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.!

Don't get on Bret Easton Ellis' bad side ...

– Maybe? Hopefully? Last week, the American Psycho author went on Twitter to vent about Lindsay Lohan missing her ADR (basically, redubbing tracks when the audio was unintelligible) for their upcoming film, The Canyons. He threatened to sic Patrick Bateman on her, which could only end one way:


Meanwhile, BEE isn't answering our emails, and Lindsay hasn't been spotted all weekend. (Though that might be more about her dad calling in the LAPD for an intervention at her place in L.A. on Friday.)

– James Franco is "dating" Ashley Benson from Pretty Little Liars. We give it two weeks till he reveals that their relationship was just a performance art piece he was taping for an upcoming MoMA exhibit.

– Can someone explain to us how Ryan Lochte got a little huffy over Seth MacFarlane's impression of him on SNL, but then did a 30 Rock cameo of himself as a "sex idiot"?

– Joaquin Phoenix makes the best analogies ever. When Interview asked him how it feels to be on the awards circuit for his role in The Master, he responded:

It's a carrot, but it's the worst-tasting carrot I've ever tasted in my whole life. I don't want this carrot.

Anderson and Phoenix.

I never cease to be amused by the pile of unmitigated crap that gets shoveled off onto the moviegoing public by pretentious critics. They’re at it again with The Master, a load of film-festival tripe that was booed in Venice and greeted with massive walkouts in Toronto but is now being defended in an organized rescue mission that hopes to develop a minor cult following in New York before the whole thing mercifully vanishes in a puff of twaddle. With an embarrassing, overwrought performance by the dependably creeped-out Joaquin Phoenix that has to be the most hysterically misguided overacting since Dennis Hopper played Napoleon and Harpo Marx played Sir Isaac Newton in The Story of Mankind, I’m tempted to call it the worst thing I have seen this year, but there are two more coming up—Terrence Malick’s dystopic To the Wonder and a diabolically demented time-travel farce called Cloud Atlas—that are even worse. I will also refrain from labeling The Master “the worst movie I’ve ever seen!” because like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, I’ve blurted that cry of despair so many times, who would believe me?It might not even be the worst movie ever made, depending on how you feel about such hollow, juvenile and superficial trash as I  ♥ Huckabees, Brewster McCloud, Punch-Drunk Love, Mulholland Drive, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost Highway, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and ... well, as they said in Hollywood during the McCarthy witch hunts, “the list goes on.” 

With so many amateurs who run what’s left of the once-great movie industry making bad movies that pander to an easy-to-satisfy youth market that doesn’t care what it’s watching as long as the projectors keep running, and with so many bogus producers who used to be parking lot attendants at the Brown Derby always miraculously raising the money to make more, one thing is certain: no matter how rotten the movie is that you just suffered through, there’s always another one on its way that is 10 times worse. Paul Thomas Anderson, the egomaniacal writer-director of The Master, is a member of the new group of anarchists that includes Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, freaky Todd Solondz and the dismally overrated, no-talent Charlie Kaufman, who wins critical praise for writing incoherent movies about why he can’t write coherent movies. Abominations like the neo-Kafka burlesque Synedoche, New York are algebraic extensions of all of them put together—eccentric but brainless. And now The Master, which follows in a perfect line—all style and no content—and therefore offers no fresh equation of its own.

Since it doesn’t make one bit of sense—and probably isn’t supposed to—there’s not much to say about it except ... why? It begins with Joaquin Phoenix masturbating and goes steadily downhill from there. With agonized silences interrupted by operatic rages, he plays a lost, unfocused sailor stationed in the Pacific during World War II named Freddie Quell, who creates the image of a woman out of sand on a beach and humps it unmercifully. Subject to black depressions, unprovoked violence and crying jags, he’s an obvious mental case. He’s also such a hopeless alcoholic that he even drinks airplane gasoline and cleaning fluid. After the war, Freddie somehow manages to talk his way out of a veterans hospital where he is being observed and studied by a band of bewildered Navy psychiatrists, and wafts from scene to scene—itinerant farm worker, department store photographer and drunken stowaway on a yacht from San Francisco to New York, where his gullibility lands him in the clutches of another nutcase, writer-philosopher-scientist Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who has invented a new cult religion called “The Cause.” Early hype promised an exposé of Scientology, with Hoffman as a thinly veiled L. Ron Hubbard, but as it turns out, The Master has nothing to do with either—or much of anything else.

