OSCAR ANTI-PREDICTIONS: I suppose I should make some. But with the exception of Best Documentary Feature, I will make no affirmative predictions, only negative ones.

In other words, I guaran-damn-tee that not one of the following nominees will win tomorrow night. Even though, mathematically, I've got about a 0.5% chance of actually being right. Here goes:

Best Picture: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. If a sci-fi/fantasy movie is ever winning this award, it's the Matrix films next year, not this. This movie has had as much Oscar buzz as Jackass (which, of course, should've been nominated in Best Documentary).

Best Directing: Stephen Daldry, The Hours. Marty could win, Rob Marshall could get swept in on the Chicago wave, Almodovar could win in a We've Always Loved You fluke and Polanski . . . well, even though the Academy hasn't forgiven Leni Riefenstahl yet, he's still got more of a chance than Daldry does.

Best Actor: Nicolas Cage, Adaptation. If Jeremy Irons can't even get nominated for playing twins in Dead Ringers, no way the star of Valley Girl picks up his second Oscar tomorrow. They're still regretting giving an Oscar to someone who went on to make Gone In 60 Seconds and Con Air.

Best Actress: Diane Lane, Unfaithful. If any of the stars of The Outsiders is going to win the award, it's Estevez or Cruise first. Maybe Rob Lowe. Also, no actress has ever won an Oscar for a film that required sleeping with Richard Gere.

Best Supporting Actor: John C. Reilly, Chicago. If "hard working, underappreciated" is going to win this year, it's Chris Cooper, not Chest Rockwell.

Best Supporting Actress: Queen Latifah, Chicago. This may be the toughest one of all, but if someone from Chicago's winning, it's Mrs. Douglas. But any of the five could win this one. Oscar pools get decided here.

Best Adapted Screenplay: About A Boy. Tthe Weitz brothers directed American Pie and wrote Nutty Professor 2. They're just not winning an Oscar. Yet.

Best Original Screenplay: Far From Heaven. Yes, I see even Greek Wedding as more likely. If the Academy liked FFH that much, then it'd have been nominated in Best Picture and Best Director. So it's not winning this.

Best Animated Feature: Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Because no one liked it, and because if I blindfolded you, you'd guess the title wrong. "Stallion: Spirit of the Stallion?"

Best Music (Score): Frida. Because nominee Elliot Goldenthal is not "John Williams" or "Philip Glass" or "Elmer Bernstein". Sorry.

Best Music (Song): "Burn It Blue", Frida. A song you've never heard of can't win, and it's up against Em, Bono and Simon. Forget it.

Best Art Direction: Road to Perdition. Because Road's only winning one Oscar, and that's for the late Conrad L. Hall for best cinematography. "Art Direction" covers the general "look and feel" of a movie, but it's often a costume-ish award -- witness recent winners like Moulin Rouge!, Restoration or The Madness of King George. So pick the one with the least funky costumes, and that's Tom Hanks in suits.

Best Cinematography: The Pianist. Conrad L. Hall's picking up his third Oscar for Perdition, albeit while dead. It's a lock. So what won't win? Well, none of my friends left The Pianist saying, "Wow, the sure Ghetto looked great!", so I'll pick on this one.

Best Costume Design: The Pianist. "And man, those SS people sure dressed nice!" Not.

Best Foreign Language Film: Hero. Except for Crouching/Hidden, has gone to a European film every year since 1986. The Chinese film can't win.

Best Documentary Feature: Winged Migration. Because if it's not the Holocaust movie, it's the spelling movie. It ain't the bird movie. Trust me.

Best Documentary Short: Why Can't We Be A Family Again? Competing against Rosa Parks, who'll be in attendance, and a 9/11 movie? Has as much chance winning as Horatio Sanz getting that Best Supporting nod next year for Boat Trip.

Best Editing: The Pianist. In recent years, "fast cutting" has become the standard for winning this category -- Black Hawk Down, Traffic, The Matrix and Saving Private Ryan won the last four. Pianist was anything but.

