And so the 2013 MTV Movie Awards draws to a close. “The Avengers” and “Silver Linings Playbook” were the night’s big winners, the result of a line-up of nominees that was uncharacteristically…not bad. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t some typically, well, BAD moments. There always are. With a few decent ones to balance it all out. So we’ve given the show a thorough review to come up with the best and worst of the 22nd annual MTV Movie Awards.

Check out our picks in the gallery below and also chalk up your vote for the BEST moment of the show in the embedded poll.

The most interesting takeaway of tonight’s MTV Movie Awards wasn’t necessarily that “The Avengers” predictably scooped up the prize for Movie of the Year. (Though, I say predictably, but I’m clearly garbage at guessing these things.) No, more interesting was that the MTV crowd gobbled up David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” with a spoon, handing the film three awards of its own on the evening. Add that to its awards season tally and eight Oscar nominations and you’re talking about one wide-ranging crossover hit. A pity, then, that star Jennifer Lawrence wasn’t on hand to share in the spoils (and pick up her own pair of popcorn trophies).

Indeed, the reason one of the evening’s biggest categories (and even a sketch) wasn’t televised is because Lawrence, who won the Best Actress Oscar in February, wasn’t in attendance. She won Best Female Performance and Best Kiss (with Bradley Cooper), but MTV only bothered to air the latter out of those rather than deal with having someone accept on her behalf, I guess. Also not televised were Best Scared-as-S**t Performance (which Lawrence DIDN’T win — it went instead, happily, to “Life of Pi” star Suraj Sharma) and Best On-Screen Duo.

Nevertheless, the point here is that the film went over huge with the demographic, perhaps surprisingly so. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2” did come away with the only prize for which it was nominated: Best Shirtless Performance. All the Twihards were busy with their big protest social networking screening of the film, so they probably didn’t even get to see Taylor Lautner accept. More on that in tonight’s Best and Worst post, though.

This stuff is endlessly fascinating to me. I can’t quite explain why. Producers and executives decide on the nominees and the winners are decided by popular vote, and the resulting mixture is some odd, weirdly representative amalgamation of pop culture in the form of a time capsule. The drama surrounding the “Twilight” crowd, for instance, is just bizarre and intriguing; they even “protested” the social media vote for Best Hero, yielding the Bilbo Baggins win rather than Kristen Stewart’s Snow White.

Or maybe it’s simply a nice reprieve from the self-serious days of Oscar season. Hey, I’ll take that.

More later tonight. For now, check out the full list of MTV Movie Awards winners here and Dan Fienberg’s live-blog of the show here.

A list of all the nominees and actual winners of the 2013 MTV Movie Awards broadcast live from Los Angeles on April 14, 2013.  Winners will be updated as they are announced.

Movie of the Year
“The Avengers” – WINNER
“The Dark Knight Rises”
“Django Unchained”
“Silver Linings Playbook”
“Ted”

Best Male Performance
Ben Affleck, “Argo”
Bradley Cooper, “Silver Linings Playbook” – WINNER
Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln”
Jamie Foxx, “Django Unchained”
Channing Tatum, “Magic Mike”

Best Female Performance
Anne Hathaway, “Les Misérables”
Mila Kunis, “Ted”
Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook” – WINNER
Emma Watson, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
Rebel Wilson, “Pitch Perfect”

Breakthrough Performance
Ezra Miller, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
Eddie Redmayne, “Les Misérables”
Suraj Sharma, “Life of Pi”
Quevenzhané Wallis, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”
Rebel Wilson, “Pitch Perfect” – WINNER

Best On-Screen Duo
Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”
Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson, “Django Unchained”
Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, “The Campaign”
Seth MacFarlane and Mark Wahlberg, “Ted” – WINNER
Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr., “The Avengers”

Best Scared-As-S**t Performance
Jessica Chastain, “Zero Dark Thirty”
Alexandra Daddario, “Texas Chainsaw 3D”
Martin Freeman, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”
Jennifer Lawrence, “House at the End of the Street”
Suraj Sharma, “Life of Pi” – WINNER

Best Shirtless Performance
Christian Bale, “The Dark Knight Rises”
Daniel Craig, “Skyfall”
Taylor Lautner, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Pt. 2” – WINNER
Seth MacFarlane, “Ted”
Channing Tatum, “Magic Mike”

Best Kiss
Kara Hayward and Jared Gillman, “Moonrise Kingdom”
Mila Kunis and Mark Wahlberg, “Ted”
Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, “Silver Linings Playbook” – WINNER
Kerry Washington and Jamie Foxx, “Django Unchained”
Emma Watson and Logan Lerman, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”

Best Fight
Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson & Jeremy Renner vs. Tom Hiddelston, “The Avengers” – WINNER
Christian Bale vs. Tom Hardy, “The Dark Knight Rises”
Jamie Foxx vs. Candieland Henchman, “Django Unchained”
Daniel Craig vs. Ola Rapace, “Skyfall”
Mark Wahlberg vs. Seth MacFarlane, “Ted”

Best Villain
Javier Bardem, “Skyfall”
Marion Cotillard, “The Dark Knight Rises” (SPOILER!)
Leonardo DiCaprio, “Django Unchained”
Tom Hardy, “The Dark Knight Rises”
Tom Hiddleston, “The Avengers” – WiNNER

Best Musical Moment
Anne Hathaway, “Les Misérables”
Channing Tatum, Matt Bomer, Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash & Adam Rodriguez, “Magic Mike”
Emma Watson, Logan Lerman & Ezra Miller, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
Anna Kendrick, Rebel Wilson, Anna Camp, Brittany Snow, Alexis Knapp, Ester Dean & Hanna Mae Lee, “Pitch Perfect” – WINNER
Bradley Cooper & Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”

Best WTF Moment
Javier Bardem, “Skyfall”
–Mutilated and deformed after a botched suicide attempt, Bardem’s villain twists his prosthetic mug to show the few teeth he has left in a gut-twisting moment filled with vindictive vengeance.
Anna Camp, “Pitch Perfect”
–As Aubrey, Camp gives a barftastic display of a capella angst that tips the scales of cinematic grossness.
Jamie Foxx and Samuel L. Jackson, “Django Unchained”
–In an excruciating sequence, Foxx’s Django blasts servile head-servant Stephen, played by Jackson, and sets the Candieland mansion ablaze with the strike of a match. – WINNER
Seth MacFarlane, “Ted”
–Fuzzy, flirtatious and flagrantly inappropriate, Seth MacFarlane’s Ted takes his co-worker crush one step too far.
Denzel Washington, “Flight”
–Washington’s Whip Whitaker rolls an inverted plane out of a 90-degree nose dive and saves the lives of 96 passengers on board.

Best Hero
Bilbo Baggins (“The Hobbit: An Extraordinary Journey”) – WINNER
Batman (“The Dark Knight Rises”)
Catwoman (“The Dark Knight Rises”)
Hulk (“The Avengers”)
Iron Man (“The Avengers”)
Snow White (“Snow White and the Huntsman”)

Last year I used the occasion of the 21st annual MTV Movie Awards as an excuse to go back in time to the day-glo, New Jack Swing days of 1992 for a look at the network’s first stab at recognizing the “best” in filmed entertainment. This year, I figured why not keep it going as the 22nd annual gears up for this evening? Let’s step back in the time machine and zip back to the pop culturally nebulous days of 1993 and the second annual MTV Movie Awards show.

