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

Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes (Getty Images)

Welcome to New York Observer's Golden Globe coverage of the 2012, where you'll be able to read (and participate!) in real time as Drew Grant and Dan D'Addario take bets on which acclaimed actor will be the first to slap that lopsided grin right off Ricky Gervais' face. Let the fun begin!

Metsgrrl blogger and author Caryn Rose spotted this ad (below) on Facebook for Moneyball.

Rose notes:

moneyball movie promo sexist stereotyping MAJOR FAIL. This ad showed up on Facebook this morning, and just made me want to spit.

Seriously, FUCK YOU, Hollywood. Some people with ovaries HAVE ACTUALLY READ MONEYBALL, and some people without ovaries have actually NOT read it.

She has a point, and to further it: some of the best movies about baseball are based around women who know more about baseball than the men they're surrounded by. Who among us have seen Bull Durham or A League of Their Own, and can actually change the channel whenever they come on television thereafter?

[The misguided and Tim Robbins, that's who.]

The based-on-a-Michael-Lewis-book, Aaron-Sorkin-scripted, Brad Pitt-starring Moneyball shows up in theaters on Friday to over 2,900 theaters. Maybe some women will con their boyfriends into seeing it!

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

With Pitt and Jonah Hill already on board -- Hill would play Beane's assistant GM, Paul DePodesta -- two more actors signed on yesterday: Kathryn Morris as Beane's wife and Chris Pratt as player Scott Hatteberg. And no disrespect to Morris, but it's the Pratt casting that has us giddy with anticipation. Not only is it out of the box -- the Parks and Recreation star has mostly kept to television over his career -- but it's also kinda inspired since Pratt and Hatteberg look very much alike.

The Oakland designated hitter was one of the poster boy's for Beane's moneyball aesthetic in that he was a scrap heap player picked up for minimal salary and went on to produce some fine and cost-effective results. If reading that sentence made your eyes glaze over, you've found the issue with Moneyball as a film. But if anyone could make this interesting it's Pitt, Hill and Pratt. Now if Sony can only find room for Pratt's Parks and Recreation co-star Nick Offerman....Didn't the A's have a bullpen catcher or something?

It's 2 a.m. and you awake with a jerk, alone in your fully lit apartment and still on the couch. On TV, the credits of some movie you've already seen a billion times are scrolling by. It feels like rock bottom. And we know, because we're just like you: single.

Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to Death Proof [starting @ 11 p.m. on Starz Edge]

Why we’ll try to stay up and watch it: In a Hollywood economic climate where Steven Soderbergh couldn’t get Moneyball made with Brad Pitt and a reasonable budget, you might wonder how Quentin Tarantino still gets funding. Yet here we are just a little over three weeks away from the release of Mr. Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and the man-child director is still making ambitious art-house parlor tricks wrapped in studio budgets and ad campaigns. And maybe that’s the key to his success: If he can create a movie with enough punchy scenes to allow the marketing department to piece together a kickass trailer, people will show up on opening weekend regardless of what the actual movie plays like. (Beware of those action-packed Inglourious Basterds trailers, which leave out the two and a half talky hours that the script promises.) Which makes us wonder: How much more successful financially would Death Proof have been as a stand-alone “Quentin Tarantino movie” and not as part of the unruly mess that was Grindhouse?

We’ll never know the answer to that, of course, but what we do know is that Death Proof is an outstanding film; a dialogue-heavy throwback filled with virtuoso camera work, sparkling dialogue and a pacing that allows the tension to simmer for quite sometime before the boil over. As is usually the case when dealing with a Quentin Tarantino movie, though, the performances manage to surprise the most. While we love Death Proof for the thrills, the scares and that unbelievable car chase that takes up most of the final act—seriously, awesome—the real treat for us is trying to understand how Mr. Tarantino is able to cull all this tremendous work from such a dissimilar group of thespians, ranging from Kurt Russell to Tracie Thoms to New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell. If the enfant terrible is ostensibly wasting his talent as nothing more than a genre-for-hire filmmaker, then as long as he keeps making things like Death Proof work, we’ll be O.K. with all that waste.

