For one thing, it's set in a strange land, with small children who run around covered in poo. Americans might be confused and stuff!

Not to worry!

The only feel-good movie of the year—or any year, really—that features (SPOILER ALERT) homeless children blinded with acid and forced to sing and hustle for money is doing quite well post Oscar-win.

Its Friday numbers were up 53% from last week, finishing third behind such worthy opponents as The Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, and Tyler Perry's Madea Goes To Jail.

Other Oscar flicks experienced an uptick, as well, including the previously unmarketable The Reader, which, in recent ads (which we're trying desperately to find for you) is being pitched as a sex-filled courtroom drama, filled with intrigue and mystery, starring "Academy Award Winner Kate Winslet!"—and is missing all of those foreboding sad piano tones found in the original trailer, and downplays that whole Nazi thing. Well, at least they figured out how to sell tickets.

Milk and The Wrestler also did well at the B.O. post Oscars-even though Mickey Rourke was a loser. The former's gross went up a whopping 37.5%-bringing the total take to $28.8 million. Guess we are commie homo-loving sons of guns, after all.

The morning after an otherwise forgettable awardscast, count on one particularly strong aftertaste in Hollywood: That of Harvey getting over. Again. There's not enough Champagne in the room to wash it down, not enough hours of sleep to shake it off. Unfamiliarity accounts for much of its potency; this is a man who was last heard threatening to shoot himself if Cate Blanchett failed to net a Supporting Actress nomination in 2007. That wasn't the old Harvey, the dick-swinging, free-spending award-season monolith whose biggest Oscar triumphs came a decade ago at Miramax. There, with Disney's money funding full-on media saturation campaigns, the studio earned 249 nominations and 60 wins.

And the Harvey who maneuvered Kate Winslet and Penélope Cruz to victory last night wasn't necessarily the old Harvey either. He went two-for-six overall, fully knowing it really was an honor for The Reader just to be nominated. Sure, he'd have liked to win big (he was the prime suspect in numerous acts of supposed sabotage against his Best Picture competition), but what the new Harvey needed more than anything was an affirmation for his reeling moguldom. At first chastened a bit by his public battles with (and 2005 split from) then-Disney boss Michael Eisner, the Weinstein Company was a running joke of dump-and-run genre trash, hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars while Miramax went on to near-perennial Oscar glory. His few awards splashes — Blanchett for I'm Not There and Felicity Huffman for Transamerica — yielded little gain on Oscar night or at the box office.

He had a few modest successes in there, though, and 2008 was, relatively speaking, the Weinsteins' banner year. When Vicky Cristina Barcelona earned $23.2 million last summer — on a maximum of 726 screens, according to Box Office Mojo — Harvey seized the opportunity to say he was back. Almost instantly, TWC began circulating Oscar buzz for Cruz.

Then came the layoffs. And the shelvings. And the excuses. And then — The Reader. He probably could have coexisted with co-producer Scott Rudin, with whom he quarreled over their previous collaboration The Hours, but Harvey didn't lift a finger to stop Rudin from leaving The Reader last fall over release-date issues. That was his first coup — likely unplanned, and generally pretty ugly, but it allowed Harvey to lock director Stephen Daldry in the editing room until his Oscar bait was ready. Neither Rudin nor Winslet wanted to compete against her other Big Serious Turn in Revolutionary Road, but Harvey had a studio to save.

Moreover, he had a point to prove. With films by Quentin Tarantino and Rob Marshall anticipated in 2009 — and with financing partners vanishing into thin recession air — it wouldn't be enough for Harvey to get over on Rudin once. Only real prestige would serve him going forward. Enter New Harvey, the half-man/half-animal whose misfortune all of Hollywood seemed to celebrate until he showed up with The Reader. Holocaust themes. Oscar darlings Daldry and Winslet, both career 0-fers but ready for redemption. It had cred. And Harvey was so much more charming these days! What's an Academy voter to do?

