If Marvel had announced they were re-casting Thor before his first movie was even released, THAT would be a disaster. Re-casting Iron Man would be fatal. This will be more of a hiccup than re-casting Rhodes/War Machine for the Iron Man sequel, but still survivable.

I don’t see this as a financial move – Norton isn’t up in the stratosphere, salary-wise, and he has demonstrated by his choices that money isn’t the primary motivator in his career. There are at least ten actors that fit his profile in terms of visibility and affordability, and no doubt their agents are keeping their phone lines open right about now. As for Norton’s twice-Oscar-nominated talent – that’s more difficult to replicate, but the question is: is that even relevant? His run in the gamma-irradiated stretchy-pants provided a basically pedestrian level of wow, failing to improve either critically or financially over the Ang Lee/Eric Bana collaboration that preceded it. And since The Avengers is going to feature a giant ensemble of heroes and villains and continuity plugs, whatever non-CGI human portrays Banner is likely to have little screen-time.

Still, Marvel decided to turn this into a public pie fight with their press release, so here’s how I see the scorecard for the moment:

Marvel: That press release was not exactly cricket, nor was it exactly smart. The story looks ugly right now; they made it that way by taking public potshots at Norton, and the way they made it ugly also gave it longevity. In the short-term, all the good light is going to fall on Norton in this story. If it gets longer, and if Marvel feels like playing ugly, they could make some mud stick on him, but that doesn’t clean them up, it just makes everyone ugly.

They should want to squash this, and the only way to do that is to introduce the new Hulk, do it quickly, and make it a chatter-worthy enough choice to turn the conversation so this flap doesn’t shadow the new guy’s efforts. One option would be a casting coup, which is difficult for the screen-time reason mentioned above, but since Joss Whedon is all-but-confirmed to direct, an actor who has logged time in The Whedonverse would provide an instantly appealing alternative storyline. Or they could go for the headline-grabbing counter-intuitive gamble that hits brilliantly. They pulled off one of those with Robert Downey, Jr., but The Avengers is a unique project – it’s tough to think of another mini-studio that even has the creative opportunity to put all their intellectual property eggs in one tentpole basket like this, much less the capital to gamble on it. With a gamble that big, you want to reduce the number of medium-sized gambles you’re making within it as much as possible.

Norton’s reps: Brian Swardstrom is doing exactly what any good agent (and Swardstrom is a VERY good agent) has to do right now – pick up his biggest, meanest bat, stick a couple of nails in it, wrap it in some barbed wire, and start swinging. Norton presents unique challenges as a client (more on that below), and Swardstrom has to be thinking long-term viability. His client is still relatively bankable on the small-to-medium-sized films he favors. But to be publicly, humiliatingly dumped from something this big – especially after you have accepted the characterization that he really wanted to be a part of it – can have a poisonous effect around town, especially in an era when star salaries (and the financing calculus that assigns values to all these names) are under ruthless assault. Swardstrom has to defend his man, and is earning his money today. I can’t fault him his actions in the slightest.

Norton: Norton wins by clamming the hell up right now. This development peels back the curtain on what, until now, has been a problem only in the Los Angeles Basin: the man is a genius, but he is a genius With a Reputation.

I have not met the man, and will say with no caveats that he is tremendously talented. All I have to offer is scuttlebutt and hearsay – most of it bubbling up from newspaper articles over the years, as well as vague things you hear in the Hollywood knitting circles: That he insists on re-writing every script in which he’s going to act. That he becomes impossible to deal with if he is not acknowledged as the smartest person on the set. That he treated Paramount with rude disdain over enforcing their contract with him in order to cast him in The Italian Job – that’s a long and obscene story that you can go find if you want.

I have no direct knowledge of any aspect of His Reputation – could be he’s a misunderstood sweetheart, and I don’t want to say that the above is gospel truth because no one person knows if it is or not, and I don’t like the laziness of trading in assumed knowledge which is actually just a rolling dung ball of gossip.

But what I have noted over the years is this – filmmakers who work with him once, don’t work with him twice. See for yourself. In two dozen movies over a nearly fifteen-year career, only one director, John Curran (for whom he starred in The Painted Veil and the upcoming Stone), has ever cast him in a second movie after directing him. That’s an insane anomaly. Russell Crowe is a volatile, challenging perfectionist known for running roughshod over unprepared directors, but Ridley Scott keeps calling and Crowe shows up every time. Christian Bale got to be a fifteen-minute laughingstock over his Terminator: Salvation set tirade, but Christopher Nolan has not only kept him in the Batman cowl, he cast him in The Prestige, his between-Batman-s movie. Downey used to break into peoples’ houses on drug benders and went to jail; and Hollywood forgave all and had its happiest day when he achieved both health and fame.

Norton is on a par with these guys creatively. Absolutely. So when you are that talented, how much of a pill do you have to be that filmmakers aren’t fighting to have you back?

D.C. Comics: If they want to score the public bitch-slap of the year, they will announce Edward Norton starring in a Martian Manhunter movie next week.

If you ask the masters of the greenlight, who must be smarter than I am since they make so much more money – the problem is…sunspots. Or the Internet. Or mean critics. They themselves are blameless, having only made the movies we asked for.

But did we ask for this? I know that the summer is our dessert season, when we get our action and our fantasies and our cartoons. But did we really ask for ALL dessert for four consecutive months? And did we really ever promise that we would eat any moose turd pie a studio put whipped cream on between the months of May and August?

I know we have given an awful lot of our money to superheroes and explosions over the years, and I am fine with them responding to that. I show up for it like anybody. But there has to be such a thing as variety. As of now, July’s Christopher Nolan dream spectacle Inception looks like the only large-budget summer movie that wasn’t spawned from a Satanic ritual and a brand-awareness survey.

