“Why is it that the only people who really appear to lose control when they accept their [Oscar] statuette are the actors?,” writes MSN’s Jim Emerson. “Why don’t the art directors and sound editors sputter and wail as if they’d just been spared from lethal injection? If anything, you’d think the actors would be better able to control their emotions than most people.

“And you’d be right. You see, actors dig emotional meltdowns, on screen and off. They do it on purpose. It’s almost a form of noblesse oblige — a generous Acting Gratuity (more than 20 percent), if you will: “I will now treat you to an extraordinary demonstration of how deeply I am moved!” And, at the same time, it’s a form of grandiose self-inflation and self-abasement.”

The esteemed auteurs who produced Anna Nicole Smith‘s last film, an apparent piece of shit called Illegal Aliens, have cancelled screenings because, as director David Giancola has explained to the N.Y. Daily News, “so much of it is riffing on Anna and her riffing on herself, I just don’t think, with her passing, it’s appropriate to screen it so quickly after her death.”

The late Anna Nicole Smith in a still from Illegal Aliens

Smith lived a life that was mainly characterized by tastelessness and lack of refinement, and now that she’s gone her colleagues feel it’s time to get all sensitive and discreet. Not to mention the likelihood that the film’s only chance of being even marginally commercial would depend on it being released as soon as possible and then sent straight to DVD.

“We had planned to release it in April,” Giancola explained. “But right now, it’s such an early stage, we just don’t know.” Filmed in Vermont in 2005, pic is “supposed to be a comedy” and in it, Smith spends a lot of time making fun of herself. Considering how she died, that humor may now be lost. She plays one of three extraterrestrials who fight an intergalactic terrorist. Edgewood Studios bills it as “Charlie’s Angels goes sci-fi.”

In his handling of Music and Lyrics, director- writer Marc Lawrence “makes everything about three times more obvious than it needs to be,” says Variety critic Todd McCarthy. And yet “there’s energy” in this Hugh Grant-Drew Barrymore romance that Warner Bros. will open on 2.14, “and the actors feed on it.

“Grant carries the day as the fortysomething lad still living off his youth and just about getting away with it; from his first moment onscreen, he persuades you he’s the only possible actor for this tailor-made role. No matter Grant’s effervescence, newcomer Haley Bennett nearly steals every scene she’s in as the Britney/Christina/Madonna figure. Very cute and a hot little dancer, the singer-thesp presents an implacable figure of absolute privilege and authority while sneakily sending up the whole celebrity package in a wonderfully sly turn.

“Which leaves Barrymore something of the odd woman out. Granted her Sophie starts out just wanting to blend into the wallpaper, but the star still comes off as rather more drab than necessary, or at least seems so in light of the charisma popping from the pores of those around her. Surrounded by an ex-star, a diva, a brilliant former boyfriend and a livin’-large sister, it’s hard for a normal neurotic to get a word in edgewise.”

A sophisticated film chum who’s currently trolling the Berlin Film Festival (and who weirdly asked for anonymity) insists that “Olivier Dahan‘s La Mome (a.k.a., La Vie en Rose) — a hurricane dramatic ride into the tumultuous life of Edith Piaf — is the first great film of 2007.”

strong>Bob Berney’s Picturehouse acquired U.S . distrib rights in Cannes last year, and is now pushing what Berlin guy feels will be the #1 contender for the Best Foreign Language Feature race of this year.”

Marion Cotillard “delivers one of the best female performance of the past decade,” he insists. “She’s the Penelope Cruz (in Volver) of this calendar year except she could have a serious shot at winning it all.’

No Variety review yet, but the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt is calling it “a messy triumph…showy and scattered, sometimes corny and other times outrageous, focused intensely on emotions, in love with its heroine and to hell with anything else.

