The top five Gurus of Gold Best Actor contenders are Daniel Day Lewis (There Will Be Blood), Tommy Lee Jones (In The Valley of Elah), James McAvoy (Atonement), Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd) and Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild).

Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood

The vulnerable wildebeests at this stage seem to be Depp and Hirsch — the former because of growing presumptions that Sweeney Todd will be regarded as being too bloody to be a Best Picture contender, and that the fiendish slitter of all those throats may get pulled down along with the film, and the latter because of the sentiments of that producer I heard from earlier today, which, I’ve been told, have been voiced by others.

Lewis’s chances are obviously undefined until people start seeing and reacting to There Will be Blood. I’m pretty sure that Jones and McAvoy are locks.

Two guys may wind up taking Hirsch and Depp’s place — American Gangster‘s Denzel Washington and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead‘s Philip Seymour Hoffman. They both kill in their respective roles as a Harlem-based, Al Capone-styled heroin wholesaler and a drug-dependent, morally downswirling businessman who hatches a plot to rob his parents’ jewelry store.

The guy who should be in the top five, no question, is Control‘s Sam Riley. I don’t care if anyone knows him or how new he is to the business. His performance as late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis is astoundingly well-calibrated. The fact that Riley never seems to be “acting” is the genius-level ingredient. And yet not one Golden Guru voted for him, and they should be ashamed of themselves for blowing him off in so total a fashion. I mean it — each and every Guru needs to go outside, light a cigarette (even if they don’t smoke), take a 20-minute walk and ask them- selves why they failed to even mention one of the absolute finest performances of the year by an actor of either gender. I’m sorry, but this falls under the heading of “dereliction of duty.” For this oversight alone, this team needs to be regarded as the Gurus of Shame.

The Guru’s second five are Denzel, Eastern Promises‘ Viggo Mortensen (forget it), the Charlie Wilson’s War star Tom Hanks (conceivably), Michael Clayton‘s George Clooney (he got his Oscar for Syriana…won’t happen) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly‘s Mathieu Almalric (an Oscar for a guy blinking his left eyelash?).

What’s so disturbing about Chris Matthews saying the following about Fred Thompson? “Can you smell the English Leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man’s shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of — a little bit of cigar smoke? You know, whatever.”

I think it’s hilarious — it’s like great dialogue from a smart movie. Not Paddy Chayefsky as much as…I can’t think of which screenwriter’s stuff sounds like this precisely, but I love it. Sounds like a real guy talking.

Speaking of Chayefsky: “He had at that time perhaps an hour to live, although prompt treatment would have saved his life. As a staff doctor he was seen without preliminaries. His vital signs were taken, including an electrocardiagram which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history, and then he was promptly, simply…forgotten to death.

“Simply mislaid. Mislaid among the broken wrists, the chest pains, the scalp lacerations. The man whose fingers were crushed in a taxi door. The infant with a skin rash. The child swiped by a car. The old lady mugged in a subway. The dere- lict beaten by sailors. The teenage suicide. The paranoids, drunks, asthmatics. The rapes, the sceptic abortions…the overdosed addicts, the fractures, hemmorhages, concussions, boils, abrasions. The colonic cancers, the cardiac arrests…the whole wounded madhouse of our times.”

Assisted by editor David Tedeschi (Shine a Light, No Direction Home), Martin Scorsese will assemble a doc about the life of the late George Harrison, the quietest, most solemn-minded Beatle who played a mean crying guitar. His playing on “So Sad,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” etc. (Is that Harrison playing on Badfinger‘s “Day After Day,” or someone who sounds like him?) He was also one of the most economical lead guitarists in rock music history. That mad jangly riff on “Hey, Bulldog” still has a great tumultuous quality.

Scorsese and Tedeschi can cut and interview all they want, but Harrison’s greatest cinematic moment will always be that Hard Day’s Night scene with Kenneth Haigh as the trend-obsessed ad man. Harrison: “She’s a drag, a well-known drag. We used to turn the sound down on her and say rude things.” Haigh: “You can be replaced, chicky-baby.” Harrison: “I don’t care.”

Harrison has always been known as the most spiritual of the Fab Four, but he wasn’t an incarnation of Shri Krishna either. He smoked himself into an early death, kept a place in his heart open for Harry Nilsson (one of the unregenerate party animals in the history of the human race), and especially liked Nilsson’s “You’re Breaking My Heart.” According to a cheap tell-all book, Harrison never stopped strumming his acoustic guitar as he received a blowjob from a girl at a party in Los Angeles, and thereafter said “thanks, luv” and strolled out of the room.

Nobody’s just one color or mood or flavor. Everyone’s complicated and inconsistent and contradictory. If Harrison-the-holy wasn’t known for occasionally flawed or weird behavior his rep would be insufferable.

Variety‘s Michael Fleming reports that the doc “is being constructed as a theatrical release, and the Harrison family will supply materials from its extensive archive. Interviews and early production will begin later this year, and the film will take several years to complete.” Several years?