To set the scene, artists were winning a big piece of the ownership pie with the new Image Comics comic book label, grunge was already yielding on the radio waves to something called “alternative,” Al-Quaeda took its first shot at the World Trade Center, John Wayne Bobbitt exploded onto the world stage (unfortunately for him) and “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was set to become a well-worn phrase.

“Unforgiven” won the Best Picture Oscar in March, but Clint Eastwood’s western masterpiece wouldn’t receive a single notice from MTV. Instead, the network hailed courtroom drama “A Few Good Men,” which is odd when you think about it in today’s context. When the MTV Movie Awards first started, there at least seemed to be a quasi-serious eye toward prestige. But if you were to put this show on now, I feel pretty confident that the Whitney Houston/Kevin Costner vehicle “The Bodyguard” (which, after all, led the way with nominations) would dominate every single category. Yet it only picked up one golden popcorn statue. (Speaking of which, this was the first year the well-known trophy would be used, subbing in for the bulky film reel prize MTV used the year before.)

If not “The Bodyguard,” surely sultry thriller “Basic Instinct,” or Tim Burton’s sequel “Batman Returns” would dominate. But no, it was Rob Reiner’s Oscar nominee from a play by Aaron Sorkin. Sure, it wasn’t unapproachable for younger audiences, but it’s always just stood out as interesting to me that the more pop-ish stuff sat it out, not that I think “The Bodyguard” is a masterpiece or anything.

Anyway, musical performances on the show came from Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, Duran Duran, Rod Stewart (whose Van Morrison cover “Have I Told You Lately” was keeping him young) and Stone Temple Pilots. Eddie Murphy, also nominated here and there for his film “Boomerang,” was our host.

So, with the memories back, let’s dig in…

BEST MOVIE — “A Few Good Men”
And here it is. Of the nominees, I would personally have gone with Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” a towering biopic in a fashion only he could have managed. I would have even been cool with an “Aladdin” win. But it was the only Oscar nominated movie of the bunch that took the prize, and its only one at that. Based on how the awards panned out otherwise, one might have expected a “Basic Instinct” victory. (Or an “Untamed Heart” nomination.) And, as noted, I’m just surprised “The Bodyguard” didn’t walk out of there victorious.

BEST MALE PERFORMANCE — Denzel Washington in “Malcolm X”
The best choice, no question. Washington’s performance probably deserved the Oscar, too. But kudos for avoiding heart throb bait in Kevin Costner (“The Bodyguard”), Tom Cruise (“A Few Good Men”) and Michael Douglas (“Basic Instinct”). No disrespect to “A Few Good Men” star Jack Nicholson, also nominated, for keeping him out of the “heart throb” discussion. We all know you’re a stud, Jack.

BEST FEMALE PERFORMANCE — Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct”
It was a big coming out year for Sharon Stone, taking a hard left into soft core-ish eroticism here and later in the year with “Sliver.” I’d say it’s the right call. But again, it’s surprising the Whitney Houston temptation was avoided. The other nominees were Geena Davis (“A League of Their Own”), Whoopi Goldberg (“Sister Act”) and Demi Moore (“A Few Good Men”).

MOST DESIRABLE MALE — Christian Slater in “Untamed Heart”
Ah, “Untamed Heart.” The “Silver Linings Playbook” of 1992. I kid. Kind of. Slater fended off Kevin Costner (“The Bodyguard”), Tom Cruise (“Far and Away”), Mel Gibson (“Lethal Weapon 3”) and Jean-Claude Van Damme (“Nowhere to Run”). No easy feat. Well, maybe Van Damme wasn’t much competition.

MOST DESIRABLE FEMALE — Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct”
Honestly? This was entering the era of “Kim Basinger is the hottest woman who ever lived” in my book. She had “The Real McCoy” and “The Getaway” around the corner, the apex of that. So I might have gone with her work in “Cool World” in this category (said my 11-year-old self). But you can understand why Stone picked up another popcorn here. I mean, come on — that shot… Anyway, the other nominees were Halle Berry (“Boomerang”), Madonna (“Body of Evidence”) and Michelle Pfeiffer (“Batman Returns”). Now that I think about it, Pfeiffer had a strong argument here.

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE — Marisa Tomei in “My Cousin Vinny”
Hey, the only Academy Award winner to take a popcorn statue this year! Tomei won the Oscar for this same performance just a few months prior. (Or did Jack Palance REALLY read the wrong name?) This was just icing on an already delicious cake for her, and one of two prizes she’d win that night. Still, Whitney Houston gets passed over again. The other nominees were Halle Berry (“Boomerang”), Kathy Jajimy (“Sister Act”) and Rosie O’Donnell (“A League of Their Own”).

BEST ON-SCREEN DUO — Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in “Lethal Weapon 3”
If it’s me? “White Men Can’t Jump” stars Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes walk away with this one. “You can put a cat in the oven, but that don’t make it a biscuit!” Anyway, I guess you have to go with Gibson and Glover at the height of a franchise’s popularity. The other nominees were Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas (“Basic Instinct”), Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner (“The Bodyguard”) and Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise (“Far and Away”).

BEST VILLAIN — Jennifer Jason Leigh in “Single White Female”
Whoa. “Single White Female.” Haven’t thought of that one in a while. A fun win for Leigh, who did a good job of playing certifiably psycho in Barbet Schroeder’s thriller. Wait, doesn’t Steven Weber die in, like, an awful way in that movie? I just had a flash. Anyway, Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” might have been a better choice. Or Danny DeVito in “Batman Returns.” Ray Liotta was also nominated for “Unlawful Entry.” Wait, just four nominees? No room for Gene Hackman in “Unforgiven?” Fine.

BEST COMEDIC PERFORMANCE — Robin Williams in “Aladdin”
A pretty inspired choice. And remember, Williams had people taking voice work a little more seriously that year, as he also won a special Golden Globe award for the film. “Groundhog Day” has lived on as a gem of comedy, so Bill Murray would have been a nice choice, but it’s hard to argue here. The other nominees were Whoopi Goldberg (“Sister Act”), Eddie Murphy (“Boomerang”) and Joe Pesci (“My Cousin Vinny”).

BEST SONG FROM A MOVIE — “I Will Always Love You” from “The Bodyguard”
Finally “The Bodyguard” wins something, it’s only award, in fact. And against some stellar competition. The biggest single of the year was Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road,” nominated from “Boomerang.” Sting brought Eric Clapton on to jazzily juice up his song “It’s Probably Me” for “Lethal Weapon 3” (may have been my choice). The Oscar-winning “A Whole New World” from “Aladdin” was in the mix, and then there’s Alice in Chains with “Would?” from Cameron Crowe’s “Singles.” Truly an awesome lineup.

