Here is an Awards Podcast Featuring a Certain Movieline Editor

The Hollywood Reporter’s resident awards guru and all-around nice guy Scott Feinberg invited me to join him on the latest installment of his “Feinberg and Friends” podcast, which is now live at THR. Therein we go deep — like, deep deep, or Ed-Harris-gagging-down-amniotic-fluid-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-in-The Abyss deep — on this year’s awards race, including but not limited to… · The curious case of the semi-respectable Golden Globe Award nominations. · The Critics Choice Awards nominations. · SAG Award nominations (including Armie Hammer’s surprising nod and Albert Brooks’s shocking snub). · The resulting state of the Oscar races for Best Picture, Best Screenplay(s), Best Documentary Feature and Best Foreign-Language Film. · Which Oscar campaign has received the most bang for its buck. And more! This is also your last chance to hear me sober before some time early in January, so if that kind of thing intrigues you (Mom?), then have a listen at THR. Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.

Debra Messing & Husband Split After 10 Years

First Published: December 20, 2011 2:55 PM EST Credit: Getty Images NY, N.Y. -- Caption Daniel Zelman and Debra Messing arrive at the 61st Primetime Emmy Awards held at the Nokia Theatre, Los Angeles, on September 20, 2009Debra Messing and her husband of more than decade, actor/producer Daniel Zelman, have split. Debra Messing and Daniel Zelman privately separated earlier this year after a 10 year marriage, a rep for the star of NBCs upcoming series Smash said in a statement to Access Hollywood on Tuesday. The decision was mutual, and they remain supportive of one another and committed to raising their son as a family, the statement continued. Debra and Daniel are parents to son Roman, 7. The former Will & Grace star announced her engagement to the Damages executive producer in 1999. The couple married the following year. The pair actually met a decade before their wedding, when they were both pursuing post-graduate studies at NYU. A rep for the actress did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Access Hollywood. Copyright 2011 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Tony Kaye eyes 'Attachment'

KayeTony Kaye is at predicts direct the indie thriller "Attachment" for W2 Media, that's fully financing. Story, composed by Christopher Denham, concentrates on a married woman's one evening stand getting students coming back to haunt her when the lover begins to now her daughter and stalk her family. W2 is anticipating a spring start.Kaye ("American History X") most recently directed Adrien Brody starrer "Detachment," which world preemed within the Tribeca Film Festival taken. Brody shows an alternate teacher whose growing add-ons to students, teachers together with a runaway teen cause him to question the solitary existence he's selected. Tribeca Films acquired U.S. rights in September.Kaye also directed "Black Water Transit," a criminal offence drama occur publish-Katrina New Orleans starring Laurence Fishburne. "Transit," which was among the assets of David Bergstein, is not distributed.W2 Media came on lately co-finance and distribute "The Theatre Bizarre 2," a follow-up to Severin Films and Mataluna Prods.' "The Theater Bizarre" horror anthology. Furthermore, it introduced a deal to co-finance and take proper care of worldwide sales for "The Drummer," starring Aaron Eckhart in the biopic about Beach Boys drummer-songwriter Dennis Wilson.W2's John Flock and Adam Krentzman are settling with Kaye's reps at ICM. Contact Dork McNary at dork.mcnary@variety.com

The Amazing Spider-Man And The Dark Knight Rises Release New Movie Posters

New posters for The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises appeared within 24 hours of each other Friday and Saturday. With the clock running out on 2011 Sony and Warner Bros aren’t wasting time looking back. It’s all about what’s next. Marc Webb’s reboot of the Spider-Man franchise with Andrew Garfield as the webslinger makes it to theaters July 3, followed by the third installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman triptych with Christian Bale on July 20.

