One of the biggest outrages in the history of the Academy’s foreign film committee — a scandal fed by deficient taste and myopic, mule-like obstinacy — has just happened with the release of the nine-film short list that doesn’t include Cristian Mungiu‘s widely hailed 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. The people who pushed for this decision need to be identified and, with all charity and compassion, expelled from this group for life. What will it take? Torches and pitchforks at the corner of Wilshire and La Peer at 8 pm this evening?

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days star Anamaria Marinca

The foreign-committee nominators were in no way obliged to salute this landmark film as their absolute favorite, but to not even put it on the short list (much less include it among the five nominees, from which the winner of the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar would be chosen) is intolerable and inexcusable. This is truly a Day of Infamy. I’m not trying to be Franklin D. Roosevelt here, but these people have embarassed themselves and the Academy and reflected on the industry as a whole…it’s laughable.
A “name” player associated with the foreign branch shared the following a few minutes ago: “I’m embarassed. I think it’s humiliating and unfair, and I’m shocked…shocked at this omission.”
Among other prizes, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days won the ’07 European Film Awards’ Best Picture prize, the ’07 Cannes Palme d’Or, and it was named Best Foreign Film by the National Society of Film Critics, the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Toronto Film Critics Association. It also won the Bronze Horse For Best Film and Best Actress from the Stockholm Film Festival 2007.
The films chosen for the nine-film short list are the following: The Counterfeiters, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, Days of Darkness, Beaufort,, The Unknown, Mongol, Katyn, 12 and The Trap. Yes, that’s right — Persepolis, the French entry, also got the boot, and so did Juan Antonio Bayona‘s absolutely brilliant The Orphanage.

Laura Vasilu, Vlad Ivanov

Somewhere between 300 and 400 people voted for the nine films. Exaggerating only slightly, a veteran marketer described the foreign film branch this morning as “all retired, their median age is 75, a lot of them are on walkers and they have very conservative tastes.”

Hollywood Interrupted‘s Mark Ebner talking to Rush & Molloy about the Tom Cruise Scientology recruitment video that was up for a while on Sunday and early Monday before it was yanked. Again — it’s not what Cruise believes or how he expresses himself that gets me. It’s that insane narrator. He sounds just like the guy who narrated the opening of the ’50s Superman TV series with George Reeves. That strident tone of barking machismo…whew.

Hitler isn’t jiving about Paramount. The word for the last week or so is that it’s only a matter of time before they capitulate to Blu-Ray. A brilliant piece. “Blades of Glory?…are you fucking kidding me?”

Asked by New York‘s Boris Kachka about Hillary Clinton‘s “tearful turnaround” in New Hampshire, November playwright David Mamet says, “Well, I only heard something on the radio. I don’t think I’m misquoting her. She said, ‘I have so many opportunities for America.’ [Long pause.] That’s kind of wonderfully revelatory. It’s not that there are so many opportunities for America, but she has so many opportunities for America.”

A footnote in the piece adds that “while this quotation was attributed to Clinton, it was later reported that she said, “I have so many opportunities from this country.”

“It’s better to have the camel inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” — a fundamental rule of political alliance and accommodation, but originally spoken by whom about whom? I’ve been repeating the conventional wisdom that it was Lyndon Johnson explaining why he appointed J. Edgar Hoover head of the FBI for life in the mid ’60s, but a friend says some other politician or essayist said this first in the 1920s.

“Buyers [coming to Sundance ’08] say they are looking carefully at three star-packed films aimed at young audiences: Hamlet 2 (with Steve Coogan and Elisabeth Shue), about a high-school drama course that puts on a musical sequel to Shakespeare’s play; The Wackness (with Mary-Kate Olsen), about a high-school kid growing up in New York who pays his therapist with marijuana; and Assassination of a High School President (with Mischa Barton), about a newspaper nerd and popular girl at a Catholic high school who investigate stolen SAT exams.” — from a 1.12.08 Wall Street Journal piece by Lauren A.E. Schuker.