Knocking Revolutionary Road off at the Oscar nomination level could have been triumph enough. But Harvey's next opportunity was too good to be true: Not only did he have Winslet vs. Meryl Streep in Best Actress, he had Cruz vs. Amy Adams and Viola Davis in Best Supporting Actress. The competition from Doubt pitted Harvey against Rudin and Miramax. This required a vintage Harvey offensive — armies of publicists, truckloads of screeners, parties, abundant media buys, Winslet in front of any TV camera in America that was turned on. Basically, the expensive stuff that Rudin and Miramax did last year while pushing No Country For Old Men to its Oscar wins, all of which was based on the original Harvey schematic first sketched out 20 years ago.

And it worked. Of course it worked. Some will say New Harvey is just Old Harvey without the cigarettes, but as much as his legitimacy (if not his very solvency) required Academy validation in 2009, the Academy requires someone like Harvey Weinstein to bully, coax, nudge and compel in the service of their own self-importance. For better or worse, no one does it like Harvey, and whether or not Winslet's crappy accent or Cruz's canny hysteria "deserve" the recognition is as useless a debate as whether or not Harvey and the Weinstein Company are "back." In this insular world of totems and myths, no one ever really goes away. You just get used to a certain, well, taste.

And whatever Harvey put in our drink last night, expect more where that came from. Talk about thanking the Academy.

In addition to her six Oscar nominations, Winslet has racked up an impressive eleven citations on the Celebrity Nudity Database and this year was honored with a "Lifetime Skinchievement Award" from Mr. Skin (not that we know any of those sites or anything). Still, Winslet tells Time that those unclothed days may be behind her:

The nudity required for the [The Reader's] sex scenes didn't unsettle her - though she now says, "I think I won't do it again: a) I can't keep getting away with it, and b) I don't want to become 'that actress who always gets her kit off.'" But she wondered if she could handle a German accent, play Hanna convincingly into old age and find a foothold in a character who exemplifies the banality of evil.

Well, who couldn't do those things? The real feat is to do them nude (especially the old age part—you're in the makeup chair for a full day!). Sadly, this is what an Oscar within grasp plus the constant, neverending "Tell us about your body! Kinda bigger than most actresses, huh?"-ism has done to Winslet; we hope you're all happy when she films Titanic 2: Escaping the Challenger while wearing a burqa in every scene.

• 
  Best Actress: Kate Winslet's Moment [Time]

Lyons was joined by his At the Movies co-conspirator, Ben Mankiewicz, to walk the ladies through their Oscar prognostications. Here is the short version: Ben M. loves Marisa Tomei, on account of her breasts, and Ben L. loves Christopher Nolan and Slumdog Millionaire hottie Freida Pinto, neither of which are nominated. Also, Joy Behar hates The Reader. HATES it. If The Reader were, say, a perky blond co-host, she would scream at it, "I will burn you down," because of the hatred.

Also enjoyable: when the Bens are asked whether there's ever been a tie between actors at the Oscars (there has, famously), and they both sit there awkwardly drawing a blank until Whoopi Goldberg saves them. Guess they haven't added that trivia to the Scene It? Box Office Smash DLC yet.

• The View [ABC]

EW on Monday outlined the Weinstein Company's strategy for establishing The Reader as a viable Oscar-night candidate — a position few if any industry observers have attributed to TWC, though they underestimated him just as gravely before Kate Winslet, Stephen Daldry and company rose up last month to knock The Dark Knight and Revolutionary Road off the Oscar bubble last month. But that's relatively ancient history, and in any case a less dangerous act of awards-season mayhem than his tack of outmarketing/outgrossing Milk and Frost/Nixon and (allegedly) throwing a latrine's worth of kiddie-exploitation shit at Slumdog.

Except, of course, Harvey doesn't know what you're talking about:

No one has accused Weinstein of being involved, but he knows his reputation precedes him. ''What can I say?'' Weinstein says, on the phone from Rome. ''When you're Billy the Kid and people around you die of natural causes, everyone thinks you shot them.''

As David Carr notes, Harvey's quite the fan of the pistolero-underdog myth, adapting it for Oscar '08 after last invoking it over seven years ago at Miramax. But the more important question, also raised by Vulture, is, "What was he doing in Rome?" The official response likely has something to do with making sure Fergie's labia-veil stays affixed throughout the production of Nine, but we think we know better: Someone owes Benjamin Button's late-season Roman plagiarism accuser a nice night out on the town.

