David Fincher‘s Zodiac (Paramount, 3.2) got two rave reviews today — from Variety‘s Todd McCarthy and the Holly- wood Reporter‘s Michael Rechtshaffen — and it opens a week from Friday, and yet the brainiacs at Metacritic don’t even have it in their database.

HE’s final Oscar calls, and thank God I won’t have to tap out these names and movies in tandem ever again in this context after Sunday :

Best Picture: The Departed;

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Departed (LOCK);

Best Actor: Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland (LOCK) (although my personal preference: is for Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed / sentimental favorite: Peter O’Toole in Becket…sorry, Venus;

Best Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen (LOCK);

Best Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine (By a nosehair, if it happens). I realize/understand that the ogre Eddie Murphy will probably win; I know it and I can’t predict it because it hurts too much.

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls (recent Hudson slippage, but still a NEAR-LOCK);

Best Adapted Screenplay: William Monahan, The Departed (NEAR-LOCK);

Best Original Screenplay: Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine (LOCK);

Best Animated Feature: Cars;

Best Foreign Language Film: Florian von Henckel Donmnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, which is a far more emotionally affecting film in the final analysis than Guillermo del Toro’s brilliant but Pan’s Labyrinth, which leaves you feeling just a wee bit abandoned at the end. I’ve just changed my prediction in this category (Fridayt, 2:12 pm), and it could wind up costing me real money on Sunday night. I’m just listening to my inner voice; just because the handicappers think Pan’s Labyrinth will win doesn’t mean they necessarily know anything.

Best Art Direction: Pan’s Labyrinth…no, Dreamgirls….no, Pan’s Labyrinth…I don’t know.

Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, Children of Men (LOCK);

Best Costume Design: Dreamgirls;

Best Documentary: An Inconvenient Truth;

Best Documentary Short: The Blood Of Yingzhou District (Alt: Two Hands;

Best Film Editing: Stephen Mirrione, Babel (although my personal preference is for Thelma Schoonmaker‘s work on The Departed);

Best Makeup: Pan’s Labyrinth;

Best Original Music Score: The Queen (although my personal preference is for Gustavo Santaolla’s work on Babel;

Best Original Song: “I Need to Wake Up” from An Inconvenient Truth;

Best Animated Short Film: The Little Matchgirl

Best Live-Action Short: West Bank Story (go to Oscar Torrents for best predictions about shorts;

Best Sound Editing: Letters from Iwo Jima;

Best Sound Mixing: Dreamgirls;

Best Visual Effects: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

Praise God a bit more: critic David Ehrenstein confirmed on the Criterion forums a week and a half ago that Criterion will be issuing a DVD of Lindsay Anderson‘s If…., which I’m been pushing for since the turn of the century, sometime in June. If… isn’t mentioned on the Criteron Co. site, but Ehrenstein said he’s written the notes and that they’re putting it out — good enough for me.

A ’60s rebellion allegory that brilliantly captures the rage and excitement of a revolution in poetic fantasy terms, If… begins as a relatively straightforward story of a few teenaged malcontents — Malcolm McDowell‘s Mick Travis being the ringleader — coping with the routine humiliations imposed upon students by the priggish staff of a military-minded British private school.

But this 1969 film (based on a script called “Crusaders,” by David Sherwin and John Howlett) gradually becomes more and more surreal, and not just in a political vein.

That look of fierce concentrated rage in McDowell’s eyes as he and his friends fire their automatic weapons from a rooftop at their public-school enemies….that’s the whole ’60s up-against-the-wall mania in a nutshell. Stanley Kubrick hired McDowell to portray “Alex” in A Clockwork Orange because of how thoroughly he rocked as If…‘s romantic-anarchic hero.

Was If… the first mainstream commercial drama to mix color and black-and-white footage in an impressionist vein? Something tells me another film or two did it first, but no titles are coming to mind.

Supposedly McDowell recorded a commentary about the film years ago — let’s hope it turns up on the DVD. Reader Max Evry has written than “in a perfect world [the Criterion If…disc] would include a doc pointing out the distinct influence of Jean Vigo‘s Zero For Conduct as well as one about director Lindsay Anderson.

