The chatter is all over the place, forum members are standing in for qualified sources, calls are being made and left unreturned, exhibitors are speaking up and through it all, speculation mounts. How will "Letters from Iwo Jima" affect the Oscar race if (and it's looking more like "when") it gets that one week qualifying run in December? I think major awards talk is a bit ahead of itself and, in the end, a move like this can benefit one man more than any other: Clint Eastwood.

"Letters from Iwo Jima," however splendid the film may be, isn't going to turn into a Best Picture nominee. Is it really expected to be in the realm of the select few foreign language films that have crossed that barrier in the past? Sure, the difference is we're talking about a domestically created piece of filmmaking that just happens to be in Japanese, but the facts are a subtitled film, whatever its origins, has an uphill battle in the Best Picture category.

Then there is the discussion that releasing "Letters" could spell renewed hope in a "Flags of Our Fathers" bid. Hardly. A failure is a failure, and "Flags" simply stalled at the box office and in the hands of Dreamworks/Paramount marketing.

Just to throw my opinion out there, I think if anything comes of this whole scenario it will be in the form of a Best Director nomination for Clint Eastwood. There might be some outside opportunities for, say, Best Original Screenplay or something in the tech arena, but Warner Bros. has a Best Picture nominee sewn up in "The Departed." Snagging a lone director bid for a director who was courageous enough to make these two films seems to me to be the only likely awards scenario. But lets wait and see how it pans out.