There are really only two words you need to describe Roger Ebert: indispensable, which would apply to his four decades of brilliant essays and criticism; and indomitable, which would apply to how he's handled his past few years of debilitating physical struggles.

If you haven't read Esquire's current profile of the 67-year-old Chicago Sun-Times critic, you should carve out the time to do it. Written by Chris Jones, it is both sensitive and unsentimental, especially in the way it describes Ebert's battles with a series of cancer surgeries that caused him to spend more than half of a 30-month stretch in hospitals. A mere shell of himself physically, he still manages to work nonstop -- he saw 281 movies in a 10-month stretch last year -- even though he is now unable to speak and is fed via a G-tube through a hole in his stomach.

But he's a writer, so he keeps writing and writing, better and better than ever. His reviews remain a must-read, as are his blog posts, which range from acerbic political observations to delightful personal remembrances of his youth. After reading the Esquire piece, I suspected that Ebert would be unable to resist offering his own personal reaction to the story. And sure enough, it's up on his blog now, and is just as absorbing as the original Esquire feature.

For Ebert, his life is now an open book and it feels especially refreshing, in our image-obsessed age, to hear him speak so plainly about his insecurities and imperfections. He makes it clear that he admired Jones' piece, especially the graceful writing, though he admits that "I got a jolt from the full-page photograph of my jaw dropping. Not a lovely sight. But then I am not a lovely sight, and in a moment I thought, well, what the hell, it's just as well it's out there. That's how I look, after all .... Running [the photo] that big was good journalism. It made you want to read the article."

For me, the best thing about Ebert's response was getting a glimpse of his own private thought processes. For example, when Jones was due to arrive, Ebert noticed that the bound albums of the wedding photos of him with his wife, Chaz, were sitting out in the living room. "When Chris was about to arrive and I was a little nervous, I told Chaz, 'for God's sake, don't start showing him our wedding photos! That will make us look bourgeois.' She looked at me in disbelief. 'What makes you think I would ever show him our wedding photos?' "

Ebert proceeds to confess that Jones had barely been on the premises for half an hour before the conversation turned to Gene Siskel, Ebert's old "At the Movies" partner and pal -- there are still photos of the late critic all over the Eberts' brownstone. Ebert told Jones what a close friendship the two men had.     " 'His daughters were even the flower girls at our wedding,' I said. 'Chaz, show Chris our wedding photos.' She looked at me like the eighth wonder of the world." Ebert later explained that he was as open as Siskel was secretive, so open that Siskel had once said Ebert's middle names should be Full Disclosure. In that spirit, Chaz impishly proceeded to tell Jones about Ebert's dire warning about the wedding photos.

If Ebert has any regrets about laying out the distressing particulars of his life these days, he's keeping them to himself, which, knowing him, seems an unlikely proposition. As a journalist, I sometimes get complimented when I've written a story that feels true to life, so I know how much it must mean to Jones when Ebert concludes that "I was a little surprised at the detail the article went into about the nature and extent of my wounds and the realities of my appearance, but what the hell. It was true. I don't need polite fictions.... The more interviews you've done, the more you appreciate a good one."

You gotta give Harvey Weinstein credit. When it comes to Academy Awards campaigns, he is the maestro, an indefatigable manipulator of every Oscar pundit in need of a fresh story angle for a dreary, overly long Oscar season. The Big W is at it again this year, having set off a slew of credulous "Can 'Inglourious Basterds' win?" blog posts after boasting to Gold Derby's Pete Hammond that "Basterds" had victory in its rifle sights. As Weinstein put it: "We're going to win best picture. This is the movie people love and it's Quentin's time. We are going for it and we are going to get it."

How can he be so sure? I mean, everyone is doing plenty of serious campaigning, so it hardly gives Weinstein an edge that he's shelled out oodles of dough on newspaper ads, staged Tarantino retrospectives and cajoled Ari Emanuel into hosting a star-studded dinner for Tarantino at Mr. Chow. But Weinstein believes that he has a trump card, pointing to the fact that "Basterds" walked away with the SAG Award for best ensemble film, often an indicator of Oscar success. As he told Hammond: "Actors are the biggest branch in the academy and they love the movie." 

The impact was pretty amazing. All Weinstein had to do was brag about his impending victory and suddenly the blogosphere was buzzing with "Basterds" victory speculation. The Wrap's Steve Pond put up a post earlier this week raising the possibility of a possible "Basterds" win, saying that "within the last couple of weeks the buzz has been suggesting that an upset could come in the shape of Quentin Tarantino's 'Inglourious Basterds.' "

The Gold Derby's always breathless Tom O'Neil also threw his hat in the ring, actually predicting a "Basterds" upset, noting, among other things, that Weinstein's "Shakespeare in Love" also pulled off a best picture upset victory after winning SAG's best ensemble award. He also touted a Peter Bart theory ("that we should all carve on tablets to be doled out from mountaintops") that the movies that win best picture almost always have a recognizable person behind them whom the academy reveres -- hence the recent wins for films directed by Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood.

Of course, if this were anyone other than the Big W, the whole scenario would be pretty laughable. Let's look at the theories supposedly supporting Weinstein's upset victory:

1) Actors love the movie: I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but if actors loved the movie so much, how come "Basterds" only has -- count 'em -- one measly acting nomination, and only for best supporting actor. The film's star, Brad Pitt, went away empty-handed. Even "Up in the Air," now fading badly in the home stretch, earned three actor nominations to "Basterds' " one. 

2) Best picture winners have recognizable people behind them that the academy reveres: That one is really a whopper. Just to mention a few recent examples, did the academy really have such abiding regard for Danny Boyle ("Slumdog Millionaire"), Paul Haggis ("Crash"), Rob Marshall ("Chicago") or Sam Mendes ("American Beauty"), especially since the latter three directors all won despite never having even made a feature film before? That's one of those theories that sounds plausible until you see how often the academy actually ignores it. And it's definitely an open question as to whether the academy has any deep reverence for the shoot-from-the-hip Tarantino in the first place.

"Basterds" has a couple of strikes against it when it comes to being a serious contender for best picture. First off, most voters, or even an enthusiast like myself, view it as an entertainment, not a weighty masterwork. It's basically a writer-director's comic-fantasy thriller, not a film with the historical sweep or depth of "The English Patient" or "Braveheart." For all its sharp dialogue and narrative imagination, as a war film it has far more in common with "Kelly's Heroes" than  with "Platoon," which was the last bona fide war film to win  best picture. The academy, as Weinstein knows all too well, isn't enamored of war movies, which is why "Saving Private Ryan" was upset by Weinstein's "Shakespeare in Love."

Let's give Tarantino his due. He's made a marvelously engaging film, but is it a best picture winner? Not in a year when academy members have an opportunity to vote for an astounding game changer ("Avatar") or a mesmerizing example of directorial craftsmanship ("The Hurt Locker"). In this horse race, win and place are already taken. "Basterds" is running strong, but its best hope is to show.  

Photo of Harvey Weinstein by Fernando Leon / Getty Images

You don't have to be a political junkie like me to know that, with the economy still in low gear and healthcare having gone down in flames, the Democrats are going to be in big trouble this November. Many pundits are already predicting that the Democrats could lose as many as 40 seats in the House and six or seven Senate seats, leaving them with the barest of bare majorities.

