Funnyman Jay Baruchel, his eternally-corrugated forehead and one of his many tattoos.

Jay Baruchel? He's the frisky title character in TV's Undeclared, the Led Zep fanatic in Almost Famous, the brain-damaged boxer in Million Dollar Baby, Seth Rogen's roommate in Knocked Up., the fanboy who taps Kirsten Bell with his, um, light saber in Fanboys, the opportunistic ex-beau in Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist and, coming Friday, a starring role as the "my" in She's Out of My League. The new film, starring Baruchel as an average-looking guy insecure about dating the va-va-voomy Alice Eve, is a raunchy sex comedy that's surprisingly sweet.

A Montreal homeboy with (I kid you not) a blood-red maple leaf tattooed over his heart, Baruchel is a patriotic Canadian who resembles the young Jeff Goldblum and possesses a similarly offbeat timing. On a press tour last month, Baruchel passed through Philadelphia ostensibly to talk about League. But what really got him going was the suggestion that he's part of "The Canadian Conspiracy." (That was the title of a very droll 1980s documentary, probably made before Baruchel was born, suggesting that Canadian comedians like Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, Eugene Levy and Dan Aykroyd were part of a plot to infiltrate and subvert the United States through comedy).

"Absolutely," declared Baruchel. "I'm part of the third-wave Canadian conspiracy. "Aykroyd and John Candy were first-wave, Kids in the Hall and Mike Myers were second-wave, and now it's me, Michael Cera and [Baruchel's Knocked Up co-star] Seth Rogen." (He adds of the Torontonian, "Cera roots for the wrong hockey team, but he's Canadian nonetheless.")

"Why does Canada export so many people in comedy?" he asks. "Because we have one foot in Britain and the other in America. Our sense of humor is both dry British and slapstick American."

Still, Baruchel's ultimate goal is not to be a secret agent in the Canadian comedy invasion of the U.S. "My dream is to direct horror movies in Montreal," he says. "I love acting, but the endgame is to get close to [Canadian filmmaker and horrormeister] David Cronenberg."

What are the distinctions of Canadian funny? How have the Canadians influenced the direction of U.S. comedy? Which Canuck comics did Baruchel fail to mention?

Mo'Nique, with her supporting actress honors. Is the comedienne a candidate for Oscar host?

Who could disagree with esteemed Oscarologist Damien Bona, author of the indispensible Inside Oscar, that this year's Academy Awards show had to be one of the dreariest ever? Despite showcasing historic wins (Precious scenarist Geoffrey Fletcher is the first African-American to receive screenwriting honors and Hurt Locker filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow the first female to receive director laurels), the telecast was, entertainment-wise, the biggest loser. (In terms of ratings, it did OK, marking a 15 per cent uptick over last year.)

Who can fix the Oscar fix? Here's my two cents: 1) A show that celebrates movies should produce in the audience the exhilaration that great movies can. Hire a great editor -- Chuck Workman, say) to compile a montage of the Best Picture moments and a montage reel each for the acting categories. (The art direction, editing and costume categories could similarly  best be showcased this way.) 2) Hire a producer who understands live television.

Your thoughts?

Kathryn Bigelow, best director

Wow. Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker wins six Oscars, including best director, making her the first woman in 82 years to win in that category. Once again,  indie upsets the studio Bigfoot. Good night for Precious (Oscars for adapted screenplay and Mo'Nique). Good night for veterans Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock. Meryl Streep, the most-nominated (and most-losing) performer in Academy history, is canonized by colleagues Stanley Tucci, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. Good night for Up. Up in the Air is shut out.

Your thoughts on Oscar awards and Oscarcast? Much as I love Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, I thought they were uncharacteristically fogeyish. You?

Alfred Hutchcock and beau ideal Cary Grant.

What with the recent release of Shutter Island, featuring the fourth collaboration between filmmaker Martin Scorsese and his muse Leonardo DiCaprio, and this week's Alice in Wonderland, marking the fifth teaming of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, a lot of movie geeks, including New York Mag's Vulture, are thinking of the most fruitful director/star couplings. Under the eye of a certain filmmaker, an actor can show all of his facets. Similarly, sometimes a director can see things in an actor that the performer didn't know he had.

