People can’t get a fix on the ’07 Best Picture race because they can’t reconcile the two camps — i.e., those who want to nominate reassuring, light-quaalude- high, comfort-blanket movies and those pushing the high-end, full-throttle, not-as- comforting art films (which actually are comforters if you accept the notion that great or intensely stimulating art is the most profoundly serene drug of all).

The blistering tough-nut contenders are No Country for Old Men, Sweeney Todd, Zodiac, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, There Will Be Blood, I’m Not There, Control and (if you want to be generous and and/or respectful of a very touching and well-made fathers-and-sons drama) In The Valley of Elah.

The comfort-blanket contenders are Atonement, Juno, The Kite Runner, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Great Debaters and, in a certain way, Michael Clayton. (I’m starting to believe that Tony Gilroy‘s film may become a Best Picture nominee for its smoothly applied craft. As much as I admired and enjoyed it, Clayton is basically an upscale John Grisham film with a redemption theme and a little Howard Beale thrown in. It’s very well made and yet familiar — it’s a first-rate Sydney Pollack film from the early ’90s — and therefore a comforter.)

There are some out there who are actually talking about Enchanted being a possible Best Picture contender. No comment necessary.

By my standards, the only two films that straddle the two categories are American Gangster — a sprawling, satisfying ’70s crime film — and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a movie not just about solitary confinement but enslavement by a debilitating affliction, and yet so beautifully made that it has persuaded thousands not to mind being confined inside the body of a man who can do nothing but blink his left eye. (I knew I was seeing something exceptional, and at the same instant that I didn’t want to watch it for two hours because of the climate of terrible confinement.)

Knowing the Academy as I do, it’ll probably work out to three comforters vs. two tough-nut, high-art entries. Or it could break down to a four-to-one ratio favoring the softies. Like the Envelope Buzzmeter chart is predicting right now, for instance — Atonement, American Gangster, No Country for Old Men, Juno and The Kite Runner. It would be a perversion of Movie God justice for this to happen, but a hard-bitten realist needs to prepare for the inevitable downers-around-the-corner.

If Once had any Best Picture heat it would be called a soother also, but it’s the kind of comfort-blanket flick that has immense integrity and deserves everyone’s allegiance.

The only favored non-comforter right now is No Country for Old Men — I know it, HE readers know it, David Carr knows it. I am respectful of Atonement and wouldn’t flinch too badly if it won. The other three contenders besides this and Atonement should be Sweeney Todd, Zodiac and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, but this won’t happen because of the softie mentality.

If I were Benito Mussolini I would round up the softies in minivans in the middle of the night and send them off to reeducation camps in the Mojave Desert, and it would honestly be for their own good. I would drill them in the morning with calisthenics, subject them to film and film-debate classes and serve them hot healthy meals. And after their release from Movie Reducation Stalag 17 they’d never again consider certain far-from-masterful films like Juno or Enchanted or Charlie Wilson’s War for Best Picture.

I usually run box-office figures on Saturday morning, but I was out of business with my cell phone yesterday due to my street-level Boston apartment being in a perfectly infuriating AT&T “dead zone.”

Weekend business was off more than usual this weekend due to last weekend being a Thanksgiving holiday “double Saturday” situation. Enchanted, off 61%, will have earned $16,822,000 as of this evening. Up to $70 million at this tonight, certain to top $100 million within 10 to 14 days. This Christmas will make $8119,000, off 59%. Beowulf was off 62% for $7,993,000 and $2400 a print. Now at a $68.7 million cume, it’s unlikely to hit $100 million — somewhere in the middle 80s, more likely.

Awake opened and closed with a $5,996,000 take…$3900 a print, nothing. Hitman earned $5923,000 for the weekend, off 69%. Dead Claus, $5,318,000. August Rush, $5,082,000… smallest % drop of them all.

No Country for Old Men added theatres, took in 4,468,000…$4000 a print. Joel and Ehtan Coen’s film is looking at a $40 milllion tally during its initial run & another $10 million or so once the awards and nominations start coming in. My numbers guy says “it’s basically an urban uptown picture that will do very little business in the boonies.”