Anyway, these two wackos hit it off on contact, mainly because Freddie is a tortured soul desperately looking for a surrogate father to lead him into the light, and Dodd is a cryptic phony and ersatz Ayn Rand clone who loves his new convert’s cocktails of peach juice mixed with paint thinner. Between nonsensical interrogations called “The Process” (“Are you one of the Hidden Rulers, or a Communist?”), they sometimes drink Lysol. What little there is of a plot: a religious manipulator who rules his flock by perfecting the art of brainwashing (they think he can trace their previous lives through hypnosis) and claims he can cure cancer finally meets up with a perfect candidate for mind control, who proves unsalvageable. The result is a love affair consummated in the pulpit of Hell. The acolytes include Amy Adams as Hoffman’s pregnant wife, Jesse Plemons as his son, Ambyr Childers and Rami Malek as his daughter and her new husband, and Laura Dern, a Philadelphia heiress who contributes to The Cause if not the film in what amounts to little more than a walk-on. It is rare to see a union of such accomplished folks so desperate to form some kind of emotional connection with material that is essentially unplayable in a film fueled by chaos. Farcical dream sequences fill in the gaps where a narrative should be, like a party where all the female converts cavort full-frontally naked while the men sip champagne and ogle them in a drooling frenzy—a scene stolen, I might add, right out of Stanley Kubrick’s dreadful 1999 Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman fiasco Eyes Wide Shut. As the movie drags on interminably, Freddie becomes his master’s henchman, defending him against all skeptics and detractors, violently attacking the police who come to arrest Dodd for extortion. Freddie is too stupid to think for himself, even after Dodd’s own son Val tells him that his father just makes up the rules of the cult as he goes along. Freddie abandons The Cause to find his own salvation, tracks down his wartime sweetheart and finds her married, then goes on a binge that makes The Lost Weekend look like a Disney cartoon. It all ends up in England, where Dodd the Zealot has relocated his operations to avoid arrest and taxes. One last stab at rehabilitating Freddie fails, and the movie just peters away to zero.

There’s a lot of excessive acting going on here, but none of it comes to anything. Since no character is ever properly developed, the cast is left to create stick figures out of some kind of neurotic haze. As much as I admire the charismatic Philip Seymour Hoffman, he’s just shadowboxing here. As a toxic messiah who charms, cheats and seduces his subjects, he huffs and puffs and tries to blow the house down, but the superficial dialogue does him in. Even accomplished actors need guidance, and director Anderson fails to display the remotest knowledge of tempo or pacing. Hoffman’s “Processing Session,” during which he forces Freddie to repeat his actions again and again, goes on for a good 20 minutes. As for Joaquin Phoenix, his idea of conveying brain damage is to walk around with a bone protruding from his shoulder blade, hunched over in a loping position, like a pretzel-shaped orangutan. Is he auditioning for The Elephant Man?Grotesquely mannered for no reason, his facial expressions range from gross distortions to blank novocained stares. They call this acting, but it’s acting from the Sacha Baron Cohen School of Dramatic Art. No director who knows anything about real acting would allow this much self-indulgence to plod on ad infinitum. I’ve got news for Mr. Phoenix, Mr. Anderson and company: on-screen schizophrenia wears out its welcome real fast.There is no dramatic arc in The Master, just 137 minutes of truncated images that provoke but do not add up to a satisfying whole. Plus, the visuals are a deadly bore. Despite the undeserved praise some critics have lavished on the director for filming the whole thing in 65-millimeter, the expensive process is wasted on an endless parade of debilitating and annoying close-ups. 137 minutes of Joaquin Phoenix’s nose hairs is not my idea of appetizing.

Call The Master whatever you want, but lobotomized catatonia from what I call the New Hacks can never take the place of well-made narrative films about real people that tell profound stories for a broader and more sophisticated audience. Fads come and go, but as Walter Kerr used to say, “I’ll yell tripe whenever tripe is served.”

rreed@observer.com

THE MASTER

Running Time 137 minutes

Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams

1/4

1. Joaquin Phoenix in the Letterdome Again

Possibly severely-disturbed actor Joaquin Phoenix's last appearance on CBS's Late Show was for the ages: Phoenix rambled and mumbled his way into infamy while the famously unflappable David Letterman actually seemed a little flapped by the experience. Now that Phoenix and brother-in-law Casey Affleck are promoting their (mock?) documentary, I'm Still Here, Phoenix is heading back to the guest's chair. Critics are still divided on the question of whether Affleck and Phoenix pulled off an elaborate hoax or not, so Phoenix's next Late Show appearance could end up being just as festive as his first. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVg-c9P2CKc

2. Matt Damon Sees Dead People, Clint Eastwood Tells Him So

Eastwood and Damon have collaborated on a movie titled Hereafter, which is about Damon seeing the dead. The plot supposedly folds in the 2004 South Asian tsunamis and various wan, sad folks who just want Matt Damon to see the dead for them even though he is grimly clear on not wanting to at all, ever. The movie might be excellent, considering Clint Eastwood's at the helm--whatever the case, the trailer is the talk of the web today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XvJwTYnKww&feature=player_embedded

