Apart from a surprise Supporting Actor nod for Michael Shannon's truth-hoarding suburban loony, we face the life-affirming prospect of Revolutionary Road's disappearance from the awards-season scene. Think about it:

· No more shrill DiCaprio or histrionic Winslet bellowing Oscar clips under Sam Mendes's lip-licking, sadistic gaze.

· A foreseeable end to the public gang-rape of source novelist Richard Yates.

· No more Reader vs. Road chatter calculating Winslet's optimal Oscar odds.

· An awardscast without the threat of hearing its theme replayed ad infinitum lest, God forbid, Road won anything.

· The likelihood its box-office will plunge this weekend.

· The likelihood its full-page newspaper ads will cease to exist as early as tomorrow.

· An unofficial rebuke to Mendes and those audience-flagellating hacks who would follow him, cheaply defying the basic laws of art, entertainment and taste.

· Remember that lost wager with Nikki Finke? Best million dollars Harvey Weinstein ever spent.

Join our ovation, will you — piss on its shallow grave below.

WHAT'S NEW: High stakes are hardly unusual for a holiday frame, but their sheer volume in 2008 is slightly disturbing: Last week's new-movie nomads shall be consumed wholly by a pack of heavyweight predators in wide release. Their top grosser should be Disney's Bedtime Stories, a sizable stride in the slow Eddie Murphyfication of Adam Sandler, playing a novice storytelling uncle who is shocked when his tales come to life. Hijinks ensue while conjuring the most explicit double entendres he can imagine, thus leaving both the kiddies and himself fulfilled when the gumball rain outside yields a ball-gum flood requiring Keri Russell's careful attention. Expect Stories to win the long weekend with $39.9 million.

The bourgeois-white-assholes-and-their-crazy-fucking-dog tearjerker Marley & Me won't be that far behind at $35.7 million, defying Disney's covert spoiler ops to steer people to their own family offfering. Behind that, look for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to officially launch its Oscar crusade with $22.6 million, hindered by its nearly three-hour length and more-than-expected siphoning off by Valkyrie (which we'll get to in a bit). At the bottom of the scrum you'll find The Spirit, Frank Miller's spectacularly awful adaptation of Will Eisner's comics classic, pocketing $11.9 million for Lionsgate. Also opening in limited release: The Cannes darling, Oscar-probable animated documentary from Israel, Waltz With Bashir.

THE BIG LOSER: There aren't enough pejoratives in the world to pile onto Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes's misbegotten attempt to steal another Oscar while the Academy reaches for its collective Kleenex. Or checks its watch; the reunion of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet is an interminable slog that, with any justice, should see its early, positive numbers reverse dramatically as Los Angeles and New York audiences flee theaters in search of refunds. What more can we say? Oh — lots.

THE UNDERDOG: We probably have no right to place a Tom Cruise film in this spot — especially one so expensively ubiquitous of late. But after all those months of speculation and dread surrounding Bryan Singer's $90 million thriller about the failed plot to kill Hitler, let's be fair: Valkyrie is a solid if weird popcorn thriller. The first act drags, Singer gets a little too cute for anyone's good (may we never again be subjected to his spinny Phonograph-Cam™), and you never do totally sink into Cruise and castmates Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson and Kenneth Branagh as English-speaking German officers. Still, the assassination conspiracy and its momentary glimmer of success is a captivating fluke of history handled articulately and tastefully — and sure, entertainingly — by Singer and Cruise. Even if you don't contribute to its $18.2 million opening, it's worth a look in the weeks ahead.

FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD releases include the Statham-y holiday favorite Death Race, the underrated Coen Brothers caper Burn After Reading, Anna Faris's Playboy commercial-cum-college comedy The House Bunny, and a couple of the year's most notorious indie flops, The Women and Hamlet 2. Gather the family, and have a great holiday weekend!

So Bad it's Good: The Spirit (Dec. 25). Perhaps it's best to know as little as possible going into this adaptation of Will Eisner's classic 1940s comic series, written and directed by Eisner acolyte Frank Miller in the arresting visual style of his debut (with Robert Rodriguez) Sin City. But the silhouettes, snow and sooty (if green-screened) Central City backdrops are less-convincing a reason to have a look than the gleeful pageantry of Miller's bad taste: The Spirit (Gabriel Macht), essentially a zombie cop turned oversexed masked-vigilante enforcer, introduces himself by way of an epic fight with equally unkillable Central City crime lord The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson). Mud is thrown, balls are crushed, toilets are slammed, and expectations are dashed. "This," you should expect to mutter to yourself and/or your incredulous date, "is fucking terrible."

Well, kind of. Your first impression — that Miller has no idea what he's doing — eventually surrenders to an intrigue with what he'll do next. Will Scarlett Johansson put her beguiling badness to work as Octopus right-hand Silken Floss, or simply stand around like a line-reading cleavage prop? Will Eva Mendes (as jewel thief Sand Saref) test the PG-13 rating with her de rigeur gratuitous nudity? Will doctor Sarah Paulson ever tire of her male-slut superhero crush? Will Jackson's fat, annoying cloned henchmen ever shut up? And is that actually Sam Jackson up there in Nazi regalia, shouting about eggs?

