The fight broke out during the first act of Glengarry Glen Ross.

As Al Pacino and Bobby Cannavale circled each other on the boards, a well-dressed woman in the audience was noisily working her way through a cellophane package of Twizzlers. When a man in the next seat shushed her, the woman’s thuggish husband loudly intervened.

The exchange became more heated until the husband—who could have passed for a second-tier personal injury attorney from Planet of the Apes—challenged his adversary to “take it outside.” The pace may have been a little slow on stage, but those of us in the mezzanine were riveted by the imminent possibility of actual violence.

For far too many Broadway-goers, like Our Lady of the Twizzlers, enjoying a night at the theater has come to mean behaving like they’re relaxing at home, watching the big-screen from their sofa. Such a sense of entitlement, and the pushback it provokes from touchy fellow audience members, has resulted in an increasing number of aggressive confrontations, which have now joined more commonplace theater annoyances like texting or a ringing cell phone.

“It’s getting worse,” said theater publicist Billy Zavelson. “People seem to be unaware of the fact that even checking the time on your phone infuriates a dozen people around you, and it’s happening more and more.”

Portable technology seems to be the most obvious catalyst for many in-theater fights. Most people have been to a live performance during which a ringing cell phone has interrupted the show—some even have stories in which the offender chose to take the call.

Meanwhile, texting or using a mobile web browser has emerged as a form of annoying audience behavior to which some people feel especially entitled. The reasoning seems to be that because such activity does not involve audio, it should be allowed. But once a sensitive fellow theatergoer catches sight of the glowing screen, it can be easy to fixate on the irritation, like a dripping faucet in the still of the night.

National Review columnist Kevin Williamson became an Internet hero last week after writing about his experience seeing Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 at Kazino on West 13th Street. After exchanging words with a woman whom he believed was using her phone to Google things during the performance, he snatched it from her hand and threw it across the room, where it hit a curtain. So she slapped him and summoned the event space’s security director.

Mr. Williamson wrote that the theater official attempted to make him stay on the premises, as the woman was considering pressing charges. He declined and went home to pen an angry column.

“In a civilized world, I would have received a commendation of some sort,” he wrote. “To the theater-going public of New York—nay, the the world—I say: ‘You’re welcome.’”

In Mr. Zavelson’s opinion, it’s not just the technology audience members have in the palms of their hands that’s to blame. He suspects that on-demand and streaming media services have accustomed people to viewing “shows” in the casual atmosphere of their own homes, and now they are bringing those manners with them into the public space. When their behavior elicits a strong response from other typically overwound New Yorkers, even minor issues can quickly escalate.

“There are the ‘shushes’ that are louder than any cell phone ringing,” he said. “I used to be the one who was, ‘Will you please shut up!’ Then you get so embarrassed because you realize you have acted disproportionately to the original issue. You become that Upper West Side, Lincoln Plaza movie person, where there are only three people in the theater and they’re yelling, ‘Shut up, shut up’ to the person behind them who’s eating fried chicken.”

How common is it for an audience member to go from “shushing” a fellow patron to actually touching them? It seems to happen all the time.

Observer theater critic Jesse Oxfeld recalls “the time I reached across my date and grabbed an old man’s arm as he started opening his second bag of M&Ms. After I’d patiently sat through him crinkling his way through the first bag.”

But that was nothing compared to the recent experience of Dean Kurth. The television news producer was attending Matilda on April 19 when his companion asked the woman next to him “to stop talking and texting. “

Would you hit this man?

“Apparently he brushed her arm lightly in an effort to get her attention,” Mr. Kurth related in an email. “She didn’t like that and their conversation quickly became a shouting match that was audible to many over the show. The woman was yelling, ‘Don’t put your hand in my face!’

“At intermission the woman started up again as my friend and I tried to leave our row. It got pretty ugly, and this time the entire crowd in the balcony took notice.” A uniformed security guard had to intervene, and further confrontation was prevented only thanks to the woman switching seats.

“I’d never seen anything like it,” wrote Mr. Kurth. “I guess the lesson is, don’t touch anyone in a dark theater.”

Of course, another disruptive thing people can do with their smartphones is take pictures. Broadway hosts a wide variety of Hollywood celebrities, and theatergoers are being asked to pay $150 or more, even for mediocre seats. With such an outlay required to see the likes of Tom Hanks in Lucky Guy or Alec Baldwin in Orphans, it is hardly surprising that many people feel it’s reasonable to augment their social media presences with a souvenir photo of the evening.

