Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has written that Lincoln is “looking good” for the Best Picture Oscar, “but don’t wager money on it…it’s not a lock. Lincoln will probably have the biggest tally when nominations are announced on January 10th and that’s key. The movie with the most bids wins the top Oscar about 75% of the time. However, it’s very vulnerable and its rivals are strong.”

O’Neil suspects that Lincoln won’t win Best Picture from the Critics’ Choice Awards on January 10th “and that usually matters a lot,” he writes. “Over the past 10 years, that trophy...

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With all the online-voting issues going on, you’d think the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would extend the balloting deadline by 72 hours, or to Monday, January 7 at 5 pm. Give people a bit more extra time to watch those screeners, etc. But no — they’ve decided to bump it a mere 24 hours. The new deadline is Friday, January 4th, at 5 p.m. Pacific.

Those who can’t finagle their way through the Academy’s much-lamented online voting software will have the option of submitting a paper ballot. They can buy #2 pencils and erasers at CVS or Walmart.

“By extending the voting deadline [by 24 hours] we are providing every opportunity available to make the transition to online balloting as smooth as possible,” Academy COO Ric Robertson said in a statement. In other words,...

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Today and yesterday friends and readers have told me they’ve gone to the site and seen nothing — a blank page. Or they’ve gone to the site, seen the front page but gotten nothing when they click on a jump page. I noticed this myself early this morning while using Firefox and Google Chrome browsers, and occasionally with Safari. (I don’t use IE or Opera.)

I naturally took this up with the all-but-worthless, know-nothing techies at my appalling internet service provider known as Softlayer. I started a trouble ticket with them but it took hours to find a tech support person whose vocabulary and attitude indicated even a glimmer of intelligence and/or a willingness to try and solve the problem.

This is my fault, of course, because I didn’t ditch these guys last year. My life becomes a head-throbbing hell when this stuff happens. And it totally turns off the juices...

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I was working on a Most Noteworthy HE Jottings of 2012 piece. Pick and highlight the best stuff posted throughout the year, month by month. But that was too hard to do in a single day. I should have begun a few days ago — my bad. And then some more technical crap happened. Awful stuff. I’m glad I don’t own a gun. Sometimes I just want to inject opiates. But there’s comfort, at least, in knowing I’ll remember Fake Armond’s “fine mulled wine” tweet for many years to come.

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It’s being reported that Republican intransigence will cause Congress to miss the fiscal cliff deadline, and so the country technically will go over it tonight…but with a bungee cord. So forget crashing on the rocks.

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2012 began with the depression of The Artist being the all-but-guaranteed Best Picture winner, and it’s ended with the depression of Oscar handicappers (Gurus of Gold, Gold Derby guys) lazily forecasting with all the vim and vigor of a 74 year-old fat man that Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln has the strongest head of steam, blah blah. Please don’t listen to their tired consensus thinking, which is a kind of virus that spreads from one lazy mentality to the next.

Not Lincoln — I’m down on my knees — and anyone but King Poobah Rajah Sultan Spielberg. Zero Dark Thirty‘s Kathryn Bigelow, Silver Linings Playbook‘s David O. Russell, Amour‘s Michael Haneke…please! And dear merciful God, not Quentin Tarantino!

There is something so profoundly...

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As The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a very tedious film to sit through, I find it appalling — almost mystifying — that fans the world over are paying to see it in record numbers. $222,703,000 stateside, $464 million overseas and a general worldwide haul of $686 million. There really is something wrong with spending that much on a film this tiresome and overlong. Taste (even geek taste) has little to do with it. They saw the Rings trilogy so they have to see the new one. Obsessive, sad, depressing. I’m averting my eyes from here on.

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New Year’s Eve (i.e., Monday night) is always lame and New Year’s Day is the emptiest day of the year…flatline. The ballot deadline for the Writers Guild awards is at 10 pm on Wednesday, January 2nd with the nominations out the next morning. The Oscar ballot deadline is late on Thursday, January 3rd. And then the National Society of Film Critics will announce their awards on Saturday, 1.5.

