The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond spoke last night to Avatar‘s James Cameron at the Fox after-party at Craft. His first question, naturally, was about Cameron’s surprise Golden Globe win over Kathryn Bigelow in the Best Director category.

“I am still stunned,” Cameron answered. “I was sure [Kathryn] was gonna win. I thought because it was the foreign press, they might appreciate our movie a little more, so best picture was a possibility, but not director.”

As for Avatar being $200 million shy of breaking Titanic‘s worldwide box-office record, Cameron said he “always knew one day someone would do it. And I knew I had to prepare myself to accept that fact. I just never knew it would be me, so yeah, I’m fine with it happening now!”

An announcement about April Criterion releases says that Sidney Lumet‘s The Fugitive Kind (1960), an under-appreciated adaptation of Tennessee Williams‘ Orpheus Descending starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, will be among them. We’re talking a double-disc special edition with a high-definition digital transfer plus extras, including a documentary about the making of the film and an essay by David Thomson.

Brando’s Valentine Xaiver, a guitar-strumming drifter in a snakeskin jacket, was his second and last performance as a youngish moody type in a frankly sexual drama. (Val could’ve been the older, alienated-hipster brother of Stanley Kowalski — one who never wrote or kept in touch.) Brando returned to this kind of character in Last Tango in Paris, of course, but as a middle-aged man on a kind of spiritual downswirl.

Joanne Woodward costarred as a heavily mascara’ed wackjob. Victor Jory plays one of Williams’ standard-issue Southern sickos — a symbol of decrepitude and intolerance.

The Criterion email calls The Fugitive Kind a 1959 film. The IMDB says it opened on December 1, 1959 but Bosley Crowther‘s N.Y. Times review is dated April 15, 1960. It premiered in Los Angeles and sat around for four months before opening in New York?

“At the center of his drama, which grimly and relentlessly takes place in the sweaty and noxious climate of a backwash Louisiana town, there are two brave and enterprising people whose inevitably frustrating fate assumes, from the vibrance of their natures, the shape of tragedy,” Crowther wrote. “And because Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani play these two people brilliantly, The Fugitive Kind has a distinction and a sensitivity that are rare today in films.

“Credit, too, Sidney Lumet, who has directed this piercing account of loneliness and disappointment in a crass and tyrannical world. His plainly perceptive understanding of the deep-running skills of the two stars, his daring with faces in close-up and his out-right audacity in pacing his film at a morbid tempo that lets time drag and passions slowly shape are responsible for much of the insistence and the mesmeric quality that emerge.”

HE reader Bobby Rivers has pointed out that during last night’s Martin Scorsese montage before he accepted his Golden Globe life achievement award there was no clip from New York, New York, even though the band played the film’s Kander & Ebb title tune as Scorsese walked to the stage.

Liza Minelli, Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York.

The reason, of course, is that very few people feel much affection for New York, New York. I’ve never really liked it myself. (It has one electric scene — i.e., when Robert De Niro is physically thrown out of a club that Liza Minelli is performing in, and he kicks out several light bulbs adorning the entrance way as he’s manhandled out by the manager and a bouncer). But I know I’ve always liked Pauline Kael‘s line about New York, New York (one of the most infamous cocaine movies of all time) being “an honest failure.”

What other films can be described this way? Is dishonesty a reason why most films fail? Do audience sense some kind of lying going on and therefore reject them out of hand? Honest Failures is just one way of putting it. Respectable Failures, Honorable Failures, Commendable Failures…movie history books are full of them.

I’m not defining Honest Failures as films which have steadily risen in esteem in the years since their initial release (like Charles Laughton‘s Night of the Hunter, say), but as admirable, well-made films that are still a little under-regarded, and in some instances have almost been forgotten.

But what is this? I’m going to be blamed for linking to this so go ahead and trash me, but I honestly gasped when I laid eyes.

In the first post-Globes Oscar projection chart, And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg has put James Cameron‘s name at the top of his list of Best Director Oscar-nominees (and with a little electric-green arrow next to his name) because he won the Golden Globe Best Director award last night. Stop that, Scott! And all the other giddy-golly Globe rebounders — cool your jets, please.

Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, Scott Feinberg

The Golden Globes are a bellwether of nothing except ethereal mood and easy-lay emotionality expressed by a group of pseudo-journalist whores for the most part, so chill down and take a breather and a sip of water.

Cameron may wind up winning the Best Director Oscar as a gesture of serious respect for the visionary craft that went into Avatar as well as an expression of community gratitude (i.e., the feeling that Avatar‘s tremendous worldwide success has given the industry a shot in the arm and changed the tentpole game with 3D). The Globe win reflected this feeling, I’m presuming. It was also about fellating a huge financial success. As Ricky Gervais inferred last night, money and glamour-power have always mattered a great deal to the HFPA membership.

