The 2007 Best Picture contenders will definitely include at least one of three prestige-aroma Iraq/Afghanistan movies: (1) Charlie Wilson’s War (directed by Mike Nichols with Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams), which has to do with the Afghan Mujahideen during the 1980s’ Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; (2) Lions for Lambs, the Robert Redford-directed film set in Aghanistan of a more recent time with Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep costarring; and (3) the Paul Haggis-directed In The Valley of Elah, about a father (Tommy Lee Jones) looking into the disappearance of his son after his return from Iraq, with James Franco, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon costarring.

The Best Picture Oscar is The Departed‘s to lose at this stage, most likely. Martin Scorsese has it in the bag for Best Director, and the certainty of this call will probably carry the film to Oscar victory. I think. A bit more than perhaps.
The Queen is admired and respected, but it has no headwind. (None that I can sense, at least.)
Dreamgirls will be nominated (I presume) but the little weasel nip-nippers won’t stop nip-nipping with their razor-sharp teeth…despite the fact that I’m okay with several portions of it, plus the fact that I’m hearing that suburban ticket-buyers are having a good time it and “getting their money’s worth,” etc.
Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men is gaining ground — the notion that it may in fact be the Best Picture of the Year has actually caught on here and there — but it will never be nominated because of its overly-realistic (and therefore overly distur- bing) dystopian visions and how these are apparently affecting the Academy conservatives who voted to give Chicago the Best Picture Oscar. You know…that crowd.
Babel was big with the Golden Globers and ought to slip through — it damn well should in my book but that and $1.75 will get you a bus ticket.
Little Miss Sunshine is the only film that everyone loves without reservation, and may therefore be some kind of plucky Dark Horse.
The “too soon” emotional mules who won’t see United 93 may be heavily dug in…or not. (I strongly suspect that they are.)
Letters From Iwo Jima has been dying in its limited run so far, and it will probably continue to die when it expands, which will give those who don’t like its doomed-Japanese-solder gloominess and its all-caves, all-the-time milieu reason to back away.
The ace-level Pan’s Labyrinth, Volver and The Lives of Others — the latter is my choice for the second Best Picture of the Year — have been relegated to the Best Foreign Language Film category, World Trade Center has been out of the game for weeks; ditto Flags of Our Fathers.

For lack of anything else to riff on, David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) has started the new year off with a little boogie-woogie on the Hickenlooper/JWEgo thing of three or four days ago. It’s cool and all…but the error of tit-for-tatting with Poland was explained to me earlier today, and I’d like to just let it all go. Rise above it, I mean.

George Clooney‘s Nespresso commercial, which I happened onto because of a riff by The Envelope‘s Elizabeth Snead. Clooney’s most affecting performance since Syriana.

“Page Six” is reporting that Jonathan Sedgwick — the late Edie Sedgwick‘s brother — has said in a videotaped interview that his sister told him that she’d gotten pregnant by Bob Dylan, but that the child was aborted by authorities in a mental institution of some kind — Page Six didn’t run the particulars — because “she was so wacked out on drugs [and] because the child would’ve been just strung out…she said that was the saddest moment of her life.” No document substantiation from the mental institution was cited. The London Times is said to be working on a story along these lines — maybe they’ll provide more details. This is all about fueling interest in Factory Girl, of course, but Dylan’s lawyers did threaten to stop distribution of the film because of suspected allegations that Dylan may have considered defamatory, so they opened the can of beans.

Hollywood Reporter editor Gregg Kilday has made the calls and reported that David Koepp wrote the Indy IV screenplay that finally got the stamp of approval from George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford.
Kilday has also passed along a Lucas quote from Empireonline.com that the film’s original conceptual McGuffin (dreamt up by Lucas) “was a little too ‘connected’ for the others…they were afraid of what the critics would think…so we finally went] back to that original McGuffin and took out the offending parts of it and we’ll still use that area of the supernatural to deal with it.’ ” A once-politically incorrect McGuffin that has supernatural aspects — what could this be?

