A senior foreign-language Academy committee guy who wanted everything he said of interest to be non-attributable called last night to say two things about yesterday’s Gomorrah snub. One, he doesn’t feel that blowing off Gomorrah this year is as much of a scandal as last year’s 4 Months snub because 12 months ago the foreign-language fuddy-duds also ignored Carlos Reygadas‘ Silent Light and Fatih Akin‘s Edge of Heaven, among others. And two, voices in the foreign branch’s executive elite committee just didn’t think Gomorrah “delivered in the way it could or should have,” he said. “It’s not a matter of it not being heart-warming. It’s a matter of our respecting the film without believing that it really brought the goods home.”

Envelope/Feinberg Files columnist Scott Feinberg spoke last night to IFC Entertainment president Jonathan Sehring, whose company is distributing Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah — the widely-hailed, much-honored Italian crime film that was snubbed yesterday by the Academy’s foreign-language committee by being kept off the “short list” — a preliminary list of foreign-language faves from which the final five nominees are decided upon.

“I know I speak for the entire country of Italy and a lot of people in the critical community when I say that it just doesn’t make sense and there’s something wrong with the foreign language committee as a whole,” Sehring told Feinberg. “It’s still broken.”

Sehring, says Feinberg, “noted that despite the endorsements the film had received from festivals, critics, and even Martin Scorsese, he was never confident that the rules changes had corrected the foreign language committee’s underlying problems or that the committee would pick Gomorrah for the shortlist.

And yet Sehring had been pessimistic all along. “We were concerned,” he said. “We got messages that the initial screening didn’t go well, so you figure you’re vying for one of three slots,” referring to the executive committee’s slots. “It just demonstrates the foreign language committee’s aversion to graphic violence, I guess. I mean, I don’t know…I look back at City of God not getting a nomination. I look back at our experience with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days not getting a nomination. And now this?

“You would hope that the [committee] would pay attention to the critical response around the world. You would hope that they would take into account world cinema awards. I don’t know. How can they get it so wrong two years in a row? It’s a real disappointment, and we’re sort of dismayed, but it’s not gonna stop us from distributing movies like 4 Months or Gomorrah and we’ll soldier on.”

Note: I don’t like spelling Gomorrah without an “h” at the end. I look at it without the “h” and I go, “That’s just not right. It needs an ‘h.'”

Outta here at 6:45 am, LAX plane at 8:30 am, landing at 12 noon. Either 90 minutes or four hours of layover, depending how it goes. But however you slice it Wednesday, 1.14, is likely to be a low-activity day in terms of postings, photos and prose poems. But it’ll all work out in the long run if you have some of that Allie Fox “four o’clock in the morning courage” stored inside…which I do.

Jack Torrance‘s seminal masterwork is an actual hold-it-in-your-hands book, published by Gengotti Editore on 12.18.08. Sells for $9.99 plus shipping and handling.

The filmsinfocus.com guys have run a series of New Year’s Resolutions from a variety of filmmakers, but the funniest one was written by Pride and Glory‘s Gavin O’Connor. I don’t have any New Year’s Resolutions myself because I don’t believe in anything being renewed on January 1st. I don’t believe in numerology of any kind. I don’t believe in magic, in Jesus, in yoga, in kings, in Elvis, in Zimmerman, in David Poland, in New York “Vulture,” in Defamer, in Beatles…I just believe in me. HE and me. And HE advertisers. And the redemptive power of movies. And that’s reality.

The Academy’s Foreign Language Committee has done it again! Last year they failed to include the brilliant 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days on the short list, and this year they’ve blown off Matteo Garrone‘s Gomorrah, which has been honored left and right by critics’ groups and last month won the European Film Award for Best Film of 2008. Committee chief Mark Johnson…what happened, bro? This b.s. wasn’t supposed to repeat itself, and yet here we are. Another embarassment!

I have to leave for an appointment and can’t get into this but here are the films that the foreign-language committee has chosen, short-list-wise:

3 Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey) — agreed, excellent film. The Baader Meinhof Complex (Uli Edel, Germany) — tough but very good. The Class (Laurent Cantet, France) — brilliant. Departures (Yojiro Takita, Japan). Everlasting Moments (Jan Troell, Sweden). The Necessities of Life (Benoit Pilon, Canada). Revanche (Gotz Spielmann, Austria). Tear This Heart Out (Roberto Sneider, Mexico). Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel) — masterful.

“I read your morning-after Golden Globes piece,” a publicist friend wrote earlier today. (He was referring to “Winslet’s Double Win.”) “Answer me this: how is Kate Winslet a Best Supporting Actress contender for The Reader when Nicole Kidman was a Best Actress winner for The Hours?”

I didn’t expect very much from Armando Iannucci‘s In The Loop, a Sundance ’09 movie that I caught here last week. The notes made this low-budget British political comedy sound too ambitious and convoluted and cross-burdened. Except it’s not. It’s easily one of the funniest comedies about governmental inanity and media mis-speak I’ve ever seen. It also felt to me like one of the fastest laughers of this type since Billy Wilder‘s One, Two,Three.

