Last night Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle won the Directors Guild of America for best director of 2008. I don’t want to go out on a limb, but the industry seems (stressing that word) to have arrived at a consensus winner. Congrats to Boyle and to the Fox Searchlight team for a brilliant marketing job.

I was 35,000 feet in the air when Boyle’s win was announced. I should have caught this in the plane and re-posted straight away but my battery gave out. The airlines all need to offer power outlets to each and every passenger — not just business and first-class.

Note: I chose “Shocker” for a headline before seeing the same on MCN. I’ll stand my ground, won’t back down.

No question about it — this Funny or Die Obama video is at least five times funnier than last night’s riff on SNL. (Thanks to heybub1 for the tip.)

Our genes tell us to show obeisance before power. Which is why the majority of job applicants for any highly desirable gig tend to imitate the behavior of those who’ve already succeeded in the field. Which usually means acting perky, smiling a lot, kowtowing, groveling and…did I mention the tendency to smile? Then there are your X-factor applicants. They tend to exude confidence and centered-ness. They look smart, talk smart, don’t necessarily smile unless there’s something to smile about and look you straight in the eye. Applicants who are just…themselves.

Consider these ten video reels of college-student applicants looking to land a special red-carpet Oscar gig that’s being offered by mtvU. But consider in particular the audition tape of one David Distenfeld, a junior at Duke University.

Distenfeld obviously loves Oscar culture, knows his shit, and talks like a seasoned and intelligent adult. He’s probably capable of kowtowing in a pinch, but it doesn’t seem to be in his nature. He’s not a journalism student (he’s actually studying filmmaking) but he’s a chip off the Ebert block.

Now consider the other nine applicants — NYU freshman Diana Snyder, Bowling Green State University’s Nicole Lovince, Drexel University’s Dylan Steinberg, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University’s Chantell Black, University of Miami’s Nick Maslow, Fordham University’s Justin Shackil, Rice University’s Fateem Ahmed, San Diego State University’s Megan Telles and the University of Cincinatti’s Rachel Alig.

Every one of these kids is trying their best to act like an E! or Access Hollywood interviewer. And they have it down pretty well. They all have that empty, fluffy, celebrity-worshipping, bullshit ice-cream attitude that every executive producer of every TV entertainment show tends to like and hire. They all suffer from Ben Lyons disease (which, trust me, will probably lead to high-paying gigs for most of them when they get out of school).

If you care (and I know it’s much hipper not to) please help stamp out the Stepford virus and vote for Distenfeld. You’ll be helping to shape the tone of future TV entertainment coverage if you do.

Smart employers always hire the X-factor types. Because they’re the ones who (a) will probably do the best job and (b) will probably resign within 18 months to take a higher-paying job (or one with better opportunities). It goes without saying that most employers tend to hire the imitative chimpanzees because they like being bowed down to. This is one reason why the world is so fucked up — i.e., the wrong people have the best jobs. A confederacy of clones.

“Disgorge, Fat Cats” — Maureen Dowd, N.Y. Times, 2.1. “Herbert Hoover Lives” — Frank Rich, N.Y. Times, 2.1.

“I sometimes feel sorry for the good friends of mine that made it too quickly in their careers and got too soft and rich and complacent to develop the panoply of skills to shepherd their own dreams along. Unless they do catch up fast they will surely and sadly miss the next big, wonderful, entrepreneurial phase of this industry. [Because] it’s common knowledge that the coming reality in the not-too-distant future is going to let us all work and play inside of a brand new paradigm.” — Director-writer-actor Mike Binder in a 1.29 piece for TheWrap.com

“Sometimes there’s a [kind] of blockbuster whose grosses can’t be predicted by even the wisest of box-office sages,” writes Vulture‘s Lane Brown.

“For example, who could possibly have anticipated Paul Blart: Mall Cop‘s explosive $39 million opening weekend? Certainly not Sony Pictures, who admitted in yesterday’s LA Times that they barely thought it’d make half that. And now, as their movie Segways speedily toward $100 million, it’s finally helped give a catchy name to all films with outsize profits and similarly awfulsome premises: Blarts.

“How does one identify a Blart? Sometimes they feature the Rock as an NFL star who unexpectedly becomes the father of an 8-year old and must, for some reason, perform ballet (The Game Plan, $90 million domestic). Others star Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy as members of the same biker gang (Wild Hogs, $168 million). Did your movie earn $94 million with a cast that included George Lopez as the voice of a dog (Beverly Hills Chihuahua), or $217 million, thanks to a trailer that featured computer-generated rodents eating their own poo (Alvin and the Chipmunks)? Congratulations — you Blarted!

