FORGET IT, JAKE. IT’S OSCARTOWN

The annual Hollywood edition of Vanity Fair is upon us, cued to the Academy Awards, and the magazine has made a welcome departure from the cheesy sex of last year. The theme for 2007 is decidedly retro in dress and attitude, and expectations are being subverted right from the cover.

Annie Liebovitz exclusively for Vanity Fair.

It shows four of the least-likely guys to be found wearing a tuxedo – Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Chris Rock and Jack Black – doing exactly that in identical penguin suits. They look like they’re preparing for a remake of The Great Gatsby, or maybe Happy Feet 2.

Inside, there’s a 33-page tribute to film noir titled “Killers Kill, Dead Men Die,” shot in its entirety by Annie Liebovitz, and it shows classy movie stars doing things that people whisper about in smoky bars, gambling dens and rooms that rent by the hour.

Helen Mirren and Dame Judi Dench look like gun molls together, not Best Actress nominees.

Penélope Cruz wears a blonde wig and vamps like a reborn Marilyn Monroe, while Pedro Almodóvar attends to her like a dutiful svengali – or maybe a pimp.

Abigail Breslin, dressed all in black, stands and mourns at the grave of an unlucky sadsack, with nary a ray of sunshine to be found.

And is that Jack Nicholson lying lifeless on the ground, filled with lead pumped by a jilted skirt? He can’t say we didn’t warn him.

The Hollywood edition doesn’t go on sale until Wednesday in New York and L.A., Feb. 13 everywhere else, but there’s a clever sneak online in the form of slide show made to look and sound like a classic film noir.

Narrated by Ben Shenkman in era-appropriate voice of doom, and set to the jazzy tones of “Blue Dahlia” composed by John “Scrapper” Sneider and performed by the Film Noir Project, it’s a beat from the dark heart of the City of Angels.

The “cast” members are Amy Adams, Ben Affleck, Jessica Alba, Pedro Almodóvar, Alec Baldwin, Adam Beach, Jessica Biel, Abigail Breslin, Jennifer Connelly, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Robert De Niro, Robert Downey Jr., Kirsten Dunst, Aaron Eckhart, James Franco, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Hudson, Anjelica Huston, Rinko Kikuchi, Diane Lane, Derek Luke, Tobey Maguire, James McAvoy, Helen Mirren, Julianne Moore, Jack Nicholson, Bill Nighy, Ed Norton, Peter O'Toole, Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, Kerry Washington, Naomi Watts, Forest Whitaker, Bruce Willis, Patrick Wilson, Kate Winslet, Evan Rachel Wood.

Many of them are Oscar nominees, good calls by the Vanity Fair staff, who begin shooting their Hollywood edition in the fall, weeks before the Academy announces its nominees.

Note the presence of Adam Beach, whom many thought might get a Best Supporting Actor nod for Flags of Our Fathers – until the movie slipped to half-mast shortly after release. Missing from the mob scene is Beach’s fellow Canuck Ryan Gosling, who is in the Best Actor running for his junkie teacher turn in Half Nelson.

Did VF make a bad call by not including him, or is Gosling showing solidarity with girlfriend Rachel McAdams, who stormed off the set of last year’s Hollywood cover shoot when guest editor Tom Ford told her she’d have to appear nude?

That’s the kind of nosy question that could get you shot in the naked city…

I SEE YOUR SENTIMENTS AND RAISE YOU CLINT

“Start the Marty party!” roared Tom O’Neil after Martin Scorsese’s Directors Guild of America triumph this weekend. O’Neil, the webmaster of The Envelope, the L.A. Times’ awards blog, was right in sync with Movie City News, OscarWatch, Hollywood Elsewhere and the other Oscar oracles in seeing the DGA win as the ticket to Best Director glory on Feb. 25.

AP PHOTO/MATT SAYLES

Martin Scorsese with his Directors Guild of America Award for outstanding director on Saturday. Does this mean we can finally start the Marty Party and see him win an Oscar at last?

Scorsese, the man who helmed the superior crime story The Departed, wrestled to the mat Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel), Bill Condon (Dreamgirls) Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine) and Stephen Frears (The Queen) to get his first win at the DGA, which has predicted the eventual Oscar winner 52 out of 58 times. No mean feat for a guy who stands just 5’4”.

I’m in agreement with my fellow prize prognosticators that Scorsese will likely take this year’s Best Director trophy. And there’s no question he deserves the Oscar, after five previous attempts where such classics as Goodfellas and Raging Bull were passed over in favour of lesser works.

But aren’t we forgetting something? As much as we like to think that the Academy wants to do the right thing — even though it didn’t do that for Do the Right Thing in 1989 — there’s no proof that the 5,830 voting members of the Academy have a collective conscience. The opposite would hold true, given their abysmal track record in giving credit where credit is due.

This is the same outfit that five times passed over Alfred Hitchcock for Best Director and which didn’t even nominate him for Vertigo and North by Northwest, his greatest films. The Academy has also passed over Canada’s Norman Jewison seven times: three times for Best Director and four times for Best Picture. Scorsese could easily get the Oscar shaft yet again, no matter how wrong we may all declare that to be.

He’s facing a dramatically different group of voters than the DGA membership, a group that no longer takes the DGA win as gospel. And in the Academy contest, Scorsese is up against a formidable old rival who wasn’t in contention in this weekend’s kudos: Clint Eastwood, whose late-breaking Letters From Iwo Jima could prove to be the Oscar spoiler.

Eastwood is a clear favourite with the Academy, something that Scorsese obviously isn’t.