In The Loop director-writer Armando Iannucci

And it has some absolutely wonderful insult humor. I’m talking one beautiful saber thrust and club-bludgeon after another.

Suffice that my pre-viewing concerns evaporated almost immediately. The reason I didn’t expect a lot going in is that I didn’t know Iannucci — he’s a successful British-based comedian, writer, director, performer and radio producer — or anything about his shows. I didn’t know squat, for instance, about The Thick of It, a 2005 political satire for BBC Four that Iannucci devised, directed and largely wrote. Some of the British government characters in In The Loop originally appeared in The Thick Of It.

In The Loop is basically about how the media can sometimes focus on a gaffe by an official or spokesperson and make it sound (via sheer repetition and obsession) to represent firm government policy concerning this or that major issue. In The Loop‘s major issue is a potential military conflict involving U.S. and British troops — think Iraq in ’02 — but the humor is about how various second- and third-tier government types in London and Washington try to dodge, maneuver and counter-spin their way around an essentially meaningless statement by a British cabinet minister that war is “unforeseeable.” Meaningless and yet strangely meaningful once the media gets hold of it. And the source of endless misery for many people.

Some of the In The Loop-ers.

“Wickedly sardonic and filled with secrets, lies, leaks, plugs, and faulty intelligence and walls, In the Loop leads us behind closed doors to reveal bungling bureaucrats entangled in petty rivalries, obsequious aides jockeying for favor, and the Keystone Cops of government,” say the Sundance notes.

Every cast member — Peter Capaldi, James Gandolfini, Tom Hollander, David Rashe, Gina McKee, Chris Addison, Anna Chulmsky and Mimi Kennedy topline — is clearly on the same Iannucci wavelength. They know they’re working with great material, and so do we. What is unmistakable is that they’re all having enormous fun with the material, although in a very assured and ultra-disciplined way.

I was so taken with In The Loop that I asked to speak to Iannucci. He called from London last Friday or something. (Thursday?) Our discussion speaks for itself. I’m hoping to meet with him in Park City, along with Gandolfini and Kennedy.

“The bottom line is that the old model — let’s go to Sundance and cross our fingers that someone is going to buy it — is ridiculous,” says veteran publicist Cynthia Schwartz, whose firm 42West is repping 15 films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and also consults on several DIY releases during the year. “Filmmakers have to take control. If they get a distributor, terrific. But if they don’t, they have to have a Plan B. And for the first time at Sundance, I feel like people are getting that.” — from Anthony Kaufman‘s 1.13.09 Indiewire piece, “Not Picked Up in Park City? Filmmakers Look Forward to DIY Release Options.”

“The reviews of Oliver Stone‘s W. were generally pretty good, which always helps ‘prestige’ films, but Lionsgate’s hopes really rose when NRG’s tracking for W. jumped after the film’s premiere. Marketers pay particular attention to how many people volunteer knowledge of their film — if the numbers are low a few weeks out, they will tweak the campaign–and W.’s ‘unaided awareness’ had risen from two per cent that Monday to a healthy eight per cent on Thursday.

“The three main research companies use their tracking data to predict the opening weekend’s gross, and their predictions for W. were in the eight-to-nine-million-dollar range. These forecasts can be astonishingly accurate — or way off. Palen has found that the tracking for Lionsgate’s hits routinely underestimates their audience: people who are slightly outside the mainstream. At the studio, they call these party crashers ‘the freak factor.’

“NRG predicted that Tyler Perry‘s first film for Lionsgate, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, would open at four to six million dollars, and it opened at $21.9 million. Tracking studies are conducted among people who’ve seen at least six movies in the past year, but Perry’s films have proved to be wildly popular with churchgoing African-American women. Other hidden pockets of interest made The Passion of the Christ and Sex and the City even bigger hits.

“Kevin Goetz, president of the worldwide motion-picture group at the research firm OTX, says that his company, knowing it can’t track all of Perry’s audience, simply inflates the ‘unknown variable’ segment of its predictive model by twenty to twenty-five per cent for his films. Often, then, the algorithm of box-office estimation, which is itself the algorithm of marketing efficacy, is actually the algorithm of the informed hunch.” — from Tad Friend‘s 1.19 New Yorker profile of Lionsgate’s Tim Palen, called “The Cobra.”

For the fourth straight year, the Oscar-nominated short films in the live-action and animated categories will play in U.S. theatres. This year’s crop, which will ultimately be seen in about 60 theatres nationwide, will open on 2.6.09, or roughly 16 days before the 81st Academy Awards telecast on 2.22.09.

Shorts International and Magnolia Pictures are the entities behind the release. A press release says that the short films “have charted a dramatic 223% increase in attendance at U.S. theatres since the [program’s] launch in 2006. Together with the theatrical run, the nominated short films will also be released on iTunes on 2.17.