The Best Picture category isn't the only thing that bulked up.

What is it about the Academy Awards? Intellectually, it's hard to muster up that much enthusiasm about who "wore it best" (Ang Lee) or how modest Katniss will be in her acceptance speech, hopefully avoiding a First Wives' Club reference that sounded like she was hating on Meryl Streep this time. And yet ... we still feel compelled to watch. Maybe it's because secretly, deep down, we still find it fascinating that the guy who does the voice of Stewie looks like the host of a reality game show about finding true love by having a dance-off on a stripper pole.

Or maybe it's because we're just suckers, who deep down believe that Beasts of the Southern Wild might still possibly have a chance against Argo or Lincoln.

Come join us, will you, on this the most magical of evenings for producers, people who are married to movie stars, and dress designers? We'll be hosting a live chat below. Just click the big countdown button and you're all set. Got it?

Great.

This year we're making our predictions in order of the film and/or celebrity, not the award. That's because this time ... it's personal. No, seriously: between Kathryn Bigelow and Ben Affleck being iced out of Best Director, the Weinstein Bros. not having a snowball's chance in hell of scoring a big win and the fact that we're practically giving an award to Anne Hathaway just to make her stop sing-crying, there's going to be a lot of sore losers tonight. But don't worry; we're using a time-tested formula for predicting the bitter ceremonies, including taking all of the guesses on Twitter and averaging them against Nate Silver's predictions. Then we throw those out the window and  get ourselves angry over Lincoln’s inevitable windfall of awards that should be going to that movie that had all those great New Yorker articles written about it and stars a 9-year-old who wasn't even an actress when she started the film, which is about 50 percent more method than Daniel Day-Lewis's decision to become an Italian cobbler every time he's taking a hiatus from Hollywood.

So enjoy, and don't forget to tune into our live chat on the Oscars, starting at 7 p.m.!

Anheuser-Busch executives have written to Paramount and to director Robert Zemeckis's studio, noting that the company had “no knowledge of the use or portrayal of Budweiser” and had a history of working to prevent drunk driving and alcohol abuse.

The company is seeking to remove the Bud trademark from all future incarnations of the movie as well as current digital prints--rather akin to the blurring of clothing brands on old MTV reality shows, perhaps. Certainly the depiction of alcohol as intoxicating is one that Busch ought to avoid!

Washington in Flight.

Denzel Washington is such a sturdy, reliable actor that his name on the screen has become synonymous with that of hero (with the obvious exception of Training Day). So it’s hard to buy him as a doped-up, alcoholic heel in Flight, an edgy thriller about the responsibility—and inherent culpability—of commercial pilots entrusted with the lives of millions.  I’d place my trust in Denzel in the cockpit any old day while humming “Fly Me to the Moon” at the same time. So it’s not easy to accept him as one of the irresponsible jerks who dangle their passengers in harm’s way. You just sort of trust him to do the right thing, and when he finally does, after more than two hours of soul-searching and moral hand-wringing, you might, like me, have double trouble with plausibility. So I have some minor problems with Flight. But don’t let that deter you. It’s the first film in over a decade by director Robert Zemeckis that guarantees originality, tempo and thrills. You go away satisfied and up to your eyeballs in entertainment. 

Mr. Washington plays Captain Whip Whitaker. He’s a seasoned, charismatic ace with a lot of wings on his uniform. But on the ground, he’s a deeply conflicted catastrophe, with an ex-wife who avoids him like a virus, a son who hates him, and a serious booze and drug problem. He’s also a womanizer with attitude issues, committed to nothing and nobody, who breaks every rule in the pilot’s manual. Snorting coke at dawn after a wild night in bed with a sexy flight attendant, he heads for the airport in pouring rain, stoned to the fins, and boards a 9 a.m. flight from Orlando to Atlanta with 102 passengers onboard. Arrogant enough to think he can outsmart severe turbulence, he ignores the 30-knot winds outside as well as the nervous shakes of his young co-pilot (the always excellent Brian Geraghty), the impaired abilities of Katerina (Nadine Velazquez), the flight attendant he just spent the night with, and the concerned, watchful eyes of senior flight attendant and old family friend Margaret Thomason (Tamara Tunie of TV’s Law and Order: Special Victims Unit). The hydraulic system crashes, the two pilots lose vertical control and the plane plummets in an uncontrolled dive that leaves the passengers screaming in terror. The first 20 minutes of Flight, short-wired for combustion, is one of the hairiest nonstop action sequences ever filmed, proving that in the 12 years since Cast Away, Mr. Zemeckis has forgotten nothing about how to stage the kind of breathtaking live-action fireworks display that keeps an audience paralyzed.

