In his intro to the list, Guru-master David Poland cautions, "about half of the contenders haven't been seen. Darts are flying in the dark. Some are hitting expected titles and others are real surprises."

How then does the punditry deliver such judgments on films which may still be getting worked over in the cutting room? A combination of factors go into a Oscar savants' calculations - first, as noted above, hitting certain tried and true notes (historic epic, biopic, Clint Eastwood directed) move a film straight onto the field, no questions asked. And then the pundits note the buzz from friends at the studios and in the marketing departments; what they are hearing about the film. One will note that Lovely Bones, which just on the basis of its provenance seemed to have the Best Picture crown locked up two years ago before it was ever shot, now falls surprisingly low on the Guru scale. Could there be some bad buzz flying about from those few on the inside who have seen the film?

One should also note that the September buzz, now 184 days before the March 7, 2010 Oscar telecast, is almost always wrong in some very huge ways. Last year's chart just after Toronto , Frost/Nixon, Milk and Benjamin Button were the early favorites, far outshining eventual winner Slumdog Millionaire, and The Soloist, which ended up being so dreary it ended up dropping out of the Oscar race,its release was pushed back to the following year, was in a respectable seventh place on the pundits round-up.

In 2007, the ultimately dreadful Atonement was far and away the pundits' best bet. In 2006, the early charts were led by Dreamgirls, Flags of Our Fathers and Babel, all of which fizzled far short of trophy night.

Perhaps the greatest fun of the Oscar race is watching these pre-season flame-outs. Every year brings a film or two massively bloated and portentious in its very silhouette; it can be seen standing on a mountain-top overlooking Hollywood, waiting to come down and claim its destiny, which then sputters and tumbles all the way down the hill, hitting Sunset Blvd. with a thud. The aforementioned Soloist comes to mind. Phantom of the Opera, Cold Mountain, Memoirs of a Giesha - wonderful car wrecks all.

Of course, a good percent of the time these bloated monstrosities actually win the race (Gladiator, The English Patient, Titanic and Braveheart, to name a few).

And no Oscar race is officially underway without the first harumph of the season from the LA Times' Patrick Goldstein. To the horror of the Times' ad sales department, Goldstein has been waging war on the Oscar race for several years now, every season making the shocking case that the Oscar derby is not about art, why it's just a contest! And a silly one at that! (Imagine, calling the Oscars silly! The cajones!)

Goldstein's brave stand against contests kicked off this week with his plea to the world to ignore the Oscars, at least until he tells you its time to pay attention. This year, he seems to be bringing some muscle into the mix, promising to review the early predictions next February and hold erring pundits accountable.

At Moviecitynews, the Gurus O' Gold pundits panel have offered their picks on this year's Oscar favorites, in a Best Picture race thrown into pandemonium by the announcement that there will be ten nominees this year, rather than the standard five. The Academy's hope seems to have been that by broadening the field, they would make room for some crowd pleasers, some movies that people have actually seen, to get what used to be called "the general public" perhaps interested in what has largely become a battle of obscure indie dramas.

If that was their intent, however, the Gurus offer little hope in the top slot.

Out of the gate, The Gurus have selected as the one film they clearly have all seen at the slight favorite: Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq bomb defusing drama The Hurt Locker, which after two and a half months of release has raked in all of eleven million dollars.

After Hurt Locker, the field is cluttered with various usual suspecty types of trophy bait, whose log lines and proper nouns read like mash-ups of contenders of yore; A Clint Eastwood directed bio of Nelson Mandela (Invictus), a Weinstein produced musical (Nine), a Jason Juno Reitman/George Clooney film about a corporate downsizer (Up In the Air), the story of an overweight, illiterate teen in Harlem (Precious) Peter Jackson's rendition of a beloved favorite of contemporary quasi-snooty fiction (The Lovely Bones) and Hillary Swank in an Amelia Earhart biopic (Amelia).

That's right people, it is on. Oscars 2010 is here to stay, for the next six months.

