“It’s always been my local,” said Mr. Kroft.

On Sept. 10, owner Lynn Wagenknecht’s longtime celebrity haunt celebrated its 25^th anniversary with a bubbly, sliders-and-fries-stuffed party attended by such notable guests as screenwriter Nora Ephron and actresses Kathleen Turner and Aida Turturro.

Mr. Kroft was among the first to arrive—and last to leave.

“It’s halfway between work and home…I know that I can walk home, stop here, have a drink and meet interesting people,” said Mr. Kroft, citing director Robert Altman and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as being among the more interesting individuals he’s bumped into at the Café Lux bar over the years.

“I’ve learned a lot about how New York works, talking to people in the fashion industry, people on Wall Street….”

One group of people that he doesn’t often encounter at Café Lux: his colleagues at CBS.

“If other CBS people came here,” said Mr. Kroft, laughing, “I wouldn’t come here.”

Altman, a tall, burly figure wearing a headset, a white goatee and rumpled khakis, was in his element, instructing a prop man to make the red-white-and-blue bunting a little more disheveled and issuing orders for the actors to take their places in front of Nashville’s famous plaster replica of the Parthenon, wonderfully Altmanesque in its faux-grandeur.

I was standing at his right elbow, reporter’s notebook at the ready for a Newsweek cover story I was writing about the arch-maverick among American filmmakers. Suddenly, I noticed that my fiancée Diana, a photographer who had never been on a movie set, was in the shot, roaming among the players with her Nikon.

“Sorry, Bob,” I said. “She doesn’t know she’s not supposed to be there.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “I put her there. Do you want to be in the shot, too?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Go stand next to Ned Beatty [who was playing the candidate’s advance man]. And pretend you’re a reporter.”

The death of my old friend Robert Altman, at 81, marked the passing of the most inclusive American artist that any medium—film, theater, music, literature, art—has known.

He was 45, a battle-scarred veteran of industrial films, TV episodes and low-budget features, when he captured the lunacy of Americans in foreign combat with his first hit movie, M*A*S*H, in 1970. From then on, in the 42 feature films that followed, he upended every genre—the western, the private-eye flick, the romantic comedy, the musical, the English drawing-room murder mystery, the documentary—for his own comic (and resolutely idiosyncratic) purposes. In the process, he overlooked nobody who hankered for a slice of the American Pie. Working at the margins of a system whose reliance on formula he loathed, he was Hollywood’s Whitman—hearing America not only singing, but loving, screwing, celebrating, cheating, praying, hustling and, above all, dreaming. In this world, he was the biggest dreamer of all.

Like all big dreamers, he was a great seducer—perhaps unrivaled in the history of the movies for his ability to attract the services of stars who would drop everything to work with him for next to nothing, unconcerned about the film’s chances of box-office success. What made Altman players of everyone from Bacall to Tomlin, Beatty to Newman was, first of all, a sense of comfort, as I discovered the first time I met him.

Entranced by his 1974 film Thieves Like Us, I’d arranged to interview him at his suite in the Pierre. His imposing size was belied by a light, musical speaking voice and a delicate, easygoing manner that put me so immediately at ease that I unthinkingly took my shoes off the moment I sat down. Altman looked at my empty loafers.

“Is that an interviewing technique?” he said. I struggled to get my feet back into the loafers.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “I’ll take off mine.”

Interviewing Altman had nothing to do with asking conventional questions and getting conventional answers. It was, in the true sense, a conversation—one that, like a meandering stream, somehow found its own course and yielded revelations about the man and his working tics that I hadn’t remotely suspected.

“I really prefer Hollywood actors to New York actors,” he once told me. “Those over-trained East Coast types always want to know why they should do something, instead of just doing it without having the foggiest notion of what they’re up to. You have to be a little dumb to show who you really are.”

I always came away from him feeling intellectually refreshed. After I compared his freewheeling, open-ended approach to moviemaking to that of an “action painter,” he called me up.

“That was the best thing I’ve ever been called—thank you,” he said. “But I don’t want you to write about me any more. I’d rather have you as a friend.”

And so I became part of what everyone who worked with Altman became part of—a great extended family. Altman had an uncanny ability to make the often-tedious process of shooting a film at once fun and serious. He was the first one on the set in the morning and the last one to go home. I never heard him say more than a few mildly suggestive words to an actor before a scene, but somehow he said just enough for the actor to understand the particular character nuance that Altman wanted. Conviviality prevailed from top to bottom; “star behavior” was unthinkable on an Altman set. Yet, when we all got together to watch the day’s rushes, it was clear that a whole, deeply grounded world was in the making; the telling details were adding up; another “Altman film” was being born.

Afterward, the extended family, beckoned by Altman’s second wife Kathryn, a dazzling, irreverent Irish beauty (Altman called her “Red”), gathered in the best local restaurant. There, the increasingly bemused paterfamilias, fueled by Cutty Sark, gradually shut himself down to prepare for the next day’s shoot.

Perhaps the secret of Altman’s magnetism was his sheer love of filmmaking. Although he was a lightning rod for both critical praise and critical assault, he never, within my earshot, basked in the adulation or expressed anger over a negative review. He simply shrugged, raised both eyebrows and plunged into the next film. Nor did he seem to care about oeuvre-building: He took on whatever happened to catch his fancy or, as in the case of 3 Women, filmed a screenplay that he had transcribed one morning from a dream he’d had the night before. Even when the whole of an Altman film seemed considerably less than its parts, there was a buoyancy at the heart of the matter.

Every artist of Altman’s extraordinary range and stamina carries a healthy quotient of rage. He could erupt explosively out of a sense of loyalty let down (as he once did to me when I arrived late for a screening). Having grown up in Kansas City, he had what I think of as a Midwestern sense of what is good and proper. He despised the M*A*S*H series on television, whose long-running success he had inadvertently launched and in which he shared not a dime. To him, the show was an immoral promotion of war for the sake of corporate profit.

But underlying that rage was a certain innocence—an almost childlike wonderment, bordering on helplessness, at the world’s (and particularly America’s) follies. One of my truest moments with this complicated, charismatic man occurred during a game of family charades in the early 1980’s. I don’t remember the title that Altman had drawn to act out, but the word “chicken” was part of it.

