The biggest Hollywood film scoop of this young year was posted Thursday at 1:33 p.m PT on TheWrap. While a number of Lucas Shaw‘s peers were immediate and effusive with Twitter praise, large chunks of the pick-up coverage about J.J. Abrams being tapped to direct the next-generation installment of Star Wars failed to credit TheWrap and this hard-working media reporter.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world in the trenches of THR, Variety, TheWrap and Deadline, with each being guilty at various times of co-opting film scoops by “confirming,” referencing same-subsequent “documents obtained”, slapping on a questionable EXCLUSIVE and so on. But a scoop of the magnitude of Shaw’s should have been exempt from the usual ticky-tack catch-up tricks.

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At the recent Golden Globes, Kathryn Bigelow and Jodie Foster commingled on stage and off; Bigelow as a Best Director nominee, Foster as the recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award.

By gracing the cover of the February 4 issue of TIME magazine, Bigelow joins Foster once again, this time as only the second female film director to adorn the publication. Foster did so back in October 1991.

The cover shot was taken by Paola Kudacki, the accompanying interview-profile conducted by Jessica Winter with help from Lily Rothman. Female power all around for this one.

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This is both a surprise and a reversal of the usual currents underlying the departure of a full-time print film critic. Today is Karina Longworth‘s last day as an LA Weekly full-time film editor writer and former film editor. She will continue to contribute as a freelancer and explains the decision was entirely hers:

For some time I’ve been itching to try new things, to write for additional venues and in formats I’m not practiced in… Then, a book project came along that I couldn’t turn down, and I decided it was time to make the leap. Said book will be my priority for the next couple of months…

This is not Longworth’s first book. Earlier this fall, Phaidon Press published the English-language version of an overview of the career of Star Wars maestro George Lucas that Longworth completed in 2011 for Cahiers du Cinema. ”The new book is on Meryl Streep,” Longworth tells FishbowlLA via email. “It’s again for Cahiers du Cinema. This one is longer, more in depth; it’s the story of her career and craft via critical analysis of ten performances.”

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A year after the original trilogy of Star Wars films was in the books, a different kind of film endeavor was launched in the San Fernando Valley in 1984. Since that time, Vivid Entertainment and the porn industry have both come a long way. Today, in the face of the Internet threat, Vivid and other SFVx purveyors have resorted among other things to big-budget, X-rated movie parodies.

Earlier this year, Vivid released Star Wars XXX: A Porn Parody, its biggest budgeted flick yet. The company already has two sequels planned and now, feeding off this week’s Disney-Lucasfilm deal, say they are planning a fourth Lucas homme-age. A quadrilogy?

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Who better to frame today’s Disney mega-deal than George Lucas? Via starwars.com late this afternoon comes a brief roundtable discussion featuring Lucas and his Lucasfilm co-chair Kathleen Kennedy:

Kennedy points to Disney’s prior success with Pixar and Marvel as a key influencer for the $4.05 billion deal. She also says that Lucas, “her Yoda,” will most definitely be involved in the pass-the-lightsaber process of meeting with screenwriters and determining a basic storyline for the next Star Wars film.

The funniest part of the video conversation occurs at the very end, when Kennedy jokes that a retired Lucas can blog about how his gatekeeper-successors are messing it all up.

USC grad Randal Kleiser (Grease, The Blue Lagoon) continues to spread the word about the phenomenal instructional DVD he put together a few years ago about his late teacher Nina Foch. As well he should.

Underwritten by George Lucas, the DVD was culled from around 100 hours of footage shot by Kleiser during Foch’s USC course about acting and filmmaking. Following a recent speech at Athens’ Michael Cacoyannis Foundation that focused heavily on the DVD, Kleiser talked to greekreporter.com about the Oscar nominee for Executive Suite and Emmy nominee for Lou Grant:

“Nina Foch was the best teacher I ever had and I knew her teachings had to be recorded for future generations. Even as she continued acting in film and television, her passion for teaching lasted for over forty years.”

“Her course was immensely popular because she developed her own unique style drawing from her experiences studying with Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Uta Hagen, as well as, the directors, Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Kubrick, Cecil B. DeMille and Otto Preminger. She taught a generation of filmmakers including John McTiernan, Amy Heckerling, Ed Zwick, Ron Underwood and many others. Nina went from being my teacher, to my mentor, to my good friend.”

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Far from the madding, furiously handicapping Oscar blogger crowd, the view of the AMPAS membership’s elderly tendencies is a little different. This morning, New York Post film critic Kyle Smith rips the ratings prospects for the upcoming ABC telecast, and really, it’s hard to argue with him.

For the first time since 1929, a silent film is not just in the Best Picture Oscar mix but also the presumed winner. For Smith, this translates into the sound of crickets:

The Oscar nominations spoke yesterday, and they said, “Shh!” ABC’s response? “Sh – - !” The list made it clear that the February 26 ceremony will be among the least-watched editions of the collapsing telecast.

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The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts will be the new home this fall to a vast collection of Brandon Tartikoff‘s industry correspondences thanks to a donation by his widow, Lilly Tartikoff.

Tartikoff, the youngest programming chief in NBC history, was credited for the success of The Golden Girls, Miami Vice and The Cosby Show.

The collection, dating from 1979 to 1992, features more than 4,000 individual letters from Tartikoff during his time at at the network. Tartikoff passed away in 1997 at the age of 48 from Hodgkin’s Disease.

“We are very grateful to Lilly Tartikoff for this unique and generous gift,” said legendary filmmaker and USC alumnus George Lucas. “It is a staggering collection for students of television and popular culture, providing rare insight into the mind and achievements of arguably one of the most prominent and influential creative executives in television history.”

The film studios have so little interest in all-black films that even Hollywood royalty like George Lucas struggled to find a distributor for his latest work, Red Tails. Lucas didn’t mince any words when explaining to Daily Show host Jon Stewart the source of the problem:

It’s because it’s an all-black movie. There’s no major white roles in it at all. It’s one of the first all-black action pictures ever made.

Lucas spent 23 years making the film, which is based on the true story of a crew of African American pilots who fought in World War II and helped start the civil rights movement. “I financed it myself. I figured I could get the prints and ads paid for by the studios and that they would release it,” he explained to Stewart. “And I showed it to all of them, and they said, ‘Noooo. We don’t know how to market a movie like this.’ It’s not green enough.” And by green, Lucas means profitable.

These are the same yahoos who brought us Mars Need Moms, a film that lost over $100 million. A whackadoodle story about motherless space aliens strikes these dunderheads as a better investment than a classic tale about real American heroes. Because they happen to be black.

Get it together, Hollywood.

View the full Lucas/Stewart interview after the jump.

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Nothing like an anonymous survey of British video game journalists to highlight how the industry has greased palms on the way to overtaking Hollywood’s movie industry.

Lucy Carter of MCV magazine solicited responses from more than four dozen leading industry chroniclers. FishbowlLA’s favorite question, “What’s the best ‘jolly’ you’ve ever been on?”, revealed helicopter flights down into the bowels of the Grand Canyon and above Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Brentwood compound, requisite stints at the Playboy Mansion, and this golden itinerary:

“My trip to Los Angeles in the run-up to Modern Warfare 2’s launch in 2009 still stands out as my favorite… Having Activision splash the cash on VIP tickets to Universal Studios and dinner at one of the most expensive restaurants in town is an experience I’ll never forget. After all, you’ve not been on the Jurassic Park ride until you’ve been on it with Jon Blyth and half of Zoo magazine.”

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