By Jay A. Fernandez

Wes Anderson received a special achievement award from the National Board of Review Tuesday night at its awards ceremony for his “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

The writer-director delivered his acceptance speech via video, in stop-motion animation no less.

Here it is.

Incidentally, several publications (New York Times, Entertainment Weekly) have posited “Fox” as a serious contender for best animated feature at the Oscars this year, beating Pixar’s latest, “Up.”

That sounds a bit like wishful thinking on Fox Searchlight’s part, but Pixar’s domination of the field has to end sometime. And despite “Fox’s” deadpan quirkiness, Anderson has earned quite a bit of critical respect for his whimsical treatment of Roald Dahl’s classic novel.

So maybe Pixar shouldn’t count its chickens.

Sorry, couldn’t help it.

By Jay A. Fernandez

Everyone knows The Dude loves his Creedence and hates the Eagles. But what about the man who played him, Jeff Bridges?

I was lucky enough to spend a few minutes chatting with the actor at a Fox Searchlight cocktail party last Thursday — the studio is pushing hard for awards consideration for Bridges — and I asked him for a music recommendation. Bridges is a musician himself, famously performed at Lebowski Fest one year and plays Bad Blake, a craggy old country crooner, in “Crazy Heart,” which Searchlight is releasing next Wednesday.

Anyway, here’s what the man is listening to these days: Benji Hughes. Bridges enthusiastically described the Charlotte, NC, singer-songwriter as a mix of “Paul McCartney, Beck and Brian Wilson,” the kind of references a few friends of mine would jump on in a second. (I listen to stuff like Elbow, The Raveonettes and Ulrich Schnauss, so I admit Hughes was not on my radar.)

Hughes apparently put out a double-disc record last year called “A Love Extreme,” and the music is all over the place genre-wise. Here’s his MySpace page, if you’re interested.

Bridges was at the party with his best friend John Goodwin, with whom he says he’s been “painting, making music, dancing and tumbling” since the fourth grade. Both of these guys have their work on iTunes, too.

So, enjoy.

Just don’t leave the iPod in the car. Freakin’ Nihilists.

By Steven Zeitchik

After missing a few of the early showings, we finally caught “Crazy Heart,” the last-minute Fox Searchlight awards hopeful, at a media screening. Comparisons to “The Wrestler” danced in our heads (and on the lips of bloggers) coming into the pic. And indeed, it’s hard to avoid the numerous similarities between the Mickey Rourke-Darren Aronofsky collaboration about a washed-up wrestler at a crossroads and the Jeff Bridges-toplined tale of a washed-up country singer at a crossroads.

Both pics feature a fading  performer whose addiction to the spotlight is rivaled only by his addiction to substances (alcohol for Bridges’ Bad Blake, steroids for Rourke’s Randy the Ram) — and who gets a harsh wake-up  after a medical close call, eventually finding salvation (or does he?) with the help of a beautiful but lost-soul single mother. There’s even the reaching out to an estranged child in both.

Bridges’ performance is almost custom-built for awards consideration. It’s not just that it’s strong; it’s that he’s playing someone who will remind viewers and voters of this timeless awards theme: perseverance as age and talent work against you.

But is the film a best-picture contender? Awards voters looking to fill out a ten-slot ballot may be tempted to consider it (especially as possibles like “The Lovely Bones” fall away, if a number of bloggers, including THR’s Roger Friedman, are to be believed). But it’s here that “The Wrestler” similarities could ding “Crazy Heart’s” chances. The pic has its effective moments and generally well-calibrates its backroad-blues mood. But director Scott Cooper is not (no fault of his own) half the helmer that Aronofsky is, and most people who make the comparison will likely come to the conclusion  that the movie feels less fully-realized than Aronofsky’s meisterwork (which itself wasn’t nommed).

By Steven Zeitchik

Last year, Fox Searchlight became the toast of awards season by cutting it close — it picked up the season’s two darlings, “Slumdog Millionaire” and “The Wrestler,” as late as August and September, respectively.

This year it could be cutting it even closer.

After the lukewarm response to one-time hopeful “Amelia” (not to mention boxoffice doldrums for young-skewing comedies “Whip It!” and “Gentlemen Broncos”), the specialty division may be making a fall push for “Crazy Heart,” the country-music drama starring Jeff Bridges.

At the moment, the picture remains dated for next year, as it has been since Searchlight acquired it this summer. But the specialty division has scheduled a surprise, last-minute screening for Wednesday in what wagging tongues are saying is a trial balloon for a 2009 release and awards push.

By Steven Zeitchik

Mira Nair’s “Amelia” had such a stigma attached to it by the time tastemakers and critics finally got the opportunity to see it at the Landmark in Los Angeles on Wednesday night — everybody, their uncle and their uncle’s sister-in-law was crammed into that first all-media screening, two days  before the pic’s opening — that it couldn’t really disappoint too much.

Yet the problem with any screening accompanied by a sense of dread is that while it can’t be as bad as the buzz has it, it won’t ever be considered good either. People are simply too keyed in to the flaws, their pickaxes out, that even problems otherwise considered minor are extracted and magnified.

