At the end of the New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony, No Country for Old Men producer Scott Rudin “came up with the Coen brothers at the end of the night and dedicated [their] best film win to Sydney Pollack,” reports N.Y. Times columnist David Carr. Rudin’s key remark: “If you grow up in New York, this is the award you hope you win and these are the two guys you hope you win it with.”

Hillary Clinton has been trying to “sell” her warm and fuzzy side for weeks now, and today — about three hours ago — she finally scored without “trying” to score. You can call her little Edmund Muskie-like meltdown “calculated” (as my 19 year-old son did on the phone an hour ago), but I sense a real person here — and for the first time in this campaign, I really kind of half-felt for her. For about a minute, I mean.

Imagine what the news media would make of, say, Mitt Romney‘s eyes turning red as he talks about how hard the campaign has been and how tired he is and how much he cares, etc.. Ask yourself honestly — what would they say? You know most of them would say that he’s soft and lacks the backbone to be a tough leader, etc. But because Hillary has been so clenched and frosty for so many months, people feel a little sorry for her when she cracks, and she actually gets points for this…it helps her.

But not from fellow campaigner John Edwards. He hadn’t seen the Hillary meltdown tape when he told CNN’s Dugald McDonnell earlier today, “I think what we need in a commander in chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are a tough business, but being President of the United States is also a very tough business. And the President of the United States is faced with very, very difficult challenges every single day, difficult judgments every single day.” But he said it nonetheless.

What? NBC And Hollywood Foreign Press Association are going to announce sometime this afternoon that not only is the 1.13.08 Golden Globes Awards telecast cancelled, but the show itself — tuxedos, red carpet, podiums, applause, acceptance speeches, etc. — won’t happen either. Not even happen as a private “senior prom” event. Instead, it will be a bare-bones news telecast of some kind, handled by NBC News. Why not just stage a senior prom? The ego and obstinacy of NBC honcho Jeff Zucker…that’s why.
A rep for HFPA spokesperson Mike Russell told me an official announcement would be coming out sometime after lunch. Order takeout, guys! Have it delivered! 4:31 pm update: Still no announcement!
Broadcast Film Critics Awards co-honchos Joey Berlin and John DeSimio are almost certainly dancing in the aisles and doing cartwheels as we speak. The Golden Globes collapse makes their Critics Choice Awards, which begins with red-carpet arrivals later this afternoon, the only visible awards show in town (along with the SAG Awards).
“The Hollywood writers strike can now claim its first awards show casualty,” Nikki Finke reported about an hour ago. “NBC will not be broadcasting a big Golden Globes show as planned for January 13th. Nor will a much ballyhooed unbroadcasted event be held, either. Instead, a stripped down announcements telecast will be aired by NBC News. It will consist of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association handing out Golden Globes to the winners, who will then pick up the awards and pass through a press room for photos and interviews.”
Presumable this means that Golden Globe after-parties are still happening? If so, where? Not near the Beverly Hills Hilton, right? Because with the BHH now shut down as Golden Globes central (the HFPA uses its ballroom for the event each year), what’s the point?

A week or so ago N.Y. Times Oscar blogger David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) called Atonement the Hillary Clinton of the ’07 Oscar season — a presumptive Best Picture nominee, early front-runner status, now falling behind and possibly even toast. Let’s just say it — it is toast as far as a Best Picture win is concerned. And yet it’s a very strong film. It moved me deeply at Toronto. What happened?

Is it fair to draw linkage?

“The media called it the front-runner early on and it had that hanging around its neck,” says Envelope handicapper and Maxim critic Pete Hammond. “And that’s what’s hurt it, those high expectations attached to the front-runner, like with Hillary I think people like the picture, but they go in with such high expectations, and it’s doesn’t seem to be getting that passionate, first-place vote. It seems to be getting third and fourth-place votes, but that may not be enough. It’s hard to say.”
I’m not saying the Atonement should withdraw from the race — it’s a respectable, touching, very well-made film with a great performance from Vanessa Redgrave at the finale. But Focus Features has definitely had a tough Oscar year sdo far with the complete collapse of Lust Caution and these Hillary/Atonement analogies that are getting around.
Amazingly, a lot of people are saying that David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises is one of their favorites, so this may be their strongest hand at this point. Speaking as a life-long Cronenberg fan stretching back to the ’70s, I’m personally saying “no to this film. It left me cold and hating all things Russian, and particularly unhappy with Armin Muehler Stahl‘s performance as the big papa-bear Russian maifioso …”eat the borscht!…play the balalaika!…subjugate and inseminate the women! Awwwgggghhhh!”

