I realize it may have occured to some that Oscar-chasing season (mid-July through late February) is about power and prestige and so on. There’s also the satisfaction of winners knowing that the term “Oscar” is certain to appear one day in their New York Times obituary. There’s also the underlying current about wanting to affirm certain emotions, values and viewpoints by celebrating movies that express these things, but let’s put that one aside for now. What I’m about to say is nothing remotely new, but I’d just like to reiterate it for the record.

There are two prime motivations driving Oscar handicappers in the picking of likely nominees for the major categories. The dominant impulse is to show obeisance before established power — an inescapable impulse due to genetic coding. 90% of all hyped would-be nominees are validated names who’ve performed in or worked on films that (a) have performed respectably with the ticket-buying public and (b) have moderately well-bankrolled distributors backing their films.

There is no substantial cultural /behavioral difference between most of the Envelope and Gurus of Gold hotshots picking their likely contenders and spear-carrying Bemba warriors in Zambia bowing down before the local chief during a village feast.

The secondary impulse is to show generosity of spirit — a helping-hand instinct (never driven by merit alone, but merit plus “likability”) that may bring a promising newcomer into the fold, or congratulate an aging, Oscar-less veteran for decades of solid, first-rate work.

Of course, all promising newcomers have to be amply supported by established, well-funded distributors, and they need to appear to be headed for some kind of connected/powerful future, which theoretically allows for a possible return-the- favor gesture down the road to handicappers (and their publications) who supported the actor/artist when they needed it. And of course they need to self-promote and schmooze their asses off during the run-up weeks to make it all kick in.

In part, the previous graph explains the Best Actor nomination given 45 years ago to total newcomer Peter O’Toole due to very ample support by Columbia Pictures, and the lack of any handicapper momentum at all for Control‘s riveting Sam Riley, who has only the slight support of the Weinstein Co. — a distributor with the nagging rep of suffering from diminished industry power — and guys like myself and Peter Howell behind him.

I was complaining again last night at the WGA There Will be Blood after-party that Benicio del Toro gives a Marlon Brando-level performance (make that early 1950s Brando -level) in Susanne Bier’s Things We Lost in the Fire. A journalist pal smiled and said, “Fight for it!” but she and I know it’s a lost cause. Hell, it’s not even a cause.

Nobody’s standing up for Benicio because (a) Fire was panned by a good portion of the critics and lost money besides, (b) there doesn’t seem to be any interest on Paramount’s part to finance a Benicio campaign, (c) Benicio is apparently saving himself for a Best Actor campaign next year for his Che Guevara performance in The Argentine and Guerilla , and (d) a Things We Lost in the Fire Benicio campaign wouldn’t work anyway because critics, handicappers and Academy members don’t like (or at least are cool to) junkies.

There’s no “obesiance before power” satisfaction in talking up Fox Searchlight’s Once, even though it feels to me like the most emotionally complete and fully self-realized film released this year, and one of the most affecting love stories in many a moon. Not because Fox Searchlight isn’t powerful, but because no one has decided if director John Carney will be around the long haul, and because the two stars, Glenn Hansard and Marketa Irglova, are musicians, not actors, so what are they going to for “us” down the road? Nothing. So the industry consensus is “great movie, loved it…bye!”

Another half day has been lost to virus issues. While picking up my finally virus-free laptop at Best Buy last night I was talked into buying the respected Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0 software to guard against future problems. I installed it this morning and lo, within ten minutes my newly repaired, running-like-a-charm laptop had ceased all functionality. Nothing would click open; it was like the disk drive has been covered in cold maple syrup. I couldn’t even get into safe mode.

I had to take the damn unit back to the Geek Squad guys and explain that everything was fine until I took their advice and installed a software that they sold me on. An intense, intelligent guy who looked like James McAvoy except for the W.C.Fields nose said I should have uninstalled the other virus program first. (Which I would have, but it wasn’t in function mode because I hadn’t renewed the license so what could it matter?) Come back in six hours, he said.

Why is so much of life like this? Why do I keep delaying about buying a Mac? Woody Allen had it mostly right about the human race being divided into two camps — the horrible and the miserable. If I could clap my hands and send a misery rocket over to the software technicians at Kaspersky (the ones who forget to include a prompt reminding all installers to delete all previously loaded virus software, active or inactive, before proceeding), I would clap my hands. Cheerfully. With vigor.

The Envelope‘s Mark Olsen has thrown together a mildly amusing riff on how an award-quality performance can be countered-buzzed or kibboshed by another high-profile performance given by the same actor or actress in the same year that isn’t as widely admired.

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performances in The Savages, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead and Charlie Wilson’s War overlap to some degree, but they don’t (or won’t) tarnish each other in the slightest.

The best-known example of this syndrome, he notes, is the case of those Norbit billboards having killed Eddie Murphy‘s shot at winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his Dreamgirls performance.

Olsen lists 14 possible scenarios that might result in another Murphy-like tumble, but no one in the running for any acting award has a low-rent stinker like Norbit in the wings. Olsen has mainly listed actors and actresses who’ve given two or three strong or distinctive performances in ’07, which may have voters dithering over which was was superior, and in what category the best one belongs. Nice try, but the analogies don’t fly.

