A fully reasoned, highly persuasive New York Post piece by Michael Kane, arguing against the notion of Eddie Murphy as a deserving Best Supporting Actor nominee, appeared this morning. It’s very surprising, I’m thinking, that the most devastating quote against the guy is delivered in the article by Oscarwatch.com‘s Sasha Stone, who’s said I’ve got my head screwed on backwards for trying to articulate the anti-Murphy current.

Murphy “has a 90 percent chance of winning right now,” she says. “And I’m getting the sense that he doesn’t even care. He’s been prickly through this whole thing. He doesn’t want to let his guard down. He doesn’t want to look desperate or appear desperate. You can tell he’s up there trying to say the right things, going through the motions, but maybe deep down he thinks it wasn’t really Oscar-worthy.”

“Norbit,'” Stone says, “is really not the best Eddie Murphy to be showing right now. What if you’re an Oscar voter, and you drive by that giant billboard on Ventura Boulevard? Maybe you start thinking, this movie is probably going to make $100 million. Let’s give the award to poor Jackie Earle Haley, who has nothing. Eddie Murphy doesn’t need an Oscar.”

“Let’s face it, he’s really very good in [Dreamgirls], on stage,” another observer says in the piece. “It’s not just that he can sing. He’s got the moves. He knows how to do it.It’s like an extended James Brown impression. Is that great acting? That’s okay acting. He did the job. But there’s no basis for him to be saluted and put up on the mountaintop.

“Eddie Murphy may well have something to show that proves that he’s a good actor, but Dreamgirls‘ and the role of James Thunder’ Early is not that role. It’s basically prancing around on stage.”

The odd thing is, Kane writes, is that “this kind of criticism may not even get an argument from Murphy himself.

“Even he dismisses his supposed ‘Oscar clip’ in Dreamgirls, a scene that comes late in the film, when his character is down on his luck and reaches for heroin to ease the pain. When a friend asks him to stop, ‘Thunder’ Early shoots him a look that without words fully captures the moment of surrender of a proud man.

“But even Murphy, true to form, laughs off the artistry of the acting.

“‘After that scene was shot,’ recalled Murphy after winning the Golden Globe, ‘our producer, Laurence Mark, said, ‘Oh, that look you just gave him was incredible.’ And I was like, ‘What’s he talking about?’ I didn’t know what he meant.

“And then [co-star] Jamie [Foxx] came over a week later and said, I saw that look that you did.’ And then I watched the movie, and I was like, what the f— are they talking about? Everyone was like, Oh, that moment,’ and I was like, I didn’t do nothing.'”

I was just-re-reading my very first, morning-after Departed review (posted on 9.21.06), and I almost started to tear up a little bit about the Leonardo DiCaprio Best Actor campaign that might have been if the people running Warner Bros. marketing hadn’t cocked things up by deciding to go the favored-nations route and calling him a Best Supporting Actor nominee along with Nicholson, Damon, Wahlberg, Baldwin, etc. Brilliant work, guys.

“The Departed doesn’t exactly throb with thematic weight,” I began. “It’s just a feisty, crackling crime film — a double-switch, triple-fake-out dazzler about lies and cover-ups and new lies to take the place of old lies, and about the psychic toll of being a two-faced informer and living in a whirlpool of anxiety and dread. And it’s Leonardo DiCaprio, more than costars Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin or Mark Wahlberg or anyone else, who exudes the vibe of a hunted, haunted animal — a guy so furious and frazzled and inwardly clenched that he can barely breathe.

“Don’t even talk about Leo’s Amsterdam Vallon in Gangs of New York or Howard Hughes in The Aviator or Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can. In fact, somebody ask those guys to please leave the room and wait for us in the car. We’ll be out later.”

Everyone has been saying the Best Director Oscar is a lock for Martin Scorsese since The Departed began to screen about four and a half months ago, so forgive me if I didn’t breathlessly post last night’s news that he’d won the Directors Guild of America feature directing award. Variety’s Dave McNary didn’t exactly indicate a quickened pulse when he wrote that the trophy “underlines Scorsese status as the front-runner for the Best Director Oscar, to be presented 2.25.”

If I had a semblance of a sports gene I’d be looking for the Bears to go all the way, baby. Stay with Barack Obama‘s home team, I’m figuring. I don’t like the Indianapolis Colts because you should never have to tap dance over seven syllables to say a football team’s name. Plus I don’t like Super Bowl games being played at Dolphin Stadium just because it’s warm in Miami. If the guys who run things were men they’d have the game in some colder climate just for the sheer machismo factor. Girls go “ooohhh, I’m freezing”; guys shrug it off and soldier on.

A three-way Eddie Murphy debate between myself, Oscarwatch. com’s Sasha Stone and N.Y. Times Oscar guy David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”), as posted earlier today by The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil.

The thing about the Oscars is that they “have nothing to do with standards of good moviemaking,” laments the Toronto Star‘s Geoff Pevere. “And I mean nothing, as in what’s left when you take zero from zero, multiply it to infinity and divide it the number of times Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman or Akira Kurosawa won for Best Director. (Which was zip, by the way.)

“If they did have anything to do with the quality of movies, the following would necessarily follow: It would not be possible that the hysterically-cloying Little Miss Sunshine would be nominated for Best Picture and Children of Men would not.

“It would not be possible that Chicago could be mentioned in the same breath with ‘Best Picture.’

“It would not be possible that the great Barbara Stanwyck would have died with no Oscars on her shelf and Hilary Swank, who will not presumably die for some time yet, should already have two.

“It would not be possible that Ron Howard would be more esteemed than Orson Welles.