The problem is not the audience; I honestly believe that our movie screens are being held hostage to the insular egos of the studios green-lighting these movies and blasting them onto 4,000 screens apiece, bullying smaller movies out of the multiplex to make room for a weekly game of Kill-or-Be-Killed among the alphas.

Take, for example, Prince of Persia, which is based on a damn good series of video games that have inherent cinematic potential. It is currently nose-diving its way to a domestic gross of around $85M. For an action-fantasy movie that would be a fabulous result – if the movie cost $70M. However, Walt Disney Studios – whose employees, it cannot be emphasized enough, must by nature of their salaries be far, far smarter than me – spent $200M.

Now, the argument goes that this is an attempt to launch a new film franchise a la Pirates of the Caribbean, and you’ve got the hit-maker Jerry Bruckheimer producing, and those last Pirates movies had budgets of over $200M; so what’s the problem?

Well, the problem is that the FIRST Pirates movie in 2003 “only” cost $140M, and at the time was considered a terrifying gamble at that price. One would think that Persia, which has fewer recognizable stars and is based on a brand only known to video game junkies, should cost less – if one is going about this rationally.

But I think that budget was actually dictated by the release date. Simply by virtue of it being assigned the Memorial Day tentpole slot, the studio felt it was REQUIRED they spend that kind of money. That’s not because assuming you can create a hit of that magnitude is any kind of business plan; it is driven by insecurity about size.

Are there filmmakers out there with enough imagination, technical savvy and discipline to have made an $80M Prince of Persia adaptation that would have satisfied audiences? Absolutely. And that would have freed up $120M to make a few other movies to broaden the palate of offerings and off-set Disney’s risk.

Studios, however, with Disney leading the way, are pursuing a strategy of making fewer and fewer and bigger and bigger movies. One reason is that the investment and effort, not in producing the movies, but in ADVERTISING them – staking out a brand identity within the din – is simply becoming too much for the slates of yesteryear. But the dirty secret is, it’s only too much because the majority of studio employees know only one way to sell a movie (the opening day playing-at-every-theatre blowout) and only want to make movies that can be effectively sold that way. And so the cycle perpetuates.

When I saw Spider-Man 3 in 2007 I wrote that “we’ve finally breached the threshold of diminishing returns when it comes to PG-13 fantasy violence spectacles. These movies have simply become so expensive, so over-marketed, and so sustained by their own momentum as cross-demographic brand name juggernauts, that Hollywood’s geek talent pool may finally be overtaxed by the assignment of spinning them into turnstile gold.”

There have been fabulous high points since then, like the Iron Man franchise, Star Trek, the landmark Dark Knight and the ongoing wizardry of Pixar, but maybe what is happening right now is that 2010 is when all those looming signs of danger behind the successes have finally given way to the threatened disaster. Tell me this doesn’t resemble a broken dam? Persia is a nightmare for Disney, and it doesn’t look promising for their upcoming The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or Warner Brothers/DC Comics’ Jonah Hex. Clash of the Titans only qualified as a hit by padding their box-office take with 3-D markups, and the only reason Robin Hood isn’t causing mass layoffs at Universal is that its international box office is doubling its limp US take.

The studios thought that all we wanted were big brand names, and they gave us this. And it’s too late to turn around their slates for the next three years, what with release dates and giant budgets already assigned to the likes of Battleship. There are many available lessons in 2010 – but I think the studios will continue putting bigger budgets behind a shrinking pool of brand names, and thus hasten their obsolescence.

This weekend, the two widest releases were both shameless cash-ins on 80’s nostalgia: The Karate Kid and The A-Team. The Karate Kid (forgive the pun) waxed The A-Team, pulling in an estimated $56.0M compared to $26.0M. Reviews helped, cross-demographic family-friendly appeal helped even more, I’m sure.

But even take all those advantages away, and assume that the numbers had turned out much closer. You want the true measure of Kid’s resounding victory? Its production budget was only $50M, compared to The A-Team’s $110M.

I’m here to say there is room for re-makes and re-launches and sequels – when they work, we like them. I’m sure the producers of The A-Team felt very cocksure about the budget they spent. But a sense of proportion (and, judging by reviews, making a better movie) is about to make The Karate Kid’s producers much, much wealthier.

Box office analysts are thinking of Get Him to the Greek as a dud because it didn’t do the numbers that The Hangover did on the same weekend. But The Hangover is currently the highest-grossing comedy of all time. It’s absurd to use the wildest outlier in existence as a measuring stick – Greek only cost $40M to make and will be handily profitable by that standard. Hell, if you accept the rough ratio that matching your budget in domestic gross is a good sign that you’ll make a profit once foreign and DVD are factored in, The Tooth Fairy is a bigger hit than Prince of Persia will ever be.

Persia opened on over 3,600 screens, and obviously did not sell out many of them. Imagine if they had cut that opening by just 300 screens. They wouldn’t have lost a dime. Playing to fuller houses might have given the audiences a better sense of fun. And maybe some of those 300 screens could have allowed a smaller or independent film to find an audience. The studios would be no poorer, and we as moviegoers would be enriched.

But it was Memorial Day Weekend – and size matters.

When you spend $200M to make a movie, it demands that you come up with, not just a hit, but one of the biggest hits of all-time, just to turn a worthwhile profit. That’s insane; it’s like planning a basketball game around making half-court shots at the buzzer.

Here’s a bit of free wisdom to all my wealthy superiors. You want more hits?

FEWER SCREENS, CHEAPER MOVIES, MORE VARIETY.

