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• Entertainment Weekly: Dave Karger speaks with Julia Roberts after a special screening of “Biutiful” at CAA that she hosted for industry insiders to help call attention to the performance of her “Eat Pray Love” co-star Javier Bardem. (Robert Forster, Kyle MacLachlan, and Bardem’s pregnant wife Penelope Cruz were among the attendees.) Roberts explains, “I think the movie hasn’t gotten the exposure. You don’t know where it is. It’s like this hidden little jewel… I just have a great appreciation for what he went through to show us all this.”

• Deadline Hollywood: Mike Fleming interviews producer-extraordinaire Scott Rudin, who this week became the first producer to receive PGA Award nominations for two features in the same year (for “The Social Network” and “True Grit”), and who will also be receiving the David O. Selznick Achievement Award at the PGA Awards ceremony. Rudin credits his “great [producing] partners on both” and emphasizes that while “the Oscar stuff is fantastic, rewarding and in some ways exciting… it’s not why you do it. You do it because you want to hold your own work to a standard of excellence.” He also notes that while he was heavily involved with the pre-production of both films (he worked closely with the screenwriters, for instance, while they formulated their scripts), he stayed out of the way of the directors during the filmmaking process itself.

• Awards Tracker: Tom O’Neil advises those who believe that “True Grit” is now the best picture favorite just because it has done well at the box-office ($91.5 million and counting) to “hold your horses.” He submits that “financial success isn’t as important as it used to be to Oscar victory,” citing the fact the best picture Oscar winner went to films that earned at least $100 million domestically 75% of the time between 1986 and 2005, but that 60% of those since have gone to films that did not, including “Crash” ($54 million), “No Country for Old Men” ($74 million), and “The Hurt Locker” ($14 million, or $746 million less than it’s fellow nominee “Avatar”).

• Hollywood-Elsewhere: Jeff Wells passes along an andorsement of the work of the cinematographer Hoyt Van Hoytema on “The Fighter” from legendary cinematographer Michael Chapman, who lensed perhaps the greatest boxing movie of all-time, “Raging Bull” (1980), among other classics. Chapman writes, “The movie struck me as doing the basic thing that cinematography does when it’s done well, which is to present a three-dimensional stage in which the actors can move.”

• The Carpetbagger: Larry Rother mourns the fact that the French film “Carlos,” one of the most critically-beloved movies of 2010, is ineligible for Oscar consideration in any category this year “because of a quirk in the rules set by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences.” The film “was initially broadcast on French television before it was packaged and sold abroad for distribution, in two different versions, one long and one short, as a feature film,” which constitutes a violation of an Academy rule that states, “Films that, in any version, receive their first public exhibition or distribution in any manner other than as a theatrical motion picture release will not be eligible for Academy Awards in any category.”

• Vulture: Jordana Horn asks Quentin Tarantino why he omitted Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” — the film to which the Venice Film Festival jury, over which he presided, awarded the Golden Lion back in September — from his year-end top 20 film list. “I’m a little embarrassed by it, actually,” Tarantino says, explaining, “It was never meant to be a dig against ‘Somewhere,’ or Sofia. I simply didn’t consider any of the films I’d seen in Venice for the list.” I put them in a separate box — I was on official duty at that time, not seeing the films theatrically, independently… Now I wish I’d put it on there — I didn’t think anyone would pay attention.” He adds, “I’d have put it in my top 10.”

• Hitfix: Greg Ellwood lists the five films that have been nominated for this year’s USC Scripter Award, which was established in 1988 to celebrate each year’s finest big screen adaptation, and honors “the screenwriter as well as the author of the work in which the screenplay is based.” This year’s finalists: “127 Hours” (Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy’s adaptation of Aron Ralston’s autobiography of the same name), “The Ghost Writer” (Robert Harris and Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Harris’s novel “The Ghost“), “The Social Network” (Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s book “The Accidental Billionaires“), “True Grit” (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel of the same name), and “Winter’s Bone” (Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel of the same name).