BEST KISS — Christian Slater and Marisa Tomei in “Untamed Heart”
The “Untamed Heart” duo picks up their second prizes of the night. How sweet. I would have gone with Michelle Pfeiffer’s lick on Michael Keaton in “Batman Returns.” The other nominees were Pauline Brailsford and Tom Hanks (“A League of Their Own” and kind of a stunt nod), Winona Ryder and Gary Oldman (“Bram Stoker’s Dracula”), Mel Gibson and Rene Russo (“Lethal Weapon 3”) and Woody Harrelson and Rosie Perez (“White Men Can’t Jump”).

BEST ACTION SEQUENCE — “Lethal Weapon 3”
Eh, good enough, I guess. It was a pretty sweet sequence (the motorcycle chase and crash), and the stuff nominated from “Alien 3” (though that one was creative), “Alive: The Miracle of the Andes,” “Far and Away” (kidding me?) and “Under Siege” wasn’t as compelling.

Elsewhere that evening, director Carl Franklin (whose work can lately be seen in Netflix’s “House of Cards”) won the Best New Filmmaker prize for “One False Move,” while “Lethal Weapon 3” star Mel Gibson helped pay tribute to The Three Stooges with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The nominees for the 2013 MTV Movie Awards, hosted by Rebel Wilson, include “The Avengers,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Django Unchained,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Ted,” and on the whole, the slate was a lot less embarrassing than it has been in recent years. Even “Twilight” finally got the shaft as that pandering has begun to subside (or maybe the fan base is just growing up).

Don’t forget to check out our predictions for what to expect, and tune in tonight to see which films and stars walk away with the popcorn this year. Dan Fienberg will be live-blogging the fun over at The Fien Print.

We already knew that Olivier Dahan’s “Grace of Monaco,” starring Nicole Kidman, isn’t going to be ready in time for a Cannes Film Festival premiere — appropriate as that would be for the Riviera-set biopic. But that’s not stopping The Weinstein Company using the Croisette as a platform for the film anyway: Deadline’s Nancy Tartaglione reports that footage from the film will be unveiled at the festival in some capacity.

It would appear, then, that the Weinsteins are planning a similar showcase to the one they held at the festival last year, where footage from their eventual prestige releases “The Master,” “Django Unchained” and “Silver Linings Playbook” was shown to a select crowd of journalists who duly set the buzz mill turning.

Somewhat tellingly, all three of those films wound up performing better in the awards season than the Weinsteins titles that were actually premiered at Cannes. “Lawless” and “Killing Them Softly” couldn’t build on the prestige of their Competition placing; meanwhile, “The Sapphires,” which opened in the US last month, hasn’t taken off as the international crowdpleaser it could have been. The year before, of course, they had better luck, snapping up “The Artist” at Cannes and riding it all the way to Oscar night glory.

We don’t know yet what kind of “Artist”-level surprises are in the wings, but the impression at this point is that the Weinsteins won’t be using Cannes as the prime launchpad for their late-year hopefuls. But the promised tease of “Grace of Monaco,” combined with the previously announced release date of December 27, suggests they do have lofty goals for this one. (Dahan has a lot to prove: he may have directed Marion Cotillard to an Oscar in “La Vie en Rose,” but his first English-language feature, the Renee Zellweger-Forest Whitaker road movie “My Own Love Song,” was a barely-seen calamity.)

It’ll be interesting to see if they preview any other titles with it: Deadline suggests “August: Osage County” (which has already been screened), “The Butler,” “Salinger,” “Long Walk to Freedom” and “One Chance,” none of which are very likely to show up in the Cannes lineup, as possibilities.

In other Cannes news, French-South African cop thriller “Zulu” has been announced as the festival’s official closing film. That’s a fairly inauspicious slot: tellingly screened when a lot of critics have already packed their bags, Cannes closers have a tendency to underwhelm, and the list of recent selections is a largely undistinguished one. At best, they’ve been diverting not-all-there efforts like Julie Berticelli’s “The Tree”; at worst, major auteur misfires like Barry Levinson’s “What Just Happened?” or Christophe Honore’s “Beloved.”

Here’s hoping “Zulu” is more of the diverting side, though casting Orlando Bloom as a hard South African cop is not the surest path to success. He and Forest Whitaker star as police partners in Cape Town who, to use the festival’s vague synopsis, are “caught up in a suspenseful search which combines elements of political film noir and social study.” 

Director Jerome Salle was Cesar-nominated for his debut feature, “Anthony Zimmer” — which was remade in the US as “The Tourist,” but let’s not hold that against him — before going on to make two films based on the Belgian “Largo Winch” comic. The South African in me is curious to check the film out; the film critic less so, but I’ll be there to the end.

The full Cannes lineup, by the way, will be announced on Thursday morning.

We had the poster for “The Bling Ring” a couple of days ago, and now the marketing push for Sofia Coppola’s teen crime drama is in full swing. MTV closed out its Sneak Peek Week with a new clip rom the film introduced live by its five young stars: Emma Watson, Taissa Farmiga, Katie Chang, Israel Broussard and Claire Julien. I can’t watch the clip because I live outside the US and am therefore not worthy — thanks, MTV! — but it’s embedded after the jump, so check it out if you can and tell us what you think.

The MTV association is, of course, a canny choice for a film that’s positioning itself as classy summer counterprogramming for female teens — whether that demographic target jives with Sofia Coppola’s woozy aesthetic remains to be seen, but I’m hearing good things about the film.

Sneak Peek Week — which also showcased “The Heat,” “This Is the End,” “Pain and Gain” and “The To-Do List” is, of course, an appetite-builder for the MTV Movie Awards, which take place on Sunday evening. “Bling Ring” star Emma Watson is nominated in three categories herself for “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” and will also be receiving the Trailblazer Award. Because, hey, why not? Check out Kris and Greg’s rundown on the awards here. 

My first thought, upon hearing that producers were cooking up yet another adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” was something along the lines of, ‘This? Again?’ The star-crossed romance to end all star-crossed romances has been well served on screen over the years, while other Shakespeare works await definitive adaptations; you wouldn’t think there are many new angles left to explore in it. 

But, of course, there don’t need to be. More than any of the Bard’s plays, “Romeo and Juliet” has a generational hand-me-down quality to it. Carlo Carlei’s new adaptation isn’t for me or my contemporaries, for whom Baz Luhrmann’s postmodern 1996 take still seems a disconcertingly fresh memory; nor is it for the boomers whose hearts fluttered for Franco Zeffirelli’s Oscar-winning 1968 version.

No, this is for the teenagers who weren’t even born when Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes made eyes at each other across a crowded fish tank, and for whom the age-old story might still hold some surprises. (Though not if this trailer, which pretty much tells the tragic tale from beginning to end, has anything to do with it.) For their purposes, this new version — scripted by Oscar winner Julian Fellowes, recently of “Downton Abbey” fame — should do the trick: Hailee Steinfeld (who, we mentioned yesterday, is set to be quite ubiquitous this year) and Douglas Booth sure are pretty together, for starters.

It’s interesting, however, that the MTV trappings of Luhrmann’s version are nowhere to be seen here, save for a stately pop song in the trailer. Carlei and Fellowes are playing things considerably more conservatively in their straight period reading, counting on the youthful stars (along with Ed Westwick as Tybalt) to draw in the new audience. (Paul Giamatti, “Homeland” star Damian Lewis and Lesley Manville are among those making up the grownup contingent.) It’ll be interesting to see if it works.

