ohmidog!

Was Blackie snubbed?

And, if so, was it because because of his large and menacing appearance — a case of Doberman discrimination?

Director Martin Scorsese — pronounced “score-SAYS-he” — is contending that the canine star of his movie, “Hugo,” Blackie the Doberman, was rudely overlooked in the nominations for the First Annual Golden Collar Awards.

But, according to Hollywood insiders (and one wonders, are there any Hollywood outsiders?), he’s doing it for laughs, and probably even more for publicity.

Blackie plays a train station officer’s attack dog, and most of his time on screen is spent scaring and chasing the child stars of the Oscar-nominated film.

In response to the void of Academy Awards for animals, the website Dog News Daily created the Golden Collar awards this year and came up with a list of nominees.

Uggie, the Jack Russell, received two nominations — for his roles in “The Artist” and “Water for Elephants” — but Blackie got no respect.

In a guest column for the Los Angeles Times Scorcese writes:

“OK, let’s lay all our cards on the table. Jack Russell terriers are small and cute. Dobermans are enormous and — handsome. More tellingly, Uggie plays a nice little mascot who does tricks and saves his master’s life in one of the films, while Blackie gives an uncompromising performance as a ferocious guard dog who terrorizes children. I’m sure you can see what I’m driving at.”

He urges readers to start a write-in campaign for Blackie, via comments on the Dog News Daily Facebook page.

Dog News Daily editor Alan Siskind says if Blackie receives 500 write-ins by Monday, February 6th, the Golden Collar nominating committee will add him as the sixth nominee in the Best Dog in a Theatrical Film category.

Uggie, the dog star of the movie “The Artist,” is the top nominee for the first ever Golden Collar Awards, being presented by the website Dog News Daily.

Shown above doing tricks with Ellen Degeneres, Uggie was also nominated for his role as Queenie in “Water for Elephants.”

The awards honor canine performances in film and television.

Other contenders for best performance in a movie are Cosmo (“Beginners”), Denver (“50 / 50″) and Hummer (“Young Adult”).

Uggie helped with the nominations announcement, appearing with his human co-star in “The Artist,” Penelope Ann Miller.

The Golden Collar Awards will take place on Monday, Feb. 13 at the dog-friendly Hotel Palomar in Los Angeles.

Proceeds will benefit L.A.-area dog rescue shelters and organizations.

Keep reading for the full list of nominees. Read more »

Author Susan Orlean, whose latest book brings Rin Tin Tin back to life, thinks it’s time that the canine star be awarded the Oscar he was so rudely denied 83 years ago.

In her biography of the most famous German shepherd ever, “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend,” Orleans recounts how the dog — while rumored to have received the most votes — was snubbed by the Academy in 1929, the year the Oscars were first presented.

In an recent interview with Deadline.com, she suggested the mistake be corrected, and a posthumous Oscar be bestowed on Rin Tin Tin.

That, we note (parenthetically and cynically) wouldn’t hurt book sales. But more important, it would rectify an injustice, she maintains.

In the silent film era, which was then coming to an end, the German shepherd was a far more popular performer than the German actor, Emil Jannings, who won 1929′s best actor award.

“That first year that the Oscars were awarded, it seems to have been more a popularity contest than a serious assessment of performance,” Orlean said in the interview. “In terms of popularity, Rin Tin Tin didn’t have a peer, he was a huge star around the world and helped Warner Bros transition from its start as a small studio into a large one.”

The dog, reportedly rescued from a bombsite in eastern France at the end of World War I, was brought to California and made his screen debut in 1922′s The Man from Hell’s River. He appeared in numerous other films before dying in 1932, at the age of 13, only to see his character later reincarnated in TV series form.

The German actor, meanwhile, after receiving the award for his roles in two silent movies, returned to Germany and took part in making propaganda films for his friend Joseph Goebbels, a close associate of Adolf Hitler.

