A couple of weeks ago, I wondered why it was taking so long for Jeff Nichols’ “Mud” — an audience-pleasing, star-powered coming-of-age story with genre trappings — to find a US distributor, after being so warmly received at the tail-end of the Cannes Film Festival. I closed by speculating that indie outfit Roadside Attractions was the sort of company that might be willing to take on the film, and steer it through an awards season where it could turn into a popular property.

Lo and behold, the news broke yesterday that Roadside, together with parent company Lionsgate, are all set to acquire US rights to the film — but that they’re only planning to release it in 2013. There’s no word yet on when in the new year “Mud” is set to hit, but if they share my belief in its awards potential — at the very least, it represents a decent Best Actor play for the currently resurgent Matthew McConaughey — the wait could be rather a long one. Meanwhile, it still hasn’t shown up in the Toronto Film Festival lineup.

Variety quotes Roadside Attractions co-president Howard Cohen:  

”Mud’ is a riveting mystery thriller set in American river country with a stellar cast by one of our greatest new cinematic voices, Jeff Nichols, and top specialty film producers Everest Entertainment… We see it very much in keeping with films like ‘Margin Call’ and the upcoming ‘Arbitrage,’ which are quality, commercial, performance-driven films that benefit from the unique partnership of Lionsgate and Roadside, where we can each shine in our respective media.”

As semi-arthouse items go, I would say “Mud” is more broadly accessible, and several shades more commercial, than a “Margin Call” — which makes me curious as to what kind of release and publicity strategy they have in mind for it. Selling it squarely on the marquee appeal of McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon — neither of whom is the true lead of the film — would probably backfire, but assuming it conjures the same level of endorsement from US critics that it did in Cannes, it’s warm and entertaining enough to become a modest word-of-mouth hit.

Indeed, it would arguably perform better as summer counter-programming than in the thick of awards season this year: Lionsgate and Roadside are probably wise to allow themselves time to build a profile for this one. Still, with “Mud” now out of the way, that leaves Lionsgate and Roadside — who, between them, have reaped considerable Oscar success in recent years for such films as “Crash,” “Precious,” “Winter’s Bone,” “Biutiful,” “Albert Nobbs” and “Margin Call” — with very little to play with in the upcoming awards season.

Kris wrote recently about how Richard Gere’s performance in “Arbitrage” could net him some awards attention, but beyond that, it’s hard to see them figuring into things much this year — bar a concerted push for “The Hunger Games,” and for Jennifer Lawrence in particular. (Don’t laugh — there’s lots of room for maneuver in that category.) “Mud” is a more serious prospect than either, and it could have allowed McConaughey (who’s very much in the Best Supporting Actor frame for “Magic Mike”) a nice two-pronged campaign, but I guess the timing just wasn’t right.

Whether this year or next, however, this is the right film for the right company. Keep an eye on it.

It’s been a busy week for Film Society of Lincoln Center, lining up the program for the 50th annual New York Film Festival. Announcements of “Life of Pi” and “Flight” as bookends to the fest already stood out as a major step forward where nabbing exclusive bows was concerned, and today, it’s been revealed that “Not Fade Away” will see its world premiere as a centerpiece presentation.

David Chase’s much-anticipated directorial debut tells the coming-of-age tale of a group of friends inspired to form their own rock band fronted by a gifted singer-songwriter. But talking with a publicist this week who’s working on the film, it’s also apparently very much about that moment in time when Chase and his friends moved to New York and realized there was a way of life as artists. And with a killer soundtrack to boot.

Chase, of course, made his name on the small screen with series like “Northern Exposure” and, most especially, “The Sopranos.” It’s nice that his first stab at the big screen will be an intimate portrait along these lines. “Sopranos” star James Gandolfini has a role in the film, which also stars Brad Garrett, Christopher McDonald and Bella Heathcote, among others.

Via press release, Chase said “‘Not Fade Away’ is a personal film with a backdrop very important to me, a period in American music that was one of the best. To have the film debut at the NYFF exceeds my wildest dreams and the dreams of everyone associated with the movie. So many of my favorite films have been revealed to the public at the NYFF. I’m honored and thrilled.”

I’ve been hearing the film could be something to watch this season, particularly for performances. It will now be released on December 21, which puts it right in the thick of things. And Paramount, with really just this and “Flight” on its hands (nice job nailing down NYFF with these two), has a unique year ahead of itself. After the large-scale “Hugo” and big pushes for “The Fighter” and “Up in the Air,” among others, I imagine it’s going to be refreshing to have a pair like this. They present their own challenges, but they’re also unassuming dramas. The spotlight will be elsewhere, putting the heat on other contenders.

With that, the 50th annual NYFF has a very exciting structure to build around. I imagine we’ll see plenty of Sundance, Cannes, Toronto and Venice carry-overs, but these three represent a stellar string of (official) exclusivity.

The New York Film Festival runs September 28 – October 14.

When I got married in March, we chose, as many couples do, to offer up readings meant to shed light on our feelings for one another. Mine was a brief but potent (to me) excerpt from Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” It was the final line, in fact, which has a long story of its own (Dickens offered up three versions and settled on one that carries a delicious sort of ambiguity).

It’s my favorite book ever since I cheated and read the Cliff’s Notes in the 9th grade (of course I’ve read it in full since). I love what it says about connectivity, about love, about passion and obsession and about finding one’s way in the world. And like many, I always felt there was little to add to David Lean’s cinematic interpretation from 1946. Nevertheless, I must say I even enjoyed Alfonso Cuarón’s embattled modernization in 1998. (That film’s poster hangs framed on my kitchen wall in Los Angeles.)

So I was a little bit uneasy at the prospect of another interpretation, particularly a faithful one, as it appeared we were going to get out of Mike Newell. It’s a piece of work that could do with abstract representation, and really, to bring the story to a fresh audience, taking faithfully from the page could just miss the mark. Also, Newell just seemed an odd fit on the whole.

That said, the recently revealed international trailer gives me a little hope. There’s a style to the production that is rich and not bogged down in period boredom. As one might expect, Helena Bonham Carter seems to relish the role of Mrs. Havisham and “War Horse” star Jeremy Irvine really does seem like a proper Pip. The trailer is spiced up with the same excerpt from Danny Elfman’s “The Wolfman” score that played so well with early “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” trailers last year and it’s built quite like a thriller, so there’s some misdirection afoot. But I’m looking forward to it now.

Ralph Fiennes takes on the role of Magwitch while Holliday Grainger gets the coveted role of Estella. Both look exceptional.

But in advance of the Toronto Film Festival, where the film will see its world premiere (unless it pops up at Telluride first — fingers crossed), no studio has sprung for the title yet. I hope that’s not telling. I guess we’ll find out in a few weeks what the film has to offer, and whether its various elements — which have peppered our Contenders pages for months — will have a shot at the awards season.

Check out the international trailer below.

If the opening night slot at any major festival is a high-pressure position — one under which many a film has collapsed — the closing night is in an even less enviable position: at least everyone bothers to see the opening film. Knowing that many journalists will already have flown the coop by the last day, festival programmers rarely leave something truly tasty to the very end, often handing the slight to something eminently skippable and/or low-profile.

Cannes has particular form in this area — barely a word was breathed about this year’s closer, “Therese D,” even if it was the late Claude Miller’s final film — and Toronto tends to take a similar approach, the festival’s recent closing selections having included “Stone of Destiny” (no, I don’t remember either) and last year’s “Page Eight,” a dreary Rachel Weisz-starring spy drama that had already premiered on British TV.

Still, there have been notable exceptions to the closing-night curse: Venice picked a winner last year with Whit Stillman’s “Damsels in Distress,” just the tonic jaded critics needed after 10 days of heavyweight viewing, and I wonder if Toronto has been a little savvier this year with the selection of “Song for Marion,” a feelgood British dramedy that has already been picked up for US distribution by The Weinstein Company.

In terms of marquee value, “Song for Marion” doesn’t seem like much of a draw. However much we love Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp — and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Gemma Arterton — they won’t have punters queuing around the block, while talented British director Paul Andrew Williams hasn’t only established a quiet name for himself in his home country. (His microbudget 2006 debut, “London to Brighton,” was exhilarating, and netted him a BAFTA nod among other accolades, but his genre-flavored follow-ups “The Cottage” and “Cherry Tree Lane” didn’t deliver on his promise.)

