There is no dominant front-runner for this year’s Best Picture Oscar, but you would never know that from the polls of the Florida Film Critics Circle and the Southeastern Film Critics Association (the two groups I belong to as a voting member).

Both tapped The Social Network, David Fincher’s account of the founding of Facebook, as the best film of 2010 and, as happens only occasionally, I am in agreement with the groups’ pick. Both organizations also named Fincher best director and singled out Aaron Sorkin for best adapted screenplay. SEFCA also recognized the movie’s cast as the year’s best ensemble, an award that the FFCC does not present.

Both groups also saw the leading acting categories the same, voting Colin Firth as the year’s best actor for his performance as speech-impaired King George VI in The King’s Speech and the best actress award went to Natalie Portman for the mentally unhinged ballerina in Black Swan. I concur on Firth, and expect him to also pick up the Oscar for the role, in part for being overlooked last year for his also impressive dramatic turn in A Single Man. I liked Portman’s performance, but my vote went to Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right, and the two of them should be battling it out for the Oscar.

The critics’ panels diverged when it came to the supporting acting categories. The Florida group voted for Geoffrey Rush, the unconventional speech therapist in The King’s Speech, and Hailee Steinfeld, the spunky frontier teen in the remake of True Grit. The Southeastern association went with two performers from The Fighter, Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, as the brother and mother of brawling boxer Mickey Ward.

I side with the SEFCA picks and think they both are probable Oscar winners. Bale steals The Fighter with his loopy, brain-addled, drug-addicted performance and should edge out the fine work by Rush, who previous took home an Academy Award for Shine. Leo is a little-known veteran actress who is greatly admired in the industry. By contrast, Steinfeld is making her film debut. She’s quite good in the Coen Brothers’ highly stylized Western, but her central role is really the movie’s lead.

In a true no-brainer, both groups call Toy Story 3 the best animated feature of the year. I not only agree, but think the Oscars should just give a statuette to the film now and consider naming the category for the Pixar Studio.

The Florida Film Critics managed to scrape together four awards for Inception, the mind-bending action picture about invading the subconscious as a form of industrial espionage. FFCC recognized it for best original screenplay, best cinematography, best art direction/production design and best visual effects. SEFCA gave its original screenplay award to The King’s Speech and cinematography to True Grit, with Inception the runner-up in both categories.

I side with the Inception wins, but imagine the more traditional Motion Picture Academy will lean toward The King’s Speech come Oscar time.

The Florida circle calls The Tillman Story, about the friendly-fire death of pro football’s Pat Tillman in Iraq, the best documentary of 2010. The Southeastern group went with Inside Job, the well-made saga of the financial collapse. I voted for Waiting for Superman, the story of the failure of our public schools and how to fix them.

The year’s best foreign film, according to SEFCA, was the Korean thriller Mother. The Florida critics tapped I Am Love, a family tale of commerce and awakening passion, which got my vote.

The Florida Film Critics Circle is composed of 19 writers from publications across the state. The Southeastern Film Critics Association has 43 members working in print, radio and online media in nine states throughout the region.

Two strangers in a museum find themselves sharing the same opinion about that thing facing them. They call it “thing” because they don't know what it is. And the brave one's loud comment (“What the heck is this?”) is the shy one's relief.

Such a flow of communication might be common at the Now WHAT? show, which opened recently at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach in an attempt to bring to town a flame or two of the fire set in Miami Beach by this year’s Art Basel.

Out of that fair came the 31 pieces and 21 artists that compose Now WHAT? The selections were made by two of the museum's curators, who went south to pick the freshest, riskiest, most relevant art representative of our times. They then decided that the theme bringing it all together will be communication.

In that sense, and only in that sense, the Norton show is great. Nothing gets a conversation going like a piece that makes no sense. That conversation usually goes something like this: Is this art? Here it is provoked by plenty, such as Pigeon Holes, by Roxy Paine, in which plasters of paints appear inside plexiglas like dead insects pinned down waiting to be examined.