Check out the trailer below (I’m told it’s new, though I saw a very similar one in UK cinemas last week) and see what you think; I’m off to ponder my haggard reflection in the bathroom mirror and wonder where the last 17 years went. 

It’s rare air for Terrence Malick today as “To the Wonder” becomes the first of his films to be released in theaters and video-on-demand simultaneously. Sacrilege some would say, the future others would say. A fact regardless. And for a great many, an easier trip than two hours to the local metropolis (been there and done that so I know). The film comes right on the heels of 2011’s Best Picture nominee “The Tree of Life,” the quickest turnaround for two Malick films yet.

We’ve got conflicting takes on the film here at HitFix. Guy Lodge found it to be “gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh” at last year’s Venice Film Festival, while a week-and-a-half later, Drew McWeeny found it to be “somewhat tedious” at the Toronto fest, noting that it “almost feels like self-parody.” That last beat I’m stunned to see I brought up myself after seeing it recently, but I’m nevertheless somewhere in between the two assessments, with more to be gleaned as I revisit the work, I’m sure. “To the Wonder” will always have a special place for being Roger Ebert’s final word on the movies, but the movies continue on. And now it’s time to get your word on this one, so offer up your thoughts in the comment section and feel free to vote in our poll below.

When the Academy announced its plans for an unprecedented gathering of the entire AMPAS membership next month, Academy CEO stated Dawn Hudson that the chief purpose of the meeting was to discuss what the organization does “the other 364 days of the year.” And right now, the biggest item on that list is the Academy Museum.

That, of course, is a project generating excitement among more than just industry insiders. It’s hard to believe that Los Angeles doesn’t have its own film-themed museum, and the Academy plans to fill the gap in grand style. A spiffy new website was launched yesterday that lays out plans for the 290,000-square-foot temple to Hollywood history in more detail, and it’s looking increasingly impressive.

The proposed design, an extension of the famous Wilshire May Company Building, has been drawn up by renowned architect Renzo Piano, whose other global icons include the Pompidou Center in Paris and, more recently, London’s Shard skyscraper. I know not everyone is a fan of his glass-globe design for the museum, but credit to the Academy for going bold on this one — situated right next to LACMA, it’s clearly aiming for landmark status.

What’s inside, meanwhile, should be just as exciting. The museum component, of course, contains multiple galleries for the Academy’s vast collection of movie memorabilia (a small sampling of which is displayed on the site) — including a permanent exhibit themed around the Academy Awards, with an embedded theater screening appropriate movies.

But that, as they say in the informercials, is not all. There will also be an education center, assorted event spaces and a vast Premiere Theater, which will play host both the premieres of major new releases, official Academy screenings, retrospectives, lecturers and symposia. (Could it eventually house the Oscar ceremony itself?) A rooftop dining room with attached terrace will afford spectacular Los Angeles vistas. The “Design” section of the website allows you to examine the proposed layout and multiple additional facilities in more detail.

There’s a lot to play with on the website, and you’re better off heading there and exploring for yourself — though the “sneak peek” video embedded below gives some idea of where they’re going. Having visited the site myself for the first time in January, I particularly liked the gallery detailing the history of the original building (once a top LA department store), which shows just how far the city has come in 60-odd years. Film buffs and architecture geeks alike, go forth and browse. I, for one, can’t wait to revisit LA when it’s done.

Hollywood and independent filmmakers, philanthropists and industry magnates, fellow critics and, yes, movie stars came together this evening in Chicago to pay tribute to the life of legendary film critic Roger Ebert, who passed away April 4 at the age of 70. The event was live-streamed on the internet via WGN and RogerEbert.com.

One of the most heartfelt remembrances came from filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who had experienced Ebert’s impact both in her career as film director as well as her career as a film publicist. The first time came when she was but a young girl and she took a trip to the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles to watch the stars go inside for the Academy Awards rehearsal. She was able grab a photo with Ebert, and he later wrote a blog post about it, just after the release of her first film, “I Will Follow.” The film was based on her relationship with her late aunt, her brought her to the Shrine all those years before.

“He Tweeted 17 times,” DuVernay said with awe of his support for the film. “He Tweeted the schedule. He Tweeted links. He Tweeted pictures. I mean, when it went to VOD, he put it in the daily schedule. And the quote we put on the poster, it was everywhere. It was, ‘One of the best films I’ve seen about the loss of a loved one.’ He made people think about my work who had seen me as invisible up until that point.”

DuVernay praised Ebert’s penchant for championing other small films as well, something she was able to see first hand in her work as a publicist. On tiny movies with little to no budget, particularly for field press agents, she was tasked with calling journalists all around the country, including Ebert.

“My path crossed with Roger Ebert’s four distinct times in my life, and they made a difference,” DuVernay said. “I hope to cross paths with him again.”

RELATED: My weekend in Champaign-Urbana with Roger Ebert

Sony Pictures Classics honcho Michael Barker further noted how Ebert’s impact on filmmakers. “Ask Ang Lee,” he said. “Ask Kathryn Bigelow. Ask Erroll Morris, who will tell you Roger handed him his career. Ask Spike Lee, who will tell you Roger put him in the big leagues with his review of ‘Do the Right Thing.’ We simply would not know films like ‘Pan’s Labyrinth,’ ‘Hoop Dreams’ and ‘Roger & Me’ the way we know if it weren’t for Roger Ebert. This is fact.”

Barker also recounted a story about “A Separation” director Asghar Farhadi receiving an invitation to attend Eberfest a few months after he won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for the film. It was hugely important to the filmmaker.

“We look at movies in a bolder way because of him,” Barker said. “Civil rights, social justice and politics gained a new clear-eyed dimension because of him.”

Indeed, regarding social issues, plenty was made of Ebert’s liberalism and political activism. “Thank you, my brother, for being a turtle,” comedian and social activist Dick Gregory said. “As you know, a turtle is hard on the outside, soft on the inside, and isn’t afraid to stick your neck out.”

When Ebert engaged with you, “he would look you in the eye,” Barker said. “He would understand what was special about you, pull it out of you and all of a sudden, you possessed the gift of self-respect…No public figure has ever meant more to me…I have always felt that Roger was the conscience of the movie business.”

Sibling actors John and Joan Cusack, fellow Chicagoans, were on hand to read a letter from the White House. John quipped about landing an interview with Ebert that “publicists would always say, ‘This is a big interview.’ I think in Hollywood that means, ‘We can’t buy this one.'”

RELATED: Roger Ebert mattered

Telluride Film Festival co-director Tom Luddy spotlighted Ebert’s heralding of the American documentary film movement. “No critic has called as much attention to a very rich renaissance in documentary filmmaking of the last 20 years, particularly in this country,” Luddy said. He recalled when Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me” played Telluride in 1989 that “by the end of the festival we had to have seven extra screenings because Roger would stop everyone up and down the street and make them go.” Moore has noted in no uncertain terms that he would have no career were it not for Roger Ebert.

