Hillary Clinton “didn’t stand outside the gates to David Geffen‘s mansion [last night], singing the Jennifer Hudson protest anthem ‘And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,'” writes N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “But she’s not exactly Little Miss Sunshine, either.

“Hillary loyalists have hissed at defecting donors to remember the good old days of jumping on the Lincoln Bedroom bed. ‘Hillary is livid that [Barack] Obama‘s getting the first big fund-raiser here,’ one friend said.

“Who can pay attention to the Oscar battle between The Queen and Dreamgirls when you’ve got a political battle between a Queen and a Dreamboy?

Dowd spoke to Geffen for her column, and the quotes are fantastic.

“I don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person,” Geffen tells her, “adding that if Republicans are digging up dirt, they’ll wait until Hillary’s the nominee to use it. ‘I think they believe she’s the easiest to defeat,’ he says.

Hilary “is overproduced and overscripted. ‘It’s not a very big thing to say, `I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t,’ . Geffen says. ‘She’s so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base. I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.”

The babble here is not about Babel; it’s about the battle of the billionaires. Not only have Ron Burkle and David Geffen been vying to buy the Los Angeles Times — they have been vying to raise money for competing candidates. Burkle, a supermarket magnate, is close to the Clintons, and is helping Hillary parry Barry Obama by arranging a fund-raiser for her in March, with a contribution from Steven Spielberg.

“Did Spielberg get in trouble with the Clintons for helping Senator Obama? “Yes,” Mr. Geffen replies, slyly. Can Obambi stand up to Clinton Inc.? “I hope so,” he says, “because that machine is going to be very unpleasant and unattrac- tive and effective.”

“Obama is inspirational, and he’s not from the Bush royal family or the Clinton royal family. Americans are dying every day in Iraq. And I’m tired of hearing James Carville on television.”

Mark Ruffalo portrays real-life San Francisco detective Dave Toschi in Zodiac (Paramount, 3.2), and obviously bears a certain resemblance to the real guy in his prime. But one thing an actor playing a cop in a big-studio movie can never have is a little funny-looking pot belly, like the real Toschi had.

Mark Ruffalo (l.) in Zodiac; Dave Toschi in the ’70s or early ’80s.

Zodiac director David Fincher was a major hard-core accuracy freak in 10,000 different ways when he planned and shot this awesome film, but no director would dare suggest that a “name” actor wear a prosthetic pot gut, and no actor would stand for it.

Film Jerk‘s Edward Havens is running his annual Oscar Handicap articles, which look at voting patterns at most of the Academy Awards categories. Here‘s the piece about the Best Picture race; links to the additional articles can be found at the end.

Big scoop: the Governors Ball, Vanity Fair and Elton John’s annual AIDS Foundation bash are the only hot-shit parties going on this Sunday night. On top of which, according to The Envelope‘s Elizabeth Snead, no Oscar post-parties are being planned by Paramount, New Line, Fox/Searchlight, Universal/Focus, Disney/Buena Vista or Picturehouse. Oh, yeah? I’ve been told about a certain distrib-hosted party. Not that big a deal but it’s said to be happening.

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.”