All film journalists and critics are obliged to write at least one essay about why people cry at movies. Today, Washington Post critic Desson Thomson wrote his. He doesn’t expose his personal soft underbelly, though, and that’s what you’re supposed to do when you write these things. Unload, let it out, confess.

For me, unleashed emotion in the womb of a movie theatre is about as primal as it gets. I’ve had many, many more emotional floodgate moments in a theatre seat than I’ve allowed myself in real life. (Most guys tend to keep things in check when someone’s watching, even trusted friends or family members.) As Thomson says, “Guys will cry only if someone squirts Mace directly at their eyeballs.” In public, he means.

Thomson’s best quote is from Mary Beth Oliver, a Penn State University communications professor and researcher of the effect of media on humanoids. Films that make us cry, she says, “cause us to contemplate what it is about human life that’s important and meaningful. Those thoughts are associated with a mixture of emotions that can be joyful but also nostalgic and wistful, tender and poignant. Tears aren’t just tears of sadness, they’re tears of searching for the meaning of our fleeting existence.”

In my most recent movie-crying piece (which ran in ’02 or ’03), I said that most guys “choke up over loss. Stuff you once had in your life (a girlfriend or wife, a beloved dog, naivete) that’s now gone and irretrievable.” (This thought actually came from Owen Wilson, who was picking up the phone back then.)

My biggest proverbial meltdown is still watching the ghost of Gordon MacRae singing his apologies to the live Shirley Jones in Carousel (1955). Talk about loss. His Billy Bigelow character blew it when alive and now he’s stuck in a kind of 20th Century Fox sound-stage purgatory, and to make matters worse his genetic code and lingering reputation are helping to screw things up for his teenage daughter….whew.

I also tear up at my idea of happy endings. Old Rose returning to her youthful form as she returns (possibly at the instant of her death) to the Titanic’s grand staircase to say hello to all the people who went down with the ship.

Or when Willem Dafoe‘s Nazarene realizes he hasn’t betrayed his destiny and is suddenly back on the cross in Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ, and rejoicing over this. That moment when he slips away we hear that cosmic sound of Arab women doing that high-pitched yodeling thing as the image recedes into blinding white, like the film is running off the reel and going into the leader…man, I just fold.

I just remembered something a friend said to me when in my 20s. It has nothing to do with movies, but I’ve never shared it before. The friend was telling me about his very first time in bed with his girlfriend, whom he was totally in love with at the time. He said, “The sex was so good, I cried.” I’ve never heard that line since — not from anyone I’ve known or spoken to, and not in any movie, book, play, poem, song lyric or nightclub act. I didn’t believe him, of course — he was trying to amuse — but I felt the residue of it. If you don’t know what he meant you haven’t lived.

Beowulf producer and co-write Roger Avary, just back from the film’s London premiere and international press junket, called to debate the ongoing Beowulf animation issue as I was editing the Paul Thomas Anderson interview earlier this afternoon.

(l. to r.) Gaim, Beowulf director Bob Zemeckis, Avary

I brought up the fact that basing animated human images upon live-action footage — a Beowulf speed-bump issue for some — is a technique that goes all the way back to Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As I understand it, Disney animators used a primitive form of rotoscoping to make the body language and some of the features of Snow White, the evil queen and the handsome prince seem more life-like.

I said towards the end of our chat that a critic friend who hasn’t seen Beowulf confided he wasn’t looking forward to the 3D headache syndrome, which Beowulf‘s IMAX 3D process is absolutely free of. Avary agreed that previous 3D films (the 3D Spy Kids, for one) have definitely been a little rough in this respect. I suggested that the Beowulf newspapers ads should promise a relief from this in so many words — “No headaches!”

There Will Be Blood director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson called a couple of hours ago to chat about the film. We spoke for about 25 minutes. I threw out some half-decent questions and did what I could to keep my obsequious impulses in check. Anderson has a shy, circumspect way of putting things. It’s axiomatic that most first-rate directors will shy away from “selling” their film or trying to explain it in any kind of relentless detail. But it was exciting to get a word in and run it all down as much as possible.

Anderson and Blood stars Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano will discuss the film and their work following a special WGA theatre screening this evening. A reception will follow.

“The horror that is Paul Thomas Anderson‘s fifth feature, There Will Be Blood, is not simply an amplified feeling of distress but distress itself: a seething perpetual pressure, unremitting, brutal, always on the brink of eruption,” writes House Next Door contributor Ryland Walker Knight (excellent name!).

“Yet the threat (or the promise) of the film’s title is a mere hint of the lurking, bubbling terror within. More pointedly, the title — written in a skuzzy, white, printing press Old English across the width of the film’s opening black screen — is the film’s first trigger pulled to wring its audience anxious and uneasy for a terse, dire, cunning two hours and forty minutes.

