Variety‘s Pamela McLintock is reporting that Summit’s New Moon will take in $140.7 million for the weekend, which is the third-biggest opening of all time, trailing only The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. With Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest bumped out of the third-highest slot, it’s also fair to say that New Moon now holds the distinction of being the most sluggishly-made, most agonizing-to-sit-through epic grosser of all time. I’m not looking for the “negative angle”…really. This honestly struck me as a fair observation. Has there ever been a worse film that has made box-office history? I’m asking.

I’ve been looking for the Hot Blog or “Blanky Weeks to Oscar” piece in which David Poland predicts that Pixar’s Up will win the Best Picture Oscar. Because that’s what he’s been saying in conversation and presumably believes and intends to state in well-ordered prose sometime fairly soon. If he’s saying that Up should win, fine…no problem, his opinion. But if he’s serious about Up actually taking the Big Prize then I’m flabbergasted.

Up will be lucky to be Best Picture nominated. Enough people believe this may happen that I’ve allowed myself to be goaded into predicting that Up may wind up as one of the ten. But I don’t think it should, and a lot of others feel the same way. My argument all along (and here we go with the old Rio Grande routine) is that animation is Mexico and live-action is the U.S. of A., and never the twain should meet.

Mexican artists should be proud of their own turf and celebrate their unique flavor and culture and personality and brushstrokes…the wholeness that is theirs and theirs alone. Did Luis Bunuel need to be embraced by the mainstream Hollywood industry to feel validated? Of course not, and neither should Pixar or Disney animated features (among others) need the endorsement of the Best Picture category to feel as if they’ve really made it. The Best Animated Feature Oscar is a huge honor. It should be more than sufficient.

But even if people are determined to ignore this reasoning, Up — as I said during the Cannes Film Festival several months ago — is “a fairly square and tidy thing…a spiritually uplifting ride that is nonethless too immersed in buoyant punchiness and mainstream movie-tude, which basically boils down to Pixar’s always-front-and-center task of giving the family audience stuff to laugh at and go ‘oooh’ and ‘aahh’ about, to finally matter all that much. It’s too entertaining, to put it another way, to sink in all that deeply.”

The Up themes are, of course, universally stirring. Perhaps too stirring or, put another way, too all-over-the-map. You’re really working all corners of the room when your film is about warming your heart, the blooming of love, finding your dreams, making a family, dropping your guard, standing up for your friends, finding courage and fulfillment, nurturing the past (as well as letting go of it) and embracing the now. It’s like Up is a politician saying anything he thinks will strike a chord with voters and thereby get himself elected.

Up revels in this thematic smorgsasbord “and in a peppy, delightful and at times Chaplinesque way,” I noted. “Particularly in a silent sequence that tells the story of loving marriage over the course of seventy years or so. And without going cheap or coarse. It’s about as good as this sort of thing gets.”

But I sure didn’t see Up as a metaphor for anything in my life, I can tell you. It’s just a high-strung animated story with a lot of gee-gosh stuff going on and some recognizable heart-and-spirit issues propelling the two main characters.

And I really and truly think there’s something ill-advised about a film creating a morbidly obese adolescent character, Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), since the Up makers knew full well that this balloon-shaped kid represents a high percentage of American kids today, and that this would subliminally be seen as a kind of endorsement of obesity, which is as dangerous and deadly as drug usage. Would Pixar have gone with a Russell who snorts heroin or sips whiskey out of a flask? Of course not, but an obese Russell is fine because half the kids in the malls today look like him so what’s the problem, right? Our life, our country, our culture…diseased and heading for a fall.

“If this gets into the press, I will know it came from you…and I will rain down on you so hard, you’ll have to be reassembled by fucking aircraft investigators. You breathe a word of this to anyone, you mincing fucking [expletive], and I will tear your fucking skin off, I will wear it to your mother’s birthday party and I will rub your nuts up and down her leg…right?”

Peter Capaldi‘s Malcolm Tucker says this in response to a not-entirely-trusted team member who has accused Tucker’s assistant of being a leaker himself with the following rant: “I could draw you a diagram if you like…it’s like a fucking swine flu pandemic…you’re like the man who fucked the monkey who gave us AIDS…monkey shit on your balls, not mine.”

All of which reminds me that “the crowd” (as in King Vidor) never went along with my ardent suggestions that Capaldi be considered as a stone-cold nominee for Best Supporting Actor for his In The Loop ranting. (Not even the fair-minded Scott Feinberg went along with this.) Because, you know, In The Loop is essentially an Armando Ianucci British TV series made into a feature and because Capaldi’s performance is all about profane tirades and it’s hard to understand everything he says because of his Scottish accent and because Loop didn’t make enough money and so on. Right?

