You may be either too old or too young (or too cool) to remember this, but on March 11, 1999, kids across America pranked MTV by flooding TRL with requests for “Hangin’ Tough” by The New Kids on the Block. The ten-year-old song reached #2 on the show’s chart for that day, and alternative youth celebrated a self-satisfying victory against the pop culture-defining institution.

A decade later, it’s time for a similar yet larger prank on the culture-defining Academy Awards. Here’s the plan: voters need to write-in “Kirk Lazarus” for Best Supporting Actor instead of Robert Downey Jr. Paramount is asking for this, after all, with their humorous For Your Consideration parody ads featuring Downey as his Oscar-pedigree character from Tropic Thunder. And though the Academy would probably shut the prank down, the organization would have to admit they’ve permitted nominations for fake people before (Coen Bros. editor “Roderick Jaynes” and select Blacklist pseudonyms come to mind). Unfortunately, it is in fact Academy members, specifically actors, who do the nominating, and it’s unlikely that many of them would participate in something that allowed their profession to be lampooned so greatly.

Check out one of Paramount’s television For Your Consideration ads after the jump.

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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?

• Matt Dentler, whose name has become synonymous with the SXSW Film Festival’s ascendancy over the past several years as both a studio launching pad and a platform for no-budget American indies, is leaving the festival to take a position on a new digital rights wing at sales agency Cinetic. He’ll be replaced at SXSW by Janet Pierson who, with husband John, repped for sale some of the biggest indie success stories of the 90s, including Roger & Me and Slacker. For the full details behind these moves, check out this story at indieWIRE.
• Time Warner has fired roughly 450 of New Line’s 500 employees, as part of their move to fold the long-independent speciality division fully into the corporate beast.  The news has been expected for awhile––so much so that, after the requisite mourning, David Poland’s already looking at mini-studio’s demise as an opportunity to lessen urban blight.
• The Academy has announced some key dates for the 2009 Oscar calendar. Most of note: nominations will be announced two days later than is traditional, in order to give the presidential inauguration on January 20 some breathing room.

• Daniel Day-Lewis and Julie Christie continued their winning streaks over the weekend, each picking up the top individual prizes at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. The WGA had issued SAG a waver to allow them to produce a telecast with professional writers, which thus made it cool for stars to show up, which thus created the conditions for this photograph of Angelina Jolie in what appears to be a tie-dyed chiffon sack, thus giving credence to recent rumors that she may be carrying two new doses of Pitt spawn.
• Of the many “specialty” films which expanded their theater count in hopes of capitalizing on Oscar nominations, only Atonement failed to see a bump in percentage this weekend, with The Savages gaining 2% even as it shed screens. But the real story of weekend in the indie box office realm––which Variety buries at the very bottom of their writeup––is that Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes-winning, Oscar-ignored drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days earned $48,176 across just 2 screens.
• Ben Fritz gets off a nice joke about Sylvester Stallone being an “ancient warrior” in his mass-market box office writeup, but it must be little comfort to the team behind Rambo, which opened in second place behind something I had never heard of called Meet the Spartans.  Cloverfield dropped almost 70% in its second weekend, which makes sense considering the film’s hype peaked six months ago.

The Oscar nominations were announced about an hour and a half ago. I feel like the last thing a girl needs on a cold Tuesday morning in Park City is to wake up to Dave Karger refusing to admit that he doesn’t actually know how to predict the future, so I didn’t get up to live blog it, but you can check out the full list of nominees here. Just skimming the list, I don’t see any huge huge surprises, but here are some thoughts:

**Two nominations for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Best Supporting Actor and Best Cinematography––the exact categories it should have been nominated in, really, but the latter’s something of a surprise, considering that most Academy members must have watched the film on a DVD screener. Imagine what Warner Brothers could do if they actually tried.
**Costume Design seems to be the place to give consolation prizes to ambitious but laughable period pics. I doubt either Across the Universe or The Golden Age will beat Sweeney Todd, but both get a kind of credibility that they probably don’t deserve just by being nominated. Then again, Golden Age is a film about costuming in a way like nothing else I’ve seen, maybe ever––it exists as an excuse to pit Cate Blanchett in a suit of armor––so if this category is really about which director gave up trying to tell a story in order to put on a batshit insane fashion show, it’s got to be a lock.

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