Harvard alum Portman followed up a few inconsistent efforts from Colin Farrell, James McAvoy and Scarlett Johansson ("I was clinging to the edge of my seat waiting for her to explode," she wrote of I've Loved You So Long actress Kristin Scott Thomas) with a touching, articulate nugget of praise for Milk star Sean Penn:

"They only need to know one of us," Harvey Milk explains to his campaign team in the film Milk. Sean Penn's performance as Harvey does exactly that: You learn one man's story, and his pains and triumphs become your own. It showed me how a great performance can also be a humanitarian act. When we know one character, one story, we recognize him as being of our own flesh and blood. When we understand his feelings, we put ourselves in his position. Not only is Sean's performance honestly and lovingly humane, but it is also virtuosic — every note is so subtly tuned that the work behind it is never visible. He infuses Harvey's courage with cowardice and his sexual prowess with hesitation.

Sean's Harvey is a cocky and charismatic orator, but always weighted by the foreboding dread of knowing his own tragedy. When the antigay Prop. 6 is unexpectedly voted down, surprise, elation and horror at the very existence of the referendum all rage in the blood beneath his skin. Sean Penn so inhabits Harvey Milk that I left the theater feeling the need to march against our frighteningly similar Prop. 8 to honor this man I now know.

Wow, Nat! Well done. Meanwhile, fellow Ivy Leaguer James Franco, who's in the first semester of a writing MFA at Columbia, turned in his blue-book tribute to Heath Ledger:

Heath in The Dark Knight was great. With any superhero movie villain, everybody is still contending with the huge shadow that Jack Nicholson cast with the first Batman. I don't know what Willem (Dafoe) thought with Green Goblin (in Spider-Man), but they have to think about Nicholson. His was such an indelible performance. Heath had to be very conscious of it when he and Christopher Nolan went into their movie. And they did such an incredible job of getting away from the Nicholson character while being faithful to the idea of the Joker.

Heath wasn't the funniest of Jokers, but certainly the more grounded of villains. At least on an emotional level, you could follow why he was doing this stuff; there was real emotional depth.

"The more grounded of villains"? Get. Us. Rewrite.

• Natalie Portman on Sean Penn in 'Milk' [Variety]

• James Franco on Heath Ledger in 'The Dark Knight' [Variety]

Publicity is really complicity. This is a simple concept that for whatever reason took me way too long to understand, but it first hit me on the set of Monster's Ball when, after I asked Halle Berry to approve some stills, she looked over a stack of contact sheets and said something like "You know, they're all fine to use however you want, but don't show them to my publicist because she'll just kill everything."

We are talking about photos that depicted Berry looking like hell, but that also showed her inhabiting a wholly unexpected character. At that moment I got the sense that Berry would be utterly complicit in the campaign, which she was, for which she was rewarded with an Oscar. You'd be surprised at how many actors (or, perhaps more accurately, their representatives) I've dealt with over the years who have not been able to grasp this.

Amen. Walker goes on to add that — gasp! — "[p]ublicity should not try to obfuscate" and that "lifestyle" publicists are probably best left to club promotion as opposed to shepherding films through competitive festival and theatrical marketplaces. We'd expect no less honesty from Jeremy Walker, which is all the more reason we'll so miss him — and sure, maybe even envy him from time to time — should he stay gone for good. Maybe he'll try consulting? Every studio in town could learn from a guy like this.

• Jeremy Walker on Independent Film PR [Indiewire]