Peter O’Toole‘s recent visit with Charlie Rose is viewable on the site. It takes too long to sift through all the corporate sponsor promos, but eventually it comes up.

To hear it from The Reeler‘s Stu VanAirsdale, the highlight of the Robert Altman tribute was Julianne Moore‘s recollection about beiong cast in Short Cuts, and being told that the role required lower-level nudity and Moore telling Altman that “I really was a redhead.”

I prefer the Paul Thomas Anderson anecdote passed along in David Carr’s N.Y. Times story, to wit: “On the set of A Prairie Home Companion, Altman would listen carefully to the suggestions of others and then say, ‘Let’s not do that.'”

An Inconvenient Truth is going to win the Best Feature Documentary Oscar this Sunday, and the right thing, obviously, would be for not just director Davis Guggenheim walking up to the podium to accept, but also (hello?) Al Gore along with producers Lawrence Bender, Laurie David and Scott Burns. Obviously. But no. Just Guggenheim. But of course.

British online voters at msn.com have allegedly decided that Shakespeare in Love is the most undeserving Oscar Best Picture winner of all time. (“Allegedly” because I can’t find the article that announces the tabulations — the news has been passed along by a BBC web page.)

The people who voted obviously aren’t very hip or knowledgable. Shakespeare in Love was a mostly tolerable, agreeably spunky period romance with a short-but-terrific Judi Dench performance. It wasn’t “right” that it won over Saving Private Ryan, but it wasn’t a rank embarassment. Mike Todd‘s Around the World in 80 Days winning the Best Picture Oscar iwas, however.

The respondents are correct in saying that the 2002 Best Picture going to Chicago was a joke, which it was. And they’re wrong in saying that Titanic winning in ’98 was undeserved. Any movie that ends as well as Titanic deserves accolades. Most of Titanic was okay, some of it was bad, some of it was genuinely engrossing and thrilling…but the last 20 to 25 minutes were spellbinding in a profoundly sad, inwardly-melting way. And that last dream/death sequence was transcendent.

John Mikulenka‘s “Hunting the Zodiac,” a 63-minute documentary “about the vast subculture of amateur detectives who are obsessed with solving the Zodiac Killer case from the late 1960s. Shot in 2001-02, the film chronicles a turning point in the hunt for the psychopath who killed at least 5 people in the San Francisco Bay Area and mailed more than a dozen bizarre letters and coded messages to local newspapers. Doc includes extensive interviews with the last two San Francisco homicide detectives to be assigned to the case, and it features more than 8 minutes of rare archival news footage from the earliest days of the Zodiac investigation.”

N.Y. Daily News reporter Chris Rovzar on the costs (“up to $25 million a year per nominated film”) and strategies that often/usually/ sometimes result in an Oscar nomination. The process is basically about having “a conversation with viewers,” I told him at one point, “and keeping certain films in their mind as they mull over possible winners.” My mind is freezing up; these phrases aren’t registering; only five more days to go.

“Case Closed” author Gerald Posner, who believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter on 11.22.63, has pointed out in a N.Y. Times story that the just-revealed George Jefferies 8mm home movies of JFK and Jackie Kennedy riding in the Presidential limo on Dallas’ Main Street (i.e., a minute or less before the shots rang out) that JFK’s easily visibly bunched-up suit jacket explains why the back-wound bullet hole didn’t line up with the bullet hole in his shirt.

And the bullet that ripped into both Kennedy and Connolly without altering its shape will be forever magic. And it was entirely natural for JFK to slam back into the car seat to his left after being shot in the head from an area above and to his right-rear. And all those confused people who ran up the slope of the grassy knoll in the seconds after the shooting were reacting to an acoustical deception, plain and simple.

Click on the Jefferies video (i.e., right next to the Posner story on the Times web page) and look at the people waiting near a Main Street corner, and notice the 1963 haircuts on the guys. Really short and close-shaven on the sides, loaded down with Brylcream, some scalp showing through. And yet all the haircuts in Oliver Stone‘s JFK were a tiny bit too long and mostly Brylcream-free. Just about any film depicting Average Joe haircuts in the early ’60s almost always get it wrong also. Pre-Beatles (i.e., before January-February 1964) haircuts in this country were very straight-arrow rigid, almost military.