In Volumes from an Imagined Intellectual History of Animals, Architecture and Man, nothing was actually created, unless you consider the title of the piece or the order in which the books are placed a creative result. The work, by Julian Montague, consists of 10 old books, most of which have the image of a bug on the cover and hint at the effect small animals can have in the life of man.

Meanwhile with September 2010, Receipts, a 24-foot long strip of personal expenses, the artist, David Shapiro, is telling us that we are all artists. After all, as an observer pointed out, we all have collections just like this at home. Due bills? Receipts? Anyone?

One singular instant in which this dialogue ceases to be sarcastic comes courtesy of Bryan Drury and is titled Ali. It is a striking small portrait that calls us no matter where we stand in the room and made dramatic by its bright red background.

Once directly facing it, we marvel at how realistic and alive Ali is. Notice the pores of the skin, the imperfect flesh, the swollen lips and you will see condensed in this seemingly traditional/safe work the prints of a skillful artist.
Whenever I’m reviewing a show, I usually go alone. This time, however, I brought along company on purpose. I wanted to see if I’m alone in thinking that lately the concepts of simplicity and absence are being repeatedly presented as art. I saw it at Art Basel. It is here again.

A dark silver wood panel is all that Teresita Fernandez’s Nocturnal (Rise and Fall) is. Hers is the second piece to the right once you enter the gallery room. I can’t detect specific figures or a message. As it often happens with art, there is no explanation for it. All it seems to be is precisely what it is: solid graphite and pencil on wood panels.

In Allyson Strafella’s foundation (2005) and inverted red catenary (2010) art seems to take the form of holes resulted from typing underlines and colons over and over on carbon paper.

When it’s not holes, art here is vanishing, disappearing, hardly visible, almost a ghost. No other work here puts it better than Christopher Russell’s Ghost-Ship-Wreck, an 18-frame piece done mostly in silver. Thin and thick white lines give life to the ship, which in some frames appears sinking and in others marching ahead.

Could it be that artists are teaching themselves to create less or use less to create? Is the trendy minimalism wave to blame?

I don’t know that you can simplify art without affecting its very essence. A kitchen, for instance, has two factors that make it identifiable: appearance and use. Simplify or alter its look as you may and you would still be able to tell it’s a kitchen through the way it is used. Art is not an appliance or a closet. It has no use through which it can make itself present or known. It relies on what you can see to make itself identifiable, ideally, as art.

Simplify the only thing it is and you end up with less of what it is, or even worse, you end up with nothing: a thing forced to pose for an audience when really all it wants is to be put out of its misery.

Kim Rugg’s The Story Is One Sign seems to me an example of this. If we go along with her message, the story is sometimes a dollar sign, $, and other times a “J” or a “K.” The artist has grabbed a front page of The New York Times and placed the same 30 times next to one another. In each copy, the content and images have been stripped from the page only to leave a sign or a letter. On one page, we can only see the “Ks” as they appeared originally on the newsprint. The rest, most of it, is white. Nothing to be seen. Less to judge.

By the end of the show my guest and I had reached a conclusion: The artists here had great concepts, ideas, but either got lazy halfway into their projects or they didn't have much imagination to carry their creations to the very end. Or maybe, they simply didn't care.

Or you could say that present here are great conceptualists or philosophers, but not necessarily great artists. Unless you find yourself already in the museum, this is not something you need to see. If you don’t come, you won’t miss anything.

The show was intended to be full of delightful surprises. And Now WHAT? seems like something we would say to the person who keeps interrupting us in the middle of something delightful. But that’s not what I feel like saying.

I want to be interrupted, pulled aside and told the secret behind this exhibit: Is it art or is it a joke? And to the museum curators I want to ask: Why? How? I get a feeling those visitors who do come from now until March 13 will be asking the same.

Now WHAT? runs through March 13 at the Norton Museum of Art. Admission: $12, adults; $5 ages 13-21. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays. Call 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org.

