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?

STICKING UP FOR BEYONCE

Is Beyoncé being punished for not being the bad kind of diva about her role in Dreamgirls, asks Peter Howell.

I’m sure Beyoncé Knowles doesn’t need my sympathy, but I’ve been feeling sorry for her anyway.

I’m also worried that her snubbing at the Oscars might lead Hollywood to be even more avaricious in the future.

When Dreamgirls was being touted by over-caffeinated commenters as a guaranteed Best Picture nominee and likely winner, months before the movie was even released, it also seemed as if Beyoncé was also shoo-in for Best Actress honours.

She was top-billed for the movie, right behind Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx and ahead of comedian Eddie Murphy.

That was before the press got a look at the movie and many scribes decided that the real story was Jennifer Hudson, the American Idol cast-off who plays a rejected Motown diva. And suddenly it became Beyoncé who was the cast-off. She’s being punished for not being the bad kind of diva.

Hudson is indeed great in the role of Effie White, both as an actor and singer, and she deserves acclaim and the Best Supporting Actress nod she eventually got. But it’s sad that in downplaying her own natural ebullience and singing power in the role of Deena Jones, Beyoncé was deemed to have been upstaged by Hudson.

The New York Post wrote it that way in a very catty article, just before the film’s release last month, saying the former Destiny’s Child lead singer is made to look “like a pretty extra” by Hudson.

Hudson does get more screen time in the movie, but Beyoncé’s role was supposed to be that of a slow-blooming talent. “I knew the risks before I took it,” Beyoncé said at the New York junket I attended in December.“I read the (stage) script. I knew that Deena was not the underdog. I knew she didn’t sing (the show-stopper) ‘And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going.’ I knew that all of our parts are very important, because it’s an ensemble cast. I knew she wasn’t the lead. It’s not about her life.”

She was very gracious about congratulating Hudson for a job well done and she seemed completely credible when she said she didn’t accept the role to win awards or to prove that she can sing. “I have nine Grammys,” she said. “I don’t have to prove that I’m a star, because I already am. I wanted to prove that I can act.”

She did just that, but what’s troublesome about this is that she’s being made to look bad for being a good soldier. She didn’t try to upstage Hudson for the sake of her own image, which many other actors would have.

Being a team player might have cost her an Oscar nomination. And you can bet that other actors will take note and be less reluctant to do what she did, in allowing a complete unknown to so dominate a movie.

Anything that makes Hollywood less about the art and more about the glory is a bad thing

BRING ME THE HEAD OF EDDIE MURPHY

Listen, I know the Oscars have turned into something of a blood sport.But this is the first time I’ve actually seen someone offering a bounty to take down one of the contenders.

Jeffrey Wells of the Hollywood Elsewhere blog is so incensed by the thought of Eddie Murphy sleepwalking his way to a Best Supporting Actor win for Dreamgirls, he's offering a C-Note to anyone willing to launch a Stop Eddie Murphy web campaign.

Jeffrey Wells of the Hollywood Elsewhere blog (http://www.hollywood-elsewhere.com/) is so incensed by the thought of Eddie Murphy sleepwalking his way to a Best Supporting Actor win for Dreamgirls, he’s offering a C-Note to anyone willing to launch a Stop Eddie Murphy web campaign.

“It may be too late and it may be a futile notion, but it’s time for all good people to rise up and band together in order to Stop Eddie Murphy from winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar,” Wells writes.

“If anyone wants to launch a website to help amplify this feeling and (who knows?) maybe trigger a turnaround of opinion, I’ll contribute $100 bucks ... seriously. He’s the one bad guy in the bunch who, I feel, really doesn’t deserve to win. Surely others feel this way?”

That’s American dough, by the way, which is currently worth $118.20 Canadian. That kind of coin would buy a lot of maple-glazed donuts.

The outburst by Wells was triggered by Murphy’s win Sunday night at the Screen Actors Guild awards for his portrayal of James Thunder Early, the amalgam of James Brown and Little Richard that Murphy does in Dreamgirls.