But something tells me both Toronto and the Weinsteins might be onto something. The potentially sentimental premise of “Song for Marion” — a curmudgeonly pensioner joins his wife’s “unconventional” church choir (I have a feeling the photo above could be a clue) after she becomes terminally ill — doesn’t suggest a surefire critical hit. It could, however, portend an audience favorite, particularly in a year where geriatric-focused cinema has belied the industry’s usual focus on youth.

“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” with its crowded ensemble of British veterans, has been nothing short of a box office phenomenon: it’s currently the ninth-highest grosser of the year at home, and has taken an impressive $45 million across the pound, proving the ticket-buying power of the under-served over-50 audience. At the other end of the artistic scale, Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner “Amour,” which focuses almost exclusively on the marriage of two octogenarians, is perhaps the most unanimously acclaimed film of the year.

Count on both receiving some kind of awards push at the end of the year, with Clint Eastwood in “Trouble With the Curve,” sixtysomething summer surprise “Hope Springs” and Dustin Hoffman’s Toronto-bound “Quartet” — another elderly ensemble piece, led by Maggie Smith — potentially set to join them. The advanced average age of Academy voters comes up for discussion every season: this year, they’ll have a lot to choose from that caters directly to their demographic.

With no reviews to go on, we can only guess whether or not “Song for Marion” will prove sufficiently sparky, or too modest, to catch on outside the festival circuit. Nathaniel Rogers has cannily had Vanessa Redgrave on his Best Supporting Actress roster from the get-go, before the film was on my or most people’s radar: it certainly sounds an awards-friendly role, particularly with the Weinsteins behind her. Then again, that supposed Weinstein muscle somehow couldn’t engineer any kind of awards traction for her monumental turn in “Coriolanus” last year, and I’ll eat my tweed flatcap if this performance tops that one. This sweeter proposition could catch more flies of the talk out of Toronto is good — first, however, it needs people to stick around to see it. 

Saturday night I shelled out cash to see Sundance hit “Searching for Sugar Man.”  Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary tells the incredible story of musician Sixto Rodriguez, who crashed and burned with record sales in the States in his time (the early 1970s) but became an inspiration for South Africans fighting Apartheid throughout the decade and into the 1980s.

Of course, the kicker is Rodriguez (his stage name) never knew about his worldwide success (he was also huge in Australia). Many fans had come to believe the myth — different depending on who’s telling the tale — that he had killed himself on stage in some dramatic fashion.

Rodriguez was re-discovered in the 1990s and actually went to South Africa to perform sold-out concerts, much to the shock and delight of his daughters, who had no idea their father had it in him. But that’s where he belonged, on the stage, telling stories through really great music. Indeed, many of the major music figures who worked with Rodriguez — as the doc points out — consider him on the top tier of their collaborators.

The film is sensational as a discovery piece. Those familiar with the story might not get as much of a rush from it, though. Personally, I’d have preferred to see Bendjelloul go for the jugular on the issue of who did make the money from those overseas sales (royalties were paid to record companies, but they never made it to Rodriguez’s wallet). One interview basically tells that whole story through deflection, but I’d have liked to see more along that track.

Nevertheless, as a kind of ode to art and the drive to create, the film is lovely, strung together by the singer/songwriter’s haunting tunes. Rodriguez has been in the same house for 40 years, working demolition, heavy labor. But he was meant to do this.

“It”s the kind of enchanting story you couldn”t make up,” HitFix’s Katie Hasty wrote of the film out of Sundance, “though all the archetypes are there: music industry mismanagement, fan fiction, revolution, Detroit decay, the essence of rock and roll and redemption, old men made young again.”

Rodriguez performed for a small crowd this evening on the roof of The Standard downtown on Cooper Square, the Manhattan skyline surrounding him as he crooned ditties like “Crucify Your Mind” and, of course, “Sugar Man.” It was a lovely, intimate gathering, and a real pleasure to just have a shot at seeing such an unsung hero of the mic. He’ll be on Letterman tomorrow night, reaching a larger audience still.

Better late than never.

Sony Classics picked up the film after it bowed in Park City and has it primed for an Oscar push later in the season. I think it could get there, even though music docs often face an uphill battle with that branch. This and Amy Berg’s “West of Memphis” would make a handsome pair of nominees for the studio, that’s for sure.

“Searching for Sugar Man” is currently playing in limited release.

In spit-balling the upcoming fall festival circuit recently, I noted that, in my view, the New York Film Festival — at least as a launching pad for year-end awards hopefuls — had been underutilized in its time. But things have changed the last few years.

Up until the unveiling of David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” NYFF had been a stopping-off point for Sundance, Cannes, Venice, Telluride and Toronto holdovers, for the most part. Films like “Good Night, and Good Luck.,” “The Queen,” “The Darjeeling Limited,” “The Class” and “Wild Grass” opened the fest after bowing elsewhere, while closing nighters such as “Caché,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Persepolis,” “The Wrestler” and “Broken Embraces” did the same. Ditto a slew of centerpiece screenings.

But that exclusive bow for Fincher’s film in 2010 was a turning point. The excitement was probably dampened a bit by the fact that Sony screened the film for press in New York and Los Angeles in the middle of the Toronto Film Festival, looking to get some headway while ultimate Best Picture winner “The King’s Speech” was dominating the festival conversation, but it was a good start.

2011 brought “Carnage” and “The Descendants” as bookends after each had played Venice and Telluride/Toronto, respectively, but an exclusive show of “My Week with Marilyn” in the centerpiece arena and, particularly, Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” as a work in progress was added muscle for a festival looking to set itself apart as more than just a stop on the tour.

And this year, for its 50th annual festivities, NYFF has gone big. Last week it was announced that Robert Zemeckis’s first live action film in 12 years, “Flight,” would close out the fest, while today, the big news was that Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” would be the curtain raiser (which I nailed in the aforementioned spit-balling column). It’s Lee’s second opening night presentation at the fest, the first being 1997’s “The Ice Storm.” His “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” closed the fest in 2000.

The question now is, what of the big anticipated awards hopefuls is left to choose from for centerpiece selections? These two are major gets as it is, so we’ll likely see something that’s already slated for Venice or Toronto.

Scott Cooper’s “Out of the Furnace” was an option at one point, but the film has been saved for 2013 entirely, while some are speculating that Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” opening in theaters just weeks after the fest ends, is a possibility. I highly doubt the latter, as Spielberg just never takes the festival approach. Neither does Disney.

I still wonder about Sacha Gervasi’s “Hitchcock” and Gus Van Sant’s “Promised Land.” The former is likely to remain a 2013 player, while the latter is probably in the same boat.

Nevertheless, congratulations to Film Society for nailing down two big contenders for its 50th anniversary and for standing tall as a place to bring exclusive awards contender bows. I have to say, it’s a good year to have made the move here. (We signed a lease this afternoon — I’m a New Yorker now, for those unaware.)

The 50th annual New York Film Festival runs September 28  – October 14.

For a film that a lot of critics continue to believe is a disaster of momentous proportions, Michael Cimino’s epic flop “Heaven’s Gate” has received an awful lot of second chances. The vast period western is one of Hollywood’s most enduring cautionary tales: made on the back of Cimino’s Oscar triumph with “The Deer Hunter,” it fell prey to the director’s hubris as it ran catastrophically behind schedule and over budget, ruining United Artists as it grossed not one-twentieth of its then-massive $44 million budget.

Critics may have piled onto the already woebegone film, both in its 219-minute premiere edit (still a feat of restraint compared to the five-and-a-half-hour edit Cimino originally had in mind) and the studio-shredded 149-minute version prepared for general theatrical release, but the rehabilitation has been steady and dedicated over the years. Originally unveiled in Competition at Cannes, it’s since been given other illustrious platforms from to recoup its credibility.

An extended director’s cut played the Berlin Film Festival in 2005, while at the upcoming Venice Film Festival, a new digital restoration of the 219-minute edit will follow the presentation of the Persol Award to Cimino. (Venice, as you may have noticed, does a lot of these vague career-achievement awards: the Italians are nothing if not a generous people.) That restoration itself heralds the imminent arrival of a Criterion Collection Blu-ray. So the redemption process is just about complete.

Some will inevitably call this a futile act of turd-polishing, but I’m glad “Heaven’s Gate” continues to receive such second, third and fourth looks. Venice director Alberto Barbera’s claim that the film is a “masterpiece” is a decidedly over-compensatory statement, but Cimino’s wild, brazenly stirring and ostentatiously beautiful film has never deserved the stinker label. It fails as fascinatingly as it succeeds, from the worlds-apart casting of Kris Kristofferson and Isabelle Huppert as romantic leads to its tangled but excitable politics. It’s both too much to manage and too much to dismiss: as Kris, another qualified admirer, wrote in a Hollywood Elsewhere thread about the film yesterday, “It’s not misunderstood, but it’s too gorgeous and detailed to disavow.”

