The Cannes Film Festival’s 2010 awards ceremony happens tomorrow tonight, so I suppose I’m obliged to speculate about the winners. What I’d like to do, for the first time in several months, is take a day off and just ride my rented scooter around town and pretty much blank out and eat gelato. But as long as I’ve begun this…

I’m half-foreseeing and am therefore predicting a Palme d’Or win for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful. If this happens all of the nip-nippers who launched a hate campaign against this film will be obliged to once again consider a familiar equation, which is that one way or another brilliant dweebs will always find some way of taking down any film that traffics in strong emotion, as Biutiful clearly does, because dweebs aren’t as comfortable with this as they could be. This has been observed time and again so let’s not have a big hoo-hah about it.

I suspect that Fair Game, for all its expertness in so many departments, will lose out to Biutiful because the Inarritu is more pained and impassioned and daring.

If Mike Leigh‘s Another Year wins the Palme d’Or, it’ll be considered a so-whatter. Leigh is a master filmmaker who knows exactly how to finesse his own realm, and he will always be respected and feted for being, among other things, a major Cannes brand.

The dweebs loved Abbas Kiarostami‘s Certified Copy — a very elegant film about almost nothing — but there will be much international forehead-slapping if it wins the Palme d’Or.

Copy costar Juliette Binoche, however, may win the Best Actress prize. I don’t know to what extent fate is behind the prospect of Yun Jung-hee‘s performance in Lee Chang-dong‘s Poetry taking this award, or if Lesley Manville has any shot at winning for her performance in Another Year.

Bertrand Tavernier‘s The Princess of Montpensier was pretty much dead among the press in the wake of its a.m. press screening a few days ago, and I can’t imagine the Tim Burton-led Cannes jury selecting it for anything.

I was saying right away that Biutiful‘s Javier Bardem looks like a strong contender for Best Actor; Sean Penn‘s Fair Game performance as Joe Wilson is a strong competitor, of course, but Barden’s turn is more anguished and operatic.

I’ve mentioned from time to time certain things that actors do in a film that are so offensive that they just alienate me like that. Once this happens they have to work like hell to get back in my good graces although usually I just say “the hell with it, I don’t want to know this guy or girl” and write them off.

And this isn’t just me and my quirky neuroses. Over the years I’ve heard a lot of people say “I was with him/her until he/she did that repulsive thing, and that was it.” It’s been said, for example, that Paul Giamatti lost out on a Best Actor nomination for Sideways (which he was brilliant in) because of that scene in which he stole money from his mother’s bedroom bureau. Does that make any sense? No, but people react the way they react and there’s no talking them out of it.

Anyway, an offensive thing I’ve never mentioned hit me last night. I will turn against any actor in any film who licks his/her fingers after eating. In a movie or in real life, I really and truly can’t stand the sight of this. I couldn’t even take it during the much-admired eating scene in Tom Jones. (Now that I think back on it I’m not sure if Albert Finney and whatsername actually do this.) The first time I realize I had this aversion was that first-act scene in Once Upon A Time in America when the young kid gobbles down the pastry and licks all five digits. I was cringing.

To me finger-licking is worse than watching an overweight person reach inside their pants and scratch. If your fingers are sticky after eating something (which in itself indicates a lack of refinement on your part), go to the sink and wash them off.

Perhaps if enough people repeat this objection often enough actors will think twice before going there.

I’m sure that I’ll see Love Ranch eventually (I was stopped at the door when I tried to attend a Cannes market screening last week), but I’m sensing something that hadn’t occured to me before now. Most people love or admire costar Helen Mirren and are certainly down with seeing her perform in an erotic context, but — this is 90% theory, pulled out of my ass — they don’t want to see a movie that combines Joe Pesci and sexuality.

It’s partly Pesci himself (I distinctly remember an uncomfortable audience reaction during those two sex scenes he had with Sharon Stone in Casino) but also the idea of any middle-aged short guy participating in any sort of erotic encounter. Same thing with Danny DeVito or Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent, Find Me Guilty) or Mickey Rooney in his prime or anyone else under 5′ 6″ or so. It’s weird and unfair, but you just don’t put extra-short guys in this sort of situation. Ask any producer. People don’t want to know about it. I realize that Rooney used to shag Ava Gardner over-under-sideways-down, but you wouldn’t want to depict that in a film.

