More Best Picture Oscar Embarassments, submitted by reader Gabriel Neeb: (a) Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (let’s call this one a post-Passion of the Christ reassessment); (b) How Green Was My Valley (it beat out the political hot-potato Citizen Kane and the legendary The Maltese Falcon, which was seen in ’41 as a hardboiled genre piece and therefore not toney enough for a gold statuette); (c) 1940’s Rebecca (a strong piece, but this is the Hitchcock film the Academy went for because…hmmm, let me guess…because producer David O. Selznick was out there twisting arms and calling in the muscle and invoking favors?); (d) 1958’s Gigi (has anyone in the presently-configured world ever seen this curiously antiquted museum piece on DVD? There isn’t a single cultural echo in all of it); (e) 1932 and ’33’s Cavalcade (the year King Kong should have been at least nominated); (f) 1936’s The Great Ziegfeld and ’37’s The Life of Emile Zola .

I missed this one when it first went up on 2.3.06: Michael Moore is asking readers to send him their health-care horror stories so he can use some of them in his new doc Sicko, which he’s currently researching and shooting. “How would you like to be in my next movie?,” he begins. “Have you ever found yourself getting ready to file for bankruptcy because you can’t pay your kid’s hospital bill, and then you say to yourself, ‘Boy, I sure would like to be in Michael Moore’s health care movie!’? Or, after being turned down for the third time by your HMO for an operation they should be paying for, do you ever think to yourself, “Now this travesty should be in that Sicko movie!”? Or maybe you’ve just been told that your father is going to have to just, well, die because he can’t afford the drugs he needs to get better — and it’s then that you say, ‘Damn, what did I do with Michael Moore’s home number?!’ Ok, here’s your chance. As you can imagine, we’ve got the goods on these bastards. All we need now is to put a few of you in the movie and let the world see what the greatest country ever in the history of the universe does to its own people, simply because they have the misfortune of getting sick. Because getting sick, unless you are rich, is a crime — a crime for which you must pay, sometimes with your own life.”

Last Monday’s remark from Tony Curtis [go south about 12 items] about not having seen Brokeback Mountain and that he probably won’t between now and balloting time has led me to re-read Nikki Finke‘s Feb. 2 L.A. Weekly column and re-consider that she might have been on to something. It began with her saying that “this year’s dirty little secret is the anecdotal evidence pouring in to me about hetero members being unwilling to screen Brokeback Mountain. For a community that takes pride in progressive values, it’s shameful that Hollywood’s homophobia may be on a par with Pat Robertson’s. Despite the hype you’re reading in the press and on the internet about Brokeback, with its eight nominations, being the supposed favorite to take home the Best Picture Oscar on March 5, Crash could end up winning. The issue isn’t which film is better. The issue is more like which movie was seen by the Academy.”

The biggest-selling Oscar book that will never be written because it can’t be: Academy Award Vote Totals. Oscar know-it-all and Maxim critic Pete Hammond says he’s long wanted to write this but the Academy never reveals the numbers and they supposedly trash-can them after seven years so forget it. If the totals were known and published, the book would never stop selling. If there are any retired Price Waterhouse guys out there who wrote down the totals from years past and kept copies and want to talk about enhancing their savings account by getting into some Mark Felt parking-garage action, get in touch.

The biggest Best Picture embarassment wins of all time? I think it’s a three-way tie between The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days and Driving Miss Daisy, with Oliver! and Chicago being the first runners-up. Which others…??

I can run links to photos of Jack Black in Nacho Libre also. It’s the new film from Napoleon Dynamite‘s Jared Hess and Paramount Pictures, due in early June.

I walked right into this one, but some low-life stole my clothes out of a dryer in a low-rent laundromat on Haley Street yesterday evening while I was back at the Santa Barbara Hotel. A loss of roughly $175, give or take, and nobody’s fault but mine.

Walk the Line director James Mangold was supposed to attend the Santa Barbara Film Festival today and do a chit-chat at the Lobero, but he had to cancel due to preparation for a pilot in three weeks time and being in the throes of casting. It was always a long shot to begin with, apparently. Too bad…

That late ’50s noir-whodunit formerly known as Truth, Justice and American Way, about the death of the TV-series Superman guy George Reeves (Ben Affleck) due to a gunshot wound in the head, has been retitled Hollywoodland, according to the IMDB. A 1.26 report by “Stax” in IGN Film Force said that Allen Coulter-directed film, which will be distribbed by Focus Features (even though it was finished a good while ago and still doesn’t have release date on its IMDB page),
had to surrender the Truth, Justice title because Warner Bros., the producer of the Superman movies (including Bryan Singer’s bewbie coming out in June), was threatening to sue Focus if they didn’t stop using the Man of Steel’s motto. Stax, who’s been writing about this film for eons and has good sources on it, said Hollywoodland is being scored and will be released “later this year.” I was talking to a film director pal about this movie last weekend, and he said he’s “heard so little about it” that he’s starting to wonder, etc….if you catch my drift. The Hollywood- land costars are Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Robin Tunney, Bob Hoskins and the great Dash Mihok. (Seriously…Mihok is a really fine actor.)

What’s the worst (i.e., most irritating sounding) movie title ever? The Chicago Tribune‘s Mark Caro is asking on his “Pop Machine” blog.

Keep your eyes peeled for a forthcoming N.Y. Times Lewis Beale story on Cuba Gooding, Jr., and how he’s trying to put his career back together. Word on the street is that Gooding is being extremely frank with anyone of a serious bent who wants to know exactly how he screwed things up. I’ll tell you how he screwed things up. Snow Dogs and Boat Trip is how.

David Carr, the N.Y. Times “Bagger” blogger, says Paramount Picture’s calorically-challenged president Gail Berman (I’m sorry but c’mon, this is a distinctive characteristic…you can’t say it isn’t) may be toast after all, and that Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel may be coming in to take up Berman’s slack. Carr is calling Paramount topper Brad Grey‘s defense of Berman in that 2.6 Laura Holson Times piece “remarkably wan,” and saying that “two people” he’s spoken to have “suggested that Emanuel will be brought in to help run the place in Ms. Berman’s stead.” Strange and prejudiced and as un-p.c. as this may sound, I suspect that deep, deep down (and I mean down the elevator in a coal mine), Berman’s c.c. factor is not a political plus for her. Face it — there are next to no c.c. stand-outs in the film industry, and I think we all recognize there’s a reason behind this.