“What’s wrong with the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. can’t be fixed by making members sign waivers or by banning parties during balloting,” Sharon Waxman wrote two days ago in the Los Angeles Times.
“The group needs, finally, to open its membership to a far broader pool, to encourage membership of bona fide journalists and critics — maybe even domestic ones.
“With the timeout provided by the strike, NBC Universal president and chief executive Jeff Zucker can make this happen. He should fix the Golden Globes or take them off the air for good.” And forego the potential of raking on $20 million in ad revenue? Jeff Zucker didn’t get to be Jeff Zucker by thinking like a reformist.

Bill Maher said something noteworthy about the WGA strike on last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher: “We’re very narcissistic out here in Hollywood, and I don’t think [the WGA strike is] the most important issue. But writers are important to me. As Paul McCartney once said, I’d rather have a band [to play with] than a Rolls Royce, and I’d rather have my writers than a Rolls Royce. And for sure, corporations are taking over everything and strangling this country and strangling little men. We do need unions more than ever but…

Because No Country for Old Men has gotten 7 guild mentions (ACE, ADG, ASC, CAS, DGA, 3 from SAG, WGA), There Will Be Blood has gotten 6 (ACE, ADG, ASC, DGA, one from SAG, WGA), Into The Wild 5 (ACE, CAS, DGA, four from SAG, WGA), Michael Clayton 5 (ACE, ADG, DGA, three from SAG, WGA) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly 4 (ASC, ADG, DGA, WGA), Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley believes these five are the most likely Best Picture candidates.
Disputes? Laments? With all due respect to talented good-guy Tony Gilroy, I say “no” to Michael Clayton. It’s a very fine and assured film of its type, but it’s nowhere near the achievement that Zodiac is and always will be. And I’d much rather see Once as a Best Picture nominee in place of My Left Eyelid. Wait…Tapley is saying the great Juno isn’t a likely Best Picture nominee? But it has to be because it’s making so much money…right?

An exceptionally well-cut tribute to the best 2007 dramas from Matt Shapiro, who regularly posts at http://www.worldofkj.com. The genius stroke is the use of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova‘s “Falling Slowly” as the “score.” Notice Shapiro’s choice of just the right cuts to accentuate the song’s final four chords. One error: using a line of Juno dialogue at the very end. It messes with the mood.

Rosebud-the-sled just wrote that with The Hottie and the Nottie, “the French now have another reason to hate us.” I’ve said over and over for years that movies like this are a major symbolic reason why Islamic fundamentalists despise Western culture and materialist values, and not without justification.
I have an idea that addresses this. In the same way that primitive South Sea cultures have been known to sacrifice a young girl to the Gods by throwing her into a volcano, we give Paris Hilton to Al Qeada. We deliver her, sedated, bound and blindfolded, to a location of their choosing and let them do whatever they want to her. It would be our way of saying, “As far as Paris Hilton is concerned, we get where you’re coming from. In fact, we sort of agree with you.”
It sounds horrific on one level, but a gesture like this could be a significant step in defusing tensions between our cultures. One life in exchange for the beginnings of rapprochement and a turning of the page.

The ickiest and most ignoble promotion riding the coattails of Sundance ’08? How about The Hottie and the Nottie (Regent, 2.8), a seemingly vulgar relationship farce (to go by the trailer) starring Paris Hilton, Joel Moore and Christine Lakin? Moore has always been hot for Hilton, makes a pitch, gets the come-hither (total fantasy), has to deal with Hilton’s witch-ugly best friend (Lakin covered with grotesque “ugly” makeup), etc. Obviously a pathetic Troma-type deal.

