Yesterday afternoon L.A. Times/Notes on a Season columnist Pete Hammond took me to task for suggesting that the Academy might want to backhand Precious costar Mo’Nique for having said on her BET talk show that (a) she doesn’t understand why she needs to roll up her sleeves and campaign for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and (b) saying “what’s in it for me money-wise?”

Hammond says that Mo’Nique’s alleged “money demands for appearances related to a campaign are quite frankly old (non)news.” He means that Hollywood Reporter columnist Roger Friedman‘s report that “one source close to the production insists that Mo’Nique asked for $100,000 at one point to show up [at an event] with the rest of the cast” was posted last September.

And yet Mo’Nique did say to guests Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson on her talk show last month, “Now let me ask y’all this, because I know y’all are gonna school me correctly: What does it mean financially?” Surely Hammond hasn’t misunderstood what this question indicates.

I understand Hammond’s point about how you don’t have to campaign if you’ve really got the goods. Roman Polanski had the moralistic haters against him and didn’t say “boo” when The Pianist was in contention, and he still won the Best Director Oscar. But you do have to campaign if you have major negatives against you, as Russell Crowe did at the beginning of the Gladiator campaign, and as Mo’Nique clearly does now.

And it’s not just me saying this. Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson recently wrote that “Lionsgate has [an] issue” to deal with in its Precious campaign, which is the fact that Mo’Nique “is a piece of work.”

I’ll admit it — I’d love to see Mo’Nique not get nominated. I feel that her Mary character in Precious is so phenomenally despicable that it constitutes a special case — the mushroom-cloud atmosphere generated by her daughter-abuse in Lee Daniels‘ film is so toxic that it should, I feel, override the fact that Mo’Nique delivers a very strong performance. Call it a moralistic community statement warranted by special circumstances.

But I’m not trying to do a takedown campaign on Mo’Nique. Really. She’s clearly going to be nominated. But in a fair and just world (and in a politically realistic one as far as Hollywood is concerned), Mo’Nique shouldn’t win, and she if you ask me she most likely won’t.

After catching Jacques Audiard‘s A Prophet I ambled over to the Museum of Modern Art last night for Universal’s big It’s Complicated party. There was the usual trouble at the door (the security apes were even challenging Peggy Siegal, who had handled the celebrity invitations) but I was eventually waved in by Universal marketing big-shot Michael Moses. Once inside I was enveloped by sublime climatorial comfort and spiritual calm — a murmuring, beautifully lighted, abundantly catered heaven filled with the best or most talented or hungriest people in town, and everyone in a serene and approachable mood.

Last night’s It’s Complicated party at Museum of Modern Art.

The stars were there, of course — Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, Alec Baldwin, Mary Kay Place. Everyone else was hovering and/or scheming to get closer, trying for a word or two, a moment’s grace, a touch of their garment. I didn’t see director Nancy Meyers but It’s Complicated producer Scott Rudin was there; ditto Universal honcho Ron Meyer. Tina Fey was in the hot-table area with husband Jeff Richmond. Barry Levinson was hanging around. And the food was delicious — roast beef, mashed potatoes, magnificent salads, pleasant wine — and plentiful as hell with several fully-staffed serving areas.

Columnists George Rush and Roger Friedman were looking for quotes, of course. It seemed from a distance as if Baldwin — obviously in good spirits but visibly sweating and clearly in need of a diet re-think and some daily treadmill time — wasn’t all that responsive to their conversation starters. I wasn’t feeling all that socially aggressive so I just wandered around and scanned the room. An instinct told me not to snap photos.

There were some other famous faces milling about. I chatted briefly with Oliver Stone (he asked what I thought of It’s Complcated, and told me he’s finished with Wall Street 2 and involved in a fast-and-furious edit). I also said hello to director-writer Paul Schrader, and talked at length with screenwriter Stephen Schiff and fiance Lois Cahall.

I sometimes…okay, frequently let go with nervy opinions, like that statement I made yesterday morning about how “mainstream Eloi tend to avoid [films] that look even slightly challenging — the movie with the brightest and most colorful wrapper with the plainest design tends to win.” It’s fairly obvious that the Eloi like emotionally simplistic, high-visual-energy movies because they’re lazy (i.e., ADD, not educated enough, narrow cultural influences), but you still feel slightly vulnerable when you write stuff like this because of…I don’t know but the sense of alone-ness that comes with the gig is part of it.