Also on hand was Richard Roeper, who took over for Gene Siskel after the critics’ death on his and Ebert’s nationally syndicated film review show, which was re-titled “At the Movies.” He spoke of Ebert’s love of telling stories (which perhaps gets at his love of watching them unfold on the big screen). “How do you tell a story about the best storyteller you’ve ever met,” he asked. “That was Roger. We’ve heard so much about his influence but those of you who have known him best and the longest know that he thought of himself as a newspaper man first. Covering movies was his beat.”

Indeed, Roeper told of being in press situations with fellow journalists who would, naturally, be in awe of Ebert. They would gawk and perhaps ask for an autograph. “He would politely wave them away and say, ‘I’m on deadline, too, right now,'” Roeper said. “He was a rock star.”

Because of Ebert’s love of Gospel music, the evening featured musical performances by Walt Whitman and the Soul Children of Chicago as well as the Grammy Award-winning Charles Jenkins and Fellowship Chicago Choir.

Others in attendance included filmmakers Andrew Davis and Gregory Nava, “Siskel & Ebert” producer Thea Flaum and many more. The event took place at the Chicago Theatre, where Ebert attended film screenings for years, right there in the back row, perched in the aisle seat, doing what he loved.

Ebert will be honored next week at the 15th annual Ebertfest. He’ll also be honored posthumously with the Sundance Vanguard Leadership Award, to be presented by Robert Redford on June 5.

The marketing of Sofia Coppola’s movies has always been a stylish business, and so it is with her latest, “The Bling Ring” — which opens in the US on June 14, after what is widely presumed will be a Cannes premiere. A couple of weeks ago, the first teaser trailer dropped, and the name of the game was chic but oblique: it told you nothing about the film you wouldn’t already have gleaned from the briefest of online synopses. The film’s new teaser poster, meanwhile, is playing a similar game: it effectively introduces the five characters that make up the titular “ring,” not with faces but via the visual metaphor of their sunglasses. It’s a cutely indirect approach very much in keeping with Coppola’s fashion-conscious sensibility.

“The Bling Ring” is inspired by the true story of a group of Los Angeles teenage girls who successfully burgled the homes of multiple celebrities — including Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan — in 2008 and 2009, using the internet to determine their whereabouts. Though Emma Watson is the film’s biggest star, the poster makes it quite clear that this is an evenly weighted ensemble piece (“the mastermind” described on the poster is played by newcomer Katie Chang). Other cast members include Leslie Mann and Taissa Farmiga (kid sister of Vera, in case you were wondering), with a cameo from Hilton as herself.

The film’s already doing the screening rounds, and I’m hearing positive murmurings. Are you looking forward to it? And what do you make of the poster?  

We haven’t seen anything from Hailee Steinfeld since she scored a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination two years ago for her (leading) role in the Coen Brothers’ “True Grit” — but at just 16 years of age, she can afford to take her time. And whatever time she has lost, she’s about to make up for in a big way.

Steinfeld is set to appear in no fewer than five films this year, including roles in “Ender’s Game,” John Carney’s “Once” follow-up “Can a Song Save Your Life?” and the umpteenth redo of “Romeo and Juliet” — every generation needs its own, after all. (Want to feel old? Steinfeld was born one month after Baz Luhrmann’s MTV-chic adaptation of the Shakespeare standard opened in US theaters.)

And the young star’s slate continues to shape up nicely: it was announced today that she’ll be returning to the frontier terrain of “True Grit” with a role in Tommy Lee Jones’s new directorial project “The Homesman” — a pioneer-era western about an outlaw and a schoolteacher teaming up to escort a trio of mentally unbalanced women from Nebraska to Iowa. Steinfeld will play Tabitha, a destitute teenager — though it’s unclear how she figures into the narrative.

“The Homesman,” meanwhile, is shaping up into quite the prestige project. With Jones himself and Hilary Swank cast in the lead roles, Steinfeld joins an ensemble that already includes Meryl Streep, James Spader, John Lithgow, Tim Blake Nelson and David Dencik (best known for “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”). It’s nice to see Jones extending his working relationship with Streep and Spader, both of whom, of course, he starred opposite last year in “Hope Springs” and “Lincoln” respectively. Good, too, to see Hilary Swank nab a quality role again: the well’s been pretty dry for the two-time Oscar champ since that surprise SAG nod for “Conviction” a couple of years back.

Most exciting of all, however, is the promise of Jones’s first theatrical feature as a director since his superb 2005 debut “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.” An elegiac neo-western with another handpicked ensemble — including Melissa Leo, Barry Pepper and a pre-“Mad Men” January Jones — “Three Burials” caught many a critic off-guard when it debuted in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, ultimately winning Best Actor for Jones and Best Screenplay for Guillermo Arriaga. (It also nabbed a quartet of Independent Spirit nods, including Best Picture, but skipped the Academy’s radar entirely.)

This time, Jones has co-written the screenplay in addition to his duties as actor, producer and director. He’s also assembled an ace team of collaborators for “The Homesman”: Oscar-nominated composer Marco Beltrami (who excelled in the western genre on “3.10 to Yuma”) was also on board Jones’s debut, but ace cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto is an exciting new addition. “Three Burials” was something of an unheralded surprise, but Jones’s follow-up should be considerably more anticipated.

Back when the MTV Movie Awards first started, they had a Lifetime Achievement prize. But it was sort of a joke. The winners were Jason Voorhees from the “Friday the 13th” franchise, The Three Stooges, “Shaft” star Richard Roundtree, Jackie Chan (those last two being the most “legitimate” winners, I suppose), Godzilla, Chewbacca from the “Star Wars” franchise and Ron Howard’s brother, Clint (who appears in all of Howard’s films). In 1999 they discontinued it, thank God.

In 2005, it was brought back around with an undercurrent of sincerity and dubbed the “MTV Generation Award.” The inaugural recipient was Tom Cruise and the winners since have been Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Sandra Bullock (tied in nicely with her Oscar march in 2010), Reese Witherspoon and Johnny Depp. This year, the award goes to actor Jamie Foxx, nominated for his performance in “Django Unchained” and an honor nicely positioned as a boost to his upcoming summer blockbuster “White House Down.”

The MTV Generation Award “is given to an artist who has shown us a variety of impressive roles, a personal and professional flair and of course, an awesome level of talent,” according to MTV. And from television’s “In Living Color” to the first hints of a quality big screen presence in “Any Given Sunday” (for which he received his first MTV Movie Award nomination, for Breakthrough Male Performance) through his Oscar-winning (and MTV-nominated) work as Ray Charles in “Ray,” as well as “Django” and, of course, his recording career, I suppose Foxx fits that criteria nicely.

RELATED: China pulls ‘Django Unchained’ from theaters on day of premiere

Foxx will join Will Ferrell (Comedic Genius Award) and Emma Watson (MTV Trailblazer Award) on the somewhat arbitrary achievement award circuit at Sunday’s ceremony. For “Django Unchained,” he is nominated in three categories this year: Best Male Performance, Best Kiss (with Kerry Washington) and Best Fight (with the Candieland henchmen). The film tied with Seth MacFarlane’s “Ted” for the most nominations across the board.

