This is why Mark Wahlberg has very good traction as a Best Supporting Actor contender.

The art of being Clint Eastwood during Oscar season is to appear to be above all the nonsense while at the same time being right in the thick of it while playing the community — press, industry, Academy members — like Jascha Heifetz on a Stradivarius. And yet…

As masterful as Letters From Iwo Jima is (i.e., everyone agrees it’s heads and shoulders above Flags of Our Fathers), I knew it was over and done as a fifth-slot Best Picture contender when (a) a certain journalist told me he couldn’t get his wife to sit down and watch a Letters screener he’d been sent, and (b) when I stuck my head into a 9:30 pm showing of Letters last Tuesday or Wednesday night at Manhattan’s Lincoln Square theatre and saw…oh, maybe 40 people. Near-great film, awesome performance by Watanabe, etc. But it’s looking like an Oscar also-ran.

Speaking to N.Y. Times correspondent Alan Riding in Berlin, The Lives of Others director-writer Florian von Henckle Donnersmarck tells where the idea came from:

Lives of Others costars Ulrich Muhe, Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Tukur, Sebastian Koch; director-writer Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck

“I was lying on the floor feeling miserable and thinking, `Oh, I’ve picked the wrong profession.’ Then I started listening to music and remembered Maxim Gorky, who quoted [Nikolai] Lenin as saying that Beethoven’s `Appassionata’ was his favorite piece of music. But Lenin said, `I don’t want to listen to it because it makes me want to stroke people’s heads, and I have to smash those heads to bring the revolution to them.’
“At that moment The Lives of Others was born.
“I suddenly had this image in my mind of a person sitting in a depressing room with earphones on his head and listening into what he supposes is the enemy of the state and the enemy of his ideas, and what he is really hearing is beautiful music that touches him. I sat down and in a couple of hours had written the treatment.”

Flash…yesterday afternoon’s news!…Guillermo Del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth was voted Best Picture of 2006 by the National Society of Film Critics. This is a huge boost for Pan’s and del Toro — the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Feature seems all but assured. Labyrinth edged out Christi Puiu‘s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Clint Eastwood‘s Letters from Iwo Jima, which came in second and third, respectively.
The Best Director award, however, went to United 93‘s Paul Greengrass. (I say again to Academy members who’ve refused so far to see this film — don’t buckle!) Del Toro and The Departed‘s Martin Scorsese were first and second runners-up.
Forest Whitaker, the Manchurian Candidate nominee for Best Actor who controls the minds of critics from coast to coasts through an implanted chip, was named best actor by the NSFC for The Last King of Scotland. The only consolation in this corner is that Whitaker “eked out that victory only after an extra tie-breaking vote,” says the Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kilday, “which left Peter O’Toole in second place for Venus, followed by Ryan Gosling for Half Nelson.”
The Queen‘s Helen Mirren was named Best Actress for the 89th time.” Mark Wahlberg took the Best Supporting Actor honors for his motor-mouth, “ya-muthah-fucked-me” cop in The Departed. Meryl Streep was named Best Supporting Actress for her performances in both A Prairie Home Companion and The Devil Wears Prada — does this mean Jennifer Hudson‘s Dreamgirls performance is slipping just a bit? (I’m not saying it is — I’m just asking.)
The Queen‘s Peter Morgan won the Best Screenplay prize, with The Departed‘s William Monahan and The Good Shepherd‘s Eric Roth the top two runners-up.
Emmanuel Lubezki, naturally, won the Best Cinematography Oscar for Children of Men.

Today is a flying-back-to-L.A.-on-Continental- Airlines day. An hour and 20 minutes before I need to leave and I haven’t even packed yet, so that’s it for stories and postings until I get to Newark Airport ….maybe. In fond memory of the last month or so, some final snaps…

8th Avenue and 53rd…or something close to that — Friday, 1.5.07, 2:50 pm; there but for the grace of God; rain always helps; I just realize what Helen Mirren needs to do to get away from her inevitable-Best Actress-recipient aura of loftiness, which a lot of people out there are getting sick of — she needs to do a carefuly lighted, black-and-white Charlize Theron photo session, and thereby blow the whole prim-and-proper Queen Elizabeth thing out of the water; parking rage; sea bass ordered and slowly consumed (so as to fully savor every bite) at Friday lunch with the Warner Bros. new media publicity guys

Night at the Museum will be #1 this weekend with a projected $26,756,000 — down 27% from last weekend — for a total cume of $166,853,000 — a huge hit and a piece of shit. The Pursuit of Happyness will be #2 with $13,879,000., off 28%, obviously a hangin’-in-there hit with a total grab of $125,037,000.
Bolstered by rave reviews, Children of Men will end up with a Sunday-night tally of $10,313,000 in 1289 theatres, at roughly $8500 a print. You could project total earnings in the $35 million range and you might be right, but I believe in fairies so I’m hoping it’ll at least break $40 million. It’s a great film, after all — a bona-fide classic
Paramount’s fourth-place Freedom Writers will have about $9,846,000 by Sunday night.
Weekend projections for the bottom six of the top ten are as follows: Dreamgirls $8,644,000 (off 39%); Charlotte’s Web,$7,360,000; Happily Never After, 7,001,000; The Good Shepherd, $6,525,000; Rocky Balboa, $6,428,000; We Are Marshall, $5,604,000. And Code Name: The Cleaner will end up with roughly $4,297,000.

The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal, 8.3) looks like the one truly exceptional threequel due out this summer. (How can it be otherwise with Paul Greengrass directing?) But which of the other five will be the worst? I’m sure there are deeply-held opinions.

