The “Bagger” (a.k.a., N.Y. Times media columnist David Carr) and the Baguette paid a visit to the N.Y. Film Critics Circle awards dinner last night, and this deftly phrased piece resulted.
“Early in the evening, the Baguette asked winners about their relationship with critics. Peter Morgan, who won best screenplay for The Queen, said, “They write and think deeply about cinema professionally. It’s clearly a highly intelligent, highly sophisticated group of people befitting the town they represent.”
On the other hand, he doesn’t read their reviews. “I live in London,” he said.

Time magazine hit the streets last Friday in order to be more competitive (or at least seem that way on some level) and the mag’s website has been agreeably redesigned, but a whole lot of Time, Inc. employees are going to get whacked later this month as part of a major cost-cutting measure.
N.Y. Times guy David Carr has reported that Time Inc. management “is trying to cut costs to reflect brutal realities in the mass magazine business,” and that “at the end of the month there will be significant layoffs at the magazine division, and it will not end with Time‘s 280 editorial employees. Other magazines within the division of Time Warner will also re-engineer and cut as well.”
Suggestion: before cutting people, Time bigwigs should eliminate the expense of maintaining the Time, Inc. corporate jet, which is primarily used by CEO Richard Parsons and Warner Bros. honcho Alan Horn and Warner-allied celebrity fat-cats like George Clooney .
Or whack Parsons, for that matter. Parsons’s bonus was trimmed last year, but in 2005 his compensation was $16 million. Parsons’ four-year compensation plan, according to a 4.20.06 Forbes article, was $32.4 million. Parsons could at least slash his own salary by five million in order to keep a few more Time, Inc. employ- ees off the streets.

Oscarwatch‘s Sasha Stone has asked me to send her my choices for the five most likely DGA Best Director nominees, which are being announced tomorrow. I started to write them out but quickly devolved into hemming and hawing because…
I can’t figure which of the well-celebrated Three Amigos (Inarritu, Cuaron, del Toro) are the most steady and venerated in the membership’s eyes, for one thing, and which is the most vulnerable? They obviously all deserve to be nominated — if nothing else, ’06 has truly been the Year of the Three Amigos — and I really don’t know which way to turn because of the Children of Men surge of the last week or so. (Did it take off too late?)
The Queen‘s Stephen Frears is a likely nominee, I suppose, but I haven’t been feeling great inevitable power surges coming out of the Queen camp. I’ve been presuming all along that Bill Condon will be nominated for Dreamgirls, and good for Bill and Larry Mark and the gang if this happens, but I don’t know. The gotta- salute-the-big-musical herd mentality will probably put him over, but I wonder.
And I’m figuring United 93‘s Paul Greengrass has to be nominated…no? The most highly regarded film of the year according to the critics?
Here are my five choices plus reasons for each: (1) Martin Scorsese (The Departed) — slam dunk, no question, in the bag. (2) Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel) — the Producers Guild and SAG ratifications make this more likely than it was two or three weeks ago; (3) Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) — because everyone loves their film, and they’re little guys from the indie/MTV world; (4) Bill Condon (Dreamgirls) — herd mentality; and (5) Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) — because he’s the master.
It depends on how many DGA voters have seen Children of Men and how many of these have picked up on the growing support for this film, but something tells me that helmer Alfonso Cuaron might just make it into the top five. And if he doesn’t make it — or even if he does — Greengrass might step in also. Dunno, can’t figure it….stumped.

20th Century Fox has officially announced that James Cameron will really, no-shit-really start lensing Avatar for them in April 2011 with an expected release date in the summer of 2013. Yeah, I’m kidding again…like I did when I wrote this other pissy-snarky item about Cameron and Avatar about two weeks ago. The film will be shot in digital 3D (“a blend of live-action photography and new virtual photorealistic production techniques invented by Cameron’s team”)…big deal. Technical paint-brushings are strictly secondary considerations. Will the story be any good? That’s what counts, hombre. Will anyone give a shit about the characters? Will Cameron really have it completed and on-screens by 2009, or roughly five or six months into Barack Obama‘s first term?

An IGN staffer has seen a big-deal fight scene from Spider-Man 3 (i.e., the second most tedious Summer ’07 three-quel after Pirates 3) at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and….described it? Horace Greeley used to describe things. Where’s the clip?

San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle riffing on Al Gore and at one point bouncing off a riff of my own about the metaphor of his weight vs. global warming warnings.

If you go by the notion that a projection of character and personality in Presidential candidate is what attracts votes (and not philosophy or policies or governmental administrative know-how), this un-aired Spike Jonze video of Al Gore sitting around and being himself (mostly in the company of his family) during the 2000 election would have elected him hands down if…a big “if”…this video had been shown all over the place and everyone had taken the five or six minutes to watch it.

Edward Rothstein says in his N.Y. Times review of Jack Sullivan‘s “Hitchcock’s Music” (Yale University Press) is well observed, but when are the Times guys going to wake up and run music links (like this one, say, and this one also) with reviews of this sort?

“Hitchcock, without ever drawing a line between the popular and high arts, explored his chosen genre with a firm belief about the powers of music,” Rothstein writes. “Music can provide an archetype for Hitchcockian suspense. Music can hint at more than it says; it can unfold with both rigorous logic and heightened drama; and despite all expectations it can shock with its revelations.
“Sullivan’s book suggests that Hitchcock’s musical faith was more profound than any he could have had about people. And this faith was shared by a generation of film composers who worked with him and were also √É∆í√Ǭ©migr√É∆í√Ǭ©s to the United States in the 1930s and ’40s, including Erich Korngold, Miklos Rosza and Dimitri Tiomkin.

“Despite the events they lived through (which provided their own form of menace and resolution), they shared a conviction that the culture of music had such power that it could match the increasing dominance of film. It could stand in confidence alongside it, knowingly alluding to ambiguities, complexities and multiplicities that not even Hitchcock’s heroes could entirely figure out before the films’ end.”

Advertising Age‘s Jeremy Mullman observes the obvious is noting that the L.A. Times, “desperate for new revenue sources as it’s beset by declining circulation and advertising sales, is aggressively angling for the $50 million award-lobbying ad market long dominated by Variety and The Hollywood Reporter with its print version of “The Envelope.”
“I can’t put out an 800,000-circulation daily broadsheet, but they’re able to cover, in print, almost exactly the same subjects we cover,” Variety publisher Charles C. Koones tells Mullman. “Given the realities of their business, they have to look at every possibility, and it makes sense that they’d look at this.”
“Times execs say moving ‘The Envelope’ into print is part of a larger initiative to make the paper as dominant in entertainment as The Washington Post is in politics. “This is the Times doing more of what it has done, and more of what it should have done,” said John T. O’Loughlin, the paper’s senior vp marketing, planning and development.”
In other words, the Times was slacking before?

Earlier this evening 60 Minutes guy Morley Safer interviewed Helen Mirren, as if she needed another media voice telling everyone that she’s got the Best Actress Oscar in the bag. Little Bitty Problem: the clips don’t play and there’s no sound to boot.

Blair Erickson‘s pretty damn persuasive trailer explaining why Children of Men should be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture, on www.somethingawful.com. Note: the link to Erickson’s video technically belongs to Movie City News in total eternal cyber perpetuity because David Poland posted it earlier than Hollywood Elsewhere.