Best Makeup: The Time Machine Because Frida is the only other nominee, and I'll go with the better film. 50/50 here.

Best Animated Short: Mt. Head. Want to impress your friends by calling another obscure category? "Mike's New Car" features the Monsters, Inc characters. It'll win.

Best Live Action Short: Fait D'Hiver. C'mon -- anyone who's seen these films knows what the class of the competition is. Do I have to draw a map for you?

Best Sound and Best Sound Editing: Road To Perdition. Loud movies win these categories -- Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, etc. So pick the only quiet film.

Best Visual Effects: Spider-Man. Three nominees in the category; Rings won last year, so it'll probably win again. Between Spidey and Anakin, only one movie had Yoda Kicking Ass. That one's got a shot here.

Full Oscar comments after the show airs. If it airs.

A MAN CAN DREAM, RIGHT? Since Eminem won't be appearing at the Oscars to perform his nominated song "Lose Yourself", any chance Robin Williams will be called in to perform?

PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT: Per my vow earlier today, here's the "best" of what I could find from reviews of Academy Award winner Gwyneth Paltrow's new film, View From The Top. Says the SF Examiner:

View from the Top" is such a misfire that you have to wonder what has happened to it during the year or so it has been sitting on Miramax's shelves. Harvey "The Butcher" Weinstein has probably been at it with his infamous scissors once or twice by now, as it only clocks in at 87 minutes.

But believe me, it's the longest 87 minutes in recent memory.

Even if Harvey trimmed it down into a very short film, say, a 30-second TV ad, there's still not enough material to make anything worthwhile. The actual TV ad resorts to using a dance number from the closing credit outtakes, proving that they couldn't find 30 seconds worth of good material in the film itself!

Writes Roger Moore from the Orlando Sentinel:

The script is patronizing and banal and doesn't cover any ground that David Spade didn't explore in those three minute "Buh-bye" "Saturday Night Live" sketches of the early '90s. Droll observations about how the working class live and entertain themselves play as if they were written by an alien. Or by some rich film school kid who's never held a real job in his life.

...

It's not that Paltrow can't play cheesecake. But why on Earth should she want to? The woman has an Oscar, charm to burn and one would hope better opportunities than this. Shame on Miramax for ever arm-twisting her into this, and for not running it straight to video when they realized how bad it turned out.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette chimes in:

That gas mask you just bought for the lovely new war? Take it along and try it out on "View from the Top" -- a real stinkeroo of a romantic comedy from Brazilian director Bruno Barreto.

...

Something's really wrong if you can't get laughs out of Mike Myers.

And Bruce Kirkland from the Toronto Sun continues the war analogy:

View From The Top, Gwyneth Paltrow's gushy airline stewardess fable, should have been declared a no-fly zone and left in the hangar.

Instead, like a wounded mallard duck, this tawdry romantic comedy is trying to take off more than two years after it was first shot. A crash landing is inevitable.

The movie is tired and old -- and now I don't mean the two years of fussing over whether it should have been released. Even though this story is set in the new millennium, View might as well be 50 years old, because it naively and/or stupidly reflects a state of being from another era.

The Newark Star-Ledger, well...

Ladies and gentleman, please fasten your seatbelts. We are about to begin our descent into Hollywood.

And it is not a pleasant trip.

Faked and forced, "View From the Top" is strictly scrapings from the bottom, full of characters who go nowhere and twists that ever happen. Watching it, the pressing question isn't What Happens Next but simply, How On Earth Did This Happen?

The cast itself telegraphs the plot. Gwyneth Paltrow is the Good-Girl Heroine, of course; Christina Applegate is the Bad-Girl Friend. Mark Ruffalo is the Non-Threatening Nice Guy and Rob Lowe the Slightly Dangerous Charmer; Mike Myers is the Comic Relief and Candice Bergen the Slightly Scary Rich Lady.

With actors cast this strictly to type, who even needs a screenplay?

...