Of course, “Amelia” provides plenty to extract. The Hilary Swank vehicle is grounded/suffers wind
shear/hits turbulence/another easy aeronautic metaphor, because of several issues– from the accents to the cardboard feminism to the underdeveloped, punch-less romantic relationships to the lack of a real and textured sense of what this new world of flying meant both to a nation and to this particular maverick. (The reviews and blog takes on the Searchlight pic have indeed been tough — David Poland memorably quipped that Amelia Earhart had disappeared so “to avoid being embarrassed by the movie about her 72 years later” –with THR’s Ray Bennett nonetheless liking the pic.)

There are some virtues, particularly an effectively nailbiting last flight (finally, after the numbing repetitiveness of ninety-minute of flights imperiled, saved and then imperiled again) and some visually stunning airplane shots, some of them green-screened but nonetheless impressive, and a runway crash that’s as thrillingly authentic as it probably was expensive.

By Steven Zeitchik

We've gotten so used to seeing Searchlight at the awards podium — the specialty division has been nominated for at least five Oscars in each of the past three years, including a best pic nom in all of them — that it feels almost unfair to highlight the question of whether the streak will end this year.

The studio has a good shot to pick up screenplay and acting kudos for "(500) Days of Summer" — still pound-for-pound the best indie movie of the year, no matter how many of you write angry emails with the words "District 9" in them — and could still end up with kudos recognition, particularly on tech and animation fronts, for Wes Anderson's animated fable "Fantastic Mr. Fox" (though we'll see how some of the early press, particularly this pointed critique of Anderson in the Los Angeles Times this weekend, affects its chances).

But much for the specialty division this season will turn on "Amelia," the Mira Nair follow-up to her immigrant-family epic "The Namesake" from three years ago.

We enjoyed the trailer for the Hilary Swank-Richard Gere-Ewan McGregor starrer, which had some nice period texture, great photography and a surprising level of suspense for a serious 1930's biopic. And between them, the three lead actors have nine Globe and Oscar noms, which automatically provide it with a pedigree.

But it's hard to know how much awards potential the pic has. Unlike most contenders, which screen weeks if not months before they open, the only screenings on either coast (besides those done for interview purposes) will take place just a few days before the release next Friday. No one we know has seen it.

By Steven Zeitchik

This one's big. Fox is completely tearing up the playbook — and its management structure — on both the film and television side. The takeaway: Television and film are going to get a lot closer together.

That's because television production is being subsumed under Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos, with Twentieth Century Fox Television toppers Gary Newman and Dana Walden now reporting to R&G. (Areas like cable and news will continue reporting straight to Murdoch.) But here's the kicker — Peter Rice is leaving Searchlight and will now over see network programming for Fox — the job that had been held by Peter Liguori, who's leaving the company.

Rice deputies Nancy Utley and Steve Gilula will take over Searchlight; they've been, along with Rice, among the key architects of the Searchlight success so don't expect big ripples there.

But Rice and the TV side is an eye-opener. A Slumdog Millionaire scripted series? A Juno mini-series? This is post-Chernin shuffling at its juiciest. It's extremely rare for a film exec to move to TV; even less common is the trajectory Rice has followed — studio golden boy to wildly successful specialty president to TV topper. (And the success is pretty evident, not only with the recent Juno-Sumdog axis but also with earlier hits like "Bend It Like Beckham" and "28 Days Later" — though as with anyone, there has also been the occasional miss, in this case with "Street Kings" or "The Darjeeling Limited.")

Rice joined Searchlight in early 2000 as president of production, after rising through the ranks in the previous six years at Fox, eventually ending up as a senior v-p at the studio. While he's known first as a business-minded exec, he's also earned a reputation as a filmmaker-friendly personality who cultivated relationships with (and oversaw movies of) filmmakers like Danny Boyle and Alex Proyas earlier in their careers — skills that could be useful as he begins anew in the television world.

Still, it's uncharted territory going from features to serialized dramas — not to mention a whole new group of writers and directors.Few have tried it. Rice did the improbable with some of the Searchlight movies. The next act awaits.

By Steven Zeitchik

Like Katy Perry, specialty divisions are in and they’re out, they’re hot and they’re cold.

But some just stay the course, as Peter Rice noted at “The Wrestler” premiere Tuesday night. The Fox Searchlight topper intro-ed the film with the common shout-out to his bosses…and then a notably honest acknowledgement of the difficult state of the indie business.

“It’s been a turbulent year for independent film,” Rice began. “We’re very lucky to work at a company that, while several of our competitors are no longer in business, we get continued support for movies that are…incredibly audacious.” He then went on to thank Fox honchos Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos.

The comment was true — but of course not because of anyone’s reflexive support. Searchlight is one of the few specialty divisions to have a movie that earned at least $35 million each of the last five years; this year, Sundance acquisition “Choke” may have sputtered, but the company has already earned nearly $40 million for “The Secret Life of Bees” and is on a Little Miss Sunshine trajectory with “Slumdog Millionaire.” And the combination of arthouse filmgoers and Mickey Rourke/wrestling fans should give it plenty of muscle on “Wrestler.” Those kinds of numbers always help execs support audacity.