Two more days until we find out who wins this year’s Academy Awards! Okay, so the exclamation point is more than forced. It’s been quite awhile since we’ve had even an ounce of excitement about the Oscars. But we mustn’t let predictability get us down. Sure, even the still-uncertain races (Penn vs. Rourke; Winslet vs. Streep; Man on Wire vs. Trouble the Water) are anything but interesting, because the everyman of 2009 couldn’t care less about who gave the year’s better performance and would probably be fine shrugging his shoulders at the TV screen in the event of a tie (or, better yet, irresolution). However, there’s one thing people keep forgetting about the Academy: they’re full of surprises.

So, rather than just go with the easy, “predictable” predictions, we attempted to guess who and what will Crash the Oscars this year with a surprise victory — preferably the kind that adds an “ing” to “upset.” And once again, we’d like to extend the forecasting fun to you. What surprises do you expect and/or hope for? Or, if you’re down with the boring route, what “certain” winners do you truly believe in? And why? The most accurate comments will be reprinted in our final Oscar column on Monday.
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Yesterday, for the second time in two weeks, In Contention’s Kristopher Tapley confessed to being done with 2008 and noted a bunch of anticipated 2009 films. These aren’t necessarily titles he’s looking forward to seeing, though; it’s basically a preliminary jump on next year’s Oscar season. Because apparently this year’s Academy Awards are all but handed out, the winners properly predicted and expected, and now it’s time to think about what will be up for what in 2010. Those titles Tapley lists are Rob Marshall’s Nine, Peter Jackson’s Lovely Bones, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, Clint Eastwood’s “Mandela“ (formerly The Human Factor), Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked, Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart and the latest from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Steven Soderbergh (The Informant), Paul Greengrass (Green Zone), Martin Scorsese (Shutter Island) and James Cameron (Avatar).

Oh, and then Jeff Wells had to go and hint that Spielberg’s Lincoln is likely to arrive by year’s end. What and who else is being foreseen as nominated this time next year? Check out the links after the jump.

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In a couple of weeks it will have been 25 years since Ridley Scott’s hammer-tastic 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh was seen during Super Bowl XVIII. Though it wasn’t seen on television again until popular demand brought it back years later, it wasn’t for lack of quality. Ridley Scott was just coming off of Blade Runner, and the spot, which cost over a million dollars to produce, has been named the best television commercial of all time. Not too shabby.

But in a day and age of TiVos and DVRs, are commercials still relevant? In fact, it’s hard to remember more than a handful of commercials that have had the cultural impact of Scott’s 1984.

Ad agencies often turn to big talent to try and draw attention to a commercial, and the pendulum often swings the other way when Hollywood taps a commercial director to direct a feature. That’s what launched the careers of David Fincher, Michael Bay, and many other high-profile filmmakers. While 1984 might be the most famous commercial by a famous director, there have been a slew of others that have been equally as strange, from artists ranging from Spike Jonze to the Coen Brothers. Here’s a look at a some of the better ones, including both Ridley Scott’s 1984 (and it’s updated 2003 version, along with the Hilary Clinton version from last year’s Presidential race).

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After a long layover at Port Authority spent reenacting scenes from Keane (see what I did there? I went for the obscure but creepy reference, instead of the topical, populist one) I took the bus up to Woodstock, NY this weekend, to spend about 24 hours at the Woodstock Film Festival. I finally saw Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway, an improvised family dramedy which plays something like a Hollywood remake of L’enfant set in the bootleg luxury trade on the streets of New York; it won big at LAFF and took Woodstock’s top narrative prize on Saturday night. The awards ceremony where Broadway was honored was indie star-studded, surprisingly casual and fun, and –– maybe unsurprisingly––littered with references to the ongoing presidential election. “Kevin, we’re giving you the Maverick Award,” screenwriter Ron Nyswaner said at the start of the show to director Kevin Smith. “That means we think you’re qualified to be the leader of the free world.”

You’ll find some of the night’s most memorable quotes, from Smith, Ang Lee and others, below the jump. Above, you’ll find video of James Schamus’ Trailblazer Award acceptance speech, and the tail end of his introduction by Lee.

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• Torture pornographer Eli Roth is in talks “a baseball bat-swinging Nazi hunter” in Quentin Tarantino’s The Inglorious Bastards. Tarantino is apparently still talking to Brad Pitt about playing the lead role in the film, but nothing has been finalized.
• Pineapple Express and the sequel to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants are opening today because their distributors want to “get a jump on a weekend full of Olympics coverage, which shifts into high gear Friday with the Opening Ceremony.” The “high end of expectations” would have David Gordon Green’s stoner comedy beating Batman at the box office. Emphasis on the “high.”
• A theoretical SAG work stoppage be damned, Ang Lee will begin shooting Taking Woodstock this month, his ensemble film about the “aspiring interior designer” who offered up his parents hotel as the concert’s base of operation. Meanwhile, a new 40th anniversary Woodstock DVD is in the works, with at least an hour of concert footage added.
• Prada has commissioned nine short films inspired by Prada, which Prada will then have edited into a feature about Prada, for viewing on the Prada website.