But it’s not just a matter of the dog being more American, or more popular, that leads Orlean to believe Rin Tin Tin would have been a better choice for 1929′s best actor award. She believes the dog had some acting chops.

“I think that training a dog to have a certain behavior is impressive and a credit to the dog’s intelligence and the mastery of training techniques. But if you look at what Rin Tin Tin did, he seemed to understand that he was performing,” she says in the interview.

“Look at Clash of the Wolves, as he limps away from his pack to die alone. You watch the scene and can’t believe he didn’t know he was acting in the movie. He is grimacing and limping, he falls to the ground in agony. How would you train a dog to look depressed and act as if he’s resigned to a lonely death? I don’t know how you do that. Somehow, the dog knows he’s supposed to look miserable and contemplating his mortality.”

Jennifer Aniston’s Welsh corgi-terrier mix, Norman, has passed away.

“He died a few weeks ago. He was an old dog and it was just his time,” a representative of the actress confirmed.

Norman was 15.

The death, according to the Daily Mail, came just before Aniston closed a deal on a New York penthouse, purchased in Norman’s name.

The former “Friends” brought Norman with her most everywhere, including television and film sets, and their relationship long outlasted that she had with the men in her life.

“He’s my baby boy. Norman goes with me on location – I’ve got to take Norman,” she said in a February appearance on the Chelsea Lately show, where Norman appeared at her side.

Even as a puppy, Aniston said, “he was as cool as a cucumber. He’s just a person in a dog suit,” she said.

Norman went missing for two days back in 1998 but eventually turned up unharmed at an animal shelter. Aniston also has another dog, a white German shepherd named Dolly.

When Aniston recently bought three units in a New York City condo, she did so under the name Norman’s Nest Trust.

Back about the time Ace and I were in Fargo, last October, I got word that a friend had died, a person I once wrote about, a woman who was Miss USA — for one day.

It was, probably, one of the saddest stories I ever wrote — how Mary Leona Gage, a country girl from Texas, ended up in Maryland, quickly grew bored with life in Glen Burnie and, with help from a beauty-show savvy accomplice, became Miss USA Maryland and then Miss USA.

Just one day later, the first Miss Maryland ever to win the contest, she’d be stripped of the national title when word leaked out that she was married and a mother of two.

The year was 1957, making it a forerunner of the many beauty queen scandals that have followed — and in my view the best one, because Gage, unlike her successors, slyly outwitted the system (now part of Donald Trump’s empire) to escape what she described, to me anyway, as a life of oppression.

Unfortunately, after the scandal, she went on to a  life of exploitation, which happens in Hollywood — and happened often in the Hollywood of the 1950s.

She’d go on, after her public humiliation, to become a Las Vegas showgirl, date the likes of Frank Sinatra and John Barrymore, get some movie and TV roles, make commercials for hand and foot cream, attempt suicide five times, go through six divorces, lose her children, become the subject of a pulp paperback biography and end up appearing on the burlesque circuit — but as a singer, she was quick to point out.

In October of last year, after her death, her housekeeper called me, apparently finding my cell phone number among her effects. The housekeeper spoke little English. I spoke less Spanish. She told me she thought I’d like to know about Leona’s passing.

When I interviewed her, in 2005, Leona was tethered to an oxygen tank. She’d been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for 10 years, and lived alone in a North Hollywood apartment. We met over two days, and were going to get together for a third talk when she called me, irate, and accused me of stealing one of the photographs she had shown me from her scrapbooks.

(She found it behind her sofa about two months later and — though she never apologized, and insisted she didn’t like the story I wrote at all — she asked for extra copies of the article and stayed in touch, calling every couple of months to chat about politics and things in the news.)

You can still find the story online at the Baltimore Sun.

She was dressed entirely in white at both our meetings — a color she said she associated with good health and — though sick and in her 70s — was still a remarkable, and remarkably unwrinkled, beauty.

“Oh, honey,” she said at one point, “if I wanted to put the real make up on, I could still look darn good.”