In a 1.7.08 story that is partly about the latest fluctuations between the WGA, NBC and the Golden Globe Awards (as well as the WGA-United Artists side-deal), N.Y. Times reporters Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply write that “frantic behind-the-scenes wrangling over the Globes continued [yesterday. Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, convened a conference call on Sunday to explore ways of salvaging the Golden Globes, according to people briefed on the matter. One conceivable situation might involve producing a completely staged show around film clips, and perhaps without an audience or stars.”
Forget it, Zucker! Just pull the plug and hang it up. You’re making it very difficult for hundreds of people who need to make plans regarding the Golden Globes (attendance, parties…dozens of contingencies) and are under loads of pressure because of this. There’s supposed to be some kind of formal announcement from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association sometime today.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has asked 11 award-season handicappers for predictions about tomorrow’s Directors Guild nominations for Best Director.
The respondents are columnst & critic Pete Hammond, MSN’s Greg Ellwood, Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley, Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger, N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Matthews, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, myself, Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, Coming Soon‘s Edward Douglas, The Envelope‘s Mark Olsen, and And The Winner Is blogmeister Scott Feinberg.
My predictions for the DGA Best Director nominations: Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men; Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood; David Fincher, Zodiac (consolation prize for all the Zeligs refusing to even consider Zodiac for Best Picture prizes]; Sidney Lumet, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Tony Gilroy, /Michael Clayton.
Note: No obsessive Russian penis/naked steambath knife-fight movies, so no DGA nomination for David Cronenberg.

Last Friday Screen Actors Guild president Alan Rosenberg informally asked big-talent publicists repping actors who’ve been nominated for a Critics Choice Award to keep them away from attending tonght’s awards ceremony. That didn’t go over — talent will be attending. To clarify or reposition, a SAG spokesperson said this morning that “the Screen Actors Guild is not discouraging its members from attending the BFCA [Critics’ Choice] Awards, nor will there be repercussions for any members that choose to do so. It is not a struck production and there will not be a picket line. Members who make a personal choice to attend the event will [therefore] not be crossing a picket line to do so.”

I was talking to a guy earlier today about NBC honcho Jeff Zucker‘s earlier refusal to back off from broadcasting the Golden Globes on 1.13, which, if he’d stuck to this position, would have killed the show because all the movie stars would have refused to attend. (NBC is said to be backing away from this, although nothing is official as of this writing.)
In any case, the guy then observed (not necessarily referring to Zucker specifically) that “the most successful people in life are often the ones who are willing to be the biggest assholes,” or words to that effect. And I thought, “Hmmm…never heard it put quite that way before.”
Here’s another way to put it: people who are afraid to use power (which would include those who are afraid to act forcefully out of fear of what people might think) don’t usually hold on to power for very long. The serious tough hombres are not, as a rule, boy scouts who are hoping that mommy will give them extra cookies as a reward for earning a merit badge.

Three new post-Iowa New Hampshire polls — WMUR/CNN, USA Today/Gallup and Rasmussen Reports — are giving Barack Obama leads of 10, 13 and 12 points, respectively, over Hillary Clinton. John Edwards is significantly below Clinton across the board, so he’s also toast.

N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James is calling George Clooney the definitive yesteryear movie star because his films are almost always “period” in one way or another. His next film, Leatherheads, which he directed and starred in, is a 1920s football tale, she reports. Clooney’s live-TV, black-and-white production of Fail Safe was a time-capsule thriller pulled from the early ’60s. O Brother, Where Art Thou? was a ’30s Depression-era piece. The Good German is a post-war Germany Michael Curtiz deal.

What else? Good Night, and Good Luck is set in the mid ’50s McCarthy area. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind goes from the √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢60s to the √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢80s and doesn’t touch the present. Intolerable Cruelty is an updated ’30s screwball comedy. Clooney wanted to do a TV version of Network, the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky-Sidney Lumet classic. Ocean√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Eleven and its sequels are tributes to early ’60s Rat Pack Vegas. Even the contemporary Michael Clayton is tonally a √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢70s political thriller.
All these examples have been noted by James except the Fail-Safe and Network projects.
“As [Clooney] sees things, it was not nostalgia but a search for strong, unusual material that led him to the past. ‘I think we all have these ideas: The world was better then, clearer, easier,’ but making so many period films ‘wasn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t in any way a conscious thing,’ he said. ‘I did some contemporary pieces that weren√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t very good,’ then started making different choices.”
Oh, and Deadline Hollywood Daily’s Nikki Finke reported a little while ago that no one is confirming that Times Of London John Harlow article that Clooney was a “major force” behind the union A-Listers refusing to cross picket lines to attend a televised Golden Globes, etc.

51 weeks ago — on 1.16.07, as the ’07 Sundance Film Festival was just starting and only days before the Academy would officially announce that Dreamgirls would not be a Best Picture nominee — N.Y. Times reporter Jeff Zeleny wrote that Senator Barack Obama took his first solid step into the Democratic presidential race by opening “an exploratory committee to raise money and begin building a campaign designed to change our politics.” And man, the acid cynicism that rained down from 85% to 90% of the HE talk-backers was like…whew. Proud of yourselves?

Warner Bros. going exclusively for Blu-ray means that hi-def DVD format war is probably over. Toshiba’s HD-DVD format is the loser and blah, blah. I’m still looking at $1750 or thereabouts for a 40″ LCD or plasma flat-screen plus the Blu-ray player and all the damn Blu-Ray discs I’d have to buy. Before you know it I’ll have gone through nearly three grand, and it’ll just pile on thereafter.

I’d like to do this because I love the idea of everything looking that much better, but on another level I’m figuring who really needs it? Regular DVDs look pretty damn good on my 36″ Sony flatscreen. And when will the next format turn come along and render Blu-ray obsolete? I don’t trust anybody or anything. I’m from Missoura.