I’ll always be in awe of Harvey Weinstein‘s chutzpah, but Inglourious Basterds isn’t going to win the Best Picture Oscar. How do I know this? I don’t, not for certain. But I do know that the season has been dragging on and that entertainment journalists are getting bored and need to come up with scenarios that allow for some variation of the c.w. — i.e., the winner will be either Avatar or The Hurt Locker.

I’m also sensing that the Movie Godz, the aspirational angels of our nature, are feeling a wee bit antsy as we speak, and have taken to hovering like the monochrome Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander in Wings of Desire and intimating/whispering “don’t…don’t do this…not the baseball-bat movie…think of how you’ll feel the next morning.”

But if you want to trip out on an IG fantasy, consider Pete Hammond‘s Notes on a Season article that was posted seven days ago. Or Steve Pond‘s piece in The Wrap (which borrows most of its material from Hammond’s piece). Or Tom O’Neil‘s piece on Gold Derby/Envelope/L.A. Times. Or Jack Matthews‘ article for Moviefone. They’re all riding this bullshit horse.

“Harvey Weinstein has been pulling out all the stops,” Pond writes, “flatly proclaiming that Basterds is going to win Best Picture.” Fine — Harvey wouldn’t be Harvey if he didn’t strut around. “To that end, Quentin Tarantino has been making constant public and private appearances. Audi sponsored a packed party for film and director. Norman Lloyd and Roger Corman threw a smaller lunch at Musso and Franks.

“The latter gathering seemed to suggest that Tarantino has the approval of an odd subset of the Academy, voters like Mickey Rooney, who told the L.A. Times that he doesn’t see new movies.

“Weinstein also has suggested that the Academy’s newly installed preferential system of counting final Best Picture ballots might hurt Avatar and help propel his film to victory.

“Under that system, voters are asked to rank all 10 nominees from first to last. Unless one film gets more than 50 percent of the first-place votes – which, let’s face it, is virtually impossible in this year’s race – the film with the fewest Number One votes will be eliminated. Its ballots will then be redistributed into the pile of whatever film is ranked second on each ballot. The process continues, with the last-place film eliminated in each subsequent round, until one film winds up with a majority of the votes.

“The system means that Number One votes alone won’t be enough to propel a film to victory — it’ll also need to be ranked second or third on lots of ballots if it wants to hit that magic number.

“Avatar, it seems, should get lots of Number One votes – but it might also be ranked pretty low on the ballots of voters who don’t think it’s the best, leaving an opening for another film that’s more of a consensus favorite to ride to victory on the strength of more second- and third-place votes.”

When O’Neil predicted a Basterds win last November I wrote, “Trust me — it’ll never happen.” This morning he notes that “Mathews is saying it really might happen and I still say it will.” I’m fine with all this crap. The fever dream of a three-way race is better than an either-or. Without it things would be fairly flat, and we still have two and a half weeks to go.

Wells to Mickey Rooney: If you don’t see new movies you should resign from the Academy. No ifs, ands or buts.

I’ve seen nothing and know nothing, but it makes sense to beware of The Pacific. Beware of any miniseries that may be a nostalgic generational tribute in sheep’s clothing. Beware of all things Spielbergian — barring a miracle he’ll be nothing but trouble from here on. Beware of Hanks because he’s too wealthy and settled. Beware of 1940s stock characters that may have been created out of innumerable viewings of William Wellman‘s Battleground.

Niels Arden Oplev‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the 2009 European hit thriller that’s finally opening in the U.S. on 3.19, is, in the view of journalist Jeffrey Ressner, “the best movie of the year thus far. It’s The Silence of the Lambs with a punk-rock Clarice. The Swedes know how to make great films, and this is in the same vein of gripping genre genius as Let the Right One In.”

I blew off a Dragon Tattoo screening late yesterday afternoon in order to catch Noah Baumbach‘s brilliant Greenberg, but I’ll catch up with it next Monday. There’s a press junket two days later. The distributor is Music Box Films.

Dragon Tattoo “is 2 1/2 hours long but it zooms right by,” says Ressner. “It’s a combination thriller, feminist tract, journalism crusade and gorefest. The fanboys will go crazy over the title character, a hacker who swings both ways and is so punk she makes Joan Jett look like Cyndie Lauper. It’s a goodie.”

It was reported two months ago that Sony Pictures has optioned the rights for an English-language film adaptation with Steve Zaillian (American Gangster, Schindler’s List) in talks to write the script.

