Envelope/Dish Rag columnist Elizabeth Snead suggested yesterday that Alec Baldwin’s m.c. performance at the 10.21 Elle Awards may have cinched his just-announced Oscar gig (i.e., co-hosting with Steve Martin). Especially with Oscar co-producer Adam Shankman in the audience that day.

Exit polls are reporting that a majority of voters in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates won tonight, say that President Obama wasn’t a factor in their voting. Obama is personally popular but people are feeling ornery. I get that. Tonight wasn’t that big a deal — certainly no national referendum.

I was seriously impressed with Tom Ford’s A Single Man in Toronto. It played even better early this evening. Gently moving, immaculate photography, elegant, understated. Ford’s script is concise and true. 11.3, 7:35 pm.

Screencrave’s Krystal Clark somehow snagged a high-quality, Russian-language trailer for Phillip Noyce‘s Salt, the Angelina Jolie actioner due next summer, and posted it earlier today. You never know how long this stuff will last before the lawyers jump in so click on it ASAP.

Angelina Jolie in Phillip Noyce’s Salt.

It looks to me like very high-throttle stuff in the action-plus tradition of Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger — nicely choreographed and cut, very handsomely lit and framed. In a role originally meant for Tom Cruise, Jolie is fine with the accent, leapings, kickings and whanot. And the wigs are cool.

I’m more than down with Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin co-hosting the 82nd Academy Awards, which producers Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman announced a little while ago. In fact I’m almost excited. They’re both wordsmiths — the pithy, erudite, dry-witted Martin vs. the pugnacious, slightly testy, vaguely-angry-all-the-time Baldwin. So it’ll be a competition all the way. They’ll be on each other’s back and will call each other’s bluff. If Martin takes the humor or commentary in a certain direction that doesn’t quite pan out, Baldwin will immediately zap him and course-correct. And vice versa.

The elegant, 60ish, New Yorker-contributing Martin vs. the tanky, 50ish, anger-afflicted Baldwin.

So with all this snip-snipping going on there the show will be bullshit-free. I think this might turn into the best Oscar-host situation since Billy Crystal’s heyday in the mid ’90s. Or, you know, they could both blow it totally because of shitty writing and whatnot. But I’ll be very suprised if thi\s happens.

A longtime HE reader who works in the broker/trading sector dropped a couple of riffs into the box this afternoon. One argues that Kristen Stewart‘s Twilight/New Moon character Bella Swan is a pathetic female role model (matched only by Sarah Jessica Parker‘s Carrie Bradshaw from Sex in the City); the other wonders why Hollywood still isn’t offering new movies on a day-and-date, pay-per-view basis.

1. “Here we are on the verge of another Twilight film, and the scary thing is that it’s entirely based on low self-esteem among young females. It’s essentially the story of the ordinary girl drifting through her boring life until she meets a ‘special guy’ who finally sees her inner beauty. Sure, he has some problems, but he loves her, right? Haven’t a million girls with low self-esteem had one bad relationship after another due to chasing guys who didn’t care who they hurt? Now we’re glorifying a girl who’s so desperate for a real connection that she’ll fall for a guy who might actually kill her? And this is romantic? As the father of two small girls, this scares the crap out of me.”

“The two worst famale role models on this planet are Bella from Twilight and Carrie Bradshaw. Both are so desperate for what they can’t have they’re either depressed about it or burying themselves in artificial baubles. Neither can have any sort of existence without a man, whatever kind of guy he might be. Chris Rock said his first goal is to keep his girls off the pole; keeping them away from this other crap should be goal #2.”

2. “I have to reiterate the fact that the industry is completely missing the boat on a major revenue stream. You have no idea how much I would love to see A Serious Man or The Hurt Locker or The Men Who Stare at Goats. But I just don’t have time to go to the theater. In this economy you have to work long hours to keep your job, and there are so many other things that need doing that I simply can’t take the time to go to theatres. One person after another I’ve spoken to about this says the same thing.

“The studios are losing so much money to piracy, and on so many dud films…. why oh why cant they deliver the good films first run to my house? I would totally pay $20 or $30 to see A Serious Man if I was able to watch it at home, even just one time. That’s the price of two tickets plus popcorn, right?”

I’m repeating myself, yes, but I can’t help gnashing my teeth over how mushy and…well, Barack Obama-minded the thinking is right now among Best Picture prognosticators in the case of the Coen Bros.’ A Serious Man — easily one of their wittiest and most sharply cut films, and hands down one of the year’s best.