“Avatar looks like something you might have to get used to on some level,” I explained. “It seems rich and dense, like a realm you might need to explore and maybe study a little bit to fully enjoy. That’s not an Eloi magnet factor. They like fast-food movies that they can wolf down right out of the wrapper– no thought, no nothing, just ketchup. They can see that Avatar is no easy-lay Roland Emmerich film. They can tell it’s a sit-down meal.”

But occasionally someone else will come along and say something very similar, and it feels good. Last night around 9 pm Lauren A.E. Schuker, a writer for the Wall Street Journal‘s “Speakeasy” section, wrote that Avatar‘s original plot “presents a challenge to audiences inured to sequels, prequels, and films based on pre-fabricated properties, such as Transformers, Twilight and the coming Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey, Jr.”

The main thrust of Schuker’s piece was a report that Steven Spielberg saw Avatar on the Los Angeles Fox lot last Friday and that “he flipped for it,” according to “a person close to the acclaimed director.” It’s entirely possible that a lot of people are going to flip for Cameron’s film, starting with tonight’s press screenings in London, New York and Los Angeles, but c’mon….what’s Spielberg going to say, given the brotherly rapport he naturally feels with Cameron and given the kind of films he likes to make?

And The Winner Is blogger Scott Feinberg has come up with a brilliant analysis of several high-profile Oscar contending performances by way of listing previous award-showered performances that closely echo their own. Without further ado…naah, screw it. I was going to paste portions of it here but it’s too much work to reformat. Just read what Scott has composed.

Audrey Hepburn, Carey Mulligan

A few hours ago In Contention‘s Kris Tapley sat down with Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper and producer-costar Robert Duvall, and during their chat Duvall said the following: “The Hurt Locker might be the best film I’ve seen in a decade.”

In a just-posted interview with A Single Man director Tom Ford, HuffPost associate entertainment editor Katy Hall reports that Colin Firth learns of his lover’s death from a family member “voiced by Jon Hamm in a winking nod to his 1960s alter ego, Don Draper.”

My honest-to-God first reaction to this latest Avatar poster was that the Na’vi looks like Michael Jackson during the Thriller period. I can see a lock of hair dropping down that reminds me his mid ’80s coif. If Jackson had made a music video about a dancing alien cat man and wore cat-eye contacts, this is exactly how he’d look. I look at that face and I really don’t see Zoe Saldana — I see a gay cat boy.

There’s a 50th anniversary screening in Santa Monica this evening of Stanley Kramer‘s On The Beach, an end-of-the-world drama with Gregory Peck, Ava Garner, Anthony Perkins, Fred Astaire, etc. It seems a little too reserved by today’s standards but it holds up half-decently, especially those submarine-visit scenes to the tomb cities of San Diego and San Francisco. A little on-the-nose (“There’s still time, brother”) but subliminally moving. Exquisite black-and-white photography by Giuseppe Rotunno (The Leopard, Fellini Satyricon, Amarcord).

A mildly amusing mutual masturbation chat between Sherlock Holmes director Guy Ritchie and star Robert Downey, Jr. appears in this Sunday’s L.A. Times magazine. Note: Mentioning that you’re well paid or loaded or anything along these lines makes you sound shallow. And recalling your Hemingway-esque response to a cut lip sounds like macho boasting — sorry.

Sherlock Holmes star Robert Downey, Jr.

Ritchie: “You really got your hands dirty on this shoot. In fact, you got punched in the mouth — seven stitches. And you didn’t fuckin’ cry like a baby. You just spat a bit and carried on. That was a shift in my attitude toward you, too. I thought, Okay, that changed the paradigm. Because you get paid a lot of money. I get paid a lot of money. And we’re indulged with the things we’re indulged with. From my point of view, we have the best jobs in the world, and I suspect you think so, too.

Downey: “I love it. But what did I do when I got that big cut? I just hoped it was deep enough that it was going to need enough stitches to get your approval. I was nowhere near the cosmos for about 12 seconds. Then I think I peeled my lip inside out, and I was so happy to hear you say, ‘That was the best fight.'”

Ritchie: “I was happy to be the guy who said, ‘Oh, that needs stitches,’ because usually I’m the guy who’s like, ‘Oh, fuckin’ stitches–don’t worry about it.’

Downey: “We needed to finish whatever we were doing. I wish I had bled more, to tell you the truth, but that might have alarmed other folks. It was kind of a coming of age for me — thinking of being not 22 but 44. But I very well remember going to the hospital.”