On recent nights at I’ll Eat You Last with Bette Midler and Macbeth with Alan Cumming, the ushers could be observed swarming like moths as the first act began, drawn to the telltale glows of half a dozen camera phones.

But even that behavior pales next the enterprising souls who realize their devices can also shoot video. Last February, Matthew Broderick famously stopped the show and broke character when he noticed a man in the audience filming him in Nice Work If You Can Get It.

While bootlegs have a long, proud history in this city—rock historians are grateful that performances at CBGB and the Fillmore East in the 1970s were not lost to posterity, thanks to smuggled shotgun microphones—many, like Mr. Broderick, would probably prefer that you simply purchase a CD at the merch stand.

Ken Davenport, a producer whose credits include Macbeth, Kinky Boots and Godspell, believes the industry needs to respond to increasingly poor behavior in the stalls.

“Theatergoing manners (like manners in general) have been on the decline over the past 20 to 30 years,” he wrote on his blog, the Producer’s Perspective, in April. “As our audience expanded, and our ability to sit still has waned, some manners have gone out the window.”

Mr. Davenport offered a six-point plan for improving audience behavior, including better training for theater staff and publishing a guide to etiquette in every Playbill and emailing it to customers before each performance.

Point No. 6: “Install ejector seats?”

One time, not too long ago, I even got into an argument at a show with a Broadway actor. It was Pacific Overtures at Studio 54, which had an ambiguous seating arrangement using four-top bar tables. The second act was in full swing as I squabbled over seats with Tony Roberts, known for playing Woody Allen’s best friend in several of his films and their stage versions.

When the usher got involved, she discovered it was the other couple at the table that was squatting. Mr. Roberts and I muttered our apologies, and years later I saw him in Xanadu.

If it happened again today, I believe the etiquette would be to hit him.

54 Below, 254 West 54th Street, 7pm; Café Carlyle, 35 East 76th Street, 8:45pm; tickets and information can be found at 54below.com and rosewoodhotels.com/en/carlyle/

Woody Allen at the 'To Rome With Love' premiere (Patrick McMullan)

Is it the summer of the prestige indies? After the superlative debut of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, Woody Allen's similarly fussy and delightful To Rome With Love landed in theaters this past weekend with an approximate $76,000 per-theater average. Last summer, Mr. Allen had his greatest financial success ever with Midnight in Paris, which ended up winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar; per a Sony Pictures Classics exec's interview with Deadline, To Rome With Love will be rolled out to theaters across America faster than was Midnight in Paris to capitalize on blockbuster counterprogramming.

To Rome With Love is unlikely to net Mr. Allen another screenwriting Oscar: our Rex Reed said that the film "should be accompanied by a sign that says 'Gone fishing.'" Not that Mr. Allen cares: he told The Observer that, although he skipped the Oscar presentation, "They mailed it to me! You can’t avoid them.”

A directing Allen, STILL not in New York.

Big talents, like everybody else, deserve a day off. And sure enough, in the illustrious Woody Allen canon, To Rome With Love is a very minor entry that should be accompanied by a sign that says “Gone fishing.”

Having forsaken New York (temporarily, I hope) for an uneven European tour that includes stops in London, Barcelona and Paris, Woody now sends home a pretty but vapid tourist postcard of Rome that is nothing more than stale bolognese coarsened by a compendium of numbingly familiar clichés. Just how stale is evident as a cheesy rendition of “Volare” overwhelms the opening credits. From there, his 44^th film as a director is a labored farce that makes few demands on the talents of its all-star cast and ends up as boring as it is preposterous.

To Rome With Love is a valentine to the Eternal City that fares weakly compared to last year’s epic milestone, the high-concept Midnight in Paris. No freshness or original insight is evident in the four disconnected short stories that comprise this cinematic pasta fazool. The original title was The Bop Decameron, but disparaging reviews at the Italian opening two months ago conveyed the strong message that Roman cineastes did not enjoy the send-up of Boccaccio’s medieval Decameron folk tales. A change to its current title ensued, which was a good thing as the quartet of dreary episodes depicted here has none of the same classic thrill as anything by Boccaccio. Nothing solid has been worked out with consistence. The whole movie has the look and feel (not to mention the phony dialogue) of an idea jotted on the back of a menu in the Piazza Navona before a sleepy afternoon siesta, and then filmed before the script was fine-tuned.