When we’ll probably fall asleep: Of all the Tarantino-ian hallmarks, our favorite might be when he replays the same scene over and over again, each time from a different vantage point. It’s a great way to provide loads of information to the audience, while at the same time taking advantage of the very nature of cinema. So we’ll make it until 11:45 p.m., 45 minutes into the film, when Mr. Tarantino stages a horrific car crash and shows how each passenger met their untimely demise. We don’t know how people keep letting Mr. Tarantino make movies, but we’re sure happy they do.

You may have heard that Sony Pictures “dropped the ball” or “struck out” (depending on which baseball cliché jumped into a writer’s head) on a film version of Michael Lewis’ best-seller, Moneyball. The film was set to star Brad Pitt with Steven Soderbergh directing. 

The reasons behind Sony’s decision appear to be sound. According to Michael Cieply in The New York Times, Sony has already paid $10 million in script developments and costs like scouting locations. With an estimated $57 million budget, Moneyball, reports Cieply, “was not hugely expensive but not a small indie project, either.  The film was of a sophisticated type that needed the cachet of a Soderbergh, the star power of a Pitt, and perhaps Academy Award potential to overcome its somewhat cerebral quality and the difficult of attracting foreign viewers for a movie about America’s pastime.”

Nonetheless, I’m left with several unanswered questions about this debacle. First, what do they mean “costs like scouting locations”?  The book is the story of how Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane managed to compete in the American League on a small budget through adroit use of baseball statistics when recruiting players rather than just relying on scouting reports. Nothing particularly complex, just more attention to on-base percentage and slugging percentage, indicators like that, which baseball analysts have been emphasizing for about a quarter of a century. The story takes place in Oakland. Why does the location have to be scouted and why would it cost millions?  Can’t they give someone gas money to drive up the Pacific Coast Highway to Oakland to look around? (It isn’t like they’d have to build a new ballpark for the movie.)

And did it cost millions for someone to figure out that there are absolutely no dramatic (or even comedic) events in the book to build a story around? 

Second, what exactly is Steven Soderbergh’s “cachet”?  The man has made three profitable movies this decade—all of them “Ocean’s” flicks with a combined star power of Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon. The rest of his films since 2001 have sunk so deep and so fast that most filmgoers never knew they were in the theaters.  Let’s review:  the twin bombs of Che Parts One and Two last year, The Good German in 2006 (which vanished quickly despite a cast that included George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire), Bubble (2005), Solaris (2002, also with Clooney), and Full Frontal (2002).  If that list confers cachet, Nia Vardalos is the queen of Greece.

Point three:  As regards the overseas potential for Moneyball, did they really need to spend $10 million and budget another $57 million before a light went on in someone’s head that said, “No one in Belgium or Kenya knows who Eric Chavez is”?  (But people in Japan, Taiwan, the Caribbean and even Australia do—isn’t there a potential box office in those countries if the movie is good?)

Fourth, forget about foreign rights—who in this country is going to shell out 10 bucks to see a movie based on a guy’s study of baseball stats? If that’s what the public wanted, Pitt would have already starred in the life story of Bill James.

According to Cieply, the swift mothballing of Moneyball “may also increase doubts that Hollywood can still deliver tricky but appealing pictures like Michael Clayton, Good Night, and Good Luck and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

This is nutty.

Benjamin Button wasn’t a small, tight production like Clayton or Good Night. It was a big-star vehicle of the kind Hollywood specializes in. In any case, what do these three films have to do with the cancellation of Moneyball, since all three were successful? Moneyball wasn’t dumped because it was like those three pictures, but very much unlike them. Everyone in Hollywood knows that producers love to green-light projects that look like previous successes.

Am I the only one who thinks there is something ironic in the flame-out of a film whose budget, including preproduction, could have cost $20-$25 million more than the payroll for the entire Oakland A’s team this year?  Moneyball might not have been regarded as “hugely expensive,” but it’s hard to understand how Pitt and Soderbergh, who are presumably fans of the book, could have missed its central message: Money doesn’t buy quality. 

Let’s give the punch line, though, to script doctor Christopher Wilkinson, who seems to know less about movies than he does about baseball.  “There’s a movie in there,” he said. “But it’s a very unusual movie.” Translated from Hollywoodese to English, this means, “I may get stuck working with some of these people somewhere along the road and I don’t want to offend anyone by saying this was a dumb idea.”

My own guess is that when and if Moneyball makes it to the screen it will be a small one, a cable TV project starring someone like Jeremy Piven in the Billy Beane role. And maybe Robert Wuhl as a colorful and eccentric old-style baseball manager.