• The Odds: Steve Pond recaps the nominations announced this week by the PGA (where “The Town” was included as one of the final 10, but “Another Year,” “Blue Valentine,” “Rabbit Hole,” “Shutter Island,” and “Winter’s Bone” were not) and the WGA (where “I Love You Phillip Morris,” “Please Give,” and “The Town” scored nominations, but many of the more likely Oscar nominees were ineligible due to WGA rules). The PGA Awards will be announced on January 22, and the WGA Awards will be announced on February 5.

• Variety: Peter Caranicas passes along the Art Directors Guild’s nominees for the three categories that will be recognized at this year’s ADG Awards, which will be announced on February 5. In the period category: “Get Low,” “The King’s Speech,” “Robin Hood,” “Shutter Island,” and “True Grit.” In the fantasy category: “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1,” “Inception,” and “Tron: Legacy.” And in the contemporary category: “127 Hours,” “Black Swan,” “The Fighter,” “The Social Network,” and “The Town.”

• Gold Derby: Paul Sheehan learns that the Cinema Audio Society’s nominees for the CAS Award for best sound mixing are “Black Swan,” “Inception,” “Shutter Island,” “The Social Network” and “True Grit.” Last year, he notes, four of the five CAS nominees for sound mixing went on to score Oscar nods (“District 9” was replaced by “Inglourious Basterds”), and the CAS winner “The Hurt Locker” went on to win the Oscar.

• The Hollywood Reporter: Sofia M. Fernandez shares the names of the seven films that have made the short-list from which the Academy’s visual effects branch will ultimately select five nominees. The finalists are “Alice in Wonderland,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1,” “Hereafter,” “Inception,” “Iron Man 2,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and “Tron: Legacy.” Fernandez notes that members of the branch will screen 15-minute excerpts from the films on January 20, while the final five nominees will be announced January 25.

Photo: Javier Bardem and Julia Roberts. Credit: Entertainment Weekly.

• The Hot Blog: David Poland claims that “True Grit,” the Coen brothers Western, “has muscled its way into the frontrunner slot to win best picture” as a result of its solid box-office performance over the long Christmas weekend. (It generated $36.1 million, good enough for second place behind “Little Fockers,” which brought in only $9 million more.) Methinks Poland is too smart to actually believe that and is just hoping to generate some late phase one traffic to his site and/or be the one guy who made a crazy pick that somehow came true (as Tom O’Neil attempted last year with “Inglourious Basterds”). Jeff Wells (here) and Sasha Stone (here) seem to concur.

• New York Times: Manohla Dargis, Stephen Holden, and A.O. Scott, the newspaper’s three film critics, share their five selections for what/who this year’s Oscar nominees “should be” in this Sunday’s edition. Having obtained an early copy, we can report that all three agree on only a few things: “Carlos” for best picture; Jesse Eisenberg (“The Social Network”), James Franco (“127 Hours”), and Edgar Ramirez (“Carlos”) for best actor; Natalie Portman (“Black Swan”) for best actress; and Christian Bale (“The Fighter”) for best supporting actor.

• Entertainment Weekly: Dave Karger obtains a strange letter sent by “Buried” screenwriter Chris Sparling to members of the Academy’s writing branch urging them to honor his script with a best original screenplay nomination. Karger calls it “one of the more brazen Oscar campaign tactics I’ve ever seen,” and I would have to agree — in fact, the only precedent for it that I can think of is the newspaper ad that Chill Wills took out pleading for a best supporting actor Oscar for his performance in “The Alamo” (1960).

• The Odds: Steve Pond learns that several of “the most acclaimed film scripts of the year” — including “Another Year,” “Blue Valentine,” “The King’s Speech,” “Toy Story 3,” “Winter’s Bone” — have been left off the Writers Guild of America’s list of films eligible for WGA Awards “because of guild rules that restrict nominations to films that are written for productions that are signatories to the guild’s Minimum Basic Agreement, or the agreements of several affiliated international guilds.” He adds, “In other words, the Writers Guild Awards are not set up to indiscriminately honor the best films of the year — their purpose is to honor the best films produced by WGA members, or under WGA guidelines.”