Miraculously, with skill and luck, Mr. Washington heads for an abandoned field and crash-lands in an ear-splitting explosion of fire and metal with 96 survivors. Although his girlfriend is one of the casualties and his co-pilot is crippled for life, the mantle of heroism bestowed on him is worthy of a ticker-tape parade. But before he’s even out of the hospital, the first person he calls is his pony-tailed, overweight hippie drug dealer (an amusing performance by John Goodman), who smuggles in cigarettes, vodka and porn. He may be declared a public hero, but the errant knight’s troubles are just beginning. A crafty airline lawyer for the pilot’s union (Don Cheadle) who specializes in investigating pilot errors sniffs out evidence of criminal negligence, the toxicology report from the hospital blood tests shows alarmingly high alcohol and cocaine levels that could lead to lawsuits against the airline, and despite his bravery, Captain Whitaker faces life in prison on multiple counts of manslaughter. The rest of the movie is about the efforts of his friends and colleagues to help him beat the rap and save his career, his efforts to go straight, and his subsequent self-destruction. And in a subsidiary subplot, he moves to his grandfather’s deserted farmhouse in rural Georgia with a beautiful heroin addict (Kelly Reilly) who tries to rehabilitate him. Every character has a moral ambiguity that keeps the balls in the air, including the exemplary Melissa Leo as the prosecuting attorney who, like all of the others, is not above complicity.

In less capable hands, Flight would undoubtedly seem like a series of rehashed themes from other movies. But the high level of craftsmanship from the fine cast and crew—particularly Mr. Zemeckis’s slick and controlled direction, and the nuanced details and tonal shifts in a terrific screenplay by John Gatins that is both carefully researched and extremely clear—all add up to unexpected levels of sophistication. Certainly Denzel Washington’s charm and unimpeachable sense of decency help the viewer sympathize with an otherwise flawed character who—let’s be honest—is basically little more than a despicable and delusional lout. (One can only wonder what a different movie it would have been with an edgier actor like Robert Mitchum or Burt Lancaster in the role.)

My biggest problem with Flight is not the unanswered questions it raises, but the eleventh-hour epiphany just in time for a happy ending. Maybe I’m naturally cynical, but I simply don’t believe that people are basically good at heart—and I don’t buy into sudden salvation. Otherwise, Flight is one hell of an entertainment.

rreed@observer.com

FLIGHT

Running Time 138 minutes

Written by John Gatins

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Starring Nadine Velazquez, Denzel Washington and Carter Cabassa

3/4

Letterman and Fallon: Braving the storm (NBC, CBS)

The only problem? Neither Jimmy Fallon nor David Letterman had a live audience--a first, in both their histories--to laugh at their jokes. But what could have turned into that creepy David Lynch episode of Louie was actually an amazing bit of performance art as the two jokesters performed to the dead silence of a mostly-empty room. *Yanks collar* "Tough crowd!"

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (with Seth Meyers and Robert Zemeckis as guests):

The Late Show with David Letterman (with Denzel Washington):
http://youtu.be/Mq2UDYVjz8Y
http://youtu.be/8NPiYyssX7Y
http://youtu.be/Hab8YTGWOhg
http://youtu.be/AWRRSX6ihTg

Is it kind of weird that both shows were promoting the movie Flight? That movie's PR machine just won't quit!

Lincoln Center, various screening times, standby tickets and information can be found at filmlinc.com/nyff2012.

Washington looks back menacingly at this poor decision.