It was pretty clear that times were hard when Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), who was expected to cruise to an easy victory in the fall, abruptly announced his retirement earlier this week, making it a very real possibility that the Democrats could lose his seat, since Indiana is a traditionally GOP state. But wait! Could John Mellencamp, perhaps the best-known Hoosier after Larry Bird, save the day? The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel has already been promoting a Mellencamp candidacy. And now Brent Budowsky, a former aide to Sen. Birch Bayh, Evan's dad, is touting Mellencamp as well.

In a piece he posted for the Hill, Budowsky calls a Mellencamp candidacy an "inspired idea," saying that the singer is "unique, one of a kind, a voice for the people who believe America needs a new brand of politics and new kind of leadership in the Senate.... I believe John Mellencamp would electrify the campaign and electrify Democrats who want a fighter for working people, farmers, small businesses and small-town America."  

Of course, even though Mellencamp was at the White House just last week, performing as part of a celebration of music from the civil rights era, he hasn't shown the slightest sign of interest in running for office. And while I'd love to see Indiana stay in the Democratic column, I can't say that I'm especially enthusiastic about the party turning to showbiz non-pros in its desperate search for a viable candidate. Once you get past George Clooney, who seems to have a better grasp of most issues than about half of the House of Representatives, it would be hard to imagine any Hollywood type being a worthwhile candidate for any office above film commissioner.

The only good news is that with the Republicans cozying up to all sorts of untested Tea Party oddballs, it would be hard for conservative pundits to engage in any of their customary celeb bashing if Mellencamp were to actually throw his hat in the ring. If in the movie business this is the year of "Avatar," in politics this is the year of the amateur.

Photo of John Mellencamp by Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

It feels like every time you turn around, someone at Disney is trying to blow up the old model of doing business and replacing it with a snazzy new paradigm. The news in the last few days has been about Disney's increasingly contentious battle with movie theater owners over shrinking the window between a film's theatrical release and its reappearance on DVD. But as I've written over and over in the past, Disney chief Bob Iger is also busy transforming his studio into a Brand Factory, where nearly every film that hits the theaters will have built-in brand awareness, just like a new Procter & Gamble detergent.

Vulture's new crack reporter Claude Brodesser-Akner has just put up an eye-popping new post reporting that Disney's brand mania has gotten so out of control that it has told the producers of "The Proposal," one of last year's most profitable films, that the studio has no interest in making a sequel. That's a serious shocker when you consider that the film, which cost just $40 million to make, grossed a whopping $315 million around the world. Even if you had to give Sandra Bullock a hefty raise to star in a sequel, you have to really want to get out of the movie star business to take a pass on raking in the shekels from a sequel with such built-in awareness and audience goodwill.

Disney's move away from "The Proposal" is sure to set off more shock waves in the Hollywood creative community, since if you're a top talent agent or manager or producer, this is yet another sign of economic Armageddon for the top-flight actors who keep WME and CAA afloat. It means that instead of giving a big payday to a top star, Disney is bent on making two kinds of movie star-free films, either the $200-million special-effects extravaganza (in which the effects and the familiar source material are the star) or the low-budget comedy or thriller that can be stocked with Disney Channel stars who are either already under contract or can be paid the kind of money Jerry Bruckheimer doles out to his interior decorator.

Brodessor-Akner nicely describes the Disney brand strategy this way: "To help pay for the whopping $10 billion Disney spent acquiring Pixar and Marvel in recent years, Iger decreed that as the world's largest licensor of consumer products, Disney needs its films not to merely succeed in theaters, but to sell gobs of spinoff merch, as well: In 2008, the company sold some $30 billion worth of licensed consumer products, and suffice to say, exactly none of that came from Sandra Bullock hand towels."

It's not as if Iger didn't spell out the strategy himself, telling a global media conference in December that the value of Disney, Pixar and soon-to-be Marvel pictures is "going to be a lot greater over time than any [value] we could create from a non-Disney branded, or non-Pixar or non-Marvel film. That is where we are headed."

Can you stock a studio like you'd stock a supermarket, with familiar brands replacing homemade products on the shelves? It's a grand experiment but one, I suspect, that isn't going to work out as smoothly as Iger expects. Though he's clearly savvy and future-oriented, Iger should hole up some weekend and read a few Hollywood history books. He'd discover a funny thing -- you can't take the risk out of the movie business, especially not with products with supposedly built-in mass appeal. Many of the most profitable movies ever made weren't pre-sold products or familiar brands, but quirky, unwanted ugly ducklings that were often made unwillingly by reluctant studio chiefs who only regained their enthusiasm for the pictures after they made a boatload of money.

"The Proposal" photo by Kerry Hayes/Touchstone Pictures

PREVIOUSLY: BOB IGER'S REDRAWING OF DISNEY CONTINUES

PREVIOUSLY: MARVEL IS DISNEY'S NEW FAMILY BRAND

Having by now read all too many snarky -- not to mention pseudo-snarky -- stories detailing the saga of Kevin Smith getting bounced from a Southwest Airlines flight because he was, in large part, too overweight to comfortably fit into one seat, I'm still trying to make sense of it all. I mean, why did everyone, and I do mean everyone, find this an irresistible story? (For my money, the funniest material is in this CNN post, which has the best of Smith's many tweets, the one where he wrote: "I saw someone bigger than me on THAT flight! But I wasn't about to throw a fellow Fatty under the plane as I'm being profiled. But he & I made eye contact, & he was like 'Please don't tell....' ")

OK, OK, I know that when a fat guy gets tossed off an airplane and he's a big-shot movie director (and despite being such a big shot he's flying standby!), the whole incident strikes such a tragicomic chord that it's impossible to ignore. And obviously, it was Smith who gave everyone permission to be as unsympathetic as they wanted, since he broke the story, happily tweeting endlessly about his embarrassing predicament. When you tweet about your troubles, the media will always consider you fair game.

But I think that Smith got trounced so badly in the media not because he was fat, but because he was a fat guy. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I'd say that as a rule, fat lady celebs get far more sympathy than famous fat guys because they have already been held under the microscope every day of their lives in a culture that, in the most wildly unhealthy way possible, insists that its starlets and singers be as scrawny and undernourished as possible.

In fact, many observers believe that the once visibly hefty Candy Crowley only got her new gig as host of CNN's "State of the Union" after she dropped a bunch of pounds. Still, for the most part, our double standard about fatness is pretty clear. For years, Oprah's battles with her weight have made her an object  not of ridicule but of sympathy, with most women in America whole-heartedly identifying with her struggles to fit into those size 12 dresses. If nothing else, it made Oprah seem far more vulnerable and lovable than the average zillionaire tycooness. I guess you could argue that Kirstie Alley has also triumphed by embracing her fatness. In fact, she has a new A&E reality show coming up called "Big Life," which focuses on her weight loss struggles.

But no one cuts fat guys any slack. Brando was pilloried for years for letting his weight balloon out of control. When Russell Crowe showed up in his last film, "State of Play," looking like he'd just auditioned to play the whale in "Moby Dick," the critics were all over him, complaining about how bloated and dumpy the onetime sex symbol now looked. Now it's Kevin Smith's turn to be the jolly fat guy who's the butt of everyone's jokes. I'm a skinny guy myself, but I feel the fat man's pain. In America, fat guys get about as much sympathy as the pushy evangelical crusader who has to explain to his wife and kids how he ended up with a skinny mistress stashed on the other side of town. Just ask Smith -- you always have a lot of explaining to do.

