Just a reminder for those who don’t scroll down that Oscar Balloon ’06 is up and running, and that any and all suggestons as far as additions, deletions and whatnot from all four corners of the globe are welcome. Our journey of a thousand miles and 365 days starts here…

The New Bond flick is looking like a wipeout before it gets rolling. Despite filming having begun on the Daniel Craig-starring, Paul Haggis-authored Casino Royale in Prague a few days ago, the producers still haven’t signed anyone to play the Icily Sophisticated, Cold-Hearted Villain in Perfect Physical Shape as well the Tough, Spirited, Independent-Minded, Fated-to-Sexually- Submit Bond Girl. “They’re talking to three to four [women] right now,” Haggis recently told a reporter. “Every week I read there’s a new Bond girl, and I call them and they say, no, you idiot.” Let’s just spit it out so we don’t have to step over the elephant: they can’t get a Bond girl because the agents for the hottest actresses are telling their clients not to do it because they don’t think Craig has the right kind of studly savoir faire and that the series may well be on its last legs, and also because no one wants to work with those Irving Thalberg-level Bond producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. Rachel McAdams would be great to cast, but the only reason she’d accept would be a need for a whopping down payment on an expensive new home. An insider has confided that “the casting of the villain is much further along than that of the female star.”

Sony Pictures Classics’ Capote is moving into 1,500 screens this Friday (2.3) to try and make a little moolah out of those five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Originally released on 9.30.05, the highest number of screens for the upscale biopic was 348 (as of 1.20), resulting in earnings of $15 million so far. “There was a difficulty in getting a people to know who Truman Capote was,” SPC co-honcho Tom Bernard recently told Variety reporter Gabriel Snyder, “but [the Oscar nominations have] put us in the mainstream of American attention.” Did everyone read that? There was a “difficulty” with Average Joe’s not knowing who the most famous literary figure of the ’60s and ’70s was…a guy who was constantly on talk shows and in magazine articles and gossip columns. Here’s to the English teachers in America’s high schools. In Cold what? Good work, guys.

Here‘s Chicago Tribune critic Mark Caro’s new blog, called Pop Machine.

Hold on a sec: I’ve just figured a way for the fourth Indiana Jones movie, which has been in and out of development since the early ’90s, to work despite the Harrison Ford aging problem. One glance at Ford in that Firewall one-sheet and your first thought is how old and grandfatherly he seems. How do you write a dashing, thrilling Indy 4 adventure flick when the star is going to be 64 in July and looks every day of it? Conventional solution: turn him into Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade…cast him as the dad/mentor figure opposite some young buck actor who’ll handle all the heavy-duty action moves. But I say “no” to that. You can cast a younger guy alongside Ford, fine…but the running joke is that old, bent-over Indy is stronger, tougher, braver and in better shape than the much-younger guy. In short, ignore the age issue. In fact, go in the other direction. Have Ford do all the grueling action sequences he did in Raiders of the Lost Ark and then some…fake it, CG it, push it, but don’t let him be Grandpappy Amos. That’s it…that’s the fix.

I watched Flight 93 Monday night on A&E, and so did N.Y. Times guy David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger“), and so did 5.9 million other good people, giving the A&E channel its largest audience ever since launching in 1984. Decently made but a bit too emotionally emphatic (i.e., too many weeping women), this made-for-cable version of Paul Greengrass’s upcoming feature of the same title (due in April from Universal) reached 2.9 million adults (aged 25 to 54….what happens when you turn 55?…do you roll over and die?), 2.7 million folks in the 18 to 49 age range, and 1 million in the 18 to 34 range…these ages overlap and, uhmm, I don’t get it.

The Santa Barbara Film Festival — orchestrated, massaged, grooved and fine-tuned by the tireless Roger Durling — kicks off tomorrow night (Thursday, 2.2) with a gala showing of Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust (Paramount Classics, 3.10), with Towne and star Salma Hayek attending. (Towne will do a “conversation with” forum at Victoria Hall on Friday, 2.3, at 5:30 pm.) The films are always well-chosen but for me the SBFF is mainly about faces, seminars & panels, parties, blondes and photo-ops. Other creatives visiting Santa Barbara over the next ten days include George Clooney (recipient of the Modern Master Award on Friday evening, 2.3, at the Arlington); Naomi Watts (receiving the fest’s Montecito Award on Saturday, 2.4); directors James Cameron (recipient of the Attenborough Award on Monday, 2.6) and Mike Binder (Centerpiece Gala focus on Tuesday, 2.7); Heath Ledger (Breakthrough Performance honoree on Wednesday, 2.8); Transamerica star Felicity Huffman and History of Violence costar Maria Bello (both participating in a “conversation with” forum) and Capote star Philip Seymour Hoffman receiving the fest’s Riviera Award. The closing night film is Jason Reitman‘s very popular Thank You for Smoking, with Aaron Eckhardt giving his best performance since In The Compnay of Men.

Us magazine critic Thelma Adams about today’s snub of a very deserving Supporting Actress: “Robin Wright Penn delivered the year’s ten tautest dramatic minutes in the underseen Nine Lives, as a pregnant wife whose chance encounter with a former lover in the aisles of an L.A. grocery store shatters her serene existence — and his.” Damn right.

The following allegedly came from Walk the Line star and Best Actress contender Reese Witherspoon, on the subject of today’s Oscar nomination: “I was completely surprised.” No…no. She couldn’t have said that.

The people at 20th Century Fox are said to be totally bummed about Walk the Line not getting a Best Picture nomination, but c’mon…Reese and Joaquin are nominated for their respective acting categories and the film is over $100 million and still climbing. The biopic lost momentum due to its own lack of sway over the last four or five weeks (those Golden Globe awards notwithstanding), but Fox’s Oscar consultant Gregg Brilliant was apparently out-schnorred and out-hobknobbed by Munich consultant Tony Angellotti and Fox’s ad campaign was also out-spent by Universal’s. If Munich had just done what it was supposed to do after it opened and gone away like a bad dog and not kept on like it did, Walk the Line would have probably been Best Picture-nominated.

Flight 93, the made-for-TV 9/11 drama that had its first Arts & Entertainment (A&E) airing last night, wasn’t half bad. Too many babies appeared`in the calls-from-home sequences and too many wives of too many guys on the plane cried and said “I love you”… not in real life, of course, but all that friggin’ crying felt drama- tically tedious to me. Director Peter Markle didn’t make it sufficiently clear about how and when the Flight 93 passengers learned of the other 9/11 attacks that were happening at the same time (this knowledge was what led to their taking back the plane from the terrorist hijackers), and I was losing patience with two or three women who wept and moaned while conferring with the male passengers on cell phones but who also failed to tell them precisely what had happened to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Presumably Bourne Supremacy helmer Paul Greengrass, whose identically titled theatrical version of the same 9/11 tale will open on 4.28, will cool it with this and focus more on Todd “let’s roll” Beamer and the other guys who rushed the bad guys and prevented the plane from crashing into the White House or the Pentagon.

I’m going to risk it and admit to something I’m not proud of, but the following passage in the New York Times coverage of the Goleta postal-worker slaughter made me snicker. This is ghastly…people are dead and families are grieving…but there’s something about the dry prose style of this passage that produced a slight grin: “The attack is the latest in a string of attacks by disgruntled mail workers that has given rise to the term ‘going postal‘ as an indication of frustration exploding into violence in the workplace.” I’m sorry for feeling this way, but somehow this seems like a good topic for a new Werner Herzog documentary.