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- Hitfix: Greg Ellwood congratulates the Paramount publicity/awards folks (and we second that) for their masterful promotion of Davis Guggenheim’s education doc “Waiting for ‘Superman’,” which led them — or at least Guggenheim and the five young subjects of his film — all the way to an Oval Office meeting with President Barack Obama yesterday. Obama previously screened the film and described it as “heartbreaking” and “powerful.”
- The Playlist: Ed Davis recounts the saga of Julian Schnabel’s “Miral,” which entered the awards season with a great deal of hype, then flopped at Venice, and has now had its release date pushed into 2011 by The Weinstein Company. Davis speculates that the poor response to the film was only one of two reasons for the announcement, the other being the financially-struggling studio’s limited budget for a campaign.
- Salon: Salon.com film critic Andrew O’Hehir’s review of Disney’s “Secretariat,” in which he essentially calls the film a Tea Party fantasy, provoked a harsh rebuke from Roger Ebert last week. Yesterday, it found an even bigger-name critic when conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh spent 10 minutes of his program tearing into it and using it to illustrate the media’s alleged bias towards conservatives. Salon.com provides a link to the audio.
- Fishbowl LA: Rick Horgan reports that Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter of “The Social Network,” posted a comment on the blog of veteran writer-director-producer Ken Levine on Saturday night in response to another reader’s allegation that the film presents a misogynistic view of women. Horgan concludes that his “willingness to share himself so candidly and interactively is just the latest example of the way blogging, tweeting and status updating is changing the rules of the Hollywood PR game.
- Deadline Hollywood: Mike Speier reports that “True Grit” lenser Roger Deakins will receive the 2011 American Society of Cinematographers Lifetime Achievement Award on February 13. Over the course of his illustrious career, Deakins has received eight Oscar nominations, spanning “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994) through “The Reader” (2008), but has yet to win.
- New York Times: Op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd believes that “The Social Network” illustrates just “how little human drama changes through the ages,” since its premise, she argues and illustrates, is essentially the same as Richard Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” (1869) and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” (1954-1955). (I’ll note one thing that the piece does not: Dowd used to date Aaron Sorkin, who wrote “The Social Network.”)
- Oscar Watch: Dave Karger shares a list of the 10 films that he believes will be nominated for best picture. He has “The King’s Speech” in the top spot, and then “True Grit” (even though nobody has seen it yet) ahead of “The Social Network” (even though virtually everyone has seen it and loved it). Other interesting choices: the rom-com “How Do You Know” (another that nobody has seen yet) and Clint Eastwood‘s “Hereafter” (which generated very mixed responses at the Venice Film Festival).
- Just Jared: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the enigmatic subject of “The Social Network,” is now being followed by some new “friends” that he might like to untag: the paparazzi. “Zuck” and his girlfriend Priscilla Chan were photographed on Sunday afternoon as they visited a local farmers market, attended a Jewish festival, and stopped at a gas station. (Ah, the exciting life of the world’s youngest billionaire!)
- Deadline Hollywood: Mike Speier passes along the first details about a 2013 sequel to the 2010 best animated feature contender “How to Train Your Dragon.” Voice actors Jay Baruchel, Craig Ferguson, America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, and Kristen Wiig will all be back; there’s no word on yet on whether or not Gerard Butler will be returning; and Dean Deblois will be the lone writer and director, while Chris Sanders, who shared those duties with him on the first film, will serve as executive producer.
- Hollywood-Elsewhere: Jeff Wells is quite a character, and you never know what you’re going to find when you visit his “stream-of-consciousness” blog, so perhaps we shouldn’t have been as surprised as we were to visit on Monday morning and read a detailed account of his run-in with the law on Sunday evening — handcuffs, bail, and all — following a party at the Hamptons International Film Festival. He writes that because of the episode his “spirit slowly withered and died.”
Photo: President Obama and the young subjects of “Waiting for ‘Superman’” visit in the Oval Office yesterday. Credit: The White House.