With the premiere of his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, looming on September 16th at the Toronto Film Festival, normally you'd expect to find Moore filling up every inch of media, shocking the bourgeiouse with his trademark Angry Guy Banging on the Palace Walls shtick, providing Matt Drudge with a new outrageous quote every news cycle.

But Moore has been strangely silent in this run-up and the LA Times' Patrick Goldstein has learned that he plans to keep a lid on it for weeks to come no less.

When Goldstein called Overture Films, Moore's distributor to arrange an interview, he was told that the filmmaker would sit for interviews after the premiere, but the pieces would all be embargoed Sept. 23rd, the day the film opens in New York and Los Angeles.

Why? Because Moore is doing a sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey, which won't air until Sept. 22. And if Oprah wants an exclusive, she gets it, since when it comes to books, movies or music, no one offers a better promotional platform than La Winfrey.

There is perhaps no bigger winner here than Barack Obama, who is trying to persuade America that his health care package is not a socialist takeover of their lives. He will get a precious few weeks wherein Michael Moore is not clogging up the airwaves with his caricature of Middle American GOP fears. A conspiratorial mind might even wonder of Miss Winfrey is slyly doing her old pal on Pennsylvania Ave. a solid.

But for Moore himself, it turns out, even when you are peddling an attack on the entire economic underpinnings of our civilization, there is no place to get that message out like the couch of the Grande Dame of the Midwest, Our Oprah.

Replacing Lyons and Mankiewicz as hosts of the long-running show, formerly hosted by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, will be A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, two men widely respected in the world of film criticism who have both served as fill-ins on the show in the past.

As the LA Times Patrick Goldstein notes, Ben Mankiewicz wasn't all that bad, but it appears as though he was brought down by the tremendous weight of Lyons' Herculean suckage.

To be fair, Mankiewicz, the scion of a fabled Hollywood family who hosts Turner Classic Movies presentations, was clearly more knowledgeable than his counterpart. As my colleague Chris Lee reported last December, Lyons, son of film critic Jeffrey Lyons, was held in such low esteem in the critical fraternity that others in the profession were lining up, happy to be quoted by name ridiculing his work, with Chicago-based film critic Erik Childress saying of Lyons: "He has no taste. Everyone thinks he's a joke."

So how awful was Ben Lyons? This awful:

You know what hurts a movie like Max Payne is the success of the Batman franchise. That obviously is about story and character so they think for all films of the genre it's gotta be about story and character and this whole backstory of him losing his wife. I don't care about that. I wanna see Max Payne shoot people. That's all I want from a movie like this.

Film lovers of the America rejoice — your own personal long national nightmare is finally over! But what will now become of the "Stop Ben Lyons" blog?

John Koblin did his heroic best to explain What It All Means: The accelerating decline of Variety, the rise of celebrity Twitters; the enduring but increasingly preposterous hope of the Los Angeles Times, the swagger of self-made blog bigfoot Nikki Finke; the "clubby" world of pre-internet Tinseltown reporting, the ambitions of upstart blogger Sharon Waxm—

"I do think it's kind of surprising that Sharon Waxman even has a blog," [former LA/NY Times reporter Anita] Busch told us. "I think she's even one of the worst journalists I've ever encountered."

Uhhh...

"Her site is getting no traffic and is inaccurate and boring..." Finke said.

OK, well, maybe we could get back to a constructive dialog about how the economic misfortunes of movie studios have maybe accelerated the decline of printed med...

[Variety's Brian] Lowry, in a blog post singling out [LA Times' Patrick] Goldstein, calls him lazy, petulant and a weak reporter. "Now you have this blog, ‘The Big Picture,' so I'm thrilled to see... you squeeze out more than 800 words a week," wrote Mr. Lowry.

Right. We'll skip right over the discussion of economic viability amid the decimation of advertising revenue in the print-to-online transition, then, and just ask if anyone else want to hurl some fecal m...

