So far, at this time of awards season, some folks have seen would-be Oscar contenders like The Wrestler and Slumdog Millionaire at film fests. And some long lead press have seen pics like Milk, Frost/Nixon and Doubt. And some late-breaking films aren't yet finished--The Reader, Gran Torino, Revolutionary Road, The Soloist.

Which brings up the issue of Robert Downey, Jr. vs. Jamie Foxx. Interestingly, Rogers and Cowan's Alan Nierob handles them both. And DreamWorks/Paramount is pushing Downey for best actor, which makes sense, as it's the true story of how LA Times journalist Steve Lopez meets homeless man Nathaniel Ayers, a Juilliard-trained violinist. Susannah Grant adapted and Atonement's Joe Wright directed. Word is the filmmakers are still tinkering and checking test screening results. Paramount insists the scores are going up. With a movie like this, you have to score a bullseye.

Even though the two stars share pretty much equal screen time, Downey, who won't get nominated for Iron Man (no more than another genre picture, Quantum of Solace, will ever get major nominations, either--Michael Cieply drank some Sony Koolaid) has a shot at an acting nod. Foxx, who won Best Actor for Ray, may have figured he was also a leading man in this movie, so I understand that accepting supporting actor status was tough for him. But he has a better shot in that category.

Best actor is crowded. Looking less likely in the face of such robust competitors as Downey, Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), Sean Penn (Milk), Leonardo DiCaprio (Revolutionary Road), Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler), and Frank Langella and Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon) is little-indie-that-could Richard Jenkins (The Visitor), whose distrib Overture won't make a competitive Oscar investment at this stage. But the DVD comes out October 11. And you never know who will be the last man standing.

As the awards season gets under way, the Gurus 'o Gold have made their first stabs at weighing the upcoming Oscar race. It's early days yet. Many of these films have not been seen. For example, the gurus know more about Frost/Nixon, based on Peter Morgan's play, than anything else, which may account for its front-runner status--which is not necessarily a good place to be at this stage.

Frost/Nixon also features two head-to-head male leads who can't be relegated to supporting status: Frank Langella and Michael Sheen. That's also true of Jamie Foxx (who won Best Actor for Ray) vs. Robert Downey, Jr. in The Soloist. Actors will bend over backwards to give Downey something this year, even if it's a supporting nod for the comedy Tropic Thunder, because Iron Man is not an Academy movie (except perhaps for technical categories like FX).

It's back to the norm this year with the actors--the best actor field looks much stronger and more competitive than the best actress list.

Meanwhile fan site IGN has launched some counter-programming, their first annual IGN Summer Movie Awards, honoring the high-octane films that their readers care about most. Winners include Best Summer Movie: The Dark Knight, Best Director: Iron Man's Jon Favreau, Best Animated Movie: Wall-E, directed by Andrew Stanton, and less predictably, Babe of the Summer: Natalie Martinez, star of Death Race.

I saw three summer comedies in a row this week, two from the Judd Apatow factory, Step Brothers and Pineapple Express, plus Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder, which screened at Comic-Con last night (Pineapple Express screens here too). UPDATE: Here's Todd McCarthy's Tropic Thunder review.

Step Brothers is a great premise that has been sketchily executed; Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly are often hilarious acting like ten-year-old boys, but the concept quickly wears thin. Pineapple Express is the best of the three movies, and the smartest; Seth Rogen, James Franco and Danny McBride are inspired throughout as pot heads on the run from some killer drug dealers. An intelligent director, David Gordon Green, an indie dramatist-turned-studio-comedy guy, makes all the difference. These guys cared about the details. It's not sloppy.

While Tropic Thunder is also funny, it's also really expensive, so it gets top-heavy as a star-studded big- budget action film shot on location in the jungle. The Comic-Con crowd ate it up--especially the opening intro with Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. competing for Comic-Con geek cred--although I had a sense that it was probably too inside for many of them. It's a rather reflexive and sophisticated treatise on filmmaking in Hollywood today as well as the art of acting. Robert Downey Jr. (as an Australian actor staying in character as a black dude) and Stiller (as an action hero who can't discern reality) dissecting their identities as actors is hilarious. Tom Cruise and Matthew McConnaughey also offer support with risible results as producer and agent, respectively. Actor/screenwriter Justin Theroux did so well with this he's writing probably the hottest project in town right now, Marvel's Iron Man 2.

On the City of Ember promo train from L.A. to San Diego on Wednesday, I found myself in close quarters with folks from the likes of Time, LA Times, aint-it-cool-news, sci-fi channel, and CHUD. I've always prided myself on being able to hold my own with the fanboys, but was stopped cold when one guy asked me point blank, as a large group listened intently, what was my favorite Adam McKay/Will Ferrell movie? My heart stopped cold. "Um, I've never seen Talladega Nights," I stumbled. "I didn't like Step Brothers that much either. So I guess it would have to be Anchorman."

So lame. BTW, the train ride was a brilliant promo idea on the part of Fox Walden's Jeffrey Godsick, who commandeered two cars and attached them to a train, showed 23 journalists some footage of Monster House director Gil Kenan's City of Ember, which was adapted by Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands) from the 2003 novel. It took Playtone's Gary Goetzman four years to get the movie made, for a price, $35 million.

The footage was promising: Saorise Ronin runs around an amazing set that was built by production designer Martin Laing in Belfast, Northern Ireland in a gigantic ship factory eight stories high. (The Titanic was built there.) He emptied it out and built what may be one of the last gigantic practical sets.

I got Kenan to admit that having come from the freedom of the CG animation world, he was a tad frustrated by the limitations of live action filming, and may return to animation. The movie looked like one of those fun escape into a future fantasies that still relate to the real world: deep underground, City of Ember is running out of resources, and mayor Bill Murray is hoarding. "It's a relevant and potent morality tale," said Thompson, "about society running out of food and power, corrupt at the top and so startlingly to the point, as the grown-ups are asleep at the wheel, in denial."