But people will be talking about Capaldi’s Malcom in pubs, columns and industry parties for years to come while whomever finally wins the Best Supporting Actor Oscar this year….well, I’m sure he’ll be remembered.

There’s a bit of an Invictus screening issue hanging in the air as we speak, having to do with fairness between the coasts. The Left Coast blogging crew saw Clint Eastwood‘s latest directorial effort — an inspirational Nelson Mandela rugby movie with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon — on the Warner Bros. lot two or three days ago. They were told absolutely no reviews or Twitterings until Monday, 11.30. The film opens on Friday, 12.11.

The New Yorkers haven’t seen it yet, and the only locked-down Manhattan screening I’ve been told about is happening on Tuesday, 12.1. There’s also been a mention of a screening here after the Thanksgiving holiday, which could technically mean on Friday the 27th or Saturday the 28th. But when people say “after the holiday” they usually mean “after the holiday weekend.” If this is the case then the Manhattanites won’t be able to see it until Monday at the earliest which means the L.A. onliners will have the first word. (And you know some will jump the gun and go on Sunday night, 11.29…right?)

So in the interest of even-handedness it would be nice if the “after the holiday” NY showings meant 11.27 or 11.28.

I saw Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers (Lionsgate, 12.4) a couple of nights ago, and then conducted a brief interview with Sheridan today at Manhattan’s Four Seasons and then attended a group press conference (Sheridan, Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Relativity’s Ryan Kavanaugh). The hazy focus during the zoom-in on Maguire is due to low light — apologies. Not a good column day. A bad one, in fact. One distraction after another.

Now that Summit Entertainment is looking at weekend New Moon earnings of $145 million or so (based on yesterday’s record-breaking $72.7 million haul at 4,024 theaters), maybe they can afford now to make extra DVD screeners of The Hurt Locker and send them out to every Tom, Dick and Harry? You know…blanket the town like Lionsgate did with those Crash screeners in late ’05 and early ’06? No more excuses — get ’em out there now.

“Finally, I’d like to step out of my pundit shoes for a moment, if I may, and make a bold suggestion: Academy, if you’re reading, please consider nominating Fantastic Mr. Fox for best costumes. Where does it say costumes have to be human sized?”– Vanity Fair.com’s Julian Sancton in an 11.18 Oscar-nom handicap piece.

I know I probably won’t end up looking like this when I’m 79, but I’d like to. Cool, studly, relaxed machismo is worth its weight in gold. The cover photo lies, of course, by favoring the subject, but what photo doesn’t lie on some level? Most of them make you look worse.

Somebody said something the other day about Alec Baldwin being exceptional in Nancy Meyers‘ It’s Complicated (Universal, 12.25). The vested parties are saying this, of course, with the post-marital comedy expected to start screening for critics sometime after Thanksgiving. A non-vested writer-director guy told me this afternoon that he can “absolutely confirm” that Baldwin is the shit in Meyers’ film and a prime candidate for Best Supporting Actor. A vested party who nonetheless tends to be blunt said Baldwin is “a lay-down hand for a nom, Jeff. And he could win. Total breakout performance. Bet on it.”

Whatever the truth, it hit me suddenly that it’s taken Baldwin 15 years to recover from the downish career dents he suffered in the ’90s — sacrificing a movie-star career and the Jack Ryan franchise for a chance to play Stanley Kowalski in a Broadway Streetcar, the messy divorce from Kim Basinger and the daughter tape, getting thicker and thicker, developing the angry guy rep, being called “the Bloviator” by the N.Y. Post, etc. — and to find his kwan and ease into a nice smooth groove over the last two or three years with 30 Rock and whatnot, and that some kind of favorable karma thing is kicking in now with his acting in It’s Complicated and co-hosting the Oscars with Steve Martin and so on. I’m just feeling a little vibe telling me it’s Baldwin’s time right now and that the winds are favoring.

The non-vested director-writer said that “besides Baldwin, It’s Complicated is also a very strong showing for Steve Martin. A nice rebound after the last Panther movie and something more in tune with his talents. Part of the fun of having Baldwin and Martin host the Oscars is the possibility of one or both of them being nominated. It’s a strong film and Universal will have a much-needed crowd pleaser. Meryl could be a lock as well for Best Actress, with the Julia Child performance being pushed for supporting.”

The only thing that gives me concern is my bedrock certainty that however satisfying and entertaining her films may be on a certain level, Nancy Meyers doesn’t want to be anything more than Nancy Meyers. She doesn’t seem to want to push herself up to the next level and be the James L. Brooks of the ’80s and early ’90s (i.e., before he lost it). I’ve said this before, but she can’t stop making movies about people with money who have shiny copper pots hanging in the kitchen.