A publicist friend just said to me, “I don’t know if Barack Obama is prepared to be president.” And I said, “And Bush 43 was? An intellectually challenged frontman for vested oil and other military- industrial interests, and a putty-like pawn of his father’s right-wing friends? Abraham Lincoln, a jack-legged legislator from Illinois with a knack for plain talk and “reading” people and political accommodation, was prepared? JFK had gone to U.S. Presidents School and was fully prepared? Bill Clinton hit the ground running? Jimmy Carter‘s training as Georgia’s governor was adequate preparation, and he used that background to form a brilliant political consensus and provide masterful leadership for the U.S.?
Leadership is about judgment, brains, vision, alliances, consensus-building. It’s time to turn the page, start the 21st Century engine and roll the dice.
Then my publicist pal wondered if America is ready for a black president, and I said there are at least 43 or 44 shades of non-Anglo Saxon pigmentation, and 43 or 44 different types of personalities and value systems to go with each. By any cultural standard I’ve ever known or gone by, I said to her, Barack Obama isn’t black — he’s latte. Which feeds into the term “Starbucks liberals,” who (apparently) compose the base of his support. Or at least the emotional base.
We need to prove to the world and ourselves that our multicultural society means something more than just statistics and percentages and charts, and we need to show to the pan-Arabic world that the term “American leadership” is not just about oil and imperialism and belligerence, and is not synonymous with right-wing ogres like Dick Cheney.
And I don’t know about that Bobby Kennedy guy either, I said. I don’t know if I can trust him. He’s only 42 years old. He’s the son of a corrupt multi-millionaire, the brother of a flagrant womanizer, and he worked for Sen. Joseph McCarthy and has a long reputation for hard, ruthless behavior. And who says he’s been such a great U.S. Senator? Has he ever heard of birth control? And he didn’t have the courage to stand up to Lyndon Johnson‘s Vietnam War policy on his own — he let Eugene McCarthy do it first, and then he jumped in after the waters had been tested.
I don’t know. I really don’t know. Hubert Humphrey has a lot more experience, and so does Richard Nixon, for that matter. I think people should vote for one of these two and let Kennedy wait his turn, maybe try again in ’76.

“There are signs of resistance to another Clinton administration,” according to a N.Y. Times story by Robin Toner and Marjorie Connelly about a recent N.Y. Times/CBS News poll. “Thirty-eight percent said they thought it was bad for two families — the Bushes and the Clintons — to hold the presidency for so long.” Really? People don’t think it’ll be kinda cool for the same two families to be running things for (if Hillary Clinton wins and gets two terms) a total of 28 years?

If I was inhabiting the mind and body of Warner Bros. honcho Jeff Robinov, I’d say “of course!” to those urging that the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows be made into two films. That way I’d double the grosses and include the dozens of plot details in the 776-page book that would otherwise have to be sacrificed. And I’d get Guillermo del Toro to direct them both.
Now…that doesn’t mean I would necessarily sit through these films. (This is Hollywood Elsewhere inside the body of Robinov, remember.) Naturally, the prospect of having to endure yet another Harry Potter film fills me with dread. The idea that intelligent people might actually find these films haunting or absorbing is ludicrous. The Potter films are about the corporates and the creatives making money and poor sods like me suffering, suffering…sitting in the dark and trudging through…slosh, slosh. I have been there, I have been there…and I would rather go to the dentist.

After seeing There Will be Blood and relishing the now-legendary “I drink your milkshake!” scene, it occured to the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell (and perhaps a few hundred others) that the “milkshake” line might be an anachronism, since the scene in which it’s spoken is set in 1927 or ’29 or somewhere in there. Howell was under the impression that milkshakes had been invented sometime in the early to mid 1930s.
But he checked Wikipedia’s milkshake page and “lo and behold, not only were they invented but they were a fast-growing fad. On top of which it’s quite plausible that Daniel Plainview was not only drinking other people’s milkshakes, but ones made with newfangled electric blenders. All indicating that Paul Thomas Anderson really did his homework. Impressive.”

Atonement is dead again. The nominations for the Producers Guild of America feature film award are The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. The winner will be announced during a ceremony that will be somewhat ignored when it happens on February 2nd at the Beverly Hilton. Nobody wants to get too excited about anything to do with producers, i.e., the bad guys who won’t give even a little bit in strike negotiations with the WGA.