Film: With meticulous attention to period details and an engrossing history-based story that humanizes the struggle of a British king like no movie before it, The King’s Speech is great, albeit old-fashioned, filmmaking. Colin Firth stars as Bertie, a/k/a Prince Albert (Colin Firth), who unexpectedly becomes King George VI as World War II looms, due to his older brother’s abdication over his love of divorcee Wallis Simpson. But the king has a secret stammer, made worse by the thought of public speaking. His struggle to overcome it, aided by an impudent commoner and unorthodox speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush), forms the heart of the film. Directed crisply by Tom Hooper, whose best work previously was the impressive Adams mini-series. Opening locally this weekend. – H. Erstein

Theater: Two towering minds of the 20^th century -- Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and a staunch atheist, and C.S. Lewis, a fervent convert to Christianity who would become a religious philosopher and author -- meet at Freud’s London consulting room as England is drawn into World War II, and they debate the existence of God, the nature of good and evil and the very meaning of life in Mark St. Germain’s two-character play, Freud’s Last Session. That’s it, virtually no plot, no action, but since the essence of theater is words and ideas, the conversation is enough to grip us over the evening’s brief, but densely packed 70 minutes. Dennis Creaghan disappears completely into the role of Freud, aided by a snowy beard and a Viennese accent, and Chris Oden is his reverent, but verbally combative foil Lewis. Continuing through Feb. 6. Call (561) 514-4042 for tickets. – H. Erstein

Music: Most of the music world is taking a breather for the holiday, but there are still some shows around over the weekend if you travel a little. On Sunday night at Fort Lauderdale’s Revolution Live, it’s a show by VersaEmerge, a trio from Port St. Lucie. Led by big-voiced singer Sierra Kusterbeck, the group has a new album, Fixed at Zero, and is on a national tour with bands such as I See Stars and Black Veil Brides. 6:30 p.m. Tickets: $19.30, available through Ticketmaster at 1-800-745-3000 or www.ticketmaster.com.

Flutist Karrie Griffiths currently plays in the Fort Lauderdale-based Symphony of the Americas, but she also is the founder of Music in Miami, a chamber music series. This Sunday at Miami’s Trinity Cathedral, Griffiths is joined by violist Modesto Marcano, oboist Marco Navarette, pianist Maria Menendez and classical guitarist Miguel Bonachea for a program of music by Beethoven (Serenade in D, op. 25), Ravel (Habanera), Ibert (Escales), and Holst (Terzett0). Also on the program are pieces by Agustin Barrios, Antonio Lauro and Jose Manuel Lezcano. 6 p.m., Trinity Cathedral. Free admission, but donations accepted. Call 954-309-2424 or visit www.musicinmiami.net for more information.

With Freud’s Last Session, playwright Mark St. Germain follows a simple formula for success -- put two compelling characters with differing viewpoints onstage, then stay out of their way and let them speak.

In this case, the characters are two towering thinkers of the 20^th century. There is Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and a staunch atheist, and C.S. Lewis, a fervent convert to Christianity who would later become renowned as a religious philosopher and famous for writing such allegorical works as the Chronicles of Narnia series.

There is no evidence that these two ever really met, but St. Germain takes his inspiration from a book by Dr. Armand Nicholi, The Question of God, who suggested that such a meeting of the minds would have been fascinating. And indeed, St. Germain has Freud -- suffering from oral cancer and contemplating suicide -- summon Lewis to his London consulting rooms for a combustible conversation about the existence of a higher being, as well as the nature of good and evil, the purpose of sex and the very meaning of life.

Yes, it is heady stuff, but St. Germain frames the actual words of these two men in an entertaining fashion, leavened with humor that keeps matters from becoming dry. And the play -- which continues off-Broadway after five months -- is produced locally in its Southeastern premiere by Palm Beach Dramaworks, a company that prides itself on offering “theater to think about.”

Director William Hayes puts the emphasis of this gem-like production on the words, moving his actors around the stage just enough to avoid the action-challenged play from feeling static. He is fortunate to have a pair of first-rate actors, Dennis Creaghan (last seen at Dramaworks as the junk shop proprietor in American Buffalo) and Chris Oden (Werner Heisenberg in a similar play of factual supposition, Copenhagen), as Freud and Lewis respectively.

