“George Lucas is wrong about the future of cinema,” says Matthew Meyeretto, in a reference to this morning’s item sourced from Lloyd Grove. “The reason people still go to theaters is because of tent-pole pictures. Films like Crash have achieved a nice niche market but they’ll never attract that key market segment of 12-30 year olds that epic tent-poles do. We all know Kong ‘disappointed’ because it was too long and was too much of pet project for Jackson. If he had trimmed an hour off and made a straight monster flick that put the pedal to the metal within ten minutes and didn’t let up (including excising that silly scene of Kong skidding around on the ice in Central Park), it would have grossed $300 million stateside.”

“A check of Brokeback parodies on Google should convince anyone with half a brain that the American pop culture is intent on passing this passionate, well-meant, and well-made movie like a kidney stone. And how does the American pop culture pass what it cannot stand? Easy. It laughs that shit right out of its system. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, at bottom as conservative as the current U.S. House of Representatives, gave Ang Lee one Oscar (which surprised me), the writing team of McMurtry and Diana Ossana another…and with those bones thrown, felt free to move on. To Crash, of course. Crash was the perfect alternative, and — ahem — I had it picked for Best Picture the whole way. It’s the sort of flick the Hollywood establishment loves best and will always embrace, if given the chance, one where the complexities are all on the surface. [But Crash has] a valid point of view, a decent theme, and Paul Haggis made the most of it. But was it the best film of the year? Good God, no. Brokeback was better. So were Capote and The Squid and the Whale, for that matter. But let’s let it go, okay? The lights are off in the Kodak Theatre for another year. The set has been struck. The Academy sent the same soothing message it almost always sends: Everything’s all right, everything’s okay, the right movie won — the good movie, not the gay movie. Go to sleep, and sleep tight.” — From Stephen King ‘s latest column in Entertainment Weekly.

“So what happened? Brokeback won almost all the critics’ awards, but the critics are only trying to select the best movie. In Hollywood, the old guard never embraced Brokeback…it never had a chance to win over the 60-year-old straight white men who compose most of the voting. Giving Brokeback an award is not the kind of message Hollywood wants to send to middle America. Hollywood does not heart homosexuals. The only people in the country who really truly seem to believe that Hollywood is pushing a gay agenda message the throats of Americans are the ultra far-right wing…the Michael Medveds, Ann Coulters, and Gary Baumans. Think about it. Hollywood’s homosexual agenda? Gay actors can’t even come out of the closet. Gay executives and agents stay in the closet. There isn’t a more closeted business in the country, except, perhaps, the National Football League. Hollywood’s homosexual agenda? Name the great gay-themed movies over the last thirty years? Let’s see, Philadelphia (where the gay protagonist is dying) and… well, that’s it. That’s Hollywood’s gay agenda over the last thirty years. Two movies.” — Journalist, former newspaper editor and book author Gene Stone in the Huffington Post.

Nothing to do with movie culture whatsoever but a great L.A. hiking-trail website for locals and anyone visiting…excellent. (Yeah, I’m a hiker…but not enough.)

Lauren Bacall, great actress and screen legend who unfortunately lost her concentration and stumbled while reading copy on the teleprompter last Sunday night…tough moment for a great lady.

“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.