What I do remember is the children screaming at him to do something as the seconds ticked by and he just stood there, unable to come up with an impersonation of the damnable fowl. When the three-minute time limit had passed, someone jumped up and demonstrated the art of acting by squatting and flapping his elbows. The great director grinned sheepishly and said, “So that’s how you do a chicken. I never thought of it.”

He had a wry smile and I got to teasing him. "How often have you gone to a party and met someone and said, 'I really like that guy's energy, I got to have him in my next film?'"

"Never."

"Come on Bob, work with me. Where do you want the sideburns? Here or here?"

He laughed. "I got something for you—you can be a driver."

Now when I read the obits I see the guy I met that night, someone natural and warm and sly, who didn't take himself too seriously.

Since I have never been a listener of Mr. Keillor’s dopey, long-running program, I am probably not his perfect test-market watcher. But the show’s longevity indicates that it must have its fans. It first aired in 1974 and became a popular cornerstone of National Public Radio for reasons none of its devoted followers have ever been able to explain convincingly. On the rare occasions when I have forced myself to tune in and find out what the fuss is about, I have always ended up dial-doodling in search of weather reports or Tommy Dorsey records. As radio goes, I prefer reruns of Baby Snooks. But the chronicles of a fictional Minnesota hamlet called Lake Wobegon have now been cloned into a rambling screen fable that is not only corny, lumbering and dull, but also pretentious, because it pretends that a lug-load of tasteless cracker-barrel baloney can pass for 105 minutes of heirloom charm. A Prairie Home Companion is about as charming as waking up with a dead animal in your bed.

Mr. Keillor, a myopic doughboy who wrote the script and stars in the film as the radio host, wears red socks—an affectation that was more becoming on Van Johnson. Instead of a local Minnesota version of Jean Shepherd or Herb Shriner, he’s a multimillionaire wheeler-dealer in Manhattan real estate with as much folksy down-home charm as Donald Trump. Instead of interesting Dogpatch characters, he pieces together gingham Lum and Abners in doll costumes. Instead of a plot, A Prairie Home Companion features the kind of all-star cast only Robert Altman could recruit in these budget-conscious days of independent production and deferred profit-sharing.

Instead of narrative exposition, there is merely a patchwork-quilt premise: On a rainy Saturday night in town, across the street from Mickey’s Diner, the crowd gathers for the weekly country-variety radio show that’s “been on the air since Jesus was in the third grade,” according to the narrator, Keillor “regular” Guy Noir (Kevin Kline), a washed-up detective who works as a clumsy backstage doorman and appears to be raving mad. This is a night like no other, because a greedy Texas corporation (represented by Tommy Lee Jones) has bought the theater and plans to turn it into a parking lot. But the show must go on, and in typical Altman style, everybody sings, mumbles, and babbles on and on at the same time in overlapping jabberwocky about absolutely nothing at all.

Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep provide the film’s most humorous moments as Rhonda and Yolanda, a singing-sister act from the county-fair circuit who screech out hillbilly lyrics like “We’ll eat pot luck and pluck guitars down on old Plank Road.” Lindsay Lohan makes a respectable career move as Ms. Streep’s depressed teenage daughter Lola, who writes morose poems about suicide. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly are Dusty and Lefty, a pair of raunchy guitar pickers who pass gas and caterwaul a filthy duet called “Bad Jokes.” (Many of the worst musical numbers, apparently a staple of the show, were written by Mr. Keillor, who is no Stephen Sondheim.)

The funniest person in the movie is Tom Keith, the show’s real sound-effects man, who plays himself and keeps the action moving with the sounds of shotguns, chain saws and barking Rottweilers. Throughout the tedium, Garrison Keillor plays an M.C. named G.K., sings commercial jingles about pizzas and powder-milk biscuits, and tells a penguin joke nobody understands. None of it is particularly amusing, and all of it shows a disappointing lack of originality. Like Altman’s Nashville, the film relies heavily on a nonstop menu of musical numbers. Unlike most Altman films, it seems to have been edited with a hedge pruner.

I guess A Prairie Home Companion is strictly for fans—the regular listeners who have a passion for nonsense songs like “Beboparebop Rhubarb Pie” and “Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin” and thrill to soliloquies about duct tape. But that still doesn’t explain Virginia Madsen, wafting through the noise and backstage confusion as an Angel of Death in a white trench coat who may—or may not—be in town to select customers for the local undertaker. This is never clear. One of the cast members drops dead during the broadcast, but it’s probably from boredom.

Damien’s Back!

“Unnecessary” is the word for the remake of The Omen. After the original 1976 horror classic and all of the cheesy rip-offs and sequels that followed, nothing new is revealed here, but the old formula still works. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Fright flicks with style, sophistication and doses of good old spleen-churning terror are rare. The Omen, a yarn about the arrival of the Antichrist in the form of a deceptively cherubic little boy who brings Armageddon to the home of a powerful and respected U.S. ambassador, scared the sap out of everybody 30 years ago, and it still packs a wallop. Branded with the numbers “666” (“the Mark of the Beast”), the Devil’s spawn has been giving people the heebie-jeebies for years. (Nancy and Ronald Reagan even had their West Coast address, a house numbered 666, changed by the city of Los Angeles, to the understandable annoyance of their neighbors.) No wonder the Beelzebubs toiling away in Hollywood P.R. opened the new version of The Omen on 6/6/06.

Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles are no Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, but as diplomat Robert Thorn and his wife Katherine, they face the same dilemma. When their child is born dead in Rome, a Vatican priest mutters, “The darkest evil this way comes” and offers an orphaned substitute to the husband, clutching his crucifix and adding, “God will forgive this deception.” But as we all know, the infant Thorn (Mr. Schreiber) brings to his wife’s hospital bed is the son of Satan, not God, and there’ll be Hell to pay. Knowing nothing of this, Katherine (Ms. Stiles) names the child Damien and showers him with love. Thorn is appointed American ambassador to Great Britain, and everything looks rosy. The Thorns have a beautiful estate near London, a healthy, curly-haired son, and a golden political future.

Suddenly, like a bolt of evil lightning, things turn ugly. At a pastoral birthday party, the boy’s nanny commits suicide by leaping from the roof with a noose around her neck. A sinister, snarling mastiff appears from the woods to act as an unwanted watchdog over the child. Gorillas in the zoo shriek and run from Damien in terror. Suddenly, a sweet, prim, soft-spoken but mysterious Mary Poppins replacement arrives in the form of Mia Farrow. “I’m the family nanny,” smiles Mia, “here to spread a bit of cheer.” The crowd roars. We’ve all seen Rosemary’s Baby. Let the fun begin.

