Jacques Audiard‘s The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which was curiously ignored by the Oscars as a Best Foreign Language Feature nominee, won eight Cesar awards last Satuday night in Paris, including ones for Best Film and Best Director. Audiard’s podium speech included a salute to James Toback, whose 1978 film Fingers was the remake inspriation for Heart. Best Actor prize went to Michel Bouquet in The Last Mitterrand . Variety reports that “demonstrators outside Paris’ Chatelet Theater came inside, took to the stage and refused to budge, holding up the start of the televised ceremony by 20 minutes to mixed reactions from heckling tuxedo-clad attendees.”

“Your analysis of David Grubin‘s LBJ doc is dead on,” says Overnight co-director Tony Montana. “He’s absolutely my favorite president. No one knows what he went through and how hard he tried. He demonstrated a higher threshold for dealing with adversity than any president I’ve ever aware of. I recently picked my favorite docs for Hot Dog magazine and that film was my number one choice, ahead of Steve James‘ Hoop Dreams. (Here‘s an interview with Montana in an issue of 78 magazine that hit newstands last week.)

I’m working on setting up a Reader Response page on each and every article and WIRED item that goes up, so that each and every letter in response to whatever will be fully viewable to everyone. Coming in a couple of weeks, give or take. I’m also going to set up a Trailer of the Week thing in which the weeks’ best trailer-teaser will be highlighted in a prominent box or frame somewhere on the main page, with some kind of smart critique with links. (This will basically replace the defunct Trailer Trash.) Nothing revolutionary, but…

Film critic TV guys Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper echoed the sentiments of HE reader “III Rathbun” on Sunday’s (2.26) show in saying they’d love to see legendary director Robert Altman let fly with his core feelings about the mainstream Hollywood establishment when he accepts his career Oscar on Sunday, 3.5. I’ll never forget my asking Altman about the Los Angeles riots of ’92 when I ran into him at the Cannes Film Festival in their immediate wake. Knowing I was reporting for Entertainment Weekly, he said, “This subject is too important to be discussed in your magazine.” How could I argue?

What changes in the style and tone of Oscar telecast is David Thomson precisely suggesting? He’s basically saying make it looser and goosier…like the MTV Awards. “I’d…give Oscars for the best deal, the best promotion campaign, the most outrageous agent of the year,” he wrotes. “I’d give a chutzpah award — while the term chutzpah is still understood. All because people are in love with the business more than the story. I’d cut the show in half. I’d make it a dinner party again, instead of an awkward theatrical event.” Thomson would also make the awards for the technical CGI compositions a much bigger deal since the under-30s understand and spect this side of things. Movies as well the Oscar awards “need to be wild, sensational, visceral, overwhelming,” he concludes. Otherwise, one day the audience is going to wake up and say, ‘Dad, why do we have the Academy Awards? Shouldn’t they be in a home somewhere?'”

Fuck the perfect gown..fuck the wow factor…fuck designer- grovelling. All right, it’s dishonest of me to say this because I like watching the hot ladies on the red carpet as much as anyone else, but who will be the actress of distinction and character who wears something coolly stylish but different? Who holds back and maybe wears something that doesn’t indicate a desperate attempt to make a big impression with Isaac Mizrahi and win praise from the fashion writers and choice placement in the trashy supermarket magazines in their post-Oscar issues? Something a bit masucline…a touch of 1930s bisexual Marlene Dietrich? It’s been a gay year, right?

It’s interesting, I think, that Fox 411 columnist Roger Friedman is on the V for Vendetta train, since his Fox News employers have reason to greatly despise this lefty political pic.

This is three-week-old news, but DV Republic is claiming that the great Harry Belafonte (whom I met during the junket of White Man’s Burden, and whose come-what-may candor I found enormously appealing) was disinvited from funeral services for Coretta Scott King because of the attendance of President George Bush, according to “reliable sources.” Belafonte’s been a tough critic of Bush policies in recent weeks, and apparently was kept from the funeral “in deference to Bush’s comfort.” Belafonte was one of
the first big-time celebs to join forces with Martin Luther King in the early ’60s, and “not only contributed his celebrity to the cause, he marched shoulder to shoulder with Dr. King, and provided critical financial support during the movement and after King’s assassination,” according to DV Republic’s story. If the disinvite story is true, it easily qualifies as the most disgusting revelation I’ve heard in a long while, and shame on whomever’s responsible.

