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.

“There’s a growing sense of gloom about what the WGA strike will eventually yield for the scribe tribe,” Variety‘s Cynthia Littleton reported yesterday, drawing on results of a survey of Variety subscribers conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates. “Only 9% of the total think the strike will be resolved in the writers’ favor, while 57% say it will be resolved in the companies’ favor — compared with 20% who believed it would end in the writers’ favor in the November survey.
“Even among writers, the pessimism appears to be growing, with only 10% of WGA respondents believing that it will end in the writers’ favor compared with 22% in November.
“Nearly half (48%) of all respondents said their view of the WGA hasn’t changed since the strike began, while 27% said they see the guild in a more ‘negative light’ and 23% say they see the WGA in a more ‘positive light.’ The guild’s poll numbers have dropped since the November survey, when 29% of all respondents said they saw the WGA in a more positive light since the strike began.
“Executives were most likely to say they’re taking a dimmer view of the WGA, with 49% saying their opinion of the guild has gone south since the strike began, while 43% of execs say their opinion hasn’t changed.”

“‘I’m telling you, Keith, this is Lexington and Concord — this is going around the world,’ MSNBC’s Chris Matthews told his election night co-host, Keith Olbermann, in describing last night’s Iowa victory by Barack Obama. He announced that the nation was in a rut and that the Iowa vote signaled a craving for radical change: ‘It’s taking us to a new place. The biblical term, since we’re in a biblical era, is deliverance.'” — from Alessandra Stanley‘s 1.4.08 “TV Watch” column in this morning’s N.Y. Times.

It is not enough for Barack Obama to have won the Iowa caucuses on the Democratic side, which he’s now done. Hillary Clinton also needs to come in third, which is where she is right now, just a hair behind John Edwards.
“Even if your candidate didn’t win tonight, you have reason to celebrate…we all do,” Arianna Huffington wrote a little while ago. “Barack Obama’s stirring victory in Iowa — down home, folksy, 92 percent white Iowa — says a lot about America, and also about the current mindset of the American voter. Because tonight voters decided that they didn’t want to look back. They wanted to look into the future — as if a country exhausted by the last seven years wanted to recapture its youth.
“Obama’s win might not have legs. Hope could give way to fear once again. But, for tonight at least, it holds a mirror up to the face of America, and we can look at ourselves with pride.”