Movie Make-out

By now, almost everyone knows that the best way for an actor—or actress, but I really dislike the word sometimes—to garner an Oscar nomination includes being British or playing a person with mental disabilities.

Well, Variety’s Timothy M. Gray came up with a few more categories to add to the “Oscars bait” pool, including:

Talk funny. Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood was a prime example of a long, proud tradition of speaking in a strange voice, using eccentric rhythms and speech patterns and—this is important—doing it while squinting.

Of all the things that actor Robert Downey, Jr. and MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz talked about in their recent interview, the quote that Ain’t It Cool News pulled out was this one:

MTV: You know that The Avengers movie is the one every comic book fan is salivating for.

Downey: That means if we don’t get it right, it’s really going to suck. It has to be the crowning blow of Marvel’s best and brightest, because it’s the hardest thing to get right. It’s tough to spin all the plates for one of these characters.

Whereas, I’m really more about this one:

I think it’s really important to keep up that idea of [Tony Stark's] interfacing with inanimate objects. He’s at his greatest ease when he’s faced with machines. I would love to see a little shout-out to the fact that he’s an MIT graduate. I love the idea of him inviting over a bunch of super-nerds from MIT who wind up figuring into [Iron Man 3] a little bit.

Of course, all of this and everything else RDJ talked about it pure speculation because the script hasn’t even been completed yet, but maybe Jon Favreau’s the kind of director who takes in that kind of input from lead actors?

Check out the rest of the interview—including some dish on Sherlock Holmes—here.

Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity opens March 20, 2009. Looks breezy enough, but despite its businessman twist, this sort of cool cat heist flick is fairly well-worn territory.

Much props go to 27 Dresses star Katherine Heigl who—as of today—started being just one year younger than me at 30. Much disgust goes to her manager for not turning down the role of Nicole in My Father the Hero 14 years ago, because it gave the world this cringe-worthy scene (via EW’s Popwatch blog).

Just in case you didn’t get enough of suave golden boy Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight this summer, you’re in luck. Hollywood Reporter noted last week that Eckhart will be the star of his very first action flick called Battle: Los Angeles for Columbia Pictures—hopefully not to be confused with Battlefield Earth in posterity.

This Battle is also a science fiction film, about a Marine platoon leader (Eckhart) and his squad who are fighting aliens in Los Angeles during an invasion. The script is by Chris Bertolini, whose last major work was adapting The General’s Daughter for its 1999 release; Jonathan Liebesman who apparently did a decent enough job directing Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning will take the helm for this one.

I’m definitely ready to believe Eckhart as a Marine, mostly because of the stark earnestness he brought to Harvey Dent in Knight. I’m also curious as to finding out more about this movie because with the advent of a different kind of sci-fi with the “new” “Battlestar Galactica” TV series and the revamped “Doctor Who,” I gotta know exactly where these aliens are supposed to be coming from and how far in the future this film will be set.

I mean, you’d think we’d have mined the “Let’s fight aliens on our own turf” genre enough with just Independence Day alone, right?