Photo of Kevin Smith by Carlo Allegri / Associated Press

Right-wing pundits and bloggers are gearing up for more attacks on Roman Polanski, now that the director's new film, "The Ghost Writer," is edging close to its U.S. release this Friday, having just had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. (I've seen the film and it's actually a pretty absorbing, Hitchcockian thriller.) As as is customary in conservative circles these days, subtlety is not an option when launching an attack on anyone involved with Hollywood, least of all Polanski, who has become a favorite whipping boy for the right in particular because he seems to have a lot of liberal supporters.

The latest salvo, from Big Hollywood's Jeffrey Jena, barely bothers to take umbrage with Polanski ("He's not a political prisoner or a dissident, he's a rapist") before getting to his real target -- the liberals who've been standing behind the filmmaker even though he's a fugitive from justice, having fled the U.S. more than three decades ago after pleading guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl. Jena manages to act as if Hollywood is simply swarming with sexual predators, saying that he's puzzled by why Hollywood liberals would "stand behind a pedophile. Maybe they're afraid to upset the applecart lest other famous deviant directors and producers would not hire them for future projects." 

Who those deviant directors are, he doesn't say. But Jena then proceeds to attack "Ghost Writer" co-stars Pierce Brosnan (whom he writes off as a "limousine liberal" because he once criticized George W. Bush) and Ewan McGregor for describing Polanski as a "maestro" who has an "alchemy with the camera." Brosnan added that in order to work with Polanski "you have to know your onions," presumably obscure Scottish slang for having to know what the hell you're doing. I suppose only a clueless conservative would be shocked that professional actors would praise a much-lauded Oscar-winning filmmaker, much less a filmmaker they'd just spent months working with on a movie. Apparently Jena has never been to a Hollywood press junket, where untold multitudes of actors, eager to talk up their latest project, have heaped just as many accolades on the likes of Michael Bay and Dennis Dugan.

Jena wishes that "just once if would be nice to hear a respected actor turn down a role in a Polanski film because they didn't want to be associated with a child rapist." And I wish that just once that a conservative pundit would remember that if you go around spending all your time trashing actors and filmmakers because you don't like their present-day politics or their long-ago personal transgressions, you're never, ever going to have much enjoyment at the movies.  

Most writers, musicians and filmmakers are delighted to talk about the biggest influences on their work. After all, for artists, the influences from their youth are usually the subconscious fuel that drives their imagination. And when it comes to cinematic influence peddling, no American filmmaker has spent more time yakking about the movies that made him fall in love with movies than Quentin Tarantino, whose Oscar- nominated "Inglourious Basterds" is crammed with hundreds of references to obscure old films of every shape, stripe and size.

So when I decided to start an informal series of interviews with Oscar-nominated talent about the varied influences on their work, it seemed like a no-brainer that Tarantino should get the first turn in the spotlight, since no filmmaker since Jean-Luc Godard has worn their influences more on their sleeve. Since he made his debut with "Reservoir Dogs," Tarantino has populated his work with borrowings and homages to everything from film noir and martial arts films to Japanese animation and spaghetti westerns, not to mention a long-forgotten 1939 B movie that actually kills off Hitler that Tarantino discovered in an old videotape rack at Safeway.

But as it turns out, after all these years of happily giving it up for his favorite filmmakers, Tarantino has become deeply conflicted about discussing the sources of his influences, in large part because Tarantino's honesty has often been used against him by critics and bloggers when they want to belittle his films or blame the filmmaker's endless parade of movie references for the swarm of mindless Harry Knowles-style fanboys who now dominate the online movie scene. In the course of a long conversation the other day, Tarantino managed to go--in a matter of minutes--from saying he "loved having influences" to saying that he was "unbelievably annoyed" with critics who used his reliance on influences as a way of trashing his movies.  

After checking out some of the critical feedback to Tarantino's films, I began to feel his pain. In the course of an otherwise admiring review of "Basterds," Roger Ebert argued that judging from the way Tarantino photographed Melanie Laurent near the end of the film, focusing on her shoes, lips, dress and facial veil, "you can't tell me [that] he hasn't seen the work of the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano." (Cackling with laughter, Tarantino's response was a resounding: "No.")

But the critic that really got under his skin was Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, who in the course of reviewing "Kill Bill" said the movie felt as if Tarantino "were holding us captive on a moldy postgraduate couch somewhere, subjecting us to 90 minutes worth of his favorite movie clips strung together, accompanied by an exhausting running commentary along the lines of 'Isn't this great?' "

To say that Tarantino finds this aggravating would be an understatement. "Here's my problem with this whole influence thing," he told me. "Instead of critics reviewing my movies, now what they're really doing is trying to match wits with me. Every time they review my movies, it's like they want to play chess with the mastermind and show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making. It feels like the critics are IMDB-ing everything I do. It just rubs me the wrong way because they end up using it as a stick to beat me down with."

Once he got that off his chest, however, Tarantino was happy to share, in great detail, some of the many key influences on "Inglourious Basterds." "I love having influences because I want people to get excited when they see something in the film or hear me talking about it and then actually go see the movie that inspired me in the first place," he says. "For example, the whole opening scene in 'Basterds' is completely and utterly taken from the first appearance of Angel Eyes [Lee Van Cleef] in 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.' That's why it has that whole spaghetti western vibe.

"So I was really using the whole feeling and mood from a scene in another movie, but what happens is that it becomes my scene with my actors and my way of telling the story and I feel like I somehow make it my own."

What are some of the other homages and references in "Inglourious Basterds"? Keep reading:

Disney's plan to release "Alice in Wonderland," its latest Johnny Depp-starring movie, on DVD only three months after it opens in theaters next month has caused the usual flurry of doomsday predictions from theater owners around the world.

Variety quoted one U.K. exhibitor as saying that "Disney has acted in an absolutely mercenary fashion. There is no compromise, no discussion being offered .... Our business model is under attack." And according to a story in the Times' business section, the head of an exhibition circuit with theaters in 13 states said he would yank "Alice" off his screens as soon as it reached DVD, complaining that Disney's move to shorten the DVD window "encourages people to wait for the DVD to come out."

But does it? That's the intriguing unanswered question at the core of one of biggest fault lines in today's movie industry: If Hollywood studios tighten the traditional four-month DVD window, will it encourage moviegoers to stay home in droves, waiting to see a film on DVD or video on demand?

My feeling is that it's really an unanswerable question, since it completely depends on the movie. To use a current example, Universal is releasing "The Wolfman" in theaters this Friday. I haven't seen it, but the early buzz has been awful, as have the reviews, with the film earning a lowly 31 at Rotten Tomatoes. If fans knew that Universal would be putting out on DVD in early May, they'd be happy to wait, since the movie has no must-see vibe.

On the other hand, if you have a well-reviewed movie that needs a long theatrical window to find an audience -- like "Crazy Heart," which has great buzz and a 93 rating from Rotten Tomatoes -- you're happy to push back the DVD window as far as possible, not wanting to endanger any of the film's theatrical grosses.

Disney's calculation with "Alice" is that the film has such a huge contingent of die-hard loyalists -- Johnny Depp fans, Tim Burton fans, and parents eager to share a family-friendly film with their kids -- that its core fan base won't be willing to put off seeing the film. In fact, a big chunk of that audience will willingly pay to see the film twice, first in the theaters and again when the DVD is released.