Spielberg was really playful with the camera back then – not in the hyper-cut, constantly-moving style you think of today, but with an uncanny knack for finding an impish way to compose a master shot, even out on location. The main characters are a young couple (played by William Atherton and Goldie Hawn) on the run in Texas with a stolen cop car and a policeman hostage – she broke the husband out of prison because child protective services put their baby with a foster couple, and she wants to steal him back.

There’s a shot where the Captain of the Highway Patrol (Oscar-winning Western movie veteran Ben Johnson) first comes up alongside the fleeing vehicle in his own; and they talk to each other over their radios. And it’s a single, unbroken shot, from Hawn’s perspective in the back seat, as his car pulls up on the left, her husband warns him to keep his distance, he speeds up ahead, then drops back around their other side, then finally falls back in line behind them with the other cars in pursuit. The whole time they’re talking through the radio, and you can see Johnson’s lips moving in the other car. This shot wasn’t pieced together with effects or editing, they’re all ACTING, at full speed on the highway.

There’s another shot, originating from Johnson’s car, where the top half of the screen catches his eyes in his rear view mirror, and the bottom half is filled with the rear window of the hostage vehicle. Hawn’s in the back seat, holding a shotgun in one hand, but playfully finger-drawing on the back window with the other. In a single shot we get to see both her, and him studying her. Not only is it a clever trick of framing, it gets across what’s so important in that moment – that he’s realizing these are just a couple of dumb, scared kids in way over their heads, and he really doesn’t want to have to kill them.

That’s what’s finally so startling to me about The Sugarland Express, because I feel like that spirit makes it utterly foreign to today’s America and today’s audience. I don’t know if it’s 30 years of Reaganomics pitting everyone savagely against each other, or our culture’s full-tilt embrace of the Just World fallacy (in which we are only able to cope with the horrors and injustices we see by finding reasons why the victims must have deserved their fate), but most people not only have no more sympathy for the poor and petty, they actively wish to see their harm. I think a contemporary audience would get restless to the point of outright anger that these tragic fools weren’t tased, beaten with clubs, and riddled with bullets ten minutes into the movie. The hostage, too – who, after all, was stupid enough to get caught.

To sum up – what most people care about in this kerfuffle, I do not. But if you want to hear more…

I want to look at the charges brought up by the bravely-anonymous crew members who decided to take a giant public dump all over their now-former leading lady. Fair context – I do not know, and have never met, Megan Fox; nor did I work on a Transformers movie, or any other Michael Bay movie, in any capacity. This is strictly based on my experience working on film sets and with Hollywood personalities in general. I want to examine the charges against Ms. Fox and provide a few rebuttals.

Charge #1: The Great and Powerful Michael Bay made Megan Fox, and she betrayed him by criticizing his Awesome Self and Awesome Works!

Fox did compare Bay’s on-set personality to Hitler – which is not exactly adult or bright – and such opinions usually do not get projected quite so loudly. There is a cultish aspect to the Hollywood community, and a weird, unspoken-but-constantly-evolving code about what’s “appropriate” to say to outsiders. Venomous and demeaning opinions about beautiful women are pretty much always allowed, obviously. Intimations that a director with clout can be an raging a-hole on the set – not allowed outside of a joking and dismissive context until he loses a studio’s money. That’s a handy outline for how I see what’s happening right now.

The Director is by and large the Alpha on-set – for better or worse that’s the social structure that has evolved around this loud, expensive, strenuous activity called Movie Production. As such, the Director tends to attract a great deal of worship and loyalty, deserved or not.

And you have to understand that people outside the business have no idea just how much sh*t we make that no one ever sees. So when a movie like the Transformers sequel Revenge of the Fallen is called bad (which I quite readily did), it ignores that just about any movie that actually reaches theaters has probably done at least 75% of what it was supposed to do not just correctly, but extremely well. Audiences grade on a pretty unforgiving curve, because of how often Hollywood has managed to produce greatness. But here in Hollywood we know how GENUINELY bad it’s possible for a movie to be – I have the dubious honor of having written a plot synopsis that became a DVD bonus feature because the delivered cut of the movie makes almost no goddamn sense without it. So it can be difficult for a lot of people out here to put that much effort into something that big and then just dismiss it as worthless afterward.

The crew members in this example go out of their way to praise Bay’s filmmaking genius, his unparalleled ability to inspire wizardry out of the ignorant sub-humanoids around him, his devotion to his crew (they work with him repeatedly!) and the good ol’ U.S. of A. (HE FILMED HERE!) That last bit I respect. I note for the record that of the eight feature films he has so far made, he has used six different cinematographers, which might be a significant fact in examining whether or not people really want to work for this guy over and over again. As for lower-paid crew members, I cannot imagine why they might jump at the chance to work on multiple Michael Bay films. It might (call me crazy!) have more to do with the fact that good-paying employment out here is harder to get than it’s ever been, that Bay is constantly making films, and that his films tend to involve massive, 4-6 month shoots at a studio-level budget, which means high-quality free food around the clock, fat per diems you never fully spend unless you’re an alcoholic, and paid travel to exotic locations where you hang out with beautiful people. It’s even possible that someone might be willing to work for him – and speak kindly of him – under those circumstances if he were less that a superhuman seer/saint.

So a lot of this you can chalk up to typical tribal hyperbole. Guys like that are on every set, and if they’ve really been working these jobs for Michael Bay for 10+ years, there’s a reason they haven’t been promoted. There are a small number of people out here who genuinely have the drive, talent, guts, and luck to actually make something special happen. Then there are the sturdy professionals who find a craft, stick with it, and make a living. All the rest talk a good game but are here for the parties. That’s very important in understanding all this.