Movies about covert CIA operatives make their own clichés, and in a violent and pointless waste of time and money called Safe House, they come in twos, like double vision. This movie wouldn’t be worth the effort even if it were about something, which it isn’t. Correction: It’s about how Denzel Washington is not above trashing his reputation when the salary works, even if the movie doesn’t.

Ryan Reynolds, who remains as critic-resistant as he is camera-ready, plays Matt Weston, a rookie CIA agent in Cape Town assigned to oversee a top-secret safe house where terrorists, mercenaries and guys with funny accents who haven’t shaved since the Berlin Wall collapsed are held for questioning and, presumably, protected by U.S. law. (In Cape Town? The St. Tropez of South Africa? Where the only people questioned are tourists who lose their room keys?) Anyway, that’s what it says in a screenplay by David Guggenheim that can be described only as what’s left after the dog ate the film-school Screenwriting 101 homework. Anyway, after smashing up half of the city with action-flick monotony, the preppie freshman spy finds himself under orders from headquarters in Langley, Va., to guard a master spy called Tobin Frost (Mr. Washington, in high dudgeon and deep doo-doo), who is suspected of betraying his government in heinous ways too vague to explain. Frost was once a great CIA hero who wrote the book on interrogation protocol before he turned rogue. Now everybody is after him. It takes the film’s entire 1-hour, 55-minute running time before you discover what they want him for and why. Meanwhile, the safe house is invaded by mass murderers Weston believes to be assassins, and he has to flee with his prisoner to save both their lives. Much more confusion lies ahead, when the killers turn out to be CIA agents themselves, but I’m getting one step ahead of a movie that is always one step behind.

With Weston trying to make sense of his orders via long-distance cell phones (they get better reception in Cape Town than in East Hampton) and Frost running, punching, machine-gunning, hand-grenading and destroying half the cars, trucks, buildings and innocent pedestrians on the streets, the movie collapses in a noisy farrago of dizzy editing. The woman at The New York Times raved about the sheer beauty of this film, which has left me stupefied. There is nothing beautiful in any single frame of the stomach-churning camerawork, grainy and shaking around in a series of ugly close-ups. Even the car chases, ratcheted up to an ear-splitting decibel level, are shot in close-ups, robbing the people who like this sort of chaos of the simple pleasure of getting off on the kind of cheap carnage that substitutes for narrative. All of which makes it doubly impossible to figure out what the hell is going on. You can write the plot on the flat side of a bobby pin.

Before the CIA can torture Frost into confessing to treason, his costar, in a dedicated effort to do his job, gain seniority and get a raise, drags his charge to a locker in a packed soccer stadium, where he fires into the crowd and causes a public riot, then escapes through a slum maze of collapsible shacks made of corrugated tin. After the CIA big shots (including Sam Shepard, Vera Farmiga and Brendan Gleeson in his first film in years in which you can understand his brogue) arrive in South Africa from Langley faster than it takes the red-eye to L.A., they start firing at each other. What is going on here? Suffice it to say that Frost is not the heel Weston thinks he is. Here comes the cliché about secret files proving criminal activity and corruption within the ranks of the CIA. One leak to the press and it could wreck the American people’s blind and unwavering trust in their own government! In the end, with almost every actor in the cast dead, blown to hamburger and six feet under, it’s up to the rookie to save the CIA from a black eye and change the course of history.

Are they kidding? We’ve seen the CIA vilified as a viper’s nest of felons, liars and mad-dog killers who all betray each other in dozens of other movies, all better and more gripping than Safe House. In fact, we’ve seen scores of other safe-house movies, all superior to Safe House. This time the suspect pool is so old it’s hairy. Directed with a maximum of overrehearsed brutality and a minimum of skill by young Swedish newcomer Daniel Espinosa, the movie is so predictable that you figure it out an hour before the actors do. This is a naive director with so little insight you wonder what comic books he’s been reading. Under his punishing camera lens, everyone looks sallow, anemic and terrible, including the usually alluring Vera Farmiga, who has never looked so haggard. Even GQ coverboy Ryan Reynolds has bags under his eyes as big as walnuts.