• 'The Reader' Changes the Game [EW via Vulture]

The Reader and Milk didn't get very far at all in their first weekends of wide(-ish) release, despite the latter film's particular efforts to separate itself from the Slumdog/Frost/Nixon pack that got a head start a week earlier. Focus pulled in $1.414 million on 882 screens — actually $39,000 less than last November's opening-weekend gross on 36 screens. The $1,603 per-screen average was still enough to knock Frost/Nixon off, but not enough to surpass The Reader, itself a disappointment with barely $2.3 million on 1,000 screens.

And of course all of them succumbed once again to the muscularly rabid breed that is Slumdog — as noted, a $7.6 million-grossing, crap-covered Oscar darling if ever we saw one. Sean Penn and Kate Winslet remain safely in the lead on their own tracks, meanwhile, redeeming at least some of Focus's and the Weinsteins' strategies. Thank God the acting branch remains lousy at math.

• Weekend Box Office, Jan 30 - Feb. 1 [Box Office Mojo]

As presumed, any scenario edging out the late Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella would have been anathema to the Academy and their Mirage Enterprises colleagues alike, but the Oscars' ironclad "three-producer" rule would have necessitated choosing one or the other of co-producers Donna Gigliotti and Redmond Morris — both responsible for much of the actual work rushing The Reader to eligibility in 2008. Then there was the Rudin Factor, bolstered by recent rumors that the man who yanked his name after a grievous tiff with Harvey Weinstein wasn't prepared to leave awards season empty-handed, or at least without another invitation to the annual nominees luncheon.

But Rudin is officially out for good, and Gigliotti and Morris will join their late counterparts in spirit on Feb. 22 per a release distributed this afternoon:

Because four producers were listed on the credits form submitted for Oscar consideration and Academy rules allow for only three producers – except in “a rare and extraordinary circumstance” – to be nominated and potentially receive Oscar statuettes, a meeting of the executive committee was necessary. In the end, the committee determined that the circumstances of The Reader – in which the two original producers (Minghella and Pollack) both died partway through the process – met its definition of “rare and extraordinary” and that all four submitted individuals should be named as nominees.

We agree — it's only fair. And anything that keeps Martin Vega extra busy is fine by us.

• ‘The Reader’ Goes Forward With Four Producers [Carpetbagger]

1. How much will Harvey Weinstein spend to buy Kate Winslet an Oscar? The Reader's extraordinary showing this morning owes everything to Harvey's secret formula of marketing, publicity and assiduous word-of-mouth since last fall. But the cash-poor Weinstein Company doesn't stand a chance against Slumdog Millionaire in Picture, Director or Adapted Screenplay, so it comes down to Actress. It's one of the weakest categories of the year, with Winslet facing her stiffest competition probably from Anne Hathaway. Or Harvey can take the nominations — and the advertisement/DVD box copy that accompanies them —- and run. Ha. Right.

2. And what does "nominees to be determined" mean for The Reader's Best Picture nod? No producers are yet named for the famously contentious Rudin/Weinstein awards-season prize, suggesting that the Academy is debating one or both of two things: How Scott Rudin fits into the equation after pulling his name off the project (and being snubbed for Doubt and Revolutionary Road), and/or the eligibility of the late producing partners Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, who developed The Reader in the first place.

3. Is Werner Herzog a powerful-enough quantity to command a sympathy win? Consensus might have Man on Wire and Trouble the Water vying against each other for Best Documentary Feature. But Herzog, whose Grizzly Man was memorably snubbed in 2005, should be considered as likely a winner for Encounters at the End of the World as are either the higher-grossing Wire or more critically acclaimed Water. Why? Because with no Iraq docs on the list and perhaps its last chance to recognize a doc pioneer, the Academy's documentary branch can safely go for the man, not the movie. If it sounds outrageous, ask Errol Morris and Michael Moore their takes.

4. How will Disney and Focus handle their multiple Best Original Screenplay nominees? With WALL-E and Happy-Go-Lucky out of the running in Picture and Director, respectively, Disney won't want to compete against its own Miramax for a Screenplay win. Same thing at Focus Features, whose Milk may be a front-runner here but whose In Bruges has previous Oscar darling Martin McDonagh and its Golden Globe afterglow going for it.