“Flipping Punch-Drunk Love on its ear, There Will Be Blood‘s operatic score (composed, by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, of dissonant string arrangements and odd percussive rhythms aping Kubrick’s favored Penderecki and Ligeti) amplifies the tension of the film not for a flow of delirious hilarity but for a knotting of orchestrated discomfort. This film denies the release laughter allows. This film will beat you down, bury you under its weight. But your beating will be beautiful.

There Will Be Blood “bears Anderson’s signature throughout. There’s the father-son melodrama, the stately and gliding camerawork, the fear of people, and even a few discomfiting wink-jokes at the audience. Most of all, though, there’s Daniel Day-Lewis, covered in crude oil, raising his arms like a conductor to signal the explosion to begin. It’s terrifying, invigorating, phenomenal. I fear I’ve said too much already.”

Knight ran his review after catching last Monday night’s benefit screening of There Will Be Blood at San Francisco’s Castro theatre.

Two days ago at the Denver Film Festival a trade critic called to say he’d been told by a Fox rep he would be physically blocked from a public festival showing of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (Fox Walden, 11.16). I ran an item about this late Saturday afternoon I was told this morning by Fox Walden spokesperson Jeffrey Godsick that the incident was some kind of misunderstanding, that an “overzealous” festival rep had conveyed the physical blocking threat (“a weird little thing“) and not a local Fox rep, that the film has in fact been screened for certain critics including Richard Roeper and Michael Wilmington, and that the film was screened for junket press last weekend so no one’s hiding anything.

Denver Film Festival media relations chief Britta Erickson also called to explain that “neither the festival staffers nor Fox reps would have physically blocked any critic from seeing the film” and that Saturday’s festival screening was “a great event for families and children, as it was a benefit for Toys for Tots.”

Godsick said there had been an expectation that trade reviews would be held until the day before the 11.16 opening, and that yesterday’s review by Variety‘s Brian Lowry was posted because Variety took the appearance of Magorium quotes in Sunday newspaper ads as a green light to run their own review.

Lowry called Magorium a “genial and G-rated fantasy from screenwriter/first-time director Zach Helm (Stranger Than Fiction) that sprinkles in charming moments but ultimately doesn’t evoke enough wonderment to overcome its tongue-twisting title and completely win over adults along with kids. Given the dearth of quality family fare, Fox and Walden might drum up nice business, but holiday shoppers at this emporium should be advised that the merchandise is limited in scope and ambition and thus more suited to the specialty realm than franchise-oriented spectacle.”

“Oddly, the same executives who speak with absolute authority about the horrifying injustice of paying residuals [to writers] seem to turn into bewildered children, lost in a fogbound forest and helpless to see even two feet ahead, when they confront the other big issue: income from streaming video, new media, and the Internet.

“Writers, like everybody else with a brain and a computer, have figured out that this is where a large chunk of the future of movie and TV revenue resides, and they want a piece of it. To which the producers have essentially responded: ‘What’s this newfangled interweb you’re talking about? We don’t know how it works! Are you sure there’s a way we can make money from it? What a silly thing to even talk about! What next, flying cars?'” — from Mark Harris‘s latest Entertainment Weekly column, called “Why The Striking Writers Are Right.”

Time magazine is running an article that summarizes the ten best moments from various Coen Bros.films over the last 22 years. It’s a decent appreciation, but as I happened to notice the piece on Sasha Stone‘s Awards Daily earlier today, I couldn’t help but notice Greg Gingold‘s Coen Brothers gag reel video that Stone included as visual filler.

Gingold’s reel is a typically shallow thing — rapid-fire clips aimed at snagging the attention of infants and cultural primitives. The Coens have always had a distinctive visual sense, of course, but to me the words “a Coen Brothers film” has always meant extremely well-crafted dialogue and sardonic hipster humor that’s vaguely misanthropic. They’ve often gone for madcap cleverness, but they’re extremely careful photographer-editors who are just as much about balance and formal framings — a kind of John Ford-Sergei Eisenstein composition sense.

Susan King posted an interesting Envelope piece yesterday (11.10) about the impact of the writer’s strike upon the various awards show, if and when it continues into January and February — the Oscars, Golden Globes, DGA and WGA awards and Film Independent Spirit Awards. The patter on some of these shows is bad enough as it is (the Globes especially) but can you imagine how grotesque these shows will seem without guild writers chipping in at least an occasional decent joke? This more than anything other presentation issue should force a settlement before New Year’s Day or soon after.

“I wear jeans, socks and a shirt — all totally normal,” Tom Cruise has allegedly told the Post-Dispatch. “I get my hair cut on set. I have no iPhone, no mobile, no email address, no watch, no jewelry, no wallet.”

I believe 80% of that statement. The “no wallet” and “no mobile” is bullshit. Everybody carries a driver’s license and a couple of cards around — you have to. (I’ve seen photos of Cruise driving a motorcycle down Robertson Blvd.) And Cruise expects people to believe that if he’s with his daughter and God forbid an emergency were to happen, he’s not going to have a cell in his pocket so he can call an ambulance or the police?

Any guy saying “I carry nothing in my pockets” is actually boasting that he’s got so many security guys and kiss-ass assistants watching his every move that he doesn’t need to do anything except “be.”