As to Bay doing Fox a life-changing favor by plucking her out of “total obscurity“, defending her against all doubters, and making her a movie star; well, he did cast her. Whoever else from among the producers or studio folks might have argued the call, it was his call, and you can’t take away that fact. But it was the PR people who put her on the magazine covers. That’s their job – sell the movie by selling the star. Was Bay personally supervising all those Maxim photoshoots? No. This was a giant team effort, undertaken by machinery that would have rumbled to life no matter who he cast in the role. These people are professionals and it’s what they do. Whether she had the necessary qualities to occupy that role…I’ll get into that below.

And “total obscurity” is farm-organic B.S. Total obscurity is someone sitting in a dark bedroom in Iowa. Megan Fox was a working actress and model who, before Transformers, had appeared in multiple feature films and over 150 episodes of television, including a leading role in two seasons of a prime-time network sitcom, Hope and Faith. Go ahead and ask any actor looking for work in LA or New York if that constitutes “total obscurity”. Then be ready to watch a grown-up cry.

Charge #2: She can’t act!

So I might not defend this charge too directly and vigorously. I generally agree that she has been tremendously over-hyped as a movie star and an actress, and has yet to show me too much to indicate she can hold that status. But as an employable actress tasked to play uncomplicated but (let’s be honest) f*ckable characters, you could do far, far worse; and she will eventually settle back into that far more natural and appropriate category.

But tribalism is best-revealed in unselfconscious hypocrisy; so my question is: If she’s such a terrible actress – what does that say about Michael Bay? It was his supposed wizardry and damn-the-simpletons faith that inspired him to choose her for that role, so how could he not see that she was actually terrible? This is especially ridiculous after making one whole Transformers movie and choosing to make a second with her.

If she got elevated beyond what she could earn on her merits, it was Bay and the studio’s doing, and now that she has a “reputation” of not being able to make blockbusters with her breasts alone, this is a pretty graceless retreat on their part. And the fact that the below-expectations-but-still-profitable gross of a single movie, Jennifer’s Body, is actually capable of making a “reputation”, should give you some idea of just how disposably attractive young women are treated out here.

Charge #3: She didn’t say hi to us or party with us!

Wikipedia says that the production of Bay’s Pearl Harbor eventually involved as many as 3,000 different crew people. I can’t imagine Bay shot Transformers Dogme 95 style, so even on a light day you’ve got many hundreds of people milling about. And again, call me crazy, but it might just be that there were some days in those many months where she just didn’t have the time or energy to make them all feel goddamned special. I can tell you from personal experience that, again, on every set, there are at least a few guys on the crew of the opinion that any beautiful actress who isn’t actively lap-dancing them is a joyless c-word, and make a tidy side income selling such opinions to the tabloids.

I just can’t imagine why she wouldn’t want to tuck into a booth and get drunk with a guy who boasts about getting paid to touch her panties.

As an out-of-the-closet introvert, it always amuses me how people don’t understand that someone might not choose to go socialize at every available opportunity. Her job is to show up to the set and act in the movie. If she wants to go to none or all of the cast and crew parties – and the thought of fifteen parties for a single movie already makes me want to crawl into my bedroom – then that’s her right, damn it. Like I said – most of the people out here are not celebrities or power-brokers or artists or even genuinely interesting people, but live off of getting into parties and events and jobs where they can feed off morsels of attention and acknowledgment they get from the real thing. And the spoiled bastards quickly learn how to hate anyone who doesn’t provide what they consider their richly-deserved fix.

And so she didn’t want to spend downtime going to a State Dinner or tour the pyramids. I probably would have chosen differently – but I didn’t notice it causing any international incidents or causing her to miss work (WORK, remember? IT’S A JOB), so now we’re in the territory of pure, catty point-scoring. If they had a different fundamental opinion of her, these would have been held up as evidence of her seriousness, discretion, and dedication to her craft.

The sh*tstorm for Megan Fox is just getting started, and unless the upcoming Jonah Hex defies both the odds and the early reviews and becomes a hit, it’s likely to carry on for several months. It’s going to be a hideously hard time for her, and my primary emotion about it is sympathy. Has she, in the past few years, shown lack of creative ambition, a willingness to use her sexuality for money and attention, a lack of endurance for fluffing each and every one of the tens of thousands of people who cross her path, and the ability to say all manner of un-informed and/or dingbatted things into a microphone? Sure. But that doesn’t make her horrible; in fact it makes her extremely normal.

And that’s probably the secret to the vitriol right there.

1) It involves a name I am not officially permitted to drop in public.
2) It does not pass my test of real in Hollywood, which we remember involves a signature on a piece of paper and a check that clears.

It must sound awfully joyless of me that I am so resistant when these things happen for which a lot of would-be screenwriters would trade three toes. But I’m not denying it, just saving it and letting it accrue interest. If this development behaves the way it potentially can – as a hard-to-resist chunk of movie bait that movie-making elements will be drawn out to sniff at – then trust me; you will see joy. Snoopy dancing with his little black nose in the air-type joy.

Until then, keep the faith, brothers and sisters.

-I publish a 10 Best/10 Worst list from the movies I saw that were released in the previous year; thus closing the book on them so I can exclusively review releases from this year.
-I publish my predictions of who will win this year’s Academy Awards.
-I have seen all the Best Picture nominees.

None of those traditions hold this year. The reasons are many and interrelated. You may have noticed that I am months behind on the movie reviews I publish, and I still have about 10 I intend to write. Organizing my writing time and goals is an ongoing struggle, with the way my life is structured right now.

I could give myself the excuse that, with 10 Best Picture nominees for the first time in my life, it’s understandable that I missed one (An Education) in the run-up. I know I will catch it soon, but I always had a certain OCD pride in seeing all the nominees in advance, so I could feel extra opinionated.

