The news that Time Warner is phasing out Picturehouse Entertainment and Warner Independent Pictures was a bit upsetting this morning, I have to say.

WIP may not have hit any major strides (though a Best Picture nominee one year after it became a brand wasn’t too shabby), but I believe Bob Berney had built something special at Picturehouse, a company that was beginning to look like a real home for filmmakers and visions you can’t put into little boxes.

Of course, the “dependent” circuit, as it were, has claimed this sort of artists’ haven thing for some time. But long ago many of them began to succumb to the same inflated budgets and profit-obsessed mentalities as their parent companies. I never got that vibe from Picturehouse.

Just look at some of the product: “Fur,” “A Prairie Home Companion,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Tristam Shandy,” “Mongol” and “La Vie en Rose,” featuring a lead performance whose ultimate Oscar victory caught more than a few people off guard.

Forgive me, but the notion that the now in-house New Line Cinema is somehow going to reach the niches that Berney and WIP did is a stretch. The potential seems all too clear for the brand to go back to the genre-soaked days of old, Dimension Films to Warners’ Miramax. But I’m happy to be proven wrong.

But for me, it’s a sad moment. I liked what Berney had cooking and on the occassions that I spoke to him about this project or that, I thought he had a pretty hip (and, thankfully, realistic) vision of what he could do at the company.

But what do I know?

Source: Entertainment Weekly

As the piece on actors managed to spark some interest and debate, of course I have to explore the women. Though I am studying just the last 20 years, the Best Actress Oscar has often left some of the greatest performances as mere nominees, or in some cases not even that.

Katherine Hepburn, though nominated for “The African Queen,” “Summertime,” and “Long Day’s Journey into the Night,” sat at home while others won; sometimes they were deserving, sometimes they weren’t. Gloria Swanson gave possibly the greatest performance by an actress never to win the award with her seething work in “Sunset Boulevard,” easily among the most iconic portrayals in film history. Shall I even mention poor Judy Garland? Robbed of her Oscar for “A Star is Born?” Into the 60s we have Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate” and Jane Fonda’s brilliant turn in “They Shoot Horses Don’t They?” — each of them Oscar losers.

Since 1988, there has been an equal amount of questionable winners in the lead actress category, beginning with Jodie Foster’s win for “The Accused” in a year that saw Mery Streep astound audiences in “A Cry in the Dark,” which won the New York Film Critics Circle award. One year later Jessica Tandy won the Oscar for “Driving Miss Daisy,” besting critics fave Michelle Pfeiffer, who won honors from the LA and NYC critics, as well as the National Society of Film Critics. Insiders had stated that Tandy was destined to win the Oscar the moment she was cast, and indeed she responded with the finest work of her career.

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After writing my piece on the recent Best Actor winners and non-winners I was rather shocked at the number of comments on Sean Penn’s astounding performance in “Mystic River,” a performance I believe to rank with the best of Brando, Duvall, Nicholson and De Niro.

I love debate, I love to talk film, and best of all I love debating the merit of performance as I studied method acting in the hopes of becoming an actor before I fell in love with film criticism.

For the record, I was terrible, but remained fascinated by those who could do it, and Mr. Penn might just be the very best at what he does. Far too often his off-screen antics have over-shadowed his brilliant work as an actor, and while he has mellowed in his later years, he is still every bit as surly and rebellious as he ever was, though as a father and husband perhaps he understands the need for boundaries these days. I had the pleasure of interviewing Penn at the Toronto International Film Festival a few years back, and always believe that there should be no trace of the characters he portrays in his films for him to be judged a great actor. There were none. The person sitting across from me, relaxing when he seemed to know I was here to discuss acting as an art and craft, was not anyone I had seen on film, nor the hot-tempered photography beater of his youth.

We all became aware of Penn in “Taps” back in the early 80s, but it was his hysterical turn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” that made him a star. I find it difficult sometimes to connect the actor who portrayed the doomed killer in “Dead Man Walking” and the deeply distrubed man in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” to the actor who portrayed the goofy, sunny, surf-loving Jeff Spicoli. Pauline Kael said Penn had the sort of talent that bites you on the nose and she was not off the mark at all.

