The stupid Broadcast Film Critics site doesn’t even have last night’s winners posted, much less photos. (They’ve still got last year’s winners posted…shmucks.) Plus last night’s show won’t even be aired on E! until 1.20.07, which is derelict by the immediate cyber standards of early 2007.

I had a chance to grab a dinner last night in Venice with Fox news guy Bill McCuddy, and it was a full-out pleasure to kick back and ignore the BFCA Critics Choice Awards shebaggle going on at the Santa Monica Civic, about a mile north of Hal’s. Is the BFCA breathing the same pollen as the Hollywood Foreign Press? Or the Oscars, even? (Consider this Oscarwatch.com comparison.) Do they even have the same kind of lungs?

If either is the case, or simply if the wind continues to blow in the direction it now seems to be blowing, then The Departed, Babel, Borat and, most importantly, Little Miss Sunshine may end up with most of the Golden Globes glory on Monday night.
It wasn’t a matter of how many Critics Choice Awards Dreamgirls, Little Miss Sunshine and The Departed won last night — it was what kind of wins.
Dreamgirls and Little Miss Sunshine took four trophies each, but Sunshine‘s were more substantial (or they seemed so to me) — Best Original Screenplay and an acting ensemble award (important) along with two minor performance awards (for Paul Dano and Abigail Breslin). Dreamgirls took two significant acting awards — Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy for Best Supporting Actress and Actor — plus best song and soundtrack wins. Due respect, but these last two don’t matter a whole lot. The soundtrack award is especially what-the-fuckish.
The Departed, by contrast, ended up with the two biggest and meatiest awards — Best Picture and Best Director (Martin Scorsese).
I’m not saying that the BFCA wins are HFPA or Oscar bellwethers, but if they are…
This is on the tip of everyone’s tongue, so I may as well just say it: if Sunshine or Borat take the Best Comedy-Musical Golden Globe Award, people are going to be saying that Dreamgirls is really on the ropes. Obviously the Academy and the HFPA are separate equations — they have their own filters and standards, and choose what they damn well prefer. And to hear it from some who’ve been around a few years (a certain New York-based columnist, for one), a portion of the HFPA membership is thought to harbor certain attitudes regarding African-American culture, so a Dreamgirls turndown, if it happens, will be, at the very least, tainted by this suspicion.
I’m not supposed to say this, and I don’t want to say this because Dreamgirls has a lot of enjoyment and punch and pizazz. I have no major beef with it except for my view that it doesn’t really flow and seep in, but it’ll be Huge News if the Golden Globes go for LMS or Borat in the comedy-drama category. It’ll be Holy Shit time …the big brassy presumptive front-runner tackled and brought down behind its own line of scrimmage. David Poland has been a good hard-charging linebacker, but…

Then again, a prominent Oscar strategist who’s not on the Dreamgirls team thinks it’ll win on Monday night. And maybe it will. If this happens, fine. It’s best not to say anything more, but it’s going to be a helluva dramatic moment either way.
My own prediction is that the Best Picture Oscar is going to be won by either The Departed or Little Miss Sunshine or Babel. I think Dreamgirls, for all the spunk and flash, is almost certainly out of the running because it doesn’t have that emotional schwing. Nobody in it falls in or out of love in a way that makes you hurt for them, nobody tragically or bravely dies, it doesn’t make you cry. It doesn’t even titillate with sex. And if I turn out to be wrong, cool…whatever.
Here’s a rundown of all the BFCA winners. MCN’s Laura Rooney did the posting last night…good fast work

Did anyone see Stomp the Yard (Screen Gems) yesterday? It’s the #1 film of this 4-day weekend (i.e., Martin Luther King Day on Monday) with a projected $25,727,000. Night at the Museum will be #2 with $20,120,000 projected by Monday night. The steady-earning Pursuiit of Happyness — no Oscar love, Will Smith‘s Best Actor hopes never got of the ground — is #3 with $11,249,000.
The “hmmm” statistic concerns the 4th-ranked Dreamgirls. Dreamamount more than doubled their screens this weekend — they were at 800-something last weekend, and are now at 1907 screens — and got very little gain from it. In fact, last night they were down 15% from last Friday. The projected 4-day tally for Beyonce, Jennifer, Eddie & Jamie is $9,235,000. Maybe they’ll get a bump off Monday’s Golden Globes awards.
Freedom Writers will end up with $8,897,000 for a #5 slot. Sixth-place Alpha Dog will tally $7,867,000. Children of Men‘s 4-day figure will be about $7,468,00 — .they added 295 dates from last weekend, and are still off 32%. Primeval, $6,785,000. Arthur and The Invisibles, $5,540,000.
The Good Shepherd, $4,464,000. Charlotte’s Web, $4,310,000.
God Grew Tired of Us, playing in 2 theatres, will end up with $35,000.

The Envelope‘s Steve Pond has written an Oscar timeline piece — not exactly pulse-quickening, but good to read and save.

New York’s Logan Hill on kinky Sundance sex movies — Craig Brewer‘s Black Snake Moan (an allegedly well-made “problem movie” about Samuel L. Jackson curing Christina Ricci of nymphomania), The Ten (a spoof of the Ten Commandments…has the aura of lame-assitude), Deborah Kampmeier‘s Hounddog (a.k.a,, the “Dakota Fanning rape project”), Robinson Devor‘s Zoo, “which is generally being referred to as ‘the horse-fucking movie,'” and Teeth, a “horror movie that follows the leader of the abstinence movement at a small-town Christian high school…when she’s raped, she discovers that she has a Carrie-like power for revenge: a real vagina dentata.”

