From The Scotsman comes this interesting story: Oscars blacklist stars in bid to prevent peace protest speeches. So, assuming the Oscars do go forward as planned, there’s another reason to tune in: to see if anyone gets their acceptance speech cut short for saying what they think about the war.

You’ve probably seen this already, but if not, you’ll need to check it out. Mel Gibson, it seems, is making a movie about the last few hours of Christ’s life, which is nothing particularly new, but he’s going to present it in Latin and Aramaic, without subtitles. Hollywood says he’s crazy, but he’s paying for it himself, so more power to him. Apparently this is related to Mel’s close involvement with an ultra-conservative brand of Catholicism that believes the Vatican II reforms were a mistake; see the linked story for more wacky details.

From Bravo comes word of this cool op-ed piece from the L.A. Times (login with cypherpunk98/cypherpunk): North Korea: The Movie. By political psychologist Jerrold M. Post, it looks at some of the cool wackiness behind North Korea’s leader.

The folks at Salon have a story on Andy Serkis’s failure to get a best-supporting nomination from those aging thespians at the Acadamy.

Let’s see, it’s been how long since producer Steve Bing last made himself look like a horse’s ass by bringing a lawsuit that ended up going against him once the facts came out? A few months, maybe? Here’s the latest one, right on schedule: dueling lawsuits between Bing and actor Sean Penn. Penn claims Bing backed out on a deal to have Penn star in the film Why Men Shouldn’t Marry because he (Penn) refused to lighten up on his protests against the looming U.S. war with Iraq. Bing claims that there never was a movie deal, that Penn never really meant to appear in the film, and that Penn invented this whole stifling-of-his-rights story in an effort to extort $10 million from him. Right.

Nicely illustrating their conservative cluelessness, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has failed to dish up nominations for Peter Jackson, Andy Serkis, and Howard Shore in the Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Score Oscar categories, respectively. The Best Picture nomination for The Two Towers, and the smallish passle of technical-category nominations, were nice enough, I guess, but the Academy is digging themselves a pretty deep hole. Sigh. They’re just going to have to do their best to dig themselves out of it with next year’s The Return of the King.

The folks at the Academy are ready for anything with this year’s Oscar telecast, according to an article from Variety that has been posted at theonering.net. Favorite quotes: Though the Oscars have in fact been postponed three times before, a cancellation or significant delay is thought to be unlikely this year. At the most, insiders say, the ceremony could be delayed for two days in the case of war. A greater delay, it is thought, would wreak havoc with talent as well as network commitments worldwide. Also, A lot has to do with novelty,” Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz told Daily Variety. “A war that has just broken out gets a huge amount of media attention. A war that has been dragging on for a couple of months becomes more of a back-burner story. So as with so many other things in life, timing is everything.” Isn’t it, though?

As many of you allready know, there are a lot of stupid people out there — but I never realized just how bad the problem was. Staff members of “Yahoo Travel” say that lots of people are searching for vacation packages in places like “Mordor” and “Rivendell” — not realizing they are make believe.

Ach. Apparently the lovely Miranda Otto got married in an unpublicized ceremony on New Year’s Day. Congratulations to the happy couple, wishing you every joy, yadda yadda yadda.

Now that we’ve got that pesky TTT thing out of the way, it’s time to initiate the final countdown to ROTK. And what better way to whet your appetite than with a dozen images, posted on the Web by some calendar company, then taken down again, but still available thanks to the tireless obsessives at theonering.net. Among other goodness we’ve got Frodo in Shelob’s lair, Eowyn radiant in the morning sun atop the walls of the Houses of Healing (or at Edoras, maybe, not that it matters; it’s still Eowyn), and Denethor tasting the bitterness in the cup he mixed for himself. Yes, it’s going to be a long year. Update: Hi-res versions of the some of the images now available (though not Eowyn, dammit): Aragorn, Gollum, Gandalf, Arwen, and Frodo & Sam

The Los Angeles Times, despite having a really user-hostile web site, has a really nice article this morning on Andy Serkis, the actor who portrays Gollum in TTT. Check it out, if you can stand the registration requirement (cypherpunk98/cypherpunk), pop-up ads, and assinine little DHTML “blimp” that crawls back and forth over the text you’re trying to read: Putting a Human Face on ‘It’. Oh, and by the way: Miranda Otto, who plays Eowyn, is 35 today. Happy birthday, Miranda!

It looks like the Academy will get a chance to make up for their pathetic fuck-up in failing to award the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar to Walsh, Boyens, and Jackson last year (A Beautiful Mind? Hello??), by giving a Best Supporting Actor nomination (or heck; the actual statue) to Andy Serkis for his invisible-yet-destined-to-be-unforgettable portrayal of Gollum in the upcoming TTT. Which is a cool idea: that an actor could be honored for a role in which not one scrap of the actual actor ever appears on screen. Here’s hoping, anyway. 26 days and counting…

On appeal, the MPAA has decided that the depiction of George Clooney’s bare bottom in Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming film Solaris does not justify an R rating after all. CNN’s version of the headline: George Clooney Butt Gets PG-13.

Those Norwegians are smart cobbers. They’ve snapped up so many advance tickets to the as-yet-agonizingly-unreleased The Two Towers that it is the #1 film in the country, beating out all the crappy stuff currently showing in the cinemas. Bring it on!

Just because a) I can’t resist posting a Lord of the Rings link that jbc missed and b) jbc has been distracted from his TT obsession by a well-dressed criminal — I now bring you a nice picture of Treebeard courtesy of elbakin.com, what appears to be a french-language fantasy news site. Surprisingly, I actually think he looks pretty respectable.

Another round in the culture wars: Director Steven Soderbergh wants a PG-13 rating from the MPAA for his upcoming sci-fi film Solaris; they counter that a scene showing George Clooney’s ass earns the film an R. So Soderbergh is taking his case to the public, arguing that the ratings board is employing a double standard (since women’s butts don’t result in R ratings). How about it, ladies? How significant is a 40-foot-wide image of George Clooney’s bare bottom?

TSIA

Prepare yourself for a long, grueling season of obsessive fanboy postings about what will become, as of December 18, the Greatest Movie of All Time. To get things going, let’s take a look at this leaked Taiwanese (?) poster showing Miranda Otto as Eowyn, shall we? Sigh.

James Scott Bell describes seeing a 6-year-old girl brutalized (cypherpunk98/cypherpunk login required) by her parents, who had dragged her along when they went to see the movie “Red Dragon.” Having seen a fair amount of this lately myself, I’m in complete agreement with him about how disturbing it is. These parents are doing this to their kids in public; who knows what they’re doing to them in private.

In another cool example of Your Tax Dollars At Work, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps have apparently contracted with a film production company to create a four-minute movie on Operation Enduring Freedom, with the film being shown in movie-houses nationwide before the regular feature. One mom reportedly complained about her kids seeing war footage before the G-rated Veggie-Tales movie, but she just sounds like a whiner. Can’t start kids too early on learning to reflexively fall into line whenever the government decides it wants to kill people overseas, is my attitude.