Now that I’m back in L.A. and all the tech stuff (microphones, speaker phone, etc.) is plugged in and functioning, “Elsewhere Live” will make its post-holiday return this evening at 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Eastern.

The Paul Haggis surge with this morning’s DGA nomination (on top of the surge for Crash with the recent SAG and Producers Guild noms) is the big story of the morning, and let’s give credit where credit is due. MCN’s Gurus of Gold is about predicting popular industry support, and no one voted for Haggis except for Maxim critic and industry gadfly Pete Hammond. In fact, if it weren’t Hammond’s vote (he listed Haggis as #3 among his five most-likely Best Director nominees) Haggis wouldn’t be on the Gurus of Gold countdown at all. All of these journo know-it-alls (myself included) totally blanked him.

Was I wrong about Munich‘s strength or is this just some corroded political DGA thing? Steven Spielberg has nabbed one of the five Best Director nominations from the Directors Guild of America, and David Poland, one of Munich‘s most die-hard supporters, is now apparently of two minds. Today’s Hot Button is obviously a limited Munich pullback piece on one level, but he also says, incredibly, that “I still believe in my gut that if Munich gets nominated, the month following nominations will see enough people lining up behind the film in this good-not-Oscar-great season for it to win the Oscar.” The reason I believe Poland to be the ultimate Japanese-soldier-holding-out-in-a-cave- in-Okinawa is that I keep hearing there’s no sizable support for Munich among the guilds, so if you ask me (and I’m not the only one) this is just about directors kissing Spielberg’s ass for giving a lot of people a lot of work over the years. The other four DGA nominees (and congratulations to them all) are Capote‘s Bennett Miller (that’s it…Capote is a flat-out Best Picture lock) Brokeback Mountain‘s Ang Lee, George Clooney for Good Night, and Good Luck and Crash‘s Paul Haggis — the beneficiary of the biggest sentiment surge. The DGA winner and the Oscar-winner for Best Director have been the same in 51 of the last 57 years.

I’ve listened and considered and poked at the ground with a stick, and I think I understand what the Jon-Stewart-hosting-the- Oscar-show deal is going to be. The Blue Staters love his tweaky irreverence and are looking very much forward to his wicked bons mots, and the Reds aren’t into him as much (a guy wrote me claiming that people between the coasts and outside the cities don’t even know who he is) and won’t watch as much as they would if someone they felt more comfortable with had been chosen to host. Am I suggesting that the Academy release photos of Stewart waiting in line at a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise while wearing a T-shirt and a baseball hat? Fuck no. But the ratings, I fear, will not…naaah, maybe not. I don’t care about the Oscar show ratings anway. Let ’em fall…what do we care? And besides, as the New York Times “Carpetbagger” David Carr has written, “Mr. Stewart is an enemy of convention, of industrial folkways, of the mannered back-slapping of the entertainment business. Joaquin Phoenix won’t be the only one walking the line on Oscar night.”

Following this morning’s Screen Actors Guild nominations, it’s looking more and more like the four Best Picture locks with the Academy are going to be Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash and Good Night, and Good Luck…because these four were nominated (along with the somewhat startling entry of Hustle and Flow…go Terrence Howard, Craig Brewer and Taraji P. Henson!) for the Best Ensemble Cast category — SAG’s equivalent of the Oscar for Best Picture. The likelihood factor kicks in when you consider that these same four films were nominated yesterday by the Producer’s Guild for their Daryl F. Zanuck award. I’m guessing that Walk the Line will nudge out Hustle & Flow…but who knows?

In any event, the Capote team can finally start to exhale — director Bennett Miller, screenwriter Dan Futterman, star-producer Philip Seymour Hoffman. George Clooney and his Good Night team can also, I think, give themselves a premature pat on the back for having (apparently, most likely) made the cut, and ditto Lion’s Gate and the Crash director-writer Paul Haggis and co-writer Bobby Moresco. I’m not congratulating the Brokeback Mountain gang because their film has been locked for a Best Picture nom (and let’s face it, seems headed right now for an almost certain victory in early March) for a good two or three weeks, and you, me and every senior citizen and 16 year-old kid between Guerneville, California, and Newton, Massachucetts, knows it. And oh yeah, no nominations of any kind for poor Munich…again. I want to be gracious about this, but if those who were claiming in October and November that Munich is the presumptive Best Picture winner want to issue their recants and mea culpas, now might be the time. It’s up to them, of course.

