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• The Odds: Steve Pond reports that “The King’s Speech” was received very warmly by Oscar voters who attended its first official Academy screening on Saturday night at the 1,000-seat Samuel Goldwyn Theater, which one member told him was about 85% full. (According to Pond, “The turnout appears to be about the same as the attendance for ‘The Social Network,’ which also drew a strong reaction when it screened at the Goldwyn in early October.”) Another Academy member shared with Pond his immediate reaction: “Of course it will get all the English vote,” a key constituency that could prove to be a difference-maker in a close best picture race.
• The Hollywood Reporter: Leslie Bruce, Randee Dawn, Todd Longwell, Carita Rizzo, Lauren Schutte, and Andrew Wallenstein profile — as part of the weekly magazine’s annual “Next Gen” special edition — a number of individuals who had breakthrough years in 2010 and have growing influence in the industry, including actors Andrew Garfield (“Never Let Me Go”/“The Social Network”) and Aaron Johnson (“Nowhere Boy”), actresses Jennifer Lawrence (“Winter’s Bone”) and Rooney Mara (“The Social Network”), and writer-directors Lena Dunham (“Tiny Furniture”) and Shana Feste (“Country Strong”).
• Deadline Hollywood: Nikki Finke passes along the news that the Art Directors Guild has selected Patricia Norris as this year’s recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award. Norris, who has been nominated for best costume design Oscar five times — for “Days of Heaven” (1978), “The Elephant Man” (1980), “Victor/Victoria” (1982), “2010” (1984), and “Sunset” (1988) — will be presented with the award at the 15th annual Excellence in Production Design Awards on February 5th.
• Awards Daily: Sasha Stone pays tribute to Ronni Chasen, the publicist whose murder last week rocked Hollywood and remains an unsolved mystery. Stone shares the last email that she received from Chasen, in which the publicist tried to sell her on the prospects of Michael Douglas for a best supporting actor nod for “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” and writes, “Here’s to Ms. Chasen. And here’s to all the hard-working men and women who really and truly make the Oscar world go round. They never step up to take any of the credit… knowing that the more light is put on them the easier we can see the strings.”
• Radar Online: An unattributed report summarizes and shares video of a segment from last night’s episode of “Chelsea Lately” on E! in which the talk show host Chelsea Handler and actress Anne Hathaway discussed Hathaway’s extensive nudity and numerous sex scenes with Jake Gyllenhaal in “Love and Other Drugs,” which hits theaters tomorrow. Hathaway tells Handler, “We decided from the get-go that real sex was out… We watched some films that do real sex and, I don’t know, that makes me feel weird.”

Photo: Colin Firth in “The King’s Speech.” Credit: The Weinstein Company.

• 60 Minutes: Lara Logan profiles the actor/producer Mark Wahlberg, who she says “has made a career of reinventing himself like no one else in show business,” just a few weeks before the release of “The Fighter,” a film that he produced and stars in as his childhood hero. He takes her back to Boston and opens up about his “reckless youth,” including an assault that he committed at the age of 16 that left a man blind and resulted in him serving 45 days in jail. That harrowing experience, he says, gave him the drive to make something more of his life — first as a rapper, then as a model, and now as an Oscar-nominated actor and producer who is on the brink of unveiling his “proudest achievement” yet.
• Gold Derby: Tom O’Neil claims that certain members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association “absolutely love” the recent blockbuster thriller “Red” and says that we should “expect it to bag noms for best comedy/musical picture, actor (Bruce Willis) and maybe even supporting actor (John Malkovich as a conspiracy-minded LSD tripper) and supporting actress (Helen Mirren as a machine-gun-toting Rambo).”
• New York Times: Brooks Barnes adds to the mounting expectations of “Tangled,” the 50th animated film from Disney, which reportedly cost $175 million to make and “will carry global marketing costs in excess of $100 million.” Disney’s chief creative officer John Lasseter, who has spent over three years working on the film since the 2006 Disney-Pixar merger left him in charge of the studio, tells Barnes: ““This film is as good as a Pixar film, but it’s classic Disney, and I love that: heart, humor, beauty, music, wonderment, the love story.”
• The Big Picture: Patrick Goldstein highlights one of the most glaring omissions from the recently released list of films eligible for this year’s best documentary feature Oscar: Werner Herzog’s visually stunning 3-D doc “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” He was previously snubbed five years ago for his critically-acclaimed doc “Grizzly Man” (2005), but was nominated three years ago for “Encounters at the End of the World” (2007).
• Awards Tracker: Susan King reports that best actress hopeful Nicole Kidman (“Rabbit Hole”) will receive the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s 2011 Vanguard Award following a career tribute on February 5. According to the festival, the award was created to annually recognize “an actor who has forged his/her own path, taking artistic risks and making a significant and unique contribution to film.” Previous recipients have included Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Christoph Waltz.
• Imageworks: As part of the no-holds-barred Oscar campaign for “Alice in Wonderland,” the special effects firm Sony Pictures Imageworks has invited select journalists to have tea with the visual effects and animation team responsible for the film, as well as to have “an individual opportunity to sit at an Avid at Sony Pictures Imageworks with one of our editors and a member of the visual effects and animation production team” for a demonstration of some of the work that went into the production of the film’s “nearly 2500 visual effects and animation shots.”
• Los Angeles Times: Mark Olsen profiles the 24-year-old writer/director/actress Lena Dunham, who has made a big impression with “Tiny Furniture,” her debut film, and is now being “courted by Hollywood.” As Dunham puts it, her story could be succinctly described as: “girl makes movie about being a loser and then gets un-loserly things to happen to her.”
• Hollywood-Elsewhere: Jeff Wells confirms that director Steven Spielberg will indeed adapt a still-to-be-written Tony Kushner script about Abraham Lincoln into a feature film, and that the 16th president will be played not by the Irish actor Liam Neeson, who was the rumored frontrunner for the part, but rather by the British actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Cinephiles largely cheered the casting of the two time best actor Oscar winner (who traveled on Friday to Springfield, Illinois and received a tour of relevant historical sites from Lincoln historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.) The film is due out in 2012.
• The Film Experience: Nathaniel Rogers chats with the 37-year-old actress Juliette Lewis, who was nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar nearly two decades ago for “Cape Fear” (1991) and is hoping to be nominated for it again for this year’s Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction.” She has only two brief scenes in the film, but, as Rogers writes, audiences can’t take their eyes of her when she’s on screen, and it seems likely that they will lead to other, more substantial acting roles for her in the near future.

