Not quite the full remainder of this morning’s Oscar nominations, with predictions and quips:
BEST FOREIGN FILM: Beaufort, Israel; The Counterfeiters, Austria; Katyn, Poland; Mongol, Kazakhstan; and 12, Russia. The year’s finest foreign language film is 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The people who excluded it are morons and need to be identified and divested of power. What Will Win?: Nobody cares. The whole category has been soiled by the 4 Months brouhaha.
BEST ANIMATED FILM: Persepolis, Ratatouille and Surf’s Up. What Will Win?: Ratatouille.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Juno, Lars & the Real Girl, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, The Savages. Who/What Will Win?: Diablo Cody for Juno or Tony Gilroy for Michael Clayton.
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Atonement, Away from Her, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Who/What Will Win?: The Coens’ No Country screenplay.
BEST ART DIRECTION: American Gangster, Atonement, The Golden Compass, Sweeney Todd and There Will Be Blood. Who/What Will Win?: Sweeney Todd as a makeup for getting Best Picture snubbed.
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood. Who/What Will Win?: Roger Deakins for Jesse James.
BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM: No End in Sight, Operation Homecoming, Sicko, Taxi to the Dark Side, War/Dance. Who/What Will Win?: No End in Sight.
BEST SOUND MIXING: The Bourne Ultimatum, No Country for Old Men, Ratatouille, 3:10 to Yuma and Transformers. Who/What Will Win?: Dunno…No Country? Which had excellent sound. (Remember how you can hear Javier Bardem unscrewing of the light bulb in the second-floor hallway of the small Texas hotel.) But please, please, please not Transformers!
BEST SOUND EDITING: The Bourne Ultimatum, No Country for Old Men, Ratatouille, There Will Be Blood
and Transformers. Who/What Will Win?: No clue at all. Anyone?
BEST FILM EDITING: The Bourne Ultimatum, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, Into the Wild, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Who/What Will Win?: I would say Bourne Ultimatum, but I haven’t a clue.
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: Atonement, The Kite Runner, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille and 3:10 to Yuma.
BEST ORIGINAL SONG: “Falling Slowly,” Once; “Happy Working Song,” Enchanted; “Raise It Up,” August Rush; “So Close,” Enchanted; “That’s How You Know,” Enchanted. Who/What Will Win?: It has to be Glenn Hansard and Marketa Irglova for Once…right?
I’m too fevered and fatigued to type out the last four categories today. I’ll get to it tomorrow or whatever. I’ve got a bad-ass virus and intending to lay low today.

Just for the record, this morning’s Academy nominations plus predictions and scattered reactions:
BEST PICTURE: Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. (Juno doesn’t belong with the other four — in a better world, being “really likable” and making lots of money wouldn’t translate into a Best Picture nom, especially with masterpieces like Zodiac and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford being cold-shouldered, and with a much more affecting spiritual delight like Once also getting the shaft.) What Will Win?: No Country for Old Men….I think.
BEST DIRECTOR: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood; Joel & Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men; Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton; Jason Reitman, Juno; and Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly. (Schabel’s is an attaboy/gmme nomination — meaningless without a Butterfly Best Picture nom.) Who Will Win?: the Coen boys.
BEST ACTOR: George Clooney, Michael Clayton (still don’t get this…a very strong and lived-in performance and Clooney’s second best perf ever after Syriana, but it doesn’t meet my criteria for “award-quality” — how about a nomination for Sturdiest Lead Male performance?); Daniel “I drink your milkshake” Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood; Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd; Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah; Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises. (“I yam Rauhssian and good with a knife, and if you attack me in a steam bath I will fight you in a way that will get the attention of certain female journalists.”) Who Will Win?: Lewis.
BEST ACTRESS: Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age (what?…welcome to the clueless blue-hair vote…aesthetically-challenged empties who are enormously impressed by histrionics and costumes); Julie Christie, Away from Her; Marion Cotillard, La Vie En Rose; Laura Linney, The Savages (well deserved); Ellen Page, Juno. Who Will Win?: Between Christie and Cotillard. HE has stood by Cotillard all the way. She should win unless the oldies get together and decided to give Christie, who is superb in Away From Her, an admiration-plus-nostalgia vote.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men; Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War (Toby Kebbell, the guy who played the same kind of smart-ass character in Control, was better); Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild; Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton. Who Will Win?: Bardem.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There; Ruby Dee, American Gangster; Saoirse Ronan, Atonement; Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone; Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton (well deserved). Who Will Win?: It’s between Blanchett and Ryan.
More to come in a few….