I was invited to last night’s Entertainment Weekly soiree to honor and welcome L.A. bureau chief Sean Smith (formerly of Newsweek), even though Smith’s been on the job for eight weeks. It was a truly elegant event — relaxing, soothing lighting, fragrant evening air, no blaring music. The best party I’ve been to in months — nicer than anything I attended during the Toronto Film Festival and that’s saying something.

Entertainment Weekly managing editor Rick Tetzeli (l.) and recently installed L.A. bureau chief Sean Smith at last night’s chit-chatter — Wednesday, 9.26.07, 7:15 pm

Smith and EW reporter Nicole Sperling talked about the just-launched online feature called Hollywood Insider that will be composed of nine or ten stories per day (just like HE!). Some of it will be trade stuff, said Sperling, and will cover movies, music, TV…the entire spread. Five staffers (Sperling, Shirley Halperin, Dave Karger, Joshua Rich and Lynette Rice) are expected to bang out three items per day.

The guests were all top-dog, cream-of-the-crop publicists. I may have been the only non-EW journalist in attendance. The party was held at Craft, an elegant Century City restaurant that sits under the shadow of “the building with the hole in it,” otherwise known as “the Death Star” because it’s where CAA is headquartered.

I was so fried and frazzled from my usual 12-hour work day and so underfed (no breakfast, lunch or dinner except for three or four tangerines, some coffee and two or three Diet Cokes) that I succumbed to the abundant Sauvignon Blanc and — brilliant! — got drunk. I verbally embarassed myself only once, I think. Live and learn.

I was noticing as I came up the escalator inside the “Death Star” building that the faces of the people on the down escalator and in the cavernous lobby had a certain old-world, blue-blood quality. Like the people you tend to see in the Harvard Club on west 44th Street. That’s CAA for you — they pick and choose very carefully and don’t let any mongrels into the club.

A producer friend has chosen to disregard the things about Into The Wild that absolutely work — the intimate communing with nature’s grand cathedral, the serenely beautiful ending, Emile Hirsch‘s performance — because of her feelings about the real Chris McCandless, and out of this believes that Sean Penn‘s film may be the weakest wildebeest among the herd of supposed Best Picture nominees (to go by yesterday’s Gurus of Gold posting).

“No way is it a Best Picture nominee,” she wrote this morning. “This is a beautifully shot, self-centered, self-absorbed [film] about a selfish, psychologically damaged brat named Chris McCandless who died of starvation and poisoning while living in a bus in the Alaskan woods. How is this heroic? Why in the world would we admire this guy? He’s pathetic, not heroic. My screening companion asked me if he was mentally ill.

“McCandless’ quest for meaning would have been better served helping people instead of indulging his sense of au natural purity and while contemplating his navel. His story is a tragedy not because he died, but because he died for nothing, proving nothing, finding nothing.

“And his rage against his family? They didn’t beat him, hurt him, deprive him. They were sad and confused people who lied about their past to protect their children, not hurt them. They didn’t seem so horrible after all compared to what he did to them and to his sister, wich was just cruel. Not to call or write for two years? What a reprehensible thing to do. Certainly not the stuff of true heroism.”

For years I’ve clumsily mispronounced the name of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but yesterday’s N.Y. Times Maureen Dowd column about Ahmadinejad’s Manhattan visit has solved the problem for good. Katie Couric, she writes, “has dryly has told people that she remembers how to pronounce his name with the mnemonic ‘I’m a dinner jacket.'”

Why didn’t the guy who posted this YouTube version of Hotel Chevalier run the whole thing? The short is 13 minutes, and this is only 9 minutes and 35 seconds. It went up eight hours ago and hasn’t been taken down…yet. But it should be. Because it arbitrarily edits.

Fox 411’s Roger Friedman ran into original Sweeney Todd creator Stephen Sondheim at last night’s Recording Academy’s New York Chapter’s Honors show, and asked if Sondheim has seen Tim Burton‘s movie version of the classic musical. Yes, Sondheim answered, and he likes it.

But “it’s not the Broadway show,” Sondheim cautioned. “It’s only an hour and 45 minutes. A lot of the score has been cut. They’ve made it its own thing. You have to go in knowing that. But what they’ve done is great.”

105 minutes with a lot of the score excised? That sounds like a good thing. You have to be nervy and authoritative in adapting any kind of stage show…anything from another performing realm that’s highly regarded. You can’t be too slavish and obsequious. A guy who’s seen it told me last night that on its own terms Burton’s film is very tight and together and self-defining. But it’s not an Academy film, the guy said, because “it’s too bloody.”

New York/Vulture‘s Tim Murphy attended a soiree the night before last for song painter Joni Mitchell and her album Shine (her first since ’98’s Taming the Tiger) at Soho’s Violet Ray Gallery. Easily the most soulful and influential female poet-composer-performer of the late 20th Century (as well as the most emotionally arresting, elegantly phrased, bravest and saddest), Mitchell spat out the blunt truth when Murphy asked why she’d recorded no new tunes since the days of the Monica Lewiinsky scandal.

“I was angry at the politics. Especially [at Bush]. Angry at the American people. At Christians. At theology — the ignorance of it. And I didn’t want to write about it. I removed myself from society and painted. It was a method of avoiding the anger, not addressing it.

