The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond is saying that the hottest Best Actor contenders are Michael Clayton‘s George Clooney vs. There Will Be Blood‘s Daniel Day Lewis? Clooney’s performance in Tony Gilroy‘s corporate thriller is his career best after playing that bearded CIA guy in Syriana, but saying it’s neck-and-neck with Lewis’s Daniel Plainview performance is like…what? Did somebody put LSD into the Stone Canyon reservoir when I was away in Boston? Clooney is a good egg but his Clayton performance is a long way from Paul Newman‘s in The Verdict…c’mon.

There’s a new still from Spike Lee‘s The Miracle of St. Anna sitting at blackfilm.com. The World War II drama is about four black American soldiers, members of the 92nd “Buffalo Soldier” division stationed in Tuscany, Italy, who find themselves trapped behind enemy lines and separated from their unit after one of them risks his life to save an Italian boy. Due sometime next fall, the film costars Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Matteo Sciabordi, John Leguizamo and the somewhat irritating Joseph Gordon Levitt.

Derek Luke is dead center; Omar Benson Miller is standing to the far left next to the boy. I don’t know the other guys’ names and I’m not going to spend an hour or two trying to figure it out by calling Disney publicists and sending them images and so on. I’ve got enough aggravation.

“Nell Boyd lives in the tiny northern Iowa town of Belmond. From the moment she saw Barack Obama speak in October in nearby Waterloo, she said, she was sold on his candidacy and made a small contribution to his campaign, the first time she had ever given money to a politician.
“At her precinct last night, 214 people signed in, compared to 72 four years ago.
“The crowd, she said, was a mix of old and young, with a sprinkling of college students home on break and high school students who will be 18 by Election Day. In the end, the tally concluded in this order: Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards.
“The Boyd household, perhaps, is atypical. She supported Obama, while her husband, Rex, walked into the caucus as a Clinton supporter. Before the final headcount was conducted, she said, he changed his mind and moved over to the Obama corner of the room.
“In an overnight e-mail, she offered an explanation.
“Rex went to Clinton and I wore a Obama sticker. As people milled and talked, he changed before the count as he heard people stating they could not vote for someone with a last name like Obama. One said, `He needs to stay in Chicago and take care of his family.’
“Rex came over to Obama, where he heard not one negative bit of talk. He felt they both stand for pretty much the same ideas, but our leader needs to be positive and Obama puts that feeling out there. That is important in this world.” — from a 1.4.08 Jeff Zeleny piece in the N.Y. Times.

John Edwards has to face reality and get out of the way after next Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. He’s out of money, he’s not going to win…it’s over. Most of the Edwards supporters will switch their allegiance to Barack Obama, and after this happens Hillary Clinton will be fully and finally toast. Obama will probably take the nomination at the end of the day, but as of this morning Edwards is basically a spoiler. Within the Democratic primary realm, he’s almost the new Ralph Nader.

The author-screenwriter teams behind Atonement, Into the Wild, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood and Zodiac have been named finalists for the 2008 USC Libraries Scripter Award. The winner will be announced 2.2.08 at a gala ceremony at USC’s Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library, with Jason Alexander emcee-ing.
I think it’s a good thing regardless that Zodiac — the fourth-best film of the year according to MCN’s Top Ten list — isn’t even being considered as a longshot Best Picture contender. It didn’t make enough money at the box-office, and that means it has to be punished during awards season…right? Seems to me like the right way to evaluate things. The great Benicio del Toro needs to be punished also for giving the greatest performance of the year in the under-performing Things We Lost in the Fire.
Where would the Oscars be if only the most deserving artists were nominated? In the shithouse is where they would be. You have to make a decent amount of money first. (At least in proportion to budget.) We will decide whether or not to give you a pat-on-the-back nomination only after you do that…kapeesh?

I’ve just heard from a non-vested party that a Sundance World Documentary selection called Stranded is a major wow. It’s partly a first-hand, looking-back documentary and partly a re-enactment of the 1972 Andes plane crash disaster in which 16 people (including members of a rugby team from Uruguay) managed to survive over a 72-day ordeal, partly by eating the flesh of those who’d been killed.

“It’s a lot like Kevin McDonald‘s Touching The Void,” the guy told me, “and I mean easily as good as that…the survivors go back to the site and describe what happened with parts of it reanacted…it’s really something else.” The French-produced doc was directed and written by Gonzalo Arijon. It will show four times at Sundance (the first screening being early Friday evening, 1.18), and is also booked to show at Roger Durling‘s Santa Barbara Film Festival at the end of the month.
The full title is actually Stranded: I’ve come from a plane that crashed on the mountains.

“I half-agree with the near-unanimous praise for There Will Be Blood,” Slate‘s Timothy Noah wrote yesterday. “[But] I would call it a halfterpiece. The first half and especially the film’s dialogue- free first 20 minutes, ranks among the most thrilling moments I’ve witnessed on film. About midway, though, I felt that There Will Be Blood lost its clarity, for reasons that say something about the impoverished state of political discussion in the movies generally.

Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “failure to say anything interesting or even coherent about the structure of American society is not unusual. I can’t remember the last time I saw an American movie that did (excepting documentaries; gangster movies, which inherited this function from The Godfather; and the occasional movie promoting ethnic, sexual, religious, or some other form of tolerance and inclusiveness).”

Somehow the news about Brandon Roush being stripped of his Superman tights and cape didn’t cross my screen until this morning. Variety‘s Anne Thompson mentioned it at the end of a 12.27 story; Latino Review‘s George Roush re-reported it yesterday. (Routh, Roush…?) Bryan Singer won’t helm the next Warner Bros. Superman flick, Thompson says. Routh, says Roush, “will be replaced in the stand alone sequel by whomever is cast as Superman in the upcoming Justice League of America movie.”

“There is no vision beyond page views,” Gawker media reporter Richard Morgan has said about Gawker managing editor Nick Denton to New York‘s “Intelligencer” after quitting at the end of his first day. “I was announced as being some kind of television beat writer. And I spent the day reading TV blogs and e-mailing and calling and meeting with TV folks. And Nick would tell me to post, like, something about Us Weekly getting Ashlee Simpson‘s engagement wrong. And then he wanted me to do another on Playgirl. Jesus spent three days in Hell. I could only handle one.”
But that’s the blogging game, man! You can research and interview and write your pieces, but in the meantime you have to post stuff and you have to keep it going all day and sometimes into the night. If you stop shovelling coal into the steam engine the train will slow down and stop and then you’re dead meat. The effort can be hellish, yes, but the game is the game, man, and if you can’t grim up and get down and ignore nearly everything else in your life (including doing the laundry, renewing your car registration and going to the post office) in order to keep focused and keep shovelling then you don’t belong. If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.

DGA and AMPTP reps may start talking sometime next week…. boring, listless, blah blah. I hate stories about strike representatives who are supposed to be doing things but instead are just making calls, having lunch, piddling around and kicking the tires.