It’s not just another movie about demonic possession, like The Exorcist, although that same theological mixture of man vs. devil forms its core. It expands and elaborates the genre in effectively hair-raising ways. A grotesque priest (Pete Postlethwaite) who lives in a room filled with religious symbols and walls papered in pages from the Bible delivers demented warnings before a stake is driven through his heart. A photographer (David Thewlis) discovers bizarre markings in his photos that threaten death for the Thorns unless Damien is destroyed. These events are effective enough to leave you checking your pulse, but you haven’t seen anything yet. It gets scarier. The journey to find weapons of destruction for Damien before he destroys the world leads to a cave near Jerusalem, a graveyard dig and endless tragedies. The finale gives goose bumps a new definition.

At the root of the dark prophecies is a passage from Revelation, freely translated by screenwriter David Seltzer to include references to the common market, politics, terrorists, tsunamis, hurricanes and Zionism. He also wrote the 1976 film and retains every element of his original script, while director John Moore adds tricks that jump out at you to make you scream. (The whole movie looks like it was intended for 3-D.) Famous scenes such as the colliding tricycle at the top of the staircase and the cemetery at midnight where Thorn is attacked by flesh-eating black ghost dogs still put ice on my spine. Filmed in Prague, the film now has the creepier look and feel of a world beyond the living. The cinematography better juxtaposes the cold daylight of reality with the hidden dangers in seemingly ordinary people and things (never has so much menace been extracted from dogs and toys). In the early version, Billie Whitelaw as the devil’s apostle who guards Damien from harm was so menacing she offered no surprise when she turned violent. Delicate but deceiving, Mia Farrow provides an element of surprise, like a cross between Lilith and Elsie Dinsmore. I don’t approve of remakes, but The Omen redux is riveting, imaginative and ultimately bone-chillingly satisfying.

A Real Looker!

The testosterone level at Feinstein’s at the Regency is running amok. Suave and rugged—a winning combination—suits James Naughton whether he’s playing a guitar in jeans or crooning show tunes in impeccable Armani. Mesmerizing the ringsiders in this new show through June 10, the two sides of Mr. Naughton’s finely toned personality are given equal time. Dashing and movie-star handsome, he’s got Cary Grant hair, Gary Cooper nonchalance and pipes that can tear up the joint on lease-breakers by Tom Waits and Randy Newman, or wrap a burnished ballad baritone around standards like “My Foolish Heart” and “I’m Glad There Is You” with romantic yearning. His patter is easy and cool, notes from his personal show-business diary full of love and lore about idols and influences like Tony Bennett, Joe Williams and Billy Eckstine. Because cabaret audiences are sparse on weeknights, he used the room on the Thursday I caught the show like the den in his Connecticut home—trading quips, talking music and sharing rare gems like the great, overlooked Jimmy Van Heusen song “Where Did Everyone Go?”, recorded years ago by Nat King Cole.

Backed by a thumbs-up quartet headed by ace pianist John Oddo, he leaves no tempo unexplored. A welcome tribute to the late, great Cy Coleman, who started Jim’s Broadway musical career with I Love My Wife and City of Angels, includes both a fast, funny comment on contemporary stoned society called “Everybody Today Is Turnin’ On” and a Sinatra evergreen, “Why Try to Change Me Now?” For laughs, I could do without Randy Newman’s “Shame” or any other song that rudely rhymes “Miss” with “piss.” But levity is broadening, and a 50’;s encore of sha-na-na, sh-boom and doo-wop doo-doo is undeniably hilarious. Whatever he tackles, James Naughton is polished and perfect. This is a show that adds spruce to the close of the supper-club season.

Since I have never been a listener of Mr. Keillor’s dopey, long-running program, I am probably not his perfect test-market watcher. But the show’s longevity indicates that it must have its fans. It first aired in 1974 and became a popular cornerstone of National Public Radio for reasons none of its devoted followers have ever been able to explain convincingly. On the rare occasions when I have forced myself to tune in and find out what the fuss is about, I have always ended up dial-doodling in search of weather reports or Tommy Dorsey records. As radio goes, I prefer reruns of Baby Snooks. But the chronicles of a fictional Minnesota hamlet called Lake Wobegon have now been cloned into a rambling screen fable that is not only corny, lumbering and dull, but also pretentious, because it pretends that a lug-load of tasteless cracker-barrel baloney can pass for 105 minutes of heirloom charm. A Prairie Home Companion is about as charming as waking up with a dead animal in your bed.

Mr. Keillor, a myopic doughboy who wrote the script and stars in the film as the radio host, wears red socks—an affectation that was more becoming on Van Johnson. Instead of a local Minnesota version of Jean Shepherd or Herb Shriner, he’s a multimillionaire wheeler-dealer in Manhattan real estate with as much folksy down-home charm as Donald Trump. Instead of interesting Dogpatch characters, he pieces together gingham Lum and Abners in doll costumes. Instead of a plot, A Prairie Home Companion features the kind of all-star cast only Robert Altman could recruit in these budget-conscious days of independent production and deferred profit-sharing.

Instead of narrative exposition, there is merely a patchwork-quilt premise: On a rainy Saturday night in town, across the street from Mickey’s Diner, the crowd gathers for the weekly country-variety radio show that’s “been on the air since Jesus was in the third grade,” according to the narrator, Keillor “regular” Guy Noir (Kevin Kline), a washed-up detective who works as a clumsy backstage doorman and appears to be raving mad. This is a night like no other, because a greedy Texas corporation (represented by Tommy Lee Jones) has bought the theater and plans to turn it into a parking lot. But the show must go on, and in typical Altman style, everybody sings, mumbles, and babbles on and on at the same time in overlapping jabberwocky about absolutely nothing at all.

Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep provide the film’s most humorous moments as Rhonda and Yolanda, a singing-sister act from the county-fair circuit who screech out hillbilly lyrics like “We’ll eat pot luck and pluck guitars down on old Plank Road.” Lindsay Lohan makes a respectable career move as Ms. Streep’s depressed teenage daughter Lola, who writes morose poems about suicide. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly are Dusty and Lefty, a pair of raunchy guitar pickers who pass gas and caterwaul a filthy duet called “Bad Jokes.” (Many of the worst musical numbers, apparently a staple of the show, were written by Mr. Keillor, who is no Stephen Sondheim.)