Anyway, good on Barbera for picking such a relatively contentious director and film to honor in his first year as festival director. I’d like to check out “Heaven’s Gate” at the festival, though will likely be pressed for time: the Blu-ray, however, is a gourmet prospect.  

Partial press release as follows:

La Biennale di Venezia and Persol are pleased to announce that the great American director, screenwriter, and producer Michael Cimino will be honoured with the Persol 2012 award of the Venice International Film Festival which aims to celebrate a legend of international filmmaking.

In speaking about this award for Michael Cimino, Festival Director Alberto Barbera said: “It is a belated but long overdue acknowledgment of the greatness of a visionary filmmaker, one of the most intense and original voices in American filmmaking of the last forty years, gradually reduced to silence after the box-office flop of a masterpiece to which the film producers contributed with senseless cuts. By virtue of his immense talent, Cimino has exalted the filmmaking art and offered a portrait of America both critical and passionate, lucid and compelling.”

The Persol Award will be presented to Michael Cimino at a ceremony on Thursday 30 August at the Lido during the 69th Venice International Film Festival (29 August – 8 September 2012), directed by Alberto Barbera and organized by la Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta.

Following the award ceremony, Michael Cimino”s masterpiece Heaven”s Gate (1980, 219″) will be screened in the new Criterion edition, digitally restored under the supervision of the filmmaker, at 14.30 at the Sala Perla (Palazzo del Casinò), as part of the Venezia Classici section of the 69th Film Festival.

Heaven”s Gate was originally presented in its full-length version in Venice at the 1982 Film Festival, directed by Carlo Lizzani, in the Mezzogiorno-Mezzanotte section curated by Enzo Ungari.

At the 2001 edition of the Venice Film Festival under the direction of Alberto Barbera, Michael Cimino presented his novel Big Jane, of which he conducted a staged reading.

After lying low in TV-land for a few years following the damp squib that was “Miracle at St. Anna,” Spike Lee seems to be all over the place this month. His latest feature “Red Hook Summer” — a loose follow-up to “Do the Right Thing,” which Kris partially saw in Sundance, and rather liked — opens Stateside today to mixed, if not unsympathetic, reviews.

In a few weeks, he’ll be unveiling his new documentary about Michael Jackson, “Bad 25,” at the Venice Film Festival — where he’ll also be receiving a career achievement award. Finally, his long-mooted remake of Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” is moving forward, with shooting set to begin in New Orleans this autumn, and Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Olsen and Sharlto Copley attached to star.

On another note, he’s also jumped on the list-making bandwagon we’ve all been on since Sight & Sound’s poll results last week, revealing his own Top 15 Films Of All Time — not via Sight & Sound (he didn’t participate in the 2002 poll, and doesn’t appear to be involved with this year’s either), but through an iTunes playlist of sorts. What a time it is to be alive, folks.

Lee says his selections also form part of his teaching syllabus for filmmaking students at NYU. It’s a distinctive, respectable if not particularly canon-bound list, some influences from which can be detected in his own work more than others. It’s no surprise that a man whose best films — “Do the Right Thing,” of course, but also my own favorite, “Summer of Sam” — palpably exude the sticky sidewalk heat of a New York summer’s day should be such a big fan of “Dog Day Afternoon.” But the Burt Lancaster thriller “The Train” is an inspired, and less expected, choice. (Of course, “Inside Man” revealed something of his affinity for genre fare.)

Interestingly, considering his reputation as a racial firebrand, no non-white filmmakers crack his list, though certain selections obviously reflect his politics. In alphabetical order:

“The Battle of Algiers” (Gillo Pontecorvo)

“The Bicycle Thief” (Vittorio De Sica)

“Black Orpheus” (Marcel Camus)

“Blue Collar” (Paul Schrader)

“Chinatown” (Roman Polanski)

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (Steven Spielberg)

“Cool Hand Luke” (Stuart Rosenberg)

“Dog Day Afternoon” (Sidney Lumet)

“Hoop Dreams” (Steve James)

“The Last Detail” (Hal Ashby)

“Mean Streets” (Martin Scorsese)

“Stranger Than Paradise” (Jim Jarmusch)

“To Kill a Mockingbird” (Robert Mulligan)

“The Train” (John Frankenheimer)

“West Side Story” (Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins)

Meanwhile, one of the great pleasures (and Twitter conversation feeders) of the past week has been perusing the individual directors’ Top 10 lists in the current print edition of Sight & Sound — they may not have contributed to the main poll, but they’re by far the most fun to read. Who would have guessed that Michael Mann is that big a fan of “Avatar?” (“A brilliant synthesis of mythic tropes, with debts to Levi-Strauss and Frazier’s ‘The Golden Bough,'” he writes. “It soars because, simply, it stones and transports you.”) Or that Asghar Farhadi’s favorite Woody Allen is “Take the Money and Run?” (Mike Leigh’s, meanwhile, is “Radio Days.”) Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a “Full Metal Jacket” man… and so on and so forth.

Though the contributors list is stacked with lofty, established names, my favorite individual lists of those I’ve scrutinized so far belong to two relative newcomers. It’s no surprise to see “3 Women” (my own favorite Altman) in “Martha Marcy May Marlene” director Sean Durkin’s list, alongside “Persona,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Shining,” “The Piano Teacher” and, more improbably, “The Goonies.” And British writer-director Joanna Hogg — whose remarkable first two features, “Unrelated” and “Archipelago,” are still, I believe, awaiting US distribution — wins my heart by plumping for Scorsese’s criminally under-treasured “New York, New York,” together with the likes of “Beau Travail,” “The Green Ray” and “Midnight,” a less celebrated Hollywood comedy from the routinely celebrated class of 1939.

I didn’t bother weighing in on last week’s scuttlebutt that Jimmy Fallon was in talks to host the 85th annual Academy Awards, mostly because I was on the road in Texas, but also because I just couldn’t see it happening. While ABC may not have veto rights on the Academy bringing in two NBC stars (the other being “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels) for its Oscarcast, I still don’t know that you’d want to ruffle the relationship all that much.

Also, with Hawk Koch newly minted as AMPAS president, it’s unlikely he’d want to carry on something brought in by exiting president Tom Sherak. Surely he’ll have his own ideas. I suppose it’s still possible Michaels could produce (along with former AMPAS president Sid Ganis, who the LA Times reported last week was also in the mix), but one giant commercial for “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” always seemed to me like it would be a bit of a stretch (not to mention a bad creative approach, at least in my opinion).

Well, it turns out the instinct was right. Though no reasoning was offered (and indeed, the subject seemed to be dealt with very swiftly), Fallon said on “The Today Show” in London this morning that it won’t happen. “No, I’m not going to do the Oscars,” he told Matt Lauer. “I’m honored to be asked by the Academy to host the Oscars but it’s not my year.”

So with that, and with a new president currently pondering these issues as you read, it’s time to revisit the annual hosting sweepstakes.

I’ve always been of the mind that TV hosts just don’t work out. There’s something about the atmosphere generated that lessens the proceedings a bit for me. So while Ellen DeGeneres and Jon Stewart, etc., may have their champions, I was never keen on those telecasts.

I’ve always liked it when movie people were tapped. I thought Hugh Jackman was fantastic in one of the best Oscarcasts in recent memory (2009’s Bill Condon-directed spectacle). That show brought a lot of love for “Slumdog Millionaire” and director Danny Boyle, who recently rode the bull that is the Olympics opening ceremonies and who Guy has noted would be an inspired pick to produce the Oscars, too. So with that in mind, I’ve always gone to one name when asked who would make a delightful host: Kevin Spacey.

But that’s me. What about you? Rifle off those names and let’s see if we can get a big pool of possibilities together for Mr. Koch and company to browse through.

NBC’s embed code for the Fallon segment is impossible. So just go and check it out here if you like.

For a week now, Sight & Sound’s decennial critics’ poll of the Greatest Films Of All Time, the results of which are awaited by cinephiles with all the eagerness of over-sugared rugrats on Christmas morning, has provided ample discussion fodder for the film-focused blogosphere.