It's the younger generation that figures out how to save the human race from extinction. Shades of Wall-E.

Yes, Jack Nicholson showed up after the Laker game, slightly hoarse, to honor his bud, Warren Beatty, at the 36th annual AFI Life Achievement fete. Count on Beatty, 71, to attract smarter-than-average tributes. "You drag me in with all these politicos," said Nicholson, who earned an Oscar nomination for Beatty's historic drama Reds. "I'm representing all the fair-weather friends you have in the city who went to the Lakers game."

"When I'm working, I have a group of people whose good opinion I'm always trying to win," Beatty said during a taped video interview. Many of that group were on hand Thursday night. "I'm still a liberal when it's coming back in style," he said after accepting his award from last year's honoree, Al Pacino, who starred in Dick Tracy. Beatty thanked his older sister Shirley MacLaine for leading him to Hollywood, which in turn brought him to his wife, Annette Bening. (Variety's Steve Chagollan profiles Beatty here.) One ex-girlfriend, Reds star Diane Keaton, made an emotional appearance, while another, Julie Christie, appeared on video, praising Beatty for choosing a mate, Bening, who was his equal, "after a fairly thorough search."

Ishtar co-star Dustin Hoffman teased his friend with google trivia, much of it not true, while constantly asking if Nicholson was in the house. "And I was here for dinner," he reminded his friend of 40 years. Hoffman praised Beatty for taking good care of his friends, such as cancer-ridden Hal Ashby, who Beatty flew via Warner Bros. jet to Johns Hopkins for treatment.

Beatty's frequent writing collaborator Elaine May did a delicious stand-up routine about Beatty's wacky ideas for such movies as Heaven Can Wait and Reds. May finally talked Beatty into directing Heaven Can Wait himself after no one else wanted to do it. It was the launch of a directing career. "Warren gives crazy a good name," she said. "I feel he is still crazy after all these years."

She was followed by her ex-partner, Mike Nichols, on video, who delivered an hilarious joke about Beatty being Jewish. On video, Barbra Streisand said of Beatty: "He's an incredibly gifted...gentile."

A luminous Jane Fonda started out the evening saying that she knew Warren longer than anyone, 50 years, from his days playing piano bar in New York. "We did our first screen test together," she recalled, a love scene for a Josh Logan movie that never got made. She kicks herself for not realizing at the time that this great-looking man surrounded by smart gay friends was actually straight. "It's nice to know somebody else who shares the same chunk of this town's history," she said.

When Beatty descended from the Kodak stage to the theatre for the ritual walk through his admirers (accompanied by live Earl Scruggs), he greeted politicos George McGovern, for whom he invented the celebrity concert fundraiser in 1972, California attorney general Jerry Brown, and Gary Hart, who admitted later that contrary to myth, he didn't think Warren Beatty ever wanted to be him, but he had always wanted to be Warren Beatty. Republican John McCain paid tribute in a funny clip.

Bill Clinton took the stage and told the story of how at age 26 at the 1972 Democratic convention, he ran into Beatty in an elevator just after an Arkansas delegate told him she'd only vote for McGovern if Beatty walked with her for 30 minutes on a beach. Beatty agreed to the task; she voted for McGovern, and turned up years later on the campaign trail wearing a Hillary Clinton button. "Over all these decades, you have shared with us as moviegoers this insatiable hunger for life," Clinton told Beatty. "You have this unbridled hunger to know and to share."

Beatty joined Bening and his closest friends on the dais, including May and Stanley Donen, Barry Diller, MacLaine, David Geffen, Robert Towne, and attorney Bert Field.

AFI chair and Sony honcho Sir Howard Stringer said that Beatty was "one of the few actors envied when he was single who continued to be envied after he got married. He's America's leading man: actor, producer, writer, director. He quite famously does it all, but not often. Not since George Lucas has a man gotten away with doing so little for such a high honor. You embodied what we wanted in a leading man: handsome, charming, brilliant, perfectionist, always reaching for something greater."

Quentin Tarantino gave a heart-felt intro to Bonnie and Clyde, saying that the 1967 movie launched the great era of American movies, the 70s. "It was a gangster genre film, a Hollywood movie without the cliches."

Faye Dunaway read a rhyming ballad (modeled after Bonnie Parker), praising Beatty, among other things, for having the guts to grab a piece of the back end on Bonnie and Clyde.

Robert Downey Jr. brilliantly hallucinated an evening as a nine-year-old concocting the movie Shampoo with Beatty and Hal Ashby.

Shampoo scriptwriter Towne remembered that it took nine years to get Shampoo made. "I've never known you to hold a grudge, reveal a secret or forget a phone call," he said to Beatty. "In 45 years you never opened yourself up. After all these years I've come to consider you as wise as Benjamin Franklin, who is also a ladies man. You're part Fellini, part Machiavelli."

Don Cheadle described the many-take tortures of working under Beatty's direction on Bulworth. "He never lets the good be the enemy of the great," he said.

The tribute will air June 25 July 8 on the USA Network.

[Photos courtesy Getty Images]

We all knew that Iron Man would make Robert Downey, Jr. into a bigger star. So it's no surprise that director Brett Ratner is lobbying the guy as his fantasy casting for Hugh Hefner in his upcoming biopic. Slight problem: the director doesn't even have a script in yet. But that's not stopping Ratner from trying.

One thing's for sure: I'd rather see Ratner and Downey get together on a Playboy Mansion set than see Ratner chase after yet another sequel for a movie star trying to recharge a tired old series.

Beverly Hills Cop is one franchise that should stay where it belongs. In the 80s.