“One sure winner at this year’s Academy Awards will be the internet,” writes Denver Post freelancer Steven Rosen.

“More specifically, it will be the awards-oriented websites and blogs that have come together — in a perfect storm convergence of complementary and conflicting interests — to incessantly write about the insider’s world of Oscar campaigning. Some are independent, entrepreneurial or fan-based; others are part of print media taking risks with new technology.

“As they post items leading to the Feb. 25 Oscar telecast, they open the process to a global audience of movie fans. They also make the seemingly mysterious motives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s 5,830 voting members more transparent. To a point.”

George Lucas was definitely joking the other day, I’ve been told, when he said The Empire Strikes Back was the “worst” Star Wars film, etc. “Say what you will about Lucas, his personality, his qualities as a filmmaker or lack thereof,” says a person who attended the Publicist Guild luncheon in question. “But on that day, in that speech, he was 100% making a joke.

“He opened his speech — on a day filled with teleprompters — by saying that he never used a script when making a speech, something that drove his publicists crazy. (He’s not exactly a great public speaker, either, so perhaps he should change that habit.) At any rate, he spoke for about five minutes in a seemingly off-the-cuff manner, and made several ‘jokes.’ Others can judge whether or not he was actually funny, but yeah, he was joking.”

“I do think there’s a hardening of the culture that’s undeniable. I think reality TV — if you just look at what’s going on this week on ‘American Idol,’ meanness is king. That offbeat behavior. You’re left wondering about the legitimacy of relationships. Reality TV has, I believe, lowered the standards of entertainment, to put it mildly. I think it’s probably harder to entertain the same people with a more classic form of writing, and romantic comedies are a classic genre.” — director-writer Nancy Meyers (The Holiday, Something’s Got to Give) speaking to L.A. Times reporter Rachel Abramowitz about the near-death (i.e., near-total irrelevance) of romantic comedies these days.

According to a David Poland/Hot Blog posting, Star Wars creator George Lucas was introducing an award being given to Sid Ganis at the Publicists’ Guild luncheon (Ganis having been the in-house publicist on The Empire Strikes Back), and said the following: “Sid is the reason why The Empire Strikes Back is always written about as the best of the films, when it actually was the worst one.” If Lucas was kidding, whatever. If he wasn’t, or if he was only half-kidding, he’s reaffirmed his rep as one of the thickest and most clueless big wheels in the history of motion pictures.

You’re not supposed to say this and I’m not “saying” it myself — I’m just asking what people think. I realize there’s something in this that sounds a wee bit racist and lunk-headed, but an industry friend passed along a supposed distributor- exhibitor belief earlier today, which is that African-American audiences go to movies in proportionately bigger numbers on Sunday than other demos do. With every other group moviegoing falls off slightly on the day of rest, but with blacks attendance either holds steady or goes up. I heard this same view from a marketing executive five or six months ago. Both guys said this is backed up by surveys, data, etc. Is this a widely understood, research-verified cultural thing, or is it something else? And if it’s accurate, why does it happen?

The only Sunday night awards presentation that matters is the Writers Guild Awards, but interest levels are barely there because the Best Original Screenplay award is a lockdown for Little Miss Sunshine‘s Michael Arndt and the Best Adapted Screenplay trophy belongs to The Departed‘s William Monahan….right? The BAFTA Awards are strictly a second-tier deal, and too quirky besides.

No one remembers or cares about a so-so Battle of Thermopylae movie called The 300 Spartans (1962), and I seriously doubt if fans of Zack Snyder‘s 300 (Warner Bros., 3.9.07), which is about the exact same thing, will like it very much if and when they rent it out of curiosity over the next four or five weeks.

I’ve seen the older film a couple of times, and it always played way too tame and talky. Snyder’s film, on the other hand, is a visual mindblower — organic live-action footage simulating the brushstrokes of a graphic novel — with all kinds of sex scenes, beheadings and whatnot. The admiration of journalists like Anne Thompson and Suzie Woz aside, it’s a fanboy thing waiting to happen.

The opening sequence in The Lives of Others “isn’t particularly graphic or even suspenseful: the camera movement is almost placid, as if it were faking disinterest. But [it] gives a firm sense of a country in which paranoia is a part of the air, like a toxin leeching oxygen from it.

“And with it, director and writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck begins building the layers of emotional texture that ultimately make The Lives of Others — an Academy Award nominee for best foreign-language film — so moving, and so deeply satisfying.” — from Stephanie Zacharek‘s Salon review. The Sony Classics release has a 92% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Hard on the heels of Jurgen Trimborn‘s Leni Reifenstahl: A Life (Faber and Faber, 1./23.07), a galley proof of Stephen Bach‘s Leni:, The Life and Work of Leni Reifenstahl arrived yesterday via messenger. I went through 30 or so pages last night during dinner, and it’s obviously a very smart and perceptive read — thorough, respectful, in some ways admiring but always clear-eyed and carefully measured.

I was struck by the following graph in the final chapter: “Thomas Mann once wrote that ‘art is moral in that it awakens,’ but Leni’s art dulled and deceived. It is the perfect expression of the machinery of amnipulation it glorifies” in her two Nazi-era classics, Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Her films are, in the words of David Thomson, ‘the most honest and compelling fruit of fascist temperament — triumphant, certain and dreadful.'”

Roger Ebert personally endorses Eddie Murphy as the most deserving winner of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar?

Norbit is #1 for the weekend with a projected $31,376,000 — playing on over 3000 screens, earning over $10,000 a print, running only 87 minutes. Hannibal Rising is second at $12,417,000, Because I Said No is third with $8,902,000 and The Messengers is #4 with $6,752,000. A Night at the Museum is fifth with $5,390,000, Epic Movie is sixth with $3,886,000, and Joe Carnahan‘s Smokin’ Aces is seventh with $3,617,000. Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth is #8 with $3,446,000, Dreamgirls is ninth with $2855,000 (down to $1200 a print…lost 400-odd theatres this weekend…will probably lose another 750 to 1000 screens next week), and Stomp The Yard is #10 with $2,352,000.

“The late Murray Kempton once described editorial writers as ‘the people who come down from the hill after the battle to shoot the wounded,'” writes L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten. “Nowadays, media analysts are the guys who follow behind them, going through the pockets of the dead looking for loose change.

“So, yes, this column is about Anna Nicole Smith.

“Friday morning, less than 24 hours after she died in a Florida hotel room, the Drudge Report — our media culture’s digital arbiter of all things tacky and prurient — had 12 items posted on the onetime topless dancer. That would account for some of the media frenzy surrounding her death. It’s a little-known fact, but certain sectors of the broadcast media have long believed that if a dozen items on Anna Nicole Smith ever were posted on Drudge simultaneously, it would herald the onset of the apocalypse.

“Who knew? This is the way the world ends — neither with a bang nor a whimper but with cleavage.”