The bottom line is that the voters and the voting that led to Cameron winning the Best Director Golden Globe are not widely or even marginally respected. In and of itself the Cameron award meant very little, and Feinberg knows better than to suggest that Cameron has some sort of headwind now. God, that little green arrow!

The Best Director Oscar is still Kathryn Bigelow‘s to have and to hold because (a) in a very real sense she accomplished as much with The Hurt Locker as Cameron did with Avatar, having singlehandedly and against tough odds created a high-throttle hammer-punch movie with its own sense of place and identity and its own special soul, only with much less money to throw around, and (b) because history and culture demand that a woman — who happens to be a formidable kick-ass director under any sun and by the standards of either gender — should win the Best Director Oscar this year, and in so doing become the first woman to be so honored in motion-picture history.

Enough with the kneejerk kowtowing to the current Big Cheese Alpha Male director of the moment…Bwana Bwana save us Bwana…thank you for bringing so much manna into our industry. Bigelow is the real Bwana — she is the embodiment of work-it, never-say-die, get-it-done and get-it-right despite the hardships. Every talented director who has had to push it to the limit and work 19-hour days without a net knows (or suspects) what Bigelow had to do to get where she is today, and how it must feel to be right on the precipice.

The visual-aural impression of Cameron’s name having been called out last night and his delivery of a gracious thank-you speech does, I admit, pass along a sense of superficial heat to Cameron/Avatar. But the opinions of 90-something foreign journalists (some of whom barely merit the name) who belong to a weird-ass exclusive club that wasn’t, at last glance, representing a wealth of world-class publications don’t mean squat.

As Sharon Waxman wrote two years ago, “Joining [the HFPA] is nearly impossible. Qualified foreign journalists from major media outlets need not apply and, anyway, they usually don’t. The group takes five new members a year at most, and any member can veto a candidate. With attrition from deceased members and those who failed to meet the work minimum, this year no more than 82 people will choose the winning movies and TV shows.” (That number stood at 95 last year, and is today presumably in the same ballpark.)

“Compare that to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which has about 6,000 members,” Waxman concluded.

Indeed. And then tell Feinberg and Dave Karger and all the other ping-pong-ball prognosticators who’ve been predicting a Cameron Best Director win (Pete Hammond, Michael Musto, Ed Douglas) to settle down and use a little perspective.

Two days ago (on 1.15 at 5:54 pm) L.A. Times/”24 Frames” columnist Steven Zeitchek posted the clearest explanation I’ve read about the apparent Up In The Air acrimony between Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner. Reitman seemed to radiate a certain coolness toward Turner when they took the stage tonight to accept the Golden Globe award for screenwriting.

DVR capture of Jason Reitman after the announcement of Avatar‘s Best Picture win at the Golden Globes.

Unable as I’ve always been to separate my feelings from my pulse-readings, I wasn’t very accurate with my Golden Globe predictions. Correct calls: Avatar for Best Picture, Sandra Bullock for Best Actress in a Drama, Jeff Bridges for Best Actor in a Drama, Meryl Streep for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical, Mo’Nique for Best Supporting Actress, and Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor.

I got everything else wrong. But everyone got Best Director wrong. It had been signed, sealed and all but delivered for Kathryn Bigelow — I mean, everyone with a shred of focus and perspective had decided this would happen — and then the HFPA, whores at the core, gave it to James Cameron because of the eye-popping grandiosity of Avatar‘s vision and box-office.

My guess is that Robert Downey, Jr. has just won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy/Music award because he’s sharp and funny and well-liked for his amusing way of riffing on the truth. Because the idea that he gave the best performance in this realm is a joke. He got through Sherlock Holmes with a slightly wiggy deadpan attitude…fine. But hardly the stuff of tribute. Any rational body would have given the award to Michael Stuhlbarg or Matt Damon. “Art in the blood is likely to take the strangest forms,” Downey said. “The Hollywood Foreign Press is a strange bunch.”

No one with an understanding of anything would suggest that The Hangover is a better, more valuable film than (500) Days of Summer. Nobody would even dare to compare the two in conversation. And yet the HFPA has just given The Hangover its Best Comedy or Musical award. “Wow…we didn’t expect this,” said director Todd Phillips.

Avatar‘s James Cameron has just won the Golden Globe for Best Director. A shocker. The question would be “why?” when the award seemed to be Kathryn Bigelow‘s. The answer would be that the HFPA members are hugely impressed by Avatar‘s worldwide reach and sweep. “I’m not prepared ’cause I kinda thought Kathryn was gonna get this,” Cameron said, “and she deserves it.”

Martin Scorsese‘s life achievement award speech is by far the most elegant and movingly phrased. Clean, clear and very much the words of a man who is alive and hungry for bear. I love that William Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”