• Deadline Hollywood: Pete Hammond breaks down Newmarket’s unconventional awards strategy for “The Way Back,” which is “aiming not to be first, but dead last” — not when it comes to voting, of course, but in terms of when its screeners land in the mailboxes of voters. Hammond, based on his conversations with publicists working on the film, writes, “The thinking was that, rather than getting lost in the pile of hopeful discs, it would be fresh in mind just as members start thinking seriously about filling out their ballot.” He also notes that “Oscar voters who would prefer to see the film in a commercial theatre this week… will have to trek to Covina, on the outskirts of L.A. County, for the one-week Academy qualifying run… the distrib didn’t want to blow its marketing wad on a December 29th qualifying release date but to save its money for the true rollout scheduled for January 21st when [the film] will open on several hundred screens, including those probably a bit closer for Acad members… The thinking is also that Academy voters are realistically more likely to watch the film on DVD than in a theatre.”

• Gold Derby: Tom O’Neil passes along Tuesday’s announcement from the United States Postal Service that it will be unveiling, on August 19, 2011, a series of stamps featuring the Pixar characters Remy the rat and Linguini from “Ratatouille” (2007); the robot WALL-E from “WALL-E” (2008); Carl Fredricksen and Dug from “Up” (2009); Lightning McQueen and Mater from “Cars” (2006); and Buzz Lightyear and two of the green, three-eyed aliens from “Toy Story” (1995), “Toy Story 2” (1999), and “Toy Story 3” (2010).

• HitFix: Greg Ellwood recalls that “there used to be a time when getting your Academy Award contending star or film on the cover of Entertainment Weekly‘s annual first ‘Oscar issue’ was a big deal,” but notes that today “you hardly hear anyone talking about who made the front page of [the] New York Times.” Still, there’s no denying that it’s a big deal that Fox Searchlight managed to land not one but both of its top acting contenders — best actor hopeful James Franco (“127 Hours”) and best actress hopeful Natalie Portman (“Black Swan”) — on the cover(s) of this year’s edition(s).

• Los Angeles Times: Amy Kaufman reports that the 23-year-old actor Miles Teller, who portrays a teenager who accidentally kills a boy with his car in “Rabbit Hole,” was himself almost killed in a car accident a few years ago. Kaufman writes, “After spending a few days at a Connecticut music festival, he and two buddies were road tripping home to Florida. Cruising down the highway at 75 mph, Teller’s friend tried to switch lanes and nearly hit another vehicle. He jerked the steering wheel back but lost control of the car, which went across three lanes of traffic, into a grass median, and flipped seven times.”

• Towleroad: Nathaniel Rogers shares his picks for “the best LGBT film characters of the year,” as in “the most fascinating.” He includes Wallace Welles (Kieran Culkin), the hero’s best friend and roommate in “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”; Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the computer hacker in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”; Steven (Jim Carrey) and Phillip (Ewan McGregor), the odd couple in “I Love You Phillip Morris”; and, of course, Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), the two moms in “The Kids Are All Right.”

• Vulture: Kyle Buchanan teases New York Press critic Armond White, a notorious contrarian, by sharing excerpts of his reviews of several of the year’s most widely admired films, noting that “sure enough, White is a hard man to please.” Among his targets: “The Social Network” (“simply Hollywood’s way, post-Obama, of sanctioning Harvard’s ‘masters of the universe’ mystique”); “The King’s Speech” (“so poorly staged that its ineptitude sometimes borders on the avant-garde”); “The Kids Are All Right” (“a sitcom primed to flatter mainstream sensibility”); and “Toy Story 3” (“essentially a bored game that only the brainwashed will buy into… ‘Transformers 2’ already explored the same plot to greater thrill and opulence”).