3. Far Too Close To The Mouth of Hell

We don't usually end this collection of viral samples on a somber note, but sometimes a clip goes viral that's so surreal it seems willfully shortsighted to ignore it. That's the case with Walter McCaffrey's brief bit of footage from moments after a San Bruno, CA neighborhood began to burn from a massive gas pipeline explosion on Thursday, Sept. 9. McCaffrey's footage caught him in a whirlwind of panic as he looked over the side of his balcony to see the rest of the neighborhood in flames. The bleeping on the video's soundtrack only makes it clear McCaffrey reacted to the disaster in the most fundamentally human way imaginable, by swearing in fear and awe and telling other people to stay away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c41OcnacYs

As the Hollywood box office machine chugs along (in case you were wondering, Paul Blart will hit $100 million dollars this weekend; expect the rain of frogs to follow shortly thereafter), we've found ourselves concentrating on larger issues besides film revenue. Like: is anyone actually buying this Joaquin Phoenix thing? His whole "I'm-retiring-from-acting-to-become-a-rap-star-and-Casey-Affleck-is-going-to-film-it" shtick has already been pretty much debunked. And, more importantly, with the exception of his Fleet Foxes-like beard, did any of his behavior during the now infamous interview with David Letterman truly seem that out of the ordinary? This is Joaquin Phoenix we're talking about! The dude has made his career out of playing soft-spoken, mumbling drifters with issues. He gets to play another variation on one of those characters in this week's Two Lovers, but if you're all Joaquined out, don't fret! Four other movies hit theaters over this dual holiday weekend (it's President's Day, too). Here's a handy guide to the releases.

Friday the 13th

What's the story: Seriously? Another one? If you've been in a coma for the last 29 years and are just coming out of it, we'll fill you in: Jason Voorhees stomps around Camp Crystal Lake wearing a hockey mask and killing sex-crazed teenagers with a giant machete. Cue the credits. Directed by Marcus Nispel (the man who brought us the despicable Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot), Friday the 13th apparently culls plot points and killings from the first four films in the franchise. Oh what fun! Expect this to make bags of money.

Who should see it: Freddy Krueger.

The International

What's the story: If The International has one thing in its favor, it's the villain: a large international bank that deals in deception, murder, arms dealing and predatory lending. Well, maybe not that last one. Clive Owen and Naomi Watts star, and as much as we love them both, we're more interested in seeing Mr. Owen battle wits with Julia Roberts in the superior-looking Duplicity next month. Tom Tykwer directs, further moving himself into one-hit wonder territory. Do you realize Run Lola Run was released over 10 years ago?

Who should see it: James Gorman, co-president of Morgan Stanley.

Gomorrah

What's the story: Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah was supposed to be one of the sure-fire nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. Whoops! Let's add another movie to the list of snubs. Martin Scorsese helps bring this violent polemic about the modern-day Mafia in Italy to America, but don't get too upset if you miss Gomorrah in theaters. IFC Films will add it to their On Demand roster in the coming weeks.

Who should see it: Young Vito Corleone.

Confessions of a Shopaholic

What's the story: In this new documentary, a young woman runs up mountains of credit card debt and is chased down by debt collectors. Oh wait, scratch that. Confessions of a Shopaholic is actually a romantic comedy based on the best selling books by Sophie Kinsella and starring Isla Fisher and Hugh Dancy. As much as we love Ms. Fisher (hooray for Definitely, Maybe and Wedding Crashers!), she still feels like the actress you cast when Amy Adams is unavailable. Meanwhile, the timing of this movie couldn't be worse—a relic of a not-so-distant past when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was over 14,000 and people spent money like drunken sailors. Not even super producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the presence of Rihanna's "Disturbia" in the trailer can save this movie from collapsing like the economy.

Who should see it: Members of the National Foundation of Credit Counseling.

This is the third paring for Mr. Phoenix and Mr. Gray—they also did The Yards and We Own the Night (take that, Leo and Marty!)—and this is the best of the bunch. Mr. Phoenix plays Leonard, a troubled and moody sort who has moved back in with his parents. We quickly learn that nice Jewish boy Leonard has some problems (judging from his maybe suicide attempt in the opening scene), that he’s working at his father’s dry cleaning business, and—holy cow!—Isabella Rossellini plays his mom. There’s been a recent heartbreak, and while his parents hover over him, he meets two very different women. The first, shiksa goddess Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow)—a high-strung and mysterious party girl who lives in Leonard’s building thanks to her married boyfriend—and Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the sweet-faced daughter of the businessman buying out Leonard’s family’s business, and the woman his parents would like to see him with.