By the time Miller answers most of these questions, you're already barreling toward The Spirit's climax — a convergence of the hero, villain and their intimates for a hyper-violent This is Your Life variant for the soul of Central City. With spectacle to spare and absolutely no interest in Iron Man's optimism, The Incredible Hulk's self-seriousness or The Dark Knight's social criticism, The Spirit instead emerges as the comics genre's semi-lucid inbred cousin. Hating this movie would be like booing at the Special Olympics.

So Bad it's Bad: Seven Pounds (now playing). At some point one might expect an ebb to the extraordinary critical tsunami that helped devastate Will Smith's morality play. Or at least a backlash of some kind, anything pledging some redeemability to the story of a purported IRS agent making a set of mysterious rounds to help an ensemble of sick, blind and otherwise downtrodden strangers.

Alas, we won't be the ones inaugurating that movement. Seven Pounds is everything its detractors say, with baffling plot contrivances and dramatic ineptitude compounded by the cardinal sin of utter boredom. As Smith's mission crystallizes and his motivations surface — in a twist so random it really does defy spoiling here — the likelihood of any emotional payoff diminishes behind the vast horizon of its star's ego. We imagine Seven Pounds' final 40 minutes may someday acquire some esteem in the Cult-Classic Canon for its adroit interweaving of printing-press repair, bone-marrow transplants, bad sex and killer jellyfish. But for want of anything worthwhile preceding them, it begs the question: If Will Smith falls in the forest and the audience walked out around the one-hour mark, does he make a sound?

So Bad it's Ugly: Revolutionary Road (Dec. 25) . While novelist John Cheever traced the glide path of America's fall from post-WWII euphoria to disillusioned ennui, his contemporary Richard Yates was the black box that captured every primal, panicked cry in the seconds before the crash. Nearly 50 years on, Sam Mendes likely fancies himself to share a little of each man's qualities, with his decade's worth of moodily revisionist entries surveying suburbia (American Beauty), crime and the Depression (Road to Perdition), the first Iraq War (Jarhead) and now Revolutionary Road, Yates's debut novel about an idealistic young couple's suffocation in the Connecticut suburbs.

But Mendes crafted not so much an adaptation here as he did a stunt. It was one thing to reunite wife Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, tricking the Titanic generation into a bit of po-mo awards-season whiplash; it was another entirely to impose his semi-literate condescension on Frank and April Wheeler, Yates's doomed ad man and his housewife, whose shared yearning for a life beyond the social constraints of their titular street capsizes in devastating slow-motion. Their unraveling was a symbolic end to the optimism of Eisenhower's '50s, no less nightmarish for its yowling, virtually unprecedented depiction of complacency's costs. It created a stir that never altogether faded, influencing American Beauty itself and prompting no fewer than a dozen failed screen attempts before Mendes and Scott Rudin coaxed around $40 million of DreamWorks' money to smear their quasi-pedigreed patina over the Wheeler family's implosion.

It would have been bad enough with screenwriter Justin Haythe digesting Yates's piercing dialogue into compact, Oscar-clip-compatible bursts. It would have been bad enough with DiCaprio and Winslet, each miscast, delivering those bursts in furrow-browed, you-shout-now-I-shout order. It would have been bad enough with Michael Shannon dropping by as the neighbors' candid loony son, the Connecticut equivalent of Southern dramas' "magical Negro" whose cruelly omniscient nuggets coincide conveniently with key junctures of the Wheelers' dissolution.

But Revolutionary Road's real failure transcends tone-deafness. Here, Mendes actively perverts his source's vanguard qualities — grossly commodifying the Wheelers, fetishizing their anguish, and in fact reveling in the excruciating emotional turmoil that tormented Yates until his death in 1992. We knew Mendes was a bit of a serial masturbator, but a necrophiliac? Moreover, a cold-blooded cultural murderer? Quick — someone save Kate.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tied Milk for most nominations with eight, including Best Picture, Best Director for David Fincher, and acting nods for Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. The remaining nine selections for the year's best film proved about as inclusive as a Ben Lyons-hosted announcement show would suggest:

· Changeling
· The Dark Knight
· Doubt
· Frost/Nixon
· Milk
· The Reader
· Slumdog Millionaire
· Wall-E
· The Wrestler

Clint Eastwood went unrecognized, however, for either of his two directorial efforts, Changeling and Gran Torino, though he was nominated for Best Actor for his grizzled, growling racist in the latter. The Wrestler's Darren Aronofsky was also overlooked in favor of Christopher Nolan and Ron Howard, not likely the last time you'll see that indignity poisoning the awards well.