Perhaps one day some Hollywood researcher will find the black box to this movie, and the mistakes that led to this disaster can be reconstructed. Because it didn't need to be this bad -- even if the story would make more sense set 30 years ago, and Paltrow is the least likely actress to play a cutely trashy cowgirl. (What, Reese Witherspoon was busy?)

Finally, one last Boat Trip comment, just because I can, from Mr. Cranky:

"Boat Trip" is the kind of movie tailor-made for bilking unsuspecting foreign nationals out of their investment money. You have to feel for the poor fools who ripped the little paper tab from the bottom of the "become a Hollywood mogul!" sign and proceeded to turn over a significant chunk of the retirement fund to have their names listed as "associate producers" of this floating fiasco. There's little hope of legal recourse, however, because technically, a movie got made, right? And technically, it even had an Oscar winner in it, right?

AND IN OTHER NEWS: Mickey Kaus noted on Slate yesterday that Thursday was going to be a good day for publicists to quietly release bad news without anyone noticing, given that everyone's attention was going to be on the war.

So, what else did we learn yesterday?

1. Liza Minnelli is back in rehab. Her PR people announced she'd be spending eight weeks at the Caron Foundation in rural Pennsylvania.

2. Anthony Michael Hall is nuts -- specifically, and more delicately, he's being sued by producers of a television show in which he acted for failing to disclose an alleged pre-existing mental health condition -- "bipolar affective disorder depression with psychotic features."

3. Mena Suvari is working again.

4. Finally, and don't forget this, kids, it remains illegal -- even on Long Island -- to engage in three-way sex with your brother and his wife on a commuter train.

BOYCOTT CUBA: And the laughs just keep on coming. Not from Boat Trip; from the reviews of Academy Award winner Cuba Gooding Jr's latest.

From Roger Ebert:

"Boat Trip" arrives preceded by publicity saying many homosexuals have been outraged by the film. Now that it's in theaters, everybody else has a chance to join them. Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive, and way too conventional to use all of those people standing around in the background wearing leather and chains and waiting hopefully for their cues. This is a movie made for nobody, about nothing.

Elvis Mitchell:

"Boat Trip," which opens nationwide today, is a series of flashing semaphores that signal its dreariness. It has the most exhausted collection of song clichés this side of a Time-Life oldies collection, from James Brown's "I Feel Good" all the way to the eventual cover of "I Will Survive." What's missing from this motley medley is a tune by Cuba Gooding Sr.: "Everybody Plays the Fool."

The junior Gooding has shown himself to be a game actor, and he is fearless at throwing his entire being into pictures that seem to exist to prove that he can be in something worse than the last movie you saw him in. If "Boat Trip" were screened on a cruise ship, most of the passengers would be dog-paddling back to shore.

"Boat Trip" is more tiresome and dumb than actually bad.

The Orange County Register:

OK, Mort Nathan, wherever you are, here's the deal: I have about $2,000 in checking, a couple of long-term, high-yield CDs and a brutalized 401k account with roughly the same net worth as Tom Cruise's haircut. It's all yours if you promise never, EVER to step behind a movie camera again.

Then again, maybe I have nothing to worry about. The work offers won't exactly be pouring in once the general public sees what a lowbrow, oversexed, witless bore you've made of "Boat Trip," starring Cuba Gooding Jr. The things you do with the double entrendre are just appalling, pal. If I ever a hear woman tell her masseuse, "I want you to go really deep this time" again, please kill me.

Says the Washington Times:

If Oscar statues were animate, the one belonging to Cuba Gooding Jr. would have jumped off its mantel perch and gone AWOL a long time ago.

Just take a quick look at the guy's post-"Jerry Maguire" resume: the unintentionally funny "Instinct," the maudlin "Men of Honor," the preposterous "Chill Factor." And Disney's "Snow Dogs" — you forgot about that turkey, didn't you?

Enter "Boat Trip," Mr. Gooding's latest vehicle.

The time for diplomacy has passed. The time for action has come.