And then come the all-important DGA nominations on Tuesday morning, January 8th. The BAFTA nominations will be known on Wednesday morning, January 9th. Oscar nominations happen the next morning — Thursday, January 10th — at the ungodly hour of 5:30 am. That night the 18th Critics’ Choice Movie Awards will broadcast. And then the Golden Globe awards happen on Sunday night, their importance somewhat diminished by...

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Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, my longtime Oscar Poker partner until we split up two or three months ago, accepted my invitation to do another one for old time’s sake. We covered everything, except I thought Sasha was recording and she thought I was recording. We talked for a good 90 minutes or so, and it was all for naught. Then I started recording and we did about 49 minutes’ worth. Happy New Year.

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A tweet this morning from The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg asked if Andres Muschietti‘s Mama (Universal, 1.18) might have a Norbit-like affect upon the chances of Best Actress contender Jessica Chastain, who plays Mama’s female lead. Reactions were swift and dismissive. Mama, produced by Guillermo del Toro, is being described as somewhere between good and not half bad.

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The following story about Steven Spielberg‘s initial connection with Lincoln star Daniel Day Lewis was apparently included an 11.30 Oprah Now interview. I may have heard it and brushed it aside, but I don’t think so.

“For a time I was going do [Lincoln] with Liam Neeson,” Spielberg explained. “But then, you know, we just decided to move in two different directions. I was sitting around at home one day realizing I’m never going to make Lincoln. It’s just never going to happen.

“And Leo DiCaprio came over for dinner that night. It was just my wife and Leo and myself. We were sitting around and Leo said, ‘What’s happening with Lincoln? You’ve been, what, five years on...

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Mom isn’t just weeping after seeing Les Miserables; she’s fairly devastated and having trouble explaining why. Everyone else in the car either has a case of the giggles or is going “okay, I respect your reaction but not so much on my end.” (Tip of the hat to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.)

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After 18 bad years behind bars, exonerated West Memphis Three defendant Damien Echols was freed on 8.19.11 through an Alford plea. And then Amy Berg‘s excellent, unavoidably compelling West of Memphis was released, and Echols has been on the promotion circuit (for his book Life After Death as well as the film) ever since.

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I like to think of my own life in this way. I am living a kind of Steve Winwood “high” life without the big money, or life as defined by a series of highs rather than one of “stability” in the old-fashioned, white-picket-sense of that term (which my parents invested in). I live in order to feel high and spread highs of a certain kind.

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Another way to put it is that I live in order to celebrate dream states that have obviously been made, at root, to fuel the fires of commerce, which is where the vaguely dirty aspect comes in. Except I love revenue. Who doesn’t?

There’s also the “constant fighting with people who disagree and are looking to spread poison by tearing you down any which way” aspect, but that will never go away.

All I know is that writing this column sure beats working. Which is what...

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“Art is an inherently amoral and ruthless enterprise, however much we may want to believe otherwise.”

This is a quote from Andrew O’Hehir‘s 12.29 Salon analysis of the Zero Dark Thirty shitstorm. Many of us go to films hoping to be blown away or mesmerized or emotionally melted down, period. We just want the movie to work. We’re not uninterested in its political leanings, or oblivious to same, but most of us, I think, are willing to process this as connected-but-separate dish.

Others want their movies above all to stand on the right side. They want their art to be moral and compassionate. In exactly the same way, I feel, that the Soviet bureaucrats of the 1930s wanted their art to celebrate the glorious wheat farmers of the Ukraine. The...

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In a 12.27 N.Y. Times interview with Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow, Brooks Barnes writes that Bigelow and ZD30 screenwriter-producer Mark Boal “have succeeded — perhaps a bit too well — in renewing a conversation about America’s use of torture to fight terrorism.”