The Top 100’s seemingly inexhaustible avenues for statistical breakdowns (How many Asian films? How many post-1968 films? Which directors received the most votes collectively? Which films fell the farthest from their 2002 placing?) are still being explored, the number-crunchers matched in enthusiasm — or lack thereof — only by the sniping commentators inevitably displeased with the results. Why is the list so old? Why is it so stodgy? Why is it so white? Why is it so male? Why are my own subjective favorites not accounted for? Many talk of the list as if it’s compiled by some unified committee with a patent agenda against cinema from many of our lifetimes, an aggressive boner for silent cinema and a vindictive urge to take Orson Welles down a peg or two.   

It’s not, of course. Democratically tabulated from 846 wholly subjective, disparate lists from critics, academics and programmers around the world — the Sight & Sound list is merely a gathering of the titles that the largest proportion of participants happen to love enough to place it in their own desert-island. And not such a large proportion, either: “Vertigo” may have won the poll with 191 votes, but that still means 655 voters don’t think it was one of the greatest films ever made. Consensus moves like molasses, yet it stubbornly refuses to represent the majority.

There is no better way to demonstrate this than a glance at the individual Top 10 lists, contributed by everyone from Roger Ebert to Quentin Tarantino to, well, me — almost every single one of which features a couple of personally treasured titles that will never amass enough support to threaten the collective list. The magazine has published a small fraction of these in print, with the rest (mine included) due to hit their website on August 15. But I’ve played coy for long enough: it’s time to reveal how I voted.

After the initial surprise and thrill of being invited to vote subsided — if you’d told me a decade ago, when I pored over the 2002 results as a university sophomore in Johannesburg, that I’d have the honor of participating next time round, I wouldn’t have believed you — a less warming sensation of panic crept in. I hadn’t kept a ranked list of favorite films since I was a teenager, having abandoned the practice until I felt sufficiently grown-up and well-versed for it to mean something. Quite what, I didn’t know, and I think I was wrong anyway: a list of this nature should be a snapshot of where one’s head and heart is at a particular stage of life. Without ascribing inordinate levels of importance to one’s taste, what more can it mean — and why should it not shift and grow with us?

Sight & Sound themselves offered an encouragingly, if complicatingly, broad brief: “You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history,” they suggested, “or the ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema.”

In other words, there was no need to separate the notions of “favorite” and “best” — a divide that I nonetheless heard many colleagues agitatedly discussing. Still, the titles that I jotted down most swiftly and unquestioningly for inclusion were ones that comfortably tick both boxes: landmark works of either innovative or perfectionist aesthetic value that nonetheless resonated with me personally on first viewing, and have continued to do so through repeat visits. With such a daunting chunk of my life’s viewing to eliminate, I decided that there was no room in my Top 10 for films I chiefly admire on an academic level, however glad I am to have them in my life. The only other rule I set for myself was a simple one-film-per-director quota: a helpful restriction at the longlist stage, though often a heartbreaking one.

From there on, my gut took over. Indecisively, it has to be said, as any number of Sophie’s choices were reversed and re-reversed over the course of an increasingly stressful week. I decided to impose no further quotas or restrictions regarding era, genre, nationality or gender, lest it begin to seem  like a list made to impress others rather than represent myself. (There is a female filmmaker on the list, though certainly not a token one.) And when a bunch of equally loved canon titles bottlenecked for the final spot on my list, I wriggled out of the decision by taking a punt on something a little newer — is it so sacrilegious to invest a little in the current cinema?

As is stands, the final list of 10 I arrived at is more western in its makeup than I’d like, with comedies, animation and silent cinema all coming up regrettably short. But I couldn’t imagine trading any of my inclusions for anything else, and not continuing to have second thoughts afterwards — they all come tied to very special and specific memories of when, where and how I first saw them. (Screen International critic Tim Grierson brought up the interesting question last week of how many films in our Top 10s we’ve only ever seen on the small screen — having largely grown up in a country with no concept of rep cinema, that goes for half my list, but that’s not to say TV, DVDs or even VHS tapes are sentiment-free media.)

The list of also-rans is so long I fear I might not be able to stop if I mention even a few. Let’s just say that “Apocalypse Now,” “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” “The Lady Eve,” “Ran,” “Umberto D,” “Holiday,” “Days of Heaven,” “3 Women,” “City Lights,” “Raging Bull,” “Les Enfants du Paradis,” “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” “Bambi,” “Hud,” “Raise Ravens,” “Barry Lyndon,” “Playtime,” “Ju Dou,” “Stalker” and “When Harry Met Sally…” are just a score of many other titles that were in the frame at one point or another — and that’s strictly off the top of my head, not from some non-existent 11-30 backup pile.

Finally, to return to my earlier point about the elusiveness of consensus, only four of the films selected below even feature in Sight & Sound’s Top 100. Compare to Kris’ recent all-time Top 10 list, meanwhile, or Drew McWeeny’s Top 20, and you’ll find not a single overlap. Isn’t it nice that there are enough great films to go around?

Check out my choices in the gallery below, and be sure to share your own thoughts in the comments. 

So it turns out Clint Eastwood was just kidding when he indicated that “Gran Torino” would be his final on-screen work. A solid Best Actor push from Warner Bros. that year didn’t yield pay dirt, but it got the conversation chugging that the studio is sure to use again this year: He may have four Oscars, but he’s never won for acting.

With that in mind, “Trouble with the Curve,” from director Robert Lorenz (a homegrown Eastwood guy who’s worked with the icon for years), could be a means to that end. The new trailer — serendipitously launched on the 20th anniversary of “Unforgiven” — plays it light but “meaningful” with its tease of an aging baseball scout (Eastwood) and his relationship with his daughter (Amy Adams) on a road trip.

Will this be the one? We’ll have to see. The film isn’t set for the fall festival circuit, though as I recently indicated, it could turn up at Telluride with a tribute for the actor to kick-start the campaign. It’s set for a September 21 release, just three weeks after the Venice/Telluride/Toronto corridor closes and just before NYFF (which, on its 50th anniversary, is looking at a thin field to choose from for openers and centerpiece screenings).

Warner Bros. had a pretty heavy slate of films going into the season, but with “The Great Gatsby” shuffling off to 2013 and (though this is probably arguable to some) “The Dark Knight Rises” not looking like the Best Picture contender its predecessor was, things are beginning to clear up — ever so slightly. We’ll see how they play it.

Also: How about John Goodman’s run the last two years? Performances in two Best Picture nominees last year and supporting roles in both this and opposite Denzel Washington in “Flight” and Ben Affleck in “Argo” this year.

Check out the trailer for “Trouble with the Curve,” courtesy of Yahoo! Movies, below. And with that, we await footage from the only holdout of the season so far: Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (which will surely have its own significant Best Actor push to show for itself).

“Trouble with the Curve” hits theaters September 21.

With the Academy recently seeming to do everything within its powers to extinguish the Best Original Song award, the passing of Marvin Hamlisch strikes an especially poignant note. The New York-born composer — who died yesterday, following a brief illness, at the age of 68 — was the kind of talent that category was created to recognize, capable of condensing a film’s entire thematic and atmospheric undercurrent into a single, inescapable three-minute theme.

It’s an art that might seem antiquated and even a little banal to contemporary audiences, as high-end film scoring grows ever less romantic and more esoteric, with pre-existing songs woven organically into scenes, if at all — the legacy of such modernist filmmakers as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. But the songs themselves haven’t faded: everyone can hum at least a few bars of Hamlisch’s title tune for “The Way We Were,” even if they haven’t seen the film. Ditto “Nobody Does It Better,” one of the most epic and steel-plated of all James Bond themes, even if “The Spy Who Loved Me” isn’t among the franchise’s most-treasured entries. In Hamlisch’s prime, great movie songs could still separate from, and often exceed, their source.

The aforementioned songs are among the eight that the Academy singled out for recognition — that category housing two-thirds of his 12 career Oscar nominations. But songwriting was by no means alone in Hamlisch’s skill set: he was equally accomplished in the areas of original score composition and adapted arrangement, film and television, Broadway and chart pop.

His unique 1973 Oscar triumph perfectly illustrates his versatility: not only did he win the Best Original Score and Best Original Song Oscars for “The Way We Were,” but he also scooped the now-obsolete Adapted Score trophy for his immensely popular, film-defining reworkings of Scott Joplin’s ragtime piano tunes in that year’s Best Picture winner, “The Sting.” He was only the second person, after Billy Wilder, to win three Oscars in a single night — all at the tender age of 29.

Such was the extent of his crossover appeal at that time that he even won the Grammy for Best New Artist the following year, one of very few non-vocal acts to do so. (Having later been honored at the Tony Awards for his musical “A Chorus Line,” and by the Emmys for assorted achievements, including musical direction for his loyal collaborator Barbra Streisand, he’s also one of a handful of names to boast the much-prized “EGOT” quartet of major showbiz awards. All that, and a Pulitzer Prize for “A Chorus Line,” too.)