I wasn’t expecting anything from Eli Roth’s Hostel (Lion’s Gate, 1.6) except gore, torture, sadism, et. al. In other words, I was expecting to sit through a typical deranged, dumb-assed horror film. But to my surprise, I didn’t hate it. It’s appalling but not stupid. I didn’t like Roth’s Cabin Fever that much, and this struck me as better…for what it was. Hostel is not a “good film” but is moderately watchable if you watch it with the right diseased attitude, which is to say the right kind of hip-movie-geek detachment. Roth says he doesn’t see the representations of violence in his films as anything but enthusiastic movie fakery…somewhat realistic on a certain level, perhaps, but not crafty enough to truly penetrate the emotions or the psyche. And now Roth has taken his opportunism and merged it with the insights of one Harry Knowles. I mean that the idea for Hostel literally came from Ain’t It Cool’s Knowles telling Roth about an alleged website about Asian snuff houses, in which desperate people (men mostly) have agreed, the story goes, to be killed by clients of these snuff houses for the sum of $10,000 or so, which will go to their families to help them get out of debt or poverty. The idea of even one poor Asian man or woman meeting death under these circumstances strikes me as one of the saddest and most revolting things I’ve ever heard, and yet Roth turns this premise into gore confetti. He sets it in Slovakia, uses 20-something kids (standard-issue lambs to the slaughter) to replace those penniless breadwinners of Asia and…well, it’s pretty damn ugly. And ludicrous. The idea of regular Slovakian Joe’s pulling down a weekly paycheck working as guards in a slaughter factory…sure thing! But all this said, I didn’t despise it. The acting and dialogue in the non-horrific first act aren’t bad, I liked that menacing gang of little zombie kids and lead actor Jay Hernandez (crazy beautiful) has presence and conviction. Sorry, haters…I hear you but I didn’t think once of leaving. If it seems to be self-aware and more or less in command, sometimes a crap movie just slides right in.

So Woody Allen has finished his second British film — a comedy called Scoop with Scarlet Johansson and Hugh Jackman. Next he’ll do another British-produced film later this year, and then in early 2007 he’ll shoot an English-language film in Spain using an international cast. I think it’s great that across-the-pond financing is working out for Allen…good financially and creatively, I somehow sense. London culture was clearly one reason Match Point turned out so well. Here’s hoping he’ll shoot a couple of films in Paris also.

The Producers Guild will choose one of the following five groups of producers to receive their Daryl F. Zanuck award, to be presented on 1.22.06: Brokeback Mountain‘s Diana Ossana and James Schamus; Capote‘s Caroline Baron, William Vince and Michael Ohoven; Crash‘s Paul Haggis and Cathy Shulman; Good Night, and Good Luck‘s Grant Heslov, and Walk the Line‘s James Keach and Cathy Konrad. Conventional wisdom says that Producer’s Guild nominations don’t portend anything in terms of AMPAS Best Picture nominations, but I don’t know. I think they might. Apart from its high ranking with the Movie City News critics picks, has Capote been singled out before this announcement as some kind of finalist in the Best Picture blah-dee-blah? Does the exclusion of Munich or A History of Violence mean anything? No? Sure it does.

“I think with the Jon Stewart pick the Oscar show producers are basically acknowledging that the ratings of the show will be pretty low because of the ‘small movies’ that will likely be be nominated,” says a reader who didn’t give his name. “Stewart is the Bush-bashing blue-state pick from the heart. He might keep some of those younger viewers that Chris got last year but will turn off older viewers for sure. I just told my red-state dad, who was going to watch in hopes of a Walk The Line sweep…but he’s turned off now.”

I’ve read this Sharon Waxman story about Walk the Line star Joaquin Pheonix visiting Folsom Prison and singing songs and meeting inmates and basically…well, promoting the movie. And yet Waxman’s story says the visit began “with an invitation from a religious outreach group called the Prison Fellowship, whose leaders felt that Walk the Line might inspire inmates with its story of redemption.” Whatever…

The Envelope‘s Steve Pond is reporting that Daily Show host Jon Stewart has been hired to host the Oscar Awards telecast, which will air two months from now. Pond says the official announce- ment is expected Thursday morning. I still say a Luke Wilson- Vince Vaughn pairing would be a cooler thing, but Stewart…I don’t know. I suspect he won’t quite be as intoxicating as Steve Martin was, and I fear he might be another David Letterman. I’ve got a bit of a funny feeling about this, but I think I’ll start watching The Daily Show again.