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He’s embarrassing himself, asking the same question over and over again when it’s clear the callers from Indiana just don’t have any insight into the matter.

Jeff Wells is running it over at his site. So is AICN. Since I saw at least two take-down orders out there on the net, I refrained from running the pic. But Jeff says he ran it by publicists at Warner Bros. and no one got back to him, so taht was reason enough for him.

Anyway — while it’s there — what do you think? Personally, if it’s indeed real, I think it’s perfect. Especially knowing what it might look like on film with Wally Pfister playing with the shadows. And it’s downright terrifying.

Unwritten rule of Oscar strategy #476: playing a troubled popular music icon will probably net you at least a nomination. Just ask Marion Cotillard, Reese Witherspoon, Joaquin Phoenix, Jamie Foxx, Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, Gary Busey, Diana Ross, Susan Hayward… the list goes on.

It’s not hard to figure out why. Academy voters have long had a bias towards biopics, somehow believing that interpreting a real-life figure, whose physicality, voice and mannerisms are already established, is more of a challenge than creating a fictitious character from scratch. Playing a real-life entertainer only ups the ante, allowing the actor to build multiple performance personae within the character, as well to show off any singing/dancing/playing skills we didn’t know they possessed. (Singing being optional, of course, as Cotillard and Foxx can attest.) Throw in the mental breakdowns and substance abuse problems that generally go with the territory, and you have Academy Award bait of the highest order.

So the news that Nicole Kidman, arguably the foremost leading lady of her generation, is set to produce and play in a biopic of the late Dusty Springfield, inarguably the greatest white soul singer of all time, can’t fail to prompt early Oscar speculation.

Even laying aside Springfield’s astonishing musical legacy for a moment, the woman is a fascinating character: born and raised in London, she overcame crippling self-confidence issues to top the U.S. charts in the 1960s, confusing the barriers between what was perceived as “white” and “black” music. As her hold on the charts loosened, however, she descended into a reclusive lifestyle of alcoholism, drug abuse and self-harm, all the while conflicted between her emerging bisexuality and her Catholic faith. Finally clean, she made something of a comeback in the late 80s, before being diagnosed with breast cancer, finally losing the battle in 1999. All this, and with a British accent to boot. Like I said, baity stuff.

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Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Frank Langella seem to be the names bandied about for Oscar consideration this year, which would place them in some impressive company of nominees and winners these last 20 years. Of course, that said, there have also been some bizarre choices for the Best Actor award, which has often left me shaking my head in disgust and wondering what these voters were actually seeing.

Since 1988, there have been 10 winners that perhaps should not have been, the award arguably deserved by another of the nominees, or worse, an actor not nominated! Consider Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man,” a widely acclaimed performance that asked that he not connect with anyone in the film, never make eye contact, rock back and forth and speak in a nasally voice.

Stop what you are doing right now and try what he did in the film, and trust me it is very easy to do. Now do you deserve an Oscar for doing what Hoffman did in that film? The real perfortmance in “Rain Man” was that of Tom Cruise, who we watched evolve over the course of the film, and of course the best performance of that year was Gene Hackman as the tough investigator in “Mississippi Burning.” Hackman was nominated, but he stood no chance in the wake of the juggernaut of support for Hoffman, who in fact should have won years before for his miraculous work in “Tootsie!”

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As you can see in the polls archive, it looks like readers aren’t too receptive to the notion that Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia” will be a major awards contender as it sits atop the hep with four or five other “frontrunners” early in the season. Joe Wright’s “The Soloist” wasn’t far behind. We’ll see if you guys were on the money in a matter of months, but for now, we’ve got a new query for you all.

Now that the summer movie season has exploded onto the scene in the form of last week’s “Iron Man,” what are you most excited about on the horizon? Well, speak up!

(I went with the nine most likely choices and an “other” option as well. If you’re more psyched for something else, come back here and let us know!)