The MTV Movie Awards will be broadcast live, Sunday, April 14 at 9pm ET.

“It’s been a long wait,” writer/director Jeff Nichols says about his upcoming film “Mud,” and indeed it has, on so many levels.

The film first screened at the Cannes Film Festival nearly a year ago, where it was picked up by Roadside Attractions for domestic release. But rather than risk it being lost in the fray by trickling screenings throughout the fall festival circuit, the indie distributor held on to it. The film, which stars Matthew McConaughey (in the thick of a career renaissance), was brought back into the light at the Sundance Film Festival in January as Roadside primed it for a late-April release.

Its roots, however, stretch back so much farther, to Nichols’ days as a film school student at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was a girl breaking up with him in high school that got him thinking on the film’s themes of romance. “It’s one of the lamest reasons that you sit and write a movie,” he admits, “but that level of heartbreak from your first love, even if it is puppy love, is pretty intense. Just because you’re young I think people dismiss those emotions and those feelings, but I think that might be unfair. Look at Romeo and Juliet. They were in their teens.”

So when Nichols first started turning over the idea of what would become “Mud,” he wanted to write something with an arc that would reflect that sort of intensity. Interestingly enough, though, way back there in college, Nichols already had his actor in mind. Yes, “Mud” was written for Matthew McConaughey over a decade ago.

Like any budding film fan, Nichols had seen and loved Richard Linklater’s 1993 comedy “Dazed and Confused,” which first put McConaughey on the map. But it was John Sayles’s 1996 indie drama “Lone Star” that really attracted him to the actor and what he was capable of. “I was just like, ‘Yes. I want that guy,'” Nichols says. “This is in 2001. I remember being home on a trip from school and I was talking to somebody. She was like, ‘What are you doing right now?’ This is back in film school when you wanted your friends to think you were not just some bum film student. I was like, ‘I think I’m writing something for Matthew McConaughey.’ Cut to 10 years later and I’ve gone my way and he’s gone his way and it’s just somewhat serendipitous that we’ve dove-tailed into each other.”

Indeed, McConaughey has been enjoying a second wind in his serious acting career after a detour into conventional commercial vehicles like “Failure to Launch” and “Fool’s Gold.” That’s “mailbox money,” as the actor has jokingly called it (referring to residuals). But lately, he’s worked with true artists like William Friedkin (“Killer Joe”), Lee Daniels (“The Paperboy”), Steven Soderbergh (“Magic Mike”) and Martin Scorsese (“The Wolf of Wall Street”), in addition to Nichols. He’ll likely be in the awards conversation later this year with “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Mud” and maybe “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and he was recently tapped to head up Christopher Nolan’s next film, “Interstellar.”

Getting back to “Mud,” Nichols’ thought process soon led him to considerations of mentorship, which fleshed out the story even more, feeding on other things that were very much in his mind coming out of college. “I was starting to walk on my own legs a little bit and figure out what kind of storyteller I was going to try and be,” he says. “I had a lot of mentors, and a few really solid ones, but I started to pick away at some of their faults. And that’s what the movie is about: false mentors.”

The film is also about a style of storytelling Nichols is fond of, he says. He wanted to embed a magical realism element, touching on ideas found in southern folklore, superstitions, etc. The presence of snakes, for instance, is as much a superficial obstacle as it is a subtextual commentary that leads back to those ideas of mentorship. “I wanted that in the story because it speaks to a bigger mythology,” he says. “It’s not uber-realism, which is something I dealt with in ‘Take Shelter,’ because it was going to be grounded, and exacerbated, by the point of view of a 14-year-old, not the point of view of a guy in his mid-30s struggling with the economy.”

In a word, it was the unknown that Nichols says he wanted to lace throughout. There is something exotic about some of its imagery — a boat lodged in a tree, for instance — that helped carry across the perspective of the film’s young protagonist, Ellis (played with staggering confidence by young Tye Sheridan). “These are things that could be fantastic and maybe true,” he says. “They don’t necessarily feel like they could be true, but you don’t know any better. So maybe they are. All of that felt appropriate.” And particularly so in a story about young love and all the mysteries that come with it.

In the final analysis, the whole process was “tricky,” Nichols says, because it was all so tied to that perspective. “It’s arguably dangerous to write a movie that way,” he says. “But I wanted to see if I could pull it off.”

“Mud” opens in theaters Friday, April 26.

Yep, we’re still talking about the MTV Movie Awards this week. Speaking of which, if you missed our look at some fun facts about the annual ceremony, go give ’em a look!

This year the big nominees are “The Avengers,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Django Unchained,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Ted,” which, on the whole, is an obvious step up from recent years. Will “The Avengers” walk out of there a winner on Sunday? Or will nominations leaders “Django Unchained” and “Ted” have something to say about that?

Check out our predictions for what to expect below, and feel free to offer up your own in the comments section. And remember, you can vote on these yourself at MTV if you so choose.

The 22nd annual MTV Movie Awards will air live, Sunday, April 14 at 9pm ET.

It is somehow fitting that the last word Roger Ebert would ever have on the movies concerned filmmaker Terrence Malick, whose sixth feature, “To the Wonder,” opens in theaters this weekend. Ebert has always been in awe of Malick, his reviews of the director’s films consistently revealing a tone of appreciation. And it all came to an apex last year when Ebert chalked up Malick’s “The Tree of Life” on his list of the 10 greatest films of all time for the decennial Sight & Sound poll of critics and filmmakers.

In trying to decide between Malick’s film and Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” for a new entry on the list, “I could choose either film,” Ebert wrote at the time. “I will choose ‘The Tree of Life’ because it is more affirmative and hopeful. I realize that isn’t a defensible reasons for choosing one film over the other, but it is my reason, and making this list is essentially impossible, anyway.

“Apart from any other motive for putting a movie title on a list like this, there is always the motive of propaganda: Critics add a title hoping to draw attention to it, and encourage others to see it. For 2012, I suppose this is my propaganda title. I believe it’s an important film, and will only increase in stature over the years.”

That last beat could well prove a calling card for the film as, indeed, I think many of us believe it will live on as one of the great films of our time. But it wasn’t the first time Ebert had such laurels to heap upon a Malick film. He penned a 2011 “Great Movies” entry on the director’s debut, “Badlands,” writing at length about Malick’s tendency toward the natural world and narration, finding something compelling about their coupled presence throughout.

“It is the wondering narrative voice that lingers beneath all of Terrence Malick’s films, sometimes unspoken,” he wrote at the time. “Human lives diminish beneath the overarching majesty of the world…Nature is always deeply embedded in Malick’s films. It occupies the stage and then humans edge tentatively onto it, uncertain of their roles. There is always much detail, of birds and small animals, of trees and skies, of empty fields or dense forests, of leaves and grain, and always of too much space for the characters to fill. They are nudged here and there by events which they confuse with their destinies.”

I don’t think I’ve ever read a more loving, erudite boiling-down of Malick’s artistic tendencies than that.

About “Days of Heaven,” in another “Great Movies” entry from 1997, Ebert wrote that “the film places its humans in a large frame filled with natural details” and that it is “a movie made by a man who knew how something felt, and found a way to evoke it in us. That feeling is how a child feels when it lives precariously, and then is delivered into security and joy, and then has it all taken away again–and blinks away the tears and says it doesn’t hurt.”