All of which makes me sad about Denzel Washington’s disillusioning participation. I forgive him if the money was irresistible enough to pay off a mortgage or put his kids through Harvard, but Safe House is total junk, and he is one of the producers. I guess I respect him too much to call him a junk dealer, but when the shoe fits …

rreed@observer.com

SAFE HOUSE

Running Time 115 minutes

Written by David Guggenheim

Directed by Daniel Espinosa

Starring Denzel Washington, Ryan Reynolds and Robert Patrick

1/4

Joe Lieberman was here on Friday in a bright green tie, dining with Mort Zuckerman. The former governor of Utah Jon Hunstman was also here having lunch with his beautiful wife. He hasn't announced it yet, but I'm sure he will run for president. Everyone was clamoring for Mr. Hunstman! And Bill O'Shaughnessy was holding court at Philip Johnson's table. I think Mr. O'Shaughnessy needs a new hairstyle. We need to send him over to Fred Fekkai. Judy Taubman, the former Miss Israel, was here without her husband, Al, and I told her that Mr. O'Shaughnessy is Al's replacement! Maybe after we get his hair cut.

On Saturday I watched the Yankees play the Red Sox. Lately there have been no Yankees at the grill--we used to have Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter coming in, but that was a long time ago. Then on Sunday I made a movie with Richard Gere called Arbitrage. He is such a professional actor--unbelievable! He was here from 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. without ever stopping, and he was very friendly, putting everyone at ease. I played myself. The scene was based on the Four Seasons. They told me to be myself, so I had little fun and did what I always do. A few years ago I also had a part in Inside Man, with Denzel Washington. Where is my SAG card?

Speaking of Hollywood, last night, we had a huge party to celebrate Too Big to Fail, the HBO movie based on Andrew Sorkin's book. They put a gigantic silver bull on top of a pile of money in the pool! Everyone was having pictures taken in front of it. Warren Buffet and George Soros were here. We had Donna Karan, James Woods, Armand Assante, Richard Plepler, Matthew Modine ... Mariska Hargitay and Cynthia Nixon were both looking stunningly beautiful. Stunning! It is really a great movie. It didn't have me in it, but you can't have everything.

Winner: Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenowith

Whether it was their opening make-out session — somewhere, Newsweek writer Ramin Setoodeh is running his DVR back to inspect the kiss for authenticity — or some banter about Chenowith not getting nominated, the Promises, Promises co-stars provided the biggest laughs of the night. Hayes did a great job as host — and following 2009 host Neil Patrick Harris couldn't have been easy— but can we start the "Kristin Chenowith Should Host the Tonys" Facebook campaign right now? Good, let's. 

Loser: Chris Noth

Poor Mr. Big. Saddled with having to introduce the one failed conceit of the night — stars for the Best Play nominees explaining what their plays are about —Mr. Noth looked lost to begin with. That he had to be told to look at the camera and talk by someone off-stage was just the cherry on top.

Winner: Katie Finneran

The Promises, Promises star won for Best Featured Actress in a Musical and her speech was tearful, heartfelt, spontaneous and everything that a great acceptance speech should be. She even talked to the "kids at home!" If you saw Finneran's speech and weren't a bit choked up, check you pulse immediately.

Loser: Denzel Washington

Kudos to Washington for winning Best Actor in a Play, but did his speech have to be so awful? Washington didn't seem to have a clue what the Tony Awards even were. The night was filled with Hollywood stars moonlighting as stage players — Catherine Zeta-Jones and Scarlett Johannson were other winners — but it was Washington who felt the most out of place.

Credit for this feat of alchemy goes primarily to second-time playwright Lucy Prebble, and her director, Rupert Goold, artistic director of London’s Headlong Theatre, which commissioned Enron. Together, they take the seemingly dry subject matter and, with a clever, tightly constructed script and dark, menacing, inventive staging, produce a vibrant, deeply theatrical experience.