Oscar Index: And the Winner is... Old

We’ve officially crossed the halfway point of this year’s Oscar Index — a bittersweet milestone where the team at Movieline’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics takes a deep breath, orders a stiff drink, and then… orders another eight or so stiff drinks. While they slam their ways over the awards-season hump, join me for a quick run-through of where things stand this week. [Click the graphs for full-size images.] The Leading 10: 1. The Artist 2. The Descendants 3. War Horse 4. Hugo 5. Midnight in Paris 6. The Help 7. The Tree of Life 8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo 9. Moneyball 10. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Outsiders: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2; Margin Call; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn; My Week With Marilyn; Shame The week offered three general themes, starting with technically the most important: The National Board of Review’s awards announcement, which shifted a share of The Artist’s momentum to Hugo while the moviegoing public kept each throwback healthy at the box office. The Descendants enjoyed a similar phenomenon, earning multiple NBR prizes while rushing off to the best opening of any of Fox Searchlight’s recent Oscar darlings — and there are some serious earners in there, including Black Swan, Slumdog Millionaire and Juno. Secretive institutional accolades aside, that kind of concrete commercial success is without a doubt the most crucial to The Descendants’ continued award hopes — the old “you can’t ignore us, we’re loved and we’re rich” strategy that Searchlight has down to a science and which Harvey Weinstein rediscovered in recent years with the likes of Inglourious Basterds and The King’s Speech. That said, the NBR — which of late, anyway, has hardly proven an especially reliable Oscar barometer — joined last week’s Gothams, Indie Spirit and NY Film Critics Circle announcements to help advance the second theme: In Pete Hammond’s words, “[T]his year is completely, completely wide open. But then you knew that already.” But what if it’s not wide open? To wit, as Grantland’s Oscar oracle Mark Harris suggests while laying out the week’s third big theme, what if we’ve regressed to those dark days of the ’80s — when awards bodies, critics and viewers alike tuck themselves snugly into sepia-colored pods of denial: I’m all for venerating old movies, and if I’m a bit resistant to the allure of The Artist and Hugo, it may be because they practically grab you by the lapels and order you to feel a childlike sense of wonder, goddammit! But as the plot of a third Best Picture contender, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, reminds us explicitly that nostalgia for values you never actually held from an era you yourself didn’t live through isn’t really nostalgia — it’s sentimentality. At this point in the Best Picture contest, The Artist’s biggest problem is Hugo, Hugo’s biggest problem is The Artist, and Midnight in Paris’ biggest problem is that these two newer, higher-profile movies are now vying for the “let’s go on a magical journey to a more inspirational time” voting demographic that Allen has had to himself for most of 2011. A lot of advertising dollars are being spent on the proposition that this mood, which propelled The King’s Speech to a very 1980s-ish win over The Social Network last year, still prevails. It’s a brilliant theory, also enfolding The Tree of Life, The Help, and War Horse. It also underestimates the slick, utterly contemporary aplomb with which The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about to crash the race. DenbyGate exposed us to the outer reaches of the ugly, scorched-earth frontier where leverage is a finer art than the movies it seeks to benefit. With two skillful shots, Scott Rudin and David Fincher invalidated the voice of the critic vis--vis Dragon Tattoo while drawing the entire desperate culture to their sides. And this in a week when it could barely scratch the official awards surface; now it’s all anyone wants to see, precisely because of how seriously Team Girl takes its chances to break through. The whole scenario is almost enough to make you wish it were the ’80s all over again, if only to drown out the noise. And anyway, when the Academy plans to screen a restoration of the silent, inaugural Best Picture-winner Wings even Maureen Dowd is toasting The Artist on the NYT op-ed page, Rudin et. al. are going to need a better card up their sleeve than the one publicly shaming a movie critic relatively nobody reads. A few other notes: As Scott Feinberg points out, The Help having done well with women viewers plays into a historically dis-advantageous Oscar trend. The Artist, The Descendants and — thank God — Melancholia picked up some juice from smaller organizations from D.C. to Europe. And all anyone could be bothered to say following the debut of the new trailer for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was how unpleasant it looks: “Seems like Green Mile made a baby with Old Yeller and then the director decided to fly a plane into it,” wrote one astute commentator. Let’s hope for “the Daldry“‘s sake that this weekend’s first screenings can stanch some of that bile. The Leading 5: 1. Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist 2. Alexander Payne, The Descendants 3. Martin Scorsese, Hugo 4. Steven Spielberg, War Horse 5. David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Outsiders: Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris; Stephen Daldry, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Bennett Miller, Moneyball; Tate Taylor, The Help; George Clooney, The Ides of March; Tomas Alfredson, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Honestly, from where I stand, I can foresee scenarios where any one of these top five guys win it all. But until Spielberg in particular can punch in Hazanavicius, Payne and Scorsese’s zeitgeist weight-class with his two-hour plus family epic starring a horse — especially with Tintin in the multiplex mix as well — the more general sense in the cognoscenti seems to be to wait and see. Meanwhile Fincher, a two-time Oscar loser who could use a boost in the Academy’s directors branch, may have helped his cause by boldly reasserting the relationship between filmmakers and audiences in its purest form. Well done!