Vulture considered only the last 25 years, so Alfred Hitchcock was out of the running in its top 15. Hitchcock liked to say that when he cast the ideal man, he tapped Cary Grant (Notorious, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest) and when he needed an Everyman, he called upon Jimmy Stewart (Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo). Likewise, the comically unstable chemistry between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton (Annie Hall, Love and Death, Manhattan, Manhattan Murder Mystery) did not fit the time restrictions. Limiting the contest to pairings post-1990, also excludes Howard Hawks and Grant (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, I Was a Male War Bride, Monkey Business) the legendary John Ford/Henry Fonda team (Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, Ford Apache) and, or course, the dynamic John Ford/John Wayne duo (Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Ford Apache, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). And then there's the case of D.W. Griffith and Lillian Gish, whose credits are too voluminous to cite.)

Would Clint Eastwood enjoy his iconic status had he not worked repeatdly with Sergio Leone  (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)? Ditto Eastwood's work with Don Siegel? (Coogan's Bluff, Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Beguiled, Dirty Harry)? It is fair to say the the screen union of Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland (Meet Me in St. Louis, The Clock, The Pirate) fixed both of their places in the Hollywood firmament. And you may disagree, but I don't think any director uses Paul Rudd more effectively than Amy Heckerling (Clueless, I Could Never Be Your Woman). Or is it that Rudd feels secure to give her performances that he doesn't give Judd Apatow? And good golly, I haven't even mentioned George Cukor/Katharine Hepburn, Akira Kurosawa/Toshiro Mifune, Francois Truffaut/Jean-Pierre Leaud, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder/Hanna Schygulla.

If there were an Oscar for best American director/star teams, my nominations would be Spike Lee and Denzel Washington (Mo' Better Blues, Malcolm X, He Got Game), Howard Hawks and Cary Grant, Nancy Meyers and Diane Keaton (this is tricky, because Meyers is screenwriter only on some of these titles: Baby Boom, Father of the Bride, Something's Gotta Give), Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood, Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart and Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, New York, New York, Raging Bull, King of Comedy, GoodFellas, Cape Fear and Casino).

Yours? Why?

Master of his domain: Albert C. Barnes at his Foundation, posing before Cezanne's "The Card Players."

Don Argott's The Art of the Steal, about the utopian past and controversial future of The Barnes Foundation, opens in Philadelphia and New York today. Argott's brief: Not only does moving the unique institution expressly break Barnes'' will, but that it will transform a singular institution into a McBarnes.

The reviews range from positive to mixed. Here's Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. And here's Lee Rosenbaum of the culturegrrl blog.  Here's Part II of Rosenbaum's post. And here's mine.

Consider this an open thread for your thoughts about the movie and the proposed move.

Richard Pryor (circa 1970), left, and Marlon Wayans, right

While Flickgrrl is not generally a huge fan of biopics, she makes an exception in the case of writer/director Bill Condon, who made the resonant Gods and Monsters (about horrormeister James Whale), Kinsey (about the mid-20th century American sexologist) and Dreamgirls (a musical suggeted by the careers of Berry Gordy, The Supremes and Marvin Gaye). Condon, who elicited such a terrific -- and Oscar nominated-- performance from Eddie Murphy in Dreamgirls, had hoped to cast the funnyman as the late comic Richard Pryor (a huge influence on Murphy's standup comedy). When the filmmaker and star could not come to terms, Condon cast Marlon Wayans, youngest of the talented brood of ten, and a funnyman who, like Pryor, has what LA Times reporter Geoff Boucher calls both art-house and outhouse cred (i.e., Requiem for a Dream and White Chicks.) Flickgrrl likes Wayans' crack  that Bill Cosby was the Martin Luther King of comedy and Pryor the Malcolm X. Still, if Flickgrrl was casting director the role would have gone not to Murphy but to Don Cheadle, who, unlike the solidly-built Wayans, is wiry and wiry like Pryor.

Who would you cast? What are the instances when biopics work? For me, too many are like VH-1 "Behind the Music" episodes with the ritual meteoric first act, burnout second act and either death or resurrection in the third act. Your thoughts?

