On 2.13.07, Warner Home Video released a reportedly better-looking-than-ever-before DVD of Tony Richardson‘s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, my second-favorite British kitchen-sink drama (after Lindsay Anderson‘s This Sporting Life). The Richardson is so authentic it feels almost surreal at times; the grimy working- class atmosphere is like some long-gone social vintage, more valuable now than ever.

“While conversing with [Ralph] Fiennes during my break, I expressed a need to go to the toilet. I went to the nearby toilet and entered it; he followed me and entered the same toilet. I explained to him that this was inappropriate and asked him to leave. Mr. Fiennes became amorous towards me and, after a short period of time, I convinced him to leave the toilet, which he did. I left the toilet a short time later.” On a believability scale of 1 to 10, this story from a 38 year-old Qantas stewardess rates a [fill in the blank].

Hooray for the BAFTA winners who might get a slight Oscar bump — Best Supporting Actor winner Alan Arkin and Best Original Screenplay winner Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine), I’m thinking. And special congrats to Best Director Paul Greengrass (United 93).

In Nikki Finke‘s Deadline Hollywood Daily story announcing that Inconvenient Truth auteur Al Gore will definitely not announce his Presidential candidacy during the 2.25 Oscar show, the following quotes are used: (a) “If Al Gore has slimmed down 25 or 30 pounds, Lord knows [what he might do]” and (b) “Gore’s weight, which has ballooned since he left office, is widely seen as a barometer of his ambitions, and the Clinton, Obama and Edwards campaigns have been studying his girth closely.”

This ties in with Mick LaSalle‘s “fat Al” riff from a while back.

There’s also this weight thing I wrote about a year ago: “[An Inconvenient Truth] is very persuasive, but it would be a tad more so if Gore were a little bit thinner. He’s not Oliver Hardy but he looks very well fed, and the metaphor is obvious. The under-message of An Inconvenient Truth suggests that a new kind of austerity is vital for the earth’s survival, and I feel it would play better if Gore looked like someone who practices more denial.”

Andy Serkis is obviously a gifted actor, but I’ve always had an attitude about him because of his gooey Gollum emoting, even though the blame for this (90% anyway) is almost certainly Peter Jackson‘s, and because of the generally unbridled, over-cranked Jackson association that follows him because of his Gollum and King Kong performances. But all of that is out the window in the wake of Serkis’s performance as an incarcerated, cold-blooded murderer in Tom Hooper‘s Longford, which debuts on Saturday, 2.17, on HBO.

Serkis totally nails it as Ian Brady, a notorious real-life killer known for his alliance with the despised Myra Hindley (Samantha Morton) in England. He uses the same kind of measured, ice-cold malevolence that made Anthony Hopkins and Brian Cox’s performances as Hannibal Lecter so historic. The deep, unfiltered- cigarette voice Serkis uses, the working-class accent, the cadence in his delivery — dead perfect. Longford is somewhere between decent and so-so, but well worth catching for Serkis alone.

The Longford script was written, by the way, by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland, The Other Boleyn Girl). What a streak.

A blunt-spoken man with a steady hand, and a motor-mouth who doesn’t mince words.

To go by stories in the trades, Martin Scorsese is out of the Martin Scorsese business for the time being. Take Thursday’s news about his intention to co-produce (along with Initial Entertainment Group’s Graham King) a damn Queen Victoria movie (i.e., “the early life of the famed British monarch,” etc.) combined with last year’s announcement that Scorsese’s next directing project will be a Japan-set drama called Silence, a “martyrdom-themed tale of two 17th century Portuguese missionaries who return to Japan to minister to Christians,” blah, blah, and you’re left with one sinking realization — the master of The Departed is going back to the realms of Kundun and cufflinks. Terrific. He’s going to make these films and we’re all going to have to suffer through them, and then after three or four or five years — maybe, if God smiles — he’ll have gotten it out of his system, and this will allow him to finally go back and make another Scorsese film.

In a phrase, film school courses teaching the craft of filmmaking are on the downswirl, and may even be going the way of newspapers. But film studies courses are eternal.

“One sure winner at this year’s Academy Awards will be the internet,” writes Denver Post freelancer Steven Rosen.

“More specifically, it will be the awards-oriented websites and blogs that have come together — in a perfect storm convergence of complementary and conflicting interests — to incessantly write about the insider’s world of Oscar campaigning. Some are independent, entrepreneurial or fan-based; others are part of print media taking risks with new technology.

“As they post items leading to the Feb. 25 Oscar telecast, they open the process to a global audience of movie fans. They also make the seemingly mysterious motives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s 5,830 voting members more transparent. To a point.”

George Lucas was definitely joking the other day, I’ve been told, when he said The Empire Strikes Back was the “worst” Star Wars film, etc. “Say what you will about Lucas, his personality, his qualities as a filmmaker or lack thereof,” says a person who attended the Publicist Guild luncheon in question. “But on that day, in that speech, he was 100% making a joke.

“He opened his speech — on a day filled with teleprompters — by saying that he never used a script when making a speech, something that drove his publicists crazy. (He’s not exactly a great public speaker, either, so perhaps he should change that habit.) At any rate, he spoke for about five minutes in a seemingly off-the-cuff manner, and made several ‘jokes.’ Others can judge whether or not he was actually funny, but yeah, he was joking.”

“I do think there’s a hardening of the culture that’s undeniable. I think reality TV — if you just look at what’s going on this week on ‘American Idol,’ meanness is king. That offbeat behavior. You’re left wondering about the legitimacy of relationships. Reality TV has, I believe, lowered the standards of entertainment, to put it mildly. I think it’s probably harder to entertain the same people with a more classic form of writing, and romantic comedies are a classic genre.” — director-writer Nancy Meyers (The Holiday, Something’s Got to Give) speaking to L.A. Times reporter Rachel Abramowitz about the near-death (i.e., near-total irrelevance) of romantic comedies these days.