The awkward/dull parts were trimmed out by Sam Donelly; the photos are by Sam Jones.

Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye has responded to the HE readers who ripped him for putting a confrontational question to Antichrist director Lars von Trier during last May’s Cannes Film Festival, which I recounted in this 12.7 article.

“Some of the comments are a tad po-faced and holier than thou,” Baz begins. “I’m really amused that if one makes a comment that people disagree with it must be because I’m ignorant,or that I didn’t understand what Von Trier was on about. Well, I understood perfectly and have publicly defended Lars in years past. I just didn’t happen to care for Antichrist.

“One of the commenters suggested that my press conference question was something that should be expected from a Daily Mail journalist and that I am therefore an idiot. That person is entitled to his opinion and allowed to make it just as much as I’m allowed to make mine. My views, however, are my own and I do not follow a Daily Mail line. I just thought I’d mention that because some of the comments were rather ignorant in assuming otherwise.”

A number of people seem to have missed my 11.27 Invictus review, which of course was posted over Thanksgiving weekend. (On a Friday.) Clint Eastwood‘s film is finally opening on Friday, so I’ve re-posted some bullet points:

Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus.

* Invictus is a nice, cleanly told, mildly stirring South African sports film that should have been released in the late spring or early summer. Because if it had been it wouldn’t have all this weight on it. The fact that it’s the latest Eastwood film with a December opening has everyone hot and bothered. Well, cool down.

* It does remind us of what a centered and wise and very cool guy Nelson Mandela is/was. But it’s all exposition, exposition and more exposition. And there’s almost no “story” in the sense that there are no character turns, no twists, no nothing in the way of surprises or intensifications. A good amount of it — most of it, really — is about South African government employees watching rugby games or standing around offices or sitting on buses or in the backs of cars or watching TV. (TV screens get a major workout in this film.) Or about athletes jogging and playing rugby and working out.

* Invictus is about an “important’ subject” — one we should think about and perhaps learn from — but it mainly just ambles along. It kinda gets off the ground at the end, but rousing sports-movie finales don’t travel like they used to because we’ve seen them so damn often. You can’t just have the good-guy team win and show everybody cheering. That’s not enough any more.

* There’s no getting around the fact (and it pains me to say this, being a major fan of Unforgiven, Play Misty For Me, High Plains Drifter, Breezy, Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino) that Invictus is agreeable but second-tier Eastwood.

* Morgan Freeman and the take-it-easy, don’t-push-it quality to Clint’s direction are two winning elements. But it should have been a more layered thing. On one level there would have been what we have now — an above-board, what-you-see-is-what-you-get story about how a rugby team and a championship game helped bring a divided nation closer together. And there also would have also been…something else. A more penetrating look at the travails and fears of Mandela or Matt Damon‘s Francois Peinaar. A parallel story, a powerful subplot, a more prominent undercurrent or some other big thematic echo. Something.

* The first half-hour is the best part, by far. Freeman’s manner and personality are quite winning, and I was particularly impressed by a scene in which he gives a low-key address to some white staffers who are presuming they’ll be fired by the new Mandela administration. There’s also a good moment as the film begins in which we’re shown a white high-school rugby team practicing behind a chain-link fence and some young black kids playing rugby in the lot across the street, and the way they react differently when Mandela’s little motorcade drives by.

* But once the rugby-championship element kicks in Invictus starts to flatten out and restrict itself to lateral passing back and forth. People said that Martin Scorsese‘s The Age of Innocence was a movie about cufflinks. And that Anthony Minghella‘s Cold Mountain was about a man walking through the woods. Boiled down, Invictus is (after the first half-hour) about people watching TVs, watching the rugby team play in a stadium, talking about what they’re seeing or thinking, and commenting on what may or may not happen.

* And feeling exhilaration, of course, when the Big Game finally happens and (spoiler!) South Africa beats New Zealand. That’s all it really is.

* I almost admire Eastwood for keeping it as simple and straightforward as it is. It’s nice to see restraint and centeredness in a director, and there’s something very elegant about the way he steers Invictus along at 35 mph without cranking things up for the sake of cranking things up.

* I know, I know — a satisfying plate of pasta doesn’t have to be “brilliant.” It just has to be carefully prepared and well seasoned and made with love. Invictus is a very pleasant and mildly stirring bowl of fettucini with a highly agreeable lead performance by Freeman. But it’s not one of those ratatouille dishes that win awards and inspire raves from restaurant critics.