Wanna make book on the Oscars and maybe score some dough? Israeli film blogger Yair Raveh, master of a Hebrew-language site called Cinemascope, has a global bilingual Oscar pool up and running, for those who like to place bets from wherever. Raveh claims he’s the only Oscar forecaster who’s willing to put up cash on (no lie) betting Martin Scorsese is going to lose the directing award on Sunday.

Yoko Ono may (I say “may”) have succeeded in “yanking” a 90-minute John Lennon documentary called John Lennon: Working-Class Hero, despite the producers having landed numerous TV and DVD deals going back to late ’05.

Narrated by Gary Oldman, the doc is said to include “never-before-seen home movies” provided by Ono, plus a reported interview with Lennon’s first wife Cynthia, who “allegedly complains on-camera that drugs and Ono were responsible for the break-up of their marriage,” according to the notoriously sloppy British news service WENN, which never provides news links.

The report says Ono also was interviewed for the feature, providing what the producers described as “her most revealing interview to date.” It says that “an unnamed source” has told the London Sun, “The film had been several months in the making but at the last minute Yoko withdrew support.” Doc was produced by Double Jab Productions, which declined to comment on the Sun‘s report and shut down its website. (This part is definitely true — the site isn’t up and running as we speak.)

If the WENN report is true (I’ve called a couple of guys who ought to know but didn’t pick up), it would seem to be in keeping with Ono’s behavior regarding previous John Lennon docs and tributes, which is to make sure her late husband is portrayed only in glowing, bordering-on-angelic terms.

As I wrote in my review of John Scheinfeld and David Leaf”s heavly Ono-cized The U.S. vs. John Lennon….

“The Lennon portrayed in this film is indeed scrubbed clean and phony as a three-dollar bill, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Leaf decided on this portrait — Lennon as a kind-of St. Francis of the anti-war movement, a guy who did nothing but good things and spoke only of love and peace and stopping the killing — under the influence of his and Scheinfeld’s alliance with Lennon’s widow.

“I call it the ‘Curse of Ono‘ — the more control she seems to have over any portrait of the late ex-Beatle, the more sugar-coated it turns out.

“Like anyone else, Lennon was a mixed bag — part genius, part beautiful guy, part angry guy, part saint, part asshole, part man-of-courage, part prima donna, part gifted troubadour, part abusive drunk (during his 1974 “lost weekend” phase), part mystical seeker. But you only get the positive stuff from Leaf-Scheinfeld-Ono. And after an hour or so of the vigilant, heroic, positive-minded Lennon, you want to barf.”

Here’s the “wake up and smell the coffin”/Rome…lotsa wops, no pizza” deleted scene from The Departed. Performed by Jack Nicholson in a hat and inky beard dye, an older guy (too old) playing Leonardo DiCaprio‘s father, and some kid playing young Leo.

Peter O’Toole‘s recent visit with Charlie Rose is viewable on the site. It takes too long to sift through all the corporate sponsor promos, but eventually it comes up.

To hear it from The Reeler‘s Stu VanAirsdale, the highlight of the Robert Altman tribute was Julianne Moore‘s recollection about beiong cast in Short Cuts, and being told that the role required lower-level nudity and Moore telling Altman that “I really was a redhead.”

I prefer the Paul Thomas Anderson anecdote passed along in David Carr’s N.Y. Times story, to wit: “On the set of A Prairie Home Companion, Altman would listen carefully to the suggestions of others and then say, ‘Let’s not do that.'”

An Inconvenient Truth is going to win the Best Feature Documentary Oscar this Sunday, and the right thing, obviously, would be for not just director Davis Guggenheim walking up to the podium to accept, but also (hello?) Al Gore along with producers Lawrence Bender, Laurie David and Scott Burns. Obviously. But no. Just Guggenheim. But of course.

British online voters at msn.com have allegedly decided that Shakespeare in Love is the most undeserving Oscar Best Picture winner of all time. (“Allegedly” because I can’t find the article that announces the tabulations — the news has been passed along by a BBC web page.)

The people who voted obviously aren’t very hip or knowledgable. Shakespeare in Love was a mostly tolerable, agreeably spunky period romance with a short-but-terrific Judi Dench performance. It wasn’t “right” that it won over Saving Private Ryan, but it wasn’t a rank embarassment. Mike Todd‘s Around the World in 80 Days winning the Best Picture Oscar iwas, however.

The respondents are correct in saying that the 2002 Best Picture going to Chicago was a joke, which it was. And they’re wrong in saying that Titanic winning in ’98 was undeserved. Any movie that ends as well as Titanic deserves accolades. Most of Titanic was okay, some of it was bad, some of it was genuinely engrossing and thrilling…but the last 20 to 25 minutes were spellbinding in a profoundly sad, inwardly-melting way. And that last dream/death sequence was transcendent.

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