This week awards season got underway in earnest, we learned lineup details on Berlin and Rotterdam, and the long, cold ass kicking that is Sundance began. See you next week!

• DEAR ZACHARY: A response to comments
• An Idiot’s Guide to the Magical Negro
• Polanski Wants Trial Moved Out of LA
• SILENT LIGHT Review
• Criterion’s Bottle Rocket: The Best and Worst Version Ever
• My Bloody Valentine 3D in 2D. Clip(s) of the Day
• Julie Delpy Goes to Berlin, Chris Moltisanti Goes to Rotterdam
• WGA Nominations
• Wall-E vs The Academy: Seven Snubbed Movies About The Future
• 13 Films We’re Watching At Sundance
• The Great Samurai Cop Swindle
• Ridley Scott’s 1984, and 11 Commercials From Famous Directors
• Sex Scenes: Sex and Drugs and My Way
• Anti-war Films ARE Successful!
• DGA Nominations
• Sad Milestones in the History of 3-D
• Film Independent and Netflix Launch Indie Film Competition
• Cinema Eye Honors 2009 Shortlist
• Sundance/Slamdance previews: LA MISSION, ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN ARE UNDEAD, PAPER HEART TV, YOU WONT MISS ME, Amreeka
• FilmCouch #103: Comedy, Tragedy, Criticism
• Oscars: 10 Unlikely Nominations We’d Like To Se
• BATTLE FOR HADITHA DVD Review
• Trailers: Hurt Locker, High Kick Girl!, THE RAMEN GIRL
• Eastwood Roundtable Video Essays
• Hugh Jackman Drops Out of Soderbergh’s Elvis Musical

It’s starting to look like early predictions that Slumdog Millionaire would be the Juno of 2008 were wrong: Juno, though a massive box office hit and an eventual Best Picture nominee, wasn’t selected as the Best Film of its year by a single critics group, an honor which Danny Boyle’s film has landed several times in the last week alone. Though excluded from AFI’s list of the Top Ten films of 2008 (it’s possible that Wendy and Lucy took its place — and if so, awesome), Slumdog was given top honors by the New York Film Critics Online (which I just joined, although I won’t be eligible to vote until next year), the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the National Board of Review (not purely critics, but often treated as such). The Los Angeles critics gave Danny Boyle Best Director, and most surprising (to me, anyway), the New York Film Critics Circle cited Slumdog’s cinematographer, Anthony Dod-Mantle, over Harris Savides, who shot their #1 film, Milk.

So what does it all mean?!? None of these groups have a particularly fool-proof track record when it comes to predicting Oscar glory, but the blanket of praise for Slumdog seems to have already lent the film an air of inevitability in a year otherwise lacking in films that everyone can get behind. Which is annoying for those of us who think Slumdog is a servicable crowd-pleaser which has been way over-praised. Which would mean that it *is* Juno 2, after all.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has announced the nominees for the annual Golden Globes, and the LA Times has all the info. First-read surprises? The Visitor gets a nod for Best Motion Picture Drama while Milk doesn’t; both Robert Downey Jr AND Tom Cruise were nominated for Best Supporting Actor (a category which the Globes don’t break down by genre) for their work in Tropic Thunder; and Happy-Go-Lucky, which has been racking up the critics nods with several Best Actresses for Sally Hawkins, was completely shut out. Take a look at the full list here, and let us know what you’re particularyl happy or sad about.

So yesterday, the Los Angeles Film Critics made the stunning move of voting Wall-E as the Best Film of 2008. Stunning, because this is the first time the body has ever given their top honor to an animated film; stunning because last year, they gave it to the decidedly less commercial There Will Be Blood, thereby giving that film one of the boosts it needed to be nominated for Best Picture. The rest of the LAFCA awards were split amongst a wide range of films: Danny Boyle for director, Sean Penn for Actor, Happy-Go-Lucky’s Sally Hawkins as Actor, and, in the biggest wealth-spreading move of all, Waltz With Bashir as Best Animated Film.

Now, today, the New York Film Critics Circle are voting on thier awards as we speak, and the results are leaking in dribs and drabs via member Mike D’Angelo’s Twitter stream. Like their LA counterparts, the New York critics have so far shared the love amongst a number of pictures––Rachel Getting Married for its screenplay, Slumdog Millionaire for its cinematography, Hawkins for Actress, Mike Leigh for Best Director––and so unless Happy-Go-Lucky takes Best Picture, we can either call this magnanimity, or we can call it what it likely is: there is not a single film this year that stands head and shoulders above the rest.

