So much for that “extortion” plot that director James Toback said kept his film “Tyson” off the Oscar shortlist.

In Friday’s New York Times, the director charged that during the voting process for the documentary feature award, he encountered an incident “which I fully put in the category of extortion.” He stood behind his comments in a statement released this morning:

"I regret that I didn’t bring my concerns to the attention of the Academy sooner but I have now done so and I have been reassured that they are looking into the matter."

Toback declined to give any more details about his complaint – but the Academy’s executive director, Bruce Davis, tells theWrap that Toback’s “concern was that one of the documentarians voting to pick the shortlist bore him a grudge and should have recused himself/herself from the balloting.”

The Academy did indeed investigate, Davis says, asking PricewaterhouseCoopers to examine the voting records and determine if the action of any one voter would have been enough to deny “Tyson” a spot it otherwise would have earned.

The accounting firm, he says, quoting PwC’s report, “has assured us that ‘no single voter was responsible for [“Tyson”’s] failure to make the shortlist….’”

In the Times story, Toback referred to the documentary voters as “some tiny, dirty covert weirdly protective little group within the Academy.”

In fact, the documentary branch of the Academy contains about 150 members, including Michael Moore (whose “Capitalism: A Love Story” was also left off the shortlist), Penelope Spheeris, Albert Maysles and Stacy Peralta. All are eligible to take part in the initial round of voting, in which each participating member was sent screeners of 15 of the 89 eligible documentary features.

The division of labor means that each of the eligible documentaries will have been scored by about two dozen members – not a large body of voters, but one that should be big enough to absorb any individuals looking to skew the vote for personal reasons.

While the shortlist always contains surprises, most observers figure they have to do with personal preferences of the documentary filmmakers who make up the branch, not with grudges or failed extortion plots.

In an interview conducted before the shortlist was announced, Toback told And the Winner Is … columnist Scott Feinberg about a conversation he’d recently had with Tyson – one that at the moment looks prescient.

“I was talking to him a couple of weeks ago,” Toback told Feinberg, “and I said to him, ‘You know, you and I’ — because I do put myself in the same category — ‘are in the unique and unfortunate position of probably having caused ourselves more pain and misery than any of our enemies or people who wished us ill ever could have done in combination.’”

(Photo of Tyson and Toback by Tracey Morris/Sony Pictures Classics)

In this morning’s roundup of Oscar news ‘n’ notes from around the web, “Tyson” strikes back, things fall apart, and Nic Cage gets weird.

When I said yesterday that the omissions in this year’s documentary shortlist “aren’t going to stir up any grand talk of conspiracies,” I guess I wasn’t taking “Tyson” director James Toback into account. Toback tells the New York Times that during the first-round committee screening process, he experienced something “which I put fully in the category of extortion.” No details, no specifics – just hints about “some tiny, dirty covert weirdly protective little group within the Academy,” by which he means the volunteers from the documentary branch who screened and scored the 84 eligible films to reach the shortlist of 15. Rob Epstein, the documentarian and Academy governor who chairs the branch’s executive committee, says he has no idea what Toback’s talking about. (New York Times) 

After detailing the most despicable Oscar snubs of the decade last week, indieWIRE’s Peter Knegt celebrates “25 things the Academy got right.” He includes Enimen’s best-song win for “Lose Yourself,” the winners in the animated-feature category, Roman Polanski’s and Steven Soderberg’s best-director wins for “The Pianist” and “Traffic,” respectively, the plethora of indies and foreign films in the screenplay categories … and, in the top spot, the overall choices made by Academy voters in 2007: “No Country for Old Men” for best picture, “Falling Slowly” from “Once” for best song, “There Will Be Blood” for cinematography, and an acting slate of Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton. (Left, that’s Ethan Coen, producer Scott Rudin and Joel Coen with their Oscars for “No Country”; photo by Matt Petit/AMPAS)

Jeff Wells talks to a guy who says “everything’s falling apart.” He’s apparently talking about the perception that “Nine,” “The Lovely Bones,” “Invictus” and “Avatar” are front-runners sight unseen, and the way that perception might be taking a hit now that the first two are beginning to screen. But there’s no telling who the guy is, what he’s actually seen, and whether he’s working from anything more than a hunch. (Hollywood Elsewhere)

David Poland sums up the race with 17 weeks to go. Actually, he spends most of his time summing up the state of Oscar coverage. As usual when Poland looks at the entertainment press, it’s not a pretty picture: “more relentless and less thoughtful than ever,” he says. (Movie City News) 