"The way [Finke] twists things and the way she always manages to bend the facts-and I put facts in quotes-is in a way that suits her..." Ms. Waxman... added. "People around Hollywood are terrified of her."

Alright, fine, bottom line: In case the example of New York wasn't clear enough, Los Angeles media also illustrate how technology and fragmentation are reviving the old tradition of feuding. As longtime Variety kingpin Peter Bart explains to Koblin, we're going back to the 1930s, when Louella Parsons competed ruthlessly with former friend Hedda Hopper to dominate Hollywood gossip. Everyone is at one another's throats.

No, the Waxman-Finke rivalry isn't exactly hot news, but the point is that more of these little squabbles are erupting all the time, if only because there are so many would-be media alpha dogs in this period of flux, before the inevitable consolidations and shakeouts that make life boring again.

Seeking a final bit of illumination on that, we excitedly emailed Koblin's piece to a media source who quickly replied, "I thought only Hollywood bloggers cared about feuds created entirely to bait traffic, but I totally forgot about the New York Observer!"

Oh, my.

Then again, what did we expect? Welcome to the future. It's kinda bitchy!

[NY Observer]

(Illustration via)

After I got over the emotional experience of seeing America embrace an African American as its president, I found myself wondering: Did this election really represent a huge cultural triumph as well as a political mandate? That was a big reason why I spent Friday night with "Soul Men" producer David Friendly, watching him do what producers often do on their film's opening night, traveling around to local theaters to see whether their movie has any juice at the box office.

"Soul Men" isn't just any movie. It's a comedy starring two prominent African Americans, Sam Jackson and the late Bernie Mac, playing '70s-era backup singers who reluctantly reunite three decades later to play at a memorial concert for their old frontman. So it was an intriguing cultural test case: Would white audiences come out to watch an R-rated comedy with two black actors engaging in uproarious, but often barbed and profane insult humor? The box-office results provided a simple answer: No.

And here we were thinking that audiences just didn't want to see this movie! In fact, later in the piece, Goldstein admits that theaters at the Magic Johnson complex were only half-full for Soul Men's first 10:15 screening, suggesting that even black audiences weren't moved to see a film where the only surviving member of the main cast has a terrible, terrible goatee-type thing. Patrick, dump the politics-cum-pop analysis (we're still trying to shake off "Secret Life of Bees Buries the 'Bradley Effect'") and stick to what you do best: going out to lunch with producers you know, and occasionally basing an entire film's box office outlook on what a Brentwood nine-year-old had to say about it.

• 'Soul Men' delivers mixed verdict on Obama victory [LAT via Brendan Nyhan]

· Back before the Internet, Patrick Goldstein used to sit at an old-fashioned typewriter and daydream and have the whooooole Oscar beat to himself at the LA Times. Then came bloggers, whom he couldn't read on his typewriter. Word got back to him they were writing about the Academy Awards! The effrontery!

Grumpy Goldie upgraded and eventually wound up blogging himself, culminating in today's bitter screed arguing: "Anyone who doesn't believe that the Oscars haven't been thoroughly hijacked by a gang of daffy, clown-suit-clad Oscar bloggers making endlessly moronic best picture predictions just hasn't been paying attention." He specifically referred to political commentary like yesterday's insane EW item "How Obama Helps Batman," but the point was clear: Patrick misses his typewriter!

· Not one to back down from an opportunity to write 5,000 words of self-defense from a piece where he isn't even mentioned, early blog adapter David Poland fired back:

[W]e don’t all think like you, Patrick. Sorry. Honestly, I seem to recall you having a broader mind a few years back. But lunch by lunch with agents and studio execs and hack producers trying to get you to peddle their wares, you seem to have forgotten that ideas do not live and die in your cul de sac… except when they are in your word processing program… you BLOGGER!

Oooooohh, that's hateful. But the first rule of Oscar Club is that you don't talk about Oscar club — especially the part about the clown suit.