The funniest person in the movie is Tom Keith, the show’s real sound-effects man, who plays himself and keeps the action moving with the sounds of shotguns, chain saws and barking Rottweilers. Throughout the tedium, Garrison Keillor plays an M.C. named G.K., sings commercial jingles about pizzas and powder-milk biscuits, and tells a penguin joke nobody understands. None of it is particularly amusing, and all of it shows a disappointing lack of originality. Like Altman’s Nashville, the film relies heavily on a nonstop menu of musical numbers. Unlike most Altman films, it seems to have been edited with a hedge pruner.

I guess A Prairie Home Companion is strictly for fans—the regular listeners who have a passion for nonsense songs like “Beboparebop Rhubarb Pie” and “Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin” and thrill to soliloquies about duct tape. But that still doesn’t explain Virginia Madsen, wafting through the noise and backstage confusion as an Angel of Death in a white trench coat who may—or may not—be in town to select customers for the local undertaker. This is never clear. One of the cast members drops dead during the broadcast, but it’s probably from boredom.

Damien’s Back!

“Unnecessary” is the word for the remake of The Omen. After the original 1976 horror classic and all of the cheesy rip-offs and sequels that followed, nothing new is revealed here, but the old formula still works. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Fright flicks with style, sophistication and doses of good old spleen-churning terror are rare. The Omen, a yarn about the arrival of the Antichrist in the form of a deceptively cherubic little boy who brings Armageddon to the home of a powerful and respected U.S. ambassador, scared the sap out of everybody 30 years ago, and it still packs a wallop. Branded with the numbers “666” (“the Mark of the Beast”), the Devil’s spawn has been giving people the heebie-jeebies for years. (Nancy and Ronald Reagan even had their West Coast address, a house numbered 666, changed by the city of Los Angeles, to the understandable annoyance of their neighbors.) No wonder the Beelzebubs toiling away in Hollywood P.R. opened the new version of The Omen on 6/6/06.

Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles are no Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, but as diplomat Robert Thorn and his wife Katherine, they face the same dilemma. When their child is born dead in Rome, a Vatican priest mutters, “The darkest evil this way comes” and offers an orphaned substitute to the husband, clutching his crucifix and adding, “God will forgive this deception.” But as we all know, the infant Thorn (Mr. Schreiber) brings to his wife’s hospital bed is the son of Satan, not God, and there’ll be Hell to pay. Knowing nothing of this, Katherine (Ms. Stiles) names the child Damien and showers him with love. Thorn is appointed American ambassador to Great Britain, and everything looks rosy. The Thorns have a beautiful estate near London, a healthy, curly-haired son, and a golden political future.

Suddenly, like a bolt of evil lightning, things turn ugly. At a pastoral birthday party, the boy’s nanny commits suicide by leaping from the roof with a noose around her neck. A sinister, snarling mastiff appears from the woods to act as an unwanted watchdog over the child. Gorillas in the zoo shriek and run from Damien in terror. Suddenly, a sweet, prim, soft-spoken but mysterious Mary Poppins replacement arrives in the form of Mia Farrow. “I’m the family nanny,” smiles Mia, “here to spread a bit of cheer.” The crowd roars. We’ve all seen Rosemary’s Baby. Let the fun begin.

It’s not just another movie about demonic possession, like The Exorcist, although that same theological mixture of man vs. devil forms its core. It expands and elaborates the genre in effectively hair-raising ways. A grotesque priest (Pete Postlethwaite) who lives in a room filled with religious symbols and walls papered in pages from the Bible delivers demented warnings before a stake is driven through his heart. A photographer (David Thewlis) discovers bizarre markings in his photos that threaten death for the Thorns unless Damien is destroyed. These events are effective enough to leave you checking your pulse, but you haven’t seen anything yet. It gets scarier. The journey to find weapons of destruction for Damien before he destroys the world leads to a cave near Jerusalem, a graveyard dig and endless tragedies. The finale gives goose bumps a new definition.

At the root of the dark prophecies is a passage from Revelation, freely translated by screenwriter David Seltzer to include references to the common market, politics, terrorists, tsunamis, hurricanes and Zionism. He also wrote the 1976 film and retains every element of his original script, while director John Moore adds tricks that jump out at you to make you scream. (The whole movie looks like it was intended for 3-D.) Famous scenes such as the colliding tricycle at the top of the staircase and the cemetery at midnight where Thorn is attacked by flesh-eating black ghost dogs still put ice on my spine. Filmed in Prague, the film now has the creepier look and feel of a world beyond the living. The cinematography better juxtaposes the cold daylight of reality with the hidden dangers in seemingly ordinary people and things (never has so much menace been extracted from dogs and toys). In the early version, Billie Whitelaw as the devil’s apostle who guards Damien from harm was so menacing she offered no surprise when she turned violent. Delicate but deceiving, Mia Farrow provides an element of surprise, like a cross between Lilith and Elsie Dinsmore. I don’t approve of remakes, but The Omen redux is riveting, imaginative and ultimately bone-chillingly satisfying.

A Real Looker!

The testosterone level at Feinstein’s at the Regency is running amok. Suave and rugged—a winning combination—suits James Naughton whether he’s playing a guitar in jeans or crooning show tunes in impeccable Armani. Mesmerizing the ringsiders in this new show through June 10, the two sides of Mr. Naughton’s finely toned personality are given equal time. Dashing and movie-star handsome, he’s got Cary Grant hair, Gary Cooper nonchalance and pipes that can tear up the joint on lease-breakers by Tom Waits and Randy Newman, or wrap a burnished ballad baritone around standards like “My Foolish Heart” and “I’m Glad There Is You” with romantic yearning. His patter is easy and cool, notes from his personal show-business diary full of love and lore about idols and influences like Tony Bennett, Joe Williams and Billy Eckstine. Because cabaret audiences are sparse on weeknights, he used the room on the Thursday I caught the show like the den in his Connecticut home—trading quips, talking music and sharing rare gems like the great, overlooked Jimmy Van Heusen song “Where Did Everyone Go?”, recorded years ago by Nat King Cole.