To my knowledge Serious still has only a handful of ardent supporters — myself, The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, The Wrap‘s Steve Pond, Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, legendary Oscar-watcher Robert Osborne, etc. Am I missing anyone?

Okay, that’s more than a handful, but this Focus Features release really should have legions behind it at this stage. The Movie Godz are appalled that it’s not locked down as one of the no-questions-asked contenders. I talk to them and I know. You wouldn’t believe the hand-wringing going on up there. Is this because the film says God doesn’t love or care, religion can’t help and we’re basically helpless before whatever dark fate may befall us? Well, that’s true, isn’t it? Shouldn’t at least one film out of the ten be allowed to feel this way?

The blockage is mainly about a perception in some (okay, most) quarters that the film is, at bottom, a chilly, misanthropic thing. This of course is seen as a demerit by the pulse-taskers because Best Picture contenders are required to provide a semblance of positive assurance. A Serious Man is very, very comforting to me because it’s so ruthlessly well shaped, perfectly performed, richly comedic and unstinting in its world view, which at the very least proves that vision lives in this industry. Vision and exactitude and making films that play just so without sanding the edges.

(Thanks to Sasha Stone for posting the above trade ad on Sunday.)

Every so often I need to shake my head and remind myself how completely off-the-reservation the tabloids have become in their reportings about alleged movie-star couplings. In the ’80s and ’90s they used to piece together tidbits from their sources and create speculative articles that may, from time to time, have contained shards of truth. But over the last decade they seem to have gotten into a habit of inventing stuff out of whole cloth. Which their equally divorced-from-reality readers apparently have no problem with.

I’m reacting to, on one hand, a just-published Vanity Fair profile of New Moon costar Robert Pattinson by Evgenia Peretz that includes presumably earnest denials from Pattinson and costar Kristen Stewart that they’re in any kind of relationship. And on the other a torrent of tab and gossip-site stories that they’re living together, breaking up, etc. All apparently driven by their readers wanting them to be in a relationship, and any semblance of verifiable facts be damned.

In the old days only the surrealistic Weekly World News subsisted on total invention; now the mainstream tabloid family seems to be doing this, at least as far as romantic-intrigue stories are concerned.

In Rouge/Universal’s MacGruber, a comedy about a screw-up secret agent (SNL’s Will Forte), Val Kilmer plays a character (presumably an edgy bad-guy type) named…Cunth. Ryan Phillippe, Kristen Wiig and Powers Boothe costar.

I don’t know why I was reluctant to play the trailer for Mike Newell and Jerry Bruckheimer‘s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (5.28). I guess it was because I knew it would deliver the same old deluge of grandiose CG that looks like nothing except grandiose CG, and the same sublime feeling of being soaked in Eloi-pandering oatmeal. And you know it’ll play like gangbusters when it opens a little more than six months hence.

I love the colloquial dialogue (“Don’t press your luck”), hunky Jake Gyllenhaal diving Batman-style from a great height (a mandatory bit in action epics for the last decade or so), Ben Kingsley conniving his heart out, Alfred Molina saving up for his retirement, etc. “Only the dagger can unlock the sands of time, and there are those who would use this power to destroy the world,” etc. The persistent spirit of Stephen Sommers — corporate factory candy for the toads.

In a piece about David Plouffe‘s The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory (Viking Adult), Arianna Huffington contemplates the gap between the ’08 Obama campaign themes and the way things have devolved since he took office. Caution bordering on timidity, status quo half-measures, playing softball with the right, etc.

“How did the candidate who got into the race because he’d decided that ‘the core leadership had turned rotten’ and that ‘the people were getting hosed’ become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?

“How did the candidate who told a stadium of supporters in Denver that ‘the greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result’ become the president who has surrounded himself with the same old players trying the same old politics, expecting a different result?

“How could a president whose North Star as a candidate was that he would ‘not forget the middle class’ choose as his chief economic advisor a man who recently argued against extending unemployment benefits in the middle of the worst economic times since the Great Depression?

“I’m referring, of course, to Larry Summers. According to a White House official I spoke with — later confirmed by sources in the White House and on the Hill — Summers was against the extension. And it took a lot of Congressional pushing back behind the scenes for the president to overrule him.

“And, according to another senior White House official, when foreclosures or job numbers come up at the regular White House morning meeting, Summers’ response is that nothing can be done. Nothing can be done about skyrocketing foreclosures or lost jobs.

“Nothing can be done — pretty much the opposite of ‘Yes we can,’ isn’t it?”