Chief among the disappointments is Woody himself, acting for the first time since Scoop in 2006, as a neurotic former New York opera conductor who arrives with his psychiatrist wife (a wasted Judy Davis) to inspect the fiancé of their daughter (the excellent Alison Pill), a dashing but opinionated political activist and right-wing Italian architect named Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti) who picked her up the Fountain of Trevi. As a germ-fearing hypochondriac, Woody has a few happily twitchy moments of self-deprecation and nervous hysteria, but we’ve seen them before, in better movies. The best thing in this episode is his discovery of the groom’s father, an undertaker and promising opera star who can sing only in the shower. (Italian tenor Fabio Armiliato turns in one of the film’s most amusing performances.) Pushing him against his will into the spotlight, Woody sets up a shower stall on a concert stage and the mortician sings Pagliacci naked to great acclaim, entering and exiting in only a towel.

Story No. 2 is a mess involving a pair of newlyweds from the provinces (Alessandra Mastronardi and Alessandro Tiberi) who become separated from each other in a series of mix-ups that turn tedious when the husband is accidentally visited—while his wife is lost in the traffic without a cell phone—by a prostitute (Penelope Cruz) who gets the wrong hotel room and he’s forced to pass her off as his wife at a fancy reception where the classy guests turn out to be her best clients. Meanwhile, the naïve wife wanders onto a movie set where she is seduced by the star, who is much too old to be mistaken as an Italian sex symbol. Pointless and excruciating.

Worse still is the one about the dull office clerk (Roberto Benigni) who inexplicably finds himself stalked by the paparazzi and turned into a celebrity before his 24 hours in the spotlight is replaced by a newer flavor of instant stardom. It’s a comment on the Italian lust for artificial fame that is less wry and more cruel than it might have seemed on paper.

Rock bottom is the empty shell revolving around an architecture student (Jesse Eisenberg, from The Social Network) spending a year in Rome who finds himself in the middle of a threesome among his live-in girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) and her house guest, a superficial, self-involved actress (Ellen Page), supervised and sarcastically annotated by an obnoxious social commentator and invisible guardian angel played by Alec Baldwin. Nothing about this little vignette works on any level whatsoever. It just lies there like congealed, week-old lasagna. The whole movie is narrated by a traffic cop on the foot of the Spanish Steps who never provides any real cohesion in the narrative or relates the fragmented sketch material to the Eternal City that surrounds it. It’s a movie made by a tourist. For the real thing, see Fellini’s Roma.

Silly and strained to the breaking point, it’s a movie that probably played out better in Woody Allen’s head than it does on film. Although they unfold against a panoply of artifacts and ruins, the parts don’t add up to a consistently riveting whole, and some of them are rusty as old nails. The only thing that resonates is the gorgeous cinematography by Darius Khondji, capturing Rome in the golden light of summer with such rich, buttery splendor that you might want to book a flight immediately. To Rome with Love has moments of isolated charm, but it’s only moderately entertaining, it isn’t very funny, and it’s entirely too long.

It’s time to pack up the Vuitton and come home, Woody. Your inspiration is thin, you’re running out of euros, and you’re having a bad day.

rreed@observer.com

TO ROME WITH LOVE

Running Time 102 minutes

Written and Directed by Woody Allen

Starring Woody Allen, Penélope Cruz and Jesse Eisenberg

2/4

A match made in...somewhere (Getty Images)

Monday evening, Woody Allen announced the cast of his yet-to-be-titled film, set in San Francisco and New York. (This is different from his upcoming summer feature with Jesse Eisenberg, To Rome With Love, which is set in Rome.)

The cast is...eclectic, to say the least. To say the most would be calling it the work of either an insane genius or just a regular insane person. Let's take a look, shall we?

Woody Allen announced today the cast of his latest untitled film. Starring, in alphabetical order, are Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Louis C.K., Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Michael Emerson, Sally Hawkins and Peter Sarsgaard. Co-stars include Max Casella and Alden Ehrenreich. It is a Gravier Productions film produced by Allen’s long time producers, Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum.

The new film will be shot in New York and San Francisco this summer. This marks Allen’s second time directing in San Francisco -- his directorial debut, 1969’s TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, was also set there.