• “If Iron Man was about America’s power overseas — specifically in Afghanistan, where much of the movie takes place — then the Incredible Hulk is about what happens to our soldiers when they come home,” writes Charlie Jane Anders in a long review at io9. It’s about the impossibility of transforming young men into “super-soldiers” and then expecting them to blend back in.” Related: Anders takes a look at superheroes who can’t have sex, including “Poor Rogue from the X-men. She’s got the cool Susan Sontag hair, and the leather jumpsuit, and the hot boyfriend… but she can never touch anyone.”
• Anders isn’t exactly ga-ga over New Hulk, but she calls Ang Lee’s version “disastrous.” At Bright Lights After Dark, Erich Kuersten vehemently disagrees. “Man, it’s a sad day on our bitterly defended-from-Galactacus earth when an Ang Lee Hulk film is just dismissed outright, and here it is a super and vastly underrated picture. Granted the CGI was a bit cartoony in the previews (I know I laughed at the time) but looked much better in real big screen life.”
• David Poland bottom lines it: “The truth is, for all its flaws, there is not a single frame of The Incredible Hulk that contains a fragment of the artistry that Ang Lee brought to Hulk. Of course, the film was too long and the psychodrama too thick for most people. But there was true aesthetic beauty. I hate to even pull this one out of the backpack, but Speed Racer? Genius in comparison. Every frame.”

• Swedish vampire buzz magnet Let The Right One In took the top narrative prize at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. Shane Meadows’ Somers Town walked away with consolation acting prizes for its two young stars, and the extremely narratively confused My Marlon and Brando inexplicably won the Best New Narrative Filmmaker award. More Tribeca wrap-up stuff later today.
• Variety says Iron Man “is looking like an ironclad winner” at the box office (for what it’s worth, the 8pm screening I went to last night was barely half-full), whilst Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey’s return to headlining big-screen romantic comedies after a 20 year hiatus, hopes to “generate some counterprogramming coin.”
• Comedian/Microsoft pitchman Demetri Martin has been cast in the lead role in Ang Lee’s next film, as the closeted gay man who accidentally invented Woodstock.
• New Line has bought its first pitch since moving in with the corporate parents. Dan Mintner: Badass for Hire, a parody of films like Cobra and Predator, is being positioned as “an R-rated comedy in the spirit of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Wedding Crashers, the kind of movie that ‘classic’ New Line was good at making and that the new iteration will be making as well.” Diablo Cody svengali Mason Novick will co-produce.

• Pamela McClintock at Variety notes that the fact that Universal is opening two comedies in two weeks––Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Baby Mama––is a sign that the release schedule is over-crowded with comic content. Related: Judd Apatow gets yet another job.
• James Schamus will adapt the memoir Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, Concert, and a Life, for Ang Lee to direct.
• MGM has acquired distribution rights to the Simon Pegg comedy How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, which co-stars Kirsten Dunst.

• The Chinese censors have reportedly placed a media ban on actress Tang Wei, due to her sex scenes in Lust, Caution.  This means she can’t attend award show or appear on television, and the nation’s print media has been ordered to pull all feature stories about her.
• Anne Thompson eulogizes New Line, with help from John Waters, who recalls, “They were the first ones to mix art and exploitation, which is where I was coming from.”
• A Sopranos producer is writing a “NASCAR drama” for Gary Ross to direct at Universal. Ross seems particularly excited about depicting a sport that people actually care about: “I used blow-up dolls for crowd scenes in Seabiscuit, but that won’t be necessary in a sport where there are 150,000 fans in the stands every Sunday.”

• Oh, good: Indiana Jones and the Dorian Grey-ing of Harrison Ford Into Shia LaBouf will premiere at Cannes! Maybe. No one’s seen the thing yet, but according to Variety, “The cast, which includes Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf and Cate Blanchett, have already been notified to pack their black-tie outfits for the French Riviera’s red carpet unspooling even though the fest has yet to confirm its official lineup.” Because celebrities pack suitcases 10 weeks in advance.
• Theatrical exhibition conference ShoWest will confer a special “Freedom of Expression Award” to Ang Lee and James Schamus, for releasing Lust, Caution with an NC-17 rating instead of cutting the film to get an R. National Theater Owners president John Fithian is inexplicably trying to push studios to revitalize the NC-17 market, even though even Lust, Caution made just under $5 million domestically, and in fact was a super-hit in China…where it was cut to appease the censors.
• Semi-Pro, which opens today, suddenly bears the dubious distinction of being the final release from New Line before the studio is subsumed into the clusterfuck that is Time Warner. It may not exactly send the studio out with a bang: although the comedy is said to be “tracking well among males under 25″ it’s nonetheless expected to “open well lower than Ferrell’s most recent films.”