Backed by a thumbs-up quartet headed by ace pianist John Oddo, he leaves no tempo unexplored. A welcome tribute to the late, great Cy Coleman, who started Jim’s Broadway musical career with I Love My Wife and City of Angels, includes both a fast, funny comment on contemporary stoned society called “Everybody Today Is Turnin’ On” and a Sinatra evergreen, “Why Try to Change Me Now?” For laughs, I could do without Randy Newman’s “Shame” or any other song that rudely rhymes “Miss” with “piss.” But levity is broadening, and a 50’;s encore of sha-na-na, sh-boom and doo-wop doo-doo is undeniably hilarious. Whatever he tackles, James Naughton is polished and perfect. This is a show that adds spruce to the close of the supper-club season.

The “sexual aberration” of which Kessel wrote undoubtedly seemed more shocking in 1929 than it is in this current period of erotic escalation on the screen, the stage, television, videos, DVD’s and—most alarmingly of all to parents—the Internet. Indeed, Belle de Jour has reopened in New York at a time when movies are crossing new frontiers of male and female bodily exposure—gay sex, transsexualism, sadomasochism et al. And yet, of all the supposedly challenging attractions playing locally in our supposedly more enlightened era, the most compellingly erotic and entertaining spectacle is still provided by Belle de Jour—because of Buñuel’s genius, and his self-involvement in the seeming sordidness of the subject.

The plot of both book and movie is straightforward enough: Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), happily married to a handsome young surgeon, goes to work in a house of ill repute—actually less a house than an intimate apartment. The money involved is less a motivation than a pretext for her actions: Pierre, her husband (Jean Sorel), provides for all of Séverine’s material needs handsomely, but his respectfully temporizing caresses fail to satisfy her psychic need for brutal degradation—a need first awakened by a malodorous molester when she was a child of 8. To preserve a façade of marital respectability, Séverine works at her obsessive profession only in the afternoon, from 2 to 5 p.m., with the mystery of her matinee schedule causing her to be christened “Belle de Jour.”

Buñuel fragments Ms. Deneuve’s body into its erotic components: His shots of feet, hands, legs, stockings and undergarments are the shots not only of a fetishist like Stroheim, but of a cubist, a director concerned simultaneously with the parts and their effect on the whole. Buñuel’s graceful camera movements convey Ms. Deneuve to her sensual destiny through her black patent-leather shoes, and to her final reverie through ringed fingers feeling their way along the furniture with the tactile tendency of a mystical sensuality—Séverine’s, Deneuve’s or Buñuel’s, it makes little difference.

The beauty of the filmed version of Belle de Jour arises from its implication of Buñuel in its vision of the world. It is Buñuel who is the most devoted patron of Chez Madame Anais and the most discerning admirer of Ms. Deneuve’s Séverine/Belle de Jour. Never before has Buñuel’s view of the spectacle seemed so obliquely Ophülsian in its shy gaze from behind curtains, windows and even peepholes. Buñuel reminded us once again in Belle de Jour that he was one of the few men of the left not afflicted by Puritanism and bourgeois inhibitions about the sex lives of the “masses.”

Anti-Erotic Pinup

Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page, from a screenplay by Ms. Harron and Guinevere Turner, is based partly on research from The Real Bettie Page by Richard Foster, though the real Bettie Page declined to cooperate with the filmmakers. Hence, no afterword follows the final fade-out, as is customary with these quasi-biographical projects. The film itself—which, I feel, has been wildly overrated—strikes me as smugly anti-erotic in the extreme, in that Ms. Harron and Ms. Turner heap ridicule on Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee (David Strathairn) for his self-righteous crusade against S&M pinup Bettie Page. This was in 1955, mind you, and we all know how backward and bigoted people were in 1955—especially people from Tennessee, who had the churchgoing Senator Kefauver to represent their state’s Bible Belt constituency. On bread-and-butter issues, however, Mr. Kefauver was a populist liberal. Who represents the state in 2006? Why, that great statesman and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who so distinguished himself with his anti-plug-pulling antics in the Terri Schiavo case. Some progress in 50 years!

This is not to blame Ms. Page for turning out to be a dull character in such a luridly advertised come-on—nor the equally attractive Gretchen Mol, who plays the period pinup with appropriately naughty but nice complicity, down to her scanties and beyond. Still, even as a certified lifelong lecherous voyeur, I cannot report that Ms. Mol’s fleshy incarnation of Ms. Page turned me on in the slightest. For one thing, though I was always susceptible to female nudity, I never had any contact that I can recall with the Bettie Page phenomenon, perhaps because I was never into bondage and sadomasochistic fantasies. She was apparently too nice a girl to be involved in hard-core pornography, like such legendary beauties as Candy Barr and Marilyn Chambers. She was never even a striptease artist like the personable Gypsy Rose Lee and Rose La Rose. All she did was pose and make faces at the camera as if it were all a big joke.

She was born in Tennessee in 1923 and was apparently a good enough student to prepare for a teaching career, but she soon turned to modeling once she left her hometown for New York City, posing first for camera clubs and later for professional photographers. Before she left Tennessee, there is the sketchy intimation that she was sexually abused by her father, and the film also shows her very naïvely allowing herself to be picked up by a stranger and lured into a gang rape that nonetheless seems to leave no lasting psychic scars. Indeed, throughout all her posing, Bettie never projects any sensuality, and her relationships with both men and women are never anything but professional. Finally, she rediscovers Jesus and returns to her revivalist roots.

The film more or less begins and ends with Bettie sitting outside a U.S. Senate hearing chamber for hours and hours while a procession of male witnesses testify about the harm that her bondage photos have done to their sons, at least one of whom accidentally strangled himself to death. Finally, Bettie is excused without being allowed to testify in her own defense. In between the beginning and the end of her ordeal, she is shown cheerfully posing for such real-life photographers as Paula Klaw (Lili Taylor), Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer), Bunny Yeager (Sarah Paulson) and the clownish John Willie (Jared Harris).

In a strange way, The Notorious Bettie Page functions as a chick-flick fantasy of a power-wielding female turning the male gaze with little effort into grotesque submission. Ms. Harron and Ms. Turner have previously collaborated on American Psycho (2000), from Bret Easton Ellis’ sicko novel. They are working at a considerably lower voltage here, though their political attitudes are consistent in pushing the envelope far beyond conventional sexual attitudes. When one makes a joke about a young man strangling himself to death trying to imitate a bondage ritual, one runs the risk of calling into question all the striving for absolute sexual freedom and tolerance.