You could argue that Hamlisch was an out-of-time artist even in his heyday, arriving to film composition in the late 1960s (debuting with Frank Perry’s aggressively modern “The Swimmer”) — just as a new wave of American filmmakers was beginning to toy with scoring options beyond swelling strings and sentimental love themes.

Perhaps not coincidentally, much of his most beloved film work has been calculatedly retro-leaning: “The Way We Were” was a throwback of sorts to a grander model of Hollywood romance, and Hamlisch’s accompanying orchestrations (and, of course, Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s title lyric) were suitably, wistfully lush. He revived an entirely ossified vein of 1920s jazz for the period frolics of “The Sting.”

And even after 13 years away from the movie scoring game — a hiatus that suggests he himself felt out of sync with new developments in the medium — when he returned, it was to provide the delightfully arch, knowingly dated caper jazz for Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 comedy “The Informant!,” a film that prided itself on its anachronisms. That the Academy didn’t quite get the joke — Hamlisch was hotly tipped for a sentimental late-career nod that didn’t materialize — suggests they preferred their nostalgia with a little less irony, the way the composer served it for much of his brilliant career.    

Somewhat quietly, it would appear, Clint Eastwood’s western masterwork “Unforgiven” is celebrating its 20th anniversary today.

The film hit theaters on August 7, 1992 and was the last western to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Though to be clear, it’s not like it was one in a long line. Only three from the genre have ever taken the prize, with a six-decade drought between 1931’s “Cimarron” and 1990’s “Dances with Wolves.”

Somehow the western didn’t spark for the Academy during its heyday. Films generally agreed upon as American classics today like “The Searchers,” “Red River,” and “The Magnificent Seven” couldn’t even manage nominations, to say nothing of Italian triumphs like “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

Indeed, it’s always been somewhat fascinating to me that the three westerns that won Best Picture came outside that heyday entirely. And “Unforgiven” — which Eastwood always said would be a great final say on the genre if he were to ever have one — has always felt like a poignant sort of closure for the western and Oscar.

An anti-violence screed that was also something of an anti-western (turning countless tropes on their ears), Eastwood’s film is, for me, one of the genre’s crown jewels. And I would argue it’s one of the top five Best Picture winners ever. It also landed wins for Best Director, Best Film Editing and Best Supporting Actor, for Gene Hackman’s wicked Sheriff “Little” Bill Daggett.

Eastwood acquired David Webb Peoples’ script — originally titled “The William Munny Killings” — in over a decade before he finally got around to making it. At the time, Francis Ford Coppola had already optioned it and let it go, but Eastwood had grand plans in mind. So he locked it up in a drawer for 10 years until he was old enough to play the lead. But he also brought his decades of western experience to the film all those years later, which only added to its potency and, indeed, the industry and audience’s reaction to it.

But it’s not like the western hasn’t been fighting back lately. I think it kind of started with Kevin Costner’s underrated “Open Range” in 2003, but most look to 2007’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (a “Victorian” western from Aussie director Andrew Dominik), “3:10 to Yuma” (a remake of Delmer Daves’s 1957 original) and “No Country for Old Man” (a neo-western from the Coen brothers that bathes in typical themes and imagery). Three years later, 2010 brought the Coens’ “True Grit” remake, which actually nabbed the genre’s record for nominations with 10. So it’s been percolating throughout the decade.

Quentin Tarantino will finally dip into things with “Django Unchained” later this year. He has consistently called his film a “southern” more than a western, but it nevertheless trades in familiar strokes. Meanwhile, Eastwood — who last week grabbed headlines with his endorsement of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney — will be on the scene with a big Best Actor push in “Trouble with the Curve,” directed by his long-time A.D. Robert Lorenz.

Will a western ever spark for the Academy again? I can’t say. I guess it will take something unique in the genre fray, like the revisionism of “Unforgiven,” to really get one there. Maybe nostalgia for the form will someday click for a romp that manages to float the Academy’s boat. I don’t know. But for now, Eastwood’s 1992 farewell to the genre remains the last to win, and 20 years later, it still feels like the one to go out on.

But let’s hope it’s not.

Well, that’s disheartening. Every Oscar season has its share of prestige dropouts, and this year’s first is a big one: Baz Luhrmann’s 3D adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” initially scheduled by Warner Bros. for a Christmas Day release, will now not reach theaters until next summer. (It’s the second high-profile title Warners have bumped to 2013, after the all-star “Gangster Squad” was relegated to the January doldrums.)

No precise reason has been given for the shift, with Warner distribution president Dan Fellman simply saying that they want “to ensure this unique film reaches the widest audience possible.” You can read that as you will. Perhaps they believe the film has genuinely strong commercial prospects and deserves art-blockbuster positioning. Perhaps, regardless of the film’s quality, they’re anticipating critical slingshots — some are inevitable, I’d say, given the scale and eccentricity of the project — and don’t want to subject it to the pressure of a prime awards-bait slot. Perhaps reshoots are on the cards and they simply need more time.

Whatever it is, I’m disappointed: sink or swim, “Gatsby” was easily the studio prestige picture to which I was most looking forward this year, and following that luridly lovely, faintly bonkers trailer, I was already getting impatient to see what Luhrmann has been dreaming up. (Hey, I remain an “Australia” apologist.)

The move, of course, doesn’t mean it couldn’t still be in Oscar player in 2013. Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” was released in May 2001 and hung in all the way to the Best Picture lineup — arguably benefiting from having enough time to overcome the divided reviews and take root as a cultural phenomenon. (“Rouge!” also got the luxury of a Cannes Film Festival berth — perhaps “Gatsby” could wrangle one?”)

“Australia,” meanwhile, opened in late November and was swiftly torpedoed. If Warners are sensing that “Gatsby” won’t be for everyone, perhaps they’re wise to get out of the firing line, particularly in a holiday season already overstuffed with high-end literary fare, from “Anna Karenina” to “Les Miserables” to Warner’s own “The Hobbit.”

That brings us to the question of what this vacancy means for Warner’s 2012 Oscar slate, which currently boasts “The Hobbit,” Ben Affleck’s “Argo” and Clint Eastwood’s return to the screen in “Trouble With the Curve” — as well as the known quantity of “The Dark Knight Rises.” Over-eager fans of the latter will inevitably cheer at any developments that seemingly give the Bat some more elbow/wing room, though it seems to me that this is particularly good news for “Argo,” a serious-minded, star-speckled drama from an ever-improving director that I’ve been thinking for some time could be the quiet one to watch in this race. 

Anyway, our Contenders charts will soon be adjusted accordingly. Here’s the full press release: 

Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures have moved the release date of “The Great Gatsby” to Summer 2013. The announcement was made today by Dan Fellman, President of Domestic Distribution, and Veronika Kwan Vandenberg, President of International Distribution, Warner Bros. Pictures.

In making the announcement, Fellman stated, “Based on what we’ve seen, Baz Luhrmann’s incredible work is all we anticipated and so much more. It truly brings Fitzgerald’s American classic to life in a completely immersive, visually stunning and exciting way. We think moviegoers of all ages are going to embrace it, and it makes sense to ensure this unique film reaches the largest audience possible.”

Kwan Vandenberg confirmed, “Baz is known for being innovative, but with this film he has done something completely unexpected–making it in 3D–while capturing the emotion, the intimacy, the power and the spectacle of the time. The responses we’ve had to some of the early sneak peeks have been phenomenal, and we think ‘The Great Gatsby’ will be the perfect summer movie around the world.”

From the uniquely imaginative mind of writer/producer/director Baz Luhrmann comes the new big screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. The filmmaker has created his own distinctive visual interpretation of the classic story, bringing the period to life in a way that has never been seen before, in a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.

“The Great Gatsby” follows Fitzgerald-like, would-be writer Nick Carraway as he leaves the Midwest and comes to New York City in the spring of 1922, an era of loosening morals, glittering jazz, bootleg kings, and sky-rocketing stocks. Chasing his own American Dream, Nick lands next door to a mysterious, party-giving millionaire, Jay Gatsby, and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy, and her philandering, blue-blooded husband, Tom Buchanan. It is thus that Nick is drawn into the captivating world of the super rich, their illusions, loves and deceits. As Nick bears witness, within and without of the world he inhabits, he pens a tale of impossible love, incorruptible dreams and high-octane tragedy, and holds a mirror to our own modern times and struggles.