• The Playlist: Chris Bell, Kevin Jagernauth, Oliver Lyttleton, Drew Taylor, and Gabe Toro compile a list of what they regard as “27 of the most underrated and underappreciated films of 2010.” Among their selections: “The American” (see: George Clooney’s “startlingly rich internal performance”), “Please Give” (see: “Nicole Holofcener’s whipsmart screenplay”), “Ondine” (see: “Christopher Doyle’s gorgeous cinematography and Sigur Ros members’ elegiac score”), and “Stone” (see: “Milla Jovovich, who turns in a performance as sexy as it is powerful”).

• BoxOffice.com: Phil Contrino conducts the debut BoxOffice.com podcast with guests Jeff Wells and yours truly. Over the course of about 30 minutes, we discuss “Biutiful” and “Blue Valentine,” which both opened in limited release yesterday; the astonishing performance of “True Grit” at the box-office over the long Christmas weekend; and the historic relevance — or lack thereof — of commercial performance when it comes to the Academy’s selection of the best documentary (feature) nominees, in connection with the performance of some of this year’s short-listed contenders (“Waiting for ‘Superman’,” “Inside Job,” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop” have done quite well, whereas “Waste Land” is struggling).

Photo: Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld in “True Grit.” Credit: Paramount.

• People: Julie Jordan exclusively reports that actress Natalie Portman has become engaged to and pregnant with the child of Benjamin Millepied, who served as her off-screen choreographer/on-screen dance partner during the making of “Black Swan.” Portman is the favorite to win the best actress Oscar for her performance in the film.

• Hollywood-Elsewhere: Jeff Wells passes along a recently-posted YouTube video that is just about the last thing that the “Toy Story 3” awards campaign needs right now. Running for more than two minutes, it features longtime, low-level Disneyland employees claiming that Disney is reneging on a promise (or at least an understanding) to cover their health care costs (in exchange for lower wages), and closes with several of the employees — and their young children — urging, “Academy members, vote your conscience… don’t reward Disney for being hypocritical… don’t vote for ‘Toy Story 3′ for best picture.”

• Gold Derby: Chris Beachum argues that “Inception” — which most people expect to be a best picture also-ran to “The Social Network,” “The King’s Speech,” or “The Fighter” — could still win the top Oscar. His reasoning? It “may well be the most nominated film which is often a telling sign towards the big winner… will receive major guild support, including the DGA, WGA and PGA… and [is boosted by its] staggering box office success ($292 million in the U.S.).” All true… but if the Academy didn’t like the even more critically-acclaimed, commercially-success, and easy-to-follow “The Dark Knight” (2008) enough to even nominate it, is it really that realistic to think that “Inception” can win?

• Funny or Die: Actor James Franco and his grandma take a break from their holiday festivities to tape a hilarious short video about people who are too scared to see “127 Hours,” the film for which he is a best actor contender. Not to be missed.

• The Odds: Steve Pond, a former music critic, listens to all 41 of the songs that have been short-listed for the best original song Oscar and concludes that it has been “a bad year for film songs — a year full of competent but hardly distinctive pop songs, with nothing having anywhere near the emotional impact of 2007′s ‘Falling Slowly’ from ‘Once’ or last year’s ‘The Weary Kind’ from ‘Crazy Heart,’ to name two recent winners.” He calls them “a pallid bunch, reeking of professionalism but showing little beyond that.” His personal favorites are A.R. Rahman and Dido’s “If I Rise” from “127 Hours” (an “atmospheric reverie” with “a ghostly resonance”) and Randy Newman’s “We Belong Together” from “Toy Story 3” (“a Pixar-perfect melody” and “an exemplary toe-tapper”).

• The Guardian: Philip French screens “The King’s Speech” and reflects on his own lifelong battle with a stammer. French writes, “I can recall no social experience prior to the king at Christmas 1937 and thus I can’t remember a time when I too didn’t stammer… [The film] brought back memories of a lifetime, some amusing, some excruciating, some instructive, all contributing to the warp and weft of my character.”