What I think theater owners fail to grasp is that most moviegoers treat filmgoing as an impulse purchase, a relatively last minute, instinctual decision (especially on the part of teenagers, who tend to head off to a multiplex and pick a movie to see only after they've arrived). And only after they've seen a picture do they make that semi-conscious economic calculation: Did I enjoy the film enough to want the DVD or was I so disappointed that I never want to see this movie again?

Of course, there are plenty of potential moviegoers who see the ads for a film and say to themselves that they'll wait for the DVD -- but that's a decision where the relative attractiveness of the marketing campaign far outweighs any concerns about how far away the DVD release is. 

In other words, I think theater owners are misreading the whole psychology of moviegoing. It's not about the distant DVD horizon as much as it is about the immediate prospect of sensory pleasure. So when I gaze outward at the upcoming releases, based on having heard buzz and having seen trailers, I look at the prospects with pretty firm ideas, firm enough to put the DVD window way, way back in the back of my already over-crowded brain:

"Shutter Island": No way to stop me. Have to see anything directed by Martin Scorsese.

"Cop Out": Mildly curious to see what Kevin Smith is like as a hired-hand studio director.

"Alice in Wonderland": Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are an irresistible combination.

"Green Zone": Even though it's been much-delayed on the release schedule, for me, the team of Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass are right in my wheelhouse.

"Hot Tub Time Machine": You could send a limo to the house with a gift-wrapped DVD tomorrow and you couldn't get me to cut the ribbon.

But that's just my take. I'm interested in hearing what you think. Does the DVD window matter when you're making up your mind whether to see a film? Are there certain types of films that you have to see in a theater -- or others that you'd automatically wait for the DVD release? Let me know where you stand.

You can always tell that the Academy has sent out its final Oscar ballots by the sudden reappearance of gaudy full-page Oscar ads in the trades, my paper and the New York Times. It also means that most nominees, fearful of making a horrible gaffe, are especially careful not to say anything that could possibly be viewed as controversial in their interviews with the showbiz press. 

Except, of course, for Jim Cameron.

He's on the cover of this week's The Envelope and he's clearly eager to mix it up with the multitudes of conservatives who've been trashing "Avatar," claiming that it's dumb, sanctimonious, anti-military, nuttily pro-environment and, as Big Hollywood's John Nolte memorably put it, a "Death Wish'' for leftists. Cameron isn't the sort of guy to take those brickbats lying down, even if means alienating a few Oscar voters, either because they agree with the conservative take on the film or prefer to vote for films that are free of any political leanings. 

As he told Glenn Whipp: "Let me put it this way. I'm happy to piss those guys off. I don't agree with their worldview." As for his detractors' contempt for his environmental consciousness, dramatized in the film by the callous destruction of the Na'vi's pastoral world, Cameron says that the film's environmental message is a lesson for all moviegoers to digest. He explains that our planet "will be a dying world if we don't make some fundamental changes about how we view ourselves and how we view wealth .... We're going to have to live with less."

Cameron admits that many people will wonder what a fabulously wealthy filmmaker ensconced in a Malibu mansion knows about living with less, but he says that "I think there's a way to live and raise your kids with a set of values that teaches them the importance of hard work, the importance of respecting other people and the importance of respecting nature."

Cameron says he did have second thoughts about using an explicit "shock and awe" Iraq war reference in the film, but he insists that it reflects a bigger point he was trying to make. "What I really was saying was, 'Listen to what your leaders are saying. Open your eyes. And understand what the run-up to war is like, so the next time it happens, you can question it."

People have debated for years whether message-oriented films actually have an effect on filmgoers' consciousness. Seeing a movie is such an internalized, diffuse experience that it's hard to know how much of an influence it leaves behind. But I would say this: You could not have spent 150 minutes immersed in the world of "Avatar" without coming away with a new respect for how much we should treasure the natural resources of our world -- or any other. 

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For the past 18 months, DreamWorks Animation czar Jeffrey Katzenberg has been circling the globe, touting the glories of 3-D movies with evangelical zeal, essentially saying -- over and over again -- that everyone should be making their movies in 3-D, since its the format of the future. (He even managed to woo New York Times political columnist Maureen Dowd, who just did a puff job touting Katzenberg's 3-D crusade.)

But guess what? Apparently even Katzenberg's 3-D zeal has its limits, especially when it comes to a rival studio that's going to open its 3-D movie a week after Katzenberg's new film. As you may have heard, Warner Bros. announced it will release "Clash of the Titans" in 3-D on April 2, one week after DreamWorks Animation unveils its latest 3-D film, "How to Train Your Dragon." According to my colleagues Richard Verrier and Claudia Eller, Katzenberg was furious when he heard the news, so much so that he shot off an e-mail to Warners Entertainment chief Barry Meyer, heatedly protesting the decision.

It's easy to understand why Katzenberg was so unhappy. As my colleagues wrote, Katzenberg was "counting on having the lion's share of 3-D screens for 'Dragon,' but the Warners move will inevitably rob the DreamWorks movie of many of the U.S.' 3,500-odd available 3-D screens. Needless to say, it seems a teeny-weeny bit hypocritical for the Katz Man to beat the drums for rolling out every sort of film in 3-D yet complain when the marketplace suddenly gets so crowded that it's his big new release that might be hurt by all the congestion.

Warners hasn't gotten off scot-free either, since its move to suddenly transform "Titans" into a 3-D film long after it had finished shooting smacks of pure, post-''Avatar'' 3-D-grosses exploitation. The fan sites have been giving the studio a good spanking, complaining that movies converted into 3-D during the post-production process are unlikely to have any of the same quality as films actually conceived of and shot in 3-D. But, of course, this is just what happens when the much-hyped 3-D revolution turns out to have a lot more to do with marketing gamesmanship and profiteering than any sort of pure cinematic artistry.

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DON'T EVER TAKE OFF THOSE 3-D GLASSES!

Some smart Hollywood publicist could make a lot of money by giving guitarist-heartthrob John Mayer one piece of very simple advice: Put a sock in it. As in: If you stop giving embarrassing interviews, maybe you'll stop embarrassing yourself. The Playboy Interview has become so dreary and old-fashioned that even Playboy readers barely read it anymore, but everyone is talking about the new March issue's conversation with Mayer (easily searchable online), who is such a walking gaffe machine that he makes Joe Biden look like Tom Hanks.

You have to give Mayer credit. When asked early on, "What if you were to Google the phrase, 'John Mayer is a douche bag,'" he didn't try to dissemble at all, simply replying: "You'd get a lot of hits."

Unfortunately, the interview didn't end there. Playboy's Rob Tannenbaum (who gets my props for not shying away from asking all the right questions) then asked Mayer, or shall we say, noted that "you seem very fond of pornography."

Instead of clamming up, Mayer breezily replied: "When I watch porn, if it's not hot enough, I'll make up backstories in my mind. My biggest dream is to write pornography." I don't know about you, but I think that is what anyone would call sharing too much.

Still, if Mayer had just stopped there, he would've dodged a bullet. But what really got the guitarist in a heap of trouble, prompting a flurry of heated, unbelievably derisive Tweets (all too derisive for me to link to, since my newspaper doesn't allow me to link to anything that features the kind of bad words George Carlin used to use 40 years ago), was Mayer's effort to look cool by using the N-word.

