I finally saw David Fincher‘s masterful Zodiac (Paramount, 3.2) last night — a lengthier reaction to follow in an hour or two — but I didn’t run home and post something immediately because I wanted to let it settle in. To see if it would gain. And it has. No posts this morning either because of…how to put this?…nourishing private stuff. It goes without saying, of course, that an 18 hour-per-day hardballer indulges in n.p.s. to a certain degree of professional peril. “Feed me…feeeeeed me,” Hollywood Elsewhere whispers 24-7. Bike-riding on the beach? Maybe, possibly….as long as you post three or four items/stories first. No, five. Wait…one more.

The great and gregarious Guillermo del Toro, director-writer of Pan’s Labyrinth, will visit Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC, 12:05 a.m) tonight along with Tenacious D (Jack Black, Kyle Glass).

In a Hot Blog entry posted this morning at 11 ayem, David Poland wrote that “the Ben-Hur that won the 1959 Oscar for Best Picture was not, in any opinion I know of, a remake of the previous movie, but a film based on the same source material.” Not really — William Wyler‘s late ’50s version adhered to same basic story bones as Fred Niblo‘s 1925 version, both being based on the General Lew Wallace novel — same Messala, same chariot race, same leprosy, oar-slave imprisonment sentence, etc.

“On the other hand,” Poland continues, “The Ten Commandments, remade by Cecil B. DeMille 33 years after he did the same story in some 2-Strip Technicolor and no sound, was a remake√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭ¶nominated and not winning the Oscar in 1957, losing to Around The World In 80 Days.” Bullshit again. DeMille’s 1923 version was half about the story of Moses and half a modern-day parable set in San Francisco about two brothers who are rivals for the same woman, etc., while the ’56 version was all Moses, all the time.

The London Film Critics have handed their Film of the Year award to United 93, and Paul Greengrass has won the Director of the Year trophy…very good moves. Otherwise, Helen Mirren won the Best British Actress award for her performance in The Queen, blah blah. That film’s director, Stephen Frears, and screenwriter, Peter Morgan, took the Best British Director of the Year and Screenwriter of the Year awards, respectively. The Last King of Scotland‘s Forest Whitaker took the Actor of the Year award blah, blah. The Devil Wears Prada‘s Meryl Streep won Actress of the Year.

I don’t like the way Robert Evans reads his own material. Too pat, too affected, too dependent on that trademark purr. Evans is five times better when he’s not selling his smoothness and just being himself — a snappy, sometimes angry, occasionally confused guy with an tenacious streak. Nonetheless, this excerpt from his forthcoming Kid Notorious recalls encounters with Frank Sinatra, Jack Nicholson, John F. Kennedy, showgirls, “debutramps,” near-death experiences, his 1998 stroke, Sumner Redstone, et. al.

Norbit has a 19% Rotten Tomatoes rating so far….good movie! Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central has the best blurb: “Norbit is remarkably consistent in its incompetence, in its tireless recycling of ugly jokes from Eddie Murphy‘s other drag artifacts, in its race-baiting and body-loathing.

“It’s such a disquieting, dreadful, reckless thing that the fact that it seems like it’s all set in a Neverland in which an angry mob chasing a trio of black men isn’t meant to evoke a good old-fashioned lynching is more the point than beside the point. Norbit isn’t farce — it’s a thoughtless, cancerous, viral, irresponsible pollution whose existence speaks ill of the society that produced it and of any society that would endorse or defend it.”

Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of the N.Y. Times, was asked the following question last week at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland: “Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

And Sulzberger replied, “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either. The internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.” Did I just read that? The print version of the Times may cease publishing on or before 2012? Good heavens.

This, in any event is what I’m reading in a story published today in Haaretz.com, written by Eytan Avriel.

Sulzberger says the New York Times is on a journey that will conclude the day the company decides to stop printing the paper. That will mark the end of the transition. It’s a long journey, and there will be bumps on the road, says the man at the driving wheel, but he doesn’t see a black void ahead.”

Sacha Baron Cohen is obviously going to have trouble finding enough gullible real-life people (gay or straight) to believe his “Bruno” persona as any kind of real deal, but I imagine it’ll be at least three or four times tougher when he starts shooting the Borat sequel. Newscorp chief Rupert Murdoch has just announced Borat 2 in a story in the Financial Times. Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke provided the break and the link.

The definitive Eddie Murphy dynamite- plunger quote has been just sent to me. It’s in the latest Entertainment Weekly, and in my judgment it’s almost in the realm of a Nixonian “smoking gun” remark — spoken by DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg, no less. If it gets around, it should finish off widespread Academy support for this wonderfully talented artist and entertainer for good…except among those Academy voters who refuse to be influenced by the facts.

“Following his Oscar-nominated turn in Dreamgirls as r & b singer James ‘Thunder’ Early, one might expect Murphy to take on riskier roles, like, say, playing James Brown in Spike Lee‘s planned biopic. Nope: After his slapstick romance Norbit opens on Feb. 9, Murphy shoots the sci-fi comedy Starship Dave. And he recently announced plans for the fantastical family film Nowhereland, along with a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie.

“DreamWorks cofounder and good friend Jeffrey Katzenberg says Murphy, 45, has no desire to stretch for stretching’s sake: ‘Some actors are interested in going somewhere they’ve never gone before — if they’re dramatic actors they want to be comedians, if they’re action heroes they want to be Shakespearean actors. That’s just not who Eddie is.”

A friend has shared the following: “Eddie’s role in Dreamgirls is about 75% comedic. The 25% that’s not comedic or impressionistic is mostly him being sullen…which I don’t think comes that unnaturally in real life. I think what people have been responding to isn’t so much a great performance as someone stepping out of his box a little…but now that he’s made it clear he has no desire to step out of that box ever again, people have to go back and actually reevaluate the performance — which is, as you said, just okay.”

Another Beverly Hills Cop flick? I know…Murphy’s a divine God and I’m the jerk, right?

D. Strauss’s EXBERLINER Berlinale blog continues on this, the first day of the festival. I’ve gotten a general impression over the years that more drinking happens at the Berlin Film Festival than at any other, in large part (I assume) because Berlin is perhaps the most extreme party-animal town in the world.

I’m sure Anna Nicole Smith died of natural causes…not. The 39 year-old wackjob “collapsed and was unresponsive while staying at the Seminole Hard Rock Cafe Hotel and Casino,” according to a story on Breitbart.com. Now she’s with (in a manner of speaking) Daniel Smith, her 20 year-old son who died due to “a lethal combination of Zoloft, Lexapro and methadone that led to cardiac dysrhythmia,” according to his Wikipedia biography. And she’s also “with” the deceased oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, whom she married in 1994 in hopes of getting a chunk of his family’s $400 million fortune when he died. They’re all up in heaven now. No more stress or uncertainty….just a sweet cosmic float from here to eternity. Seriously, people into damaging their bodies by whatever means are looking to die. It’s a passive-aggressive form of suicide.

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.