For three years, Harvey Weinstein went without an Academy Award Best Picture nominee to promote. That's like three Decembers in a row where they forget to run How the Grinch Stole Christmas. (Talking to Ramin Setoodeh for Newsweek, Harvey recalls the golden days of early Miramax Oscar campaigns when he would force his way into potential voters' homes to make them watch his movies, and actually says, "I was like Santa Claus. I had all the DVDs, and I'd go to everybody's house, with cookies." Setoodeh fails to ask about reports that anyone who tried to reach for one of Harvey's cookies got a fork stuck in his hand.) This year, Harvey--my apparent inability to refer to this man, who I have never met, as "Weinstein" testifies to his status as a semi-beloved living cartoon character--has a contender in The Reader, the roots of which go back to the days when, as the head of Miramax, he was an Oscar force to be reckoned with, sending out Shakespeare in Love to defeat Saving Private Ryan and somehow wangling a nomination for the fluffy Chocolat. Apparently Harvey read the Bernhard Schlink novel in a single night back in 1997, the year it was first translated into English, while keeping watch over his sick daughter. In the dawn he rose like thunder and and sent one of his minions to Germany to secure the movie rights, with orders that if he failed, he was never to darken Harvey's towels again. The movie had a troubled history that included the deaths of two of its producers, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack. And when it finally opened this past fall, it didn't get the reviews that the filmmakers might have wanted. In fact, it set off a brief exchange of gunfire on-line when a blogger used Manohla Dargis's dismissive New York Times review to accuse her of being insensitive to the plight of ambitious bad movies. And since the nominations were annnounced, Ron Rosenbaum of Slate pondered the question of whether the movie should be given an Oscar in an essay with the ambiguous title, "Don't Give an Oscar to The Reader".

Weinstein laughs off all of this and much, much else. The important thing for him is that he's back, baby, after a dearth of nominations and a few high-profile box-office disappintments (such as Grindhouse) that followed his and his brother Bob's departure from the company they'd created and the establishment of their new base of operations, The Weinstein Company.

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Hot on the heels of the great Tropic Thunder/"retard" controversy come reports that groups for the unsighted are angry about the new movie Blindness, with the National Federation for the Blind planning protests when the film opens in theaters tomorrow. The movie, which was directed by Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian whiz kid responsible for City of God and The Constant Gardener, is a dystopian fantasy that depicts the effects of an epidemic that sweeps through a large city, rendering its inhabitants blind. It stars Julianne Moore as a woman who doesn't go blind but pretends that she has so that she can remain with her husband, played by Mark Ruffalo, when he and others who have been stricken are quarantined. The city is unnamed --the movie was shot principally in Sao Paolo, Brazil, with additional shooting in parts of Canada and Uruguay--and the characters have names like "The Doctor", "The Doctor's Wife", "The Thief", "The Accountant", and "Woman with Dark Glasses." Those capable of taking a hint might conclude that the film is intended as an allegory with symbolic characters, but when representatives of the NFB attended a preview, all they saw--or heard, and had described to them or something--was a major motion picture in which a bunch of people who instantly and mysteriously lose their sight insist on taking a glass-half-empty attitude about it.

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