Documentaries have sometimes managed to crossover from Sundance recognition for most of the last decade, with films like Born Into Brothels and An Inconvenient Truth winning Oscars among nominees including Capturing the Friedmans, Murderball and No End In Sight. But that trend exploded this morning, with three of the five Documentary Feature nominees having launched at Sundance, and two of them — Man on Wire and Trouble the Water — having won their respective sections at the fest in 2008.

Meanwhile, the dramatic award winners coming out of Park City are usually lucky just to find distribution and modest theatrical grosses before shuffling off to video and cable. Little Miss Sunshine broke out as a Sundance premiere in 2006 en route to four nominations and two wins, but it didn't have to drag the mixed blessing of Sundance's Grand Jury Prize — usually given to challenging films with Big Social Themes — all the way to Oscar night behind its ubiquitous yellow van.

This year, though? In addition to the doc nominees, Sundance's 2008 winner Frozen River will compete for Best Actress (Melissa Leo) and Best Original Screenplay (by director Courtney Hunt). The Visitor's Richard Jenkins is a Best Actor contender. Martin McDonagh earned his own Original Screenplay nomination for In Bruges, last year's opening-night film.

On one hand we're inclined to invoke the fluke quotient here, but watch what Sony Pictures Classics — whose unqualified commercial success with Frozen River will only improve after today's news — does with this year's Sundance acquisition An Education, which is roundly recognized as one of 2009's best films to date and features awards-caliber work by lead actress Carey Mulligan, supporting actors Peter Sarsgaard and Alfred Molina, screenwriter Nick Hornby and director Lone Scherfig. If Frozen River was SPC's Park City prototype, An Education may be its first sportscar off the line after tinkering with the awards-season machinery its co-presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard know so well. Wait and see.

Which ultimately amounts to little more than succeeding without Steven Spielberg or Marvel's creative influence. But it will, as The NY Times reminds us, first depend on whether or not Grey can actually make people forget about Paramount Vantage less than a year after the label co-produced two Best Picture nominees before folding into the mother ship. How else to accomplish that, of course, but by courting both Oscar and audiences on the tenets of early 19th-century philosophy:

In a less expected twist, Paramount’s marketers have been building their campaign around a theme taken not from Fitzgerald but from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. “We keep rearranging the words,” said Megan Colligan, co-president of domestic marketing for the studio. “But the idea is: You must live your life forward, but it can only be understood backward.”

Whatever, gang — we've already called our shot for Pitt. Just as long as you leave Deepak Chopra out of this one, you can't really go wrong.

• Paramount Steps Up to Contest for Oscars [NYT]

WHAT'S NEW: Barring some Joker-emulating fanboy's cackling sabotage of a few thousand projectors nationwide, this will likely be the week The Dark Knight slips out of first place behind The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Make that "first place at the box office," that is — not necessarily in our hearts, where the roundly loathing critical reaction to Mummy doesn't have us too confident in its overall superiority. But that's August for you, and despite the Batmobile at its tattered heels, The Mummy's awfulness shouldn't keep about $52 million worth of American ticketbuyers away. Sorry about that. Or, if you're up for a counterprogramming schlep to Norwalk, Lionsgate's buried Clive Barker adaptation Midnight Meat Train finally opens in one theater. Again, welcome to August. It can only get better. Really.

THE BIG LOSER: In fairness, we're checking out Swing Vote this weekend, so we don't know for ourselves yet whether or not it's a joy to behold. But let's recap for second: Kevin Costner's latest is the story of an alcoholic single dad whose vote is discovered to hold the key to a presidential election. Its plot is essentially lifted from a 1939 John Barrymore film. It's over two hours long. Costner financed it himself, and best promoted it Wednesday night as Conan O'Brian's Chinese-restroom-tour sidekick. Kevin, we really are puling for you, but why are we not encouraged?

THE UNDERDOG: Speaking of counterprogramming, the small drama Frozen River is about as antisummer as its gets: A broke single mother (Melissa Leo) in frigid upstate New York, whose American dream consists of a new double-wide and a Christmas with actual presents under the tree, falls into an immigrant-smuggling ring with a young Native American woman (Misty Upham). That's it — that simple, that stark, and quite strong. And don't hold its Sundance Grand Jury Prize against it; for every brooding indie convention into which it trips, Leo and Upham dig out with help from writer/director Courtney Hunt's elegant eye and gut-punch plot twists. It's not an August miracle or anything, but it's easily the best thing opening in town this weekend.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD releases include Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert doc Shine a Light, the 25th anniversary rerelease of WarGames, and a three-way tie for Must-Have-Right-Now Box Set: The Hills: The Complete Third Season; Beverly Hills 90210: The Fifth Season; and Girlfriends: The Fourth Season. Don't rush off to buy them all at once — we have a feeling they'll be there for a while.

So are we worrying too much? Is The Mummy 3 ready for misunderstood masterpiece status? Or is that Swing Vote? Or will Heath Ledger surge back to make fools of us all? We're up for anything at this point in the season — fire away below, and help us count down the days until Pineapple Express.