The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone chatting about Oscar blogging and taking shots at pundits like Patrick Goldstein and Scott Foundas, who’ve accused them (and the Oscar-blogging comunity in general) of focusing too much on the race and not enough on the films.

The Clinton campaign’s “other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards,” N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich observes in today’s issue.
“In October, USA Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr. Obama among African-American Democrats by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent. But once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought.
“In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), ‘the black candidate’ (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself). The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote.
“Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have ‘not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.’ Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was ‘making a historical statement.’
“It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists.”

I have to go to a BAFTA awards viewing party that starts around 11:30 am. Maybe I can file a story or two from this location. I can certainly post a couple of photos.

Isabel Coixet‘s The Dying Animal, which is apparently screening today in Berlin Film Festival, is an erotic drama about a university professor (Ben Kingsley) having a scorching affair with a much younger Cuban student (Penelope Cruz), and the mad possessiveness (stemming from a fear of death) that this alliance brings out in him.

Unreviewed so far (later tonight?), The Dying Animal is based on a Phillip Roth novel of the same name; the title comes from something (a line, a poem… whatever) written by William Butler Yeats, who had a thing for younger women as well.
For the average moviegoer, of course, The Dying Animal is going to be seen as another film about Kingsley doing his wackjob thing — i.e., playing characters who either embody or succumb to an intense but arresting eccentricity bordering on madness. This is what he’s principally become known for since his great seminal performance as Don Logan in Sexy Beast, which came out seven and a half years ago.
Kingsley has played many different sorts, but his nutters attract the most attention. The irresponsible, pot-smoking therapist in The Wackness. The alcoholic hitman in You Kill Me. The nutter criminal type in Lucky Number Slevin. The deranged Herman Tarnower in Mrs. Harris. Is it fair to say that the saner and more rational his characters are, the less engaging Kingsley’s performances are?

Diablo Cody took the WGA’s original screenplay award for Fox Searchlight’s Juno and Ethan and Joel Coen have taken the adapted screenplay trophy for Miramax’s No Country for Old Men at tonight’s WGA Awards show.

“What do you mean one of the most violent movies of all time?” Sylvester Stallone says to Scotland on Sunday about Rambo. “It is the most violent movie of all time!” Slight amendment: it’s also, at times, the funniest super-violent film of all time.

In a letter earlier today to NBC News president Steve Capus about the flap over MSNBC’s David Shuster‘s comment that the Clinton campaign had “pimped out” 27-year old Chelsea Clinton by having her call super-delegates and three of the View regulars, Hillary Clinton said that suspending Shuster isn’t enough — she wants him whacked. This is who she is and what she is — a seething revenge harridan, back-arched, ready to wield the knife at the drop of a hat. Most liberals agree with Hillary (as do I for the most part), but has there been a more loathsome would-be Presidential candidate on the Democratic side in terms of personality and character? Here‘s the letter.

Strange cyborg art created seven years ago for the old Reel.com column, inspired by Jude Law‘s “Gigolo Joe” character in Steven Spielberg‘s underwhelming A.I.: Artifical Intelligence. No biggie but I’d forgotten about this. It was going to be a regular column. Bad idea.

Can we add A.I. to the list of films we’re never going to see or think about ever again? I think that’s an article, no? Permanent Banishings of Filmland, or movies you’d like removed from your memory a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Electric chair executions were yesterday suspended in Nebraska, which had been the only state to rely solely on electrocution as its sole method of dispatching the condemned. This doesn’t mean the barbaric practice is totally finished in the U.S. since, as the N.Y. Times‘ Adam Liptak has reported, “seven states allow at least some inmates to choose electrocution instead of lethal injection [and] two others, Illinois and Oklahoma, have designated electrocution as the fallback method should lethal injection be ruled unconstitutional.”

But it’s enough for all of us, I feel, to declare now and forever that Frank Darabont‘s The Green Mile — a movie about a nice-guy prison guard (Tom Hanks) and a little white mouse bearing witness as one death-row prisoner after another gets fried to death — matters even less than it did when it first came out. I hated this application of sentimental sadism with a passion when I first saw it eight and a half years ago, but these feelings have only grown over the years.
I for one would like to say goodbye forever to it. No more DVD rentals, no critical revisionist essays from Scott Foundas or F.X. Feeney, no more watching it on TCM….banish it from the collective unconscious. Am I alone on this?

I finally got around to watching the two Real Geezers videos on YouTube last night, and they’re actually pretty good. And I love that meowing cat in the background! Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor) and producer and former writer’s agent Marcia Nasatir (The Big Chill) are sharp and seasoned and don’t mince words.

Semple’s Michael Clayton love is relentless — he’s voting for Tilda Swinton in the Best Supporting Actress category. Nasatir also in her worshipping of George Clooney. Semple loves Diablo Cody and Julie Christie, hates Lars and the Real Girl, and isn’t all that moved by Hal Holbrook. The segments provide a fascinating eavesdrop into the thinking of the industry’s 70-and-older generation. Part 1 is below; here‘s part 2.

With the WGA having finalized its tentative agreement with the AMPTP, over 10,000 writers on both coasts will review the details and vote to ratify or reject them in meetings today in Los Angeles and New York.

Weirdly, the New York writers are meeting less than an hour from now — 2 pm Eastern at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Times Square (B’way and 49th) — but the Los Angeles writers won’t convene at the Shrine Auditorium until 7 pm this evening or 10 pm Eastern, a full eight-hour workday after the NYC gathering.
The WGA West board of directors and the WGA East Council “will meet Sunday to formally endorse the contract. Writers could be back at work as early Monday, depending on whether the WGA√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s ruling bodies decide whether to end the three-month strike at those Sunday meetings,” the Variety story (filed this morning at 3:38 am) reads.
So the Oscars are definitely on, people are going to have to come up with new parties to replace the ones that were cancelled (like the Vanity Fair soiree), Nikki Finke‘s Deadline Hollywood Daily is about to go back to being just another Hollywood website, and all-over “normalcy” (a term coined either during the Warren G. Harding or Calvin Coolidge administrations) is about to kick back in.
“The WGA West board of directors and the WGA East Council will meet Sunday to formally endorse the contract. And writers could be back at work as early Monday, depending on whether the WGA√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s ruling bodies decide whether to end the three-month strike at those Sunday meetings.
Leaders of the WGA made the announcement of the finalized deal early Saturday after spending much of Friday meeting with lawyers over the contract language. WGA West president Patric Verrone and WGA East prexy Michael Winship sent a message to members that stressed the gains made in the new-media sector.
“It is an agreement that protects a future in which the internet becomes the primary means of both content creation and delivery,” they said. “It creates formulas for revenue-based residuals in new media, provides access to deals and financial data to help us evaluate and enforce those formulas, and establishes the principle that, ‘When they get paid, we get paid.’ ”

Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is reporting that the moderately detestable Fool’s Gold will end up Sunday night with $22.6 million, having earned $7.8 million yesterday (i.e., Friday). Martin Lawrence‘s Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins will finish a distant second with a lousy $14.1 million. The Hannah Montana concert pic has nose-dived 65% from last weekend’s debut tally, but will nonetheless place third with $11 million. Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Show is also a tank.
The weekend’s biggest disaster, however, is unquestionably Paris Hilton‘s The Hottie & The Nottie, Mason reports. It opened yesterday on 111 screens “and managed only $76 in ticket sales per location. That means that approximately 10 people showed up and bought a ticket at each of those 111 theatres today. Hottie will sell only an anticipated $23,000 during the 3-day weekend for a $207 perscreen average. That√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s about 26 ticket buyers per location for Friday-Sunday.”