• 24 Frames: Steven Zeitchik shares a list of much-hyped 2010 movies that he and/or his colleagues found to be overrated, including “Black Swan” (“As subtle as a pit bull, it’s camp disguised as art.”), “The Town” (“We’ve seen the working-class Boston setting before. The chase scenes are tired. And accents and outfits can’t substitute for character depth.”), “Winter’s Bone” (“Slow pacing, a contrived world and unearned bleakness make this the emperor’s new clothes of the indie world.”).

Photo: Natalie Portman and Benjamin Millepied during the making of “Black Swan.” Credit: Niko Tavernise (New York Times).

PLEASE NOTE: The following rankings and remarks reflect my personal opinions and do/will not in any way impact my projections or analysis on this site, wherein I strive above all else to correctly forecast what will happen, not what I believe should happen. My demonstrated ability to do that over the years is what has led most of you to my site, and any failure to do that will undoubtedly lead you away from it, so you can rest assured that I mean it when I say that one has/will have no bearing on the other.

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• Sports Illustrated: The most popular sports publication in America has released the cover of its 2010 “Year in Sports Media” edition, and the stars of the boxing drama “The Fighter” — best actor hopeful Mark Wahlberg and best supporting actor hopeful Christian Bale — grace the cover. Inside the magazine, coverage is also devoted to the horse-racing thriller “Secretariat,” the soccer doc “After the Cup,” and the mountain-climbing saga “127 Hours.”

• Time: Lev Grossman reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old billionaire who is portrayed in “The Social Network” by Jesse Eisenberg, has been named Time’s 2010 “Person of the Year.” This only reinforces the narrative that the film’s backers are trying to push for the film — namely, that it is “the movie of the moment,” a timely, relevant reflection of the current zeitgeist and world in which we live today, unlike, say, “The King’s Speech,” which has little connection to the present.

• Awards Daily: Sasha Stone passes along the Academy’s recently-released list of the 41 songs eligible for nominations in this year’s best original song category. The presumptive favorites include “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me” (performed by Cher in “Burlesque”), “Bound to You” (performed by Christina Aguilera in “Burlesque”), “Shine” (performed by John Legend in “Waiting for ‘Superman’”), “If I Rise” (performed by A.R. Rahman and Dido in “127 Hours”), “I See the Light” (performed by Zachary Levi and Mandy Moore in “Tangled”), “We Belong Together” (performed by Randy Newman in “Toy Story 3”), and “Nothing” (performed by Janet Jackson in “Why Did I Get Married Too?”).

• Awards Campaign: Greg Ellwood reports that Fox Searchlight — the same studio that famously hired a Volkswagen minibus to drive around Hollywood to promote “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006) and mailed hamburger phones to journalists to promote “Juno” (2007) — has come up with yet another crafty marketing tactic to promote its 2010 hopeful “127 Hours.” This week, industry insiders were sent a T-shirt reading, “I KEPT MY EYES OPEN FOR 127 HOURS” — the film’s subject Aron Ralston did that literally; the studio would be thrilled if you would do that figuratively.

• Los Angeles Times: Betsy Sharkey questions the sanity of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in light of the group’s many questionable selections for the upcoming Golden Globes. Among them: best actor and best actress nominations for Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, respectively, for laughable performances in “The Tourist,” but nary a mention in those same categories for Robert Duvall for “Get Low” or Tilda Swinton for “I Am Love.” As Sharkey puts it, in light of Depp’s second nomination for “Alice in Wonderland,” “If this is Wonderland, even Alice wouldn’t want to live here any more.”

Photo: Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale, the stars of “The Fighter.” Credit: Sports Illustrated.

The Broadcast Film Critics Association, of which I am a voting member, released its 2010 nominations for its 16th annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards this morning. “Black Swan” earned a record 12 nods (picture, director, actress, supporting actress, original screenplay, art direction, costume design, cinematography, editing, makeup, sound, and score), while 11 were bestowed upon “The King’s Speech” and “True Grit,” 10 upon “Inception,” and 9 upon “The Social Network.” Nicole Kidman, meanwhile, became the most nominated actor in the organization’s history when she received her seventh career nod (for best actress in “Rabbit Hole”).

