I’ve just pulled what feels like a major tea-leaf reading out of my ass, so here goes: Babel seems to have picked up a kind of default Best Picture headwind — it may be more of a stiff breeze than anything else, but you can hear it and feel it in 20 different ways — and a good number of people are obviously deciding, voting and sending in their ballots as we speak, so I think it’s pretty much settled.

Depending, that is, on how many sent in their ballots early, how many are sending them in right now, and how many are going to wait until the last minute. These three groups probably amount to “most,” “some” and “few,” in that order.

I’m sensing (am I wrong?) that Little Miss Sunshine peaked between the Producers Guild win and the SAG awards. Letters From Iwo Jima doesn’t have the votes. The Queen has never had any headwind at all. And The Departed (my personal favorite) has been oddly marginalized by the 100% consensus that Martin Scorsese will win Best Director. So that leaves you-know-what, baby.

Take this to the bank, deposit it and get a receipt — it’s Babel, Babel, Babel all the way. Nothing’s going to change, nothing’s going to surge…it’s over. Babel has the most blue-chip nominations that count the most — Picture, Directing, Screenplay, Editing, Supporting Actress. Plus it’s emotional and beautifully made, superbly cut, exquisitely acted and — this is key — it’s seen as being Crash-y as hell. By which I mean Academy-friendly because of its compassionate weight-of-the-world tapestry narrative. (It’s an outrageous misrepresentation to equate Inarritu’s film with Paul Haggis’s ’05 Oscar winner, but so many people have bought in this there’s almost no point in arguing. )

It’s curious that Samuel L. Jackson‘s put-down of Babel (sometime during or shortly after last May’s Cannes Film Festival he called it “Crash Benetton”) would serve, in a way, as a kind of analagous passport to the Big Win.

MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz announcing a sneak peek at Edgar Wright‘s Hot Fuzz, a spin-spoof of the buddy-cop genre with Shaun of the Dead costars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. The worst thing about clicking on this is that a video interview with Joss Wheedon comes up, and you have to listen to him talk about…well, I was actually delighted that he’s not doing Wonder Woman. I’d be delighted if he didn’t do anything.

That very guitar-y Lou Reed song that partially salutes Martin Scorsese called “Doing The Things,” courtesy of Oscarwatch.com’s Sasha Stone.

“I know everyone knew Norbit was going to be a piece of shit, but I saw it last night and it’s worse than you think. It’s not just stupid and pandering — it’s borderline incompetent. I can’t recall a film I’ve seen in theaters that trumps it for badness — a hyperbolic statement, I realize, but I’ve wracked my brain and I really can’t.

“I saw it in a completely fully 500-seat theater in Baltimore, and even it’s target audience barely chuckled through it. The 6 year-old boy sitting behind me seemed to enjoy it the most. I would think maybe this was a little bit below the Wayans brothers, but as many terrible movies Murphy has made, I could never imagine he’d do something as piss-poor as this.

“Spoiler: The evil-because-she’s-fat villain Raputia gets her comeuppance by having the Chinese character (also played by Murphy) scream ‘Whale Ho!’ and throw a harpoon at her asshole.

“I hate to jump on Wells’ spiteful bandwagon, especially because I think Murphy was very good in Dreamgirls (though nowhere near as good as Jackie Earle Haley), but I think this more than merits him losing the Oscar.” — Pan The Faun

I didn’t ask Benicio del Toro at last night’s Three-Amigos-minus-one party about his intention to play “Lawrence Talbot” in Mark Romanek and Andrew Kevin Walker‘s The Wolfman, but we got into a couple details about Steven Soderbergh‘s two Che Guevara films — The Argentine and Guerilla — in which he’ll play the lead.

Shooting on the two Spanish-language films will begin (or so I recall reading) sometime in May or June. But first Soderbergh has to finish post-production on Ocean’s 13 (Warner Bros., 6.8.07). I think Benicio said something about the plan being to shoot Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s story in sequence — Argentine first, Guerilla second — but I can’t swear to it. This would make sense, of course.

I was later told by editor Stephen Mirrione — Oscar-nominated for his work on Babel, currently cutting Ocean’s Thirteen, hired to cut Guerilla — that Soderbergh has already cut together a sequence reel (he called it a “kind of trailer”) made from the footage of Benicio-as-Che visiting New York City in 1964, which was taken last year. Man, would I love to see this. It would also be great, naturally, to get hold of the Argentine and Guerilla scripts.

I asked Mirrione if Ocean’s Thirteen, which Clooney and others have said is a revenge piece, will resemble The Sting. Not that much, he said. The guy that the gang takes its revenge upon, he made clear, isn’t Andy Garcia‘s “Terry Benedict” character but Al Pacino‘s “Willie Banks.”

The L.A. Times finally runs its own official Eddie Murphy takedown piece, separate from the stuff Tom O’Neil ran last week in The Envelope. It happens to be in the form of an article about how much damage Norbit (which a friend saw and hated last night) is doing to Murphy’s chances of winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his pretty-good-but- that’s-all performance in Dreamgirls.

“Every time I pass that billboard, it makes me sick,” a veteran Oscar consult- ant tells Times staff writers Greg Braxton and Robert W. Welkos. “I think his performance in Dreamgirls‘ is so fabulous” and deserves to win the Academy Award. But, he added, Murphy’s latest comedy offering “doesn’t help.”

To paraphrase a line that Charlton Heston says in Ben-Hur, “When and if Murphy loses the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, a cry will rise up throughout the land.”

“If the online file-sharing universe is the Wild West, Sweden is Deadwood — a place where the rule of law leaves barely a footprint,” writes Steve Daly in a just-out Vanity Fair piece about cybergeek movie piracy called “Pirates of the Multiplex,” and particularly the two guys who run Sweden’s Pirate Bay site, Fredric Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm.

Vanity Fair Hollywood issue, page 278

“Thanks to a combination of national copyright laws, laissez-faire social attitudes, and inexpensive and superior bandwidth,” Daly erxplains, “gentle little Sweden — which refers to itself as Europe’s ‘duck pond’ — has become a file-sharing fortress in which more than 10 per cent of its nine million citizens trade digital material, much of it provided by Pirate Bay.”

The seminal pull-quote of the piece reads, “Will Hollywood adapt and survive, or will it continue its battle against a million resourceful computer geeks?”

Being a relentless ahead-of-the-curve type, it took me eleven months to catch up with this non-movie-related YouTube juggling video, which has been viewed 8,957,608 times.

“In my view Berlin is now the third leg of the tripod of markets — there’s AFM in the fall, Berlin in the winter and Cannes in May. That’s the new paradigm.” — H20’s Mark Horowitz speaking to Variety‘s Elizabeth Guider. Toronto and Sundance are chopped liver?

Best scene in the film…

Children of Men opened in England in late September, so naturally the DVD is out now and purchasable at that cool-ass DVD store next to the Nuart.