UBS: Viacom sets $20 bil stock buyback

Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman implied Monday that a fluctuation in Nielsen sample households might be behind a sharp ratings deterioration at Nickelodeon this fall but he admitted that there's no clarity on the drop which threw Wall Street for a loop last month. Still, Dauman wowed investors on the opening day of the three-day UBS Global Media and Communications confab in Gotham with news that the company plans to buy back a whopping $20 billion worth of stock over the next five years, accelerating an already hefty repurchase program. Asked if tying up so much cash could preclude major acquisitions, Dauman said Viacom's focused on growing "organically," beefing up international, film and TV content and its nascent film animation biz. He stressed that the combo of a new stream of animated pics plus Nickeleon's iconic TV fare will give the company significant added muscle in consumer products, where Nickelodeon already has a big footprint. At this moment, however the kid's network, which went into a ratings tailspin just ahead of the crucial holiday season, is clearly causing him some grief. "Nielsen is the only game in town for now so we have to live with it," Dauman said during his luncheon keynote presentation. "We have seen anomalies in the past. Never to this extent." Dauman revealed on Nov. 10 while discussing quarterly earnings that the generally steady kids' cable network saw a highly unusual 15%-20% ratings drop in mid-September. The company said then it was working with the ratings agency, and analyzing independent set-top box data. The net is also adding a spate of new animated and live-action programming. Investors remain baffled. "We don't know what's going on yet. We'll know next quarter" when the company announces a new set of financial results, said one attendee. Earlier in the conference, a trio of forecasters predicted that global advertising growth this year would prove resilient, although lagging earlier estimates. Zenith Optimedia's head of worldwide Steve King sees advertising rising 4.7% in 2012 after growing 3.5% this year amid the economic uncertainty convulsing Europe, the natural and nuclear disasters that hit Japan and the Arab spring that has rocked Egypt and other key territories. The numbers fall shy of Zenith's previous estimates of, respectively 5.3% and 3.6% for 2012 and 2011. Spending next year, while still weighed down by the Euro-zone crisis, will see a pop from the Olympic games in London and, Stateside, from the presidential campaign, King said. MagnaGlobal, the media unit of Interpublic Group, said Latin America posted the strongest gains this year - up over 13% -- followed closely by Central and Eastern Europe. Western Europe sales rose a meager 1.6%. North America grew 3.1%. The strongest growth rates came from Argentina -- up 38%. The lowest from beleaguered Greece -- down 19.3%. On the digital side, according to GroupM, a unit of WPP, digital media investment will make up 43% of the global ad dollar growth in 2012. Digital ad spending is expected to reach nearly $85 billion this year, a 16% jump over 2010, and rise to $98 billion in 2012. GroupM sees digital comprising 22% percent of all measured ad investment in mature western economies in 2012, and 12% percent in the faster-growing world. "The predicted respective digital growth rates in 2012 are 11% and 37%, so the faster-growing world is catching up fast," said GroupM Futures director Adam Smith at UBS. Global ad spending on paid inventory in social media is likely to be around $5 billion in 2011, or about 6% of measured online ad investment. Smith said this is probably the largest single growth component in paid-for digital today, on a trajectory, which could double to $10 billion within two years. Contact the Variety newsroom at news@variety.com

Exclusive Start Searching: Eliza Dushku Will receive a good Grip round the League

Eliza Dushku When Eliza Dushku guest-stars round the League, expect if there's some tension up. It is not personal, it's just sports. "She's a sizable Boston girl so she loves the Pats, the celts, as well as the Red-colored-colored Sox. I, however, am a sizable NY fan therefore i love the Leaders, the Yankees as well as the Knicks," Stephen Rannazzisi notifies TVGuide.com. "So there's plenty of angry sexual tension between us.Inch In Dushku's episode, airing next Thursday at 10:30/9:30c on Foreign exchange, the Buffy alum plays Kevin's new Krav Maga instructor after his wife encourages him to work through more. As noticed in this exclusive start searching, his new teacher is very hands-on, much for the disbelief of Kevin's wife and all of his pals. "Nobody would ever reckon that the woman that hot might be attracted to some guy like Kevin," Rannazzisi states. Although Rannazzisi didn't achieve meet Dushku prior to the day's shooting, he confesses the fact the two would never know each other already made their close moments together less uncomfortable. "I went to date as she was ready to go and he or she am funny and very open to trying nearly anything,Inch according to him. "The further she goes, the higher awkward it's personally which is where the comedy lies." "People it's time when you are getting into use free," he adds. Are you currently presently excited to find out Dushku round the League?