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Never known for their radical choices (inexplicable, occasionally, but rarely daring), the National Board of Review split the difference with their 2008 honors, citing predictable crowd pleasers (Slumdog Millionaire was named the Best Film of the year) and well-feted indies (Man on Wire for Best Documentary, Frozen River for Directorial Debut), alongside a few actual, suprisingly surprising choices. Let the Right One In and Edge of Heaven for Best Foreign Film? Okay! Changeling as one of the 11 best films of the year? Aww, NBR — your milquetoast cred remains intact. Never change!

indieWIRE has the full list.

Conservative film blogger Dirty Harry is often best ignored when he’s aggressively railing against the liberal Hollywood elite, but when he offers a faux-populist view of filmgoing that’s so obstinately limited in scope that it’s actually potentially dangerous, I have to say something.

The gist: the cursed Hollywood elite is once again pushing movies with purely elite appeal for awards, and audiences are not responding to these films because after years of reading reviews written by partisan elitists who are out of touch with What The People Want, they no longer trust film critics. Also, elitism! An excerpt:

From early predictors, it looks as though the ever-widening disconnect between Hollywood and their audience will reach into 2008. The Visitor, The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Rachel Getting Married… Any of these on your radar? Any of these captured your imagination?…what a sad statement that the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office.

Dirty Harry’s commenters take it from there; the basic consensus is that if any of the above named films get the Best Picture nomination that should rightfully go to The Dark Knight, why they’ll … become really indignant about the tyranny of the liberal media? Not watch the Oscars? Boycott movie theaters? So, pretty much status quo, right?

Anyway. First things first: that Variety story he bases the post on is three weeks old, which is a lifetime in the prognostication game. And let’s leave aside the fact that neither Slumdog nor the Wrestler have opened anywhere yet, and that only a very small percentage of the population would admit to having their “imagination captured” by a Woody Allen film, even though Vicky is still on almost 100 screens almost three months after its release and is currently about a million dollars away from being Allen’s highest-grossing film in 22 years.

Regardless: Dirty Harry chooses to extrapolate two films named in that story as evidence that “the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office”: Rachel Getting Married and The Visitor. I’m far more of a fan of one of these films than the other, but Harry’s assessment of audience “indifference” is misleading for both. As is common for him, he willfully refuses to acknowledge that expectations and accounting are different for films that open on 3 screens and then expand, than they are for films that roll right out into 3,000.

So, some numbers: …Read more

The International Documentary Association announced their nominees for their annual awards today. The five features to get the nod are Kassim the Dream, Stranded, Man on Wire, Young @ Heart, and Waltz With Bashir. It’s an interesting batch of nominees, for sure. For one thing, it excludes some the year’s most seen American documentaries. Though Young @ Heart and Man on Wire made multiple millions and are thus considered nonfiction hits, both of the religion twins, Religulous and Expelled (currently the #2 and #3 highest grossing nonfiction films of the year, respectively, behind U23D) were excluded from the honors. Also interesting is the nod for the mostly animated Waltz with Bashir, which Sony chose to keep in the New York Film Festival rather than pull for a qualifying run.

IDA also announced today that in addition to the career award that they’d previously planned to give to Werner Herzog, the December 5 ceremony will also honor Rob Epstein with the Pioneer Award, and Stefan Forbes, director of my favorite political doc of the year thus far, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, will get the Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Filmmaker Award.

indieWIRE has the full list of honorees.

When I was on the Shorts jury at CineVegas last summer, we gave the top prize to Man, Myna Joseph’s short, tense drama about two adolescent sisters whose bond is tested when one goes on an ill-advised internet date. Although unfortunately it’s not embeddable, New York Magazine has posted the 15 minute film (which also played at Sundance, SXSW and New Directors/New Films) online. You can watch it in two parts on Vulture.

Fantastic Fest announced their film awards late last night, even through we’ve still got three more days of movie watching and alcohol drinking to go. As expected, The Good, The Bad and The Weird took the Audience Award, although JCVD took third place in that category, which continues to baffle me. The much buzzed about Let The Right One In was named best horror film over Donkey Punch and Acolytes, and the Danish film How To Get Rid Of The Others took top award in the Fantastic Features category with Cargo 200 and Ex Drummer in second and third place. Thankfully they gave the wacky and fun Santos a special award in that category.