But Bigelow “was not particularly keen to discuss torture over lunch, she said, partly because she wants her work to speak for itself and partly because she is aware that any public comments could just add fuel to the fire.”

I love and admire Bigelow, but c’mon. The anti-ZD30 rhetoric has obviously been raging over the Christmas holidays, and it’s become clear that the Hollywood Stalinists have probably...

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The only time Harry Carey, Jr. half-got me was when he played young Dan Latimer in Howard Hawks‘ Red River (’48). He’s on his horse, gently calming the herd…”whoa, dogies, whoa”…when Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift) come up to chat. Latimer tells Dunson that when they reach Missouri and everyone gets paid he plans to buy his wife a pair of red shoes.

An hour later the cattle go on a stampede and Latimer is trampled to death. They find what might be his body but can only presume it’s him because he was wearing a checkered shirt. Dunson tells Garth to give full pay to Latimer’s wife, “just like he finished the drive…and, uh, … anything else you can think of.” Garth replies,...

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I know the 1950s are generally regarded as a moderately prudish or at least somewhat restrictive era in terms of sexual content in movies, TV and advertising. But I doubt if any copy for a 2012 one-sheet would allude to a woman’s “soft mouth” for fear of sounding soft-porny. This poster is currently hanging in the Academy’s main lobby as part of a general Stanley Kubrick exhibit.

I’ve run this photo once before. It may be my all-time favorite Times Square capture. I love the blizzard-covered atmosphere, or the blizzard-at-6-am atmosphere or whatever it is. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American opened in early February of 1958.

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The good news is that Criterion has a Badlands Bluray coming out on 3.19.13. The bad news is that they’ve cleavered the aspect ratio down to 1.78 to 1. The good news is that I still have my copy of a 1999 Warner Home Video Badlands DVD, and it’s presented at 1.37 to 1. [See jump page.]

I don’t know for a fact that this WHV DVD presents the definitive full-frame, open-matte version of Terrence Malick‘s

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What happened to The Guilt Trip, the Seth Rogen-Barbra Streisand relationship comedy that opened nine days ago and has…what, fizzled? It was killed by 64% of the Rotten Tomatoes critics and has only made a lousy $14.5 million since opening nine days ago so I guess you can call it a bit of a wipe-out. Okay, a shortfaller. It’ll probably end up with…what, $25 million? It cost $40 million to produce plus distribution and marketing costs.

Nobody wants to watch a dramedy about a Jewish mom badgering her emotionally aloof son, right? Looked a little sleepy? Not...

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Quentin Tarantino attempted one of his career-resuscitation moves when he cast Breaking Away‘s Dennis Christopher and 48 HRS. and Drugstore Cowboy costar James Remar roles in small Django Unchained roles. Very good for all three. But I’ve watched Django one and a half times and I never recognized Christopher or Remar. Certainly nothing they said or did popped through. I had to read about it, etc.

(l.)...

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Scott Feinberg‘s 12.27 Hollywood Reporter story about how Academy members are having difficulty with online Oscar voting (possibly due to forgetting passwords, but with more than one industry source describing the site as a “disaster,” says Feinberg) is the equivalent of a weatherman reporting rainshowers on election day.

It simply means that some of the older voters (who tend to vote in a conservative, status-quo, go-along way) might possibly throw up their hands and not vote, which probably means a slight weakening of support for lazy-default favorites like Lincoln, Life of Pi and Les Miserables. I can’t imagine what else it might portend. Older people have always had and always will have trouble with passwords and whatnot, and software guys always have and always...

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There are only five blazingly well-crafted, obviously levitational 2012 films that truly deserve to be Best Picture nominated. Not eight, seven or six…five. One of these is Michael Haneke‘s Amour, although I’m presuming it’s been relegated in most minds to the Best Foreign Language category. The second of these, Leo Carax‘s Holy Motors, has barely been seen and hasn’t a chance. Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina has been seen, but has been widely dismissed by too many critics (to their eternal discredit) that it’s almost certainly a non-starter.