“The only things Blarts usually share are family-friendliness, an inexplicably enormous gross, and a screenplay that seems like it was probably submitted on a dare (also, it helps if a participating actor publicly refers to it as a ‘piece of shit.'”

If I may be so bold, a “Blart” is a film that has hit the jackpot with the lower end of the American middle-class gene pool. Simple.

Celebrating the first-ever HE post from 35,000 feet! American Airlines’ Gogo “air” is pretty fast, I must say. We’re somewhere over New Mexico, my laptop is jammed up against the seat in front of me, and the American stewardesses are graciously selling turkey and cheese sandwiches for $10.

Waiting to leave on an American flight to JFK, in sometime around 9:45 pm. But there’s an in-flight online option for $11.95! First time I’ve ever seen this offered to coach. Great.

It’s no secret that Wayne Kramer‘s Crossing Over (Weinstein Co., 2.27), which I saw last night, has had a difficult (some would say agonized) post-production history. The integrity of Kramer’s vision violated up the wazoo, all kinds of re-editing and arguing about which cut works better, Sean Penn ‘s footage being cut from the film over his discomfort with an Iranian honor-killing subplot, etc.

Generally speaking a film that goes through this much grief and second-guessing ends up feeling muddled and compromised all to hell. I’m not saying that Crossing Over is a masterwork — it’s not. It uses a familiar strategy — five or six story lines woven into a social-issue tapestry — in an attempt to be an illegal-immigrant Traffic. But it’s really Crash. To some, I realize, that might sound like a heartless thing to say, but Crossing Over isn’t half bad within the boundaries of its scheme and particularly given what Kramer had to deal with. The bruises and abrasions show, but it has a certain integrity. You can feel the efforts of a strong impassioned director trying like hell to make it work.

Crossing Over needed to be rougher and longer and less contrained. More probing and more exposition would have helped with some…okay, many of the characters. There’s an abbreviated, pruned-down feeling to the narrative, suggesting that a certain amount of nervy, rude material may have gone by the wayside.

It’s basically an in-and-out thing, but it catches a good groove about 30 minutes in and pretty much holds onto it right to the end. There are several scenes that work well, and one or two that are serious gut-slammers.

There’s a curiously touching moment when a sleazy INS officer played by Ray Liotta suddenly becomes the Heartbreak Kid — and what his character says and does is unexpected and rewarding in a roundabout way. There’s a grocery-store robbery-and-shootout scene between Cliff Curtis and a gang of Asian gang-bangers (and particularly a terrified young recruit whom Curtis faces down) that flirts with ridiculousness but is finally riveting and daring as hell.

I’m not going to say any more, but Crossing Over is by no means a wipeout. It has its moments and intrigues and curious sidelights. It just should have been longer and more wild-ass — more willing to offend. Too much second-guessing went into it, and I’m sorry for that. And I wish Penn hadn’t bailed.

Nikki Finke posted a story yesterday afternoon about Eat Pray Love, an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert‘s spiritual-seeker book (a kind of lah-lah travelling pants Siddhartha) that’ll be produced by Sony after getting jettisoned by Paramount. The thing that caught my eye was Finke calling Julia Roberts, who’s set to star under director Ryan Murphy, a “has-been actress.”

Roberts has been low-flaming it over the last two or three years (certainly since the middling response to Closer), but until just now I hadn’t applied the word “over” to Roberts’ career. But maybe it is. No one had specifically said so before yesterday. It’s up to the HE crowd now. How done is Roberts? And is it necessarily a tragedy that she had her 13 or 14 years in the sun — late ’80s to early 21st Century — and then decided to downshift for whatever personal reason?

North of Point Dume, driving south to Los Angeles — Friday, 1.30.09, 12:05 pm.

Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo

Speaking to Reuters’ reporter Alex Dobuzinskis about the hard-times downsizing of Hollywood’s two trade papers (and the much-discussed possibility that the Reporter‘s print version may be gone a year from now), Variety president and publisher Neil Stiles said he “doubts his paper’s award ads will migrate to the web because studios get more punch from print,” Dobuzinski writes.

Variety Group publisher Neil Stiles

Or, to put it another way, an issue of Daily Variety “hangs around in an agent’s office, people see it,” Stiles said. ‘It’s very visible in a very tangible way. Online tends to be more of a question where someone would have to go online to find it.'”

No offense, but this is a view you’ll never hear from a 40-and-under Hollywood player. Only boomers and baby-busters say, “Gee, where do I go online to find this or that? Maybe Google will tell me.” I know the sense of tangible there-ness that comes when you see a copy of Variety sitting around someone’s office, but Stiles’ comment is a regrettably typical boomer’s view of online showbiz culture.

The perennial cultural-generational divide in perceptions between the over-50 types (certainly the over 60s) and the under-40s continues, and never the twain shall meet.