5. Can Slumdog Millionaire's double-nomination in the Best Song category shorten the awardscast? Is it impolitic to kindly request combining "Jai Ho" and "O Saya" into one Bollywood-style number led by host Hugh Jackman? We'd appreciate it and will volunteer our aid any way we can.

In her new film The Reader, Winslet plays 36-year-old Hanna Schmitz, whose sexually explicit relationship with a 15-year-old schoolboy has already led some cultural critics to wag their fingers. According to Coming Soon, one interviewer tentatively broached the subject with Winslet herself, eliciting quite the reaction:

Q: Do you ever have any trepidations about approaching controversial material like abortion in "Revolutionary Road" or statutory rape?
Winslet: I'm so sorry, "statutory rape"? I've got to tell you, I'm so offended by that. No, I really am. I genuinely am. To me, that is absolutely not this story at all. That boy knows exactly what he's doing. For a start, Hanna Schmitz thinks that he's seventeen, not fifteen, you know? She's not doing anything wrong. They enter that relationship on absolutely equal footing. Statutory rape – really please, don't use that phrase. I do genuinely find it offensive actually. This is a beautiful and very genuine love story and that is always how I saw it....She wasn't cruel to him. She didn't force him into anything at all. There's nothing I believe to be remotely inappropriate or salacious about that relationship.

Salacious? Well, we've never seen a teenager's ball hair lit so romantically in a film, but then, we haven't yet caught up on our Criterion editions of the Bel Ami catalog. Certainly, it's an intriguing Oscar trend that The Reader can join Doubt in this year's Queasy Underage Sweepstakes; let's just be glad that David Fincher demurred from shooting a graphic Benjamin Button scene where Cate Blanchett ushers an acne-ridden Brad Pitt through the back end of puberty.

• Kate Winslet: Grace Under Press [Coming Soon]

WHAT'S NEW: There's no wanting for prestige or variety this weekend, with Fox's remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still leading a saturated box-office charge on 3,600 screens. This time around, Keanu Reeves arrives from space to portend our imminent doom, evincing a timely environmental-awareness message with the aid of Jennifer Connelly and fitfully clusmy CGI. And if there's anything holiday moviegoers love, it's a Keanu apocalypse; expect Earth to pull around $38.3 million.

The next biggest opening is something called Delgo, the sci-fi quasi-Romeo & Juliet rendered with discarded Pixar 2.0 software and the budget voice talent of Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Malcolm McDowell and Burt Reynolds, among others. We like this one for about $3.2 million en route to Flopz™, neck-and-neck with the Latino ensemble (plus Debra Messing for gringa kicks) laffer Nothing Like the Holidays at around $3.3 million.

Doubt, meanwhile, opens small this week against fellow Oscar groveler The Reader; the former is faring far better with critics than the latter (unfairly, we might add), but the Kate Winslet lookie-loo factor won't disappoint the Weinstein Company when the numbers come in Sunday night, probably around $41,000 per screen. Also, if you've got four and a half hours and a seat cushion to spare, pack a lunch and check out Che in its one-week-only Academy qualifying run. It's the kind of thing you can tell your grandkids about years from now when they tug on your sleeve and ask you to regale them with stories of cinema's good old bloated days.

A few stars are actually smattered elsewhere in the mire: Ethan Hawke and Mark Ruffalo's Beantown gang drama What Doesn't Kill You opens on three screens, while Michelle Williams's spare girl-loses-dog indie Wendy and Lucy arrives on two. Also opening: The noirish Dark Streets; the animated fantasy Dragon Hunters; the stop-motion Oscar hopeful $9.99; the Chinese vanity project Waiting in Beijing; the Kim Basinger revenge flick While She Was Out; and the polish Holiday tale Hania. Whew.

THE BIG LOSER: Not so much a "loser" as an example of what we wish there was less of in the world, Timecrimes is an acclaimed Spanish thriller that nevertheless orbits around the genre conventions of time travel. Not to be arbitrary about it, but dear film industry: Please let the time-travel movie die. They're ultimately the same hoary stunt performed again and again, illogically at worst (Primer) and amusingly at best (Back to the Future), and almost always forgettably. Let Timecrimes end it. Please.