Masterfully conveyed, that. I found digging back through Ebert’s writings on Malick that they are some of his most potent assessments. Malick is a filmmaker who drives that kind of thoughtfulness out of anyone who might be willing to dig into his work rather than dismiss it out of hand, but Ebert found sometimes uniquely fertile ground when assessing these films.

He didn’t take to “The Thin Red Line” as much, which is interesting, as that is my favorite of Malick’s oeuvre. He only wrote about it once, however, upon the film’s release in 1998. I would love for him to have written about it again at some point. Of course, there was plenty more to be said about Malick’s use of nature and what it means within his frame, but Ebert began to think seriously about war films in intriguing ways. By the end of his review, we get this nugget:

“The central intelligence in the film doesn’t belong to any of the characters, or even to their voice-over philosophies. It belongs to Malick, whose ideas about war are heartfelt but not profound; the questions he asks are inescapable, but one wonders if soldiers in combat ever ask them (one guesses they ask themselves what they should do next, and how in the hell they can keep themselves from being shot). It’s as if the film, long in pre-production, drifted away from the Jones novel (which was based on Jones’ personal combat experience) and into a meditation not so much on war, as on film. Aren’t most of the voice-over observations really not about war, but about war films? About their materials and rationales, about why one would make them, and what one would hope to say? Any film that can inspire thoughts like these is worth seeing. But the audience has to finish the work: Malick isn’t sure where he’s going or what he’s saying. That may be a good thing. If a question has no answer, it is not useful to be supplied with one. Still, one leaves the theater bemused by what seems to be a universal law: While most war films are ‘anti-war,’ they are always anti-war from the point of view of the winning side. They say, ‘War is hell, and we won.’ Shouldn’t anti-war films be told from the point of view of the losers? War was hell, and they lost.”

On nature and losing, one couldn’t cook up a better segue to Malick’s next film. And Ebert cherished 2005’s “The New World” immediately. “There are two new worlds in this film, the one the English discover, and the one Pocahontas discovers,” he wrote upon its release. And further getting at what he took away from the film, the sense of discovery free of the context of hindsight, he noted that “what distinguishes Malick’s film is how firmly he refuses to know more than he should in Virginia in 1607 or London a few years later. The events in his film, including the tragic battles between the Indians and the settlers, seem to be happening for the first time. No one here has read a history book from the future.”

Then, “The Tree of Life.” As noted, it made enough of an impact for Ebert to consider it one of the greatest films of all time. But when you read the review, you see how much it struck him on a personal level, how he took such ownership of the family dynamic on display. It’s fascinating to read it because I can’t recall another time he saw so much of himself in a film, and therefore, wrote so deeply about it. Indeed, he said as much himself:

“If I set out to make an autobiographical film, and if I had Malick’s gift, it would look so much like this. His scenes portray a childhood in a town in the American midlands, where life flows in and out through open windows. There is a father who maintains discipline and a mother who exudes forgiveness, and long summer days of play and idleness and urgent unsaid questions about the meaning of things.”

He called it “a film of vast ambition and deep humility,” which says everything there really is to say about “The Tree of Life.” And on the aforementioned note on paternal discipline, Ebert found a truly formative moment that must have echoed as a memory to have been so thoughtfully conveyed:

“Listen to an acute exchange of dialogue between Jack and his father. ‘I was a little hard on you sometimes,’ Mr. O’Brien says, and Jack replies: ‘It’s your house. You can do what you want to.’ Jack is defending his father against himself. That’s how you grow up. And it all happens in this blink of a lifetime, surrounded by the realms of unimaginable time and space.”

He even, as many did, compared the film to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which sits right alongside “The Tree of Life” on Ebert’s list of the best ever.

And finally, “To the Wonder.” Ebert found a lot to soak up with this film and surely would have come back to it. But to see him refusing to be definitive with it, to see him making his way through the film even as he wrote about it, is so wonderful and such a gift to be his final review.

I know I, for one, will need a few more looks at “To the Wonder” before I settle on what it means to me. It feels troubled on first blush, self-parody, almost. But there’s a texture to it I want to explore further, so I delight in Ebert’s thoughts on it. “As the film opened, I wondered if I was missing something,” he wrote. “As it continued, I realized many films could miss a great deal.”

This review is a bit of a landmark, really, not just for being his last but for revealing something in Ebert that many critics could learn: a sense of relinquishment of authority, and indeed, a desire to NOT be the authority, rather an idle observer. His final four graphs:

“A more conventional film would have assigned a plot to these characters and made their motivations more clear. Malick, who is surely one of the most romantic and spiritual of filmmakers, appears almost naked here before his audience, a man not able to conceal the depth of his vision.

“‘Well,’ I asked myself, ‘why not?’ Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren”t many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren”t many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn”t that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?

“There will be many who find ‘To the Wonder’ elusive and too effervescent. They”ll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need.”

Malick is, as we all know, famously press-shy. He’s not the hermit some would have you believe as he can be seen out and about in and around Austin, Texas, but even TMZ doesn’t know when they’ve captured Sasquatch on camera. Ebert wrote about that, too, in his “Badlands” assessment. “I am unaware of a single interview he has given,” he wrote. “The many second-hand reports from those who know him paint a cheerful man, friendly, obsessed with details, enraptured by nature. There is a hint of Kubrick…In five movies [now six] in four decades, he has, in his own way, fashioned one of the most distinctive bodies of work of his time. Very much in his own way.”

Could those last words not be written about Ebert as well? I think so. Meanwhile, the film’s star, Ben Affleck, was naturally asked about this at the premiere of the film in Los Angeles last night. Having visited with Ebert last year where he talked about “Argo” (which Ebert predicted, before anyone, would win Best Picture), Affleck said that, combined with the review, has made for “one of the most powerful things that”s ever happened to me in my career. His last review, about this movie, was viewed through the prism of this wonderful man, who at the very end of his life, had to see the movie through that lens.”

Despite Malick’s press shyness, he nevertheless had a statement to offer about the late critic’s passing, saying that he “was very sorry to hear of Mr. Ebert”s death and remembers him, with deep gratitude, as a man of kindness and generosity, encouraging to all, a loving man whose goodness will not be forgotten by those whose lives he touched.”

And the critic and filmmaker will converge at least one more time: “Days of Heaven” has been tapped to open the 15th annual Ebertfest on April 17.

All of these reviews and more can be perused at the newly revamped RogerEbert.com. It stands there, fully updated, a monument to the great work of a great man. And the collection above is but one of countless such pieces that could be written about Ebert’s thoughts on this or that filmmaker. I’m quite sure his words will be considered and studied for years and years to come.

In a typically astute essay written for the March edition of GQ, Mark Harris muses on the qualities that make and sustain a movie star in the current Hollywood climate, and hit upon the contrasting fates of Channing Tatum and Taylor Kitsch last year to prove his point. Both actors began 2012 on the brink of stardom, with multiple mainstream releases ahead of them poised to do the job. But only Tatum made good on the promise, with a series of well-chosen leads in overperforming mid-size projects, while Kitsch’s vehicles (“Battleship,” “John Carter,” “Savages”) were all high-profile clunkers that did little to advance his big-screen identity.