Why is that, I asked? People in Redville aren’t smart enough to appreciate a first-rate arthouse thriller? “Hinterland audiences don’t want to know from arthouse,” he said. “Arthouse shmarthouse…they just want to be entertained.” If by clapping my hands I could permanently vacuum this attitude out of humans and send it into the hottest caverns of hell and keep it there, I would clap my hands.

Bee Movie, $4,410,000. American Gangster, $4,278,000. The Savages…$163,000 in 4 runs, almost $39 thousand a print Diving Bell and the Butterfly, $73,000 total….$24 thousand a print in 3 theatres.

Strictly on a hired-gun basis, Martin Scorsese has directed a nine-minute Hitchcock homage-cum-wine advertisement called The Key to Reserva. It stars Simon Baker (The Devil Wears Prada) and is somewhere between not half bad and fairly good — witty, amusing, well-shot. Then again, Brian DePalma used to make entire films in this vein in the ’70s and ’80s.

With Bernard Herrmann‘s North by Northwest music playing throughout, it uses classic bits from The 39 Steps, the 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rear Window, North by Northwest and, at the very end, The Birds.

The funniest part is a preface in which Scorsese explains to an interviewer (who strongly resembles Ted Griffin, the Ocean’s 11 and Matchstick Men screenwriter) that the short is based upon three pages of a script for a Hitchcock film that was never shot. The hyper, over-caffeinated Scorsese is half natural-Marty and half-“character.” Scorsese could play this guy in a weekly reality series about a hyper, over-caffeinated filmmaker going through various creative adventures, and I wouldn’t miss a segment.

A reader has compared The Key to Reserva to Wes Anderson‘s American Express commercial from a couple of years back. I prefer Anderson’s because it’s about its own here-and-now (i.e., here-and-then) thing. Then again, I love the mania that led to Scorsese dressing an Eva Marie Saint-like actress in the exact same evening dress that Saint wears in North by Northwest.

Reserva is a Spanish wine produced by the Friexenet company, one of the giant Cava houses in Catalonia, Spain, that produces natural sparkling wine.

The Zodiac “director’s cut” (out on DVD on 1.8.08) screened the night before last at the Variety screening series at the Arclight. I drove over right after the Sweeney Todd screening and caught the last 45 minutes. I’d seen this cut on a screener sent over a month ago, and yet I felt curiously riveted, glued. I was saying “wow” all over again. This is what great movies do — they refresh their game and deepen and spread out a bit more every time.

David Fincher at the Arclight — Thursday, 11.29, 10:55 pm

The percentage of Oscar handicappers and Academy apparatchiks who truly get this — who understand that Zodiac is the ultimate Shelby Mustang of ’07, a film so unique and special and unified that even half of the supposed cine-sophisticates don’t quite get the full splendor of it — amounts to a slender slice of the pie. But what a feeling it is to know. I’ve never been so certain of the right-on rootedness of any film in my life. The people who scratch it off their Best Picture lists shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Zodiac director David Fincher, producer Brad Fischer and screenwriter James Vanderbilt sat for a q & a with Variety critic Todd McCarthy after the screening. Fischer had a good quote that I didn’t write down — “This is a newspaper film, not a serial killer film…more in the realm of All The President’s Men” — but no one felt inclined to say what it really is. Maybe it hasn’t struck a deep enough chord because most viewers haven’t been down the road that Jake Gyllenhaal‘s cartoonist character goes down. The quiet madness of an all-consuming obsession. Or maybe a lot of people have and it makes them uncomfortable.

There is lingering irony in Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days having today won the Best Picture and Best Director trophy at the 20th annual European Film Awards. I’m referring, of course, to the reported “definitely mixed” reactions to the film among an Academy foreign film screening committee that happened a month ago.