There are songs, but it’s not a musical. There are laughs, but it’s not a comedy. Enron is history as avant-garde burlesque. “When we tell you his story,” says the lawyer for disgraced CEO Jeffrey Skilling, serving as an emcee, “you should know it could never be exactly what happened. But we’re gonna put it together and sell it to you as the truth.” It’s what theater does, and it’s what Enron did.

The script covers a wide swath. Direct-address history lessons on Alfred P. Sloan and mark-to-market accounting and structured debt join song-and-dance numbers celebrating commodities trading and spoofing enamored stock analysts, which is layered atop the character-driven morality tale that is the rise and fall of names you remember, like Skilling, Ken Lay and Andy Fastow. It indicts the rest of corporate America, capitalism at large, the Clinton administration and, of course, George W. Bush, whose presidential campaign, the play suggests, was largely funded by Enron, so that his administration would deregulate the electricity market.

The Enron board of directors are blind mice; the go-along-get-along accountants at Arthur Andersen are represented by a puppet; and the shadow companies that hold Enron’s debt and will eventually destroy it are red-eyed velociraptors, trolling the dungeon that is Fastow’s finance department and feeding on cash. Enron’s stock price is constantly ticking past on the upstage wall, rising, rising, rising—until suddenly, disastrously, it’s not.

Norbert Leo Butz stars as Skilling, the visionary CEO who leads Enron to become a corporate powerhouse, the most admired company in the world, by inventing new businesses for it—energy trading, weather-based derivatives, a bandwidth exchange—that don’t actually produce revenue. He’s charming, smarmy, defiant and excellent. Marin Mazzie is sexy and commanding as the fictional Claudia Roe, the one Enron exec to challenge Skilling; she favors tangible assets—power plants—over Skilling’s trades and swaps.

Gregory Itzin makes Ken Lay, the chairman, into an avuncular buffoon—a man who enjoys the trappings of power and knows enough about what’s going on in the office to know he doesn’t want to know about it. Stephen Kunken makes Fastow, the CFO whose schemes brought down the company, a needy nerd so desperate for Skilling’s respect and attention that he invented ways to hide all those losses—and named his son Jeffrey.

Enron ends with an interesting twist: An incarcerated Skilling arguing that bubbles are ultimately good for society. One brought us the railroads, he says; another the Internet. Perhaps. But I’m not sure what of use Enron’s bubble brought us (tricks for hiding debt? Bush?), except this: one hell of a play about it.

AS THE SUFFOCATING paterfamilias Troy Maxson in the emotionally wrenching revival of August Wilson’s Fences that opened at the Cort Theatre Monday night, Denzel Washington—two-time Academy Award winner, with his first name as big as the title on the marquee—is intense and fiercely charismatic, but he’s also a little bit latter-day Pacino, from the why-is-he-shouting-so-much school of acting. 

This is the first Broadway revival of Fences since its 1987 debut, which won Wilson a Tony and his first Pulitzer, and no doubt that’s thanks to Mr. Washington’s presence. It is part of Wilson’s 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle, about the African-American experience in the 20th century, and it’s directed here by Kenny Leon, who mounted the full cycle at the Kennedy Center two years ago.

Fences is set in 1957, as the world is beginning to pivot around Troy. The son of a sharecropper, he was a gifted baseball player, but before the integration of the Major Leagues. Now he’s a garbageman, but the only one forceful enough to ask the boss why only white men are allowed to drive the trucks. His son Cory is a high-school football star, about to be recruited to play in college, but Troy won’t allow it, maybe to protect his son—he learned the hard way that white men won’t allow black men to succeed through sports—or maybe to protect himself, because he’s afraid his son will achieve and outshine him. He’s been diminished by the outside world, but in the home he shares with his wife, Rose, and three children from three different relationships—a small, worn brick house, with a patch of dirt yard—he must reign supreme. Ultimately, this drives away his son, his wife, his best friend.

Viola Davis is sensational as Rose, the devoted and betrayed wife. Wilson’s lyrical script offers any number of stirring monologues, and Ms. Davis delivers hers—especially when she learns of Troy’s betrayal—with a vivid, bracing rawness. She more than holds her own against Mr. Washington, both in their tender scenes and in their explosive ones. It’s no small feat, and she does it without too much shouting.