In the course of praising Tom Cruise for making fun of himself in "Tropic Thunder," Mayer explained that it's hard for a celebrity to be "very" anything, especially very sincere or earnest. Or as he put it: "You have to show that you don't take yourself seriously. Once you do that, people will say you're cool ... It's like I come on very strong. I am a very -- I'm just very. V-E-R-Y. And if you can't handle very, then I'm a douche bag. But I think the world needs a little very. That's why black people love me."

Tannenbaum asks, innocently enough: "Because you're very?"

And Mayer just goes right ahead and stabs himself with a hot poker, saying: "Someone asked me the other day, 'What does it feel like now to have a hood pass?' And by the way, it's sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a [n-word] pass ... But I said, 'I can't really have a hood pass. I've never walked into a restaurant, asked for a table and been told, 'We're full'.... Not to say that my struggle is like the collective struggle of black America. But maybe my struggle is similar to one black dude's."

Tannenbaum mused: "Do black women throw themselves at you?" And just in case he wasn't already in enough trouble already, Mayer actually answered the question by saying: "I don't think I open myself to it. My [penis] is sort of like a white supremacist. I've got a Benetton heart and a [expletive] David Duke [penis]."

It actually gets even worse, if you can believe it, with Mayer fantasizing about which African American actresses he finds especially hot. But you'll have to go to Playboy and read all the rest for yourself (plenty of intimate details about his relationship with Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Aniston, etc.) 

Suffice to say that we've started the countdown for when Mayer surfaces on Oprah, trying to explain what he really meant to say and how much respect he has for black women and the collective struggle of black America. Not to mention how, now that he's thought it through a bit, he's probably given up on his dream to write pornography for a living as well. All I can say is that if Mayer can say that many dumb things in that little time, then he's surely qualified to run for public office.

Photo:  John Mayer. Credit: Dan Steinberg / Associated Press.

My old pal, producer Larry Gordon, who grew up in Belzoni, Miss., knows how much I love everything about the South, so he regularly sends me copies of his hometown newspaper, the Belzoni Banner. The paper reveals how, in Mississippi, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Mississippi schools were forced to integrate years ago, but as the local paper makes oh so clear in its photo spreads of high school graduation and homecoming queen ceremonies, in Mississippi, integration simply means that African Americans are allowed to attend the public schools while many of the white children go to private academies.

And guess what? It's not all that different in Hollywood, where there are oh so few black executives, agents, managers, producers and filmmakers. It's especially true of the movie business celebrated in Vanity Fair's 2010 Hollywood issue, which just arrived on my doorstep this week. The magazine has nine lovely actresses on the cover foldout, including Kristen Stewart, Abbie Cornish and Carey Mulligan. Want to take a wild guess as to how many of them are African American?

Inside the magazine, you can find the traditional Annie Leibovitz glamor photos of the Hollywood elite. And guess what? The people in the photos are all white, except for one photo of the three leading lights from "Precious": director Lee Daniels and stars Mo'Nique and Gabourey Sidibe. They represent the only black faces in a sea of white folk. It wouldn't have been so hard this year to put a little more chocolate into the magazine's vanilla photo spreads, because when it came to Oscar possibilities -- which is the rationale for Leibovitz's photos -- there were films like "The Blind Side" and "Invictus" that could have lent a little more color to the proceedings.

But instead, Vanity Fair simply went with the usual suspects. It's a pretty safe bet that most of the people in the photo spreads -- Meryl Streep, Jim Cameron, Julianne Moore, Quentin Tarantino -- will all be spotlighted in the pages of the magazine someday soon. But judging from the history of Hollywood hiring practices involving black actresses, Mo'Nique and Sidibe had better enjoy their moment in the sun. The odds of seeing them again in Vanity Fair are probably somewhere between slim and none.  

Now that we know the Super Bowl broadcast had the biggest TV ratings ever, we can move on to more pressing concerns like -- who got the most money's worth out of their movie ads on the telecast?

Studios spend b-i-i-i-i-g bucks going after the biggest audience ever available to advertisers, but is all that outlay worth it if their ads don't deliver the goods? I was down with a nasty bug yesterday -- must've been all that New Orleans gumbo I had during the football game -- so here, better late than never, is a look at Hollywood's Super Bowl marketing winners and losers:

The biggest winner: "Alice in Wonderland" (opening March 5). This kid-friendly title was full of wonderful, arresting visual images, including exciting swordplay and Johnny Depp in a red fright wig, giving Disney a big leg up over the competition and reminding us that Tim Burton's "Alice" will be as distinctive and sly as all of the filmmaker's other best work. Who couldn't love seeing Helena Bonham Carter's imperious Red Queen using her pigs as a footstool?

The best of the rest: "Shutter Island" (Feb. 19). Full of spooky, smoky, fun-house images, this spot continues Paramount's effort to sell "Shutter Island" as a genre thriller, not just as a Leonard DiCaprio film. But the studio shrewdly hedged its bets by also going after the Martin Scorsese audience by plugging not one, not two, but six Scorsese titles during the ad, even though the creepy horror-film images on display make it feel a lot more like we're watching a Wes Craven movie.

The biggest surprise: " Robin Hood" (May 14). You know it's a Ridley Scott movie right away from all of the fiery arrows being launched and the muddy warriors in full battle cry. But what really came as a surprise was how Universal made a big point of selling the story as being a look at the adventures of Mr. Hood (played by Russell Crowe) before he arrived in Sherwood Forest, showing us a hero who looks a lot more like a beefy crusader than a light-limbed adversary of the Sheriff of Nottingham. (I know the Super Bowl is a male-dominated event, but it was sort of sad to see the great Cate Blanchett reduced to two tiny glimpses--maybe she'll get better play in the ads Universal runs on the Lifetime Channel.)

The biggest disappointment: "The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" (May 28). Yikes! Judging from this overwrought ad and its blandly generic visual-effects images, you almost get the feeling that producer Jerry Bruckheimer didn't know what kind of story he really wanted to tell, so he just ripped off every enticing image he could find from "The Mummy," "Harry Potter," "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." And while I know that actors aren't exactly the most important ingredient in an effects thriller, surely the best description for the presence of a long-haired Jake Gyllenhaal in this spot is ... miscast!

The worst of the worst: "The Wolfman" (Friday). Universal only bothered to buy a 15-second spot, which pretty much says it all when it comes to the level of expectations the studio has for this film. All we learn is that the movie is set in gloomy, Edwardian London, has Anthony Hopkins as a scenery-chewing mad physician and that the Wolfman can race along the roofs of London tenements at top speed. Oh, and that the film is rated R. I'd say the box-office prospects, based on this perfunctory spot, are as gloomy as London looked like back in the days before solar panels.

Photo of Helena Bonham Carter in "Alice in Wonderland" from Disney.

One of the worst-kept, not to mention most embarrassing, secrets in late-night TV has been the virtual absence of female writers from the late-night comedy show writers rooms. Up until now, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien have had the same track record, having zero -- as in 0 -- women on their writing staffs. According to a recent story in Parade magazine, Jimmy Kimmel and Craig Ferguson each have one female writer, though in the case of Ferguson, the writer is -- ahem -- his sister.

Matters are so bad that New York Times TV reporter Bill Carter actually weighed in with a blog post to break the amazing news that "The Late Show With David Letterman" has hired a female writer. It's Jill Goodwin, who had to put in nearly a decade with the show, most recently as an assistant for the writing team, before finally being allowed to graduate to writer's status. Carter didn't mention why Letterman might be finally hiring a woman now, but many female writers in the business have long speculated that Letterman, having something of a female problem after news surfaced of his longtime flings and affairs with female staffers, might be making the hire simply for PR reasons.