Altman in Queens

Robert Altman’s creative and varied 29-film career is being honored by a retrospective of his work at the Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 36th Street, in Astoria, Queens. It begins on April 29 at 2 p.m. with Kansas City (1996), starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Harry Belafonte, Michael Murphy, Dermot Mulroney and Steve Buscemi in a jazz-scored mix of crime, politics and melodrama redolent of Mr. Altman’s hometown memories. The series ends with his latest effort, A Prairie Home Companion, on Thursday, June 8, at 6:30 p.m., at the D.G.A. Theater on 57th Street, starring Garrison Keillor, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline and Lindsay Lohan. Mr. Altman will be on hand at both the opening and closing events of the series for a Q&A with museum curator David Schwartz.

In between the director’s two appearances are such acknowledged Altman classics as Nashville (1975), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), Images (1972), Short Cuts (1993), Gosford Park (2001), Brewster McCloud (1970), M*A*S*H* (1970), The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), Three Women (1977), Vincent and Theo (1990) and The Player (1992), among others. Ms. Streep and Ms. Tomlin were clearly the comic highlight of this year’s Oscar ceremony with their well-rehearsed riff on Mr. Altman’s gift for improvisation, a prelude to the director’s richly deserved Lifetime Achievement Award. Both actresses appear as if for an encore in A Prairie Home Companion, which, I hear, is destined to become another Robert Altman classic.

The Three Faces of Eve is notable today in its DVD reincarnation for the same reason it attracted attention during its original theatrical release in 1957: Joanne Woodward’s breakout, star-making and Oscar-winning performance as the three-faced victim of multiple-personality disorder. Otherwise, there is something almost comically campy and dated about the solemn tones with which host Alistair Cooke introduces what he describes as an amazing but true case history of a woman who, in his analogy, endures one more change of identity than did Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll.

Fortunately, Nunnally Johnson wrote and directed this potentially farcical and melodramatic material with commendably poker-faced seriousness and tastefully minimal hysteria. Joanne Woodward’s Eve White is introduced as your average Southern housewife next-door with a slight problem: She’s been experiencing severe headaches, after which she behaves strangely with her husband and child and has no memory of her bizarre actions afterward. Lee J. Cobb plays the psychiatrist with unyielding dignity and very helpful open-mindedness, which is not surprising since Mr. Johnson’s screenplay is based very loosely on the novel by Corbett H. Thigpen, M.D., and Hervey M. Cleckley, M.D., the two doctors who treated the real-life "Eve."

When Eve White morphs in front of the psychiatrist’s astonished eyes into Eve Black, a bolder, flirtier, sassier version of her soft-spoken, head-bowed, whimpering sister, the psychiatrist rushes out of the office to get a colleague to witness the stunning transformation. Eve Black displays complete contempt for her husband. Modern feminist viewers will have no trouble diagnosing Eve White’s problems as repressed disappointments in an unworthy husband, who is eventually unmasked as a fool and a bully. Indeed, the "cure" for Eve White consists largely of ridding herself of her partner, and finding happiness and fulfillment with a kinder and better-looking man. After having tried to strangle her daughter Bonnie as Eve Black, "Jane," a more intelligent version of Eve White, is reconciled with her daughter and goes off with her and Jane’s new lover into a happier future.

Yes, I know, it’s the traditional happy Hollywood ending—but this is 1957, remember, when the censors were still on hand to make sure that Eve Black didn’t go off the deep end sexually. Of course, this didn’t stop more daring 1957 movies, like Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, from pushing the envelope on suggestive sexuality.

An added feature of the DVD is the valuable, insightful and exhaustively knowledgeable commentary by film historian Aubrey Solomon. The Three Faces of Eve, Mr. Solomon tells us, was one of the earliest Fox black-and-white productions shot in wide-screen CinemaScope, a process previously restricted to color costume epics. Directors tended to be uncomfortable with the wide screen; it reduced their ability to cut to different camera angles. Hence, Ms. Woodward had to do her Jekyll-and-Hyde switches of character in a single take, without the benefit of a cutaway to the psychiatrist reacting to the change in her expression. This feat of acting may explain why Ms. Woodward beat out for the Oscar much better-known actresses like Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Anna Magnani in Wild Is the Wind, Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree County and Lana Turner in Peyton Place. I would have preferred Ms. Kerr—or, even better, Patricia Neal in A Face in the Crowd, who wasn’t nominated at all.

[ The Three Faces of Eve, 1957, unrated, 91 min., $14.90]

Vote Moore!

It’s election time, and the political documentaries are out, ready to sway the remaining handful of undecideds — or further enrage the devoted masses. Fahrenheit 9/11, rushed to distribution in four months, boasts a number of extras, including "The Release of Fahrenheit 9/11," footage from Samarra, Iraq, and some deleted scenes. God knows Michael Moore’s fans can’t get enough. But The War Room, veteran documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’ entertaining look at the 1992 Clinton campaign, might prove more illuminating than Mr. Moore’s anti-Bush riff, especially as Nov. 2 approaches. It’s helpful to understand how campaign spinmaster James Carville revs up his candidates (here with the aid of boy wonder George Stephanopoulos), and why his colorful, tough-minded advice might be just what John Kerry needs.

But before The War Room, K Street and light years before The Daily Show, there was Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau’s Tanner ’88, an inspired lampooning of the American political process. Mr. Altman follows Jack Tanner, a fictitious Congressman running for President, as if he were shooting a real documentary. The 11-part series is bookended by the 1988 New Hampshire Democratic primary and the Democratic National Convention; it aired on HBO during the 1988 election season. Mr. Tanner holds real focus groups, meets with real people and hobnobs with real candidates—so much so that the line between reality and fiction is blurred to the point of obsolescence.

According to the DVD’s 20-minute discussion between Mr. Altman and Mr. Trudeau, the director was ready to make more episodes, describing the process as the most fun he’d ever had making a film. That conversation, although yielding a rare chance to see Mr. Altman in a good mood, is the DVD’s sole "special" feature. Newly shot introductions to each episode—also on the DVD—featuring the candidate, his daughter (Cynthia Nixon) and his former campaign head (Pamela Reed) were made for the Sundance Channel’s recent broadcast of Tanner ’88.