Creaghan again demonstrates that he is one of South Florida’s most versatile performers, a chameleon disappearing behind Freud’s snowy beard and Viennese accent. Oden is a worthy foil, in awe of Freud yet drawn to attacking his nihilistic view of the world with respect and a bit of sadness. Together, they pick apart each other’s arguments with surgical precision.

Freud’s Last Session runs only 70 minutes, but they are densely packed with ideas, served up by a pair of actors who make the time spent with these two historical figures bracingly cerebral.

FREUD’S LAST SESSION, Palm Beach Dramaworks, 322 Banyan Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Feb. 6. Tickets: $47. Call: (561) 514-4042.

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Speaking of characters with opposing viewpoints, consider what happens when Maxine, an unemployed lesbian from Brooklyn who has given birth to a baby girl by artificial insemination, meets Goldie, a judgmental Orthodox Jewish lactation consultant.

The sparks fly in Karen Hartman’s world premiere comedy, Goldie, Max & Milk, at Florida Stage, even though it is not hard to predict that the two women will rub off a bit on each other, teach one another a few important life lessons and, after some tidily resolved crises, reach a truce of understanding and respect.

Yes, Hartman’s play is sitcom-convenient, but this decidedly offbeat look at alternative family values still manages to win us over with its humanity and its heart-on-the-sleeve argument for tolerance.

As the play begins, Max is down in the dumps. Her apartment has fallen into disrepair, her longtime lover Lisa has left her in a sudden fit of heterosexuality and Max has no prospects of landing a job. But she cradles in her arms her gorgeous new daughter, tiny Lakshmi Rose, named for the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity. If only there were milk flowing in her breasts so she could nurse her baby.

Enter Goldie, sent by the hospital to help matters, which she does, even though she opposes Max’s sexual orientation. So they spar with some clever, pointed exchanges, but Hartman soon runs out of comic barbs. What gives the play its follow-up punch is the arrival of Goldie’s teenage daughter, Shayna Brucha, who comes laden with a noodle casserole and a dilemma of her own. You see, she is a closeted lesbian, who worries if she tells her mother she will be ostracized from the family.

Wait, there’s more. As the first act ends, Lisa rashly kidnaps little Lakshmi to gain Max’s attention. Not much is made of this intermission cliffhanger other than turning us off to Lisa.

Goldie, Max & Milk is directed by Margaret M. Ledford of Promethean Theatre, making her Florida Stage debut. To her credit, she reins in the play’s potential for caricature, getting an earnest, dimensional performance from Deborah L. Sherman as Goldie, full of practical wisdom as well as a religious code that knows no compromise. She is a vivid presence, but the production belongs to Erin Joy Schmidt (Max), endearingly clueless on child-rearing and perpetually exhausted, but with a natural maternal instinct.

Sarah Lord is a petite wise-beyond-her-years dynamo as Shayna, Carla Harting adds some nuance to the play’s villainess Lisa and David Hemphill lends solid support as the odd-man-out, Lisa’s brother Mike, the sperm donor dad who moonlights as a drug dealer.

Florida Stage gives further evidence that it is learning how to use its new home at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse, thanks to Timothy R. Mackabee’s scenic design, which has far more set pieces than would ever have fit in the Manalapan playhouse. Goldie, Max & Milk is lighter than much of the company’s usual fare. Maybe the company wanted to ease up for the holidays as it continues to search for an audience in West Palm Beach. Still, the play weaves some substance in between its strokes of warm humor.

GOLDIE, MAX & MILK, Florida Stage at the Kravis Center’s Rinker Playhouse, 701 Okeechobee Blvd., West Palm Beach. Through Sunday, Jan. 16. Tickets: $47-$50. Call: (561) 585-3433 or (800) 514-3837.

Singing bassist Nicki Parrott's trio walked on to the stage at the Harriet Himmel Theater in West Palm Beach on Tuesday while still getting used to dry land.

Parrott, Italian pianist Rossano Sportiello and drummer Ed Metz Jr. had just exited a Crystal Cruise line ship earlier in the day after playing a 10-day jazz-themed sail from Fort Lauderdale to the Caribbean.

