Photo: Columbia Pictures/Music Box

"Bond cries in 'Skyfall.' No one remarks on that," Rachel Weisz told me over breakfast in the East Village of Manhattan. "I think it's a huge scene, isn't it?"

I couldn't help but agree with Weisz, who deserves an Oscar nomination for her role as an unfaithful wife in "The Deep Blue Sea" — but couldn't have been more faithful in her reading of her husband Daniel Craig's hit "Skyfall." She was referring to the climactic scene when Bond holds an injured M, played by Judi Dench, in his arms in a Scottish church.

Photo: Dreamworks

"I would say that we still have Daniel Day-Lewis as No. 1," Thelma Adams told Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil in their second joint podcast. Ever the gentleman, O'Neil agreed about the "Lincoln" star's front-runner status, but couldn't quite back Adams's contention that John Hawkes is "pretty much a sure thing for 'The Sessions.'" Too small?

Also tossing their pointed elbows in the crowded competition are Joaquin Phoenix ("The Master"), Denzel Washington ("Flight"), Anthony Hopkins ("Hitchcock"), Hugh Jackman ("Les Misérables"), and Christoph Waltz ("Django Unchained"). And then there's Bradley Cooper, who may ride the "Silver Linings Playbook" popularity contest all the way into the winner's circle.

Meanwhile, the final five depend on the two yet-to-be-screened movies: "Django" and "Les Misérables." "You can pretty safely say that Waltz is going to knock it out of the park," Adams asserted, adding: "The huge open question is Jackman."

Another open question is whether Phoenix has hit the

Photo: Columbia Pictures

In "Skyfall," which has already grossed half a billion worldwide, Judi Dench's spymaster M gets more screen time and more to do, and she undergoes more changes than in any previous Bond film. Her character is integral to the plot -- always powerful, never eager to please. This aging government servant believes, when nudged toward retirement, that age and the experience that comes with it are actually to be valued by the motherland, not binned.

'Silver Linings Playbook' by The Weinstein Company

Sometimes it feels like the year's very best films all come out at once in November and December. Looking at these five gems, including a violent noir starring Brad Pitt and a crowd-pleasing comedy from Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, there might be some truth to that theory.

Mads Mikkelsen (Photo by Joel Ryan)

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, 46, courts Oscar in the 18th-century romance "A Royal Affair," (opening today) the Danish entry for Best Foreign Film. In that sexy historical drama, Mikkelsen plays the German doctor and philosopher that charms crazy King Christian VII of Denmark (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard) and beds his young English queen (rising star Alicia Vikander).

"Mads? Of course, as a Scandinavian I had seen a lot of his films," Vikander told Yahoo! Movies this week. The Swedish actress, 24, who also has a major role opposite Keira Knightley in "Anna Karenina" continued: "He's one of our greatest actors. When I met Mads for the first time at a screen test in Copenhagen, it took me one second to realize he's one of the most down to earth men. He's funny, witty, brilliant and a real inspiration."

Photo by Warner Bros. Pictures

I was belatedly watching "Cloud Atlas" at my local Cineplex, catching up on movies that I hadn't seen because, thanks to Hurricane Sandy, I no longer had my Manhattan to upstate NY umbilical cord. I hadn't read all the reviews when "Cloud Atlas" premiered in Toronto because, as I recently told Steven Gaydos, executive editor at Variety, "I see the movie and then I decide." But this was a case where the gaseous critical response to "Cloud Atlas" had wafted in my direction, a skepticism and negativity reflected in Rotten Tomatoes' stingy 63 percent fresh. So, I'd postponed seeing an adventure that was completely radical among contemporary American films in the gleeful, optimistic way it played musical chairs with male and female, young and old, and future and past. By creating a movie that starred Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Huge Grant and blurred the boundaries between men and women, the Wachowski siblings (Andy and transgender Lana), and Tom Tykwer, adapting David Mitchell's genre-busting best-seller, took some major risks. And they created an entertaining, ambitious movie that went beyond feminism to an all-embracing humanism that wasn't naive enough to believe that evil didn't walk the earth in wingtips or stilettos or bare feet.