Stop for a sec and click on this Cannes website…it has a really great crickets-and-birds soundtrack and if you throw in the rising sun visual it’s kind of perfect. It really and truly captures the way that town feels…at times. I’m feeling jaunty about Cannes because I just scored a good flat share at the right price.

A little over three weeks ago, or on February 4th, former N.Y. Times critic Elvis Mitchell returned to National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition Saturday” for the first time since…well, it gets complicated from here on. In February ’05 an announcement came down about an acqusitions gig Mitchell had supposedly landed with Columbia Pictures in Manhattan…which he apparently never performed. Maynard Institute columnnist Richard Prince referenced a 2.1.5.05 Daily News story about the Columbia gig, and also a column written last year by the New York Observer‘s 2.27 piece that Jake Brooks saying that Mitchell had “been assigned the welcome task…of trolling film festivals for potential acquisitions and evaluating the Columbia library for potential remakes.” Mitchell has a reputation of being a bit erratic when it comes to fulfilling gigs and assignments. (“In the early ’90s, it wasn’t hard to find an editor who had assigned Mitchell a piece — and it wasn’t hard to find an editor who wished he hadn’t,” Sean Elder wrote in Salon seven years ago. “Deadlines were often missed.”) And here we have Prince running a statement from an NPR spokesperson saying that Mitchell “never actually took the job with Columbia so there is no conflict of interest” with being an NPR commentator. Mitchell began on NPR as host of “The Treatment” on Santa Monica’s KCRW.

A very cool Volkswagen ad starring Peter Stormare, okay, but let’s not go overboard. It’s about the GTI Mark V, which starts at $21 thousand and change.

Critics have been saying for years that the Oscars have to loosen up and change with the times and not be so stiff and regimented. Well, here’s one very cool and classy idea: annnounce a brand-new category called the Masters Oscar, which in effect would be a retroactive Best Picture Oscar. The idea is to give a Masters Oscar each year to some richly deserving film that has steadily gained in reputation in the years and decades since it was first released, but was ignored or under-valued by Academy members at the time. An opportunity to right a past oversight by way of a second look, the Masters Oscar, if adopted, would probably be dubbed the “Second-Chance Oscar.” The idea partially came from reader Richard Swank, who put it to me this morning as follows: “All this talk of movies that were robbed in years past got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be great if the Academy had a veteran’s committee like the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame? It’s their job to induct those players who are deserving, but, for one reason or another didn’t make it in during the regular balloting.” My idea (thanks, Rich…now go sit down) is that each year the Academy Veterans Committee could nominate five Best Picture contenders from the past (any year, any decade) that didn’t win but deserved the honor and then some, and then of course send out DVDs of the five nominated films to the general Academy membership, and require them to vote for their favorite along with all the other categories. Think of the thrill and the major emotion that would come from films like Citizen Kane, Notorious, Psycho, A Clockwork Orange, Au hasard Balthazar, Touch of Evil, Taxi Driver, Bringing Up Baby or Out of the Past winning a Masters Oscar each year…ratified by a majority of the membership with the producers, directors and stars (or their descendants) coming up on stage to receive their Oscars to rapturous applause. It would obviously do wonders for the Oscar’s historical reputation, as well enhance the winning film’s reputation with the DVD-buying public. I don’t want to brag, but this is the best innovative idea I’ve come up with in a long time. Now watch Gil Cates and his old-school cronies blow it off.

A friend sent me a list of scripts, and I’m wondering which (if any) seem the most intriguing to readers. (1) Casino Royale by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade, second set of revisions by Paul Haggis (12.13.05); (2) Believe it or Not! by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (5/6/05); (3) The Last Kiss by Paul Haggis (10.31.03); (4) Night At The Museum by Scott Frank (2.4.5); (5) The Martian Child by Seth E. Bass & Jonathan Tolins (3.14.05); (6) The Astronaut Farmer by Mark & Michael Polish (6.16.05); (7) Steven Soderbergh and Terrence Malick’s Che; (8) Cabin Fever 2 by Adam Green (9.20.04); and (8) 300 by Snyder/Johnstad (11.22.04). If these scripts aren’t vital reading, which ones are?

Sir Carol Reed made three masterpieces in a row in the mid to late ’40s — The Fallen Idol, Odd Man Out and The Third Man And what does he win his Oscar for? Oliver (1968), a mediocre big-studio musical that seems a little less each time you reflect upon it. (Forwarded by reader Jeremy Fassler.)