Someone needs to go on a mission of mercy. Someone needs to stage an intervention and rescue that supporting-actor trophy from a lifetime of shame and ill repute.

As far as View From The Top is concerned . . . well, let The Oregonian's Shawn Levy preview what's to come later today:

If the new I-wanna-be-a-stewardess picture "View From the Top" were an airplane, it would blow up on takeoff. If it were an airline meal, it would infect you with E. coli. If it were a parachute, it would be riddled with holes.

I'm not here to tell you that "View From the Top" is moviemaking at its absolute worst. Any veteran critic knows that there's always a bottom beneath the bottom you think you've hit. But I am here to tell you that this picture comes so close to the absolute worst that I could swear I could feel the bottom with the tip of my big toe while watching it.

BOMBS AWAY: And as for Boat Trip, Entertainment Weekly strikes first:

I thought Cuba Gooding Jr. couldn't blow his Oscar cred more profligately than he did last year in the pandering black-guy-lost-among-white-folks comedy "Snow Dogs."

I was wrong.

In the titanically bad straight-guy-lost-among-homosexual-folks comedy "Boat Trip," Gooding plays Jerry, a glum galoot recently dumped by his girlfriend (Vivica A. Fox) who realizes only after the boat has sailed that the recuperative cruise he's embarked on with his boorish, skirt-chasing buddy Nick (Horatio Sanz) is for gay men. And had the ghost of Paul Lynde swanned by in a caftan-clad cameo, you couldn't find a more outdated, miscalculated collection of stale, queen-size stereotypes than those trotted out on this ship of fools.

Bless you, Lisa Schwarzbaum.

[Note: Let's be clear: there are plenty of weblogs you can visit to read people's views on the war. This ain't one of them. This place is the E! Channel to everyone else's CNN, and I'd like to keep it that way.]

VIEWS FROM THE BOTTOM: Okay, let's get started. From the Associated Press:

It's hard to imagine what attracted Gwyneth Paltrow to "View from the Top," a sputtering, underfueled slapstick romance in which she stars as an aspiring international flight attendant.

If all she wanted to do was show up and get paid, she probably could have found a bigger-budget movie where phoning it in would have been acceptable.

. . .

The few laughs in this movie are thanks to Myers, but you can feel him straining to make something of a character that's more bizarre than funny. As with Paltrow, you wonder: Why is he in this movie? For whom is he doing a favor?

. . .

First-time writer Eric Wald provides neither a shrewd structure nor a single line of memorable dialogue. "View from the Top" wheezes to a finish in which all of Donna's decisions are affirmed beyond reason.


As for Paltrow's decisions, she's allowed to make a bad one like signing to do this movie — so long as it doesn't become a habit.

From FilmCritic.com:

Assume crash positions, people. We're going down.

. . .

Bashing View, though, is like kicking a puppy for licking your hand too often. The sweet but schizophrenic effort begs to be loved, and takes itself so seriously that you'll question its sincerity. It reaches high levels of camp, packing a vicious cat fight, a Rob Lowe cameo, and a lazy-eyed flight attendant instructor played without wit by Mike Myers. But Barreto is uncomfortable with such juvenile material, so he retreats to the safe trappings of the romantic comedy formula whenever View flirts with legitimate spoof.

Regardless of the intended genre, the horrible dialogue in Roger Kumble and Eric Wald's script makes the air up here awful thin, suffocating all attempts at humor.

. . .

Casting Paltrow is the biggest mystery. Clad head to toe in pretty-girl pink retro costumes stitched from cheap spandex, the rail-thin A-lister parades in skintight flight suits and skimpy bikinis. Can't she play dress up in the comfort of her own mansion? She does lend an ounce of credibility to the underdeveloped romantic angle, but the naturally trashy Applegate makes a better fit for the down-and-out Donna role.

Without Paltrow's presence, though, View would have been issued a one-way, coach class ticket to the nearest cable network. So now we know why Barreto cast Paltrow as Donna. We're still hazy on why she accepted the part.