Sasha Stone convenes pundits and asks questions. The most passion comes from the folks who thought moving the honorary Oscars into a separate Governors Awards ceremony was a terrible idea. I’m not one of them. (Awards Daily)

Dave Karger assesses the Oscar prospects of the films opening today. For “Broken Embraces,” he gives Penelope Cruz a shot at a best-actress nod and Pedro Almodovar a chance at an original-screenplay nomination; for “The Blind Side,” he thinks Sandra Bullock stands at better chance with the Golden Globes. (Oscar Watch)

Patrick Goldstein wonders if anybody is unhappy about the Oscar snub of Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story.” His conclusion: no. Me, I’m still waiting to see what Jim Toback has to say about it. (The Big Picture)

Anne Thompson asks Tom Ford 16 questions about “A Single Man.” Ford says he is “very much” the character Colin First plays in the film, a gay man despondent over the death of his partner of 16 years, and that many details in the film came from his own life. Furniture, too: “I dragged in my furniture, pits and pieces of art … We hung drapes and made a curved sofa and threw down some shag carpet from Carpet Warehouse.” (Thompson on Hollywood)

Roger Ebert loves Nic Cage’s unhinged performance in “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.” (He loves a lot of stuff these days.) Owen Glieberman at Entertainment Weekly loves Cage, too. As does Betsy Sharkey at the L.A. Times. And A.O. Scott at the New York Times. Will all that love be enough to squeeze Cage into the best-actor race? It’s a longshot, but stranger things have happened. Not many of them, though.

Gerard Kennedy takes another look at the original score category. He thinks Michael Giacchino leads the pack with his score for “Up” (and maybe “Star Trek” too), likes Thomas Newman (“Brothers”), Alexandre Desplat (“Fantastic Mr. Fox”) and Elliot Goldenthal (“Public Enemies”), and wonders if a comeback could be in the making for Marvin Hamlisch (“The Informant!”). But he also wonders about the unheard music to “Avatar” and “The Lovely Bones”; the former is from old hand James Horner, the latter from ambient/pop musician Brian Eno. (In Contention)
 

 Oscar staffers don’t have as much to fear from the show’s new director, Hamish Hamilton, as they originally feared.

Responding to a post in this column that followed the announcement of the British director’s hiring, an Academy spokesperson says that Hamilton will not be bringing a large UK crew to the Oscar show, a fear that some disgruntled staff members had expressed to me.

He will bring his “vision mixer,” a technical-director-type position that doesn’t normally exist in American television, as well as his main associate director. Otherwise, the spokesperson says, he will be staffing the Oscar show with an American crew.

Longtime Oscar crew members, including those who have worked with Hamilton in the past, were angered because he normally brings in additional British ADs and camera operators when he does shows in the United States.

The first of three rounds in the documentary feature judging has been completed, and in narrowing the contenders to 15, the Academy’s documentary screening committees have kicked a few big names out of the race.

Goodbye, Michael Moore. It’s a TKO, Mike Tyson. You won’t be winning a second Oscar this year, Davis Guggenheim. Your fairy-tale story isn’t getting this particular happy ending, Anvil.

The documentary committee is no stranger to controversy (remember “Hoop Dreams”?), but this year’s omissions aren’t going to stir up any grand talk of conspiracies. Gone are the days when the doc screening committee, made up of members whose only qualification was that they had lots of free time, would halt screenings by waving little flashlights 20 minutes into the movie. 

Now the committee is made up of members of the documentary branch, and now they watch everything all the way through.  The fact that the voters have to see every movie before voting throws many of the usual yardsticks (visibility, momentum, popularity) out the window.

("Capitalism: A Love Story" photo: Overture Films/Front Street Productions)

It comes down, basically, to what they like. Which means that the shortlist can teach a few lessons about just how the voters think, and what they’re looking for. For example:

1. A big name is not a free pass.

Michael Moore is the 800-pound gorilla in the field. He presented “Capitalism: A Love Story” as his magnum opus, and he worked it hard. Some reviews were raves; others weren’t. In the end, it’s likely that voters, unswayed by celebrity, just didn’t think it was good enough. (I didn’t, either.)

Davis Guggenheim was probably the second biggest name in the competition, a winner three years ago for “An Inconvenient Truth.” (Al Gore got the glory; Davis went home with the statuette.) Guggenheim made a wonderful documentary this year, “It Might Get Loud,” which didn’t get shortlisted. Because:

2. The Academy is too old to rock ’n’ roll.

Or maybe age has nothing to do with it; maybe they’re just reluctant to rock.

