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.

I’m leaving now for the Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica. Well, within 15 or 20 minutes. They’ll be broadcast on IFC Channel starting at 2 pm Pacific. I’ll try to post reactions and photos as they happen.

Politico‘s Jeffrey Ressner is reporting that “a major documentary” about Sen. Barack Obama is being produced by Edward Norton‘s Class 5 Productions and directed by Amy Rice, sister of Andrew Rice, an Oklahoma state senator and U.S. Senate candidate.
Rice and Norton have shot “staggering amounts” of “revealing behind-the-scenes footage for the untitled project, which has been ongoing for roughly two years.” One advantage these filmmakers enjoy, says Ressner, is “near-exclusive access,” having “engaged directly with Obama and won his staff’s trust in the year before he even announced his presidential candidacy.”
But “it could be years before the Obama doc is even seen, much less has an impact on his reputation,” Ressner qualifies. “The film is still being shot and producers won’t begin editing until his race for the presidency has ended.”
What? Why wouldn’t Rice have been editing all along? Alex Gibney or Oliver Stone or Michael Moore would never play it this way. If she’s only just shooting and assembling footage with plans to start editing after the campaign is over, then I’m saying here and now that she’s a novice and a dilly-dallyer who’s not to be taken seriously.
A serious pro would have the final doc assembled no more than four to six months after this November’s election. If I were directing it I would try to get it into the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Ass-dragging doesn’t cut it anymore in documentary circles. If Rice is only going to start editing nine months from now, forget it. Nobody will see anything until late ’09 or perhaps even 2010 this way. She’s not for real. The train is moving too fast these days with fortunes and changes in the national mood changing much too quickly to abruptly for documentarians to dither and delay and piddle around.

I love that the last-minute Oscar situation seems fluid and uncertain enough for odd and unlikely predictions to be advanced by serious people. One example of this is The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil predicting a George Clooney Best Actor win for his performance in Michael Clayton. It won’t happen but I love flirting with the possibility. Any Oscar win that surprises or freaks people out is “good” in my book.

Boiled down, O’Neil is making the Clooney call because, like me, he’s impressed with the pro-Clayton, pro-Swinton, pro-Clooney sentiments voice by Real Geezer commentators Marcia Nasatir and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who’ve become the most distinctive (influential?) voices in the Oscar-prognosticator community of late. I love these guys. They’re a window into the thinking of Hollywood’s over-the-hill gang.

O’Neil isn’t saying Clooney deserves the Oscar more than There Will be Blood‘s Daniel Day Lewis. He’s simply saying that the “yuts” like Clooney more because they love his clubhouse smoothie aura, and that’s that. They don’t care about the rest.

Newsweek‘s David Ansen has joined those predicting a win for Michael Clayton‘s Tilda Swinton in the Best Supporting Actress category. He’s not calling this a certainty as much as confessing he has a hunch along these lines, the rationale being that voting for Swinton is “a way [for Academy members] to honor a movie they like, and an uncompromising actor who’s paid her dues in movies both far-out and mainstream.”

Ansen informs, incidentally, the Cate Blanchett‘s name is supposed to be pronounced “BLANCHIT and not BLANSHETTE, as if it were French.” He got it straight from the horse’s mouth.