Of course, women aren't doing any better on the movie side of the business. Even though there are two female-directed Oscar best picture nominees this year, both films were independently financed far outside of the studio system. As the Jezebel website recently noted in a conversation with New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, who has been an especially vocal detractor of sexism in Hollywood, two studios -- Warners and Paramount -- managed to go through all of 2009 without releasing a film directed by a woman.

It's pretty embarrassing to realize that women are better represented on the cobwebby old Supreme Court -- two of nine judges -- than they are at virtually any major Hollywood studio or network comedy show. When studios are bidding for hot new directing talent, it's rare to ever hear a woman's name on the buzz lists. Just check out Deadline Hollywood's Mike Fleming's post today about the hot new talents being hired to direct big studio films. Needless to say, they're all guys.

I'm delighted to see Letterman taking a tiny step in the right direction, but as the immortal James Brown would say, in show business, it's still a man's, man's, man's world.

Photo of David Letterman by John P. Filo / Associated Press.

When I first read my colleagues Steven Zeitchik and Rachel Abramowitz's intriguing post about a new film where the male lead plays an "aging, alcoholic musician who mentors/is schooled by--and then finds romance with--a younger female star," I thought for sure that some crazy producer had decided to make a low-budget knockoff of "Crazy Heart."

But no, it's Warner Bros., who, if the rumor mill is right, is pursuing Russell Crowe to star in yet another remake of "A Star Is Born," with Beyonce taking the female lead. (The most recent remake of this ancient "she's up as he's heading down" melodrama was in 1976, with Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand as the doomed lovers.) To say that Crowe would be a step down from Kristofferson, especially if the story remains set in the world of music, is an understatement.

I was once a big Crowe fan, but I have to say that his recent string of duds, including "State of Play," "Body of Lies," "A Good Year" and "Cinderella Man," all in the past five years, have made me a non-believer. Despite giving a knockout performance in "American Gangster," his box- office credentials are shaky at best, as is his likability quotient with American moviegoers. Warners may have seen an early cut of Crowe's "Robin Hood," due this May, that is making them believe he still has some juice, but that's not the vibe I've been getting from rank and file moviegoers, who have clearly lost that lovin' feeling for Crowe.

Beyonce is a different story. She's young, sexy, hot (in a pop culture way) and even though she didn't make a dent with her role as Etta James in "Cadillac Records," she did have a surprise hit last spring in the thriller "Obsessed." It's still an open question as to whether she could carry the kind of role she'd have in a new "Star Is Born," especially since she's played it so safe with most of her solo albums, but obviously having her above the title would definitely give the project more heat than it would get from the usual suspects (meaning thank God Warners isn't trying to cast Jessica Alba or Megan Fox in the part).

I'm sure having Beyonce on board will also give the film a big media bounce, since it would be a breakthrough for Hollywood to actually make a film with a real interracial romance, something that has been verboten in studio films for years. But if I sound skeptical about the whole idea, it's that when it comes to remakes, at least good remakes, you need to have a really good reason to make the film. If all Warners is doing is simply updating a hoary idea to 2010 and giving it some hip-hop flava, then I'm guessing this version of "A Star Is Born" isn't going to be the one that will make any memories.

Photo by Armando Arorizo / EPA

It was the big showdown, the media equivalent of Ali vs. Frazier, Tyson vs. Spinks or Louis vs. Schmeling. Jon Stewart went into Big Poppa Bear's den last night for a media heavyweight bout with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, a brawny meeting of two of our most celebrated media giants that felt so much like a boxing match that at one point, when O'Reilly reached out with one of his long arms, pointing a finger at his adversary, Stewart recoiled, practically curling up in a ball, saying "God, you've got Ali's reach!"

Most of the time, these much-vaunted clash of the titans feel anti-climactic, so I can't say I entirely agree with Time's James Poniewozik, who writing on his blog this morning, called the exchange "one of the best debates about media and politics in general, and Fox News in particular, that I've seen on TV in a while."

I'm not so sure I'd go that far, since the best debates are usually the ones where the combatants are two men from the same social class who really despise each other (like Bush vs. Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign). Stewart and O'Reilly, truth to tell, actually seem to like each other and each man certainly has a begrudging respect for the other, a respect you wouldn't see if Stewart were going up against Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck. (For a fascinating inside peek at the showdown, check out my colleague Matea Gold's piece, which actually takes us inside the Fox News control room during the show.)

But hey -- if I'm calling this a heavyweight bout, then you just want to know who won, right? I'd have to give the edge to O'Reilly, if for no other reason than when it comes to TV interviews or the NBA finals, home court advantage is everything. When Stewart demolished CNBC nut-job stock booster Jim Cramer last year, "The Daily Show" host had his finger on the button for the entire exchange, putting up damning TV clips at will, leaving Cramer pretty much defenseless. But last night, Stewart was on O'Reilly's playing field, with O'Reilly controlling the tempo of their exchange, repeatedly interrupting Stewart in mid-sentence, throwing him off his comic rhythm.

I'm not saying O'Reilly won on the intellectual force of his arguments, since I'm totally in the Stewart camp when it comes to the insidious lack of fairness and balance on Fox News. But I have to give O'Reilly his props -- he's an old master as an interviewer and, presiding on his own home court, he used it to every advantage. For example, O'Reilly led off the interview with a great right hook, focusing his spotlight right on President Obama by asking Stewart: "How's he doing so far?"

It was a shrewd tactic, putting Stewart on the defensive, since as O'Reilly surely knew from watching "The Daily Show" that Stewart, like a lot of liberals, isn't especially enthusiastic about the president's first-year performance. And Stewart being Stewart, perhaps the most verbally convoluted comic of his generation, he wasn't going to duck the question or offer an easy answer, which immediately made him look as if he were dissembling a bit. In fact, Stewart's comic style, which tends toward elliptical, self-referential humor, didn't play especially well on the O'Reilly format, which rewards short, punchy replies and doesn't have the raucous studio audience that Stewart enjoys on "The Daily Show," which gives his comedy riffs a much-needed extra momentum.

Even though Stewart landed some powerful punches, especially when making clear how intimately connected Fox News is with the Republican Party, for the most part he was out of his element. It was like watching a great athlete playing an unfamiliar sport (like Shaquille O'Neal, for example, trying to hit a baseball). Stewart got in his swings, but he certainly wasn't hitting the ball out of the park like he does on "The Daily Show."

Photo: Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly verbally duke it out on "The O'Reilly Factor." Photo credit: Fox News

If you didn't see the show, here's the first half of last night's exchange: 

Three of this year's Oscar best picture nominees have something unusual in common -- they have leading characters who are open, self-proclaimed Jews.

Think about it: It's almost impossible to find any goyim in the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man," a slyly satiric look at the Jewish community in a 1967-era Midwestern town. A big chunk of Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" revolves around a raucous band of Nazi-scalping Jewish soldiers who've been assembled to go after the Fuhrer and his high command. And Lone Scherfig's "An Education," costars Peter Sarsgaard as an unscrupulous young Jewish real-estate speculator who woos a 16-year-old British schoolgirl eager to see the world.