Naysayers like David Poland have said the script for Children of Men doesn’t make it (i.e., underwritten, doesn’t explain stuff thoroughly enough) and then along comes the bequeathers of the 19th annual USC Libraries Scripter Award and they hand it over to P.D. James, author of “The Children of Men,” and the film’s screenwriters Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby. Don’t these people get it? Poland explained the film’s story and character problems in his last “Hot Button” column.

The Terry Press-is-leaving-DreamWorks-but- tangentially-staying-in-the-family story, as written by Variety‘s Nicole Laporte (who’s also the new co-editor of Variety on the Town). Press’s departure has nothing to do with how the Dreamgirls campaign has been going, but nobody would have even glancingly thought otherwise if she’d waited until the Oscars were over and done with. Her new marketing firm will undoubtedly kick ass.

A simple five-word response: the singer, not the song.

Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Night Buffalo, a novel about an intense love triangle, intense sex, betrayal, death, schizophre- nia and stabs at redemption, has been made into a sharply-honed drama with the same title — produced by Arriaga and directed by Jorge Hernandez Aldana.

Night Buffalo writer-producer Guillermo Arriaga at United Talent Agency headquarters — Thursday, 1.11.07, 4:20 pm

It’ll have its debut at the end of next week at the Sundance Film Festival. This, obviously, is mainly what this article is about — bringing attention to Arriaga’s film and (perhaps) helping him to land a U.S. distribution deal, as well as catching up with a guy I regard as a friend.
In Arriaga’s words, The Night Buffalo is the story “of a man named Manuel (Diego Luna) and a very good friend named Gregorio (Gabriel Gonzalez), who is schizophrenic, and about Gregorio’s great love for his girlfriend Tania (Liz Gallardo). Manuel and Tania are the people Gregorio trusts the most, but while he’s going in and out of the mental asylums, they begin having a relationship until they fall in love. Obviously the relationship between Gregorio and his girlfriend is broken and the friendship is broken.
“When these friends seem to reconcile, Gregorio kills himself, and he leaves Manuel a box with secret messages after being dead, with letters, photographs, tapes, and slowly Manuel begins to get into the spiral of madness that his friend has been living. So this is a story of madness, of love, of a sense of being lost, of guilt, and how in the end you have to realize and assume the consequences of your acts and the valued importance of love.”
Arriaga is best known as the guy who penned Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s three films — Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel — as well as Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Arriaga is also known for the big creative split that happened between himself and Gonzalez Innarritu sometime early last year (but not revealed until last May, during the Cannes Film Festival).

Just before I left I snapped this shot of Arriaga and Night Buffalo co-producer Jimena Rodriguez — Thursday, 1,11,07, 5:45 pm

I’ve been friendly with Arriaga since the time of 21 Grams (i.e., three years ago). We’ve been talking about sitting down and discussing The Night Buffalo for a long while now. We finally did this in a conference room at the United Talent Agency building yesterday afternoon. Here’s what resulted.
Our chat went on for the better part of an hour. It’s a bit quieter than the Sienna Miller conversation. I wasn’t in a journalistically pushy frame of mind. The gentle, soft-spoken Arriaga had that effect on me.
At the end of our chat I also met Night Buffalo co-producer Jimena Rodriguez, who will be with Arriaga in Park City along with the rest of the team.
Sundance honcho Geoffrey Gilmore says that “male culture, the fickleness of love, and desperate searching by lost souls are only some of the subjects this highly erotic, superbly photographed depiction of young lovers touches upon.
“As despicable as the behavior of this very dysfunctional community is, the need for love and absolution is relentless. As a treatise on the cognitive dissonance of romance, The Night Buffalo is pure and powerful storytelling. It may show us things that we don’t want to see, but it will eventually lead us to a fuller understanding of the mysterious power of love.”
The first Night Buffalo screening will be at 9 pm on Friday, 1.19.07, at Park City’s Egyptian theatre. Then comes a midnight screening on 1.20 at the Holiday Village followed by a 3:15 pm the next day (Sunday) at the same venue. The screening at the Tower theatre in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, 1.24, at 9 pm doesn’t count because nobody goes to Salt Lake City during Sundance and the festival is essentially over anyway by that day.

“The cretins rule in Alpha Dog, which has much the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo or reading the latest issue of Star magazine. Of course a little of that nasty stuff may land on you, but such are the perils of voyeurism.
“Voyeurism that [director Nick] Cassavetes, a filmmaker with a lurid imagination and a talent for coaxing full-throttle performances from his actors, rewards with an embarrassment of vulgarities: lusciously tanned flesh, sensuously quivering muscles, cascades of blond hair, acres of tattoos, a sylph in a schoolgirl miniskirt (√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúDance, bitch!√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù someone cries), a three-way in a swimming pool, intimations of Nazism, a little tae kwon do and a lot of homegrown weed.
“The kids are not all right. Which is, like, you know, the point.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis riffing on Alpha Dog….hilarious.