My money, naturally, is on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End — another superdooferus Gore Verbinski wankbuster that’ll look terrific and will be about absolutely dead frickin’ nothing except the major participants getting richer. (Will a certain columnist who loved Dead Man’s Chest write after seeing this new one, “Ecstasy! My heart is fluttering with joy!”?) One comfort factor: the presumed return of Bill Nighy as Davy Jones.
Perhaps I shouldn’t underestimate the potential tediousness of Spider-Man 3, the trailer for which makes it look like the Spider-Man version The Empire Strikes Back, with Kirsten Dunst being the lead supplier of Yoda-like “beware of the dark side!” warnings.
Shrek the Third will be harmless. Ocean’s Thirteen — a Sting-like revenge-against- Andy Garcia story — may actually be half-decent. And Brett Ratner‘s Rush Hour 3 will almost certainly be glorious.
Time‘s Richard Corliss has written that “the trifecta of threequels is crucial to Hollywood’s health.” My first reaction to this was the opposite — they’re crucial to feeding the Hollywood disease. But if the big three Threequels are profitable enough, they’ll bring in the bucks that will help cover the shortfalls on artistic- gamble films like Children of Men and others….and that’s a good thing.

Fearless Manhattan journo Lewis Beale has passed along his ’06 superlatives — here are a few: (a) The Best: Inside Man, United 93, Little Miss Sunshine, Half Nelson, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Proposition, Babel, The Departed, Casino Royale, Children of Men; (b) The Worst: The Notorious Betty Page, London, Freedomland, Talladega Nights, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Fast Food Nation; (c) Underrated: Brick, Find Me Guilty, Hollywoodland, Clerks II, Miami Vice, The Fountain, Apocalypto, Come Early Morning; (d) Overrated: Volver, Borat, Dreamgirls; (e) Full Disclosure: Beale has not seen Letters From Iwo Jima; (f) Guilty Pleasures: Glory Road, Slither, Invincible, Something New.
On top of (g) Best Doper Movie: The Fountain; (h) Best Pre-Columbian Chase Film: Apocalypto; (i) Best Film I Saw In 2006 Which Won’t Be Released Until Later This Year: The Lives of Others, a brilliant German movie about East Germany’s Stasi security system, in which a rigid spy becomes humanized after he is assigned to get information on a noted playwright and his actress lover; (j) Patti Labelle “I Can Sing Really Loud and Shatter Glass” Award: Jennifer Holiday; (k) Great-Looking Grunge: The Proposition.
Beale’s Favorite Scenes: (1) The highway chase in Children of Men; (2) The construction site chase in Casino Royale; (3) The awesomely trippy final 15 minutes of The Fountain; (4) Martin Sheen thrown off the roof in The Departed; (5) Abigail Breslin dancing to “Super Freak” in Little Miss Sunshine; (6) The Motown dance number in Clerks II; (7) A female cop telling a white supremacist what a bullet from a high-powered rifle will do to his head in Miami Vice; (8) Any time Meryl Streep gets bitchy in The Devil Wears Prada; (9) Newark air traffic controllers watching as one of the lethal planes passes [a mile or so] in front of them, heading for the Twin Towers, in United 93; and (10) Ashley Judd not knowing how to deal with a lover who just wants to caress her in Come Early Morning.

It’s interesting that underdog-against-the-overdog movies have been so plentiful in this country (especially recently) since it takes a relatively comfortable middle-class audience of complacent jello- bodies to enjoy them.
If people out there were really hurting due to their own underdog sagas being suffered on a day-to-day basis, I suspect that today’s underdog films wouldn’t sell as many tickets. American audiences emotionally identify with underdogs — it makes them feel good to see themselves as never-day-die believers who finally win the blue ribbon — despite their actual lifestyle realities, which naturally feed into the spiritual.
I’m thinking of typical hinterland Americans…sea lions deciding whether to go out or order takeout as they slumber in an easyboy, half-assedly channel-surfing while their tweener kids sit at the dinner table with iPod plugs in their ears, wearing leave-me-alone expressions.

Right, yeah….sorry…I forgot to post this earlier today. L.A. Times writer Deborah Netburn asked a bunch of web pundits (myself included) to predict what will happen in 2007.

A news analysis piece from Premiere.com (submitted by assistant editor Stephen Saito, the former Hollywood Wiretap guy) about the forthcoming Indiana Jones 4 and, perhaps more interesting, a 1989 Nancy Griffin piece in which Steven Spielberg talks about why Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade will be his last Indiana Jones film.

The 2007 Slamdance Film Festival has caved in to pressure from certain unnamed moral guardians and agreed to pull the controversial video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG from the finalist pool for its Guerilla Gamemaker Competition. Newsweek‘s Technology and Video Game Editor N’Gai Croal explains what happened.

“The Last Temptation of Christ, Do the Right Thing, Kids, Irreversible. These are some of the most controversial and polarizing films of the last two decades,” he begins. “All of them played at prestigious film festivals like Cannes, Venice or Sundance before their subsequent theatrical releases. Film festival organizers are generally free speech absolutists; the Cannes Film Festival, for example, was created in response to the meddling of the fascist governments in Italy and Germany in the selection of films for the 1938 Venice Film Festival.
“So it came as something of a shock last night to read an exclusive Kotaku report that the Slamdance Film Festival had pulled Super Columbine Massacre RPG.”
“In a last minute phone call Thursday evening,” the Kotaku report states, “Slamdance president and co-founder Peter Baxter told game developer Danny Ledonne that he regards his decision to remove the game from the festival as ‘deeply flawed,’ but necessary to the festival’s survival.

“Baxter went on to say, according to Ledonne, that the festival’s initial decision to select the game was ‘consistent with Slamdance’s philosophy but somewhat naive,’ and apologized profusely for pulling the entry.
“Ledonne said that he bears no ill will toward the festival, but that the decision to pull the game does raise concerns about freedom of speech and video game development.”