Of course, everyone is flipping biscuit's over the casting of Andrew Dice Clay, most recently seen playing himself on Entourage, though a close second is Louis C.K. (Though we could absolutely see the FX star as a blue-collar Woody surrogate in the feature.) But the other members of the cast are just as strange: Cate Blanchett and Alex Baldwin are the biggest names on the roster, but we just can't imagine those two with any type of neurotic sexual chemistry.

Then there's Michael Emerson, better known as the villainous Ben Linus from Lost, who absolutely should be in everything, ever. But maybe not a Woody Allen movie? Unless Andrew Dice Clay will be playing a Smoke Monster going through a mid-life sexual crisis, only to be aided by the help of his best friend, a grown-up Vincent Delpino.

Add Peter Skarsgard, and you have a farrago of stoic, emotionally-repressed character actors...and Andrew Dice Clay. Based on the casting, we're going to assume that Mr. Allen's next feature will be a tense melodrama, in the vein of Matchpoint or the one with Ewan McGregor that no one saw.

Lindsay Lohan (Getty Images)

Woody Allen, director of the upcoming From Rome With Love as well as a few other things, may be taking Lindsay Lohan under his wing. People reports that the New York director and the Long Island star got dinner at Phillippe on Saturday night, a week after Ms. Lohan attended the White House Correspondents' Dinner (the girl is keeping busy!).

Ms. Lohan may be Mr. Allen's next project--the director has said that he intended to cast Winona Ryder and Robert Downey, Jr. (before the latter's comeback)  in his 2004 film Melinda and Melinda, before being told they were uninsurable. The man has a soft heart! The pair may also just be close pals, though it's hard to imagine precisely what the pair have in common besides admiration for the work ethic of Scarlett Johansson.

Academy Award Nominee Rooney Mara

This morning, thousands upon tens of New Yorkers are realizing they have to go see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, as that film was announced as one of nine Oscar Best Picture nominees.

Big surprises of the morning included that film's nomination for Best Picture, the inclusion of Best Actor nominees Demian Bichir and Gary Oldman, and the breadth of the Best Picture category, which found room for movies as different as War Horse and The Tree of Life after speculation tended towards the notion that there would be fewer nominees about which voters felt more strongly.

The predictions we got right? That Rooney Mara would take the place of Tilda Swinton in the Best Actress race, and that Albert Brooks would fall out of Best Supporting Actor--as well as the first five of those nine nominees. We didn't speculate on Best Animated Feature, speculating to ourselves that the field was a bit fallow, and with nominees including Chico and Rita and A Cat in Paris, we may have been right.

Hugo leads the race with 11 overall nominations, followed by heretofore perceived frontrunner The Artist with 10.

The nominations in top categories are below, and the full list of nominations is here.

Best Picture

The Artist; The Descendants; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; The Help; Hugo; Midnight in Paris; Moneyball; The Tree of Life; War Horse

Best Director

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris; Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist; Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life; Alexander Payne, The Descendants; Martin Scorsese, Hugo;

Best Actor:

Demian Bichir, A Better Life; George Clooney, The Descendants, Jean DuJardin, The Artist; Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Best Actress:

Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs; Viola Davis, The Help; Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady; Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

Best Supporting Actor:

Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn; Jonah Hill, Moneyball; Nick Nolte, Warrior; Christopher Plummer, Beginners; Max Von Sydow, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Best Supporting Actress:

Bérénice Bejo, The Artist; Jessica Chastain, The Help; Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids; Octavia Spencer, The Help; Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs

Best Original Screenplay

The Artist; Bridesmaids; Margin Call; Midnight in Paris; A Separation

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Descendants; Hugo; The Ides of March; Moneyball; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best Animated Feature

A Cat In Paris; Chico and Rita; Kung Fu Panda 2; Puss in Boots; Rango

Michelle Williams--who will be nominated. Who else will join her? (Getty Images)

Tomorrow morning will bring that early-morning announcement of this year's Oscar nominees--with the attention-desperate wrinkle that no one knows how many nominees there will be. Herewith, our predictions, for last-minute entries into your office pool (if yours is the sort of office at which Oscar nominations are the subject of a pool. Ours is not, which is why we're writing a blog post).

Best Picture

The Artist

The Descendants

The Help

Hugo

Midnight in Paris

We know any number of films between five and ten can be nominated for Best Picture, but with The Artist and The Descendants sucking up so much oxygen and so many first-place votes, it's easy to imagine no sixth choice gathering enough steam. The likely sixth entry, if there is one, would be Moneyball--but aren't many of those voters who love "adult dramas" more likely to vote in the buzzier Descendants first?