But now I will see that habits can be broken and the world does not come to an end. And I’ll get to do the important thing, which is to enjoy the ceremony with friends, and appreciate the passing of another excellent year of cinema.

And by the way? This isn’t a full round of predictions, but all that talk of this being the year of Avatar versus The Hurt Locker? In the last two weeks, I have come around to thinking there is a different possibility for one of the two top prizes – Inglourious Basterds.

My reasons why?:

-Harvey Weinstein distributed Inglourious Basterds; and no one knows how to run a better single-minded, no-bullet-un-fired campaign of ratfuckery for Oscars than Harvey. The well-timed news articles complaining about Hurt Locker’s originality and accuracy in the final hours before the ballot deadline, the leak of that producer’s e-mail breaking Academy rules by bad-mouthing Avatar; someone has done a very good job provoking a hot war between those two pictures. With the new vote-counting procedure for Best Picture, the movie with the most first-place votes won’t necessarily win, if everyone outside its camp ranks it much lower. In religion, business, and politics, always ask: “Who benefits?”

-James Cameron got his big sweep with Titanic, and Oscar has a resistance to repeating history this exactly. Titanic may have been criticized as hokey, but it was providing romantic sweep and melodrama that gave a patina of classicism to its scope. Avatar doesn’t score as high for its all-ages dramatic appeal, and is probably a little too weirdly-spectacular for the older voters (and boy are there a LOT of them).

-The Hurt Locker’s box office was small. REALLY small. Look at the most recent Best Picture winners – Slumdog Millionaire, No Country For Old Men, The Departed, Crash, Million Dollar Baby. The lowest grossing of them, No Country, had over five times Hurt Locker’s box office when it won. Locker finished its run in theatres many months ago, and while it ran an amazing awards campaign, it doesn’t change the fact that just not a lot of people have seen it. And being on DVD doesn’t provide the same cultural currency payoff. That said, because of the strength of its campaign, and the historic possibilities for director Kathryn Bigelow, I still think it is well-positioned to win Best Picture or Best Director, or possibly both. But I now think that, if it splits, the movie it splits with will be Inglourious.

-The Academy’s favorite prize to give is the make-up prize. Quentin Tarantino had to be satisfied with the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Pulp Fiction, one of the greatest and most influential films of its generation. He’s a slow-burning savant who doesn’t put out movies as often as other filmmakers, and eccentric enough that he doesn’t always put out movies that can attract the approval of the respectables. Inglourious is roundly admired, financially successful, and shows him working at the peak of his craft. The Academy has a chance to give him one of its top prizes, and can’t be assured it will have another any time soon.

-Did I mention Harvey Weinstein?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threw one humdinger of a curveball when they announced that they would nominate ten films for the honor of Best Picture of 2009, instead of the field of five which has been traditional for over 65 years. This was not an arbitrary act; it was a calculated experiment to see if they could increase viewership for the Oscar telecast by strengthening the odds for nominees that Joe Popcorn Combo has actually seen. This was a bold counterstroke after last year’s snubbing of mainstream masterpieces The Dark Knight and WALL*E in favor of The Reader – a movie so prestigious hardly anyone had seen it at all.

What the Academy remembered is that for the non-industry viewer, suspense over the outcome is not on the shortlist of reasons to watch. The non-industry viewer has probably only seen two or three of the movies in contention, if that, and have only the exposure to, or interest in, the awards season horserace that they get from Entertainment Weekly. They don’t get lost in the weeds of the For Your Consideration ads. When a Best Picture front-runner is a popular, big-grossing movie – particularly if it is still in wide release – ratings consistently go up. I think this is because, for the average viewer, Oscar is coming into their living room to affirm their intelligence and taste, which they enjoy.

Now AMPAS cannot have known that James Cameron was already preparing to handle their visibility problem – his Avatar is already one of the biggest hits of all time, and is becoming the same sort of irresistible cultural black hole as his previous film, Titanic. That makes it a Day One frontrunner for the big prize, the inspiration for many potential blue-skin jokes on the night of the broadcast, and a guaranteed ratings draw.

So has the experience proved useless? I do not think it has. With every film critic, professional and otherwise, making a ritual out of a top 10 list, for Oscar to do the same hardly feels alien at all. And looking at the 10 they chose reveals not 10 movies whose greatness everyone necessarily agrees on, but 10 movies that represent a diverse spectrum of the many things the movie industry does well. We have science-fiction, inspiring drama, wicked social satire, contemporary stories and period stories, groundbreaking visual spectacle, rueful comedy, an inspired pulp war epic, and only the second animated feature in history to be in contention (more on that in a bit). There are still safe choices in there, but also some admirably daring ones. If we keep this up, we might even see a documentary in there someday.

Of course, the Academy is a consensus of voters, so maybe five movies just weren’t a big enough sample to produce good consensus results. Maybe this actually provides a little inoculation against some of the goofier inclusions and exclusions. Certainly you will find boosters disappointed that Invictus couldn’t even make a ten movie shortlist, or that Where the Wild Things Are was forgotten entirely. But aren’t the arguments fun?

Probably the most troubling argument has to do with the new normal of prestige in a Best Picture nomination. With twice as many handed out, are they now worth only half as much honor? And can’t we think of years when there just haven’t been ten truly outstanding films? With the graveyard of Oscar history already haunted by mediocre nominees, haven’t we just laid the groundwork for many, many more? These are all possibilities, and not likely to be solved by half-measures like a field of eight nominees. As the brilliant-but-mortal George Carlin once observed about the 10 Commandments: “10 sounds official. 10 sounds important.”

I don’t think you’re going to see this experiment go away after this year.

Beneath this major development, Nomination Tuesday wrote a few more historical footnotes. As mentioned above, Pixar’s Up became only the second animated feature in history to make the Best Picture cut, after 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. It’s valid to suggest that the creation of the Animated Feature category has held more than one worthy contender back – you can’t say that this honor makes Up an objectively better movie than past Pixar triumphs like WALL*E, Ratatouille, or Finding Nemo. We’ll never know how any of them would have fared in a field expanded to ten. But with feature animation in its current, competitively-thriving state, I can predict with confidence that it won’t be eighteen years before this happens for a third time.

Kathryn Bigelow became only the fourth female filmmaker, after Lina Wertmüller (1976’s Seven Beauties), Jane Campion (1993’s The Piano) and Sofia Coppola (2003’s Lost in Translation), to be nominated for Best Director. And Lee Daniels became only the second black director to appear in the same category, after John Singleton, nominated for 1991’s Boyz in the Hood right after his 24th birthday. Daniels’s film Precious: Based on the novel “Push” by Sapphire is the first film by a black director to compete for Best Picture, and somewhere between those two achievements of his, Spike Lee admirers have a lot to grouse about.

And then the black-white color barrier has been left in such small and smashed pieces in the acting categories that it’s not even worth study. Unusually, all four acting categories arrive with clear Day One frontrunners, with only the Best Actress showdown between Sandra Bullock (for The Blind Side) and Meryl Streep (for Julie and Julia) showing any chances of mobility.

What is interesting to me in the acting area is something which is just becoming clear as a trend: no movie managed to achieve nominations for both Best Actor and Best Actress. One of the rarest Oscar achievements is the so-called Grand Slam, winning Best Picture, Director, Screenplay (in whichever appropriate category), Lead Actor, and Lead Actress. Only three movies have pulled off this trick – 1934’s It Happened One Night, 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. No movie this year even qualifies to try for the Grand Slam – the last time we even had Best Actor and Best Actress nominees from the same film was for 2005’s Walk the Line, and the last film to have a chance at all five was 2004’s Million Dollar Baby, which claimed Picture, Director (Clint Eastwood), and Actress (Hilary Swank), but not Actor (Eastwood) or Adapted Screenplay (Paul Haggis).

What does it say that we now think there’s only room for one lead in even our biggest movies? Will we never again see powerhouse casts like the one in 1976’s Network, so stuffed with brilliant performers and great roles that it actually achieved five acting nominations, two of them competing for Best Actor? (In that duel, Peter Finch, in his best-remembered role as the “mad as hell” Howard Beale, posthumously took the prize over his co-star William Holden).

We have had a few strong multiple-actor contenders recently, like 2007’s Michael Clayton and 2008’s Doubt; and with three acting nods, Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air carries the standard this year. But did both the female nominees – Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick – really need to share space in the Supporting Actress category? The emotional journey undertaken by Kendrick’s character in particular could have merited a Best Actress push – although crowding in that category and her relative lack of fame would likely have left her squeezed out.

The choice of which category for which to push a performance is a fluid, and frequently political, decision. Christoph Walz won the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his tour-de-force performance in Quentin Tarantino’s eight-times-nominated Inglourious Basterds, but on Oscar night he will have the Supporting Actor category basically to himself, even though he is arguably as close to a central character as any of those in that tapestry. But if his all-but-assured win puts him in just the recent historical company of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight and Javier Bardem in 2007’s No Country For Old Men, that’s company I think he’ll be honored to keep, because his Hans Landa is just as iconic a villain.

Looking ahead to Awards Night, Avatar’s nine nominations put it in the pole position, which we’ll discuss below; and it will most likely be the first movie conceived of and filmed in 3-D to take the Best Cinematography prize. This area of competition continues to have its boundaries pressed and redefined at revolutionary pace, as more and more of the photographic art can be tweaked in post-production, and more and more of what is photographed exists only in computers.

The screenplay categories offer a rich bounty of viewing suggestions, from the multi-layered District 9 to the scabrously-witty In the Loop to the Coen Brothers’ pessimistic cosmic prank A Serious Man. The Animated Short category features the return of Nick Park’s beloved clay duo Wallace and Gromit in the fantastically-titled A Matter of Loaf or Death. And the Animated Feature category, expanded to five nominees because of a critical mass of qualifying films, provided an astounding breakthrough for underdog The Secret of Kells, which probably nudged out expected contender Ponyo from Japan’s master animator Hayao Miyazaki. Have a look at this preview for Kells, a stylized, Celtic-inspired fantasy-adventure not even released theatrically in the US. Think about how many more people might seek it out now that the Academy has recognized it.

These are the two hands of Oscar – proudly back-slapping the well-made mainstream efforts with one, and gathering some worthy lesser-known fare into their worldwide spotlight with the other. It’s a good job, and I’m glad they’re doing it.

Now for early handicapping of the major categories, along with personal choices for an extra contender I would sneak in if I had such a power.

Achievement in Writing (Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published)
District 9 Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
An Education Nick Hornby
In the Loop Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire Geoffrey Fletcher
Up in the Air Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner

Until Avatar opened, you could see some early front-runner mojo building behind Up in the Air, and part of the reason is that the screenplay seemed to capture contemporary American life with such wistfulness, humor, and self-questioning, while creating a splendid trio of main characters to tell its story. But the planet Pandora seems to have staked its claim on the biggest prizes, and filmmaker Jason Reitman will be twice a directing Oscar bridesmaid at the tender age of 32. He’ll be back in those major categories, but in the meantime, looks poised to snag a trophy here. District 9 – the year’s most unexpected piece of genre-bending, has carved out some potential spoiler territory; its surprise Best Picture nomination may have voters revisiting it between now and ballot-check time.