Whatever the reason, “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” was one of the year’s funniest docs, the touching story of a real-life Spinal Tap. It attracted enthusiastic, high-profile fans. But it was also about loud, brash and more than occasionally stupid rock 'n' roll. And while the media, guild members and other guests went to “Anvil!” parties with Catherine Keener and Tilda Swinton and Cameron Crowe, the doc committee members watched it in a dark room and shrugged.

“It Might Get Loud,” meanwhile, was Guggenheim’s classy doc about three rockers: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s the Edge and the White Stripes’ Jack White. The musical performances were terrific, the conversations were often relevatory, and the whole thing was enormously entertaining. But it was about guys playing guitars.

“Soundtrack for a Revolution,” on the other hand, made the shortlist as a music-heavy doc that also has terrific performances, intercut with a civil rights movement primer that’s awfully pro forma and doesn’t tell you much that hasn’t already been seen in many previous documentaries. But the subject clearly gave it a gravitas with the committee that the rock docs didn’t have. Which means:

3. Serious always plays better than entertaining.

Yes, it was a cheap shot a couple of years ago when Oscar show presenter Jerry Seinfeld described the documentary nominees as “five incredibly depressing” films. But year after year, despite some notable exceptions, the nominees are a dour lot.

You don’t even need to look at the doc features to see this; just compare the shortlist in the documentary short category with the doc shorts nominees at the International Documentary Association awards. The IDA mixes it up with a lovely tone poem set high above London and a lyrical ode to a stark South Australian landscape in addition to last year’s serious, issue-oriented Oscar nominee “Sari’s Mother.” The Oscar doc short shortlist, on the other hand, was virtually all long (30- to 40-minute) docs on serious topical issues.

The feature shortlist is similar. It contains movies about dolphin slaughter, Lyme disease, unsafe food, human rights protests in Burma, trash collectors in Egypt, doctors in war zones in the Congo, bombing in Iraq, unaccompanied child migrants in Mexico …

The funny thing is, entertaining often wins in the feature documentary category; witness “Man on Wire” and “March of the Penguins.” It just doesn’t get nominated very often. This year, the “Chorus Line” doc “Every Little Step” qualifies – which leads to a corollary to the last rule:

4. If you’re making a doc about a public figure, it helps if they have a little heft to them.

Anvil? Not so much pop-culture cachet. “A Chorus Line"? Classic.

Mike Tyson? Perhaps too volatile to make voters comfortable with a film that sometimes plays like an apologia, however revealing it is. Muhammad Ali? Sure, he’s unassailable.

Finally, here’s one last lesson – though it’s a lesson just waiting to be unlearned:

5. Maybe, just maybe, the Holocaust is played out as an Oscar doc subject.

We’ve now gone seven years since the last Holocaust-themed documentary feature was nominated (“Prisoner of Paradise”), and nine since the last one won (“Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport”).

It may have once been the Academy’s favorite doc theme. But as World War II recedes into the past and new members join AMPAS, the days of make-a-Holocaust-doc, get-a-nomination may be ending … at least until the next great Holocaust doc comes along.

In this morning’s roundup of Oscar news ‘n’ notes from around the web, the doc shortlist gets scrutinized and the top categories get analyzed.

New Gurus of Gold charts. “Precious” is now in the top slot, “Up in the Air” drops to second, “Invictus,” “The Hurt Locker” and “An Education” follow. But “Precious” director Lee Daniels is only fourth on the best-director chart, behind Jason Reitman, Kathryn Bigelow and Clint Eastwood. Unsurprisingly, “Up” dominates the animated-feature predictions. (Movie City News)

Vanity Fair jumps into the Oscar-handicapping game. In part, this consists of rounding up the usual suspects – “Precious,” Jeff Bridges, Carey Mulligan, Kathryn Bigelow -- though Julian Sancton then goes on to break down picks and dark horses in nine categories. He thinks Quentin Tarantino is a more likely best-director nominee than Jason Reitman, which sounds a little crazy to me.  (Little Gold Men)

A.J. Schnack considers the newly-released documentary-feature shortlist. To him, the most surprisingly omission is the Anna Wintour doc “The September Issue,” along with Aron Gaudet’s “The Way We Get By.” He figures that the frontrunners are “The Cove,” “Food, Inc.” (right) and “Burma VJ,” and that the final two nominations will go to “The Beaches of Agnes” and “Mugabe and the White African.” (All These Wonderful Things)

David Poland also looks at the doc shortlist and deems it “very strong.” He thinks that “Tyson” should have been on the list, and that the frontrunners are now “The Cove,” “Every Little Step” and “Valentino: The Last Emperor.” I’ll go with him on the first of those, but I’ll bet that at least one if not both of the other two doesn’t land a nomination. Oscar doc voters like serious issues way more than they like entertainment or fashion. (The Hot Blog)