A journalist-critic friend told me a little more than two weeks ago that the Roumanian film “may not even make the short list,” that some committee folk had complained it’s “too slow” and that others “didn’t like the fetus on the floor shot” and so on. Some felt otherwise, but there was generally a strongly split reaction.

It’ll almost be thrilling if the naysayers manage to block Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner from becoming one of the five nominees for Best Foreign-Language Film. They have a reputation to uphold, after all. So what if there’s a slight difference of opinion from other parties, other countries? Isn’t it better to be “full of passionate intensity” (in the William Butler Yeats sense of the term) than to reconsider a position or give ground?

This 11.30 Variety article by Tatiana Siegel (with reporting by Anne Thompson) about the continuing insufficiency on the part of major distributors to adequately preserve their film libraries — including, surprisingly, relatively recent gems like Martin Scorsese‘s Taxi Driver — is one of the most soundly written and reported pieces on this subject ever posted by either Siegel or Thompson or anyone.

“With an eye on the bottom line, studios are reluctant to preserve or restore films for which they have no foreseeable distribution plans,” the article reads. “[And] preservation execs are facing impossible odds. Even though Columbia’s Taxi Driver is stored in Sony’s climate-controlled vault, it’s losing its color (though some critics have placed the blame on the restoration work Scorsese performed in 1996).

“Other vulnerable pics from the era include the seminal dark comedy Harold and Maude, which is in grave condition. Even The Godfather was recently in need of triage. Paramount sent the original camera negative to Warner Bros.’ facilities for color correction and sound remixing, among other restorations. The Francis Ford Coppola movie has been a consistent money-maker since its 1972 bow, on vidcassette, DVD and homevideo. If that movie is in need of repair, what hope is there for lesser-grossing films?

“Many 1970s films are suffering because they were preserved on a form of film called CRI (Color Reversal Intermediate), instead of a negative. ‘That particular form of negative turned out to be unstable and not good enough. A lot of the films had to be redone,” says Roger Mayer, a former MGM honcho who’s now chairman of the National Film Preservation Foundation.”

Before the Alabama New South Coalition gave its support today to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, Perry County commissioner Albert Turner urged the group to support Sen Hillary Clinton for a reason that would have to be described as blunt, at the very least.

An African-American lobbyist and former assistant director of the Alabama Department of Community and Economic Affairs, Turner told the membership that despite his admiration for Obama, “The question you have to put forth to yourself is that whether or not in this racist country a black man named Obama — when we are shooting at Osama — can win the presidency of the United States?” Turner said Clinton is the Democrat most likely to win in November “because of her husband and because of some other things, mainly because she’s white.”

People who’ve sensed Bubba sentiments among the electorate don’t usually put it this way. The last time I heard anything remotely like this was from a Manhattan- based columnist during the Toronto Film Festival. “Go outside the big cities,” he said, and America “is a nation of rubes and crackers. As fair-minded and issue-driven as these voters like to portray themselves with pollsters, the bottom line is that some of them are constitutionally incapable of voting a black man into the White House.

“As far as these voters and Barack Obama are concerned, the columnist suggested, the ’08 race is a kind of a dry-run, getting-used-to-the-idea exercise that may allow for attitudes and conditions in 2012 or 2016 in which a black man (Obama or someone else) might stand a chance….maybe.”

Most of the readership dismissed this when I quoted the columnist in this space two and half months ago. The same pooh-poohers are now obliged to dismiss Albert Turner’s opinion as well. You know who you are. The forum is yours.

“Any great modern film which is successful is so because of a misunderstanding.” — from an interview with Jean Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema 171, October 1965, from Godard on Godard, translated and edited by Tom Milne, and used as a preface in a Glenn Kenny piece about the ending of No Country for Old Men.

“At the end of the day, your ideas in a book have less impact than if you had summed them up in two paragraphs on the most widely read blog at the most-read time of the day, so why do you spend two years on it?” — Emily Gould, the recently-resigned Gawker editor, talking to New York‘s Vanessa Grigoriadis for a 10.14.07 profile of the then-Gawker crew called “Everybody Sucks.” A wise and well written piece…worth 15 minutes of your time.

