Everything the director Michael Bay turns his hand to tends to be loud and hostile, and that includes a nervously whiny memo to his backers at Paramount’s marketing department, sent 10 days before his latest opus, Transformers 2, was unleashed.

“Right now we are not an event. We are just a sequel, which is very different. There is no anticipation. Remember Spidey 2 — it was everywhere. This is lame. Is it a cash issue with your company? I am sure we shall do fine, but not to your internal expectations because we are being cocky.” Cocky? Pots and kettles?

Bay’s robo-blitz is critic-proof and has broken summer records, but will he apologise? Okay, if not for the memo, at least for Pearl Harbor and The Island?

Sony Pictures has dared to cancel Brad Pitt’s next project hours before the cameras rolled, saying the $60m baseball script Moneyball was not on the money. No other studio has picked it up, suggesting not many in Hollywood care about their local team, the Oakland As. Even the original book’s author, Michael Lewis, said he could not see it as a movie. But who ever listens to the writer?

Now that 3-D is old hat, and America’s Imax screens are literally shrinking, Hollywood’s venerable Grauman cinema is charging $5 extra for seats that vibrate, pitch and yaw along with the movie: these Canadian D-Box chairs are fabulous for The Fast and the Furious, where on-screen acceleration throws you back into the padding, but not recommended for those tender of stomach wanting to see the new Pixar film about a flying house, Up. And speaking of Up, Adult Industry News reports an upsurge in sales of videos showing clothed men popping balloons by sitting on them, which is a sexual turn-on even beyond Pixar’s wild imagination. Hopefully.

Next March, Oscar voters will get the chance to choose 10 rather than five Best Picture nominations. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is doubling the field to include more movies people have actually seen — last year’s creative and commercial hits The Dark Knight and Wall-E were relegated to side categories — not the indie fare voters have headed for of late.

The first bookie’s poll of next year’s (expanded) Oscar contenders — films few have yet seen — includes Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, based on the Alice Sebold bestseller; Daniel Day-Lewis lightening up in Nine, the musical version of Fellini’s 8½; Meryl Streep’s cookery course Julie & Julia, about the eccentric American celebrity chef Julia Child; Penelope Cruz in Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces; Clint Eastwood’s Nelson Mandela biopic Invictus; Hilary Swank as aviatrix Amelia Earhart; the Irish hope Jim Sheridan’s Brothers; Kathryn Bigelow’s powerful Iraq war movie The Hurt Locker; Avatar, the sci-fi extravaganza that is Jim Cameron’s first big film since Titanic; and, of course — envelope please — the saddest feelgood experience of the year, Pixar’s Up.

You can judge a party by its guests, even the American Glastonbury. Last month, Bonnaroo, in Tennessee, overtook Coachella, outside Los Angeles, as the coolest US pop festival. It wasn’t just Bruce Springsteen’s set, from which Born in the USA was not missed by 80,000 joyous fist-pumpers, or even Dumbarton-born, tutu-wearing David Byrne lapsing into a British accent during Talking Heads numbers (he does that when frustrated, apparently), but the unheralded arrival of Drew Barrymore dancing in the crowds. Face paint did not make her paparazzi-proof. Coachella, meanwhile, attracts Paris Hilton, hand grafted to bony hip. Enough said.

Zhang Yimou, the Chinese director of Hero and House of Flying Daggers, as well as orchestrator-in-chief of last summer’s Olympic opening-ceremony theatrics in Beijing, is remaking the Coen brothers’ debut, Blood Simple. Am guessing remaking No Country for Old Men would be taken personally by China’s ruling gerontocracy.

Sandra Bullock’s latest box-office topper, The Proposal, has generated much guff about women’s films coming of age. I call that tosh until a woman leads a hit movie that does not include a wedding. Or shoes. Especially shoes.

Richard Brooks is away

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