You'd think this might be cause for celebration, or at least a show in pride, in the Jewish community, especially since you can often go years at a time without seeing openly Jewish characters in Hollywood films. But are Jews happy? As my grandfather (who spoke Hebrew with a Southern accent) used to say: Not in a million years. In fact, the Jewish Journal just ran a provocative cover story entitled: "Realism or Anti-Semitism: Negative Depictions of Jews Raise the Age Old Question." 

Written by Tom Tugend, the piece attempts to be even-handed, saying that "A Serious Man" and "An Education," depending on the viewpoint, "represent either vile throwbacks to Jewish stereotypes in Nazi propaganda movies or creative works of art that show Jews, like other ethnicities, as multidimensional human beings." But it turns out that most of the people in the story actually had very little problem with the films. Tugend interviews all sorts of smart folks who defend the movies' portrayal of Jews, including historian Neal Gabler and UCLA professor Howard Suber. Even Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman supports "An Education," who said: "To call it anti-Semitic would suggest that any depiction of bad behavior by a Jew is beyond the pale. That is not the view of ADL, and ADL does not find the film offensive."

So who are the people who are up in arms over the movies? Tugend only found two people he could actually quote as being outraged by the films. One is Irina Bragin, who teaches world and English literature at Touro College. She hated "An Education" so much that she walked out in the middle, which in my mind, already disqualifies her as a serious critic, since she didn't bother to judge the film in its entirety. In a piece she wrote for the Journal, she called "An Education" "an artful film which wraps old anti-Semitic messages into a pretty new package." The other is Internet movie critic Joe Baltake, who said of "An Education": "This film should be offensive to any thinking, feeling person," going on to complain about Jewish film critics who "remain firm in their convictions that the film isn't anti-Semitic."

That would presumably include my paper's film critic, Kenny Turan, who in his rave review of the film wrote that " 'An Education' does so many things so well, it's difficult to know where to begin when cataloging its virtues." I felt the same way. But what especially bothers me is that the Journal seems to have gotten sucked into the vortex of another age-old issue -- the hyper-sensitivity among Jews to any portrayal of a Jew that could possibly be viewed as a negative stereotype by the outside world.

Remember, "An Education" is based on a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber about her teenage affair with a man who was Jewish. So it's not a work of imagination, where you could ask the question, as many did of Spike Lee when he cast John Turturro as a sleazy Jewish nightclub owner named Moe Flatbush in "Mo' Better Blues": Why make him Jewish? (After Lee was attacked by the ADL and B'nai B'rith, he responded by arguing that not every Jew in his films had to be a good guy, that there have been plenty of exploitative Jewish nightclub owners and, furthermore, that "not every black person is a pimp, murderer, prostitute, convict, rapist or drug addict, but that hasn't stopped Hollywood from writing these roles for African-Americans.")

As for "A Serious Man," while it is clearly a work of fiction, it is also clearly based on the Coen brothers' youthful memories of growing up in a closeknit Jewish suburb of Minneapolis. As someone who is roughly the same age as the Coens, I watched the film with a delirious sense of recognition. I knew those Jews in that movie and felt just as alienated from their neurotic ways as Larry Gopnik's red-headed son does in the film. Even though my family are Southern Jews, they have the same Jewish DNA as the Coen's characters, in the sense that I could've cast the majority of my family in most of the parts in the film, right down to the crazy uncle played by Richard Kind.

When I went to Hebrew school, I had to listen to long, hazy and often entirely unsatisfying religious discourses by rabbis who were eerily similar to the ones in the film. If you thought the Coens were offering a mean-spirited, self-hating portrayal of Jews, you missed the point of the movie. It's simply a comically barbed look at an insular community that simply happens to be Jewish, because the Coens did what all good writers do -- they wrote what they know.

Frankly, I think the Journal is making much of nothing. It's telling that it couldn't find any Jews who were upset about Tarantino's portrayal of bloody, baseball-bat-wielding Jewish tough guys in "Inglourious Basterds," since I'm betting that every Jew -- starting with my father, who's probably seen the film a dozen times by now -- is secretly, or not so secretly, thrilled by their no-nonsense virility. 

It also seems fitting that when the Journal asked Ethan Coen what he would say to people who believe their film is anti-Semitic, he struck just the right note of "Basterds"-style defiance by responding: "Too bad, you big crybaby -- that's what David Mamet would say." Funny, that's just what I would've said too.

Photo: Michael Stuhlbarg in "A Serious Man." Credit: Wilson Webb/Focus Features.

New York Post film critic Kyle Smith and I agree on a lot of things about the Oscars, notably that "Inglorious Basterds" was a terrific film and that "An Education" scribe Nick Hornby should be writing lots more movies. But Smith is a conservative and as his brethren in Washington have proved again and again that conservatives see the world through a very rigid ideological lens. Even when it comes to movies. So if you thought it was nutty for conservatives to claim that Barack Obama is a socialist, even when his administration is loaded with rich guys from Goldman Sachs, you can imagine what they thought of yesterday's Oscar nominations.

Smith just put up a post titled the "Five Most Idiotic Oscar Nominations of the Year," where he trashes a number of wonderful movies, starting with "The Hurt Locker." Smith knocks the Kathryn Bigelow-directed film for having only one great scene, "which is essentially repeated three times, just to be sure we caught it," before dismissing it entirely for having only one simple theme: "We get it. War is a drug. Four words do not a story constitute, let alone a great story, let alone a great movie."

He also dismisses "District 9" for clearly having a squishy liberal message: "Ooh, the aliens are kinda like black people in Jo-Burg shantytowns. Deep, man."

And he really loathes "The Messenger," since it clearly doesn't possess any conservative-friendly gung-ho war cliches, writing off the film's best screenplay nomination by saying: "A humvee of anti-military cliches. Truly one of the worst 'serious' pictures of the year."  

John Nolte, Big Hollywood's resident right-wing bomb-thrower, also got in a couple of shots at the nominees (although he loves "Crazy Heart," so he clearly can't be all bad). He also trashed "The Hurt Locker," which in conservative circles is seen as an anti-Army film, even though it portrays American soldiers as complex and professional, not to mention incredibly brave guys. In the course of making his Oscar predictions, Nolte picked Bigelow as the best director winner, even though, as he put it: "I was no fan of the film for a number of reasons, including its trashing of our military and a rudderless story that eventually devolved into a series of fairly repetitive set-pieces." 

All I can say is that its lucky John Wayne isn't alive anymore, since surely if today's conservatives had seen "The Alamo," they would've called it a "Hate America" movie, since we end up losing the battle to an army of barbaric Mexicans. That's not the kind of history we should celebrate, right?

Photo: "District 9" Photo credit: TriStar Pictures

There weren't all that many surprises among the Oscar nominations, except for the fact that virtually every breathless Oscar pundit managed to leave "The Blind Side" off their best picture prediction lists. But what really seems surprising--even strange--is that when the best picture nominees were announced, the academy dumped "The Blind Side's" three producers into its "to be determined" list.

Since the academy has a rule limiting a film to three producers (except under extraordinary circumstances), it is no surprise that "The Hurt Locker" went into the "to be determined" Dumpster, since it has four producers. One of them will get the ax. But "The Blind Side" has only three producers--Alcon Entertainment partners Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove, who financed the film, and veteran producer Gil Netter, who started work on the project when it was at 20th Century Fox and was on board for the whole ride. 