Best Director

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

Alexander Payne, The Descendants

Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Mr. Allen, Mr. Scorsese, and Mr. Hazanavicius are clear locks, and Mr. Payne will get in on the strength of his film's reputation. For the fifth spot, Mr. Fincher and Steven Spielberg seem the likeliest (The Help's debut director, Tate Taylor, did not particularly distinguish himself), but the total fade of War Horse's repute gives the advantage to Mr. Fincher for what would be his third nomination in four years.

Best Actor

George Clooney, The Descendants

Jean DuJardin, The Artist

Michael Fassbender, Shame

Ryan Gosling, The Ides of March

Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Leonardo DiCaprio has been nominated for all manner of precursor awards for his role in J. Edgar, but that movie's disappeared from theaters and from the minds of viewers who've seen many, many better movies by now (J. Edgar really is uniquely terrible). Anyone who loves biographical films about controversial figures gets to vote one in with Meryl Streep in Best Actress--and the surprise nominee might be Ryan Gosling, who does nothing too special in The Ides of March but who'd be a big enough star to stand alongside Mr. Clooney and Mr. Pitt.

Best Actress

Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs

Viola Davis, The Help

Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

Ms. Streep, Ms. Davis, and Ms. Williams have all won early awards, and Ms. Close helped produce her own movie, in which she plays a traditionally bait-y role as a female impersonating a male. The notion that four people in Oscar-bait roles would be joined by Tilda Swinton in the avant-garde We Need to Talk About Kevin stretches credulity--silent for long stretches and chronologically disjointed, this doesn't seem like the sort of role that gets an actress to the Kodak. The narrative around Rooney Mara--plucked out of nowhere in the most extensive casting search since Scarlett O'Hara--seems to coalesce towards a surprise nomination.

Best Supporting Actor

Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn

Armie Hammer, J. Edgar

Jonah Hill, Moneyball

Nick Nolte, Warrior

Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Mr. Plummer is so far ahead here that the rest of the nominees seem plucked from thin air--an impersonation of Lawrence Olivier? Sure! A fairly quiet turn by a popular comic? Definitely! An attempt at a comeback in a movie no one saw? Okay! Armie Hammer's nomination seems the least likely, but the energy he brought to J. Edgar could make him the one element of the film they nominate.

Best Supporting Actress

Bérénice Bejo, The Artist

Jessica Chastain, The Help

Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids

Octavia Spencer, The Help

Shailene Woodley, The Descendants

Three movies with huge amounts of apparent support carry their supporting stars towards a nomination, with the addition of Melissa McCarthy, taking the spot that some believe might have gone to Janet McTeer in the little-seen Albert Nobbs.

Best Original Screenplay

50/50

The Artist

Bridesmaids

Midnight in Paris

Young Adult

This category seems fairly open--besides the two Best Picture nominees, the three other top entries are not traditionally Oscar-y comedies. The Writers' Guild of America nominated Win Win, a sort-of comedy also, here, but that movie seems even less up Oscar's alley than Young Adult, a movie in which past winner Diablo Cody deals with her relationship with fame.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Descendants

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Help

Hugo

Moneyball

This category, on the other hand, has the real heat--it's hard to imagine anything sneaking into a set of screenplays this popular. It's also one of the few categories with true suspense as to the winner--because the real speculation only begins on Tuesday.

He'd rather fly than bike.

Bicycles have won some powerful enemies in the city as they have grown more popular. For every David Bryne there is a Chuck Schumer. But perhaps the city might need to rethink its cycling policy now that Mr. Manhattan himself has come out against them.

In an interview with Interview.com, none other than Woody Allen says that the profusion of bikes is what annoys him more than anything else in the city these days.

MADUKA: You have given many people their image of Manhattan, and have, in the past, been one of its greatest cultural champions. But, of course, you've gone international in recent years. How has your feeling towards this city changed or matured? Does it continue to inspire you and your work? How has the city itself changed over the course of your career?

ALLEN: New York has changed for the better in some obvious ways, like the dropping of the crime rate and people don't squeegee my windshield when I come to a stoplight. On the other hand, uncontrolled bike riders are a great hazard, and the wonderful idea of more and more people having bikes in New York will turn sour as people become alienated because so much of it is out of control. That will be a pity.

The Observer can't help but wonder: Is Bicycle Thieves still one of Mr. Allen's top-three favorite movies?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC