, Dallas, Minneapolis, Denver, Atlanta, S.F. Bay Area, Chicago, Washington. Everything you might have suspected about the demos for various films are clearly visualized. Dark red represents the most intense interest — pale yellow and white reps low or zero interest. You can’t stop laughing.

Los Angeles Netflix rental patterns for Paul Blart, Mall Cop.

Los Angeles Netflix rental patterns for Mamma Mia. This was a hugely popular film with female Eloi all over, and yet the only dark red area is a tiny little spot in Beverly Hills. What does this tell us? That the largely female audience decided it had to be seen communally in theatres, but that it didn’t like the film enough to want to see it again in their homes? Except for women in Beverly Hills? Odd.

I wrote something important last May about the annual Oscar season wars that needs to re-posted every year. I was responding to a then-recent A.O. Scott N.Y. Times rant about the many offenses of the Oscar show. “Do something!,” he said. In an almost touching submisssion to the nihilistic impulse, Scott also suggested that the Oscars be killed.

To which I responded: “Rejigger and rejuvenate by all means, obviously, but never kill the Oscars. Never. Not because the show itself is anything close to magnificent (although we all derive fleeting emotional charges each and every year), but because every Oscar season is like a great spiritual Olympics. Because each and every film of any merit and our reactions to them are opportunities for assessing our values, lives, beliefs — the whole magillah.

“Because the Oscars, of course, are only nominally about the competing films. They’re really about how we feel and think about these films, and what we’re looking or hoping for each time we enter a theatre and submit to the dark. In short, they’re about us.

“Each year the Oscar race allows — demands — that we assess who we are, what we need and want, what defines artistic greatness or at least distinction, and the kinds of spells and meditations that films need to provide.

“Every day I’m looking to understand and sometimes redefine who I am and what I want, but we all do this en masse during Oscar season. It’s a stirring, at times joyously argumentative process. (I loved trashing Chicago and praising The Pianist in ’02 — it was all to the good.)

“For me, the October-to-February argument is all, or certainly 95% of the game. The show is maybe 5% of it — the end, the crescendo, the cherry on top, whatever. And through all of it the distributors of the films in the arena, the ones that each year compete and strive and receive the constant attention, clearly benefit.”

Variety‘s legendary breaking-news reporter Mike Fleming has resigned to run the New York office of Deadline Hollywood Daily. He obviously won’t be the east-coast Nikki Finke — Fleming is Fleming — but he’ll certainly be seen as a compliment of her column from here on. (And vice versa.) They’re not exactly married now, but it’ll be fair to call them a brother-and-sister act.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson calls this “a smart hire” but adds the following: “Over two decades Fleming has built a network of sources who go to him with scoops because they trust him to take care of them. He is the exact opposite of DH’s Nikki Finke, who uses scare tactics and bullying as well as good old-fashioned power-mongering to get her stories.”

MCN’s David Poland said this: “Of course, the most significant thing about Mike Fleming going to NikkiVille is not that she has added value, but that Variety is all but done now. Another one of their stars out the door. Interesting times.”