Sweeney Todd wins Best Art Direction Oscar, which I had on my sheet. Deserved. Dante Ferreti‘s soft, delicate Italian accent.

Dwayne Johnson delivering the Best Visual Effects Oscar, which moves me not. The cool effects are the ones you don’t notice. The team behind The Golden Compass, the bomb that rocked New Line Cinema, wins. Who cares? Nobody. Not me anyway. I hate blatant CGI.

Late start with live-blog (indecision at the liquor store), but the makeup Oscar going to the La Vie En Rose guys is a favorable indication of Marion Cotillard winning Best Actress….no?

I’ve never understood the difference between sound editing and sound mixing, even if someone writes in and explains it all in Jack-and-Jill terms, like I’m an idiot. I’ll certainly never understand things in a way that will help me decide which No Country For Old Men sound nomination to mark on my ballot — Skip Lievsay for Sound Editing, or Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland for Sound Mixing. And don’t tell me I’m slow or stupid. Nobody understand this stuff.

Among Nikki Finke‘s list of tips about the content of tonight’s Oscar show: “Queen Latifah, one of the scheduled presenters, had a family emergency and had to drop out.”

That’s an uptick in my book. I respect the fact that downmarket award presenters tend to raise viewership levels, but Queen Latifah fans are probably among that broad sector of the public that wouldn’t watch There Will Be Blood at the point of a knife so who needs’ em?
Sooner or later it’s going to sink in among Academy officials and Oscar producers that more and more this show is attracting a sizable, profitable (in terms of ad dollars) but diminished viewership. The chances of the ratings being at March 1998 levels (when Titanic was the big winner) are slim to none. Those days are over. Most people out there are too thick to get with the program — it’s a fact. Cut ’em loose, I say. Life is short.

“The Oscars maintain the capacity to surprise,” N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr reminded this morning. “This year it is writ that No Country will win best picture, that Javier Bardem is a lock for best supporting actor and that Daniel Day-Lewis‘s name will be announced when they open the envelope for best actor. But chances are, at least one of those things won’t happen.

“Two years ago we were all humming the Brokeback Mountain music at the end of the show when Jack Nicholson surprised everyone, including himself, by saying the word Crash. It is that moment we all wait for.”
Last licks — what will the big surprises be this evening? Is it fair at this stage to call Michael Clayton‘s Tilda Swinton winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar a surprise? Are we far enough along in this game to call Swinton not winning tonight a surprise?
If the charming Ellen Page, a first-rate actress, wins the Best Actress Oscar for Juno it won’t be as bad as if Eddie Murphy had won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar last year for Dreamgirls, but it sure won’t be cause for celebration. What it will be, plain and simple, will be “wrong.” If it happens, I will light a candle for Marion Cotillard, and my soul will become a living embodiment of Mudville.

I checked the entertainment and movies section of today’s New York Post for my piece about how the revolutionary Best Picture lineup of 1967 (the story of which is richly told in Mark Harris‘s just-published Pictures at a Revolution) to no avail.

I assumed they’d killed it because it was too dense or thinky or whatever. (I tried to write it like a borough guy but there’s a limit to such contortions.) Then my editor wrote back and said no, it’s in the paper — in the Opinion section.
What was I thinking? A totally reported piece about Hollywood then and now, zero opinion, running on Oscar Sunday with no links in the Movie Section. I guess it wouldn’t have made sense to run it in the Classifieds.
It’s called Year of the Brat with a subhead that reads “In 1967, the Young Turks Took Over Hollywood — And Invented ‘Indie’ Film.” Even if all they accomplished in ’67 — and this was no small potatoes — was to get themselves a solid foothold in a business that would continue to be stodgy and erratic and status-quo-minded in its constant attempts to kowtow to the chumps.
The best quote in the piece comes from Michael Clayton director-writer Tony Gilroy: “All those films and filmmakers [behind edgy 1967 nominees Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate] were jumping off the cliff. They didn’t know what was happening next.

“I think in the last 40 years, it’s become hard to see where the cliff is anymore,” Gilroy states. “There’s been a fundamental shift in what constitutes revolutionary. We’ve been through so much over the years [that] we’ve seen over the abyss. I think movies are less about astronomy today than quantum mechanics. They’re about going in rather than going out.”
On second thought, it’ll be kind of agreeable if Michael Clayton steals the Best Picture Oscar tonight. Quantum mechanics!