THE UNDERDOG: Speaking of going out gracefully, Clint Eastwood says his performance in Gran Torino is his last. And why not? Eastwood's late-career revisionist streak has knocked off its last myth: The vigilante hero, a man who'd sooner revolt in Dirty Harry than keep pace with the degradation of social order. Torino's grizzled Korean War vet still takes the same vengeance on Hmong gangs and black thugs overtaking his Detroit suburb, but essentially in the service of a multiethnic utopia perceivable just over the horizon. (He even gives his Silver Star and titular vehicle to the tormented young man he's taken under his wing, a little more optimistic bellwether than Harry Callahan's climactic badge-tossing in 1971.) As a straight drama, Gran Torino isn't especially good — sort of a violent, profane revenge epic crossbred with an afterschool special — but! Viewed in context with the last four decades of Eastwood's mercury, it's a strikingly rich, funny, elegant and utterly fascinating valedictory.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include The Dark Knight, the thrilling, Oscar-chasing doc Man on Wire, the first four seasons of Happy Days, and holiday-ready complete-series box sets of The Wire, Get Smart and Deadwood.

DEFAMER: There's a legend that Harvey Weinstein dispatched an associate to buy the rights to The Reader, saying not to come back without them. How soon after you were familiar with the book did you know you wanted to direct its adaptation?

STEPHEN DALDRY: Just as soon as I read the book. It was not immediately after it was published; it was a couple of years later. I immediately started to phone up to see who had the rights, and it was my old friend Anthony Minghella. I asked what he wanted to do with it, and he said he wanted to do it himself — write and direct it. And so I kept badgering him over the years: "Are you going to make it, or are you not? What's happening?" I think in the end Anthony realized he wan't going to get around to it for at least a few more years, and he felt a responsibility to [author Bernhard] Schlink to get it made at some point. He eventualy relented very generously and allowed me to make it, with him and [Minghella's producing partner] Sydney Pollack.

D: 36-year-old Hanna's seduction of 15-year-old Michael has proven pretty controversial in the last week, essentially hijacking the discussion of why these two have a relationship in the first place. Do you resent that the conversation has taken that turn?

SD: It's funny, isn't it? Did you watch Mr. Schlink's interview with Oprah Winfrey when the book first came out? The first thing Oprah started talking about was the abuse. Interestingly enough in that interview, it took Mr. Schlink some time before he realized that what Oprah was talking about was not the atrocities Hanna was involved in, but rather the abuse of a 15-year-old boy. He was slightly taken aback, and later said, "This seems to be a peculiarly American question."

But the key element of that relationship is the sins of of the past — not the sins of the relationship. Does the boy love her profoundly and maybe too much because it's his first love? Yes, he probably does. Should she be involved with a 15-year-old boy? Inevitably, different cultures will have different ideas about that. And I do understand that it's a bigger moral issue in America than it might be in other societies. Having said that, I think I'd be disingenuous if I didn't say yes — there is a controlling element about a 36-year-old woman having a relationship with a 15-year-old boy. But I don't think the subject of this story is child abuse. And of course he's not a child; he's going on a 16-year-old sexual being.

D: At least it's deflected some attention from the Scott Rudin/Harvey Weinstein meltdown a couple months ago. As the filmmaker, what was your impression of that imbroglio at the time, and how do you think it impacted the final product?

SD: I don't think it did impact the final product. It's funny, isn't it? I spent two years on this. People talk about the sex scenes, and we took two days shooting those. People talk about the argument between Harvey and Scott, and that took two weeks. In the overall scheme of things, these aren't necessarily pivotal moments for me. In finishing the film, we absolutely did need more time, and Scott was absolutely fantastic — and in the end, so was Harvey — in getting a solution that we were all very happy with. So the fact that subsequently, Harvey and Scott couldn't get on, was a sadness for those two. But it came to a very happy resolution for me.

D: These guys tangled over your film The Hours, too. Did you ever see this coming, or at least have any reassurances early on that such pyrotechnics could be avoided on The Reader?