Rants Wells: “I’ve seen that bored-indifferent, man-am-I-rich, leave-me-alone look on Murphy’s face too many times, and I’d be tickled if the Oscar camera could catch him scowling when Mark Wahlberg or Alan Arkin win instead. He may have the Oscar in the bag, but I keep hearing he’s not very well-liked in the industry and that he’s regarded as a bit of an a--hole. Plus he was too cool to show up for any one of those three swanky Dreamgirls press events that Terry Press threw last year. It’ll just take a little blogosphere surge to make it happen ... maybe. Or maybe not.”

Peter Howell is rooting for Mark Wahlberg to take the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Departed.

Wells goes on to say that he doesn’t hate Murphy and actually used to love him, but “I can’t get over that run of truly awful big-studio films he made from the mid ’80s to the late ’90s.”

As extreme as it seems to be hammering a Wild West bounty poster into the Oscarville oak tree, I suspect Wells may be onto something here.

Murphy really has had it pretty easy this awards season. He didn’t do much press to support Dreamgirls — certainly a lot less than Beyoncé, Jennifer Hudson and Jamie Foxx — and it’s possible his lack of enthusiasm contributed to the movie’s shut-out from the big-ticket Oscar noms.

And Murphy’s performance really wasn’t all that remarkable. If you saw him during his Saturday Night Live heyday in the early 1980s, you’ve already seen his Dreamgirls shtick.

Meanwhile, there are far more deserving choices for Best Supporting Actor amongst any of the other four nominees, whom I list in order of personal preference: Mark Wahlberg (The Departed), Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine), Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) and Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond).

Let the Sunshine in

Hope you had lots of Red Bull and strong coffee tonight, if you were staying up to follow the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

The tape-delayed results trickled in via satellite and online, each one inducing greater yawns than the other – with the exception of the ensemble acting award, which may indicate an upset brewing for Oscar night.

Four of the five film winners weren’t the least bit surprising, and they serve to improve the chances of an Oscar “me too” on Feb. 25, since actors dominate the Academy. But don’t expect an exact match, since the memberships of SAG and the Academy intersect but aren’t mirror images of each other.

Helen Mirren won Outstanding Female Actor in a Leading Role for The Queen.  In a replay of her Golden Globes twofer, she also won the prize for Outstanding Female Actor in a Television Movie or Miniseries for Elizabeth I.

Forest Whitaker won Outstanding Male Actor in a Leading Role for The Last King of Scotland.

Eddie Murphy won Outstanding Male Actor in a Supporting Role for Dreamgirls.

Jennifer Hudson won Outstanding Female Actor in a Supporting Role for Dreamgirls.

No surprises for these four choices, which were all widely predicted. But there might be sign of a tide turning in the fifth film category, the award for Outstanding Cast in a Motion Picture.  It went to Little Miss Sunshine, an indication that Hollywood’s infatuation with “The Little Sundance Comedy That Could” is no fluke and continues to build. There is no Oscar equivalent for ensemble acting, but people really love this movie, more so than the perceived Oscar front-runners Babel and The Departed, it seems. Could an upset be brewing to crown a comedy Best Picture?

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.

THEY WUZ ROBBED: If Dreamgirls was looking for any sympathy for its Best Picture snubbing from regular moviegoers, it was sulking on the wrong street corner.

The Internet Movie Database (http://imdb.com) asked web surfers the musical question, "Which film was robbed the most by this year's Oscar nominations?"

In an IMDb poll, 23 per cent of respondents are convinced Children of Men was robbed for not getting a Best Picture nomination compared to less than 7 per cent for Dreamgirls.

The answers from 16,954 respondents indicated the majority of people are far from heartbroken over the Dreamgirls debacle. The film's Best Picture beating ranks a distant fifth on the list of things people are peeved about.