“It would not be possible that, when the searing Goodfellas lost to the all-but-unwatchable Dances With Wolves, Martin Scorsese should be told that sorry, but you’re just not as visionary an artist as Kevin Costner.

“And it would not be possible for Will Smith to commit as heinous an act of sentimental terrorism as The Pursuit of Happyness — holding his own son hostage on-screen in the process — and actually be rewarded and not jailed for it.”

The new 295-seat, stadium-style Billy Wilder Theatre at Westwood’s Armand Hammer Museum will launch on Friday, 2.9, with a showing of Wilder’s The Apartment, to be followed by a discussion between director Curtis Hanson and star Shirley MacLaine. Also slated during the first 10 days of programming are the first “Art of Light” evenings, spotlighting the work of cinematographers, as well as the initial “First Mondays,” a showcase for advance screenings of new films. The archive’s month-long retrospective of the films of Italian neorealist giant Roberto Rossellini starts on 2.16. Another upcoming program is called “From Nitrate Through Digital,” which will examine different projection technologies and innovations over the decades.

The journey to Santa Barbara was stopped in its tracks yesterday by that large crane crashing onto the 405. It took me two hours to travel about 1.5 miles on that awful stretch of road; I finally gave up around 5 pm. Trying again this morning via the much prettier coast highway; hoping to see a couple of films and then attend the Forest Whitaker tribute early this evening.

The Messengers is the weekend’s top film with a projected $14,435,000 in 2522 theatres, $5700 a print. Because I Said So is #2 at 12,228,000 — 4800 a print. Epic Movie, off 60% from last weekend, is third with $7,483,000. Night at the Museum is #4 with 6,617,000. And Joe Carnahan‘s Smokin’ Aces is coolin’ off fast with a 56% drop from last weekend’s debut and a projected $6,369,000 by Sunday evening.

The sixth-place Dreamgirls is in 2700-odd theatres and pulling in only $1400 a print for a weekend tally of $4,084,000. (It’ll probably lose 800 to 1000 theatres next weekend.) Stomp the Yard is #7 with $3,991,000. Pan’s Labyrinth is eighth with $3,587,000. The Pursuit of Happyness is #9 with $3,014,000. Catch and Release is tenth with $2,798,000…down 62%. Forget it.

The Departed has been put it back into theatres and is doing some decent business — $2,700,000 in 1400 theatres. It’s the 11th-ranked film of the weekend.

Wanting in on the Eddie Murphy smackdown, The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is recalling some some righteous/conten- tious thoughts that Murphy passed along at the Oscar podium exactly 20 years ago (which would be….uhm, 1987). Murphy “told the audience that he originally planned to refuse the Oscars’ request to present the award for best picture,” O’Neil writes, “because ‘they haven’t recognized black people in the motion picture industry‘ — noting that only three African-Americans had won an acting award over the past 60 years.

“I’ll probably never win an Oscar for saying this,” Murphy remarked. “Actually, I might not be in any trouble because the way it’s been going, it’s about every 20 years we get one, so we ain’t due until about 2004.”

I don’t see how this throws any kerosene on the fire, frankly. More like water. I respect Murphy for standing up and saying what he did — anybody would. But that was then and this is now.

It may be pointless to try and further explain myself, but I’ve just been saying what any veteran of this town would acknowledge and then chuckle about at a party, buzzed or sober. Murphy is a pissed-off, guarded, obviously gifted comic performer who has never laid it on the line in terms of heavyweight acting, and there’s no absolutely way he’s laying it on the line in Dreamgirls. Like Peter Howell said, he’s doing his SNL James Brown shtick. Plus the part isn’t written with any third-act payoffs. It’s one of the most bizarre and groundless acting nominations in Oscar history.

It’s not just the calibre of a performance — substantial character construction and some kind of semi-meaningful arc (or journey) have to be there also. And the writing in the Dreamgirls script that would accomplish this just isn’t there. James Thunder Early is an amalgam of famous black performers — barely a character, and certainly not a character with any intriguing turns, deepenings and/or crescendo moments — this is who I am, what I want, what I need, please love me, I don’t care if you love me…anything along those lines.

The Oscar nom is much more of a referendum on Murphy himself — some half-assed notion of a career comeback, his likability in the early to mid ’80s, his current asshole-ishness (see the Razor item), the p.c. positiveness that comes with giving an Oscar to any person of color, etc. And in that light, the thought of him winning the Oscar almost gives me indigestion. I’m serious…I can feel the turbulence building in my stomach as I write this. And the Oscar goes to….Norbit!

Anyway, O’Neil’s thing works for today, there’s the New York Post story (allegedly) coming out tomorrow…but then what? Burnout, most likely.

The Bagger (a.k.a., N.Y. Times Oscar guy David Carr) is is looking at language wrinkles regarding Babel‘s eligibility for the Golden Globes Best Picture Drama (which it won), and also the Academy’s for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Feature.

A Paramount Vantage spokesperson tells Carr that 45 minutes of Babel is spoken in English, 33 minutes in Japanese, 24 in Arabic, 23 in Spanish and 10 seconds in French — a total of 80 minutes spoken in foreign tongues, or nearly double the time spoken in English. Carr reportss that the Academy rules state that “a foreign language film is defined as a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States of America with a predominantly non-English dialogue track.” The rule, however, is only used for deciding what movies can be nominated in the best foreign film category. For best picture, any movie, in any language, or languages, is eligible for The Win.

The Babel eligibility issue “never came up,” says Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation president Philip Burke. “It was submitted as an English language film by the studio and it never occurred to anyone that this was a foreign language film. The predominant language is English. The film begins with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who are obviously tourists speaking English in a foreign country.”