Photo: Mark Wahlberg in “The Fighter.” Credit: Paramount.

• indieWIRE: Brian Brooks passes along the news that Annette Bening will be the recipient of the the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s American Riviera Award on January 28, just three days after this year’s Oscar nominations are announced. Bening, who is a best actress contender for her standout performances in both “The Kids Are All Right” and “Mother and Child,” joins an impressive list of recipients of this particular honor. Since it was created in 2004, all but one of the honorees went on to receive an Oscar nod, and three went on to win — Philip Seymour Hoffman for “Capote” (2005), Forest Whitaker for “The Last King of Scotland” (2006), and Sandra Bullock for “The Blind Side” (2009) just last year.
• The Hollywood Reporter: Mimi Turner summarizes the nominations for the British Independent Film Awards, which were announced yesterday. “The King’s Speech” led the field with eight nods — among them were best British independent film, best director (Tom Hooper), best actor (Colin Firth), best supporting actor (Geoffrey Rush), best supporting actress (Helena Bonham Carter), and best screenplay (David Seidler). It was not surprising that “Never Let Me Go” was also among the nominees for best British independent film, but the same cannot be said for the other three selections: “Four Lions,” “Kick Ass,” and “Monsters.” Last year’s big winner at BIFA was “Moon” (2009), which did not go on to receive a single Oscar nod. This year’s winners will be announced on December 5.
• The Awful Truth: Ted Casablanca reports on the latest public criticism of the MPAA for giving an NC-17 rating to Derek Cianfrance’s relationship drama “Blue Valentine” last month. Jamie Patricof, the film’s producer, told the audience at a recent screening that the MPAA’s issue is not only with the nudity and sex in one scene involving stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, but also its “dramatic elements,” which doesn’t really make sense to him or anyone else. Regardless, he made some news by stating unequivocally that “the filmmakers have no intention of changing the film” in order to resubmit it for a lower rating. (No word on how distributor Harvey Weinstein feels about that.) Casablanca asks, “Have the Oscars ever had an NC-17 Best Picture winner?” The answer? For all intents and purposes, yes — the film was “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), which was released before the current ratings system was in place and received an X, which basically meant the same thing.
• New York Times: Karen Durbin celebrates this award season’s “meaty roles for actors to chew on,” singling out Lesley Manville’s fragile alcoholic in “Another Year,” Lena Dunham’s disillusioned college graduate in “Tiny Furniture,” Stephen Dorff’s emotionally-conflicted movie star in “Somewhere,” Paprika Steen’s rehabilitating alcoholic/actress in “Applause,” and Maricel Alvarez’s youthful counterpart to Javier Bardem’s character in “Biutiful.”
• Los Angeles Times: Mark Olsen points that “location, location, location” can really play a central character in a film, as demonstrated by Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” which was shot almost entirely within the historic Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, “the discreetly decadent hotel tucked above Sunset Boulevard that combines the low-key luxury of contemporary Hollywood with the tarnished glamour of Tinseltown’s classic era.” Coppola states, “It’s sort of a rite of passage for an actor to live at the Chateau Marmont… it means you’ve made it, but you’re still ‘down-to-earth.’” Indeed, Stephen Dorff, the film’s star, personally lived there for a brief period early in his career.
• Los Angeles Times: Lisa Rosen takes a closer look at the real events that inspired Nigel Cole’s “Made in Dagenham,” a “cheeky and charming” portrayl of a ’60s strike by the women working in the Ford motor vehicle factory in Dagenham, England, as part of a valiant fight for equal pay for equal work. In the years since the strike, the story of the women who waged it has been largely largely forgotten — indeed, even the veteran British actress Miranda Richardson, who is one of the film’s stars, says that she was unaware of what had transpired before she read the script, and was largely inspired to take it on because “it’s good to know where you come from.”
• The Odds: Steve Pond feels that “the race is getting boring” and “somebody needs to open a big can of crazy.” It’s not that he has a problem with the most likely contenders, he writes, just that he also wants “unruly wild cards, movies that make you wonder how they ever got made, exhilarating experiences that you just know are going to baffle or upset a good chunk of the audience.” His suggestions? A best actor nod for Joaquin Phoenix (“I’m Still Here”), a best supporting actor nod for John Hawkes (“Winter’s Bone”), a best supporting actress nod for Jacki Weaver (“Animal Kingdom”), and a best original screenplay nod for “Four Lions.”

Photo: Annette Bening in “Mother and Child.” Credit: Sony Pictures Classics.