So why wouldn't all three men deserve credit? As Kosove told Deadline Hollywood's Michael Fleming Tuesday: "I was confused by that announcement because my understanding was that there could be three producers, and all three of us functioned in that capacity." Reps for the Alcon duo have been incessantly phoning academy officials today, but still haven't received an answer. I don't think there's any doubt that all three producers will end up getting credit, especially since the Alcon team, even though they are known as financiers, are members of the academy's producer branch.

But according to a pair of different academy insiders, here's the most likely reason why the movie was stigmatized by being lumped into the "to be determined" purgatory: The academy simply didn't think "The Blind Side" would earn a best picture nomination, so they hadn't gotten around to fully completing the vetting process. I guess that's the true meaning of being an underdog, when the academy thinks a movie is such a long-shot that they don't even check out the producers until after they've walked away with a best picture nod.

"The Blind Side" photo by Ralph Nelson / Warner Bros.

The best thing that you can say about today's Oscar best picture nominations is that, thanks to "Avatar," millions of casual American moviegoers--the kind of folks who load up on popcorn and candy, bring a carload of kids and wouldn't dream of staying to watch the end credits--can actually say that they've seen an Oscar-nominated movie. That's a big step forward from last year's awards, which had three best picture nominees that, even if you added all their U.S. grosses together, didn't make as much money as "Avatar" did in its first week of release. The presence of "Avatar" will do wonders for the academy's March 7 Oscar telecast, at least in terms of ratings, since judging from the numbers the Oscars received the year "Titanic" won best picture, having a Jim Cameron film around on Oscar night almost assuredly delivers tons of TV eyeballs.

The academy made a bold move this year, expanding its best picture nominees from five to 10 pictures, which has clearly accomplished its obvious intent--making room for more commercial pictures. It's pretty clear that if we only had five nominations this year we wouldn't have "The Blind Side" or "District 9," two films that each made more than $100 million at the box office, in the best picture mix. (We probably wouldn't have had "Up"--another blockbuster--in the best picture race either, but it would have still been a high-profile presence on the show, since it's the prohibitive favorite to win best animated feature.)

But it's a little too early for the academy to declare victory. Since Cameron only makes a film every dozen or so years, "Avatar" is a once in a blue moon phenomenon. It won't be around next year or any of the years afterward to goose TV ratings. And if you take "Avatar" out of the mix, the best picture nominees are still heavily weighted toward the kind of serious, high-minded movies the academy, along with the nation's film critic establishment, likes to reward for their artistic ambitions. 

It is a wonder to see "The Blind Side" get a best picture nomination, since it is exactly the kind of well-crafted, heartfelt film that is usually ignored at Oscar time. Ditto for "District 9," which had an intensity and restless energy that is rarely seen in the Oscar precincts. But the academy still couldn't entirely shed its elitist sentiments. Every year, Hollywood makes a home-run comedy--this year it was "The Hangover"--and every year the academy ignores it, foolishly persuaded that comedy is somehow easier to do than drama. The academy also has a tin ear for more adult-oriented comic entertainment (represented this year by "Julie & Julia" or "It's Complicated") that were once regularly nominated by academy voters in the era of Billy Wilder and George Cukor. And the academy wouldn't dream of nominating well-made films that actually lured millions of young moviegoers to the theaters, whether it was "The Hangover," "Twilight" or "Star Trek."

What fascinated me the most about Tuesday's best picture nominations is how different they were from most of the top nominations given out by the Grammys, which had their big show Sunday night, earning an astounding 35% boost in ratings, putting the broadcast into "American Idol" territory. Both organizations are made up of respected industry professionals, presumably eager to reward the best work in their respective fields. Yet the motion picture academy almost always opts for seriousness over comedy, artistic heft over youthful innovation. It's not a coincidence that in most years, the majority of best picture nominees are set in the past, not in the present.

On the other hand, the Recording Academy, officially known as NARAS, has increasingly given itself over to mainstream commercial taste. As my colleague Todd Martens pointed out the other day, the five Grammy nominees for album of the year, the industry's top award, sold more than 13 million albums. Taylor Swift's "Fearless," the eventual winner, was the year's top-selling album, moving 4.6 million copies.

The most striking thing about those awards was the gap between pure talent and Grammy glory. Even though Swift was the big winner Sunday night, she has largely been derided by critics and is viewed as a youthful enthusiasm, not a serious artist. (If you watched the show, you may have noticed that while she has lovely hair, she can barely sing.) Yet the much-vaunted Recording Academy showered her with honors. It would be the equivalent of the Oscars giving Michael Bay the best director statuette for "Transformers" or presenting the best actor award to Kevin James for "Paul Blart: Mall Cop." The Grammys also nominated the wonderfully outrageous Lady Gaga for a slew of awards, which would sort of be like the Oscars giving multiple nominations to Kristin Stewart for her work in "Twilight."

How is it possible that the two most prestigious academies can have such radically different attitudes toward awards? My theory is that the Recording Academy, whose industry has already been devastated by a disastrous, decade-long economic tailspin, has been forced to shed any lofty ambitions and reach out for its core fan base. In a sense, the music business has finally embraced the future. If you watched the Grammys on Sunday night, you saw a show making a naked grab for TV ratings, even borrowing from "American Idol" by having viewers vote on a song that would be performed by Bon Jovi toward the end of the broadcast. It worked beyond the recording academy's wildest dreams--and of course puts the pressure on the Oscars to deliver a similar kind of ratings bounce.

It hardly matters whether the Grammys' producers decided to go for the gold or had a CBS shotgun at their heads. It was an awards show in survival mode. The broadcast was transformed into a completely populist variety show, full of eye-popping carnival acts, from Lady Gaga's surreal show-opening musical number with Elton John to Pink's amazing Cirque du Soleil-style high-wire number. The show barely gave a nod to the best-reviewed artists of the year--not a minute was wasted showing off the Animal Collective or Neko Case or the Dirty Projectors. The broadcast embraced the industry's top-selling acts, showcasing Beyonce, Swift, GaGa, the Black Eyed Peas and the Dave Matthews Band.

It was instructive to notice what didn't get airtime. The Oscars, maddeningly, still insist on giving out every minor award on air, encouraging millions to tune out while the winners of best sound editing or best documentary short are onstage. The Grammys only gave out nine awards in a 3 1/2-hour broadcast--everything else was pure entertainment. The industry's legends got short shrift too. Michael Jackson had a lengthy tribute, but one enlivened by performances by commercially viable stars. When it came to honorary tributes, if you blinked, you missed 'em. Leonard Cohen got all of 14 seconds of face time for winning one of the night's lifetime achievement awards.

So what can the motion picture academy learn from this? I'm not saying the Oscars have to stoop to conquer, although it would be pretty funny to have viewers vote--Bon Jovi-style--on having Robert De Niro and Robert Downey Jr. come out and perform the viewers' favorite scene from a big 2009 hit, like "Taken" or "The Hangover." (OK, OK, just kidding). But the Grammy telecast was a glimpse of the future, not just for the Oscars, but for all awards shows.

The era where you could simply deliver a TV audience by having a decorous evening honoring an industry's highest artistic achievements is going, going, gone. If the motion picture academy wants the Oscars to retain their stature as show business' top award show, it's going to have to give props to a wider range of movies than it ever has before. Today's nominations were a small step in the right direction, but the Oscars still have a lot of remodeling and reinvention to do before they can say that they've made the leap into the new world.