“Dahan, who co-wrote the script with Isabelle Sobelman, pulls apart Piaf’s improbable, melodramatic life and puts it back together in a mosaic that suits his idea of the singer. Dahan sees Piaf’s life as a fantasia where nothing separates life from art, where miracles dwell alongside tragedy and grief and a saint can drop by for a visit.

“The film is messy the way Piaf’s life was messy: It’s unafraid of extravagant gestures even when they fail to come off.

“La Vie en Rose aims at a broad international audience with a mix of Piaf standards, doomed romance and a larger-than-life, self-destructive heroine.

“Thanks to an extraordinarily brave performance by Marion Cotillard, whose every gesture and singing performance channels not only Piaf but perhaps a bit of Judy Garland, the film should have wide adult appeal,” Honeycutt declares. “Critics will be divided about the filmmaking, especially its more self-conscious aspects, but Cotillard’s performance and the film’s fervent, romantic belief that misery can be turned into art will connect with many age groups, especially among women.”

Marion Cotillard on the carpet

Is EXBERLINER Berlinale blogger D. Strass behind the curve and/or missing the boat on La Mome/Vie en Rose? He could certainly file a bit faster, since La Mome is the first seemingly hot thing to emerge from the Berlin Film Festival, with Marion Cotillard allegedly giving the first ’07 performance with a shot at becoming a Best Actress contender.

“Film choices are minimal today,” he wrote yesterday. The press screenings kicked off with a French prestige production (which is to say, it was almost three hours long): Olivier Dahan‘s La Mome, a biopic about Edith Piaf. [I’ve been] assured that this film will be worthwhile, though films of this size and nature tend to be more worthy than worthwhile if you see what I√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢m saying.

“The French still create the sort of gigantic historical epics that passed from favor in the U.S. 40 years ago, and with a sprinkling of politically muddled exceptions. And very few of these French Fanfares have much to offer other than some finely lit soot and, again, with a few exceptions. I notch this up to a pervasive nostalgia and melancholia that continues to flow through French culture √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Ǩ≈ì the same sort that enable their love of Edith Piaf.”

“My expectations are low. It would be silly for me if I haven’t learned from my experience [of losing]. But it’s fun, dear. It really is fun. I would be delighted to win. If not, I will be the record holder for the one who never won one.” — Peter O’Toole speaking to L.A. Times profiler Susan King.

N.Y. Times Oscar David Carr — a.k.a., “the Bagger” — sees and wisely, rightfully plugs Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others.

The First Ones, a black-and-white N.Y. Times short film, directed by Jake Paltrow. It’s basically seven big-name actors — Brad Pitt, Helen Mirren, Leonardo DiCaprio, Penelope Cruz, Cate Blanchett, Abbie Cornish, Ken Watanabe — talking about the films that made early vivid impressions. Not bad.

David Fincher‘s Zodiac (Paramount, 3.2) is a knockout. I felt pleasantly drugged (like I’d taken an art-film quaalude) after seeing it. It’s my idea of entertaining and then some — it’s absorbing, sharp, edge-of- the-seat stuff — although it’s not really “entertainment.” Not in a hoi polloi, whoo-whoo, pass-the-popcorn sense. Which is why certain voices on the Paramount publicity team have been skittish about showing it.

I guess they’re afraid that Zodiac‘s unusualness (particularly its lack of a conven- tional catch-the-killer finale) may result in iffy buzz or a not-big-enough haul on its first weekend in theatres, which is only three weeks away. The nervous nellies may be right (or half-right), but anyone who doesn’t see Zodiac is going miss one of the most oddly arresting and excitingly different cop thrillers of all time.

What it is, most definitely, is a commercial art film of the highest order — an existential police procedural about one of the most notorious “cold” investigations in U.S. history. It’s especially haunting for me because it doesn’t have a finale that conventionally “pays off.” It’s a movie about the unsolvability of some things — about how some riddle or intrigue will sometimes excite you and then turn around and mess with you big-time, and then finally deny a sense of closure. I don’t exactly know why I think it’s a better film because of this. I just know that a film as assured, well honed and tightly packed as this one deserves to be seen at least two if not three times.