It was during those shoots that Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Altman decided it was time to resurrect Jack Tanner "For Real." (That was his old campaign slogan.) The result, Tanner on Tanner, a four-part series in which Tanner’s daughter talks to her father about his failed run for President, airs this week.

[ Fahrenheit 9/11, 2004, 122 min., R, $28.95; The War Room, 1993, 96 min., PG, $14.98; Tanner ’88, 1988, unrated, $29.95]

—Jake Brooks and Suzy Hansen

What a bizarre movie this is! Unlike most ballet movies, whose plots are relentlessly clichéd and predictable (a Rocky in tights or tutu making it against all odds), The Company has no plot at all. Although the story is credited to Barbara Turner and Neve Campbell (who also stars and co-produces), there is no story; instead, there are slices of ballet life (the physical hardships, the pain, the anxiety, the camaraderie, the glory) and yards and yards of dancing, almost all of it bad. There are characters who are never characterized, situations that are never resolved. It's often hard to tell who is who. Or why.

And then, of course, there is Altman's famous darting camera, shooting through, around, above the dancers. Clearly, he's in love with the world of ballet. And there's Neve ( Scream ) Campbell herself, who's bravely got herself back into shape years after abandoning ballet for acting. She's worked hard, and is rewarded by looking no more or less adequate than her colleagues. It's fortunate that this is the repertory she's being seen in: In so much of what the Joffrey dances, it really doesn't matter who does what as long as everyone just keeps going.

At least two of the works on view are new. The first is a lugubrious and pointless duet set to "My Funny Valentine" by the ubiquitous Lar Lubovitch. Campbell, equipped with a pushy ballet mother and a nice smile, is on her way up the company ladder and lands this plum role. The ballet itself is so forgettable that you've forgotten the beginning before you get to the end, but it does provide two bits of amusement. First, the way the great choreographer is greeted when he arrives at the studio: "Do you know how long this company has waited for a Lar Lubovitch ballet?" (My guess is that it didn't have to wait more than 10 minutes after asking.)

Then there's the premiere. It's at an outdoor Chicago theater, and a storm is whipping up. The audience sits there hypnotized by the genius of Lubovitch and Campbell while lightning and thunder gather. Then, up umbrellas when the deluge strikes! But nobody thinks of leaving. How gratifying to see so many dedicated balletomanes in Chicago, a city that has famously withstood every attempt to make it available to ballet.

The other new work is by Robert Desrosiers, and it's a hoot. It's called The Blue Snake because it features a giant blue snake. Dancers cavort around in costumes designed to reduce them to special effects. Desrosiers, like Lubovitch, is shown in the Act of Creativity, and he can make fun of himself, so I don't have to bother. This work is closer to Cirque du Soleil than to ballet, and it's harmlessly silly. Poor Neve Campbell falls and hurts herself during the premiere, but hunk interest James Franco is on hand with flowers to cheer her up. (He's some kind of chef in a fancy restaurant-and he's creative, too; with shrimp, if I remember correctly.)

We get a second-rate ballet by Alwin Nikolais, a snatch of Laura Dean and three helpings of Arpino, whose endless parade of cheap, trendy works has held the Joffrey back for decades. He inherited the company from his friend and partner, Robert Joffrey-none of whose work, by the way, turns up in this film. There's a moment from the company's reconstruction of Saint-Léon's La Vivandière pas de six -suddenly, real steps. But it's over before any permanent damage can be done to the dominant aesthetic.

Why movie and dance critics are taking The Company seriously, I can't imagine. Are they impressed by Altman's reputation and naïve sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach? Are they enjoying Malcolm McDowell's fakey but enjoyable performance as Mr. A (for Antonelli), the egotistical and cowardly stand-in for Arpino? Or are they just relieved to see a ballet movie in which the heroine neither dies ( The Red Shoes ) nor has an overnight sensational success (most of the others)? The Company certainly does propose that dancers have a hard time of it. It's true that Neve Campbell's character has a largish, habitable place to live in, but it's right next to the El, with trains roaring past. That's hardship.

I enjoyed a couple of short scenes in which a steely senior ballerina stamps her pretty little toe-shoes and gets her way. And, of course, the moment when someone says, "Margot Fonteyn-she was a dame." (It's the only reference I can recall to any ballet name or subject not connected to the Joffrey. Talk about product endorsement!) And finally there's Gerald Arpino's remark in the press release: "Robert Altman really directs the way I choreograph." That says it all.

I was pleasantly surprised by some of the choices, and depressingly resigned to others. As an enthusiastic admirer of the unjustly neglected Iris , I was happy to see Judi Dench nominated for Best Actress, Kate Winslet for Best Supporting Actress and Jim Broadbent for Best Supporting Actor. These three mentions for the film earned it a return engagement in a few theaters, and I urge all my readers to rush off to see it.

Contrary to the received wisdom of the gossip columns, Robert Altman was not "punished" for his recent publicized anti-American comments; nor was Gosford Park with seven nominations, including one for Best Picture, Mr. Altman's directorial nod, and two for Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith as Best Supporting Actress. Indeed, they might just as well have nominated everyone else in the cast, or perhaps they could have invented a new category for Upstairs-Downstairs Excellence, with only one ensemble eligible for consideration.

In my heart of hearts, I didn't really expect my favorite film of the year, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence , to be nominated for much of anything, and it wasn't, except for John Williams' original score and its visual effects, which are sure to lose to those of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

I and many other people wrongly predicted that Nicole Kidman's showy performances in Moulin Rouge and The Others might cancel each other out and thus have her come up empty. Instead, Ms. Kidman cashed in with the ridiculously overrated Moulin Rouge , and the much more richly deserving Billy Bob Thornton suffered the fate of the overqualified, with his two prize-worthy performances in The Man Who Wasn't There and Monster's Ball both overlooked.

A Beautiful Mind with its eight nominations, including Ron Howard's first-ever directorial mention, followed the lead of the Golden Globes rather than that of the various critics' groups, the members of which mostly pretended that the movie and its romantically paired performances by Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly didn't exist.

But let's face it: The Academy nominated three films for Best Picture that made my list of movies other people liked and I didn't ( In the Bedroom , The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Moulin Rouge ), and only two ( A Beautiful Mind and Gosford Park ) that made my 2001 10-best list. So why am I jumping around as if I'm happy?