Acting nominations were much more charitable, even surprising, with the Valerie Plame/Judith Miller tale Nothing But the Truth pulling Actress and Supporting Actress recognition for Kate Beckinsale and Vera Farmiga, respectively. Robert Downey Jr. found a Supporting Actor slot for his blackface turn in Tropic Thunder, while Milk's support tandem Josh Brolin and James Franco earned nods as well. The downside: The BFCA couldn't find a place for Frost/Nixon's superb Michael Sheen, or even add him to the category's five nominees; every other acting category had six nods apiece.

But consolation for Rudin and Co.: Doubt was represented in three of the four acting categories (plus ensemble cast and screenplay). Then again, Winslet's Reader performance received a Supporting nod while her Revolutionary turn netted zilch. Surely there's no pressure ahead of Thursday's Golden Globe nominations;

• 2009 BFCA Nominees [BFCA]

In fairness, her husband, Sam Mendes, was the director — a first for Winslet that seemed to bother her in ways that her Titanic leading man Di Caprio more readily shrugged off:

Did some of those intimate scenes get a little awkward? "Not a problem in this department," Leo says. "It was right for the characters."

"You know what? Yes, it was (awkward)," says a candid Kate. "I did feel weird about it — [but] you get over that quickly. You really have to." She adds that her husband "really treated me like the actress playing [the character]," and that during one of their more heated scenes, "Sam would sort of yell from the other room, 'No, Leo really grab her thigh! Really grab her thigh!' I thought, 'This is really strange, but I'm gonna go with it.'"

Kinky! Not to mention an improvement over those James Cameron days, when "grab her thigh" was simply something the Titanic taskmaster disgustedly spat at on-set paramedics every time the fragile Di Caprio cramped up while treading water for six hours on end.

• LEO & KATE ON AWKWARD LOVE SCENES [ET]

The first Button item we saw was submitted by an "industry spy"; if it was published by anyone other that Anne Thompson, we'd assume it was just a publicity intern practicing her press-note chops:

The achievement is big and bold and ambitious and life-affirming, but the sentimentality is always toughened by the continual sense of loss and deep sadness at the transitory nature of the human condition. If it sounds like an art movie, it absolutely is, but it's a four-quadrant art film!

Or as director David Fincher might put it, a "four-quadrant rim job." That's a milestone, no doubt, but we'd missed an even earlier, spoiler-heavy read from a blogger who was less sanguine:

I wasn’t as moved by this film as I wanted to be. This was number one on my list of must-see holiday movies and I so wanted to be blown away but it just didn’t happen. This movie is a very ambitious effort—it looks gorgeous, there are some groundbreaking special effects and the rest of the cast also do excellent work but it’s the kind of movie you respect more than love. It’s like a piece of art that you look at and say, “It’s pretty,” but don’t necessarily want to bring home.

And then came Spout's Karina Longworth, who honored every part of the embargo except for the part prohibiting slagging the visual effects. And then came the hater to whom The Playlist attributed an "emotional dud":

While they didn't think it was terrible, they did say the film wasn't the tearjerker we all heard it was supposed to be and was much more of an "emotional dud." They're reaction to it was lukewarm, but they also noted it was the kind of tepidness that the Academy loves. When we probed a little further and asked about its deeper Oscar hopes, the mention of Brad Pitt was practically laughed out of the room.

NOOO! We needed him for our Oscar pool — even though the season's other big Paramount release (with DreamWorks), Revolutionary Road, is prompting lip-loosening hype itself on two sides of the Atlantic. Thompson again had an anonymous impression back on Oct. 29, citing a "very powerful two-hander for Leo and Kate. [...] You can sense the real-life bond that lets them really go for it, all defenses down." Modern classic, etc etc.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Wells's source in the UK agreed for the most part today:

"Only the ending felt a little unsure; otherwise, I feel Mendes has made serious progress as a director. A daring scene at the breakfast table is pulled off with virtuosity towards the end. I'll say no more than this. Much is demanded of the leads. [...] We're dealing with a lot of heightened emotion bordering on melodrama. But the actors cope well, although Kate Winslet, I feel, is more convincing than Leonardo DiCaprio.

Great. We heard she might be in the running for some sort of honors this year. So! Thanks to everyone for contributing, and we'll see you on the studio blacklist!

The svelte five-time-Oscar-nominee isn't having it: "Kate is furious at suggestions that her body has been airbrushed," her rep tells PEOPLE exclusively.

..."She is in terrific shape and what you see is how she looks or she would never have agreed to pose for those shots," adds her rep.

We're inclined to believe Winslet, if only because we'd like to subscribe to the exercise regimen she espouses in Vanity Fair: “Everyone can commit to 20 minutes [of working out], especially if there’s a glass of Chardonnay afterwards.” Does 15 minutes of Wii Fit and a couple of Akbar-poured highballs count, too?

[Photo Credit: Steven Meisel/Vanity Fair]

• Kate Winslet 'Furious' Over Body Airbrush Claims [People]