· Speaking of which, skin-crawling awards freak Tom O'Neil looked down at his floppy shoes and jump suit with animal balloons dangling from its belt loops, grabbed his big red nose and honked out his own reply:

If Goldstein wants to take aim at anything, why not those best-picture victories by Gandhi or Dances With Wolves or the fact that one was denied to what the American Film Institute repeatedly hails as the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane?

No, Tom, you'll do, but thanks! Is it March yet?

• Election + Oscar pundits = absurd [LAT]

• How Patrick Goldstein Thinks [The Hot Blog]

• What's behind Patrick Goldstein's relentless attacks on Oscar bloggers? [Gold Derby]

We've already elaborated on why we think this is, but Fox chieftain/upwardly mobile TV host Tom Rothman unwittingly proffered his own opinion on the matter last year in a chat with Goldstein:

Fox's reluctance to promote the film's sci-fi nature is actually in keeping with studio Co-Chairman Tom Rothman's long-held belief that sci-fi films and films set in the future are box-office poison. In 2006, the studio had Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey and filmmaker Jay Roach all signed up to do a big comedy called Used Guys, but got cold feet, killing the project.

Why? Rothman thought it was too expensive. But more important, the studio chief was worried about the subject matter—it was a sci-fi comedy about men living in a women-ruled world. Not long after the project was axed, when I was having lunch with Rothman, I asked him why he was so adamant about dumping the film. He threw a question right back at me. "Can you name one sci-fi comedy that's ever made any money?" When I couldn't come up with an answer, he said, triumphantly: "See!" (I was halfway home before I thought of the perfect comeback: Men in Black.)

First of all: Tom. Seriously. When are you going to invite us to lunch? We know you probably didn't see the whole "Goldstein blogs" thing coming either, but still. What's your Friday look like? Second: Actually, we have no second. Have we mentioned that nobody cares about Eddie Murphy? Sucks for Paramount, as Goldstein mentions, which has two Murphy vehicles (A Thousand Words and NowhereLand) on the way this fall. Alas, we don't make the rules. But we can make the reservations — call us, Tom!

• No one wanted to 'Meet Dave' [The Big Picture]

And while the release has now been postponed indefinitely and Horn assures us that Jonze is staying on the project, tell us if Horn's comments after the jump read as one of the less emphatic endorsements you've seen from a studio boss this year:

"We've given him more money and, even more importantly, more time for him to work on the film," Horn said. "We'd like to find a common ground that represents Spike's vision but still offers a film that really delivers for a broad-based audience. We obviously still have a challenge on our hands. But I wouldn't call it a problem, simply a challenge. No one wants to turn this into a bland, sanitized studio movie. This is a very special piece of material and we're just trying to get it right. ... The jury is still out on this one. But we remain confident that Spike is going to figure things out and at the end of the day we'll have an artistically compelling movie.""

Goldstein brings up a good point that for better or worse, Warners gambles (or used to, anyhow) on directing talent more aggressively than most studios are prepared to do, but that for every Christopher Nolan franchise reboot there's a Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain) or Oliver Hirschbiegel (The Invasion) lurking in the distance. The worst thing Horn and Robinov could do, though, is nudge Jonze somewhere toward the middle — somewhere ostensibly "safe," where the edge and the bloom wear off in short, mediocre order, leaving everyone dissatisfied.

Which, of course, is where it's headed considering Warners' recent hard right turn. Thanks a pantload for the pep talk, Horn.

• Can Spike Jonze save 'Where the Wild Things Are'? [The Big Picture]

Nowadays Graves' office even accepts scripts to review for a ratings opinion. "We don't guarantee the film made from a script will get a certain rating, but we can give them an idea. We can say, well, you've got two 'fucks' in the script, or the violence on Page X sounds brutal. One of our senior raters is very good at assessing scripts. Another is the filmmaker liaison, to answer production questions like: 'How much nudity can we show in this scene?' " Graves says the liaison issues are "the most interesting part of the job for me, and growing larger." ...