With a Best Picture nomination under its belt, I guess it’s not appropriate to use “poor” as an Atonement adjective any more. The fact that Joe Wright didn’t get a Best Director nomination means the Academy voters liked it mainly for “soft” reasons — Brideshead Revisited vibe, moving love story, period sets and costumes. But Atonement nonetheless received three prestige-level nominations — Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress (Saoirse Ronan) and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The four “soft” Atonement nominations are for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Score and Best Costume Design.
As noted elsewhere, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood got eight nominations each — cheers and a clink of glasses for Miramax (which landed 21 nominations in total) and Paramount Vantage.
Michael Clayton earned six nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director (Tony Gilroy), Best Actor (George Clooney), Best Supporting Actor (Tom Wilkinson) and Best Supporting Actress (Tilda Swinton). Ratatouille, The Diving Bell & the Butterfly and Juno were handed four nominations each. The Bourne Ultimatum, Enchanted, Sweeney Todd and Transformers got three each.

Sundance rigors have made me sick — bod feels enervated, head feels virusy — but in my limited capacity I’m seeing at least one surprise among the just-announced Oscar nominees: Tommy Lee Jones being nommed as Best Actor for his performance in In The Valley of Elah. I called it for Jones in the Oscar Balloon all along, but I’m not aware of many other Oscar handicappers who did the same. This seems to me like a back-pat for the movie, for director-writer Paul Haggis…and a little bit of a slapdown for all the Elah dissers.
And you’d have to call Johnny Depp‘s getting a Best Actor nomination for Sweeney Todd a surprise also. Depp’s biggest supporter, The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, looked at the indicators and wrote his chances off not too long ago. In a similar semi-passionate way, the Depp nomination is about Academy members giving a half-assed back-pat for Sweeney Todd, which they didn’t like (much less love) enough to give a Best Picture nomination to.

I could run a final Oscar nomination prediction list (like Nathaniel at thefilmexperience.net has done), but I think I’ll just let it happen tomorrow morning and react at will. We’ve been over and over and over this, and Sundance is a demanding taskmaster. What will be will be. Part of me wants poor Atonement to get a Best Picture nomination, but that’s all I’ll say.

Steven Sebring‘s Patti Smith: Dream of Life is an authentic spiritual adventure film — a mostly black-and-white exploration of Smith’s life, loves, history, poetry, music, alliances, relationships, etc. It feels at times like a companion piece to D.A. Pennebaker‘s Don’t Look Back (the monochrome classic about Bob Dylan touring England in the mid ’60s), at other times like a patchwork meditation, a home movie, a concert film, a fashion show. It’s about music, heroes, rants, chants, parents, deaths, declarations and determinations.

For me, the authenticity is in the way Sebring has captured (or emulated) the grit and textures of Smith’s prose, and the fierce spiritual tension that her band music has always injected in one form or another. “Life is an adventure of our own design…a series of lucky and unlucky accidents,” yes…but having a locomotive inside you helps. There is no boredom or lethargy in this lady’s life…not a lick of this. The movie is a pleasure, a journey, an attic sift-through, a huge charge. I could see it again today if I wasn’t so buried.

A cell-phone image posted by dlpreviews (“a peer-reviewed entertainment review blog — A Doctor, A Lawyer and A Priest”) on 1.20. Taken at the AMC 24 Stonebriar in Frisco, Texas (a Dallas suburb) on the evening of Saturday, 1.19.