I suspect there might be a West Coast vs. East Coast thing happening here, the same kind of street rumble that rappers get into. Scorsese is very much a New York guy. Eastwood is West Coast all the way. Most Academy members live and work on the west coast.

Those other five times that Scorsese was nominated for Best Director and lost? He lost to a Westerner on three of those occasions: Robert Redford in 1980 (Ordinary People), Kevin Costner in 1990 (Dances With Wolves) and Clint Eastwood in 2004 (Million Dollar Baby). Barry Levinson (Rain Man) beat Scorsese in 1989. Levinson is from Baltimore, but he lives in California.

The only true Hollywood outsider to win against Scorsese is Roman Polanski (The Pianist) in 2002 and he was living in California before involuntarily relocating to Paris.

Maybe Scorsese should be talking to Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre on how to crack the West Coast posse.

THANKING THE ACADEMY FOR THE PRESIDENCY

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore delivers the keynote address on "Thinking Green" to a Silicon Valley group in San Jose, Calif., on Feb. 2, 2007.

I can't vote in American elections, so I can say this with no fear of being called partisan.

Well, I guess you could call me a gun-hating, Medicare-boosting Canuck surrender monkey, but let me say this anyway.

Former vice-president Al Gore will be the next president of the United States.

Why? Because on Feb. 25 he's going to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for An Inconvenient Truth, his exposé about global warming that is having a big impact on the global village consciousness.

Gore is on the side of the angels and of history with this issue, and he's been leading the charge. Even Canada's Conservative Prime Minster Stephen Harper is turning green with envy -- and with a eye to a coming election.

Wiser political minds than mine insist that Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards will be the next president.

I say the three are just worthy contenders for the crown, which will ultimately be placed on the head of Gore.

Global warming has become the issue of current times, replacing global terrorism as the nightmare scenario.

Gore offers hope and action. Just ask the people who hand out the Nobel Prizes, whom this week nominated Gore for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to save the planet.

The guy could have both an Oscar and a Nobel this year.  A perfect way to launch a campaign for a presidential race you know he's going to enter, despite all the non-denial denials.  He's being smart and letting Clinton, Barack and Edwards tear themselves apart before committing.

But he will. And he will win. Always trust a Canadian, eh?

Incidentally, An Inconvenient Truth just might be the first Oscar-nominated film to be linked to a presidential candidate, potential or otherwise. It might even be the first linked to any kind of active politician.

It's hard to verify that claim but even the Academy library staff can't think of a similar situation in the past.

"No one has jumped to mind," said librarian Libby Wertin, who has been asked the question before.

She qualified that by saying the Academy doesn't have the time or resources to do an exhaustive search.

"That's not part of the information we keep in our database," she told me. "We have no way of answering. It's just too broad a scope."

Wertin suggested I do my own digging, using the Academy online archive of Oscar nominees and winners.

I stuck with documentaries because I don't think a feature like All the President's Men would count. Nothing came up under "president" or "presidential."

For non-elected leaders, there were better results.

Interesting things came up under "king" and "queen."

A King's Story, a movie about royal abdicator King Edward VIII, was nominated for Best Documentary Feature in 1967.

A Queen is Crowned, a movie about the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, was nominated in the same category in 1954.

That's the same Queen Elizabeth, by the way, who is the subject of The Queen, the current Best Picture nominee.

SHINING OSCAR’S BOOTS

American Beauty snagged eight Oscar nominations in 2000, but was it Kevin Spacey's tour of retirement homes that locked up 5 of the statues, including one for him for Best Actor?

This is the start of Be Kind To Pensioners Month in Hollywood, although it’s better known as foreplay for the Academy Awards.

Are you a Miss Daisy in the L.A. area, requiring someone to drive you to the Piggly Wiggly for your skim milk and radishes? Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese will be happy to personally wheel you there, or to send over a chauffeured limo.

Do you require Jennifer Hudson to visit your bridge club or sewing bee at the Sunnydale Retirement Home, to sing one of her hit songs from Dreamgirls? I’m telling you that she’s going.

And hey, the love is infectious. Everybody gets to share, as long as they know Oscar.

Are you booking talent for talk shows, anything from Leno to Larry’s Cable Connection? Everyone from Alan Arkin to Mark Wahlberg will be happy to oblige. No need to pay for airfare or hotel and regular tap water in the green room will do. Just put them on the air, please.

All this is because ballots for the 79th Academy Awards have now been mailed to the 5,830 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

They must be returned by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 20 to official accountants Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, in order to be counted in time for Oscar night on Feb. 25. This means that nominees have to be on their best behaviour for the next few weeks, because the voters are mulling over their choices. It’s especially important this year with all the tight races.

Nominees can’t throw tantrums or telephones and they have to be willing to talk with and smile at even the most annoying of press hacks. The smart hopefuls are Oscar whisperers. They stroke for votes.

Visits to old folks’ homes is a tried-and-true method for getting votes out of the many elderly Academy members who may not have the time or inclination to plough through dozens of DVD screeners. Seniors are likely to remember the nice young man or woman who dropped by their home to sing a song, tell a joke or play a round of shuffleboard. They’re also less likely to ascribe cynical motivations to it, the way media jackals are apt to do.

The gambit is very successful. Just ask two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey, who did a tour of retirement homes enroute to his second Oscar in 2000, the year of the American Beauty sweep. He described it as giving back something to the people who had come before him.

I call it smart campaigning. But I’m a media jackal. Clint and Marty! Can you send that Caddy around for Miss Daisy now?