And while a few tentative early moments showed that the three were still getting their land legs under them, they soon righted the ship through creative arrangements of a few classics and more than a few surprises, all to the delight of the three-quarter capacity crowd.

“We're going to play tunes from the American Songbook,” Parrott said, tongue firmly planted in cheek, “otherwise known as the Rod Stewart songbook.”

The humor of the Australia native, now based in Brooklyn, showed all night long. On Louis Jordan's bluesy Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby, she augmented her breathy, understated vocal delivery with snippets of scat-singing as Metz creatively played his snare drum with brushes, drumsticks, and even his hands.

Sportiello introduced an early highlight, Tommy Flanagan’s Beats Up, by playing a long, ragtime-influenced solo. Metz propelled the warp-speed piece with his rimshots and hummingbird breaks, and Parrott played a snippet of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March during her solo.

The bassist then downshifted by singing Consuelo Velazquez’s Besame Mucho, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas (which she renamed Down Under Christmas, and infused with lyrics of Australian imagery), and Adler and Ross’s Whatever Lola Wants, a tune from the musical Damn Yankees.

The best of the first set’s jazz standards was Cole Porter’s Let's Do It, Let’s Fall in Love which Parrott injected with her own humorous lyrics (“Piano players who are Milanese do it,” with a wink toward Sportiello, before she also mentioned Metz, the Tea Party, TSA agents, Lindsay Lohan, Batman, Mel Gibson, Tiger Woods, and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie).

All of which led to the evening’s signature piece, a medley of Chopin melodies that Sportiello arranged for the trio.

“Imagine that Chopin gets caught in Harlem in 1955,” Parrott said. The three musicians then engaged in a dizzying chase that started with the pianist's introduction over a mid-tempo rhythm by Parrott and Metz. The drummer used brushes, and Parrott employed her bow, as Sportiello led them into dramatic pauses, then his manic, Art Tatum-esque solo at a breakneck pace. The trio then effortlessly de-accelerated into a ballad feel; a bluesy Harlem shuffle, and a 6/8 rhythmic cadence before the coda and a necessary, breath-catching intermission.

“I hadn’t planned on doing this, but we're going to do a little tribute to Les Paul,” Parrott said early in the second set. The bassist was a part of Paul’s weekly house band at the Iridium Jazz Club in Manhattan for nine years until the 94-year-old icon died in 2009, and she still honors him there on Mondays as part of the Les Paul Trio (with guitarist Lou Pallo and pianist John Colianni).

Parrott again changed the lyrics to suit the subject, this time in a medley of Young at Heart and How High the Moon. The loping former segued into the up-tempo latter, complete with a swinging Sportiello solo and trades between Metz and Parrott that had the bassist laughing and dancing. Her infectious energy permeated the entire concert, right down to her ballad ode to Peggy Lee, I Love the Way You're Breaking My Heart (featured on Parrott’s 2009 CD Fly Me to the Moon).

Sportiello then showed his arranging prowess again, this time infusing George Shearing’s Lullaby of Birdland with a Baroque feel. Parrott’s underrated playing included both bow and fingerstyle; Metz soloed only on the cymbals, and the pianist seamlessly shifted between swing and Baroque figures.

A muscular arrangement of Bert Kaempfert’s Spanish Eyes closed the show, and featured compelling solos by both Sportiello and Parrott. Yet it was Metz who brought the house down. Like Buddy Rich, the drummer uses every tool at his disposal -- playing with brushes, soloing with his hands, and then bouncing drumsticks off of the snare, some of which he caught; some of which ended up on the ledge above the stage.

This trio first played together while recording Metz’s 2008 CD Bridging the Gap, and it developed chemistry while performing a week’s worth of dates in Switzerland the following year. Parrott and Sportiello have recorded two duo CDs and are completely simpatico already, so any hiccups on this night (most coming at the end of songs) were en route toward complete symmetry with their otherwise fabulous drummer.

The three are likely to have all kinks worked out by the time they record during late-January dates at the Jazz Corner in Hilton Head, S.C. If this evening was any indication, the result could be a stellar 2011 live CD.