Here's the 13 occupants of Oscar's boneyard of broken dreams, ranked in order of significance (percentage of respondents follows in brackets):

1. Children of Men: No Best Picture nomination - 23 per cent

2. Casino Royale: Zero nominations -19 per cent

3. Volver: No Best Picture/Best Foreign Language Film nominations - 10.9 per cent

4. United 93: No Best Picture nomination - 9 per cent

5. Dreamgirls: No Best Picture nomination - 6.7 per cent

6. Bobby: Zero nominations - 6.5 per cent

7. Apocalypto: No major category nominations - 5.8 per cent

More than 10 per cent of IMDb surfers wanted Volver to be shown more Oscar love with a Best Picture or Best Foreign Language Film nomination.

8. Flags of Our Fathers: No major category nominations - 5.5 per cent

9. Over the Hedge: No Best Animated Film nomination -4.4 per cent

10. This Film Is Not Yet Rated: No Best Documentary nomination - 3 per cent

11. Little Children: No Best Picture nomination - 2.7 per cent

12. The Painted Veil: Zero nominations- 2.3 per cent

13. Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing: No Best Documentary nomination - 1.1 per cent

Number crunching

Jennifer Hudson’s supposed lock for a Best Supporting Actress win is in doubt.

DOING THE MATH: It’s always dangerous to allow a words guy near numbers. But I haven’t seen any Einsteins out there crunching the data on the Best Picture contenders, so I guess it’s up to me.

Tradition has it that the leading Academy Awards nominee not only gets a Best Picture nod, but almost always goes on to win the prize as well.

But as everyone now knows, Dreamgirls made Oscar history this week by becoming the first nominees champ to not have a Best Picture bid in its basket of kudos.

Take a closer look, though and perhaps we’ve all erred by naming just one champ. There might actually be three of them.

Dreamgirls has eight nominations, which is on the low side to begin with. But three of those nods are in the Best Original Song category, for the tunes “Listen,” “Love You I Do” and “Patience.”

Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin, the 10-year-old firecracker who charms everybody, male or female, young or old, could dance home with an Oscar.

The film can win just a single Oscar for its songs, no matter how popular they are, which means the best it can do on Feb. 25 is to take six golden statues. And that result is far from assured, because it’s clear the Academy isn’t as enchanted with Dreamgirls as it obviously is with Little Miss Sunshine.

As the Dreamgirls skyrocket sputters, Jennifer Hudson’s supposed lock for a Best Supporting Actress win is in doubt. She could quite conceivably lose to Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin, the 10-year-old firecracker who charms everybody, male or female, young or old.

Now look at Babel, which has seven nominations, Best Picture included. Two of Babel’s noms are for Best Supporting Actress for Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi. Like Dreamgirls, the film could take a maximum of six Oscars. Unlike Dreamgirls, the dual acting nomination indicates a deeper appreciation of this movie by the Academy, which is dominated by actors.

Then there’s The Queen, which has six nominations, none one of them competing and one an almost guaranteed winner: Helen Mirren as Best Actress. The film also has a Best Picture nomination.

So Dreamgirls, Babel and The Queen could each win statues, but they couldn’t all do it together. And only Babel and The Queen could win Best Picture.

Only nine movies have ever won Best Picture without an accompanying nod for editing. The last time that happened was in 1980, when Robert Redford’s Ordinary People beat Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull in an awards outcome often cited as one of the weirdest.

Perhaps there are really three nominations leaders? Or am I missing something here?

Here’s something else to key into your calculator. Only nine movies have ever won Best Picture without an accompanying nod for editing.

The last time that happened was in 1980, when Robert Redford’s Ordinary People beat Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull in an awards outcome often cited as one of the weirdest.

Only two of the current Best Picture nominees also have nominations for editing: Babel and The Departed (which has total of five noms).

Could this spell trouble for The Queen? The lack of an editing nomination last year for Brokeback Mountain may have foretold the film’s loss for the Best Picture title to Crash, which did have one.

Anyone with a slide rule or crystal ball who wants to challenge these numbers and theories, feel free to let me know.