Michael Cieply examines the surprise emergence of “Crazy Heart” in the race, and the intriguingly tangled tale of the film’s road to Oscar: made by Country Music Television, rejected by Paramount, rescued by Fox Searchlight. (The New York Times)

Kris Tapley listens to the U2 song “Winter,” their Oscar contender from the Jim Sheridan movie “Brothers,” and figures the song could make the cut and land a nomination. Based on a single listen (which, let’s face it, is what most music-branch voters will give it), I’d say Bono and the boys will have a rough go of it. The song begins over the final moments of the film, but most of it plays over the credits, which will diminish its impact when voters watch the clip-compilation reel that is now used for judging in this category. And more damaging, to my mind, is that the song sets up a nice mood but doesn’t really go anywhere; there’s no real hook, no chorus that stands out, not enough to grab voters who’ll be considering 40 to 50 songs in one sitting. I love U2; and I really love “Bad,” the 1984 U2 song that figures prominently in the movie and is even incorporated into the score; and I may learn to love “Winter” once I’ve heard it a dozen more times – but for now, my guess is that there’s no Oscar on the horizon for this particular track. (In Contention)

Tom O’Neil thinks that the three frontrunners in the supporting-actor race are 1) Christoph Waltz in “Inglourious Basterds,” 2) Christopher Plummer in “The Last Station,” and 3) Alec Baldwin in “It’s Complicated.” To which I say: 1) of course; 2) yes, unless the actors branch decides he’s lead; and 3) whaaat? But then, I haven’t seen “It’s Complicated” yet. Still, I have a hard time believing that Alfred Molina in “An Education” isn’t near the top of the list, too. (Gold Derby) 

The Academy has released the shortlist of 15 documentaries that will move into the next round of competition for the 82nd Academy Awards, and several of the year's highest-profile documentaries are not  on the list.

Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" was not included on the shortlist, which was chosen by the Documentary Branch Screening Committee, volunteers who viewed and scored all the eligible films.  Neither was director James Toback's well-received "Tyson," which covered the life of boxer Mike Tyson in his own words.

And the screening committee obviously doesn't like rock 'n' roll, because neither "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" nor Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim's "It Might Get Loud" made the cut.

Among the films that did qualify are the presumed frontrunner, "The Cove" (left), along with "Food, Inc.," the "Chorus Line" doc "Every Little Step," "Valentino: The Last Emperor" (but not the other fashion-world entry, "The September Issue"), and Andy Abrahams Wilson's "Under Our Skin," which recently screened as part of TheWrap's Filmmaker Screening Series.

The full list, with each film's director:

“The Beaches of Agnes,” Agnès Varda.

“Burma VJ,” Anders Østergaard. 

“The Cove,” Louie Psihoyos.

“Every Little Step,” James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo.

“Facing Ali,” Pete McCormack. 

“Food, Inc.,” Robert Kenner.

“Garbage Dreams,” Mai Iskander. 

“Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders,” Mark N. Hopkins.

“The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith.

“Mugabe and the White African,” Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey.

“Sergio,” Greg Barker.

“Soundtrack for a Revolution,” Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman.

“Under Our Skin,” Andy Abrahams Wilson.

“Valentino The Last Emperor,” Matt Tyrnauer.
 

Over at Gold Derby, Tom O’Neil loves making bold pronouncements about the Oscar race. Lives for it, in fact. He has fun with the game, and more power to him.

His latest bold pronouncement, in which he explained why “Inglourious Basterds” would win the Oscar for best picture, has been stirring up lots of talk in Oscar-blogging circles, where we all love to sit around and talk about what each other is saying.

And his theory does bear a little examination (and a little disputation), since he’s predicting that Quentin Tarantino will sail to victory based on momentum from a Hollywood guild that doesn’t even like him.

O’Neil starts from the premise that the film that wins the Academy Award for best picture usually wins thedirector Oscar as well. And the director who wins the Oscar is usually the same director who already won the DGA Award for feature film directing. Ergo, the film that wins the DGA Award will be the Oscar frontrunner for best picture.

And then he explains just why he thinks Tarantino will win the DGA Award, which means he’ll win the Oscar, which means “Inglourious Basterds” will be named best picture. (Photo: Eli Roth and Brad Pitt/The Weinstein Company)

Basically, his argument is that Tarantino still has the cool factor, along with a big hit movie, that will make him an irresistible choice in a year in which his competitors will be “refried beans” like Clint Eastwood and Peter Jackson. He thinks the buzz on “Nine” is quieting, hurting Rob Marshall’s chances, and he doubts that Jason Reitman can win, and he thinks Kathryn Bigelow will be nominated, “but women rarely triumph at these ole boys’ clubs.”