Leona recounted how she outfoxed pageant officials, and the circumstances she said led up to her competing — an effort to escape from what she saw as an oppressive husband, an airman who married her after getting her pregnant at age 14.

She remembered how reviled she was after her deception became known — Miss USA rules prohibit married contestants and mothers — and how one of the few that it didn’t bother was Ed Sullivan, who booked her on his show. All she did was wave. A week later she appeared live on the Steve Allen show, but flubbed the song she said she wasn’t given time to rehearse — “Sentimental Journey.”

Life after that had more downs than ups. There were suicide attempts, an institutionalization, the release of a paperback, “My Name is Leona Gage: Will Somebody Please Help Me” that portrayed her as pathetic — the common theme, she said, of most everything ever written about her.

Still, she was at peace with herself. She’d converted to Judaism. She’d become celibate. She had only one one regret — not being on good terms with her children.

Despite all the sadness in her life, I found the lengths she was willing to go to, as a woman of the 1950s, to gain her independence, kind of inspiring. And I’ll even admit to admiring (wrong as it was) how, for a day at least, she stole the crown, turning the tables on the exploitative and anachronistic world of beauty pageants.

What brings all this back to mind was a promo I saw on TV last night for one of the handful of movies she was in — “Tales of Terror,” a trilogy of Edgar Allen Poe stories produced for the big screen by famed B-movie director Roger Corman.

Leona played the title role of “Morella,” in the first of the three stories — about a woman who died during childbirth who comes back to life and kills her husband, portrayed by Vincent Price, who has kept his dead wife’s body at home for 26 years.

It airs tomorrow at 2 p.m. on  THIS TV.

The beginning of this video clip show’s the climax of the “Morella” story, where she rises from the dead and chokes Price’s character to death as flames consume the seaside mansion.

 A 40-year-old DreamWorks animator – one who worked on animal-themed children’s movies such as “Kung Fu Panda” and “Madagascar 2″ —  has been arrested on an animal cruelty charge after a surveillance camera videotaped him beating a neighbor’s muzzled dog with a hammer.

Young Song pleaded not guilty in court yesterday and faces a preliminary hearing next month. He allegedly climbed a fence into a neighbor’s yard in Pasadena. Surveillance camera video shows the 16-month-old dog being beaten but does not reveal what Song did with the dog.

Authorities say the dog is missing and presumed dead.

Song was being held on $40,500 bail, according to authorities, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“When our officers first viewed the videotape, one of our officers had tears in his eyes. He’d never seen anything like this before,” said Steve McNall, who heads the Pasadena Humane Society and Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “In my 31 years at this animal shelter I’ve never seen anything like this.”

McNall’s agency, which is licensed to investigate crimes involving animals, is conducting the probe. It made the arrest in conjunction with Pasadena police.

According to authorities, the suspect shot the dog with a pellet gun, then returned with a hammer and began chasing and striking the animal.

The Times reported that Young works as a “surfacer,” an artisan who creates the look and surface qualities for animated characters, props and environments. Young’s credits on animal-themed films also include “Shark Tale” and “Bee Movie.”

The motive for the attack is not clear. “It might have originated as a barking issue, a noise issue, and then escalated into something else,” McNall said.

If convicted, Song could face more than four years in prison, the district attorney’s office said.

For all those wondering what Steve Carell would do after “The Office,” now we know: He has agreed to star in and co-produce a new movie about talking to a dog.

It may sound cutesy, but it’s not.

“Dogs of Babel” will be a film adaptation of the 2003 novel by Carolyn Parkhurst, described as a tragic story of love and loss, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Carell — pretty much a virgin when it comes to serious drama — will play a linguistic professor who comes home to find his wife dead in the backyard.

When the police rule the death an accident, the professor has some doubts, and he attempts to teach his dog Lorelei — the only witness – to talk, so he can learn about the final moments of his wife’s life.