For an adaptation of a book on how a successful baseball team can run on the cheap, cable TV is where everyone should have been looking in the first place. A feature film is the kind of idea the Steinbrenner boys might have gone for.

UPDATE: Cieply reports that Sony "has quietly moved to salvage its troubled movie project 'Moneyball' by hiring the high-profile screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for a quick rewrite, while looking to add Scott Rudin, known for his turns on the Oscar circuit, to the film’s roster of producers."

Sometimes watching how Hollywood studios operate is more entertaining than the movies they produce. Case in point: Moneyball. For those of you haven’t been following the chaos surrounding the now-dead adaptation of Michael Lewis’s nonfiction baseball best seller: Steven Soderbergh and Brad Pitt were all set to make this film for Sony Pictures—with a budget of around $57 million—when, just days before shooting started, company co-chair Amy Pascal pulled the plug because of issues with Mr. Soderbegh’s revised script. Ms. Pascal says that the revisions made the film too much like a “dramatic reenactment” and not like the baseball comedy with Brad Pitt that they agreed to, a statement we’re pretty sure is code for, “We wanted to make something more crappy!” We’re tempted to get out the pitchforks and torches for Ms. Pascal, but, considering Warner Brothers, Paramount and Fox all passed on Moneyball as well—Sony was kind enough to let Messrs. Pitt and Soderbergh shop the script around to see if another studio wanted in—it appears that she is far from alone in her poor decision making. If Hollywood doesn’t think it can make money on a moderately budgeted film with international superstar Brad Pitt and directed by an Oscar winner, what can they make money on? Take a look at some of the ridiculous projects being tossed around this week!

Mother’s Curse: Because you didn’t ask for it, here comes Seth Rogen and Barbara Streisand playing a son and mother on a road trip. True story! While, admittedly, this proposed film isn’t actually that close to happening—to quote Mr. Rogen, it’s “one of the many projects I may or may not do in the next fifteen years”—just the simple idea that it could happen strikes us as both hilarious and scary.

Asteroids: We were about to sit here and scoff at the idea of Universal going forward with a big-screen adaptation of the ’80s arcade game that is sure to be light on story and heavy on special effects. Then we remembered that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen not only exists, but it has already grossed a katrillion billion dollars.

Cloudburst: What is it with Hollywood and road trip comedies? In Cloudburst (terrible title, p.s.), Oscar winners Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker star as a couple who break out of their nursing home and travel to Canada to get married. Think Thelma and Louise but with old ladies making out. This gets past “Go,” but Moneyball doesn’t? Nice industry.

Here are some things I’ve learned since becoming a father:

—The Queens Zoo is a wholesome and inexpensive place to take two boys, ages 1 and 3, on weekends. Also: It is fine for boys that age to ride the merry-go-round outside the zoo even if the operators run it overly fast and even if their horses are the up-and-down kind, as long as their father stands between the horses and holds the backs of their shirts.

—They can sleep through all kinds of ambient noise at night—clatterings from the adjacent area behind the bakery and laundry and Chinese restaurant; overenthusiastic conversations between in-their-cups parent-friends in the “living room” outside their door—if there’s also a fan running.

—They will try to run into the water again and again at Rockaway Beach, as if they know how to swim, even if the waves are rough and the water is zero degrees.

—They will eat grilled octopus and taramasalata and fried smelt, crunchy heads and all, if said foods are handed to them without ceremony.

—They will eat the gravel at the Beer Garden unless someone intervenes.

—If at least one uncle lives less than a block away, everyone wins.

—The Q66 is fun.

This information is useful to me. It is not much work to keep track of. And it will never seem burdensome to me to review it, even after the information has stopped being useful, because it will evoke specific thoughts about my specific boys, whom I find to be endlessly amusing and fantastic.

But I would tend to hesitate before inflicting this information on other people in anything other than small doses. It just stands to reason: For people I know in circumstances different than mine—they don’t have young children, say, or they have children but don’t happen to live in a part of Northwest Queens in which carp roe dip is widely available—my hard-won knowledge is useless. (Vaguely interesting, maybe, insofar as it tells them something about what my family and I are up to, but useless all the same.)

