The outcry over Best Foreign-Language Film nominees appears to have subsided for the time being, however, with the honorary 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days Rule apparently ceding more control to the category's Executive Committee:

The foreign language film nominations have long been a point of major contention among cineastes, as many of the most lauded titles from the annual film festival circuit are overlooked at Oscar nomination-time in favor of less challenging, more easygoing fare. ...

The new rules will allow the 20-member Foreign Language Film Award Executive Committee to determine three of the nine films on the shortlist. The other six titles will be determined by the voting of the "Phase 1 committee," any voting member who views a minimum number of eligible films. The executive committee will make their selections after the Phase 1 committee's voting has been tallied, presumably to avoid leaving out certain titles.

Alas, the Academy still has yet to develop a method to account for taste in the vote for the Final Five. Wake us up when Nuri Bilge Ceylan or Apichatpong Weerasethakul win something, will you?

• Oscar alters song, foreign film rules [The Envelope]

1. Enchanted - $17.023 million
Rather than drag their children back to theaters to watch Disney send up decades of its relentlessly cheery, emotionally dishonest fairy tales, parents instead plopped the kids in front of the TV with a stack of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Little Mermaid DVDs, instructing the tykes to erupt in cynical laughter each time any of the films' obviously delusional heroines breaks into song to explain how much better her life will be once her prince shows up to save her.

2. This Christmas - $8.4 million
3. Beowulf - $7.882 million
One day, envelope-pushing filmmaker Robert Zemeckis will apply his groundbreaking motion-capture technology to attempt to reinvigorate the stagnant "home for the holidays" genre, working under the theory that tiresome bickering around the dinner table and Christmas tree will seem far more compelling if dramatized by digitally rendered actors with disturbingly dead eyes that reveal the soul-draining effects of years of family dysfunction.

4. Awake - $6.011 million
Kudos to Awake director Joby Harold, who realized that the best utilization of star Hayden Christensen's abilities would be to strap him to a hospital bed while paralyzed by an anesthetic coma, aware of the scenes unfolding around him but unable to woodenly interact with his fellow castmates.

5. Hitman - $5.8 million
A brief debate in last week's box office report seems to have ended in consensus about the Timothy Olyphant vs. Vin Diesel question: while Diesel probably would have been the bigger draw, the marble-mouthed onetime action star can't equal either Olyphant's dramatic chops or his trademarked brand of clenched-jaw sex appeal.

• Weekend Box Office November 30-December 2, 2007 [Box Office Mojo]

[I]t happens when the bus driver exits the bus. Listen closely. Someone with a new york accent appears to shout the F-word.

So did you hear it? Isn't that crazy? How sure are you?

[B]ecause the New Yorker in question doesn't actually say:

"Get the F*CK out of there!"

Listen again, one more time, and you will find that he actually says

"Get that BUS out of there".

We direct you now to slashfilm.com to examine the scene in question, and decide for yourselves whether the phrase uttered by an anonymous voiceover thespian specializing in disgruntled New Yorkers was innocuously referring to the "steel beast" vanquished by Prince Edwards, or instead offers a distressing indication of just how far family films are now willing to go in pandering to parents forced to sit with their kids through a fractured fairy tale instead of the screening of No Country For Old Men in the theater next door.

• F*cking Enchanted: The F-Word in a PG Movie? [slashfilm.com]

1. Enchanted - $35.322 million ($50.048 million—5-day weekend)
Enchanted's success was inevitable: families trapped at home for the Thanksgiving holiday with kids who were discovering that their newly purchased Shrek the Third DVDs, once drained of entertainment value by nine or ten viewings, make excellent projectiles, know that a trip to the multiplex is a sanity-saver—even if the cinemas were filled with other harried parents desperately hoping that the combination of a dark theater and some child-sedating musical numbers might temporarily calm their little brood of monsters.

2. This Christmas - $18.6 million ($27.1 million—5-day weekend)
No holiday moviegoing season would be complete without Hollywood reminding us that even though our families are crazy and dysfunctional—and they are, aren't they?—in the end, they're all we have™ and we love each other™. Especially if Delroy Lindo is around to help us keep our shit together.

3. Beowulf - $16.240 million ($23.15 million—5-day weekend)
We briefly considered a trip to Beowulf to ogle Angelina Jolie's computer-enhanced form, but then we realized that we could simultaneously save some money and get our jollies by flipping through our cable movie channels, knowing that at least one example of the actress's many fine, digitally unassisted nude scenes would likely turn up after no more than 20 minutes of surfing.

4. Hitman - $13.035 million ($21 million—5-day weekend)
We suppose we'll never know how many opening weekend millions were sacrificed when Fox, having lost the services marble-headed, monosyllabic action star Vin Diesel, had to settle for shaving Timothy Olyphant's head and praying for the best.

5. Bee Movie - $10.025 million ($15.988 million—5-day weekend)

• Weekend Box Office November 23-24, 2007 [Box Office Mojo]