There was supposed to be an embargo on Sweeney Todd reactions until Monday, but then Envelope guy Tom O’Neil posted last night and then N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”), let go. So I called my Paramount guy this morning and begged for a release from bondage, and he said okay.

Then David Poland posted this morning, mentioning also the embargo and being careful to point out that the film “plays a lot better on multiple viewings.” (Mutliple viewings because, you know, Poland is so important and well-connected.) The only guy who’s unmoved so far is Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley.

I went to last night’s screening of Sweeney Todd (Dreamamount, 11.21) with a guarded attitude. Here we go, another flush of the downward Burton swirl, get ready for it. The man has been in a kind of losing-it mode since Planet of the Apes and he’s had his day…live with it. And then it began, and less than two minutes in I knew it was exceptional and perhaps more than that.

Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter

Ten minutes later I was feeling something growing within me. Surprise turned to admiration turned to amazement. I felt filled up, delighted. I couldn’t believe it…a Tim Burton film that reverses the decline! Call me a changed man. Call Burton a changed man. Sweeney Todd is his best film since…Beetlejuice?

I have to leave for LAX and a flight to Boston in less than an hour, but I have to get at least some of this down.

All my life I’ve loved — worshipped — what Stephen Sondheim‘s music can do for the human heart. Blend this with a tragic, grand guignol metaphor about how we’re all caught up with some issue of the past — needing on some level to pay the world back for the hurt and the woundings. Add to this Burton’s exquisite visual panache and precision, the drop-dead beautiful, near monochromatic color, the ravishing production design and…pardon me for sounding like a pushover, but this movie pushes over.

At times it melted me like a candle. I was lifted, moved. I was never not aroused. Every frame is a painting.

Johnny Depp is fantastic as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street — he has to be a Best Actor candidate as of this moment. It grieves me to admit this, but bully-boy David Poland predicted that Depp’s Todd would be a major contender early last year. Helena Bonham Carter can’t sing very well but she’s great anyway. Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Jamie Campbell Bower (a major new arrival), Jayne Wisener, Sascha Baron Cohen…everyone fills the bill.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has been calling this one for weeks and weeks, and if Sweeney Todd hadn’t been this good he would have egg yolk all over his face this morning. But he listened to the voices and somehow just…knew. Sweeney Todd is a locked Best Picture contender at this stage. It’s too beautifully made, too full of feeling, too exquisitely performed to shunt aside. But it won’t win because of the blood.

I was lifted, touched, moved, melted…and also showered and sprayed. And I’m sorry for this. If only Burton had held back and focused harder on the metaphor of a man consumed by bitterness, determined to pay back those who ruined his life…if he’d only elected to turn away and not indulge his B-movie director’s fetish for the gushing red vino, as if from a garden hose or a fire hydrant. The film is its own tragedy, in a way. So near and yet so far.

Jamie Campbell Bower, Johnny Depp

Something very deep-down kicks in when a human being is killed or mutilated or both. It’s horrible and ghastly, and the spirit naturally recoils unless — and this is a very big “unless” — the style and the context turn it around and redefine it in some way.

Al I know for sure is that I was mesmerized. I loved the duets, the look of it, the control, the poise, the ache, the tragedy. This is a major, major film. Way up there. Better, impact-wise than the B’way stage version I saw a couple of years ago with Patti Lupone. The finest big-time movie musical since the under-appreciated Evita, which I feel is Alan Parker‘s best film ever.

So into the top-five slot it goes and let the back-and-forth begin. It almost certainly won’t win the Best Picture Oscar because Burton, intractable mule that he is, allows a gore fetish to override the emotion and the metaphor and the beauty. Okay, perhaps not “override” but he gives too much exposure and power to the plasma. But this is still a masterful work. Heart-stopping, heart-lifting. I came close to tears several times, and I don’t like admitting this stuff because people use it against you later on.