Oh dear God. Porcelain sex robot Chace Crawford will be Ren McCormack. Though Zac Efron was long ago maybe going to star in the upcoming Footloose, he backed out because, you know, no homo. So the Gossip Girl actor has now been cast and the whole movie has sprung a leak. [Variety]

Oh, good. The up-and-coming young actress Melissa Leo has been cast in David O. Russell's The Fighter, playing Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale's moms. [Variety]

Jackass Chris Pontius has just been called up to the artsy leagues. He'll play a role in auteur Sofia Coppola's new movie Somewhere. Playing the lead in that movie about a fried-out rock 'n roller living at the Chateau Marmont? None other than our old, long-lost friend Stephen Dorff. Good for him. Elle Fanning is also in it. So. [THR]

Lostie Matthew Fox has left ICM for the new mega-agency WME, forged in the volcanic fires of William Morris and Endeavor's god-like lovemaking. So hopefully for Fox this means less Speed Racer and Vantage Point and more, well... anything else. [Variety]

Good news for those of you helplessly addicted to those wonderful crystals, those glassy things that burn and smolder and give you energy and keep you up for hours, and are dangerous in that "I'm alive!" kind of way. No, Ricky your meth dealer hasn't figured out the science from Breaking Bad ("I want blue meth like the TV, and I want it now.") It's just that Robert Pattinson's sparkly vampire skin diamonds will be twinkling for a fourth Twilight movie. Aren't you happy? [THR]

Huh. Benjamin Bratt's dirge-like A&E drama The Cleaner has been picked up for a second season. So, well, that's nice. [Variety]

Begrizzled homo-loving son of a gun Sean Penn will be starring in a film about drugs. It's a Brian Grazer-produced film called Cartel and is a sorta revengey, child protect-y kinda movie. [Variety] David Ayer, who's previously dazzled us with such fare like the baroque LA crime flick Harsh Times and the broke-ass LA crime Keanu Reeves movie Street Kings, has received a seven figure deal from Regency to write and direct a film called Last Man, about American soldiers in space dukin' it out with frakking aliens. [Variety]

Fox has picked up the screen rights to the book Mr. Popper's Penguins. They plan to turn the 1938 publication into a thriller about what happens when the air conditioning is on too high at the Abbey. [Variety]

Begrizzled immigrant-loving wielder of a gun Melissa Leo, of Frozen River Oscar nodding, has signed on to a new HBO pilot. She'll be playing a lawyer in Treme, David Simon's New Orleans-set followup to The Wire. [Variety] Meanwhile at a project of completely equal prestige, former Ugly Betty transsexual Rebecca Romijn has signed on to play the lead in the Witches of Eastwick pilot for ABC. [Variety]

Michael J. Fox is returning to television, in a reality show called Michael J. Fox: Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, in which he travels the world spreading good cheer. You just shut yer damn trap right now, Limbaugh. [Variety] Meanwhile a TV star of today makes Bambi steps toward movie stardom. Leighton Meester of Gossip Girl will star in the totally-mid-90's-ish thriller The Roommate, about a college student whose roommate becomes obsessed with her, Single White Female style. In that movie, Jennifer Jason Leigh was Bridget Fonda's, um, roommate. [THR]

Oh awesome. The wonderful Missy Pyle, Chris Parnell, and Deanne Dunagan are set to star in a CBS comedy pilot. Parnell and Pyle have been doing funny work in TV and film for years now, but Chicago actress Dunagan is probably best known for her ferocious, every-award-possible-winning turn in the play August: Osage County. She'll play a Southern mother making things difficult for an East Coast-transplant couple. [THR]

Despite Winslet's best clothes-shedding efforts, we've long suspected the Best Actress category was a closer call than most would give it credit for (see the new issue of Time Magazine for starters). Yet it wasn't presumed silver-medalist Meryl Streep making the biggest late strides, but rather Frozen River's Melissa Leo — a 25-year film/TV veteran who may accrue enough rank-and-file votes to split Winslet and Streep and sneak in for the win. That's how Marcia Gay Harden did it in 2000, as Sasha Stone noted this morning; David Carr was even more direct at The Carpetbagger:

[W]hile Ms. Winslet does appear to be the favorite for her role in The Reader, The Bagger heard some stuff at parties last night at parties about Melissa Leo coming on strong; this line of thinking holds that many people did not see Frozen River and her amazing performance until recently and that some have been put off by Ms. Winslet's admission that she would like this year to be hers.

Meanwhile, Winslet's husband Sam Mendes played dumb about her Oscar groveling, instead throwing his own light weight behind the campaign yesterday in New York: "Give her a break from Losing Face, everybody." Was he not at the Globes? Break's almost over, Kate — it might be time to get back to work.

• The Bagger in L.A.: It Better Be Kate [Carpetbagger]

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.

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.