“You don’t need creativity to describe Park City this week,” the Salt Lake Tribune‘s Robert Kirby wrote this morning. Meaning that for sheer entertainment value, all he had to do last Saturday was cruise the streets and observe the after-chaos with Park City Police Sgt. Annette Ellis.
“The sun was up, but Friday night wasn’t over. Cops were still cleaning up the mess caused when the power on Main Street went out just as the bars loosed several thousand drunks. Also, some idiot stealing a flat screen TV from the Main Street Mall fell off the roof.
“Around 10 a.m., a guy woke and found a half-dressed drunk woman in his bathroom. Because he had no idea who she was, they argued over the fact that she was using his toothbrush. He called the cops.
“We arrived as the woman was leaving. Her Friday night must have been really busy. She had a skinned-up face, dog poop on her shoes and a blood-alcohol content still around 0.15. With the typical pick-a-fight logic of a drunk, the woman tried explaining her side: ‘I [deleted] went to a [deleted] party, OK?’ The cops let her go when no one pressed charges.
“The cops towed one celebrity’s Mercedes from a parking garage. It was unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. Inside were luggage, clothing, money and a ticket for driving 105 mph.
“I didn’t see any films, but there was plenty of entertainment. After lunch (lamb gyro for me) a dozen animal rights activists stood outside a fur shop. ‘Burn these buildings to the ground! It’s a fur war!’
“The opposition didn’t make any better sense. A few passers-by hollered that they loved animals because they taste so good. If the ability to reason is where we draw the line with our food, then we really should be able to eat those people as well.
“Sundance should give itself an award. Really, you can’t make this stuff up.”

A battle over Lance Hammer‘s Ballast is apparently brewing between Variety‘s Robert Koehler, who championed the film in a 1.19 review, and Screengrab‘s Mike D’Angelo, as indicated here.
I almost offered to have a bare-knuckled fist-fight with D’Angelo last summer over In The Valley of Elah. “Almost” means I was into the divine providence notion that if my support of Elah was fundamentally right and true (that Annie Lennox song excepted), God would help me defeat D’Angelo, and if D’Angelo was right I would be the loser. But I wasn’t entirely serious because getting into a fight would mean swollen hands and an inability to type for a two or three days.

Premiere.com’s Glenn Kenny reported yesterday afternoon about an ugly racial incident that happened to Sleep Dealer director Alex Rivera and his two stars, Luis Fernando Perla and Leonor Varela. The setting was one of the Main Street photo shoot/swag houses. Accompanied by Falco Ink’s Steve Beeman, they had an hour to kill after posing for photographs and decided to visit the upstairs swag suite. Perla and Varela were ushered in but Rivera was blocked at the door. “No directors,” he was told.
Beeman, understandably offended, told the swag girls that the Sleep Dealer trio “can buy their own t-shirts, they’re merely looking for a place to hang, they haven’t seen each other in over a year since the shooting, and so on. A brief consultation among swagmasters leads to the director’s entry into the hallowed sanctum. [But ] Rivera soon noticed that one of the room’s female attendants was dogging his every step.
“Are you following me?” Rivera asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Could you stop?”
“No. You might steal something.”
I can believe that a swag girl might conjure a paranoid fantasy of a Latino artist pocketing an item. Standard U.S. of A. racism. But it’s hard to believe that she would be so stupid and cloddish as to actually say the words “you might steal something.” Are we sure she didn’t say something more along the lines of “we’re just being careful” or…you know, something allusive instead of blunt?
Note: Kenny doesn’t identify the players by name in his piece. I was given the lowdown last night after a showing of Patti Smith: Dream of Life.
Followup: In a world of my own devising an organized demonstration would be held outside the photo shoot/swag sometime late this afternoon. The chant could be something along the lines of “Hey hey, ho ho, swag racists have to go!” An all-media advisory would be sent out this morning. The usual pitchforks and torches would be handed out of the back of a pickup truck on Swede Alley 30 minutes prior to the start of the demonstration. Flyers with a photo of swag girl who uttered the racist remark would be wild-posted all over town alongside a slogan that reads, “Who are we? Does Barack Obama have reason to be concerned?”