John Mikulenka‘s “Hunting the Zodiac,” a 63-minute documentary “about the vast subculture of amateur detectives who are obsessed with solving the Zodiac Killer case from the late 1960s. Shot in 2001-02, the film chronicles a turning point in the hunt for the psychopath who killed at least 5 people in the San Francisco Bay Area and mailed more than a dozen bizarre letters and coded messages to local newspapers. Doc includes extensive interviews with the last two San Francisco homicide detectives to be assigned to the case, and it features more than 8 minutes of rare archival news footage from the earliest days of the Zodiac investigation.”

N.Y. Daily News reporter Chris Rovzar on the costs (“up to $25 million a year per nominated film”) and strategies that often/usually/ sometimes result in an Oscar nomination. The process is basically about having “a conversation with viewers,” I told him at one point, “and keeping certain films in their mind as they mull over possible winners.” My mind is freezing up; these phrases aren’t registering; only five more days to go.

“Case Closed” author Gerald Posner, who believes Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter on 11.22.63, has pointed out in a N.Y. Times story that the just-revealed George Jefferies 8mm home movies of JFK and Jackie Kennedy riding in the Presidential limo on Dallas’ Main Street (i.e., a minute or less before the shots rang out) that JFK’s easily visibly bunched-up suit jacket explains why the back-wound bullet hole didn’t line up with the bullet hole in his shirt.

And the bullet that ripped into both Kennedy and Connolly without altering its shape will be forever magic. And it was entirely natural for JFK to slam back into the car seat to his left after being shot in the head from an area above and to his right-rear. And all those confused people who ran up the slope of the grassy knoll in the seconds after the shooting were reacting to an acoustical deception, plain and simple.

Click on the Jefferies video (i.e., right next to the Posner story on the Times web page) and look at the people waiting near a Main Street corner, and notice the 1963 haircuts on the guys. Really short and close-shaven on the sides, loaded down with Brylcream, some scalp showing through. And yet all the haircuts in Oliver Stone‘s JFK were a tiny bit too long and mostly Brylcream-free. Just about any film depicting Average Joe haircuts in the early ’60s almost always get it wrong also. Pre-Beatles (i.e., before January-February 1964) haircuts in this country were very straight-arrow rigid, almost military.

The names of 35 world-class gentlemen directors have been named as creators of a series of three-minute films that will make up a feature film called “To Each his Own Cinema,” which will be shown during the 60th Cannes Film Festival in May. The chosen all have a certain elite, Cannes- sanctified tasteful aura about them. They are Theo Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Bille August, Jane Campion, Ethan & Joel Coen, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Atom Egoyan, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Takeshi Kitano; Andrei Konchalovsky, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Roman Polanski, Walter Salle, Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Wim Wenders,Wong Kar Wai, Zhang Yimou, etc. You know…that crowd.

“Howard Dean has been a virtual Nostradamus on predicting what would happen in Iraq from the beginning. But he screamed once. He said ‘yee-ha’ — publicly! He screamed louder than a crowd of people screaming at him, and the media acted like Grandpa just yelled out the ‘N’ word at a ball game.

“And before the war began, it was Al Gore who got it right, who spoke unequivocally about not making this bad choice, a choice that 77 Senators voted for. But during the debates of 2000, Al Gore…sighed! We can’t have a sigh-er for president!

“That’s why I think every candidate has to come out now, and say or do the stupidest thing they possibly can, and get it out of the way.” — Bill Maher in a posting that appeared four days ago on the Huffington Post

“A once venerated icon has been devalued by the hordes of eager-beaver marketers,” the quote goes. “Welcome to the devalued world.” And the topic is the over-use of laurels in film advertising. Whatever.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that “one of the best gurus of all — Pete Hammond of Maxim and Hollywood Wiretap.com — [has] just switched his best-pic prediction today from Little Miss Sunshine to Babel.” But if you ask me, it’s a shaky prediction based upon a dry hunch and a sense of Oscar fatigue.

“I’ve been talking to my Academy voter people and getting this survey, which told me last year Crash, Crash, Crash and not Brokeback at this point in the race,” Hammond explains. “But I’m not getting that [this year]. It’s all over the map. I talk to a Departed person, then I get a Little Miss Sunshine, then I get a lot of Babel and so there doesn’t seem to be a consensus.

“A lot of them think Little Miss Sunshine is too slight for their vote as best picture. That’s its biggest drawback. That and the fact that it doesn’t have editing and directing nominations, which would make it the first in academy history to win that way. And The Departed is too ‘genre.’ Scorsese — they appreciate him and all of that…but some people think it’s not the best Scorsese. There have been better ones. So it’s always odd that you’re going to give an award to a guy for something that’s not his best work, but that’s what we often see.

