E.T., CALL OSCAR

Pixar's Lifted, about an alien-in-training, is up for an Oscar Sunday night.

The categories for short films at the Academy Awards have traditionally been the make-or-break ones for office Oscar pools, since they’ve usually been a straight guess. Very few people outside of the Los Angeles city limits would have had an opportunity to see them prior to awards night.

This has changed in recent years with the advent of the Internet and its online streaming ability that is ideally suited for short subjects.

In many cases, you still can’t see all of the movies, but you can at least get a glimpse. Such is the case with Best Animated Shorts, which looks to be particularly competitive this year.

The Animated World Network is offering handy little clips of the five contenders: Pixar’s Lifted, Disney’s The Little Matchgirl, Fox’s No Time for Nuts, the NFB’s The Danish Poet and the Hungarian entry, Maestro.

The most curious of the lot is Pixar’s Lifted, the first film directed by movie sound ace Gary Rydstrom, the man behind many of the memorable noises in the Star Wars prequels, Finding Nemo, Terminator 2 and many other blockbusters.

It’s a story about a rookie space alien who has is being tested for his ability to abduct humans. He’s using some kind of tractor beam, the kind seen in the cheesiest of sci-fi movies, and he’s not very good at it. An unimpressed examiner sits by him with a clipboard, grading him on his lifting skills. There’s a Lifted page at the Pixar website that shows how it was made.

Word on it is good to win the Oscar on Sunday, if only because Rydstrom has many friends in the industry. Which made me wonder why it is that Pixar hasn’t seen fit to put it out for public consumption yet, either online or off. It was shown for three nights in September at an L.A. theatre to qualify for the Oscars and it’s part of a road show of Oscar-nominated shorts that Magnolia Pictures is taking to select U.S. cities. But most people won’t be able to see Lifted until June 29, when it will be released along with Ratatouille, the next Pixar feature.

This struck me as an awfully long time to wait for Lifted and odd that a 2007 release should be considered for the 2006 Oscar year, but apparently it’s not without precedent.

A Pixar spokeswoman says the company goes by the production date, not the release date. Last year it was nominated for the short One Man Band, which didn’t arrive in theatres until June 2006, when it was attached to the Pixar feature Cars. The same strategy is being used for the Lifted/Ratatouille combo. “It won’t change, whether we do win the Oscar — knock on wood — or we don’t,” she said.

Reading the digital tea leaves

AP Photo/Matt Dunham

British actress Helen Mirren mugs with her Best Actress statue at the British Academy Film Awards Sunday night.

Another weekend, another set of confusing awards.

The Brits of BAFTA like The Queen and the American writers of the WGA like Little Miss Sunshine for best original screenplay and The Departed for best adapted.

Which means we still can't say with any certainty which of these three films will win Oscar's Best Picture, or whether it will be Babel or Letters From Iwo Jima, the other two contenders.

So I'm looking elsewhere for clues. And I think they might be as near as a few mouse clicks away.

I've studied several major online polls that collect and collate Oscar predictions. (These are predictions as opposed to preferences, which I'll get to in a minute):

* Gurus o' Gold: A panel of critics, of which I am a member, that convenes every week or so at Movie City News (www.moviecitynews.com). We've been predicting for a couple of weeks now that Little Miss Sunshine will take the prize. The feel-good Sundance film currently leads with 54 points. The Departed and Babel are tied for second place (each has 46 points), followed by Letters From Iwo Jima (34) and The Queen (29).

* The Academy Tracker: Online poll at Variety.com shows The Departed leading with 32% of the vote. But second place is "Undecided" at 26%, followed by Babel (20%), Little Miss Sunshine (9%), Letters From Iwo Jima (7%) and The Queen (6%). For what it's worth, the percentage for LMS jumped by 1 per cent overnight, following the BAFTA and WGA awards, while Babel and Letters slipped by about the same.

* Entertainment Weekly: A panel of critics and Oscar watchers at www.ew.com list their predictions. Babel leads with 25 points, followed by Little Miss Sunshine (22), The Departed (19), Letters from Iwo Jima (12) and The Queen (12). LMS and Letters are gaining, the other three are slipping.

Do these figures tell us anything? Only that respondents to these polls believe that the three main contenders for Best Picture are, in alphabetical order, Babel, The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine.

Now let's look at a poll where personal preference is sought, not predictions:

* The Vanity Fair Oscar Poll: Online at www.vanityfair.com, which also has a daily blog called Little Gold Men, it has The Departed leading by a precise 31.7% of respondents, followed by Little Miss Sunshine (27.37%), Babel (20.18%), The Queen (13.97%) and Letters From Iwo Jima (6.78%). LMS does better when personal preference is used as the selection criteria.

Here's the million-dollar question: How many of these Vanity Fair voters are also Academy voters?

The Departed has almost exactly the same score on the Vanity Fair preference poll as it does on the Variety prediction poll. Does that imply any advantage or momentum?
And what does the sizeable "undecided" vote on the Variety poll mean? Are more than one in four respondents amongst Variety's Hollywood-savvy audience still hedging their bets?

Sasha Stone's Oscarwatch.com, meanwhile, has two Best Picture polls:

What will win: The Departed (39%), Little Miss Sunshine (30%), Babel (22%), Letters From Iwo Jima (5%), The Queen (1%)

What should win: The Departed (47%), Little Miss Sunshine (20%), Babel (15%), Letters From Iwo Jima (9%), The Queen (6%).

It's still a guessing game at this point. Best Picture probably comes down to a three-way fight between Babel, The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine.

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…

Number Crunching React

Sasha Stone, the high priestess of the must-read blog OscarWatch.com, gives Oscarology a nice shout-out today.

She posted an item about my Number Crunching post of two days ago, in which I mentioned how there hasn't been a Best Picture winner without an accompanying nomination for editing since Robert Redford's Ordinary People in 1980.

The factoid may seem trivial or geekish, but front-runner Brokeback Mountain didn' t have an editing nom last year, and the eventual winner Crash did.

Babel, nominated for Best Picture, also received a nomination for editing, which bodes well for its chances on taking home the top prize.

This year, only two of the Best Pictures nominees also have bids for editing: Babel and The Departed. If you believe in omens, this could spell trouble for Letters From Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen.

Two OscarWatch commenters added additional insights.

"Has any film ever won Best Picture without being nominated for editing or director?" wrote Michael Cusumano. "Unless I'm mistaken, Little Miss Sunshine would be the first. Also, you'd have to go back quite far to find a time when picture and director didn't line up two years in a row, 1948-49, I think. So if Scorsese wins, the odds favour The Departed. And since we're talking about stats, I haven't heard anyone mention that if Streep loses as predicted it will be her tenth (!) loss in a row."

Another OscarWatch poster, identified only as Nigel, isn't buying the "no editing, no win" voodoo.

Speculation is Little Miss Sunshine is longshot for Best Picture because it did not receive an editing nomination..

"I put it down to pure coincidence," he wrote. " I highly doubt Academy members (or their assistants) sit there filling out the ballot and think, 'Well, hang on a second there, Skip, Brokeback Mountain doesn't have an editing nomination! I can't vote for that!' Then again, this is the same group that gave Kim Basinger an award for acting, so who knows how they think?"

Excellent points all, and just another indication of why this is one of the most interesting Oscars in recent memory.