Hilton will presumably attend the two Hottie and the Nottie parties on Sunday, 1.20 — a pre-party and an after-party (after what? is there a screening?) at the Bon Appetit Supper Club, 540 Main St., Park City. They’re being thrown by Livestyle Entertainment‘s David Manning.
From the mid ’80s to the mid ’90s, there was only one Sundance Film Festival. But over the last ten years (certainly since the turn of the century) it has split into two entities — the real-deal festival centered around screenings at the Eccles, Racket Club, Library, Prospector Square, Holiday Village and the Yarrow and the various dinners and parties celebrating various real-deal filmmakers, and the piggyback faux-festival that (a) happens on Main Street, (b) has nothing to do with movie-worship, (c) is primarily about companies looking to ride the Sundance hoopla in order to promote their brands and wares, and (d) is economically propelled by thousands of under-35 party animals who come to Park City to drink and score and go “hoo-hoo!” until 3 ayem for nine or ten days straight.
If anyone has heard of anything more odious than The Hottie and the Nottie as the flagship for the faux-festival, please inform and I’ll take a look.

According to “The Fattening of America” author Eric Finkelstein, the ballooning of America is less of a health problem than it is a “lifestyle choice.” Obesity, he asserts, “is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labor-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less.” Are you hearing this guy? He’s enabling — he’s selling the idea that obesity is a so-whatter.

Finkelstein’s book explains the prevalance of childen and adults with the bodies of sea lions has more than doubled in the U.S. between 1960 and 2004, rising from 13 % to around 33 %. That’s averaging in the blue areas where people actually exercise and try to eat healthily, of course. Visit any airport in any middle-American region and it’s obvious that at least 50% (if not more) are Jabba-sized.

“It can be a hostile country. There’s nothing living in those mountains that won’t sting or bite or stab you. If you molest the plant, the plant will spike you. If you molest the animal, the animal will bite you. If you disrespect the country, it will cripple you. But I am very comfortable there. It’s my home.”

So says Tommy Lee Jones about his home turf of San Saba county in Texas, where he runs a sizable cattle ranch, to the Guardian‘s Benjamin Secher. But hell….except for the past about the spiking plant, Jones could be talking about the culture of Hollywood. Show respect. Always show respect.

Help me out here: Just about a month ago (12.13.07), Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke ran an announcement about Brad Grey deciding to name Paramount Vantage chief John Lesher as the overall Paramount Motion Picture Group top dog & grand poobah in terms of creative and business-affairs shots for the general Paramount operation, including the film divisions of Paramount Vantage, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and BET.”
And now today, 1.12.08, L.A. Times business reporter Claudia Eller has run an official blah-blah announcement of pretty much the same story. If you get beat by another reporter then c’est la guerre, but to wait 30 days to run your own version…?

Fox Searchlight President Steve Gilula is “eyeing” the possibility of Fox Searchlight’s Juno crossing the $100 million mark, “though he cautions that interest could wane without warning,” according to a 1.10 Marketwatch report by Russ Britt. “But with expanding demographics and little loss in business, it seems clear Juno has yet to peak. ‘There is no ceiling on this yet,’ Gilula said. ‘If we hold this weekend, there’s a huge, huge upside.'”

At one point in a 1.21 New Yorker analysis piece about the results of the New Hampshire primary, called “Minority Report,” Ryan Lizza wonders if Barack Obama‘s final tally was influenced by the “Bradley effect” — a tendency of poorer, less-educated white voters to say they support this or that black candidate, and then turn tail when they’re in the privacy of a voting booth.
“The evidence is murky, but his campaign believes the question is important enough to warrant study. When I asked a senior Obama adviser whether the Bradley effect was a possible explanation for the gap between the final poll numbers, which showed Obama leading by an average of eight points, and the ultimate outcome, he replied, ‘Definitely.’
“He added, ‘If so, then the question is: what’s different between Iowa and New Hampshire? It could be that the socially acceptable thing in front of your neighbor at a caucus could be different than what you do in a secret ballot. Obviously, that’s something we’re going to be trying to figure out as we go forward, primarily through polling. I know people are working on ways of asking questions about getting at people’s attitudes about race. We’re working on this.”