The thrust of this N.Y. Times box-office analysis piece by David Halbfinger, which I read yesterday but was unable to respond to due to the lethargy it inspired, is that audiences always go for movies that seem to promise a fluttery, quaalude-like emotional high — especially when there’s a sense that the usual chaos and uncertainty of life (9/11, Iraq War, increasing global warming) is more acute and/or bothersome than usual.
When Jack Haley, Jr.‘s That’s Entertainment! came out in June 1974, after years of ’60s-style social turmoil plus the ongoing Vietnam War backdrop plus two heavy years of Watergate scandal, the slogan that sold the movie was, “That’s Entertainment — boy, do we need it now!”
The age-old old theory is that mainstream moviegoers are emotional alcoholics in normal times, but if the headlines seem more disturbing than usual their choices tend be more reactionary. Give them a film that promises some kind of agreeable emotional beer-buzz and they’ll probably give it a shot. Give them a movie that smacks of herbal tea, strong coffee, mineral water or some other non-alcoholic ingredient, and chances are they’ll either steer clear or adopt a wait-and-see approach.
“What worked was classic, get-away-from-it-all entertainment,” Rob Moore, Paramount’s marketing and distribution chief, tells Halbfinger “What didn’t was things that were more challenging and esoteric.”
“They showed no appetite for a critique of their eating habits in Fast Food Nation,” Halbfinger writes. They weren’t ready to fly along on United 93, no matter how skilled its expose of homeland insecurity. They didn’t care to see combat or suffer its after-effects in Flags of Our Fathers. And even Leonardo DiCaprio couldn’t interest them in touring the ravaged Africa of Blood Diamond.
“While Al Gore‘s prophecies in An Inconvenient Truth produced a respectable $24 million for Paramount, it was the message-movie exception that proved the rule. The big money was to be made making people laugh, cry and squeeze their dates’ arms — not think.”
That said, I don’t blame anyone for avoiding Blood Diamond, although it appears that reviews weren’t the main reason, and I can understand why GenY moviegoers were averse to seeing the boomer-oriented Flags of Our Fathers.

“People over fifty make up 30% of the population but only 20% of the audience. The trouble is that grownups are less likely than kids to go on opening weekends (they wait for reviews and reports from friends), so, apart from the fall awards season, when most of the serious movies are released, they don’t pull their weight in terms of what gets made. As a result, the studios have conceived grownup moviegoing behavior in such a way that confines it to an enclosed circle.

New Yorker film critic David Denby

“When the adult audience does go to a low- or mid-budget movie released in winter or in spring — say, Crash or Inside Man — the studios consider the hit an anomaly, a ‘non-repeatable event.’ In the jargon of the trade, such movies are ‘execution dependent’ (they have to be good to succeed), rather than ‘audience dependent’ (the audience will show up regardless of the quality).
“Some execution-dependent movies, such as Inside Man, The Devil Wears Prada and Sideways, are hits by any standard. Some, like The Squid and the Whale and Capote, haven’t made big money but are still counted as successes in relation to their costs. Others, like Little Children, are financial failures, although that film, a stubborn and prickly plant, played through the fall to loyal audiences, and may pick up some awards attention and, with it, added box-office.
“Many more people go to bad movies than go to good ones, but the good small movies that do well, like Brokeback Mountain and Borat, are, in relation to cost, among the most successful movies ever made.” — from an Olympic-sized David Denby/New Yorker piece called “Big Pictures: Holywood Looks For a Future,” about where movies are going, how they’re evolving and what’s being lost as this happens — an article roughly similar to Pauline Kael’s 6.23.80 New Yorker piece called “Why Movies Are So Bad, or The Numbers.”

“Mass infertility…is an extraordinary premise for a film — a childless world — and it will leave some viewers feeling restive and underinformed. How, they will want to know, did this catastrophe arise? To director Alfonso Cuaron, however, the first rule of storytelling is: Go with the given. Don’t waste space on deep background, and don’t delay the action with a preface — remember Ben Kingsley, intoning like a royal robot at the start of Steven Spielberg‘s A.I.?
“Cuaron respects his audience, presuming that we are grown up enough (or ground down enough) to work out the horrors for ourselves.
“The people I know who have seen Children of Men have admired its grip, but they had to be dragged to the theatre; it’s a film that you need to see, not a film that you especially want to. I guess it should it be logged as sci-fi, yet by 2027 mankind is clearly beyond the reach of science, and the roughened pace of the film — photographed by Emmanuel Lubezki — leans away from fiction and toward the natural stutter of reportage.
“When a bomb explodes in Tony Scott‘s Deja Vu, it is tensely prepared for and filmed with a lingering gloat; when a bomb explodes in Children of Men, it bursts from nowhere on a dreary street. Even if you don’t buy the main conceit, the scumbled texture of the movie makes it feel not just plausible but recognizable, and Cuaron takes care never to paint the future as consolingly different.” — from Anthony Lane‘s review in the 1.8.07 issue of The New Yorker.

Is good old Hollywood Wiretap in a coma or what? The same story links have been sitting there for at least a couple of days, it seems, aside from Monday’s link to Nikki Finke‘s weekend boxoffice story. Hollywood blogmeisters aren’t allowed to have lives or take days off or any of that good stuff. I thought that was understood.

Hickenlooper Butt-Boy Dispatch #7b: The unfortunate haste with which Factory Girl has been thrown together has meant that some critics have seen slightly different versions. Some — critics for L.A. City Beat, L.A Weekly and Box-Office, apparently — were shown the very first rough cut that included most of the newly-shot footage but did not include the Santa Barbara psychiatric interview stuff (i.e., a brunette-y Sienna Miller recalling her Warholian adventures with a middle-aged female shrink). This is indicated by Wade Major‘s Box-Office review referring to the use of documentary interview footage (a la Reds), which was included for one screening but was finally not used. (The interviews were originally scattered all through the film. The final version uses snippets during the closing credits.)