Another problem, though, is that studios may embroider on the feedback they receive from the ratings board and request editing changes as if they were demands by the ratings board. Graves says, "We don't make editing suggestions. So if a director complains, 'The ratings board said we have to change the whole first half of the film,' they're clearly being lied to." She predicts, however, that such scapegoating has peaked: directors, who are "wising up" to the studio trick, insist on speaking directly with the ratings person.

Of course, as author Sonja Bolle notes, only 28 percent of the more than 800 movies submitted annually to the ratings board come from MPAA members, meaning that the lion's share of the remaining 72 percent — mostly American independents already facing limited distribution options — are accountable only to Graves and company for the rating that can single-handedly make or break its profit potential.

The results of that arrangement are evident to anyone who's seen Kirby Dick's ratings board documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, which itself exposed the board's anonymous raters (just average parents — except their kids are mostly over 30), studio-vs.-indie hypocrisy and received an NC-17 when producers at IFC submitted it in 2005. But there she is, Stanford's pride of 1963, still seething about the time Bertolucci's PG-13 epic The Last Emperor apparently forced her to explain shrimping to her young daughters. Everyone knew she'd go far.

• Discretion Adviser [Stanford Magazine via TBP]

Some little birds at the LAT tell us that venerated entertainment journalist Patrick Goldstein will expand his Big Picture column with the launch of a new blog Tuesday morning.

The LAT hopes to put Goldstein's knowledge and sources to work in a blog that brings responsible journalism to the faster-than-pulp pace of 24/7 online entertainment reporting.

Terrific — except those little birds at the LAT must have missed the part where Goldstein has already been blogging for weeks now (to be fair, it takes about that long to navigate the LAT website). Still, thank goodness we've got Goldstein on the "faster-than-pulp" blogging beat; his edgy, current musings like "Wal-Mart rocks" and "The National Anthem needs to be sung this way, not that way," will surely leave Hollywood insiders quaking in their Prada boots.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• BREAKING: Patrick Goldstein Goes from Journo to Blogger [FishbowlLA]

In case you haven't been paying attention (and the gist if these pieces is that you haven't, but you really, really should), it goes like this:

1. Longtime critics are being bought or forced out of their print institutions.

2. Studios don't need critics, but independent film distributors are upset because they need the word of mouth.

3. The dissemination of film news, reviews and rumors online has supplanted their print analogues.

4. The Internet both diffuses and democratizes criticism — and the market that sustains it.

5. Rinse and repeat in The New York Times, Variety, New York Post, Salt Lake Tribune, Movie City News and finally (we pray) the Los Angeles Times.

Are we oversimplifying? No more so than Goldstein, who ambitiously invokes everyone from Pauline Kael to Matt Drudge en route to the same sorta-thinky semi-conclusion at which the last 100 writers who tackled this issue arrived:

Whether critics are irritants or masters of elucidation, opinions still matter. But no one is respected simply because of the authority of the institution they write for. The Web isn't the enemy of critical thinking. The land of a million blogs is a medium brimming with opinion. What's different is the reader gets to decide whose opinion matters the most. It's a big adjustment, but maybe it's time critics, like many artists, realize they should pay more attention to their audience.

So should Goldstein, the ultimate latecomer to a dance that really got going back in 2006 when everybody and his mother (including David Carr and Anne Thompson, who've eagerly revisited the meme in the last seven days) was writing about the phenomenon of the "critic-proof" film. Readers didn't care then, and two years of distance and 27 critical casualties later, they still don't seem to be reacting — unless, that is, you count our eyes rolling back in our heads at the first glance of Goldstein's "analysis." We don't.

Not coincidentally, all this overkill dovetails with The New York Times's recent "Blogging Will Kill You" fret-piece; it's not just Web writers inflating demand in a voracious 24/7 news cycle. Goldstein et. al. prove that a slow news week is slow everywhere. It just feels that much slower when we can sense what's coming from a mile away.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• The end of the critic? [LAT]