“Then you’ve got Babel, which is really appealing to people’s social sense and it has a little more to it. And it’s an international picture, which is what the business has become — worldwide. It’s one drawback is the lack of guild support…”

If you’re determined to believe something and you’re smart enough, you can always make a case for it — and it will sound half-reasonable. But when certain know-it-alls get into making a pitch along these lines, it can be truly fascinating to consider the motives, the personal politics and the mental contortions that went into it.

The defeat of Dreamgirls — i.e., its exclusion from being nominated for Best Picture — was a surprise to everyone, myself included. But it was also a thunderclap moment along the lines of Roman Polanskiwinning the Best Director Oscar for The Pianist. I didn’t like Dreamgirls all that much but I didn’t despise it, and yet I was thrilled by the sheer drama of hearing it had been slapped down. It was one of those “my God, the voters have really and truly spoken!” moments in history.

Given the shock-corridor factor and the difficulty of recovering from same, I can understand on a certain level why an almost comically revisionist view such as this one is being listened to and picked over. LIstening to this tape/video is like watching little lumps of mashed potatoes being thrown at the wall and watching some of them stick and others fall to the floor…plop.

It wasn’t good enough, the third act was weak, Beyonce’s character amounted to almost nothing, that moment with Jamie Foxx looking at Jennifer Hudson’s kid at the very end — throw it all together and the ensemble message on the ticker tape read, “Not bad, pretty good but no cigar.”

Do you, HE readers, believe that (a) Dreamgirls would have won the Oscar if it had been nominated for Best Picture?, (b) that it lost $30 million in revenue “at least” because it wasn’t nominated? and (c) that the Dreamgirls slapdown “hurt the industry”?

The front page of the IMDB is the same old design deal with the Times Roman font, but they’ve done a redesign of all the film pages using the Avant Garde font and a sense of more space.

This Best Picture slide show, which I saw a little while ago on Sasha Stone‘s Oscarwatch, is, for starters, technically substandard with its cavalcade of muddy desaturated third-generation poster images. And the music that plays with the images is trite and tedious. But the main import is one of vague depression as the thing that hits you most if how “meh” a good percentage of the Best Picture winners now seem to be, particularly those from the late ’20s and ’30s. The best decade by far was the ’70s, no question.

Why is it I can’t seem to make myself rent a DVD of Dances With Wolves, which took the 1990 Best Picture Oscar. I’ve said to myself time and again, “Why don’t I rent the long version?” There’s a part of me that wants to, but I never do it. That’s because the Wolves-friendly part of me is a fairly small part — the much larger and stronger and more passionate part would rather watch Goodfellas for the 17th time. This is what much of the Best Picture Oscar legacy feels like to me — something I nominally respect but don’t really want to get into all that much.

I can watch Gone With the Wind, Million Dollar Baby, The Best Years of Our Lives, On The Waterfront, From Here to Eternity, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Apartment, The Godfather I & II, American Beauty, Unforgiven, All About Eve, Ben-Hur and The French Connection over and over again, but will I ever actually sit down and watch Wings again, or You Can’t Take It WIth You, Gigi, Marty, Driving Miss Daisy, Mrs. Miniver, Around the World in 80 Days or any of the other not-too- bad-but-really-not very-goods, which, after watching that video, seem more plentiful than the former group?

Michael Tucker, co-director (with Petra Epperlein) of Gunner Palace and The Prisoner, or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, has written a piece for Vanity Fair.com (“My Prisoner, My Brother”) about an American soldier from Ohio named Benjamin Thompson who “formed an unlikely friendship in the crucible of Abu Ghraib with an Iraqi detainee named Yunis” — the Iraqi central character in The Prisoner who refuses to take any shit from U.S. soldiers — “who was under his command.”

The Bagger (a.k.a., N.Y.Times Oscar David Carr) has written that he “has no idea what horse, or frog, to saddle up” as far as picking the Best Picture nominee most likely to win.

“His industry sources left him even more baffled than before, and while some of the comments he got from readers, whose predictions he solicited yesterday, where amazingly cogent and persuasive, they also tended to argue for different movies. Expect to hear much sound and fury for the rest of the week, signaling precisely nothing.”

It’s Babel, okay? It’s that old Crash magic plus the three countries and three languages plus the look on that young Tokyo detective’s face when he realized what was going on (and not going on) with Rinko’s deaf teenager character plus her very upset and concerned dad hugging her at the end. But if it turns out to be The Departed (i.e., my personal favorite), cool. And “yay, team” also if it’s Little Miss Sunshine.)