Crunch week as Oscars hopefuls take center stage

It's crunch week as many Oscar hopefuls like "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "Revolutionary Road," "The Reader" and "Australia," among others, get shown to the majority of press and early awards voters.

Sony is hinting that screeners (few and far between this season to date) of the unseen Will Smith contender, "Seven Pounds," will be in the hands of Globe and Broadcast Critics voters by the first week in December. This is well before even  academy members get their screeners,  but just under the wire for many critics groups' deadlines.

Clint Eastwood's  "Gran Torino," another late bloomer, was shown to a handful of top critics (OK, exactly three) on the Warner Bros. lot last Thursday afternoon, and consensus is it's a slam-dunk acting nomination for Clint. Eastwood always lets a very select few on his approved list see his movies first, and in this case it was a highly respected top-tier critic from a major daily newspaper, a major Hollywood trade paper and a major consumer entertainment news TV show.

Paramount Vantage on Saturday threw all caution to the wind and let its  powerful view of a marriage circa 1955, "Revolutionary Road," rip with very successful screenings and Q&A's for the DGA, PGA, BAFTA-LA and SAG Nominating Committee, among others. Word is, the cast and crew were run ragged traveling from one screening to the next.

The 4 p.m. SAG Nom Comm screening at the Paramount Theatre, which I moderated with director Sam Mendes and six cast members  (including of course, Leonardo DiCaprio  and Kate Winslet),  turned away 250 people who had to be accommodated elsewhere. The parking lot at Paramount was so overtaxed, there was a major traffic pileup just trying to get in and out of the lot. Producer Scott Rudin was in New York, but I understand publicists were giving him a play-by-play account as the Q&A continued. Michael Shannon, a sure-fire supporting actor nominee as Kathy Bates' brilliantly disturbed son, stole the show on stage after the screening, just like he does whenever he shows up in a scene in the movie.

At the cast dinner at Larchmont Grill later, Paramount topper John Lesher told us awards would be nice but that he just hopes the film does well. He added that the studio will resist the temptation to bill the movie as a  "Titanic" reunion; it will try to draw audiences in who appreciate well-made  and provocative dramas. This one is of a quality and intensity not seen since Liz and Dick went at each other in 1966's "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf."

Kate Winslet will probably secure her sixth nomination for "Revolutionary Road"  unless she somehow cancels herself out with her performance in The Weinstein Company's "The Reader," arguably a leading role that is likely to be pushed for supporting so as not to siphon votes away from her turn as April Wheeler opposite Leo's equally fine work. Certainly an embarrassment of riches for this Kate.

Meanwhile, next night another Kate (Beckinsale) held court with the Sag Nom Comm crowd at Harmony Gold for her very-well-received role as a reporter who goes to jail for refusing to name her source on a controversial story in Rod Lurie's "Nothing but the Truth," which gets a one-week Oscar qualifying run from The Yari Group starting Dec. 19 at the Crest Westwood. Kate stayed an extra 20  minutes to take photos and chat with the actors, and she was also guest of honor at a dinner saluting her performance for select press and friends earlier in the week.

Lots of anticipation for "Australia" (which finally press screens on the Fox lot at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday) after Oprah heartily endorsed it last week on her show, saying it was the best movie she had seen in a long, long, LONG time. While that's great free advertising for Fox in hitting its  target demo and has raised the wanna-see level for the film, it's also significant. Oprah, lest we forget, is a card-carrying academy voter. It's also interesting to note that by the time she and her audience saw the rough cut of "Australia" and then proclaimed it her favorite in eons,  she had ALREADY seen what is perhaps thought to be THE major contender, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" for a show with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett (airing Wednesday) that she pre-taped on Nov. 5. It will be intriguing to see how much "Benjamin Button" rates on the Oprah gush-o-meter vs. the unqualified rave she handed Baz Luhrman's Nicole Kidman/Hugh Jackman epic. Can Oprah have the same kind of impact for Oscar that she had for Obama???

Hoping not to get lost in the crowd of all these late-breaking best picture contenders, Disney has launched a major push to land a rare best pic nomination for its animated summer hit,"Wall-E." Pixar and Disney 'toon topper John Lasseter told us he has his fingers crossed for "Wall-E" in the animated feature, song, score, sound and screenplay categories -- and also best picture. This was only achieved once, in 1991 for "Beauty and the Beast" before there was a separate category. Lasseter thinks "Wall-E's" quality could also get it into the big sandbox this year.

"That's the reason we're doing a best picture campaign. I think it's a great movie. Look, they nominated  'Life Is Beautiful' for best picture and best foreign film, why not do the same for a deserving animated film? The studio has always believed in 'Wall-E' and with the enormous public reaction to the movie we feel it deserves this recognition,"  he said.

He may be right. It's still one of the most mentioned films by academy-ites when asked to name their favorites.

Another unexpected best picture contender, "Slumdog Millionaire,"  got a rapturous response at a Landmark Theatre premiere just before its successful limited opening last week. Academy members from Paul Haggis to Robert Forster were so enthused talking at the after-party it sounded like they had just joined a cult. This kind of enthusiastic response will likely translate into first-place votes which should, along with its impressive grosses (for a specialty release), lift "Slumdog's" Oscar prospects into the stratosphere. Director Danny Boyle told us he's on a whirlwind this time that is miles apart from the low-key experience he had in his only previous encounter with Oscar, when his movie "Trainspotting" managed a screenplay nomination 12 years ago.

Finally, even though we're seeing one major contender after another now, it's also silly season. My Envelope colleague Tom O'Neil actually wrote two items recently speculating on the Oscar prospects of the teen vampire movie "Twilight" and its star-making performance from Robert Pattinson. The film had its SRO world premiere Monday night in Westwood.

Although this event was genuinely exciting and the biggest anyone could remember since "Batman" 20 years ago, nobody was thinking Oscar, Golden Globe or even Golden Satellite, Tom. It was the real potential the highly entertaining but hardly Oscar-worthy "Twilight" has for minting money that had everyone's tongues wagging at the Hammer Museum post party.

Noting the fan-demonium outside, "Batman" and "300" producer Mark Canton said THIS is what our business is really all about.

In this season of going for the gold, there's still only ONE kind of gold that really matters in Hollywood.

--Pete Hammond

(Photo: "Revolutionary Road" courtesy Francois Duhamel / Dreamworks)