Academy Award(R) nominee DiCaprio (“J. Edgar,” “Aviator”) plays Jay Gatsby, with Tobey Maguire starring as Nick Carraway; Oscar(R) nominee Carey Mulligan (“An Education”) and Joel Edgerton as Daisy and Tom Buchanan; Isla Fisher and Jason Clarke as Myrtle and George Wilson; and newcomer Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker. Indian film legend Amitabh Bachchan will play the role of Meyer Wolfsheim.

Oscar(R) nominee Luhrmann (“Moulin Rouge!”) directs the film in 3D from a screenplay co-written with frequent collaborator Craig Pearce, based on Fitzgerald’s book. Luhrmann produces, along with Catherine Martin, Academy Award(R) winner Douglas Wick (“Gladiator”), Lucy Fisher and Catherine Knapman. The executive producers are Academy Award(R) winner Barrie M. Osborne (“Lord of the Rings – Return of the King”) and Bruce Berman.

Two-time Academy Award(R)-winning production and costume designer Catherine Martin (“Moulin Rouge!”) designs as well as produces. The editors are Matt Villa, Jason Ballantine and Jonathan Redmond, and the director of photography is Simon Duggan. The music is by Craig Armstrong.

Warner Bros. Pictures presents, in association with Village Roadshow Pictures, in association with A&E Television, a Bazmark/Red Wagon Entertainment Production, a Film by Baz Luhrmann, “The Great Gatsby.” Opening Summer 2013, the film will be distributed in IMAX(R) 3D, 3D and 2D by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company, and in select territories by Village Roadshow Pictures.

Anyone who happened to be on hand at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica this evening for the American Cinematheque unveiling of a new DCP of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” was treated to quite the exciting surprise: the first public screening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.”

A source at the event tells me that, prior to the screening, personnel announced that there would be a “secret screening” following the event and that anyone who’d like to stay was more than welcome. When the lights came up after the closing credits of Kubrick’s icy horror staple, attendees were told the secret film was Anderson’s much anticipated opus (which will screen at the Toronto, Venice and maybe Telluride and Fantastic Fest film festivals next month).

The film is being shown in 70mm, the director’s preferred format of exhibition for “The Master” and one that has reportedly caused issues in lining up both commercial and festival exhibition. Anderson is in attendance (along with Maya Rudolph).

Recently there has been a lot of activity around Anderson’s film, which tackles (though not explicitly) L. Ron Hubbard and the rise of Scientology. After landing slots at the previously mentioned Venice and Toronto film festivals, The Weinstein Company pulled the release date of the film up to September 14.

Gotta love the guy. He doesn’t go the traditional route. Popping the film on unsuspecting cinema lovers (Who else would be at a Cinematheque screening of “The Shining?”) is pure PTA.

So here’s to you lucky folks seated in the Aero right now soaking up the latest from one of the best working filmmakers today. It makes me feel even worse that I’m way over here in some Holiday Inn north of Mobile, Alabama. I’ll try to get some thoughts on the film out of my source after the screening.

Meanwhile, do what you can to help Anderson exhibit the film in 70mm. “Definitive P.T. Anderson resource” Cigarettes & Red Vines has some ideas. I’ve had the opportunity to see a few films in the format in my time and it really is glorious. I can’t wait to see what he’s done with it.

UPDATE: Well that caused quite the stir last night. My heart goes out to all the LA peeps who had planned on attending that screening of “The Shining” but opted out. Let that be a lesson to ya! My guy decided to sleep on it before sending a detailed reaction (though he texted a one-off to me afterward — he was impressed). But reactions are all over the place now, so you’ll find them. Slash Film has a good aggregation, so start there.

UPDATE 2: A few days late here as I’ve been traveling, but my guy sent in his extended thoughts, so I’m passing them along:

“I’ll get the (semi) negatives out of the way first. Because everyone will do this, and because it is merited, I will knock out the ‘There Will Be Blood’ comparisons. Stylistically and tonally they are of a piece. And that, in my eyes, is both a positive and a negative. Positive because I think he has honed in on style that can connote themes and display a character’s psyche in the best and most compelling way. Negative because it was such a fresh and overwhelming sucker punch of a feeling when seeing it in ‘Blood,’ and that might be a little diluted here. And that is only a thing I bring up because I feel like people might think that, and it is a little unfair.  Also, “Blood” had such a strong narrative through-line because of the intensely-focused main character, and The Master tends to meander. It has a strong sense of theme and is always compelling, but it does seem a little aimless in sections. BUT–and I tend not to say this too much–I think that has much more to do with the plight of the character, who is very much aimless in this film.

“That out of the way, all of the things you might be excited about live up to expectations AND MORE. It is never less than visually stunning. The music fits the style perfectly (actually enhances it), and, as I already texted you, actually wavers and strays from the anxiety-inducing percussion to lush and beautiful in some parts. The period detail is impeccable. The production design and costumes are incredible and always believable. Most importantly, of course: The performances are AMAZING. And I don’t use the word ‘amazing’ unless I mean it. Phoenix had me *slightly* worried with the teasers that he might come off too ticky, but it is quite an accomplishment. It’s rare to see a performance where I was legit worrying about the other actors in the scene–that’s how unpredictable a powder keg he was. I could not ever predict what he was going to do next (the performer and the character). Sometimes P.T. just holds on his face for an extended period of time and it is so, so moving/funny/sad/disgusting–ALL AT ONCE. Hoffman is much bigger than I thought he would be, but his vacillations from cool/collected to explosive and scary were always believable. And Adams is great and her character and performance grow in power and stature are the movie goes on.

“The film is about 2 hours 10 minutes, but honestly felt longer than that. I *do* think it could be tightened. But it’s a unique vision pushed forward and is unlike anything else out there (besides his past work). There are moments that are heartbreaking and funny and melancholic all in the same beat, and that is an fantastic feat. I would say it’s always good with some great, great moments and scenes peppered throughout.

“A side note: Much of the material from the first couple teaser trailers is not in the film. And when it is, there are different takes used. Just thought that was interesting.”

“The Master” opens September 14.

You have to like any award that links Abbas Kiarostami to Sylvester Stallone, Agnes Varda to Al Pacino and, now, Spike Lee — even if it’s one of those career achievement prizes determined more by who’s going to be in town than anything else. Lee, it was announced today, will be the latest recipient of the splendidly named Jaeger-Le Coultre Glory to the Filmmaker Award (named for a film by its inaugural recipient, Takeshi Kitano) at the Venice Film Festival later this month.

It’s slightly bittersweet seeing Lee ascend to the realm of golden-watch awards. It doesn’t seem that long ago that he was the abrasive upstart instead, but then, it has been all too long since he last made a feature film that shook anything up. (His latest, “Red Hook Summer,” received mixed reviews at Sundance in January and opens in limited release next week.) He’s arguably made more of an impression in the later career as a documentarian, and the Venice award presentation will immediately precede the world premiere of his Michael Jackson documentary, “Bad 25,” at the festival.

Lee has a happy history with Venice, having served once as a Competition juror and having previously taken eight films to the Lido — two of them, “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990) and “Clockers” (1995), in Competition. He left empty-handed on both occasions, though in 2006, his mammoth post-Katrina doc “When the Levees Broke” premiered in Venice and took the Orrizzonti documentary award. 

Edited press release as follows:

The Biennale di Venezia and Jaeger-LeCoultre announce that the great American director, screenwriter, actor and producer Spike Lee has been awarded the Jaeger-LeCoultre Glory to the Filmmaker 2012 award of the Venice International Film Festival, dedicated a personality who has brought great innovation to contemporary cinema.

The Director of the Venice Film Festival, Alberto Barbera, in regards to this acknowledgment to Spike Lee, stated: “Spike Lee is a bold creative spirit, the author of daring and corrosive films, often unpredictable and provocative in the best sense of the term. Films that challenge us to rethink our prejudices and our preconceptions.”

The prize will be conferred to Spike Lee at the awards ceremony which will take place on Friday, August 31st during the 69th Venice Film Festival (29 August – 8 September 2012), directed by Alberto Barbera and organized by the Biennale di Venezia chaired by Paolo Baratta.

Following the awards ceremony, the 69th Venice Film Festival will present the world premiere screening of the new documentary by Spike Lee, Bad 25, filmed on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Michael Jackson”s historic album, Bad. Spike Lee made two videos for Michael Jackson, They Don”t Care About Us (1997) and This Is It (2009).