With my extra slot, I would recognize Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers for their deeply-moving translation of Where the Wild Things Are into feature film form. Jonze’s direction and the work of the performers and designers may have realized their vision, but that vision of how to honor Sendak’s insight into childhood started on the printed page.

Achievement in Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen)
The Hurt Locker Mark Boal
Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino
The Messenger Allesandro Camon & Oren Moverman
A Serious Man Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Up Screenplay by Bob Petersen, Pete Doctor. Story by Bob Petersen, Pete Docter, Tom McCarthy

Tarantino has seasoned as a filmmaker, but he still plays the rebel role so well. His 1994 screenplay win for Pulp Fiction came in an era where the screenwriting statue often worked as a consolation prize for the indie masterpiece that was too hip for the studio-sponsored room (see also: 1992’s The Crying Game, 1995’s The Usual Suspects). Inglourious Basterds represents the kind of fearlessly vision-driven writing that truly honors the Original Screenplay category, and just as with his last night as a nominee back then, this looks poised to be where the Academy acknowledges his accomplishment.

This year provided a number of imaginative and dynamic original screenplays, enough that I could honor several, but to choose only one would lead me to Moon, written by Nathan Parker from a story by director Duncan Jones. It is one of the most intelligent, satisfying science fiction films I have seen in a long time, and not only puts over a mind-bending premise but continues to turn its screw until it has unearthed unexpected insights into human nature.

Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Penelope Cruz as Carla in Nine
Vera Farmiga as Alex Goran in Up in the Air
Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jean Craddock in Crazy Heart
Anna Kendrick as Natalie Keener in Up in the Air
Mo’Nique as Mary in Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire

Momentum has already gathered behind Mo’Nique for her fearlessly unsympathetic performance in Precious, and none of her four competitors’ performances, excellent though they were, had such an impact on audiences. The film has its best chance for a prize here, and will likely make the smart play and devote the necessary publicity resources to sew it up. If her quiveringly emotional acceptance speech at the Golden Globes was any preview, her time at the podium on Oscar Night is likely to be memorable.

I’d give my bonus nomination to Rachel Weisz in her role as the screwball heiress in The Brothers Bloom, a role that called on an extraordinary range of skills and an unanticipated amount of depth. The always-beguiling Weisz had already proven she could do much as an actress, this just showed she could do even more.

Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar in Invictus
Woody Harrelson as Captain Tony Stone in The Messenger
Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station
Stanley Tucci as George Harvey in The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds

A nomination for Woody Harrelson acts as both a welcome show of support for the narrowly-distributed The Messenger, and a collective honor for a kind of comeback year that also saw him essaying a ridiculously-charismatic undead-slayer in Zombieland, and making the most of his expository doomsayer role in the financially-successful 2012. He even scored laughs as the yogurt-making “ex-punk” in the limited-release love story Management. Christopher Plummer joins Hal Holbrook (for Into the Wild) and Ruby Dee (for American Gangster) in the recent, welcome club of Octogenarian Oscar nominees, while Stanley Tucci’s performance in The Lovely Bones probably stood in even more frightening relief given how recently he’d played a much kinder role as Julia Child’s husband in Julie & Julia. None of it will matter a whit when it comes time to give Christoph Waltz the trophy he had already earned by the time he’d gripped our attention through that long first scene with the Dairy Farmer.

I considered recognizing In the Loop’s reality-re-writing government bureaucrat played by David Rasche, but in the category that has perhaps been kindest to comedic performances over the years, I decided instead it was more fitting to make room for Zach Galifianakis in The Hangover. In the Vegas setting of the year’s runaway comedy hit, Galifianakis is the scruffy, weird wild-card responsible for many of the movie’s biggest laughs, always operating by his own private metronome. His “Wolfpack of One” speech is already justly immortal.

Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side
Helen Mirren as Sofya Tolstoy in The Last Station
Carey Mulligan as Jenny in An Education
Gabourey Sidibe as Precious in Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Meryl Streep as Julia Child in Julie & Julia

Sandra Bullock has built up a lot of esteem in the Hollywood community since her breakthrough in Speed 15 years ago. Actors make up the largest voting bloc in the Academy, and I haven’t noticed many of them with an unkind word to say about “Sandy”. Her role as the saintly spitfire housewife caps off her most successful year ever, with a second blockbuster in The Proposal to go alongside The Blind Side’s grosses. She does a solid turn and she’s made a lot of people money, and they are likely to take this, their first and best opportunity, to reward her for all that. But she should not underestimate Meryl Streep, who after all, has to win another Oscar SOMEDAY, and had a pretty phenomenal year in her own right.

My bonus nod goes to Mélanie Laurent as the vengeance-seeking Shoshanna in Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino needs extraordinary women to channel the ferocious alchemical mojo he conjures, and Laurent proves to be a most capable angel of fury, willful and electrifying.

Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake in Crazy Heart
George Clooney as Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air
Colin Firth as George in A Single Man
Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela in Invictus
Jeremy Renner as William James in The Hurt Locker

Jeremy Renner richly deserves this nomination after years spinning gold out of tiny roles, and Clooney is getting better and better with age. But when it comes to cashing-out a long-nurtured portfolio of esteem, nobody’s seeing a better return this year than Jeff Bridges for his captivating role in Crazy Heart. He has had this much talent, discipline, and screen naturalness for decades; and while technically the voter shouldn’t have that in their heart when filling in their ballot, it’s going to exert a mighty gravity all the same. Bad Blake is the kind of broken soul that thrives in this category, and Bridges gives him dignity while never blunting a single rough edge. From the first minutes to the last, you just plain believe him – and that’s the job.