SD: Yeah, I've been through it with them, and I know how they do it; they have a good old time! I'm just being ridiculous, but yes — they have a combative relationship. There certainly wasn't a creative burden. It was more a practical point about resources and time. And neither of those two were my immediate producers. My immediate producers were Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack.

D: What was your reaction when Rudin took his name off the film?

SD: I thought it was absolutely the best thing for him, given the potential meltdown those two were heading into on a personal level.

D: To what extent do distractions like these — especially all the awards-race politics — rattle your faith as a filmmaker?

SD: It's only in the United States. To be frank, the discussion only happens when I get to Los Angeles. I'm sure that the infighting on movies is much more interesting here than it is anywhere else in the world. You have to take it all with a big pinch of salt. I don't think one can worry too much about it. It would, again, be disingenuous of me if I suggested that I'm not aware there's a marketing advantage to the so-called "awards season." But I think that one has to perceive it as a marketing exercise, not get caught up in the idea that it's too important. I don't come to Los Angeles very much, but what's great about it is that everybody's sort of here, and it's like a mini-film festival. Everybody's rushing from screening to screening, and you meet your friends, and there's something rather collegiate about it — not a competition. It's rather lovely.

Not that Harvey isn't a stand-up kind of guy. He'll be paying off his $1 million Reader bet any day now, and he did race to cloak Fergie's labia when the singer so indecorously exposed herself on the set of Nine. But the Rudin/Weinstein blow-up — triggered in large part by Weinstein's insistence to rush The Reader into theaters for 2008 Oscar consideration, opposite Rudin's other Kate Winslet drama, Revolutionary Road — reflected an ugliness stretching farther than just the point of no return, disappearing deep into the black horizon of mutually assured destruction.

Until Wednesday, reports Page Six:

Weinstein told the audience: "I'd also like to do something that isn't a very popular thing to do, which is to thank Scott Rudin for all the hard work on this film."

David Carr witnessed even more magnanimity before the screening, when Harvey boasted of his good mood and "how lovely it was that people were paying attention to the film." (What? Who'd miss the new Porky's?) We hope this leads to a gregarious new era of détente between Harvey and all his adversaries, from the folks at Bravo to the Fanboys cult to his indefinitely postponed fall release slate. Life really is too short to have Killshot mad at you forever.

• Harvey's Peace Feeler [NYP]

• Détente Rules, at Least for a Night [Carpetbagger]

10. Seth Rogen in “Zack and Miri Make A Porno”

9. Daniel Radcliffe in Equus

8. David Duchovny from “Californication”

7. Kyle McLachlan in “Desperate Housewives”

6. Gilles Marini in “Sex In The City: The Movie”

5. Neil Patrick Harris in “How I Met Your Mother”

4. Hunter Parish from “Weeds”

3. Stephen Moyer from “True Blood”

2. James Franco in “Milk”

1. Jason Segel in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”

Particularly as seen in The Reader, which Huffington Post contributor Thelma Adams argued Tuesday is perhaps a bit too upfront in its portrayal of the sexual affair between 36-year-old ex-Nazi guard Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) and 15-year-old schoolboy Michael Berg (David Kross). Sure, it's tastefully done, and director Stephen Daldry did shoot his film's love scenes last, literally days after Kross's 18th birthday. But in retrospect, sure: Maybe Winslet and Kross's anal-sex lesson is a youthful indiscretion too far.

And worse yet, Adams argues, The Reader's casual depiction of that relationship's consequences actually recognizes the act of child sexual abuse (very light spoiler ahead):

When we first see the adult Michael, he's having an affair of the bed - but clearly not of the heart - with a gorgeous woman nearly young enough to be his daughter. And, as the mistress complains that Michael won't let her in to his life, he clearly can't wait until she leaves his apartment so that he can be alone with himself and his memories. It's textbook abused behavior — and all the movie's ambiguities about Nazis, hidden secrets, and admitting culpability don't fully address the fact that Michael is both the victim of abuse, and lost in his continued love for his abuser, because nothing since has come close to that intensity. Emotionally, he stopped growing at 15.