We’ll have a lot more to say about these films and much more soon, so keep checking back for more festival information and news throughout the week. Heck, I’ve even enjoyed seeing Conquest of the Planet of the Apes at this thing. The complete awards listings can be found after the break.
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• Penelope Cruz will be honored at this year’s Gotham Awards. Details at the FILMMAKER Blog, where Scott Macaulay also points to an appreciation of Manny Farber written by his former student, filmmaker Barbara Schock.
• Meanwhile, everyone thinks she’s got the Best Supporting Actress Oscar race locked up for her work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Even Lawrence Levi, who writes the film itself off as “as blinkered and lazy as the ‘90s films I got sick of,” admits that Cruz and Javier Bardem are “staggeringly funny and sexy” in it.
• Speaking of “too soon!” Oscar predictions: Can Robert Downey Jr win a nomination by acting in a movie about actors who are whores for Oscar nominations?

According to Jeff Wells, Larry Charles and Bill Maher’s Borat-style religion doc Religulous is playing this week in Claremont, CA in order to meet the Academy’s rule stating that non-fiction films must screen for one week in a commercial theater in both New York and L.A. in order to qualify for a Best Documentary nomination. “That means Religulous is probably playing in some out-of-the-way theatre in the Manhattan area also,” Wells writes.

Sure enough, a Moviefone search reveals that the film is currently playing a publicity-free two matinees per day run at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street–the same theater where Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired had its qualifying run last spring. So far there’s been no surreptitious Manohla Dargis review of Religulous, so if you find yourself in Claremont or in the noseblood section of Manhattan and decide to check it out, by all means, report back.

• The headline of Variety’s “Get Smart made a decent amount of money and Love Guru got what it deserved” story: “Audiences make the ‘Smart’ choice.” Is this qualitative analysis, right in the headline? I love it!
• Scott Sternberg, producer of Peter Bart and Peter Gruber’s “stating an opinion as if it is fact is more legitimate on television than on a web site updated in reverse chronological order” chat show Sunday Morning Shootout, is setting up a division of his production company to make feature-length non-fiction films. His first topic? Hasidic jews, of course!
• In what looks to me like a sign that somebody’s finally admitting to themselves that they can only bleed money on untested auteur experiments for so long, The Weinsteins are planning to take advantage of “all these properties that lend themselves to musicals.” They’ll make Broadway shows out of a bunch of crap that they own, including Finding Neverland and Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
• She Unfolds By Day took the top prize at the CineVegas film festival, which announced its awards on Saturday. I was on the shorts jury at the fest, but Variety didn’t name the shorts winners in their writeup, so no disclosure needed, right?

Tonight’s the night documentary fans have been waiting for for almost exactly two months: the first ever Cinema Eye Honors for excellence in non-fiction filmmaking will be awarded tonight at the IFC Center in New York City. I will be there, and since my live-Twittering of last month’s Oscar party was such a success with my millions of fans (well, okay––maybe just with Paul), I will be reporting back from the festivities in real time via 140-character, text messaged-updates. You can subscribe to my Twitter feed to get the updates on your phone, IM or computer, or just keep refreshing this page––the badge above will update every time I do. For more info on the Cinema Eyes, check out co-organizer AJ Schnack’s blog, and IndiePix.net.

UPDATE: I’ve taken down the Twitter badge and posted a full transcript of the live blog after the jump.

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• Vanity Fair has canceled their annual post-Oscars party, as a show of solidarity for the striking writers, and also presumably because there may not be a “real” Oscars to throw a party after.
• That said: the WGA is planning a “bicoastal powwow” for Saturday in order to present a tentative contract plan to their members, and if all goes well, says Dave McNary, “the boards could quickly start the ratification process — and possibly issue a back-to-work order that could take effect as early as Monday.”
• Welcome to the seventh circle of hell: an awards show honoring publicists, hosted by Billy Bush. It would almost be irresponsible to craft a joke around the following: “‘This is an event by publicists, for publicists, honoring publicists yet nobody knows about it because it’s not publicized,’ host Billy Bush joked in his opening remarks at the luncheon, to the delight of the flack-filled room.”