Zodiac is based on two best-sellers by Robert Graysmith, “Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America’s Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed,” which are first-hand accounts about the hunt for the Zodiac killer who terrified the San Francisco area in 1968 and ’69.

The chief Zodiac hunters in the film (as they were in actual life) are Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist at the time (and later a novelist), a blunt-spoken, never-say-die San Francisco detective named Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), his low-ley but super-focused partner William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and a Chronicle reporter named Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.)

(Toschi is understood to have been the real-life model that Steve McQueen based his tough-nut San Francisco detective on in the 1968 Peter Yates film Bullitt. And of course, the Zodiac killer was the model for Andy Robinson‘s psycho killer in Dirty Harry , the 1971 Don Siegel-Clint Eastwood classic…right down to the Zodiac claim about wanting to kill a busload of school children.)

Zodiac is partly about the thrill and fascination of the hunt (the scores of hints and clues that pile up are more and more fascinating as the story moves along), and partly about how the complex, seemingly never-ending nature of the case makes Graysmith, Toschi, Armstrong and Avery go a bit nuts.

Is there such a thing as being too determined to stop evil? At what point do you ease up and say, “I’ve done all I can.” Is it always essential to finish what you’ve started? Should never-say-die always be the motto, even at great personal cost?

Unshowy, exquisitely measured and assembled like a perfect watch, Zodiac is about how the difficulty of cracking a complex case never has the slightest inhibiting effect on the investigators. They just keep at it until the damn thing turns around and starts to eat them, and still they don’t stop. The victims, in other words, aren’t just the ones who get shot or stabbed or otherwise killed.

Zodiac isn’t just about sleuthing. Deep down I think it’s a metaphor piece about obsessions wherever you find them, and how the never-quit theme applies to heavily-driven creative types (novelists, painters, architects, musicians) as much as cops or cartoonists or stamp collectors or baseball-card traders.

Zodiac and Se7en have at least a couple of things in common: both are heavily focused on the bottled-up emotions and personal frustrations of their two main protagonists, and both films end on a note in which the “crime doesn’t pay” motto doesn’t exactly ring out from the belltower.

It’s the most masterly film of Fincher’s career. He doesn’t seem to be pushing or selling or manipulating anything here — he’s just got a good grip on the material, and is letting it play itself out according to its own rhyme.

All I know is that I couldn’t get enough of it — it ticks like a metronome and sucks you in without really delivering anything stand-out spectacular in the way of mind-blowing finales, pull-out-the-stops performances (which isn’t to take anything away from the actors, who are damn near perfect) or shocking plot turns. It scores primarily by just being a great piece of filmmaking.

Paramount’s decision to not release Zodiac at the end of ’06 was, due respect, not swift. It’s not an Academy-type film, but it easily would have landed on several ten-best lists, which could obviously have helped with the ad campaign. A critic friend is calling Zodiac‘s 3.2.07 release “the most ridiculous [call] for a major Hollywood film that I’ve ever observed — certainly in our era where, in general, the first four or so months of the year are a dumping ground for crap.”

This guy wrote me this morning and called Zodiac “a high masterpiece.” I wrote back and said, “I agree with you 120 %…it’s brilliant…a masterpiece of sorts. Doomed to fail with the gorillas, but still….”

The guy wrote back and said that Zodiac is “a complete work of art — easily one of the most impressive procedural movies ever made in this country. What I think you’ll find is that as the film observes — not so much the killer — as those piecing together the pieces and clues, and nearly losing their lives and minds in the process…well, the film itself is a product of the same obsession as the characters, resulting in a remarkably rare example of story, subject, theme and filmmaking becoming an organic whole.