“Gigs in expensive films that are designed to be blockbusters are, for emerging stars, the devil’s temptation,” writes Harris. “[But] a big opportunity is not the same thing as a good part.” 

That may be true for leading men and women, but for even the most well-regarded character actors — the kind whose names will never headline a major studio production, no matter how many awards they win or hits they latch onto — the rules are rather different. A big opportunity doesn’t equal a good part for them, either, but it equals a good paycheck; moreover, the movie’s eventual commercial or critical fate will never be blamed on (or credited to) their presence.

Which is why, amid the general tongue-lashing dished out to Antoine Fuqua’s unashamedly dim-witted siege thriller “Olympus Has Fallen” a few weeks ago, little critical bile was reserved for recent Academy Award winner Melissa Leo — even if her thankless part (and entertainingly shrill reading thereof) as a brutalized Defense Secretary was well beneath the actress and her skill set.

After all, we’re getting quite used to seeing the defiant 52-year-old actress popping up in one-dimensional parts in A-list Hollywood projects, and watching her punch whatever life she can into them. Late last year, in “Flight,” she seemed to strain at the leash in an antagonistic role far more curtailed than the narrative had promised. Next week, US audiences will see her — though never entirely in the flesh — opposite Tom Cruise in megabudget sci-fi actioner “Oblivion,” where her perky-sinister Southern delivery as Cruise’s commander provides the only suggestions of humor in an otherwise solemn enterprise.

None of these roles, needless to say, were taken with the remote intention of bringing Leo her third Oscar nomination. But it’s still a sufficient novelty to see this outspoken veteran of the independent scene in such glossy product — a one-woman culture clash, if you will — that her admirers are willing to cut her some slack.

Not least because it’s obviously a sufficient novelty to the actress herself that she’s still throwing herself into these parts with some measure of creative abandon, making singular, even eccentric decisions within them (her fruity inflections in “Oblivion,” her barely lucid physical rage in “Olympus”) with full knowledge that no one will be spending much time discussing them. Play this game for long enough and you’ll eventually acquiesce to sleepwalking: ask Morgan Freeman, who coincidentally also appears in “Olympus Has Fallen” and “Oblivion,” and is taking a little more critical heat for his nondescript work in both.

In Leo’s case, of course, such assignments still have a noble practical outcome, enabling her to continue in her preferred realm of low-budget, sometimes experimental work with up-and-coming filmmakers — which in turn gets a boost from her late-blooming celebrity. Released not long before “Flight” last year, for example, was her boldly committed, award-level turn in “Francine,” a beautifully wrought miniature and a virtual one-woman show for Leo. It’s these projects that allow her to show what she’s made of, and the Hollywood fodder that allows her and her indie allies to bring such projects to fruition.

It’s a pretty ideal career position for a jobbing actor, and Leo has worked awfully hard to get to this point. Not many opportunities came her way in the decade-plus that separated her stretch as Kay Howard in TV series “Homicide: Life on the Street” (something of a landmark figure in small-screen female characterization) and her career-changing lead turn in 2008’s “Frozen River,” and even through the highlights — striking supporting turns in “21 Grams” and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” among them — nobody would have anticipated she’d be turning up alongside Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington in her sixth decade.

Leo hasn’t been afraid to let her hunger show: her self-funded campaign ads on her path to winning Best Supporting Actress Oscar for “The Fighter” two years ago may have drawn accusations of desperation, but its hard to look at her recent career upswing and say she was wrong to want it that badly. And her flavorful, sometimes curiously detailed performances in even the least worthy roles betray that same eagerness: Leo knows she’s a great actress, but she’s also toiled for too long to start coasting.  

It’d be nice, then, to see the mainstream start rewarding her with slightly more creative legroom: more hearty, human supporting roles in the vein of “The Fighter,” less of the anonymous functionaries she tries to animate in “Flight,” “Olympus Has Fallen” and “Oblivion.” I’m not so naively idealistic as to suggest Hollywood casting agents start calling Melissa Leo instead of Meryl Streep — though I’d kill to see her take on “August: Osage County” — but there’s no reason why secondary characters can’t be as dimensional as the actors playing them. 

Whether in Streep’s autumnal box-office clout, the unlikely star construction of Melissa McCarthy or the improbable Academy-fuelled reinvention of old hands like Leo and Jacki Weaver, Hollywood seems slowly to be waking up to the possibilities of actresses outside the usual star demographic. (They need no such reminder, of course, about the men: it’s worth noting that Leo and Tom Cruise are near-exact contemporaries, yet she’s 20 years older than the two actresses cast as his romantic partners. So it goes.) Melissa Leo has the character to hold her own in the big leagues. Now she needs the characters. 

You have to go back to 2002’s “Talk to Her” to find a Pedro Almodóvar film that didn’t show up at the Cannes Film Festival — not that that’s a bad precedent, of course — but his new comedy “I’m So Excited!” is taking the same path.

Instead, the film’s big festival appointment looks to be a less pressured one. It’s just been announced that “I’m So Excited!” will open the Los Angeles Film Festival on June 13, a little over two weeks ahead of its US release, and it seems like a suitably fun pick for curtain-raising duties.

The film (distributed by Almodóvar’s long-term allies Sony Classics) only hits US screens on June 28, but is already out in multiple European territories — and while many critics have jived to its light frothiness, the tone of the reviews suggests he might have been wise to escape the unforgiving scrutiny of the Cannes crowd. (I’m seeing it for myself next week.) Meanwhile, film critics and LA fest director David Ansen says:

“Pedro Almódovar is the cinematic gift who keeps on giving. For four decades he’s amazed us with movies that are funny and dangerous, lovable and challenging, subversive and wildly inventive. It’s a privilege and pleasure to present his latest comic treasure as our opening night film.”

Last year, the LA Film Festival also opened with a Sony Pictures Classics title: Woody Allen’s rather poorly received “To Rome With Love.” The studio also  re-showcased the eventual Oscar winner “Searching for Sugar Man” at the fest, where it won the Audience Award; they’ll be hoping for something closer to that reaction for “I’m So Excited!.” (The festival’s biggest coup last year, meanwhile, was its closing pick: the world premiere of “Magic Mike.”)

A bawdy ensemble farce set almost entirely in the confines of a problem-plagued airplane bound for Mexico, the film has been widely pitched as a throwback to the scrappy, sexually charged comedies with which Almodóvar made his name in the 1980s.

Variety’s Jonathan Holland describes it as “a hugely entertaining, feelgood celebration of human sexuality that unfolds as a cathartic experience for characters, auds and helmer alike … as light and airy as the skies in which it”s set,” though other critics have grumbled about that very slightness. Its frivolity may count against it when Spain picks their Oscar submission later this year: they haven’t opted for an Almodóvar since “Volver” in 2006, after all. Still, as a summer diversion, it may be just the ticket.

Are you as excited for Almodóvar’s latest as the title wants you to be? Perhaps you’ve already seen it? Tell us in the comments.