And for people in circumstances similar to mine—people familiar with the ways of small, horse-and-cow-obsessed omnivores who really, really like pulling the stop cord when it’s time to get off the bus to play soccer in Jackson Heights—it’s all old news anyway.

That’s the weird thing about the subject of parenting. The non-parents shouldn’t really be expected to care what some parent has to say about it, and the parents, who’ve already done it all, should care even less.

And yet. The fathering memoir, as demonstrated by the regularity with which they’ve been pumped out recently by publishers, is a highly gainful commercial genre. The authors don’t have to know anything about anything—that’s kind of the gag—and,  as with reality TV, the source material is cheap and plentiful. Also, there’s always an audience.

Apparently, the market for these books—parents who will pay their own money to read about a stranger’s journey of self-discovery through parenting—is more than robust enough to make up for the rest of us.

THIS, SURELY, was the calculation of the publisher of Home Game, a series of Slate articles by Vanity Fair contributing editor and Bloomberg columnist Michael Lewis that have been bundled into book form as an “Accidental Guide to Fatherhood.” (Just in time, naturally, for Father’s Day.)

Given the limitations of the form, Lewis—an effortlessly prolific writer and storyteller—does well.

In part, he succeeds by cheating: The first part of the book is less about child-rearing than it is about Paris, where Mr. Lewis and his wife, the former MTV News reporter Tabitha Soren, and their infant daughter set up shop in an effort to fulfill a wish to live abroad before multiple childbirths permanently foreclose the opportunity for them to do so. So, see, it’s about their experiences with their baby daughter, Quinn, but really, the joke is on the French.

Like, for example, when they sign Quinn up for a mysterious water-acclimatization program called Bébé L’Eau, only to find that the “class” consists of a dozen unhygienic Frenchmen, with their unhygienic kids, in an oversize Jacuzzi, led by a buffoonish instructor “in a snorkel and a mask and not much else.”

(“It is no accident that Jacques Cousteau was French. The French know how to find categories ignored by the rest of the world and colonize them. Here at Bébé L’Eau was another example: baby dunking.” Etc.)

Mr. Lewis does the standard parent-book set pieces competently, too. Back in America, after the birth of his second daughter, Dixie, he describes his attempt—at first disingenuous, then less so—to “validate” his first daughter’s feelings of sibling jealousy:

“I was stumped. I couldn’t think of what to say next. All I could think of was: Of course you hate Dixie. She has taken Mama away. I’d hate her, too, if I were you. Truth is, a tiny part of me was proud that she saw the situation for what it was, a violation of her property rights. It boded well for her future in the free market.”

There is also drama.

Mr. Lewis presents a harrowing description of his wife in the throes of postpartum panic disorder after the birth of their third, final child, and only boy, Walker.

Later, he bonds with the 11-week-old Walker, who comes down with a serious virus, by barricading both of them in a hospital room to guard against the predations of bill collectors and curious interns and bored nurses.

It’s a nice book, full of nicely told stories, the least interesting of which deal with the actual moments of birth. (What else can anyone say about this? Mom in more pain than expected, Dad charmingly useless, push, push, baby.)

But that’s kind of the thing: It’s just the subject matter. You can really like Mr. Lewis—I do—and still get the impression that he really labored to make this book into something that’s worth the effort for people not named Michael Lewis to purchase and read.

FROM THE consumer point of view, Home Game is a considerably cheaper commodity than his other books, like Liar’s Poker and Moneyball and The Blind Side, and even his forgettable-but-important-seeming-at-the-time book about the guy who founded Netscape. They were all reported documents that were great first and foremost because of his extraordinary access to something that his readers wouldn’t otherwise have had a clue about.

Home Game, by definition, is not that sort of undertaking. It is merely something that Michael Lewis was able to put together as he was going about his business at home.

Near the end of the book, after Mr. Lewis sees to it that he and Tabitha will never have any more children, he writes about trying to decide whether the time had come to stop writing about Quinn, Dixie and Walker.

“Like dreams, these fatherhood moments are easily forgotten and no doubt also a lot more interesting to the teller than to anyone else. But when they’re forgotten, their lessons, such as they are, are lost. The vacuum winds up being filled by experts on child rearing, and books on fatherhood, and social counselors and psychiatrists—the outside world has a lot to tell you about how to be a father and how to raise your children, and its advice no doubt serves some purpose.”

No doubt.

Josh Benson is political editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jbenson@observer.com