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Among the things that factored into this week’s projections (which appear further down on the page)…

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The 15th annual Hollywood Film Festival and Hollywood Film Awards, presented by Starz Entertainment, will honor Academy Award nominee Bennett Miller with its 2011 Hollywood Director Award.

Miller is being recognized for his work on the critically acclaimed blockbusterMoneyball, which was adapted fromMichael Lewis’s best-selling novel and stars Brad Pitt as Oakland A’s general managerBilly Beane. Miller will collect his statuette at the Hollywood Awards Gala Ceremony, which will take place at the Beverly Hilton on Oct. 24.

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If I took one thing away from my interview in Toronto last month with Bryce Dallas Howard (which you can hear for yourself below), it’s that the 30-year-old actress/producer is absolutely lovely — smart, funny, and remarkably humble and down-to-earth. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, based on everything that I’d previously heard about her and the fact that her father is Ron Howard, one of the most liked and respected men in Hollywood… but I must confess that it sort of did, primarily because she was so convincing on screen this year playing not one but two — forgive me — irredeemable bitches, a southern racist and a philandering girlfriend, in Tate Taylor’s The Help and Jonathan Levine’s 50/50, respectively.

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Today’s recommendations of important, interesting and eccentric stories pertaining to the awards race…

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The vast majority of this year’s awards hopefuls have already played at least once on the festival circuit (Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, and/or New York) and/or gone into general release. Most of those that have not are set for October or November releases. But a select few others are being held until December, the last month in which they are eligible to qualify for Oscar consideration this year, and only being selectively screened for the press before then, if at all.

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While hanging out in the Tribeca press lounge on Sunday afternoon, I ran into my friend/fellow film pundit Ed Douglas, who had been at the festival all week and told me that the best film that he’d seen, to that point, was a sequel to “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969). I chuckled and said that I thought a sequel to that classic buddy movie had already been made, referring to “The Sting” (1973), which obviously involved different characters but not coincidentally re-teamed the earlier film’s director (George Roy Hill) and stars (Paul Newman and Robert Redford). No, no, Douglas said, this one was literally a sequel to the first, albeit with the different actors inhabiting the iconic parts of the bandits. It sounded sacrilegious to me, but I respect Douglas, so I got on the phone with the film’s publicist, who was kind enough to provide me with a ticket to the second public screening of the film later that evening.

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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 in order to help to peel back the curtain on the Oscar voting process. (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 1 about his general preferences; column 2 about “Solitary Man” (Anchor Bay Films, 5/21, R, trailer) and “Winter’s Bone” (Roadside Attractions, 6/11, R, trailer); column 3 about “Alice in Wonderland” (Disney, 3/5, PG, trailer), “Mother and Child” (Sony Pictures Classics, 5/7, R, trailer), and “Toy Story 3” (Disney, 6/18, G, trailer); column 4 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); column 5 about “127 Hours” (Fox Searchlight, 11/5, R, trailer), “Biutiful” (Roadside Attractions, 12/17, R, trailer), and “Shutter Island” (Paramount, 2/19, R, trailer); column 6 about “Inception” (Warner Brothers, 7/16, PG-13, trailer), “Made in Dagenham” (Sony Pictures Classics, 11/19, R, trailer), and “Somewhere” (Focus Features, 12/22, R, trailer); column 7 about “Another Year” (Sony Pictures Classics, 12/29, PG-13, trailer), “Fair Game” (Summit, 11/5, PG-13, trailer), and “Rabbit Hole” (Lionsgate, 12/17, PG-13, trailer); column 8 about “Blue Valentine” (The Weinstein Company, 12/29, R, trailer), “The Fighter” (Paramount, 12/10, R, trailer), and “True Grit” (Paramount, 12/22, PG-13, trailer); column 9 about “The Ghost Writer” (Summit, 2/19, PG-13, trailer), “The King’s Speech” (The Weinstein Company, 11/26, R, trailer), and “The Town” (Warner Brothers, 9/17, R, trailer); column 10 about “Black Swan” (Fox Searchlight, 12/3, R, trailer), “Conviction” (Fox Searchlight, 10/15, R, trailer), and “I Am Love” (Magnolia, 6/18, R, trailer); column 11 about his nomination ballots; column 12 about “All Good Things” (Magnolia, 12/3, R, trailer), “Animal Kingdom” (Sony Pictures Classics, 8/13, R, trailer), and “The Way Back” (Newmarket, 12/29, PG-13, trailer); column 13 about “Barney’s Version” (Sony Pictures Classics, 12/3, R, trailer), “Love and Other Drugs” (20th Century Fox, 11/24, R, trailer), and “Tangled” (Disney, 11/24, PG, trailer); and column 14 about “The Illusionist” (Sony Pictures Classics, 12/25, PG, trailer), “Inside Job” (Sony Pictures Classics, 10/8, PG-13, trailer), “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1” (Warner Brothers, 11/19, PG-13, trailer), and “How to Train Your Dragon” (DreamWorks Animation, 3/26, PG, trailer).

This week, he assesses three more films: “Casino Jack” (ATO Pictures, 12/17, R, trailer), “Hereafter” (Warner Brothers, 10/22, PG-13, trailer), and “Iron Man 2” (Paramount, 5/7, PG-13, trailer). The first brought Kevin Spacey a Golden Globe nomination for best actor (drama); the latter two are nominated for the best visual effects Oscar.