Spike Lee has participated in eight previous editions of the Venice International Film Festival. In Competition twice, in 1990 with Mo”Better Blues and in 1995 with Clockers, and Out of Competition twice, in 2004 with She Hate Me and in 2005 with the episode Jesus Children of America from the film The Invisible Children. In 1997 with the documentary 4 Little Girls in the ‘Officina veneziana” section; in 1998 with He Got Game in the ‘Notti e stelle” section; in 2001 with the documentary A Huey P. Newton Story in the ‘Nuovi territori” section; in 2006 with the documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, which won the Orizzonti Doc award. In 2004 he was a member of the International Jury for the Competition. 

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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“So, what do you think of Jimmy Fallon hosting the Oscars?” a colleague asked me yesterday, when the news dropped that the Academy is wooing the talk-show host to take on the task of emceeing next year’s Academy Awards ceremony, kicking off a discussion we wouldn’t normally be having for a few months — and sparking a potential political conflict between two TV networks in the process.

“Who’s Jimmy Fallon?” I replied, before I could stop myself.

I was only half-joking. I know Fallon by name, and vaguely by indistinct face — though I could well be thinking of Jimmy Kimmel instead. (If you put a gun to my head right now and asked me whether Fallon or Kimmel was the target of Sarah Silverman’s famous “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” skit, I’d probably end up dead.) The online seepage of American pop culture has got me that far. But ask me what he actually does, what he sounds like, what his comic persona is, and I’ll draw a blank. I’ve never seen him at work.

I know that might seem unfathomable to some of you. Saturday Night Live stars and late-night chat show hosts — and Fallon has been both, I gather — are uniquely treasured celebrities in the States, where their professional comings and goings and rivalries and faux pas are keenly and exhaustively tracked by media analysts and viewers, not all of them aware of just how parochial a fascination this is.

For by and large, these celebrities don’t travel: here in the UK, for example, their shows, inevitably America-centric in their cultural and political concerns, aren’t aired on any but the most obscure satellite channels. Twitter was aflame last year with Conan O’Brien’s professional travails, Team Coco becoming an impassioned meme for many — the rest of us just looked on in amused confusion. (We Brits were busy getting only a fraction as riled up about Dannii Minogue’s unjustified ousting from “The X Factor.” Who, you ask? Exactly.)

The same, perhaps more surprisingly, goes for Saturday Night Live, the work of whose regulars and guest hosts is routine water-cooler fodder Stateside, and a rather more specialized enthusiasm beyond those borders. A major figure like Tina Fey didn’t exactly penetrate the cultural consciousness in my part of the world until her Sarah Palin impersonation went viral and she started headlining feature films — even then, she’s hardly a household name here.   

All of which is why, when names like Fallon, O’Brien, Kimmel, Craig Ferguson (a Scot, yes, but one who hasn’t been an overseas presence since his British TV career fizzled in the early 1990s) are advocated for Oscar hosting duties by readers and media commentators alike, I tend to shrug my shoulders. For all I know, any one of them could do an excellent job with the gig, whether I’m familiar with their work or not: you don’t have to know a person, after all, to laugh at their jokes. But selecting one of them seems an oddly insular approach for a show that is watched by many millions internationally. The current line is that Fallon could boost the Oscar show’s flagging ratings in the US, and I realize that’s a priority — but need that come at the global audience’s expense?

The Academy has, of course, gone down this road before. Johnny Carson did the honors several times in the early 1980s — a few years before my time, though I gather he was a popular choice. I do, of course, remember David Letterman’s decidedly unpopular turn in 1994, when the Oscars sorely paid the price for their cultural myopia: his positively Dadaist barrage of misfired gags was only made more bewildering to my party of South African viewers by the fact that none of us knew who the hell he was. (I fondly remember my mom asking, “Okay, we know who Oprah and Uma are. When’s he going to introduce himself?”)

After several years of rotating names widely known to moviegoers around the world — Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and Steve Martin, all of whom I think acquitted themselves well — the Academy returned to the TV pool with Jon Stewart. Arguably better known to us foreigners than, say, a Letterman — thanks to the extensively relayed political import of “The Daily Show” — he was a sharp, urbane and not particularly beloved host: like Ellen DeGeneres in 2006, his didn’t exactly put a foot wrong, but never quite overcame the faintly awkward sense that he was intruding on Hollywood’s turf. (I had the same problem with Britain’s Fallon/O’Brien equivalent, Jonathan Ross, hosting the BAFTAs for several years, except he didn’t even have the good grace to be funny.) 

Not knowing Fallon’s style, I can’t guess whether he’d fall into the same trap or not, however nifty his routine. But I do believe that the most consistent and comfortable hosts of my Oscar-watching lifetime have been ones already embedded in the film community: Steve Martin’s wry irony, Billy Crystal’s slightly cosier schtick, Whoopi Goldberg’s more divisive but rewardingly game kookiness, even Hugh Jackman’s jazz-hands showmanship. (He wasn’t witty enough for my taste, but many disagreed.)

Lately, that formula has been going awry for the Academy: the seemingly can’t-miss pairing of Martin with Alec Baldwin foundered as a result of the latter’s visible stage fright, while Young Hollywood reps Anne Hathaway and James Franco proved every bit as mismatched as they looked on paper. In clock-ticking desperation, with wildcard choice Eddie Murphy opting out of the gig, they reverted to Crystal, a safe pair of hands that, it turned out, had been idle too long. His broad, spotty performance had a few endearing highs, but seemed both disengaged and dated: ratings crept up slightly, but one can’t blame the Academy for sensing that the door had been shut on a certain model of Oscar ceremony.

It’s not surprising, then, to see them switching tack and looking to Fallon to bring the “young, hip” audience quotient for which they so disastrously overshot two years ago. I’m not sure I have a better suggestion for raising ratings: speaking selfishly, I’d happily watch Martin cruise through it year after year, but I know most wouldn’t.

I suspect the Oscars’ status as a ratings titan is irretrievable, so perhaps a more radical conceptual overhaul of the show is required than a different breed of host — perhaps the very concept of a host at all is something to which we shouldn’t feel bound. Earlier this week, I was inspired by Danny Boyle’s wild, woolly, multimedia-oriented Olympic opening ceremony to suggest that he direct the Oscars in a spiritually similar, if vastly downscaled way: if the Academy Award ceremony danced from one imaginative visual and sonic (dare I say cinematic) set piece to another, punctuated by star-studded award presentations, would we miss the odd bit of stand-up patter?

That, I realize, is an unreasonably vague and impractical pointer. But my sense is that, to withstand the shifting interests and attention spans of a global audience — and distinguish themselves from any number of structurally similar awards shows — the Academy should be thinking bigger rather than smaller. I’m not sure network TV comedians quite fit that brief — particularly for an institution that, as such recent Oscar champions as “The Artist,” “The King’s Speech” and “Slumdog Millionaire” have underlined, is not just about America anymore.

For more views on movies, awards season and other pursuits, follow @GuyLodge on Twitter.

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Well, it had a good run. For half a century, Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” reigned supreme as the default candidate for the Greatest Film of All Time. That, in part, was thanks to its routine dominance of august British film magazine Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade critics’ poll — the largest and most historically embedded survey of such matters, initiated in 1952 and topped by “Kane” for five decades running from 1962 to 2002. (Interestingly, though 11 years old at the time, it didn’t even feature in the inaugural Top 10.)

No more. To everything there is a season — just a very long one, sometimes — and Welles’s groundbreaking 1941 dissection of a Hearst-like media tycoon has finally been supplanted by a younger (well, slightly), more colorful pretender in the form of Alfred Hitchcock’s dreamy 1958 thriller “Vertigo.” “Kane” actually endured a double defeat, also losing the top spot in Sight & Sound’s parallel directors’ poll, — this time to Yasujiro Ozu’s minimal old-age study “Tokyo Story,” which also rose to third place in the critics’ list.

The results of Sight & Sound’s 2012 vote, and further commentary, after the jump.

Critics’ Poll: 2012

1. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

2. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)

3. “Tokyo Story” (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

4. “La Règle du jeu” (Jean Renoir, 1939)

5. “Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans” (F.W. Murnau, 1927)

6. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

7. “The Searchers” (John Ford, 1956)

8. “Man With a Movie Camera” (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

9. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927)

10. “8½” (Federico Fellini, 1963)

Directors’ Poll: 2012

1. “Tokyo Story” (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

=2. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)

=2. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

4. “8½” (Federico Fellini, 1963)

5. “Taxi Driver” (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

6. “Apocalypse Now” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

=7. “The Godfather” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

=7. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

9. “Mirror” (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)

10. “Bicycle Thieves” (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

If I’m pleased with the outcome, unveiled tonight at London’s BFI Southbank, it’s not just because I voted for “Vertigo” (and not “Kane”) in my own contribution to the poll. (Incidentally, I’ll reveal the films I voted for in next week’s edition of The Lists — my top 10, along with that of every other contributor, will be posted on the magazine’s website later this month.)