PROMISES, PROMISES, REVIVED Sunday at the Broadway Theatre, starts off with such, well, promise. As the orchestra plays Burt Bacharach’s 1968 overture, all strings and muffled horns and shimmery high hats, the curtain rises on Sean Hayes as C.C. Baxter, an anonymous office worker in the behemoth Manhattan headquarters of Consolidated Life. He’s working away mechanistically, stamping a document and moving on to the next one, as dancers enter behind him in mod suits and ’60s-allusive choreography, mimicking Baxter’s office motions but also twisting and frugging. It looks great, it sounds great, and you’re primed for a great show.

But then the plot gets started, and it’s all downhill.

Promises, Promises was a 1968 Broadway hit with a book by Neil Simon, music by Mr. Bacharach and lyrics by Hal David, based on Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic The Apartment. (You know: Guy gets ahead by lending his apartment to the bosses for trysts; one is trysting with the elevator girl that work guy has a crush on.) It hasn’t been revived since, and it’s easy to see why: It’s not very good. Neil Simon comedy does not, it appears, age well. This isn’t the quite painfully unfunny Odd Couple of a few seasons ago—at least there are songs—but there’s not a lot to laugh at.

Sean Hayes is surprisingly charming and ingratiating as Baxter, and Katie Finneran steals the show for the scene and a half she’s in, bringing a much-needed comic jolt as the floozy Baxter picks up in a dive on Christmas Eve. But Kristin Chenoweth—who earned not just entrance applause but also entrance shrieks on the night I attended—seems miscast as Baxter’s love interest, Miss Kubelik: It’s impossible to imagine that such a no-nonsense dynamo would ever fall for Baxter’s conniving boss, much less try to kill herself when he jilts her.

The best part of the show is director Rob Ashford’s wittily retro choreography. It’s a shame he didn’t do it for Bye Bye Birdie instead: Maybe we could have had one successful Mad Men revival this season instead of two disappointing ones.

THE PROBLEM ENDEMIC to authorized biographies is that cooperating subjects generally prefer a sanitized version of their own life. This remains problematic even when the gauzy biopic is presented on a Broadway stage.

The Roundabout Theatre Company’s Sondheim on Sondheim at Studio 54, the umpteenth tribute to the composer in his 80th birthday year—this one sung by a stellar cast headlined by Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat and narrated by the man himself in vintage video clips and current talking-head interviews—is a pleasure to listen to. It’s also entirely unrevelatory.

Indeed, it’s cleverly withholding: We get just enough information to feel like we’re learning something about Mr. Sondheim without actually learning anything about him. We’re shown his studio and told he writes on yellow pads with soft pencils, but we don’t learn anything substantive about his writing process. We’re told he had a terrible relationship with his mother, but we don’t really learn how that affected him. We’re told he was confused about his sexuality at 35 and had his first serious relationship at 60, but he doesn’t mention anything—even the gender—of the person he met at 60.

It’s a live-action A&E Biography, and it’s a dull one. But, hey, you can’t complain about the soundtrack.

IF YOU HAVE THE CHANCE to see a play by Annie Baker, do it. The young playwright deeply impressed critics and audiences with her Circle Mirror Transformation at Playwrights Horizons in the fall. Now she’s back with The Aliens at the even tinier Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

Once again, she is examining the lives of regular folks in small-town Vermont—here, a trio of otherwise friendless sad sacks who hang out behind a local coffee house and believe each to be a misunderstood genius. The writing is beautifully crafted but simple, naturalistic dialogue that manages to be almost accidentally funny and wise. For much of the play, little happens, but we’re rapt. (Finally, something does, and it’s almost disappointing: This perfect little fascinating-nothing creation has been sullied by a plot.)

The acting, too, is excellent. It’s never clear whether the three are the geniuses they think themselves to be or merely losers deluding themselves. They’re believable either way, and it’s clear which Ms. Baker is.

editorial@observer.com