Which uncannily returns us to the more healthy, angsty virility of the modern American teen-sex romp, as elucidated today by Guardian blogger Henry Barnes. Memo to young people: This is the kind of movie sex you want:

Post-[American] Pie, it appears teen comedies are taking a (slightly) more sophisticated view of adolescent sex and sexuality. [...] Sex Drive's hero, Ian, isn't just a randy teenager. He's lonely, desperate and hormonal, bullied by an older brother who boasts greater sexual prowess and outgunned by a more experienced best friend. He's also painfully insecure around girls, who tend to ignore or use him. [...]

It suggests that Hollywood is beginning to realise that most teenagers are driven by more than their base instincts. Concerned parents should take comfort in that. After all, hormones alone are unlikely to turn your teenager pie-fucking crazy. But hormones, plus the influence of Porky's-like idiocy, just might.

So. While The Reader may be among the most sober films of its seasonal class, is it unreasonable of us to deduce that it is today's analog of those reductive sex farces of the '80s? The anti-Sex Drive, perhaps? Or just another garden-variety soft-core Oscar chaser? Either way, we feel like we could use a shower. And maybe a cigarette.

• Reading Between the Lines in 'The Reader': When is Abuse Not Abuse? [HuffPo]

• How Hollywood grew up about teen sex [Guardian]

1. Mischa Barton
Title: Closing the Ring
Release Date: August 1, 2008
Mischa Barton not only goes topless 26 minutes into this World War II drama, but at the 34-minute mark, the O.C. hottie bares T&A. Mischa’s nude scenes are luscious, lengthy and brightly lit, so they’re guaranteed to turn you into a Barton fink!

We're disappointed and a little surprised, frankly. Old Harvey would have locked down the number one spot with an aggressive lobbying effort, NSFW "For Your Consideration" ads, and a series of generously topless post-film Q&As with Winslet. It's a stunning upset for Barton, but then, many in the industry have wanted to see Weinstein toppled since Gwyneth Paltrow's Shakespeare in Love nude scene somehow beat out Cate Blanchett in '98. Consider yourself avenged, Cate!

• Mr Skin's Top 20 Celebrity Nude Scenes of 2008 [Mr Skin]

· Carr actually leaped back on to the Oscar hamster wheel on Sunday, when he narrowed the 2008 Best Picture class to "seven or eight" potential nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Revolutionary Road, Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Doubt, Frost/Nixon and The Reader. Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino was tossed in as well, but forget about it — it's more likely a Best Actor lock for Eastwood, with the film falling off everywhere else. Frost/Nixon is in a little better scenario, with two acting nods likely and an adapted screenplay nod likely.

· At least one fellow Oscar wonk suggests Carr is getting bad information regarding The Reader, and Variety offered lukewarm praise at best. But part of the Defamer team got a look at the embattled Weinstein offering this morning, and it's actually quite good — not the best thing any of us has seen this year, but handled with all the tasteful austerity and consistency Oscar voters love from their Holocaust-themed films. For now anyway, however unpopular the sentiment, we can't see how the Academy would snub it for Picture.

· Or actress — another point Carr addresses today. That Kate Winslet-vs.-Kate Winslet scenario she and Scott Rudin feared is likelier than anyone (except Harvey Weinstein) would probably hope for.

· Bozo O'Neil refuses to go away, meanwhile, with his latest malformed balloon-animal at the LAT looking suspiciously like a two-headed Button/Slumdog hydra battling each other for a bone. This is when it helps to have a seasoned sucker-puncher like David Fincher on your side. EDGE: Button.

· Finally, the Gurus o' Gold at Movie City News are forecasting dark-horse candidates for acting nominations. But! One of those waaaay down the list is Sally Hawkins, who is actually a nominee shoo-in for Happy-Go-Lucky. Keep your grain of salt nearby.

Winslet, who wasn’t involved in the machinations, acknowledges that the back-to-back schedule puts some pressure on her, but prefers to view her glass as half full: “How the hell did I get that lucky [to have two compelling roles] in the same 12-month period? It’s really rare and remarkable, and I don’t take that position lightly. It might not happen like that again—I’m well aware of that. You know, the truth is, I’m just going to bloody well make the most of it.” [...]

This year she hopes not just to be nominated but also, she freely confesses, to take home some hardware. “Do I want it? You bet your fucking ass I do! I think that people assume that I don’t care or don’t want it or don’t need it or something. It’s hard to be there five times, and I’m only human, you know? But I don’t go home and cry, because we’re all grown-ups here.”

