“The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie,” George Lucas has told N.Y. Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove. “Those movies can’t make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with King Kong. I think it’s great that the major Oscar nominations have gone to independent films…small movies. Is that good for the business? No — it’s bad for the business. But moviemaking isn’t about business. It’s about art! In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies. I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million.” Good, straight-talking stuff from a guy who is widely seen, with some justification, as being one of the two big-time Hollywood filmmakers (along with Steven Spielberg) who did more to bring down the curtain on the golden filmmaking era of ’70s and banalicize and flatten down movie culture with the spread of CG-FX kid-friendly epics…a guy with hundreds of millions in the bank from all this, and now he’s gotten religion and is preaching the indie gospel (in the form of hard-nosed industry analysis) like a reformed whore.

“Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky” — Ojibwe saying written on a small piece of paper, posted on a tile wall and captured three times by the cameras in episode #4 of the new Sopranos season, debuting 3.12 on HBO.

Something very big and very traumatic happens right off the bat in the first episode of the new Sopranos, which debuts on March 12th. That’s all I’ll say. Except that having seen the first two episodes so far and feeling like a family member of sorts (as I have for the last five or six years), it makes me feel untethered and out to sea. David Chase is a nervy guy.

“The DVD edition of Crash that came out last September says right on the back cover: ‘running time 122 minutes.’ It also gives a date of ‘2004,’ which means it shouldn’t have been eligible for the 2005 Oscar, but what do I know? I’ve seen it in a theatre, but I watched it again last night and it did seem to end earlier than it was supposed to. Confusing, yes. Why anyone would want to see a version three minutes longer…or three minutes shorter, for that matter? Your guess is as good as mine.” — Gordon Eklund, Seattle.

Variety‘s Brian Lowry and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt are both calling Failure to Launch (Paramount, 3.10) a non-starter. There’s some merit to this opinion, which the vast majority of the reviews appearing this Friday will confirm. Sarah Jessica Parker can shrug it off and move on, but poor Matthew McConaughey…what can he do? No one on this film ever woke up one morning and realized that Failure to Launch is one of the worst titles ever conceived? Astonishing.

Okay…two more comments about the Crash victory. Can’t find the link but it appears that the Boston Globe‘s Wesley Morris wrote that “the memo from Hollywood seems clear enough. Better to reward the movie about people who clean our closets than the one about the men who live in them.” And the Washington Post‘s Tom Shales said last Monday morning that “film buffs and the politically minded…will be arguing this morning about whether the Best Picture Oscar to Crash was really for the film’s merit or just a cop-out by the Motion Picture Academy so it wouldn’t have to give the prize to Brokeback Mountain.”

I’ve been overhwelmingly told by so many readers that I’m overheated or flat-out full of shit about my belief that there was a sufficient numbers of Korean War and World War II-generation Academy members flinching at Brokeback Mountain to cause it to lose the Best Picture Oscar. I don’t know what to say except that I know I’m right about a certain percentage of these people voting against Ang Lee’s film for reasons I’ve described in previous postings, and/or supporting Crash for the “wrong” reasons. I know it, I know it…but nobody seems to agree (here’s Roger Ebert disputing it) so let’s just drop it and move on.

I don’t know how long this Starz bunny parody of Brokekack Mountain has been kicking around, but the words “who cares?” are inadequate to the task of expressing my interest levels. Why am I posting it then? Good question.

Ron Grover‘s 3.6 Business Week scoop about the recently- cemented deal between the Weinstein Co. and the Sony-based MGM Studios came out yesterday, and the official announcement may be announced at a press conference on Wednesday, 3.8. The MGM-Weinstein Co. deal “will mean a new, high-profile home for Harvey and his brother, Bob, who had a nasty 2005 divorce from Disney, which had bought Miramax in 1993,” Grover writes. The pact will also signal legendary studio MGM’s return to making and distributing films. “Sources” say Harry Sloan, MGM’s new CEO, will proclaim MGM’s resurgence as a full-fledged studio at the 3.8 press conference.

“My life is about finding time to dream. That’s why my card is American Express.” This speaker is famed director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs), and it’s the only line of narration heard in his fascinating, self-directed two-minute American Express ad, which is definitely Night-flavored and Night-creepy, and two or three cuts above the usual-usual. (And I don’t care how long it’s been viewable…I just saw it now.

Okay, so the Oscar-viewing TV audience was down 8% from last year, but — but! — viewership among 18 to 34 year-old males was up 5%, which is probably due to Jon Stewart’s popularity with this demo. Nielsen’s estimated total count came in at 38.8 million viewers, compared to last year’s 42.1 million. And Sunday night;s show was ahead of the 2003 audience of only 33 million. And the 38.8 million figure is larger than the audience for the recent Emmy and Golden Globes shows combined, and was also larger than the Academy Award telecasts in 1986 and 1987. But they should still get rid of Gil Cates.

“The key to the success of Crash,” writes James Bates in today’s L.A. Times, “was that the film itself — and the carefully orchestrated promotional campaign undertaken by its distributor, Lionsgate √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√É¬Æ appealed to actors, the academy’s largest voting bloc. With 22% of the voting members, the acting contingent is nearly three times as big as the next-largest group, producers. It was actors — specifically, those in Los Angeles — who were targeted to deliver votes. And judging by the upset, deliver they did. Crash likely…scored points with some actors because it was shot in Los Angeles at a time when runaway film production is a sore point. Crash was also set in Los Angeles, which probably gave it an additional home-field advantage. 78% of the academy’s voting members live in California — the vast majority of them in the L.A. area.” All of which is true, but downplaying or waving away the reported attitude-posture of who-knows-how-many-but-probably- more-than-a-few oldsters and old-liners toward Brokeback Mountain (couldn’t hack the pup-tent scene, wouldn’t see the film, resented the macho cowboy tradition being messed with) is a form of denial. All Bates will say on this aspect is that “much of the morning-after punditry and blog logic has centered on whether members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had trouble giving Brokeback Mountain a Best Picture nod because of its gay love theme.” As if it was some theory of celestial mechanics being floated in a scientific journal.