My film class at Columbia University collectively gasped when I declared that–given the unavailability in the Best Actress category of Stockard Channing in The Business of Strangers and Frances O'Connor in A.I . and About Adam –I would choose Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary over Halle Berry in Monster's Ball, Judi Dench in Iris, Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge and Sissy Spacek in In the Bedroom . But comedies are always short-changed. Fortunately, they forgave me when I said that I would vote for David Lynch as Best Director over Ron Howard, Ridley Scott ( Black Hawk Down ), Robert Altman and Peter Jackson ( Lord of the Rings ). Yes, I know–I picked Mr. Altman as my favorite director last year, even over Zhang Yimou, and at that time Mr. Lynch placed fourth. But picking Mr. Lynch as Best Director now is my way of tweaking the Academy for giving such short shrift to Mulholland Drive.

I know more than a few of my friends, acquaintances and colleagues will find it outrageous that the universally panned Pearl Harbor and the wildly acclaimed Black Hawk Down each received four nominations. I prefer to focus on the fact that the Academy didn't acknowledge the gritty, war-is-hellish Black Hawk Down even further, suggesting a lack of martial spirit after the traumatic events of 9/11.

As for the new category of Animated Feature Film, I certainly hope that Shrek beats out Monsters, Inc . and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius . But again, there will be those who wonder why Waking Life was not even nominated.

I'll pass on sizing up the nominees for musical awards, forever trapped as I am in a Jerome Kern time warp. And I'll stop the stalling: What are my picks for this year's major Oscars? Even after my usual warning that under no circumstances are you to bet the rent money on my choices, I must add a further disclaimer after my disastrous betting experience at this year's Super Bowl party at a friend's house. To put a point to it, I went with the hype and picked the supposedly omnipotent St. Louis Rams to win by 17 points. By contrast, my usually sports-averse better half bet with her heart and picked the New England Patriots to win by three. It wasn't losing the bet that bothered me; it was something in my nature that I recognized and finally acknowledged. All my life, all things being equal (and for a New Yorker, all things were equal in this Boston-St. Louis contest), I have always rooted for the favorite against the underdog. I have never been moved by the triumph of the human spirit against the odds. For me, the odds represent the logic of analysis, and I feel deeply that logic should always prevail over emotion. I know it doesn't, but though this was the best-played and most exciting Super Bowl of all time, I felt only saddened at the defeat of logic by emotion yet again. So sue me.

Without further ado, I pick A Beautiful Mind to win over its closest competitor, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring . Why? Actors make up the biggest contingent of Academy voters, and aside from Ian McKellen's performance, Lord plays more like an animated cartoon than an articulated drama.

The award for Best Actor is a toss-up between Mr. Crowe and Tom Wilkinson. I give the edge to Mr. Crowe because of his stirring acceptance speech at the Golden Globes.

Ms. Spacek is a lock for Best Actress, Mr. McKellen likewise for Best Supporting Actor. Ms. Connelly should prevail over Marisa Tomei for Best Supporting Actress–though my heart belongs to Ms. Winslet.

My wild hunch for Best Director is Mr. Howard over Mr. Altman. They've waited all this time to nominate Mr. Howard; they'll be tempted to go all the way.

No Man's Land should beat out Amélie for Best Foreign Film, if for no other reason than the opportunity it gives the Academy to show that it cares about social issues in the rest of the world–and particularly in what Anita Loos' Lorelei Lee once designated as "the Central of Europe."

You're on your own if your Oscar pool takes in the writing and cinematography categories. One clue early in the evening, however, will be the Film Editing Award, in which A Beautiful Mind is up against Lord etc., with Moulin Rouge a distant third: Editing is an adhesive category that no one evaluates on its own merits apart from the film with which it's associated.

The Royal Tenenbaums failed to gain any Academy recognition beyond a mention for Original Screenplay by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson. The voting for the Adapted Screenplay category may be complicated by the adverse criticism directed at A Beautiful Mind for not fully recording all the sordid details in the central character's biography–details that would have guaranteed the film's commercial failure and prevented it from being nominated for an Oscar in the first place.

What has been overlooked in the nominations of African-American actors Denzel Washington and Will Smith for Training Day and Ali , respectively, is that white actors Ethan Hawke in Training Day and Jon Voight in Ali were swept in as nominees in the Supporting Actor category. When you add Mr. Crowe and Ms. Connelly in A Beautiful Mind , Ms. Dench, Mr. Broadbent and Ms. Winslet in Iris , and Ms. Mirren and Ms. Smith in Gosford Park , you have a doubling and even a tripling up of acting nominees in a single movie that I cannot remember in Oscar history. This makes the singleton nomination of African-American actress Halle Berry in Monster's Ball all the more glaring for the exclusion of Billy Bob Thornton, who in addition to the aforementioned performances in Monster's Ball and The Man Who Wasn't There was also memorable in Bandits , with Cate Blanchett and Bruce Willis. By contrast, the lamented Gene Hackman was less than memorable in Heist .

Anyway, what are the odds on any of the African-American nominees going all the way? On the one hand, they have history, or rather the lack of it, on their side. On the other, the Academy is notorious for patting itself on the back for making a liberal gesture with the nominating process, and thus not feeling obliged to follow through on Oscar night with a full-fledged triumph. Still, I would not rule out surprise wins for Mr. Washington, for changing his type (or, rather, stereotype), and Ms. Berry, for an impressively full-bodied performance with more decibels of pure hysteria than anyone else. Mr. Smith, however, may be fatally handicapped by the doubts raised about his attempt to simulate a real-life character whom the media have made overfamiliar to most of us. It's a game in which you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

I find it difficult to believe that Sean Penn, an actor of admittedly enormous talent, was nominated for his virtuoso portrayal of a mentally handicapped father in I Am Sam . If he should win, I would be certain that the ghost of Old Hollywood has risen from its grave for one last hurrah. I am not exactly offended by disease-and/or-handicap-of-the-week sentimentality, but when you throw in a girl-child so cute she makes Shirley Temple look positively Brechtian, run for your lives, the dam has burst. Even so, I wonder if Mr. Penn would have been nominated if the filmmakers had left in a scene in which Michelle Pfeiffer's lawyer character goes to bed with Sam.

What are the odds?