Dragon Tattoo is based on the first of the crime-thriller trilogy by late Swedish journalist-activist Stieg Larsson.

The story “follows Mikael Blomqvist, a disgraced journalist, and Lisbeth Salander, a bisexual female hacker with Asperger’s syndrome, investigating the 40-year-old disappearance of a industrialist’s niece on a remote island,” wrote Dark Horizons‘ Garth Franklin. “They uncover religious killings, Nazism, rape, child abuse and murder.

“The next two novels deal with a conspiracy within the government dating back to the Cold War. All three books have scored rave critical reviews, especially for the Salander character who’s considered one of the most compelling female characters of modern fiction.”

A Monkey Bar party happened earlier this evening for Robert Kenner‘s Food, Inc., one of the five nominees for Best Feature Documentary Oscar. It’s presumed that the only real competition it has is Louie Psihoyos‘ The Cove (or vice versa), so it made sense for Magnolia Pictures, Food, Inc.‘s distributor, to hype things up a bit.

Food, Inc. director and co-writer Robert Kenner, Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman — 2.16, 8:55 pm.

Documentarian Alex Gibney (Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson), Martha Stewart — 2.16, 8:25 pm.

“Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser.

Peggy Siegal handled the guest list. Kenner attended along with Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation” (which Food, Inc. is based upon), and foodie maven Martha Stewart, an admirer/supporter who’s hosted several screenings of the film, she told me. Plus the usual array of filmmakers, Academy members and journalists like myself.

The accent was on healthy good, of course. The only unhealthy things served were mini-hot dogs inside toasted mini-croissant buns. The hors d’oeuvres were all-around delicious.

I haven’t written about Kenner’s doc since last June, but I strongly approved when I did.

I never went along with the general Zoe Kazan infatuation, which started with her Revolutionary Road performance, and I can feel myself pulling further away with each successive turn. She seemed irritatingly flighty in It’s Complicated (especially with the texting), and excessively coy and mannered in Happythankyoumoreplease, which I hated at Sundance. And now I don’t know if I even want to watch The Exploding Girl (Oscilloscope, 3.12) after watching this trailer. She isn’t done — she just has to get past what she’s been doing.

Thanks to HE reader Jake Hughes, a Bay Area resident, for taking an hour or so to throw this together. A little weird but I can handle it. Much appreciated.

My interest in Toy Story 3 (Disney, 6.18) has mainly to do with the Pixar honchos having hired Michael Arndt, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Little Miss Sunshine, to do the script. I’m therefore expecting a certain snarky urbanity and sardonic flavor. In short, the good old double-track deal (i.e., appealing to kids and hip adults) that the best animated features achieve. The director is Lee Unkrich.

The Jeff Bridges of legend posed during Monday’s Oscar luncheon with his fellow Best Actor nominees. But the portrait in the current Time magazine is…well, the word has to be Luciferian.

Zentropa producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen has told Screen Daily‘s Geoffrey Macnab that he’s “seen it [the story] in the Danish film magazine” about the rumored Martin Scorsese/Lars von Trier remake of Taxi Driver and “what is written there is not true.” Jensen confirmed that the directors had met at the Berlin Film Festival, but that the remake story is “rubbish.”

Positive & negative reviews be damned — the public has already decided to give Shutter Island a strong opening weekend. Definite interest of 46 and 53 among under-25 and over-25 males, respectively, and a surprisingly high 44 and 40 among under-25 and over-25 females. Go figure.

Marlon Brando‘s decision to briefly pause between the words “to” and “fight” in this clip constituted the only moment of wit or subtlety in an otherwise bombastic and broadly emphatic film. Which I’d nonetheless like to see on Bluray some day. Warner Home Video has already mastered for HD-DVD — why not just offer it on Bluray? All 70mm and VistaVision films of the ’50s and ’60s need to turn up in this format, even the somewhat mediocre ones.

The above-quoted dialogue can be found at 6:24.

I’ve been punched, kicked and spat upon, but never face-slapped. I take that back — a pretty blonde who’d had a few drinks slapped me during a high-school party once. But that was eons ago. I suspect that face slaps are mainly a movie thing because they look and sound highly dramatic. I don’t believe people actually slap each other in real life. I’ve almost never seen it happen, nor have I ever heard of it happening.

That said, this clip from Charley Varrick is one of strangest slap scenes of all time.