It’s really spooky about how the rule of three — celebrities always seeming to leave the earth in trios within the same two- or three-day period — keeps happening. I was on the verge of saying it hadn’t occured last weekend with the deaths of Darren McGavin and Don Knotts, but now comes the news of Dennis Weaver‘s passing in Connecticut last Friday. The three actors were all in their early ’80s and had their greatest triumphs on television in the ’50-s, ’60s and ’70s. Weaver called his Sam McCloud character, based on an Arizona lawman played by Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel‘s Coogan’s Bluff, and whom he played in his own soft-pedalled way on McCloud series from ’70 to ’77, “the most satisfying role of my career.” If you ask me Weaver’s finest hour, hands down, was his performance as the terrorized motorist in Steven Spielberg’s Duel (’71).

I was looking at this Ramey pix micro-shot (top left) this morning of Dyan Cannon, giving what looks like the finger to the guy shooting this photo of her and Jim Carrey at a Laker’s game. (I may be wrong…it’s a small image.) It led me, in any event, to this Christian website story about Cannon having become “an evangelist to the Hollywood community” with her Saturday night “God’s Party with Dyan Cannon & You,” at the CBS Studio Center in Studio City. Visitors “range from Hollywood insiders to people from all across the incredible diversity of the L.A. community,” with Cannon imprinting her personality “on this unique blend of southern revival meeting and Kathryn Kuhlman-like healing service.” Healing? Amazing what some people manage to put together when their career sputters. This is a town of liberal existential artist-heathens with guilty consciences, and the idea of holy-rolling in Studio City seems…well, different. What was that funny line she said in Heaven Can Wait? “I should be Cannon-ized!”

In June, Warner Home Video will finally cough up a DVD of one of the most intriguing late-’60s era films ever made: Richard Lester‘s brilliant, wonderfully textured, time-jumpy Petulia (1968). (WHV has it on the DVD market in England right now.) It’s about an impulsive, airy-fairy wife (Julie Christie) half- cheating on her stiff-necked husband (Richard Chamberlain) with a vulnerably grumpy divorced surgeon (George C. Scott) whom she’s deeply in love with…as far as it goes. Shot in San Francisco during the flower-power summer of ’67, Petulia mixes antsy energy with a bittersweet tone of regret about slipped-away love.

A Senses of Cinema essay by Peter Tonguette says that Petulia represented “the last gasp of Lester’s explicit engagement with present-day life. After it would come the masterful apocalyptic satire of The Bed Sitting Room (1969), which today looks symptomatic of a trend Pauline Kael identified in the mid-’70s: ‘At a certain point in their careers — generally right after an enormous popular success — most great movie directors go mad on the potentialities of movies,’ Kael observed. ‘They leap over their previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative; they make a huge, visionary epic in which they attempt to alter the perceptions of people around the world.’ Kael wrote this in a review of Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 (1976) — characteristic of this tendency if any film ever was — and goes on to site works such as D.W. Griffith‘s Intolerance (1916) and Abel Gance‘s Napoleon (1927). The Bed-Sitting Room was “a massive failure on every level and, not unlike the directors of other magnificent follies, he was punished for it; a full four years would go by before Lester directed a feature film [i.e., The Three Musketeers] again.”

Well, whoop-dee-doo…Universal production chief Stacey Snider made a firm call on Sunday to become chief executive and co-chairperson of DreamWorks…as if everyone was on pins and needles wondering if she’d stay with Universal. (Hah!) Snider will share the same creative and corporate authority that DreamWorks founders David Geffen and Steven Spielberg hold, and will report directly to management genius Brad Grey, the chairman and CEO of Paramount, which bought DreamWorks in December for $1.6 billion. The Snider thing was a Geffen move, of course. Hiring Snider was Geffen basically giving NBC/Universal’s owner General Electric (and its chairman and CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt) a hale and hearty f.u. for failing to deal in a more assertive and forthright way when a purchase of DreamWorks was being mulled by Universal last year. Like all corporate owners of entertainment companies, G.E. is basically a bean-counting operation without a lot of enthusiasm for entertaining or movie-making, and Geffen has taken advantage of that element of vague corporate suffocation by offering Snider a somewhat more creative, hands-on job with a bit more time off for her kids. With Geffen and Spielberg’s assent, Snider will be able to greenlight projects with budgets up to $85 million.