“I couldn’t listen to music for ten years, I hated it all. It all pissed me off. Music just became grotesquely egocentric and made for money. It wasn’t music — there was no muse. Music requires a muse. The producer is not a muse. He’s a manufacturer. Contemporary music made me want to punch people. I couldn’t stand any of it. The whoring, the drive-by shooting of it all. I don’t care how well crafted it is. America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It’s grotesquely mentally ill.”

Mitchell’s reputation as a world-class phraser, searcher and sufferer will last for the next several centuries. She’s a heavy cat among kittens. Nobody has recorded a more touching and transcendent version of “Unchained Melody” than Mitchell. Her early ’70s to early ’80s stuff was rock perfect. Especially The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. Those “six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain” and ” the hexagram of the heavens.” That “poppy poison-poppy tourniquet [that] slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit.” I’ll take these lyrics with me into the next life.

I saw Mitchell play at Studio 54 in ’81 or ’82, and I stood fairly close (ten or twelve feet from the mike stand) and just smiled and beamed out every positive-energy combustion I had inside me, and after a couple of songs she caught my eye (or vice versa), and I don’t care if this makes me sound like a fan but I was grovelling at that moment and I couldn’t have felt more rapture. It happened 25 years ago, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel now like that Everett Sloane moment on the Staten Island ferry in Citizen Kane when he saw the girl in a white dress with a parasol.

I just checked the lyrics to “Refuge of the Road,” and all this time I thought the line went “hard of humor and humility,” as in “hard of hearing.” I loved that line! But apparently Mitchell actually sings “heart and humor and humility.” Very disappointing…very.

MTV’s Larry Carroll reported this morning that Gregg Araki‘s Smiley Face, which got a rousing reception at Sundance last January, has gotten the shaft from its distributor, First Look. The comedy will open in one lousy theatre in Los Angeles later this year and then go straight to DVD in January. Carroll is calling Smiley Face “one of the funniest films we’ve seen in 2007…it deserves better.” Tough break, tough town.

MCN’s Gurus of Gold (Scott Bowles, Pete Hammond, Eugene Hernandez, Peter Howell, David Karger, Glenn Kenny, Jack Matthews, Mark Olsen, David Poland, Sasha Stone, Sean Smith, Anne Thompson, Susie Woz, Glenn Whipp) have put up their first Best Picture rankings, and the top five are Joe Wright‘s Atonement, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country For Old Men, Mike Nichols‘ Charlie Wilson’s War, Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster and Sean Penn‘s Into the Wild.

This is is the very first time that a group has gotten together this year and said, “Okay…these five.” The game from here on will be to nip away at the weak wildebeests in the herd until one or two stumble and fall to the ground and are torn apart and consumed, which is what happened last year to Dreamgirls despite wildlife park ranger David Poland trying to keep away the lions and the cheetahs and the wild dogs with his .22 Derringer.

I’m totally agreed on Atonement and No Country. Charlie Wilson’s War is obviously a strong maybe but nobody knows anything at all. I saw American Gangster last night and totally agree — it’s a very likely Best Picture nominee. And due respect to Into The Wild, which I quite admire, but I don’t think it’s quite Olympian enough to be a top-fiver (although it’s Penn’s best ever).

The two vulnerables, I believe, are No Country for Old Men (the old-fashioned crowd is going to have problems with the ending) and Into The Wild (although Emile Hirsch is a very safe bet for Best Actor). Atonement is, I believe, a total Best Picture lock-down. American Gangster ought to be a nominee and probably will at the end, but I know some are cool on it so I’m not 100% sure. And we’ll see what happens with Charlie Wilson’s War.

The challenge from this end of the cage is to try and wake everyone up, or as many as possible, to the greatness of Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. The fact that only Howell, Whipp and Woz have listed it among their top ten indicates this won’t be easy.

Thank god no one’s trumpeting Tim Burton‘s Sweeney Todd as a top-fiver sight unseen (not that it has the slightest chance — Burton doesn’t “do” Academy films), although right now it has the #6 slot.

Jason Reitman‘s Juno is #7 as we speak, but it may fall away as things move into late November and December. It’s not as sharp and true as Little Miss Sunshine, and it sort of needs to be to play in this game.

Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and Butterfly is #8, but it hasn’t a prayer.

Although Paul Thomas Anderson‘s totally unseen There Will Be Blood is #9, it could obviously surge forward if the movie is great and Paramount Vantage plays its cards the right way.

Nobody I know has seen Marc Forster‘s The Kite Runner, which has the #10 spot but has recently had its release date pushed back to December.

Michael Clayton is #11, Hairspray is #12 (a show of politeness is requred), Eastern Promises is #13 (forget it), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (just wait) is #14, and In The Valley Of Elah is #15.

Here’s a link for Wes Anderson‘s Hotel Chevalier — Jason Schwartzman, a yellow and biege hotel room with a great view, Peter Sarstedt‘s “Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?“, the naked Natalie Portman (with bruises) and a great pair of lines — Portman saying “if we fuck, I’m going to feel like shit tomorrow” and Schwartzman saying “that’s okay with me.” The download is free. It’s best to have iTunes open first. It lasts 13 minutes.