The names of 35 world-class gentlemen directors have been named as creators of a series of three-minute films that will make up a feature film called “To Each his Own Cinema,” which will be shown during the 60th Cannes Film Festival in May. The chosen all have a certain elite, Cannes- sanctified tasteful aura about them. They are Theo Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Bille August, Jane Campion, Ethan & Joel Coen, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Atom Egoyan, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Takeshi Kitano; Andrei Konchalovsky, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Roman Polanski, Walter Salle, Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Wim Wenders,Wong Kar Wai, Zhang Yimou, etc. You know…that crowd.

“Howard Dean has been a virtual Nostradamus on predicting what would happen in Iraq from the beginning. But he screamed once. He said ‘yee-ha’ — publicly! He screamed louder than a crowd of people screaming at him, and the media acted like Grandpa just yelled out the ‘N’ word at a ball game.

“And before the war began, it was Al Gore who got it right, who spoke unequivocally about not making this bad choice, a choice that 77 Senators voted for. But during the debates of 2000, Al Gore…sighed! We can’t have a sigh-er for president!

“That’s why I think every candidate has to come out now, and say or do the stupidest thing they possibly can, and get it out of the way.” — Bill Maher in a posting that appeared four days ago on the Huffington Post

“A once venerated icon has been devalued by the hordes of eager-beaver marketers,” the quote goes. “Welcome to the devalued world.” And the topic is the over-use of laurels in film advertising. Whatever.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that “one of the best gurus of all — Pete Hammond of Maxim and Hollywood Wiretap.com — [has] just switched his best-pic prediction today from Little Miss Sunshine to Babel.” But if you ask me, it’s a shaky prediction based upon a dry hunch and a sense of Oscar fatigue.

“I’ve been talking to my Academy voter people and getting this survey, which told me last year Crash, Crash, Crash and not Brokeback at this point in the race,” Hammond explains. “But I’m not getting that [this year]. It’s all over the map. I talk to a Departed person, then I get a Little Miss Sunshine, then I get a lot of Babel and so there doesn’t seem to be a consensus.

“A lot of them think Little Miss Sunshine is too slight for their vote as best picture. That’s its biggest drawback. That and the fact that it doesn’t have editing and directing nominations, which would make it the first in academy history to win that way. And The Departed is too ‘genre.’ Scorsese — they appreciate him and all of that…but some people think it’s not the best Scorsese. There have been better ones. So it’s always odd that you’re going to give an award to a guy for something that’s not his best work, but that’s what we often see.

“Then you’ve got Babel, which is really appealing to people’s social sense and it has a little more to it. And it’s an international picture, which is what the business has become — worldwide. It’s one drawback is the lack of guild support…”

If you’re determined to believe something and you’re smart enough, you can always make a case for it — and it will sound half-reasonable. But when certain know-it-alls get into making a pitch along these lines, it can be truly fascinating to consider the motives, the personal politics and the mental contortions that went into it.

The defeat of Dreamgirls — i.e., its exclusion from being nominated for Best Picture — was a surprise to everyone, myself included. But it was also a thunderclap moment along the lines of Roman Polanskiwinning the Best Director Oscar for The Pianist. I didn’t like Dreamgirls all that much but I didn’t despise it, and yet I was thrilled by the sheer drama of hearing it had been slapped down. It was one of those “my God, the voters have really and truly spoken!” moments in history.

Given the shock-corridor factor and the difficulty of recovering from same, I can understand on a certain level why an almost comically revisionist view such as this one is being listened to and picked over. LIstening to this tape/video is like watching little lumps of mashed potatoes being thrown at the wall and watching some of them stick and others fall to the floor…plop.

It wasn’t good enough, the third act was weak, Beyonce’s character amounted to almost nothing, that moment with Jamie Foxx looking at Jennifer Hudson’s kid at the very end — throw it all together and the ensemble message on the ticker tape read, “Not bad, pretty good but no cigar.”

Do you, HE readers, believe that (a) Dreamgirls would have won the Oscar if it had been nominated for Best Picture?, (b) that it lost $30 million in revenue “at least” because it wasn’t nominated? and (c) that the Dreamgirls slapdown “hurt the industry”?