And this from Bill Maher, also on the Huffington Post:

“Yeah, I’m disappointed, too. I thought we were sweeping into power; I thought change meant Change. I believed all that talk about another First 100 Days, a la Roosevelt. Well, that didn’t happen. The question is, is this as good as it gets from President Obama, or is he pacing himself? He may have a four and eight-year plan and they included a first year of just gettin’ to know you and not gonna rock the boat too much. Well, Mission Accomplished on that.

“It’s still too early to lose hope in a guy as smart and talented as Barack Obama. But I would counsel him to remember: If you’re going undercover to infiltrate how Washington works, so you become one of them for a while, to gain their confidence, well, it can be just like all those movies where a cop goes deep, deep, DEEP undercover with drug people and — fuck, he’s a drug addict, too!

“Logic tells me that really smart guys like Obama and Rahm Emanuel know better what they’re doing than I do. They certainly know things I don’t know. I think we have the same general goals and beliefs. And this is what they do for a living — I wouldn’t even try it. But I will never stop having this doubt: that maybe if they had really charged in there riding the forceful energy of the historic election, and acted like it was an emergency moment — which it was — they could have gotten some big victories right up front, and there really could have been an historic ‘first hundred days’ for this administration and the country.

“Instead of what happened, which is the Obamas got a dog.

“It could have worked — the country had given its endorsement to ‘…and now for something completely different.’ There might have been a way to knock the Republicans back on their heels right away, with the argument that ‘The American people demanded we make these changes, and you are unpatriotic to stand in their way.’

“We’ll never know. Because that moment passed, and now it could follow the pattern of World War I and devolve into boring, static trench warfare where nothing really gamechanging happens while both sides slowly bleed to death.”

No trailer yet for Extraordinary Measures (CBS Films, 1.22.10), the Brendan Fraser-Harrison Ford true-life drama (based on Geeta Anand‘s The Cure) about a father teaming with a scientist to create a medical-establishment-defying cure for his ailing kids. But here’s a video piece about the actual history that inspired the book and the film.

Harrison Ford, Brendan Fraser in Extraordinary Measures.

The appearance is obviously that of a medical procedural along the lines of George Miller‘s Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), as both deal with finding medical cures for sick kids without the aid of FDA-approved remedies. I’m guessing that Measures probably delivers a bit more raging machismo, which you can pretty much count on with Ford playing a staunch maverick type.

Ford, who’s also executive producing, clearly has a thing for dramas about families under threat. He’s not playing the dad (i.e., Fraser’s role) but it’s a familiar line of country.

The director is Tom Vaughan (Starter for 10, What Happens in Vegas). Michael Shamberg, Stacey Sher and Carla Santos Shamberg produced. The script is by Robert Nelson Jacobs (The Water Horse, Chocolat). The costars are Keri Russell, Courtney B. Vance, Dee Wallace (where’s she been?), Jared Harris and Patrick Bauchau.

I don’t remember Lorenzo’s Oil all that vividly. (I saw it only once, and that was 17 years ago.) But I have a recollection of it being not half bad, and of better-than-decent performances by Nick Nolte (as an Italian) and Susan Sarandon. N.Y. Times critic Janet Maslin wrote that it’s “not the maudlin television-movie version of such a tale. There are no false miracles; there are no self-congratulatory triumphs; there is no smiling through anyone’s tears. [The] film has an appealingly brisk, unsentimental style and a rare ability to compress and convey detailed medical data.”

Among the four breakout performances mentioned on 10.30 by the N.Y. Times Karen Durbin, there’s no question who makes the most robust impression and who seems (to me anyway) the most talented, personable and charming — A Single Man‘s Nicholas Hoult, who’s not yet 20.

Nicholas Hoult in Tom Ford’s A Single Man

Guys this young rarely have this kind of quietly charismatic confidence. Either way he exudes something that feels steady beyond his years. Focus, discipline, some kind of tick-tocky metronomic thing going on inside. Hoult doesn’t seem to be playing an alert and confident student who talks straight, knows how to handle his feelings, and has the confidence to speak his mind (and heart) — he seems to be this guy. That’s solid acting. Plus he has astonishing eyes and a great smile.

Of course, a lot of what I’m describing is due in part to Tom Ford‘s writing and direction of A Single Man. I’m sure Hoult is capable of seeming mediocre, given half a chance. Who isn’t?

Intriguing as they may seem to others, Durbin’s other three — Up In The Air‘s Anna Kendrick, The Road‘s Kodi Smit-Mcphee and Fish Tank‘s Katie Jarvis — strike me as less formidable, presence-wise, and probably less talented (or certainly less developed) than Hoult.