Wifi for budget-minded American travellers in Rome (i.e., those not staying at four-star full-service hotels) is still, for the most part, a future-tense thing. It took me over four hours of wandering around and getting lost before finding an internet “point” (i.e., walk-in salon) that offers wifi for people carrying laptops. 95% of Rome’s internet environments are still offering 2001 technology with rented flatscreens. Forget wifi — they don’t even offer ethernet cable plug-ins! I asked the guy at the desk if he knows of other operations like this one (which I’m sitting in, just up the hill from Piazza Barberini). “Places like this are rare,” he said with a certain resignation.

Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir has posted an excellent (if abridged) Fair Game review along with a perceptive, quote-heavy summary of the post-screening press conference. I was poking around online at a Nice Airport departure lounge when I came upon it…nice.

A major critic told me before the start of the Fair Game press conference that Yun Jung-hee‘s performance in Lee Chang-dong‘s Poetry (which I haven’t seen) should, in any kind of fair and just world, win the Cannes Film Festival’s best actress award this weekend. It’s unquestionably superior, he claimed, to Lesley Manville‘s in Mike Leigh‘s Another Year, which many have called the presumed front-runner.

As I would sooner have my teeth pulled out by rusty pliers than watch Michael Bay‘s forthcoming Transformers 3, his decision not to use Megan Fox (as reported yesterday by Nikki Finke) is of incidental interest, at best. It’s a wise one, however, as Fox has nothing — nothing — going on inside. And if you re-read those brutal crew letters about Fox, you can’t help but smirk. Even if they’re only half-true, they explain a lot.

I missed the following comment from Wall Street 2 costar Shia Lebeouf when it was [presumably] posted last weekend, but I want to give him alpha points for trashing ’08’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and, by obvious implication, Steven Spielberg.

“I’d already been involved in a movie where I felt like we dropped the ball on a legacy,” Lebeouf said during last Saturday’s junket. “In that movie, I just felt sort of pigeonholed. Like I didn’t have enough meat to chew on. I just feel like we were trying to enforce innocence on an audience that wasn’t willing. You can’t force things, you know?”

I guess he means that Lucas/Spielberg enforced innocence” by insisting upon….actually, I can’t make that one come together. How does a movie seek to “enforce innocence”?

I can let it go. Any Spielberg protege who breaks ranks and shits on the boss wins points in the HE book.

On his website 30 Ninjas, Fair Game director Doug Liman describes Naomi Watts‘ Valerie Plame as a “truly challenging role because NOCs (government intelligence operatives who assume covert roles in organizations without official ties to their government) are wallflowers by nature…they want to learn about you without you learning about them, and [in so doing will sometimes attempt to be] the least interesting person in the room.

Fair Game star Naomi Watts (l.) director Doug Liman (r.) at the beginning of this morning’s press conference — Thursday, 5.20, 11:36 am.

“Traditionally, this is not the type of character whom audiences fall in love with, or want to follow. Audiences want emotive characters who are interesting to watch. This was a bit of an issue with the characters (Naomi’s in particular) in Fair Game, especially with the producers who were more hell-bent on me doing more traditional emotion with her. I felt very strongly that I wanted her to keep the steel exterior that is so honest to that type of person in real life and the fact that I didn’t have to relent is exactly why I think Naomi’s performance is so extraordinary.

“I was able to be totally true to that steel facade and still create a character that is completely compelling, whom you empathize with and root for. And at the same time, you’re infuriated by her because she just has this steely exterior and won’t let you through it. We’ll see from this point forward whether my choice to insist on this detail was it was the right call.

“It would have been easy to create a fiction that Naomi’s Valerie is an emotional NOC (i.e., non-official cover). That she has this steely exterior but when she comes home and she’s something else. In fiction you can make up anything, but I actually spent time around the real Val and found her completely compelling as a person and she kept that facade no matter what she was doing, and I wanted Naomi Watts’ character to follow suit.

“In Fair Game though, it’s the Joe Wilson character that is the more movie star role, because he is loud, colorful, charismatic and opinionated. It’s no wonder that Sean Penn, after winning an Academy Award, picked this character over the hundreds of others he was offered, because Joe Wilson is an amazing character with the kinds of traits that are appealing to a masculine movie star. And Valerie is a little bit of a cipher and to make matters worse, Watts has to be on the screen with Penn while he’s getting to play this incredibly colorful, charismatic character and she has to play the cipher and somehow still steel the movie because it is her movie.”

Thursday, 5.20, 11:37 am