Noteworthy inclusions: Noomi Rapace (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) for best actress; Jeremy Renner (“The Town”) for best supporting actor; Mila Kunis (“Black Swan”) for best supporting actress; “The Town” for best adapted screenplay; “The Fighter” for best ensemble; 13-year-old Chloe Moretz was nominated twice in the best young actor category (“Kick-Ass” and “Let Me In”); “I Love You Phillip Morris” for best comedy; “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” for best documentary; and “127 Hours” for best editing

Noteworthy snubs: “Blue Valentine” and “The Kids Are All Right” for best picture; Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (“Biutiful”) for best director; Javier Bardem (“Biutiful”) and Mark Wahlberg (“The Fighter”) for best actor; Julianne Moore (“The Kids Are All Right”) and Tilda Swinton (“I Am Love”) for best actress; Justin Timberlake (“The Social Network”) for best supporting actor; “Black Swan” for best ensemble; “Hot Tub Time Machine” for best comedy; “Shutter Island” for best art direction; “The Social Network” for best cinematography; “Shutter Island” for best costume design; “The King’s Speech” for best editing; and “Iron Man 2” for best visual effects

The BFCA’s picks — which have correlated with the Academy’s picks as often as any awards group’s in recent years — will be announced at the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards ceremony at the Hollywood Palladium on Friday, January 14, 2011 at 9pm EST/PST. VH1 will broadcast the gala live around the world.

The full list of nominees follows…

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Brandon Gray of BoxOfficeMojo.com reports that “post-Thanksgiving doldrums were in full effect over the weekend,” as is always the case after a big holiday weekend — but this year’s was down 14 percent from last year’s. Last week’s #1 “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” and #2 “Tangled” swapped places, but receipts for both were off more than 50% from last weekend. “The Warrior’s Way” was the sole nationwide debut last weekend (“a weak one at that”), but “Black Swan” opened in limited release on just 18 screens and took in nearly $1.4 million (its $77,000 per screen average is the highest ever for a Fox Searchlight film and the second highest of 2010 after last weekend’s showing by “The King’s Speech”).

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“Deep Vote,” an Oscar winning screenwriter and a member of the Academy, will write this column — exclusively for ScottFeinberg.com — every week until the Academy Awards. He will help to peel back the curtain on the Oscar voting process by sharing his thoughts about the films he sees and, ultimately, his nomination and final ballots, as well. His identity must be protected in order to spare him from repercussions for disclosing the aforementioned information.

Thus far, he has shared his thoughts in column one about his general preferences; column two about “Winter’s Bone” (Roadside Attractions, 6/11, R, trailer) and “Solitary Man” (Anchor Bay Films, 5/21, R, trailer); column three about “Alice in Wonderland” (Disney, 3/5, PG, trailer), “Toy Story 3” (Disney, 6/18, G, trailer), and “Mother and Child” (Sony Pictures Classics, 5/7, R, trailer); and column four about “Get Low” (Sony Pictures Classics, 7/30, PG-13, trailer), “The Kids Are All Right” (Focus Features, 7/9, R, trailer), and “The Social Network” (Columbia, 10/1, PG-13, trailer).

This week, he assesses three more awards hopefuls: “127 Hours” (Fox Searchlight, 11/5, R, trailer), “Biutiful” (Roadside Attractions, 12/17, R, trailer), and “Shutter Island” (Paramount, 2/19, R, trailer)…

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• Los Angeles Times: An unattributed report filed late tonight states, “A man believed to be connected to the slaying of veteran Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen fatally shot himself at a Hollywood hotel Wednesday evening as Beverly Hills police were serving a search warrant there.” It continues, “The name of the man was not released, and his exact connection to the Chasen murder case was not immediately known. The shooting occurred after 6 p.m., according to two law enforcement sources who spoke on the condition that they not be named.”