The Academy Awards represent “the self-assessment of a self-interested, self-involved professional clique,” writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. “It can be argued that, over the past decade or so, this roughly 6,000-member [Academy of Motion Pictures] has become more discerning, more willing to confer its blessings on quasi-independent, medium-budget films instead of the lumbering, middlebrow prestige productions it used to favor.
“Nowadays the main divisions of the studios — Columbia, Paramount, Universal and the rest — specialize in big-ticket entertainment aimed at a global audience. Their art-house subdivisions — the Miramaxes, Searchlights and Vantages — have taken over the business of supplementing cash with cachet.
“Connoisseurs may be satisfied with this arrangement — we can watch the broadcast without superciliousness or slumming — but a showbiz populist might complain that, in honoring the products of the studio specialty divisions, the academy has lost touch with the mass audience.”
Yes, it has — that is exactly what has happened — and thank heaven for that. The tastes and ticket-buyings of Gorilla Nation keep the film industry stable and flush, for the most part, and allow for the funding of the No Country‘s and There Will Be Blood‘s. But in the privacy of one’s home and in the company of trusted friends, there is nothing to do when discussing most of the Gorilla Nation favorites except shake your head and say, “What a bunch of fucking peasants.” And then maybe go outside and spit.
I found this Scott paragraph perplexing,by the way: “The system is not exactly winner-take-all, but it does leave behind a distressingly high number of designated losers, among them some of the most interesting and daring films of the year.
“It should not make a difference that, say, Into the Wild, Starting Out in the Evening and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead are barely represented in the Oscar sweepstakes. Your list of glaring omissions may be different, but if you’re among the passionate admirers of Lust, Caution or We Own the Night or 3:10 to Yuma, you are similarly stuck savoring the sour grapes of your own good taste.”
With the exception of Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, each of the above-mentioned films is an unqualified short-faller that has disappointed or offended or bored the pants off the vast majority of the people I know and suss things out with on a regular basis.
Yuma had a stirring and satisfying second act and a fine Russell Crowe performance, but it didn’t begin to approach the time-machine realism and visual majesty of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. (On top of which way too many guys got shot, and I really didn’t like those snow- covered plains being plainly visible just outside of that snow-free town where the final shoot-out occured.)
Starting Out in the Evening had too faint a pulse.
Much of Lust Caution was exquisitely made, but it had a perverse and incomprehensible ending that left most people stranded. Endings matter enormously.
We Own The Night had a great car-chase-in-a-rainstorm, but the rest of it was borough garbage.
And Into the Wild was finally alienating because Emile Hirsch‘s character was too selfish and egoistic.

There was grumbling and shoulder-shrugging at the Spirit Awards after-bash about Juno winning the best picture prize. Nobody dislikes it (myself included) but nobody I know thinks it aspires to greatness, much less achieves it. Over and over I heard “why?,” “I don’t get it,” “Whatever,” “I don’t know…obviously people like it,” “they were sucking up to Fox Searchlight,” etc.

Juno‘s Ellen Page

No problems in this corner with Juno star Ellen Page winning the best actress award, or with Diablo Cody winning the best first screenplay prize. They’re fine, but it just doesn’t seem right on some level to give Juno the absolute Big Kahuna top prize. Likeable, touching and well-made though it may be, it doesn’t drill into the groundwater. (A fear that Little Miss Sunshine definitely achieved.)
It’s supposed to mean something to win a Spirit Award, and right now, the Juno win has lowered the bar and made it all seem a tiny little less.

Once director-writer John Carney

I’m Not There‘s Cate Blanchett

Spirit Award-winner Diablo Cody

I have to be somewhere. I’ll get into it later. Above are four Spirit Awards snaps.

The wi-fi in the backstage press tent at the Spirit Awards is so pathetically weak that it insults the name. If I could find a 28 k dial-up connection, I’d take it. I’ve taken some good photos and have many impressions to share (80 % of which will evaporate by tonight or tomorrow morning) but it might as well be 1987 for all the connectivity here. (Typed on the damn iPhone.)

NPR’s Kim Masters and Pete Hammond talk about the unbridgable gulf between the savorers of Oscar-nominated films and performances (not to mention worshippers of 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days) and those enjoyed by Gorilla Nation.