HE reader and correspondent Terry Woods reports “a friend just got back from an invitational screening of Avatar plus a James Cameron q & a. The director stated that his first cut of the film was 4 hours and 18 minutes. A fair amount of Sigourney Weaver‘s scenes were deleted and other secondary characters were pared down. A sizable number of special-effects scenes were also excised including a battle between Jake’s Avatar and some howling Pandoran animal. In fact the beast itself was excised completely from the final theatrical cut.

Presumably much of this material will resurface as an extended Avatar Director’s Cut DVD/Blu-ray, which would also include the Jake-Neytiri sex scene.

Winners at the 36th annual Eloi Choice Awards included Twilight (Favorite Movie, Favorite On-Screen Team, Favorite Franchise), Taylor Lautner (Favorite Breakout Movie Actor), Sandra Bullock (Favorite Movie Actress), The Proposal (Favorite Comedy Movie), Inglourious Basterds (Favorite Independent Movie), Hugh Jackman (Favorite Wolverine), Jim Carrey (Favorite Comedic Star), Miley Cyrus (Favorite Breakout Movie Actress….in what film?), and Johnny Depp (Favorite Movie Actor).

An Education, three Weinstein films, District 9 and In The Loop — all allegedly ineligible for WGA awards.

After the preceding appeared I heard from a guy who tends to know stuff, to wit: “You are probably already aware of this but just in case you weren’t, Disney-Pixar’s Up is unfortunately ineligible for DGA and WGA awards because the filmmakers are not signatory members of either guild.” I know nothing for sure. Looking into this as we speak.

A person going for the second hug is always a sure sign that they’re tipsy. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this embarassment is any kind of mark against Precious. Because for me Mariah Carey‘s performance is the best thing in it. If she was nominated instead of badass Mo’Nique, I’d be all for it.

Think about it — small-theatre marquees with hand-placed letters are nearly dead. They’ve been gone for years in American small towns, and it won’t be long before they’re gone from the big cities also. You can feel the lore of cinematic romance when you stand under a funky old marquee. I don’t know what others feel when they stand under an electronic moving-word sign outside the Lincoln Square plex on 68th Street, but I feel nothing. It’s a damn shame.

Variety‘s Clifford Coonan is reporting an exceptional reception for Avatar in China, which he says is causing “massive ripples.” Filmgoers saw it record numbers despite “the worst weather in half a century in parts of the country,” he says. He reports that James Cameron‘s film has “struck a chord with local auds because of the way it deals with people being forced to move from their homes — a big issue in China where land grabs by unscrupulous real estate developers, aided by corrupt officials, are a national scandal.”

Like Marshall Fine and other aficionados sadly burdened with a sense of taste, OK Magazine‘s Phil Villarreal hates Leap Year also. That’s okay because you have to hate some things in order to love others. Francois Truffaut once said that “taste is a result of a thousand distastes.”

“There is one moment of hope near the end of the movie,” he writes, “after the idiot lead character, Anna (Amy Adams) faces a severe disappointment in a small Irish town, then high-tails it to a jagged cliff. It’s here that hope finally arises that Anna will come to her senses and live up to the title by taking a header off the cliff in an effort to atone for her sins of being the stupidest idiot alive and leading the audience through 90 minutes of her drudgery-inducing hunt for someone, anyone — maybe even anything — to marry her.

“You won’t hear it from me whether or not Anna jumps off the cliff or turns around to be swept up by Matthew Goode in an embrace of doom. But I will say this: Just once, Hollywood, could you give us a happy ending?”

Precious has gathered eight nominations for the 41st annual NAACP Image Awards. This for a film that Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy called “a film of prurient interest that has about as much redeeming social value as a porn flick.”

Precious was nominated for outstanding motion picture and outstanding independent film. Lee Daniels was nominated for Best Director, and Gabby Sidibe, Mariah Carey, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton and Lenny Kravitz were all individually nominated for acting. Fox will air the Image Awards live on 2.26.

I got into a scuffle this morning with HE reader “Bob Violence” over a remark I made about Vince Vaughn needing to lose 30 pounds. Violence took the remark as another expression of what he and others regard as a longstanding HE prejudice against people of girth. As this incorrect and fat-headed observation keeps coming up, I thought I’d try to damper it down.

I’ve never said there’s anything inherently distatsteful about fat people per se. Ever. Millions of people are simply built that way through genetic inheritance. What I’ve said is that there’s something inherently gross about morbidly obese people. I also have a slight side-issue thing with adolescents and teens and 20somethings who are fat because they’ll eventually turn into out-of-control Jabbas when their metabolisms start slowing down in their 30s.

Vaughn isn’t obese (yet) but for an actor with pretensions toward being an attractive lead male type, he’s getting too fat to pull it off. Especially if he’s going to be in a Ron Howard movie about infidelity, which means he has to look like a guy who has the ability to score every so often. It’s an Absolute Hollywood Law that if you’re going to play someone involved in sexual-romantic activity, you can’t look like a beast.

One look at Vaughn’s appearance at the Couples Retreat junket and you thought, “Jesus Christ, this guy needs to lay off the pizza and the pasta and work out more.” He’s not pulling in the big bucks in order to play motor-mouthed water buffaloes — he’s being paid the big bucks to play hyper, motor-mouthed, ESPN-loving, video-game-playing guys who are fit and semi-attractive enough to pair up with women like Jennifer Aniston (Teh Kreak-up), Isla Fisher (The Wedding Crashers) and Malin Akerman (Couples Retreat).

Do you remember what Vaughn looked like in Swingers in the mid ’90s? He was Jimmy Stewart in Destry Rides Again. Then he became the bulky but still appealing Wedding Crashers guy. Now he’s on the verge of a third incarnation — total Jabba/sea lion/Orson Welles.

Large-boned, barrel-chested, man-boob guys hook up with perky, small-framed, button-chested women all the time in real life, but flatulent wildebeests generally don’t do as well in this department.