• The Carpetbagger: Melena Ryzik recaps Monday night’s ever “scrappy and unpredictable” Gotham Independent Film Awards, at which Debra Granik’s little indie “Winter’s Bone” was the big winner — despite the shocking upset of star Jennifer Lawrence by Ronald Brownstein (“Daddy Longlegs”) in the best breakthrough actor category. The film took home the top two prizes of the night, best feature (over “Black Swan,” “Blue Valentine,” “The Kids Are All Right,” and “Let Me In“) and best ensemble performance awards (over “The Kids Are All Right,” “Life During Wartime,” “Please Give,” and “Tiny Furniture”). “The Hurt Locker” claimed those same Gotham honors last year and went on to score nine Oscar nominations.

• The Odds: Steve Pond reports that some people close to the Academy are concerned about the implications of the recently-announced decision that actors James Franco and Anne Hathaway will be hosting the 2011 Academy Awards. Both are Oscar contenders this year — Franco is “all-but-certain” to get a best actor nod for “127 Hours” and Hathaway is a “long-shot” possibility for a best actress nod for ““Love and Other Drugs” — and these people believe that the selection of them is akin to “giving the Academy’s seal of approval to those two performers, and by extension their performances.” Academy president Tom Sherak, though, pointed out that nominees have hosted seven times in the past, most recently in 1987, and insists “it makes no difference to us.” (Nevertheless, one consultant insisted, “I don’t work with Colin Firth [the best actor favorite for “The King's Speech”], but if I did, I would be worried that Franco is going to get a lot of goodwill out of this.”)

• Thompson on Hollywood: Anne Thompson passes along the list of nominees for the 2011 Independent Spirit Awards, which was announced yesterday. “Winter’s Bone” led the field with seven nominations, including one for best feature. It will compete in that category against “127 Hours,” “Black Swan,” “Greenberg,” and “The Kids Are All Right.” The most noteworthy snubs were of Robert Duvall (“Get Low”) for a best actor nod, even though his co-star Bill Murray was nominated for best supporting actor, and Julianne Moore (“The Kids Are All Right”) for a best actress nod, even though her co-star Annette Bening was nominated in the category.

• Screen Junkies: An unattributed interview with “The Fighter” director David O. Russell sheds light on some of the drama that unfolded during the making of the film courtesy of the colorful Wards/Eklunds of Lowell, Massachusetts, whose unusual family dynamics are largely its subject. “I thought they might be some very harsh people that I wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes with,” Russell confessed, but notes, “The fact is, the people are so unbelievably lovable. I still hang out with them.” (Still, Christian Bale, who plays Dickie Eklund in the film, notes, “There were a couple of times I had to physically restrain Dickie from going and landing one right on David… There were some script changes going on, and Dickie wasn’t initially totally understanding that sometimes in putting a whole life into two hours, a little bit of license has to be taken and mixing things up. He wanted everything initially to be absolutely how it was portrayed. And if it wasn’t, there was a couple of times he would say, ‘I’m gonna go and I’m gonna get him.’ So there’s a couple of times I’d be going, ‘No, no, no.’ Then we’d talk and David would talk with him.”)

• National Public Radio: Terry Gross chats with the French actor Vincent Cassel, a best supporting actor hopeful for his performance as the slithery maestro of a ballet company in “Black Swan,” who insists that he’s really “a good guy who plays villains.” Together, they reflect on his life, career, and long list “bad guy” roles — including those in “Birthday Girl” (2001), “Ocean’s Twelve” (2004), “Derailed” (2005), “Eastern Promises” (2007), “Ocean’s Thirteen” (2007), “Mesrine” (2008), as well as “Black Swan.”

• Wax Word: Sharon Waxman reports that former United States Congressman Tom Davis (R-VA) is “the front-runner candidate” for the MPAA chairman position that was vacated in January by former Secretary of Agriculture Daniel Glickman. Davis, who is known for his expertise in the field of intellectual property, has reportedly “met most of the heads of the six major movie companies in the MPAA… [but] one individual knowledgable about the moguls’ views said that, ‘There are still question marks’ about Davis.”

Photo: Ronni Chasen. Credit: Getty Images.