In a game where with criteria are so variable and subjective, it’s hard to make a watertight case for why “Vertigo” deserves the title more than “Citizen Kane,” or indeed anything else. Are we voting for personal favorites or for some academic notion of “best?” Most influential or most impeccable? It’s an entirely elastic conversation, which is why I think it’s important to have a change at the top — no film should have an untouchable claim on All-Time Greatest credentials, but “Citizen Kane” had somehow acquired a default superiority that arguably hasn’t done it many favors. It’s a film of many marvels that many nonetheless regard as a kind of oatmeal text — who knows, a slight desanctification of its status could encourage younger film buffs to engage with it afresh.

How viewers outside the critical enclave will respond to “Vertigo”‘s elevation will be interesting to see. Some might see it as a mildly more populist choice — it’s in color, for starters, with genre trappings, sexy iconography and a director whose name is recognized even by casual movie fans — but it’s arguably Hitchcock’s most opaque and ambiguous film: not for nothing was it regarded as a disappointment on its release 54 years ago.

Sight & Sound editor Nick James makes the argument that it’s a film that resonates particularly powerfully with critics — as opposed to civilians or filmmakers, who only ranked the film seventh in their poll — because it’s “about people who are not sure who they are but who are busy reconstructing themselves and each other to fit a kind of cinema ideal of the ideal soul mate.” 

There may be something to that. Others will argue that the shift in favor of “Vertigo” is the result of Sight & Sound expanding the reach of the poll significantly this year: 846 critics and film experts from around the world were invited to submit lists this time, as opposed to only 144 in 2002. (The directors’ poll, meanwhile, counted the votes of 358 filmmakers, ranging from Woody Allen to Apichatpong Weerasethakul to Martin Scorsese to Mike Leigh.)

That said, “Vertigo” has been climbing steadily through the ranks: absent from the Top 10 until 1982 (an indication of how long it took for consensus to override its initial mixed reception), it entered in seventh place, jumped to fourth in 1992 and 10 years ago, came within just five votes of toppling “Kane.” This time, it leads the runner-up by a margin of 34 votes: still a fine margin, considering the increased scale of the survey.

One presumes the expansion of the voting pool allowed for a younger, more online-based swathe of critics to have their say — certainly, someone in my position wouldn’t have been invited to vote 10 years ago. But while that could have contributed to the demotion of “Citizen Kane,” it isn’t reflected in the Top 10 as a whole: the most recent film, in sixth position, is the 44-year-old “2001: A Space Odyssey,” while an unprecedented three silent films from the 1920s made the cut. (Interestingly, they come at the expense of previous Top 10 mainstay “Battleship Potemkin” — the absence of which perhaps also points to a slight shift away from the academic.)    

Indeed, 2002’s Top 10 featured a more recent presence in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II”: votes for the two films were combined last time round, landing the pair in fourth place. This time, S&S editors decided (rightly, I think) that votes for the films would be counted separately, which presumably split Coppola’s chances of a showing this year — though “The Godfather” does place seventh in the directors’ poll — tied, as it happens, with “Vertigo.”

The magazine has yet to reveal the full Top 100, though the press release reveals that the most recent film to place in the Top 25 is Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 romance “In the Mood for Love” at #24. Should there be a film from the last five decades a list of the 10 greatest films of all time? Certainly, but it’s surely not for lack of votes — doubtless many critics voted for more recent favorites, but this outcome is indicative of how long it takes for consensus to build around canon titles as the critical community grows ever wider and more splintered.

Perhaps even more distressing for the British magazine is the lack of homegrown product on the list. The highest British film in the top 100 is “The Third Man,” in a lowly 73rd place — a slightly dismaying outcome for the home of David Lean and Powell & Pressburger. As for gender parity, forget it: only two female-directed films landed in the Top 100, though I’m delighted to read that Claire Denis’s “Beau Travail” (in 78th place, three rungs above “Lawrence of Arabia”) is one of them. 

In the end, though, it’s unwise to subject these lists to too much scrutiny: the range and mass of contributors in this year’s poll gives it more authority than most, but it still amounts to a bunch of movie lovers naming the films they personally love a little more than the rest. It’s a highly unscientific and changeable process: having been driven to distraction trying to assemble a Top 10 that is still by no means set in stone, I can attest to that. Your life will be a little richer for watching any of the films in Sight & Sound’s list: which one places first or tenth is little more than a highly entertaining bingo game.  

And, just so you can see how things have shifted over the decades, here are the results of all Sight & Sound’s previous polls:

Critics’ Poll: 2002

1. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)

2. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

3. “La Règle du jeu” (Jean Renoir, 1939)

4. “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 and 1974)

5. “Tokyo Story” (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

6. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

=7. “Battleship Potemkin” (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

=7. “Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans” (F.W. Murnau, 1927)

9. “8½” (Federico Fellini, 1963)

10. “Singin’ in the Rain” (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)

Directors’ Poll: 2002 

1. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)

2. “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 and 1974)

3. “8½” (Federico Fellini, 1963)

4. “Lawrence of Arabia” (David Lean, 1962)

5. “Dr. Strangelove” (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

=6. “Bicycle Thieves” (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

=6. “Raging Bull” (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

=6. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

=9. “Rashomon” (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

=9. “La Règle du jeu” (Jean Renoir, 1939)

=9. “Seven Samurai” (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

Critics’ Poll: 1992

1. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)

2. “La Règle du jeu” (Jean Renoir, 1939) 

3. “Tokyo Story” (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

4. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) 

5. “The Searchers” (John Ford, 1956)

=6. “L’Atalante” (Jean Vigo, 1934)

=6. “Battleship Potemkin” (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

=6. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927)

=6. “Pather Panchali” (Satyajit Ray, 1955)

10. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Directors’ Poll: 1992

1. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)

=2. “8½” (Federico Fellini, 1963)

=2. “Raging Bull” (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

4. “La strada” (Federico Fellini, 1954)

5. “L’Atalante” (Jean Vigo, 1934)

=6. “The Godfather” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

=6. “Modern Times” (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)

=6. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

=9. “The Godfather Part II” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

=9. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927)

=9. “Rashomon” (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

=9. “Seven Samurai” (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

1982 poll

1. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)

2. “La Règle du jeu” (Jean Renoir, 1939)

=3. “Seven Samurai” (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

=3. “Singin’ in the Rain” (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)

5. “8½” (Federico Fellini, 1963)

6. “Battleship Potemkin” (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

=7. “L’avventura” (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

=7. “The Magnificent Ambersons” (Orson Welles, 1942)

=7. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

=9. “The General” (Buster Keaton, 1926)

=9. “The Searchers” (John Ford, 1956)

1972 poll

1. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)

2. “La Règle du jeu” (Jean Renoir, 1939)

3. “Battleship Potemkin” (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

4. “8½” (Federico Fellini, 1963)

=5. “L’avventura” (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

=5. “Persona” (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)

7. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927)

=8. “The General” (Buster Keaton, 1926)

=8. “The Magnificent Ambersons” (Orson Welles, 1942)

=10. “Ugetsu Monogatari” (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

=10. “Wild Strawberries” (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

1962 poll

1. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)

2. “L’avventura” (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

3. “La Règle du jeu” (Jean Renoir, 1939)

=4. “Greed” (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)

=4. “Ugetsu Monogatari” (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

=6. “Battleship Potemkin” (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

=6. “Bicycle Thieves” (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

=6. “Ivan the Terrible” (Sergei Eisenstein, 1944)

9. “La terra trema” (Luchino Visconti, 1948)

10. “L’Atalante” (Jean Vigo, 1934)

1952 poll

1. “Bicycle Thieves” (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)

=2. “City Lights” (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)

=2. “The Gold Rush” (Charlie Chaplin, 1925)

4. “Battleship Potemkin” (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)

=5. “Intolerance” (D.W. Griffith, 1916)

=5. “Louisiana Story” (Robert Flaherty, 1948)

=7. “Greed” (Erich von Stroheim, 1924)

=7. “Le Jour se leve” (Marcel Carne, 1939) 

=7. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1927)

=10. “Brief Encounter” (David Lean, 1946)

=10. “Le Million” (Rene Clair, 1931)

=10. “La Règle du jeu” (Jean Renoir, 1939)