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Last night, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival presented the writer-director-producer Christopher Nolan with its highest honor, the Modern Master Award, at the majestic Arlington Theatre. The two-hour ceremony featured an extensive Q&A with Nolan moderated by film critic Pete Hammond, followed by a brief but heartfelt tribute to him from his “Inception” star/doppleganger Leonardo DiCaprio, who also presented him his statuette. (Previous recipients have included Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Jodie Foster, Peter Jackson, George Clooney, Clint Eastwood, and James Cameron.)

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Last week, I had the opportunity to spend about 15 minutes at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with Matt Damon, who is not only one of the biggest movie stars of his generation but also a genuine actor’s actor who not infrequently takes on smaller parts in outstanding films. The latest and greatest example of this is his role as the verbose, cocksure Texas Ranger Mr. LaBoeuf in the Coen brothers’ newly-released Western “True Grit” (Paramount, 12/22, PG-13, trailer), for which he is now in the running for a best supporting actor Oscar nod.

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• AMPAS: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shares over 20 clips taken from its second annual Governor’s Ball, which took place on Saturday night. Among them are acceptance speeches from Irving G. Thalberg Award recipient Francis Ford Coppola (as well as toasts to him from director Kathryn Bigelow; director Roman Coppola, Francis’ son; actor Robert De Niro; and director George Lucas) and two of this year’s three honorary Oscar recipients, silent film historian Kevin Brownlow (toasted by actor James Karen; producer Lindsay Doran; and actor Kevin Spacey) and veteran actor Eli Wallach (toasted by actor Josh Brolin; actress Anne Jackson, Wallach’s wife; singer Tony Bennett; De Niro, again; and actor/director Clint Eastwood). Jean-Luc Godard, the night’s other honoree, elected not to attend the event (but was still toasted by cinematographer Haskell Wexler; film editor Mark Goldblatt; producer Mark Johnson; documentary filmmaker Lynn Littman; composer Charles Fox; writer/director Phil Alden Robinson; and actor Vincent Cassel).
• Thompson on Hollywood: Anne Thompson recounts the scene at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre on Sunday afternoon when moviegoers attending a retrospective of the four films on which director Martin Scorsese and actor Leonardo DiCaprio have collaborated — including, most recently, this year’s “Shutter Island,” which Paramount hopes will land a best picture nomination like the other three — were treated to a Q&A with the two A-listers. (Both were beamed in via satellite from overseas cities, Scorsese from London where he is shooting a film and DiCaprio from Tel Aviv where he is celebrating his 36th birthday with his Israeli girlfriend and her family.) Scorsese said that his favorite film with DiCaprio was “The Aviator” (2004)
• Awards Tracker: Tom O’Neil thinks that Melissa Leo (“The Fighter”) has “got a choke hold on Oscar’s supporting-actress bout,” noting that “we haven’t seen this much ’tude expressed in a loud, working-class twang since Marisa Tomei pulled off an upset win” for “My Cousin Vinny” (1992). O’Neil supports this fascinating comparison by listing even more parallels: “Both roles are over-the-top, demanding shrews who can’t 1.) stop whining, 2.) take ‘no’ for an answer, or 3.) keep their faces out of everybody else’s. They’re defiant dees-and-dems gals from blue-collar environs who wobble in high heels, wear their hair too big and their skimpy clothes too tight. Yeah, Tomei’s role is comedic, but, really — let’s be honest — so is Leo’s.”
• People: Reagan Alexander speaks with “Black Swan” stars Natalie Portman, a best actress contender, and Mila Kunis, a best supporting actress contender, about the intense training they undertook in order to convincingly portray professional ballet dancers. “I started a year ahead of time,” Portman tells him, “and by the end I was doing eight hours a day.” Kunis, meanwhile, says she “lost 20 pounds” as a result of her regimen, at the end of which she “looked like Gollum from ‘Lord of the Rings’… everything was just protruding.” Kunis also shot down reports that she and Portman sought “liquid courage” before filming their lesbian sex scene: “There was no tequila! Not sure where that rumor came from, but it’s false. I don’t think we could have done that scene if we were intoxicated.”
• Vanity Fair: Krista Smith profiles 12-year-old actress Elle Fanning, the precocious younger sister of Dakota Fanning, whose career “takes a giant step forward this month” with the release of Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” a film in which she plays the daughter of a famous Hollywood figure with whom she winds up hanging out at the Chateau Marmont hotel. Fanning essentially serves as a surrogate for Coppola herself, who often tagged along with her father, the director Francis Ford Coppola, when she was a kid.
• The Hollywood Reporter: Jay A. Fernandez posts the new red-band trailer for “Love and Other Drugs,” the sexy new romantic-dramedy that finds “Brokeback Mountain” (2005) lovers Jake Gyllenhaal, a best actor contender, and Anne Hathaway, a best actress contender, back in the sack together again. The trailer, which is “for restricted audiences only” (and requires a prospective viewer to insert his or her birthdate in order to try to ensure that those are the only people who see it), is, as Fernandez puts it, “full of naughty words with hard ‘k’ sounds and visual jokes about just plain being hard.”

Photo: Eli Wallach, Francis Ford Coppola, and Kevin Brownlow at the 2nd annual Governors Awards. Credit: AMPAS.