As some may remember, Pryor made the fascinating 1986 autobiography Jo Jo Dancer, This is Your Life Calling, with its unsparing look at the kid born not in a trunk but a brothel.

Mashup in the Air: When buoyancy meets gravity

An effective movie poster is like an effective newspaper headline: It encapsulates in one image what a headline does in a few words. An artistic movie poster does this, but is visual haiku that poetically distills the essence of the film as well as its content.

The site worth1000.com (as in one picture is worth a 1000 words) ran a contest -- now closed -- for best movie poster mashups (hat tip, slash film). Pictured is my favorite, a composite of two Oscar nominees.

Which movie poster of this (or any year) do you think most poetically conveys its subject? Why? Send images (under 80 kb, please) if you can.

Michael Pitt as Kurt Cobain in Gus Van Sant's "The Last Days."

According to The Hollywood Reporter, filmmaker Oren Moverman is negotiating to direct the long-gestating biopic of late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. Over at Popcorn and Prejudice, Seattle Post critic Moira McDonald asks, who should play the demigod of grunge?

Five years ago, Gus Van Sant cast Michael Pitt (pictured) as a Cobain-alike in The Last Days, a moody biopic speculating what happened during the musician's final hours. Pitt suggested that insular forcefield that was Cobain, and looked enough like him not to be distracting. I have no idea whether Pitt can handle the musical aspect, but he's an underutilized actor (see also Bertolucci's The Dreamers) and would be my first choice. Second: Emile Hirsch. As Jamie Foxx proved in Ray, you don't so much need to look like who you are playing as you need to channel him.)Who would you cast as Cobain? And who should play Cobain paramour Courtney Love?

Alternatively, most convincing performance in a musical biopic? Besides Jamie Foxx as Ray, I'm thinking Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn in "Coal Miner's Daughter," Reese Witherspoon as June Carter in "Walk the Line," and Forest Whitaker as Charlie Parker in "Bird." Also liked Judy Davis as Judy Garland in the telemovie "Me and My Shadows."

Gregory Peck has his shrink Ingrid Bergman "spellbound" in the 1945 Hitchcock thriller.

While my review of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island won't be online until tomorrow afternoon, seeing this psycho-thriller, with its homages to movies from Spellbound to Shock Corridor, made me geek up and list my six favorite movies set in mental institutions.

1) Bedlam (1946) That 18th-century grandaddy of asylums, London's St. Mary's of Bethlehem (known colloquially as "Bedlam'), occasions a crusading Quaker (Anna Lee) to challenge the cruel administration of the warden (Boris Karloff) in the Val Lewton production directed by Mark Robson.

2) Spellbound (1945) Repressed psychiatrist Ingrid Bergman analyzes colleague Gregory Peck, who may be a murderer but unlocks her  libido and opens the doors of her heart in this Hitchcock classic with a dream sequence by Salvador Dali.

3) The Snake Pit (1948) Olivia de Havilland is heartbreakingly fine as a mental patient who submits to shock therapy, is released from the hospital before she's ready, and is sent back to a ward for even more extreme patients, only to repeat the slow process of reordering her disordered mind.

4) The Cobweb (1955) Vicente Minnelli's Freudian melodrama set in a leafy mental institution where the only way to tell the difference between the patients and doctors is that the patients get well. With Richard Widmark, Gloria Grahame, Lillian Gish and Charles Boyer in a story that maintains decor can drive people mad.

5) Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) In Joe Mankiewicz's adaptation of the Tennessee Williams melodrama, Elizabeth Taylor is institutionalized after her cousin Sebastian is brutally murdered on their vacation. Does she need help or does her aunt (Katharine Hepburn) have reasons to want to keep her in mental lockup? With Montgomery Clift.

6) Shock Corridor (1963) Sam Fuller's pulpy psychodrama about a reporter (Peter Breck), hungry for a Pulitzer, who pretends he's mad in order to gain entry to an asylum to solve a murder mystery. The patients there have more than a passing resemblance to J. Robert Oppenheimer and James Meredith.

Your nominations?