It’s strange to see Ms. Paltrow play a slightly dizzy and self-destructive character. There’s a certain kind of poshness and intelligence about the actress that’s natural, but her casting as the blond unattainable beauty works; her long, flaxen tresses and sad eyes reminded us of Great Expectations (in a good way!). Her married boyfriend is played by the great character actor Elias Koteas, and since we’re going down memory lane, we’ll give a shout-out to his role in Some Kind of Wonderful, but we’re not really sure if he was perfectly suited as Michelle’s lover. But aside from these minor quibbles, it was really nice to see this rather old-fashioned drama unfold. Mr. Gray, who hails from New York, manages to capture another side of Brooklyn far away from the double-wide strollers and tin ceiling fancy-pants bars most of us know. In fact, it’s so otherworldly that at a certain point we weren’t even sure what decade the movie was supposed to be set in (except for the cell phone text-messaging). But it’s Joaquin Phoenix who carries the weight of the film, and he does a beautiful job conveying the many complicated layers of Leonard. Hopefully, this film won’t be his last.

Two Lovers opens Friday at Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema.

svilkomerson@observer.com

James Gray’s Two Lovers, from a screenplay by Mr. Gray and Richard Menello, manages to immerse itself in the community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to such an extent that the 30-something male protagonist’s eventual decision to abandon it, along with all his ties to his Jewish family, seems foredoomed from the outset. From this point, I must warn the reader that I intend to give away the plot in order to explain what I find peculiar about it.

The film begins with a failed suicide attempt through drowning in Jamaica Bay in mid-winter by a young man whom we later come to know as Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix). We later learn also that Leonard was reacting self-destructively to a wrenching breakup with a longtime girlfriend. He retreats for emotional shelter to his parents’ apartment. His father, Reuben Kraditor (Moni Moshonov), operates a cleaning establishment at which Leonard works sporadically in a menial position. His watchful mother, Ruth Kraditor (Isabella Rossellini), worries about Leonard’s seeming aimlessness in life, and his frequent habit of locking himself in his room.

Shortly thereafter, Leonard is formally introduced to Sandra Cohen (Vinessa Shaw), the young and pretty daughter of Michael Cohen (Bob Ari), the wealthy cleaning magnate who is set to purchase Reuben’s business for a hefty sum. Sandra immediately comes on to Leonard, and they end up sleeping together; their parents become aware of the relationship and thoroughly approve. Sandra’s father takes Leonard aside and offers him a good future in his firm.

One day he encounters an attractive young woman his age standing out in the hall to escape her grandfather’s loud ranting on the telephone. As it turns out, her name is Michelle Rausch (Gwyneth Paltrow), and she has been having an affair with a married man for a long time. We later learn that she has been hooked on drugs for a long time also. Leonard realizes immediately that she is as mixed up in her life as he is in his, and this forms a bond between them.

While still seeing Sandra, Leonard grows closer to the frequently ailing Michelle, and decides that he wants to accompany her to San Francisco to start a new life. But on the day of departure, she tells him that she is returning to her married lover. Crestfallen, Leonard briefly considers another suicide attempt, but then decides to return to Sandra and their two families for what he considers to be a conformist future.

Mr. Gray’s narrative was inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story “White Nights,” and by Luchino Visconti’s 1957 film, adapted from the Dostoyevsky story, except that the story and the film dealt with one young girl’s quandary in choosing between two male lovers. In any event, Leonard’s initial and instinctive choice of Michelle over Sandra seems perverse in the extreme unless the point is that Leonard is entranced by the idea of sharing neuroses with Michelle. The acting is all first-rate nonetheless, and Mr. Gray and his cinematographer, Joaquín Baca-Asay, have captured their locale in its most somber stages, as if to emphasize the essential sadness of the two love stories, and the chill they induce in the viewer.

Mr. Gray made his directorial debut at the age of 25 with Little Odessa (1994), a critically acclaimed crime drama about a hit man confronted by his younger brother upon returning to his hometown of Brighton Beach. That film starred Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Maximilian Schell and Vanessa Redgrave.

In 2000, Mr. Gray wrote and directed his second film for Miramax, The Yards, starring Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, James Caan and Joaquin Phoenix. We Own the Night (2007) paired writer Gray with Mr. Wahlberg and Mr. Phoenix for the second time. The film is an emotional crime drama about a man who has chosen to hide his past only to discover that he has to confront an inevitable future. Eva Mendes and Robert Duvall also star.

Mr. Gray was born in New York City, grew up in Queens and attended the University of Southern California School of Cinema—Television. So who says you can’t go home again?

asarris@observer.com