An agreeably spirited piece by Radar Online‘s Shana Ting Lipton about the zen of Hollywood party crashing. It’s not really about crashing the Vanity Fair party at Morton’s, though, except for the tip about dressing like a fire marshall with a tuxedo underneath.

It’s mainly about Rex Reginald, “the self-styled ‘King of the Party Crashers’ who claims that his story outline and party-crashing handbook were co-opted by New Line Cinema when they made the film Wedding Crashers.” (What handbook? There’s no link in Lipton’s piece, it’s not on Google and it’s not being sold on Amazon.) “Gate-crashers in Los Angeles make up an exclusive society that boasts perhaps 50 ‘really elite’ members,” Reginald tells Lipton. “It’s almost like the mafia. You have to be brought in and become a ‘made’ crasher.”

Nikki Finke is also revealing that the Oscar telecast will kick off with “an inspired piece of CGI trickery.” Shocker! The Oscar show has been opening with inspired pieces of CGI trickery for years, since the Billy Crystal hosting days in the mid ’90s. Wait…has there been a year since ’97 when it hasn’t opened with inspired pieces of CGI trickery?

Sticking to form, host Ellen DeGeneres will reportedly be placed into various scenes (presumably those from Best Picture nominees). Obviously Ellen will be CG’d into royal robes of The Queen, if this is in fact the plan. What else? Jack Nicholson sitting down with Ellen at a back-room table and asking who’s the rat? Ellen clasping a hand grenade to her stomach and blowing her intestines all over the walls of an underground cave, a la Letters From Iwo Jima?

Finke says DeGeneres will be seen dancing with the Happy Feet penguins. (Warner Bros., the producer of both Happy Feet and Ellen’s syndicated series, spent “an enormous amount of money to make this happen,” Finke writes, including hiring Happy Feet director George Miller to coordinate.) Let’s see…have we ever seen a big-name TV star dancing with animated penguins before?

Another Nikki Finke Oscar-show spoiler: Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, 60ish graybeards all, will jointly present the Best Director Oscar to Martin Scorsese.

Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke is reporting Seven Oscar-Night Spoilers, the biggest one being that the Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards won’t be presented in the early portion of the show, as they always have. Instead, no acting awards will be given out until the last third of the telecast. The Academy is doing this, Finke understands, because Oscar viewership starts out strong and then wanes, and the only real cliffhanger is Eddie Murphy vs. Alan Arkin.

Please, Movie Gods…please don’t let Murphy win. You’re not pro-active and you don’t interfere as a rule, but you know what’s best and “right” and sometimes you step in and push the button anyway. You gave the Best Director Oscar to Roman Polanski for The Pianist despite a whisper campaign by the Polanski haters… bless you for that. Last year you knew Brokeback Mountain should have won and yet you inexplicably stood by and allowed the homophobic geezer contingent to overrun and conquer. You have to make it up to all of us because of that. Please don’t let a Bad Person win this year….please.

The best thing in N.Y. Times guy David Carr‘s Oscar prediction chart [click on “Juicy Subplots & Other Picks”] is the roundabout suggestion that if and when Little Miss Sunshine wins Best Picture, that the officially nominated producers — David T. Friendly, Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub — plus the film’s actual hands-on, Michael Arndt-hiring, Jonathan Dayton-and-Valerie Faris-hiring producers who weren’t nominated because of the Academy’s clumsy and insensitive rule-of-three — Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, of course — “perform a rear-guard action” and appear on-stage together as a quintet, arm-in-arm, all for one and one for all.

In a last-ditch attempt to squeeze intrigue out of a dying Oscar season, Rotten Tomatoes has put up an interactive feature called “The Best of the Best Pictures,” a list of 78 Best Picture Oscar winners ranked by how well-reviewed they are — not at the time of their release but (mostly) based on what today’s critics have written. The worst reviewed is Cecil B. Demille‘s The Greatest Show on Earth. The all-time best reviewed is Francis Copola‘s The Godfather; the second best is Elia Kazan‘s On The Waterfront.

“I know less and less about who I am, or who anyone else is.”