• The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has invited 105 member of the industry to join their gang, including 2008 Oscar winners Marion Cotillard and Diablo Cody. Insert stripper to Hollywood establishment joke…here.
• Jeffrey Katzenberg presented “clips, storyboards and early animation sequences from” several Dreamworks animation films in the works at the CinemaExpo in Amsterdam this week, as part of a push to convince European theater owners to convert to digital projection systems.
• The English Surgeon, The Garden, and Throw Down Your Heart won big at the SilverDocs film festival. For our SilverDocs coverage, click here.

• Though Universal says they’re still assessing the damage of Sunday’s fire, which destroyed a tape and film print vault/shipping and receiving center, there’s speculation that some of the prints lost may be irreplaceable. “So-called EK prints, struck from the original negatives when the negatives were new and thus irreplaceable, would be among the most valuable prints on Earth.”
• Director Craig Gillespie is trying to cast his Lars and the Real Girl star Ryan gosling in The Dallas Buyers Club. Gosling would play a real-life AIDS patient circa 1986 who, “frustrated with the lack of available medical options and unwilling to accept a death sentence, found a lifeline using alternative drugs and created a lucrative smuggling business that made those drugs available.”
• The guy who made “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” for The Jimmy Kimmel Show has been given a movie deal. He’ll direct the comedy Cool School for Fox.
• The United States of Tara––a TV pilot starring Toni Collette, produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Diablo Cody––has been picked up by Showtime. Cody is expected to write about half of the 12-episode season.

Artist on Artist: John Cusack and Diablo Cody

There’s a really strange moment in the above Artist on Artist video with Diablo Cody and John Cusack, where Cusack is all, “The mainstream media don’t understand my my shitty war satire movie, so I gave Liz Phair a copy and she gave me a blurb for my website,” and Diablo’s all, “Uh, yeah, I’ll give you my quote soon,” and she has this look on her face like, “Shit, people are actually doing that? Liz Phair’s actually doing that? I have as big a crush on Lloyd Dobbler as anyone but … seriously?” Maybe we like Diablo Cody better than we thought. Although this does come right after she says something about how blogging=good because “you don’t have to contend with The Man,” which is about as fresh a sentiment as any in War, Inc, so maybe her pullquote really *is* on the way…

• 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.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two days––and or, don’t read many film blogs, which is the likelier of the two scenarios––you’ll know that Nathan Lee was laid off from his position as second film critic at the Village Voice this week, due to unspecified “economic reasons.” That makes Lee the fourth full-time New York based critic to get pink slipped in the past month, and it’s not hard to see his firing as a sign that, as Lee himself put it in an email to colleagues widely circulated on blogs, “staff film critic…jobs no longer appear to exist.”

For those of us old enough to have put a few years effort towards such a career but too young to have achieved any kind of institutional seniority, this is a pretty troubling state of affairs. Strippers are winning Oscars, but *I* have no future? There’s a great joke here, but because it’s on me it’s up to someone else to unpack.

In any case, I’ll point you to the comment sections on both The Reeler and The House Next Door, where bloggers/internet critics like Vadim Rizov and Andrew “Filmbrain” Grant are chewing over the issues with “old media” critics like Glenn Kenny and David Edelstein. Interestingly, a number of members of the extended Village Voice family weigh in, most notably Luke Y. Thompson, whose comment on Lee at The Reeler (which he now admits was “ill-considered”) touched off a firestorm of bashing.

I don’t know if it’s really appropriate to call Chasing Windmills a “mumblecore webseries,” as Molly at This Recording does, but that’s definitely Oscar winning screenwriter Diablo Cody playing a hippie stripper who teaches pole dancing in her living room, and implores the stars of the show to “throw off the shackles that society has placed on your pelvis.” Watch for the cameo from what appears to be Cody’s now-ex-husband Johnny, who provokes the line, “Do you really want to have a starring role in some ex-stripper’s sex games with her skeezy husband?”

• Naked pictures of a stripper? Not news. Naked pictures of a stripper-turned-Oscar winning screenwriter? Eh. Pictures of a stripper-turned-Oscar winning screenwriter emulating the naked-but-for-whipped-cream scene from the classic James Van Der Beek vehicle Varsity Blues? News enough!
• Meanwhile, proving that no good-intentioned attempt to bridge the cultural-political divide goes unpunished, some people are mad that soldiers presented Oscars. Interestingly, most of the complaints conflate the two documentary awards into the claim that the Academy implicitly mocked the soldiers by forcing them to give an award to the anti-Iraq war film Taxi to the Darkside. In fact, the soldiers presented the Best Documentary Short award, which went to Freeheld. Debbie Schlussel, probably the most hateful of the Hollywood haters, gets that part right, but she also repeatedly insists that Diablo Cody is fat, which, as the above pictures of her ribcage should show, is definitely wrong.
• David Bordwell credits “piracy” for ensuring the classic status of His Girl Friday. “If Columbia had renewed its copyright on schedule, would this film be so widely admired today?” Jason Mittel agrees in theory, but takes issue with Bordwell’s use of the p-word. “Once the film lapsed into the public domain, all of the resulting shoddy copies were legal and licit, not pirated. A more accurate term would be ‘unauthorized’…”
• I guess WIRED bloggers aren’t allowed to say “fuck.”

Here’s proof that Kevin Smith is the old and busted comedy filmmaker and Judd Apatow is the new hotness. Smith is totally biting Apatow’s meta, viral-marketing shtick with this video starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, which is meant to promote Smith’s upcoming movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno. It is also meant to parody the continuing string of “I’m Fucking So and So” videos (Sarah Silverman fucking Matt Damon, Jimmy Kimmel fucking Ben Affleck, Karina Longworth fucking Diablo Cody — oh wait, that last one hasn’t happened yet).

First of all, just casting Rogen and Banks makes Zack and Miri appear like an Apatow-movie wannabe. Then referencing Apatow’s films — the very premise of the video mocks the premise of Knocked Up and obviously it literally references The 40 Year Old Virgin and Apatow himself — builds up that appearance more. Mind you, I’ve never been a big fan of Smith’s work, but he has been around longer and should be more original than this. Right?

…Read more

Unlike other major papers, which mostly went with a cover shot of a resplendently emotional Marion Cotillard, the ever-classy New York Post puts “former stripper” Diablo Cody on the cover of their Oscar morning-after edition, letting her outdated job description stand in for her name. And with THAT, the rags-to-riches transformation from strip club Cinderella to Oscar winner, as well as the little indie-choo-choo-that-could fiction that made it happen, (the Post story actually uses the phrase “the little indie that could”, and refers to the win itself, which was the second-biggest lock of the night behind Javier Bardem, as a “shocker”) is complete.

Oh, and did we mention that the Post, like Fox Searchlight, the teeny-tiny independent company that made and released Juno, is owned by Rupert Murdoch? Vertically integrated corporate strategy is a beautiful thing.

Via Tim Shey.

UPDATE: I apologize for suggesting that Cody only wore one earring to the Oscars. I was clearly wrong.