Newsweek‘s round-table chat with the five directors everyone is assuming will be Oscar-nominated for Best Director — George Clooney (Good Night, and Good Luck), Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain), Bennett Miller (Capote), Paul Haggis (Crash) and Steven Spielberg (Munich) — has some good banter and at least one strong political acknowledgement. “From the end of the first wave of the civil-rights movement, all the way through Watergate, people were constantly talking about what was going on in the country,” says Clooney. “Now it seems that’s happening again. You can sit in a room and have people talk about politics — in Los Angeles, of all places.” Then Lee says, “There seems to be a collective social consciousness.” And Spielberg says, “I think we all have been given our marching orders … Maybe I shouldn’t get into this. [Pause] I just feel that filmmakers are much more proactive since the second Bush administration. I think that everybody is trying to declare their independence and state their case for the things that we believe in. No one is really representing us, so we’re now representing our own feelings, and we’re trying to strike back.” And Newsweek asks, “So Bush has been good for film?” and Spuielberg says, “I wouldn’t just say Bush. The whole neo-conservative movement.” And Clooney says, “Because it’s polarizing. I’m not going to sit up and say, ‘This is how you should think.’ But let’s at least acknowledge that there should be an open debate, and not be told that it’s unpatriotic to ask questions.”

What exactly will constitute an upset or big surprise in terms of Tuesday morning’s Oscar nominations? I’ve been trying to figure that one. I’m not sure I give that much of a shit right now, but I guess I’ll rustle up some enthusiasm starting tomorrow sometime…

Variety critic Todd McCarthy has written a good bitch-and-moan piece about Sundance ’06. Called “The Big Chill,” it bemoans the mostly underwhelming dramatic competition entries except for Wristcutters: A Love Story (I presume this means McCarthy doesn’t harbor loads of affection for the award-winning Quinceanera), visually lackluster camera work in just about every film, punishing traffic snarls and parking problems, “too many useless scenesters clogging up the town,” showings starting way too late, etc. I still love looking up at those snowflakes at night and feeling their gentle moisture on my face, but I agree with every word McCarthy says here.

Like I mentioned earlier today, nobody I spoke to during the Sundance Film Festival had anything to say at all about the dual-award-winning Quinceanera, but Roger Ebert saw and wrote about it, at least. He called it “one of the strongest and most touching films in the competition…there is rich human comedy here, and sadness, and a portrait so textured that we get very involved…[it’s] a film that is serious, joyful, and filled with heart.”

The top two Screen Actors Guild awards — Best Actor and Best Actress — were handed out earlier this evening to Philip Seymour Hoffman for his legendary lead performance in Capote and Reese Witherspoon for her soulful country gal turn in Walk the Line. And the Best Supporting Actor trophies went to Cinderella Man‘s Paul Giamatti and The Constant Gardener‘s Rachel Weisz. It’s a fait accompli they’ll all be nominated Tuesday morning, and I guess they’re the quartet to beat at the Oscars on March 5th. Crash‘s “upset” win over Brokeback Mountain for the overall cast award might signify a Brokeback slowdown…maybe. But I doubt it.

Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling sat down with KTYD talk-show guy Matt McAllister last Friday to talk about the lineup for the festival (which kicks off Thursday, 2.2), and wound up issuing a “Brokeback challenge”…which McAllister accepted. Using the patient-but-persistent approach, Durling gradually talked the faintly homophobic McAllister into seeing Brokeback Mountain, which the jock has said he wouldn’t sit through due to feared squeamishness over the same-sex coupling scenes. Listen to the chat…it’s pretty funny. Durling and McAllister will be attending a screening of Brokeback on Monday, 1.30, at 2 pm at Santa Barbara’s Fiesta Five. Here’s Durling’s account of his encounter with McAllister on his festival blog page.

The Guardian‘s Graham Fuller is buying into a fantasy being pushed by Envelope columnist Tom O’Neil that Walk the Line or Crash might take the Best Picture Oscar from Brokeback Mountain. Whatever…fantasies are fun to wallow in sometimes.

With all the Sundance jazz, Nicole Laporte’s Variety story about the limbo-tracking (i.e., slow-boat demise) of Joe Roth‘s Revo- lution Studios went in one ear & out the other. Partly because it felt like ho-hum news. Anyone with a casual interest in the savoring of good movies wrote off Revolution a long time ago. Formed by Roth in 2000, it became quickly known as a toney outfit that got lucky now and then but seemed to mostly churn out synthetic crap. I really liked Rent, The Missing, Punch Drunk Love and Black Hawk Down, and I even grooved on Hollywood Homicide (seriously…it’s not a bad film). But Mona Lisa Smile, Gigli, Tomcats, Christmas with the Kranks, XXX, Little Black Book, Maid in Manhattan, America’s Sweethearts, Daddy Day Care, XXX: State of the Union..forget it, man. Way too much suffering. Revolution will be around for another couple of years (some 13 films are in the theatrical pipeline) but “the company has ceased developing films,” says LaPorte, which basically means it’s over.

I ran into Marshall Fine, author of a new John Cassavetes bio called “Accidental Genius“, at the Picturehouse party at Zoom the other day.
I told him I was 90% sure I had received a copy, and planned to write about his book soon…but here’s an admiring New York Times review by Phillip Lopate in the meantime.

“It is generally understood that Sundance juries, which are composed of independent filmmakers, actors and actresses, producers, journalists and others associated with low-budget moviemaking, are sympathetic to films that have little chance in the marketplace,” writes John Clark in a close-of-Sundance piece in today’s New York Times. “After all, many of the jury members were once struggling (and in some cases still are). As a result, they will sometimes give the top prize not to the best film in competition but to the best film that needs help the most.”

Here’s the single most disgusting story about the ’06 Sundance Film Festival, written by freelancer Chris Lee and published by the L.A. Times. Why disgusting? Because it’s about a kind of glitzy cancer attached like a boil to the back of a once-great film festival. And because it made me want to throw up. On Lee. Sample graph: “To get to the truth of the underground Sundance economy, an intrepid Times reporter — a nobody among somebodies — boldly attempted to discover how much swag one could collect in six hours spread out over two days. The yield: more than two dozen products and services with a monetary value of $11,326.89. At the conclusion of the experiment, everything was given to charity (or in some cases, eaten or drunk).”

“How did Brokeback Mountain break out? By surgically targeting where the movie would play in its initial release; selling it as a romance for women rather than a controversial gay-bashing tale; and opting out of the culture wars rather than engaging them.” So reads John Lippman’s Wall Street Journal article [free] about the surprising box-office success of this film, which is selling more tickets than Munich by a 3-to-1 margin and, if you ask me, is looking more and more likely to hit or top $100 million. Lippman reports data from Focus Features marketing guy David Brooks to wit: “As the weeks pass, the demographics of the Brokeback audience have shifted. Gays turned out for the first weekend, with 60% of the audience male and 40% female. But in the next three weeks, women responded to marketing and the audience flipped to 60% female and 40% male. Now, as the media attention intensifies in the wake of the film’s wins at the Golden Globes, heterosexual men are going to the film on their own and the women are sliding back down to the mid-50 percentile.”