“I was fortunate enough to meet Paddy Chayefsky at the Carnegie Deli very near the end of his life. I asked him if he had any idea, when he wrote Network, how life would follow art. He said that his original script had been twice as cynical but he had been forced to dilute it to get it made. When he asked why I was so interested, I told him I worked in TV news. ‘Oh wait’, he said, ‘just wait.'” — Christopher Dalrymple, Digital Verite.

The deadline for the Oscar ballots to be filled out and received happened exactly fourteen minutes ago — 5 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday, 2.28. Please, please…give us a surprise in one of the major categories.

I suggested a continuation of David Carr‘s
“Carptebagger”/Red Carpet column a few days ago, and now it looks like Carr is giving the idea some thought. “Although his ‘Carpetbagger’ movie awards season blog is supposed to go dark after the Oscars, Carr said that he might consider continuing to blog for the Times as an add-on to his regular media column. He told us that blogging has taught him spontaneity and gave him more confidence with his writing.” — Zack Barangan writing about Carr’s visit last weekend to some kind of NYU blogging class.

Toughest Job on Oscar Night Award contenders, from a piece in Time magazine: (a) Jennifer Aniston’s publicist: Has Jen seen Brangelina’s sonogram? Will she attend the shower? Red carpet chatterboxes have many rude questions for this presenter. Wells comment: Those fearless vampire killer questions asked of tabloid victims like Aniston, Brangelina and Tomkat are beyond sickening. (b) Isaac Mizrahi: the grabby E! co-host must keep his hands in his pockets, and off of starlets. Wells comment: More brash tittie feels…go for it, Isaac…make it a lifelong signature thing. (c) Dolly Parton’s stylist: O.K., we’re not sure she has one, but heck, fitting a gown on this buxom Best Song nominee for Transamerica‘s Travelin’Thru would be a real achievement. Wells comment: Zzzzzzzz. (d) Host Jon Stewart: Really, will there be any original gay cowboy jokes left by March 5? Wells comment : A Stewart bioographer will one day report that gay cowboy jokes were immediately dismissed when Stewart and his team started working on his monologue…done to death by Leno, Letterman and Nathan Lane. (e) Reese Witherspoon: Acting surprised when she wins Best Actress for Walk the Line will surely require Witherspoon to channel more of that June Carter-style class. Wells comment: There’s a belief out there that a Witherspoon upset by Transamerica‘s Felicity Huffman is possible. Not likely, but it could conceivably happen…maybe.

Guy goes to see The Pink Panther with his mom, laughs in a weird and too-loud way, audience members complain, and the guy gets thrown out. This is frontier justice, and if I were there I’d probably support the eviction. If you can’t keep it together in a movie theatre, you’re going to tick people off, and being handicapped is no excuse. This is where the DVD solution comes into play.

I failed to mention in an earlier riff about Warner Home Video’s All The President’s Men double-disc special edition DVD that it contains three brilliant mini-documentaries by Los Angeles-based documentarian Gary Leva, and that two of these are especially valuable and noteworthy because they’re serious looks at the state of U.S. journalism today rather than typical celebrate-the-movie puff pieces. They’re basically about how journalism has gone downhill since the days of Watergate and, by implication, how attempts to muscle journalists under the Bush administration are just as bad if not worse today than they were under the Nixon administration in the early ’70s. “Woodward and Bernstein: Lighting the Fire,” which runs 18 minutes, is an indictment of the current chicken-hearted state of corporate- controlled journalism, which a complacent public doesn’t seem to care very much about. The scariest remark comes from Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter, saying that if Watergate were to happen today the story probably would have never come out. The second doc, “Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Was Deep Throat,” starts as a look at Mark Felt, the #2 FBI guy back then who was revealed last year as “Deep Throat. But it gradually shifts into an examination of the importance of unnamed sources, and how most news stories would just be press releases and pablum without them. Peter Schweizer (author of “The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty”) laments that Felt never tried to fix the corruption from within. Alter calls this notion a “preposterous canard,” explaining that “we simply can’t do our jobs without anyonymous sources… people will often not tell the truth if they have to be on the record.” Here’s an excerpt from the doc’s final moments. The talking heads appearing on both docs include Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Ben Bradley, Linda Ellberbee, Walter Cronkite, Oliver Stone, William Goldman and Oliver Stone. I spoke to Leva this afternoon about the unusually political and hard-hitting nature of these docs, and he said “it’s always a lot more interesting looking at the issues raised by a film in a broader context…rather than simply in light of the physical production of the film.” Leva says that apart from these docs, the piece he’s proudest of is one about ’70s filmmakers called “A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope.” It can be found on the THX 1138: The George Lucas Directors Cut two-disc DVD that came out in September 2004.