“I think that’s the key to the film’s extraordinary intelligence, and why Fincher jettisons nearly every stylistic device and post-modern inclination he’s previously loved (I’m thinking especially of Fight Club, of course, but also Se7en, which this film will be endlessly compared and contrasted to…)

“[People will] notice how thoroughly the film feels and walks and breaths like a 70s work — far more than just a re-creation of the ’70s, or a loving re-capturing of the ’70s, but completely grounded in the ’70s, from the flattened-out institutional lighting seen in Lumet’s films (which this most recalls, like Prince of the City), the long chapter-endiing fade-outs, David Shire‘s magnificent score that brings his Conversation music back to life (what a touch that is!) and the film’s balance of movie-star scenes and social reality. All of it without a shred of affectation or clever cultural quotation.

“I really can’t heap enough praise on this thing, and I’ll tell ya….Paramount was out of its freaking mind to hold this over to 2007. Maybe the whole DreamWorks business was clouding people’s judgment, but my god!! Zodiac would have certainly been a major contender in critics awards. It’s just beyond me that Paramount is now effectively dumping this into early March, after once considering January(!!!) …Utterly astounding.

“Perhaps, but possibly this absurd early March opening might have the result of ensuring that the film actually does better at the b.o. since absolutely nothing else in its class is opening. Mass audience, no way. But wow, this movie just keeps working in your mind. It’s made with such care, attention, perception, detail and sense of what comprises great moviemaking.

He said he loved that Fincher “is no longer displaying the need to be noticed that I detected in his earlier work. He approached this not only with total confidence, as someone who knows the story up one side and down the other, but also as a Californian. It contains such a rock-ribbed sense of what it was to be a Californian during that period, and a Bay Area resident.

“The San Francisco presented here runs so counter to the city of cultural cliche, here one dominated by white guys — was there a black face on screen? No counter-culturalists, no hippies, no freaks — unless you want to count Downey’s Paul, but he was still an ink-stained wretch only with a hip style sense and an upscale taste in drugs. In this way, again, it reminded me so much of The Conversation, but also Alan Pakula‘s 70s films. In a way, the SFPD stuff was based in Lumet-land, while the Chronicle stuff was based in Pakula-land, while never feeling like the movie was ripping off or stealing from these or other directors. I could go on….”

One small beef: Graysmith is a very strongly written guy with a lot of struggle and frustration inside — the pressure on him just builds and builds. But in a script I read last year, Graysmith had a great “release” scene at the end when he delivers a spellbinding 12-page oratory that ties up all the loose ends about who and what Zodiac is and was. (I was reminded of Simon Oakland‘s this-is-what-actually- happened speech at the end of Psycho.)

This scene acted as a kind of climax, but Fincher hasn’t used it. The finale — the film itself — would have been stronger if he had.

An exceptionally hip NASDAQ.com columnist named Frank Barnako has taken notice of Stephen Rodrick‘s Los Angeles magazine piece about Oscar bloggers…whoop-dee-doo. The article “says that some of the most influential Oscar-related journalism, if you can call it that, is coming from bloggers”…old-media asshole.

Half Nelson star Ryan Gosling doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the Best Actor Oscar — he’s probably the fifth-place choice of most voters — so why not go location-scouting in Uganda for The Lord’s Resistance Army, which Gosling with direct, produce, co-write and star in? Our time on the planet is limited, after all.

I’m still wondering, though, how and why Gosling suddenly grew into the Brian Dennehy of his generation. I would analogize his body-weight gain over the last two years to the contrast between Marlon Brando‘s physique in A Streetcar Named Desire in ‘651 and Bedtime Story in ’64.

It broke early this morning that News Corp. honcho Rupert Murdoch screwed up yesterday by giving reporters bogus information about Sacha Baron Cohen signing to make a Borat sequel for 20th Century Fox. Not yet he hasn’t. Studio spokesperson Chris Petrikin said, “We’re eager to work with Sacha again, and we’ve had casual discussions about a sequel, which we’d love to do, but at this point, it remains too preliminary to discuss.”