That leaves Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty and David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook. These are the only two main-event sluggers with that special blend of craft, command and transportation that people...

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In a 12.27 “Top Ten Worst movies of 2012″ piece, Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet has called Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina a “dud.” No, it isn’t. It’s a brave and visionary film (in my view the bravest film of the year) that people with Brevet’s sensibility have, to their profound shame and discredit, tried to characterize as some kind of dud embarassment with a litany of flip, snarky comments.

There should be laws and prosecutions and penalties for this kind of thing, I swear to God.

Anna Karenina is in no way, shape or form a shortfaller. The shortfallers, trust me, are the critics. It’s a “serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin...

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I’ve never called Silver Linings Playbook a romantic comedy, although it is comedic and unmistakably romantic at the end, and it does, to its detractors’ discomfort, use a familiar and formulaic romcom-type ending (although David O. Russell shapes and renders it in a novel, engaging, live-wire way). It’s a much smarter and deeper thing than your typical Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigel film, for sure, and much more skillfully made. But you wouldn’t be wildly off if you called it a “romantic comedy.”

I would call Silver Linings a manic romantic dramedy about anxiety, obsession, family and sports-betting superstition. It obviously doesn’t walk or talk and go for the easy-lay emotion like the other romcoms, but it’s certainly an oddball cousin...

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In this Sunday’s N.Y. Times Oscar section, critic Manohla Dargis provides a nice reputational upgrade to David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook by comparing it Michael Haneke‘s Amour, or more precisely by evaluating them as equally strong and honorable films.

Amour and Silver Linings Playbook “are as different from each other in mood, look, feeling, cinematic technique and visual style as is possible to find in theaters,” Dargis observes. “[And yet] both are love stories. One shows love and a shared life at their inception; the other shows life, and the love that it sustained, ending. How Mr. Haneke...

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Today I ordered an English Bluray of Liliana Cavani‘s The Night Porter, which in my book is probably the most artistically valid expression of the Nazi-Fascist Perversion cycle of the early to mid ’70s. (Along with Salo and 1900, I suppose.) This scene is arguably the iconic-erotic highpoint of Charlotte Rampling‘s early career. I’m 90% sure someone is now going to write in and say “thanks for the warning…watching this video could get me fired!”

I’m sorry if the title of this post has struck some as vulgar, but (a) I love the sound of it and (b) with what other story or riff could I use it?

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The best part of this Throck Morton video is the gas station fill-up. The LACMA Kubrick exhibition tour portion isn’t riveting, but it does give you a pretty good idea of what it is. The fisheye-lens headcam delivers reasonably good quality. I intend to purchase one for my own adventures. I’m thinking of visiting the LACMA Kubrick show sometime this week. I saw the show at the Cinematheque Francais in May 2011, and reported as follows:

“The Stanley Kubrick exposition at the Cinematheque Francais is a very thorough, abundantly detailed and absorbing presentation of Kubrick’s 54-year career, beginning with his photographer period (which began in 1945 when he took a...

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I told a friend that I had a dream the other night, and in it a well-known critic was murdered. It was a horrible dream. A kind of nightmare really. The friend suggested that the critic was being dispatched because he’s a fan of Lincoln. I laughed and said “that’s funny,” but I reminded her that I’ve never hated Lincoln. I hate the Lincoln Best Picture talk — that’s the difference.

I reminded her that I gave Lincoln a passing grade in my initial review….a pass with reservations. A good, intelligent film that is also a doleful, talky, slow, ponderous civics lesson. Plus that hateful Janusz Kaminski lighting scheme as a kicker. Yeesh.

“But there are worse films than Lincoln that could win Best Picture,” my friend replied. “Good intentions and all of that. Lincoln has made $120 million at the box office and is the highest...

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