His conclusion: “Therefore, by process of elimination, it looks like Tarantino is the likely front-runner, which means ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is probably ahead for the top Oscars, too.”

Now, I thought “Inglourious Basterds” was a thoroughly entertaining movie, and I think it’ll probably get (and probably deserve) one of those 10 best-picture Oscar nominations. It’s not a slam-dunk, but I expect it to get in.

But I don’t expect it to roll to victory after picking up momentum at the DGA Awards. And I certainly don’t expect the “old boys club” to shun people they’ve liked before, ignore a well-liked and hard-working young director coming into his own, and use gender as an excuse to shun the director of one of the best-reviewed films of the year.

Because if the DGA is an old boys club, Tarantino is not one of the old boys. He’s not a member of the guild, never has been, and that fact has definitely caused some ill will within the organization.

When I asked a friend inside the DGA about Tarantino, the response came quickly: “He’s not very well liked around here.”

Unlike the Writers Guild, the directors do nominate non-DGA members for their top awards. But look at their winners over the last 20 years: all members.  ("Slumdog Milionaire" director Danny Boyle was not a member at the time of his win, but he joined soon afterwards.) Tarantino was only nominated for the guild’s top honor once, for “Pulp Fiction,” back when most of the DGA brass were convinced that he’d eventually join.

Another problem with O’Neil’s “DGA win = Oscar directing win = Oscar best picture win” equation, besides the fact that the Oscars didn’t match four times in the past 11 years, is that this year the two Oscar races are being counted in completely different ways.

The directing Oscar will use the old-fashioned one-member, one-vote format; best picture will use the preferential system, which will look for a consensus and will take into account second- and third-place votes. The result probably will be even more splits between director and picture.

I just don’t think there’s enough affection for “Inglourious Basterds” for it to prevail in a preferential tally. And I suspect that its delirious historical revisionism won’t exactly resonate among voters who’ve long embraced more reverent World War II films.

But even it does somehow win over the Academy (which, after all, loved Tarantino at the Governors Awards last weekend), I’d be amazed if Tarantino uses the DGA as his springboard to Oscar gloury. Because, you know, those guys kind of think he’s a basterd.

Sorry, Tom. I’m not buying this one.
 

The selection of Hamish Hamilton to direct the 82nd Academy Awards was met with jubilation by many hoping for a more up-to-date Oscars, one that will be more entertaining and lure in more viewers.

Among people who work on the show, though, the reaction was considerably more measured -- and coupled with a very real fear that in these economic times, giving Oscar jobs to a British director and his key aides is not a message the Academy should be sending.

“There’s a lot of animosity right now,” said one veteran crew member who expects to work on this Oscar show as well. “It’s an American TV show. Why are we outsourcing it to the Brits?”

On variety shows like the Oscars, the director hires his own team of associate and assistant directors, camera operators and stage managers. In the U.S., directors generally draw from a pool of experienced talent who work all the awards shows and major live events; the top echelon, who staff the Oscars each year, consists of no more than a few dozen in each occupation.

But Hamilton, who has directed numerous shows in the U.S over the past few years, generally brings his entire team of assistant and associate directors and camera operators from England. At the Oscars, staffers expect him to bring in his “vision mixer” -- a British term for a job that doesn’t exist in the United States, a combination director/technical director who chooses most of the camera shots -- as well his main AD and a few other ADs and cameramen.

ADDENDUM: An Academy spokesperson says that despite the fears of crew members, Hamilton will not be bringing his full team to the United States for the Oscar show.  He will use his British vision mixer and his main AD, but the rest of the crew will be staffed by an American crew.

In recent years, variety television and some awards shows have seen what some in the field have termed a "British invasion" of crew members following the likes of "American Idol" producer Nigel Lythgoe.  One reason for anger among staffers is that American variety-show workers find it very difficult to obtain visas to work in the U.K. “We’ll give all of his people visas, but it’s not reciprocal,” says a disgruntled awards-show vet. “They’re going down a really terrible path, and a lot of people are angry.”

Beyond the displeasure with the idea of importing any staffers, crew members who’ve worked with Hamilton are divided on his suitability for the Oscar job.

“He’s very British, very creative, and a little scattered,” was a typical comment.

“He’s a wonderful editor, but his live shows are not as good,” agreed another staffer.

“He’s quite the English gentleman,” said a third. “He comes at it from a different direction. I like him.”

[This story has been amended since its original posting to reflect information from the Academy on the size of Hamilton's British team.]