TIME has a story about Steven Spielberg’s departure from his post as creative consultant to the Beijing Summer Olympics, and most interestingly, how China will need to scramble to save face in the wake of it.

Landing Spielberg in the first place was a coup, considering that China’s main goal with the games is to sell the idea “that China has returned to its rightful place as a world player whose opinion matters.” That’s not necessarily a fiction––Spielberg, after all, dropped out of his commitment in frustration over China’s “opinion” on their trading partner Sudan and Darfur––but the idea that China is ready to play on the world stage without facing the blowback of various human rights issues and international political, trade and manufacturing controversies certainly seems like a fantasy worthy of Hollywood. Can they pull off this globalist fairy tale without the guiding vision of the man who brought us Hook?

It’s a situtation that’s going to require serious damage control. As a spokesman for Human Rights Watch puts it in the article, “They are trying to have a perfect Games and present a picture of unmitigated success to the world. And here is something that is not a success.” Part of the problem is that protest groups, emboldended by the Speilberg exit, have started lobbying other Hollywood types associated with the Games (Ang Lee is another creative advisor), as well as the event’s corporate sponsors. China can probably survive the loss of their hired Hollywood cred, but if Coca-Cola drops out, their dreams of joining the big boys on the global-pop cultural stage will be dashed for good.

• Lady Wakasa makes a strong case in defense of Lust, Caution. “It’s true that there are elements in the story that won’t be clear to some Western audiences…There are universalities that can be picked up: about the effects of environment and upbringing, about the nature of love, about what in relationships is and isn’t an act, how war is hell with a twist. But these universalities are filtered through a Chinese lens. As such, I think it’s up to the Westerners to go the extra mile and fill in blanks they find. The shoe on the other foot, to a certain degree.”
• The Shamus thought Contempt was “about nothing more than the pneumatic perfection of Brigitte Bardot’s ass,” but a later Godard film went over much better. “Masculin-Feminin strikes me as a Warhol-esque montage of the ’60s as we wanted them to truly be, with more going on under the surface than we might want to admit.”
• A holdover from the heady days immediately following Dumbledore’s outing … you know, last week: Joe Leydon writes that he’s “occasionally had students ask me — earnestly, not snickeringly — if certain movie characters are intended to be interpreted as gay…The two names that pop up most often during these “Is he or isn’t he?” queries: Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotten) of Citizen Kane and Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor) of Singin’ in the Rain.”
• The Flaming Lips sent 1000 skeletons on parade in Oklahoma City. Scott Solary links to the video evidence.
• For the record, I would like to note that I recorded my segment of this week’s episode of Film Couch, about actresses who have played Joan of Arc, way back on Tuesday. At the time, I had no idea Jeff Wells would use multiple Saint Joan references to mock Tom O’Neill’s unflappable faith that Sweeney Todd has a chance in hell of winning multiple Oscars.

I probably shouldn’t even legitimize this with a post, but what the hell, it’s Friday: OK! Magazine, that bastion of fairness and accuracy in reporting (see their previous “scoop” from earlier this week) is reporting that Heath Ledger is about to sign on to star in a sequel to Brokeback Mountain:

“It will follow the nasty process of being openly gay in 1963 Wyoming, an insider tells OK!. “Ennis will finally come out of the closet.”

Defamer, noting that Ang Lee’s film followed Ledger’s Ennis DelMar through to 1983, calls bullshit:

Escape from Brokeback Mountain promises to mine all the nasty gay processes missed by the original, while setting the stage nicely for part three, Brokeback Revolutions, in which our hero finally reaches the fabled realm of Zion (which looks a lot like a leather-themed circuit party in Fort Lauderdale).

• Francis Ford Coppola accuses Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro and Jack Nicholson of being old, rich, and lazy. While opening up another bottle of wine on his estate and noodling with his first film in ten years.
• Hannah Takes the Stairs is playing the London Film Festival. Xan Brooks has a mixed review: “Hannah Takes the Stairs is a film that showcases much of what is good about independent American cinema: its naturalistic, free-form rush comes embroidered with the sort of casual epiphanies that a bigger production would have either ironed out or ignored altogether. But it is also prey to much that is bad.”
• Ang Lee has trimmed “7 or 8 minutes” from the version of Lust, Caution set for Chinese release, but the film has yet to pass that country’s censorship board, and the longer the release is delayed, the greater the potential damage from piracy.
• A release date and title for the Wolverine spinoff has been set. X-Men Origins: Wolverine, to be directed by Rendition/Tsotsi helmer Gavin Hood, comes out May 1, 2009.
• Three new scribes have joined the exclusive New York Film Critics Circle: Melissa Anderson (Time Out New York), Elizabeth Weitzman (NY Daily News) and Steven Snyder (New York Sun).