“My Dog Tulip” — J.R. Ackerley’s classic account of how a dog entered his life, stimulated his curiosity, broadened his horizons, and brightened his otherwise cranky golden years — is now out as an animated movie, and the book has been reissued in paperback.

“Unable to love each other, the English turn naturally to dogs,” the British writer wrote in what’s perhaps the most famous line of the 1956 book about the bond between dog and man.

“Sometimes love really is a bitch,” reads the tagline, updated for the times, of the new movie.

The movie came out late last summer, directed by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger, who are also responsible for the hand-drawn animations that, on screen, are like a New Yorker cartoon come to life.

The film is narrated by Christopher Plummer, in the role of Ackerley, and also features the voice of Lynn Redgrave, who died in May and to whom the movie is dedicated. One review called it “the most sophisticated dog movie ever made.”

It tells the story of a lonely gay man who has all but given up on finding a longtime companion and “ideal friend” in the human world.

Enter Tulip, or, as was her name in real life, Queenie, a German shepherd Ackerley acquired from his neighbors when he was “quite over 50,” and with whom he would spend the next 15 years.

“She offered me what I had never found in my life with humans: constant, single-hearted, incorruptible, uncritical devotion, which it is in the nature of dogs to offer.”

Ackerley died in 1967, and though the book is now 55 years old, it retains a sense of freshness attributable to the fact that Queenie was his first dog. His keen observation of inter-species interaction is that of someone who just landed on the planet, as opposed to being an old hand with dogs.

“It seemed to me both touching and strange,” he says at one point, “that she should find the world so wonderful.”

We long-time dog lovers know exactly what he means. It’s what makes dogs so lovable — they see the world as wonderful, and, no matter how curmudgeonly we may be, they help us see it that way too.

Name: James Dean

Breed: Brooding rebel

Age: 24 at the time of his death. Were he alive today, he’d be 79

Encountered: The James Dean sign is at Blackwell’s Corner, a gas station, nut dealer and memorabilia shop in Lost Hills, California that bills itself as “James Dean’s last stop.”

Backstory: An icon of 1950s Hollywood, Dean was killed in a head-on collision in 1955 — the same year the movie version of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” came out, in which Dean had a starring role. Steinbeck reportedly didn’t like Dean personally, but thought he was perfect for the role of Cal Trask.

After the movie’s release, Dean was driving his Porsche to Salinas for a car race. About 20 minutes after he gassed up at Blackwell’s Corner, an oncoming car struck his vehicle. He would posthumously receive an Academy Award nomination for best actor.

Today, Blackwell’s Corner specializes in pistachios and almonds, and also sells 1950s memorabilia. It offers a free pack of James Dean trading cards with a purchase of $75 or more.

John Steinbeck, as he tells it in “Travels with Charley,” didn’t stop in Fargo.

He kept Rocinante rolling another 40 miles until he stumbled upon a more idyllic setting — yet another riverside camping spot, this one along the Maple River, near the sleepy little farming town of Alice. There, he just so happened to run into what would turn out to be one of the book’s more colorful characters, an itinerant Shakespearean actor.

Steinbeck would break out the coffee, and the whiskey, and listen as his flamboyant fellow camper explained that he performed Shakespeare around the country, in tents, in high schools  … “wherever two or three are gathered together … With me there’s no question of doing something else. It’s all I know — all I ever have known.”

Steinbeck recounted the meeting in great detail — including how the actor unfolded a packet of aluminum foil to reveal a note he once received from John Gielgud. After that, explaining the importance of a good exit, the actor makes one.

Was the Shakesperean actor a dramatic invention in Steinbeck’s classic work of non-fiction? We’ll probably never know. But indications are, just maybe, something is rotten in the state of North Dakota.

From all existing clues, it appears Steinbeck didn’t actually sleep in the town of Alice on the night of Oct. 12, which can only lead one to wonder if the actor was real, or if, like Tom Joad in ”The Grapes of Wrath,” he was artfully concocted by the author, most of whose works were fiction.