I could stock an entire alternate Best Actor category with off-beat lead performances I loved this year – Robin Williams for his agony-behind-the-smile in World’s Greatest Dad, Robert Downey, Jr. for clearing the very high bar of re-interpreting Sherlock Holmes, Paul Rudd’s totally overlooked work tweaking at the nature of masculinity in the comedy I Love You, Man, Sam Rockwell’s trickier-than-you-know one-man-show in Moon, and Matt Damon’s oddball with the hidden layers in The Informant!. Finally I have to go with Damon, the hero in his own mind who cannot face also being his own worst enemy.

Achievement in Directing
James Cameron Avatar
Kathryn Bigelow The Hurt Locker
Quentin Tarantino Inglourious Basterds
Lee Daniels Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
Jason Reitman Up in the Air

Best Picture of the Year
Avatar James Cameron, Jon Landau
The Blind Side Nominees TBD
District 9 Peter Jackson & Carolynne Cunningham
An Education Finola Dwyer & Amanda Posey
The Hurt Locker Nominees TBD
Inglourious Basterds Lawrence Bender
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness and Gary Magness
A Serious Man Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Up Jonas Rivera
Up in the Air Daniel Dubiecka, Ivan Reitman, Jason Reitman

For Picture and Director both I have to favor the work of Cameron, who is aiming to be the latter-day Cecil B. DeMille by growing the medium itself with the sheer spectacularness of his showmanship; and who, like DeMille, has plenty of appetite for Ham and Cheese. Avatar has generated a momentum for itself that goes far beyond the Oscar race – just look at the number of 2010-11 releases scrambling to position themselves as the “next” 3D epic. Criticize the story you may (oh, you may, you may), but it is unlikely to even check the velocity of the Pandora express. This movie smacked gobs around the world. They are likely to hand over the trophies before they even get their jaws back up to think about it.

This is not to say I think Avatar is the year’s best film, landmark though it undeniably is. My 10 Best list always waits a little longer while I catch up on a few contenders I missed, but I can tell you already that I saw films I liked better. This is not about what Should Win, but what Will Win, and at the start of the race, Avatar has a wide, wide lead.

If I could squeeze in one more director, I would actually make it two: Joel and Ethan Coen, whose A Serious Man ranks among their best work for both its perfection of technique and sureness of theme and tone. We may well see them around these parts this time next year, when their remake of Western classic True Grit (starring soon-to-be Academy Award-winner Jeff Bridges) has hit theatres and vies for nominations of its own.

And if a group of ten Best Picture nominees could accept an eleventh on my word alone, I’d ask it to take Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. Twice-nominated already for Best Foreign-Language film and for its hypnotic black-and-white photography, this work about the evil we can do that leaves a long-lasting impression. It tests and challenges you, refusing you easy moral satisfaction, and it is like no other film made this year.

As always, on the day of the ceremony I will reveal my revised predictions in all categories, and before then will share my top 10/bottom 10 list. In the meantime – there’s nominees to watch.

I’m flexing my own muscles right now. If something happens – and it may happen – it’s going to happen unbelievably fast. Stay tuned.

It’s small…I’m talking minuscule. This is one of those budgets that wouldn’t cover a week’s food on a superhero movie. There is a legitimate question whether or not the script I’ve written can actually be made for the money that is on the table. IF everyone does three jobs and works for circus peanuts, and IF we catch a couple of breaks on our locations, and IF this camera we have access to can actually live up to its cost-saving billing, and IF we can trim the script and schedule this thing hard and deep with no lube, then…maybe, Jimmy, maybe.

I would be producer, writer, assistant director, and at least a few other tasks along the way. I would have to quit the office job; not immediately but once things started ramping up – which, given the weather requirements of the script might not be for several months. But I also found out today that my screenwriting class is definitely on for the spring, which means money. It didn’t take me long to start working the personal budget numbers. IF the class happened in the fall as well, and IF I finished the novel in a timely manner so I could bring in the rest of that money, and IF I could pick up a few one-off production gigs like I was awhile back, and IF I don’t eat at restaurants or drink in bars for the majority of 2010, then…maybe.

But I’m not walking yet. A good piece of advice I once read about the question of when to leave your dayjob is: “You’ll know when it’s no longer possible to keep it.”

More on this as it develops.

From Variety.com: Sony Takes ‘Risk’ With Board Game

Risk. The board game. The one they made fun of on that episode of Seinfeld. Soon to be a Sony Pictures Development Hell project.

I have had this long post brewing for awhile about Hollywood’s binge on branded properties, and the long-term (lack of) wisdom it shows. I still intend to write it, because I was there at the ground floor of this stuff: My last job in the development world (way back in 2004) was for a company whose business model was built around scooping up old IP (Intellectual Property) rights and reviving them as movie projects. Ask me someday about the story proposal I wrote for a Frogger movie.

I should not even have to make the mathematical point that this year’s most notorious box-office disaster was based on a branded title: Land of the Lost.

Like I said, I shouldn’t even have to make that argument. It should be loudly, clangingly obvious to anyone who hasn’t succumbed to studio brain phage that Risk is not the raw material for a movie. It is a board game where people roll dice to conquer the world, and everybody tries to hold Australia, because you get the two extra guys every turn and you can only attack it from that one place. The article says Will Smith’s company will produce the film. Just picture Will Smith saying “I know I don’t need Northwest Territory, but I’ll get a Risk Card next turn if I win!”

At this point, they are just paying for a title, ANY title, that people recognize and with which they have a positive association. Very shortly they will be proposing “Banana! The Movie!”