If so, it wouldn’t be the first discrepancy between Steinbeck’s account in “Travels with Charley” and what his papers and other sources reveal about his 1960 trip.

Many of those are now being brought to light by blogger Bill Stiegerwald as he retraces Steinbeck’s route. (Bill, who we met at the begining of our trip is a good two weeks ahead of me.)

“Contrary to what he wrote so nicely and in such detail in ‘Charley,’ Steinbeck didn’t camp overnight near Alice on the Maple River or anywhere else on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 1960,” Stiegerwald concluded on his blog, Travels Without Charley. “He stayed at… in Beach, N.D., some 300-plus miles to the west.”

This, along with some of the recent stops on our own retracing of Steinbeck’s travels with Charley, brings us back to our discussion of the truth in fiction, and the fiction in truth.

We’re all for the former, but have some problems with the latter. We have nothing against using the techniques of fiction writing in non-fiction – in portraying the innate suspense of a situation, or the turmoil raging inside characters; or in skipping over the boring stuff.  (Otherwise, a writer might end up boring readers with something as mundane as tossing french fries to his dog.)

But we’d argue that a reader of books, even a reader of blogs, deserves — like an eater of food — to know what he’s consuming. What sort of liberties an author of non-fiction has taken in processing the facts is information to which a reader should have access, much like a diner should be able to find out what sort of oil a fast food restaurant uses to cook its french fries.

The line between fiction and non-fiction, it seems, is becoming a difficult to define boundary. Then again, maybe it has always been so.

Earlier this week, our “Travels with Ace” took us to Sauk Centre, or as Sinclair Lewis called it in his 1920 novel “Main Street,” Gopher Prairie. “Main Street,” while labeled fiction, exposed many truths about small town life — more, at least initially, than some Sauk Centre residents cared to be exposed, proving that not only does the truth hurt, but fiction can as well.

Our next, and latest, stop was Fargo, which most people know through the Coen brothers movie of same name. The movie starts off with the words: “This is a true story …  At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.”

But “Fargo” — whose characters were mostly portrayed as dull-witted sorts, living in a frozen wasteland — wasn’t a true story at all; rather it was a concoction of the wonderfully degenerate minds of two brothers from neighboring Minnesota.

Both the movie “Fargo” and the book “Main Street” brought some unflattering notoriety to the towns they were depicting — much like Steinbeck’s novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” offended some Oklahomans.

In addition to criticism that “The Grapes of Wrath” was too political, didn’t accurately describe the migration of farm families from the dust bowl to California, and some nitpicking that Sallisaw, the town it opens in, was not actually part of the Dust Bowl (a fairly major nit), there were those who thought the novel portrayed “Okies” as illiterate hicks.

(Possibly, that’s why when he was traveling with Charley, Steinbeck sidestepped the state of Oklahoma.)

In each case, though, once the dust settled, there was something close to a happily-ever-after ending – some acknowledgement of the truth beneath the fiction, or at least some evidence that any perceived slights were forgiven.

Sauk Centre, where Main Street now intersects with Sinclair Lewis Boulevard, has embraced Lewis, its most famous son, with an annual festival.

In Fargo, chamber of commerce types proclaim there has been “a renaissance” — not so much due to the movie itself, maybe, as to the efforts to show the world there was more to Fargo than the movie portrayed. In 2006, on the movie’s 10th anniversary, it was projected on the side of the Radisson Hotel, the city’s tallest building as part of the Fargo Film Festival.

And even Sallisaw, on the 100th anniversary of Steinbeck’s birth, started a “Grapes of Wrath” festival, though it was short-lived. It has since been replaced with the annual Diamond Daze Festival, which isn’t Steinbeck-related at all.

All of which, in addition to just being interesting, serves as proof that — as the maybe real, maybe not Shakespearean actor in “Travels with Charley” might have said — all the world really is a stage.