Well, not all of us — but again, if "half-full" is the mantra, consider Harvey's charitable million an investment in Winslet's future.

• Isn’t She Deneuvely? [VF]

So who's in and who's out?

· The Soloist: OUT. The move to March 13 stings for everyone, especially with millions in marketing dollars already being spent ahead of the Jamie Foxx/Robert Downey Jr. drama's Nov. 21 release. Both men were on the bubble for actor nominations — Foxx as a schizophrenic cellist and RDJ as the journalist who chronicles his feel-good recovery journey — but Paramount's new conservatism (i.e. an intern hiding Brad Grey's checkbook) means it only has so many in-house resources to lend to its fall releases. The studio's semi-official insistence that the shifts have nothing to do with the film's quality or favoring its homegrown Benjamin Button and Scott Rudin/DreamWorks offering Revolutionary Road, but that's bullshit. It's not 2006 anymore; nobody can afford all this prestige at once.

· Defiance: IN. Barely. Paramount inherited the WWII-era Daniel Craig drama from its lopped-off Vantage arm; but unlike The Soloist, the studio didn't have it on its Oscar-season books until earlier this year. Pushed back from Dec. 12, it'll still get a qualifying run in New York and L.A. before opening wide on Jan. 16 — sort of an afterthought treatment that won't likely sit well with director/producer and biennial Oscar bridesmaid Ed Zwick, but hey: There's always the ShowEast Kodak Award. Congrats again, Ed!

And while we're at it, let's not forget the neglected Weinstein and MGM family:

· The Road: OUT. As noted yesterday, the Weinsteins took it back from MGM only to nudge it from Nov. 14 to an undisclosed release date in December. It's not finished, and the Weinsteins can't promote it; we foresee this one left wailing on someone's doorstep in a basket some time in mid-2009.

· The Reader: IN. It's apparently back on the Weinstein Web site, and Bob Weinstein thinks it's "terrific"! And now without Defiance to contend with, Harvey's Folly may actually have a shot at an audience on Dec. 12. Oscars, though? We're not so sure.

· Valkyrie: IN. Even the MGM Tower receptionist is pulling her weight on the campaign these days. If gold had a smell, Valkyrie would reek.

One awards-season wag points out the notable absence of The Reader from the Weinstein Company Web site, which may not be as insidious as it sounds; a cached version of the site dated Oct. 6 — three days before Rudin's escape — didn't feature the film either (God forbid any marketing resources be expropriated from the Zack and Miri campaign, which isn't faring so well itself). Meanwhile, another report sketches a fraught relationship between Reader director Stephen Daldry and Weinstein's designated Reader go-between Donna Gigliotti: "[T]he entire team 'despise her,' 'won't deal with her' and 'regard her as a [Weinstein] stooge.'" And so soon after Rudin threw in the towel! Are you shocked? OK, us neither.

Again, we may never know, but Rudin's motivation is likely twofold: First, cut his losses and save face with Daldry, Kate Winslet (essentially out of the picture now herself) and the survivors of the late co-producers Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack. Second, as we noted in our cluttered Rudin/Weinstein scorecard a few weeks back, the principals at Rudin's go-to Oscar-campaign firm once were Harvey's field marshals at Miramax. We're not the only ones skeptical that they would go back into the fire — particularly on this project, with the only despot in town who spends a million dollars to buy bad press. Life — and the turnaround time here — is way, way too short.

• Scott Rudin takes his name off ‘The Reader’ [InContention]

• 'Reader is Rudinless [Hollywood Elsewhere]

• Oh Well... [The Hot Blog]

Patrick Goldstein has the news at his blog, though details are foggy and fairly speculative; pretty much everyone knows by now how fiercely Rudin and Weinstein loathe each other, with both Weinstein and his pocketbook suffering last week as Rudin's authentic hate mail made the tabloid rounds. But contumely is the coin of the realm with these guys. As sure as their awkward public detente of 11 days ago was bullshit, couldn't they just as easily keep their mouths shut for two months as director Stephen Daldry went about his post-production business for a Dec. 12 opening?

Ha. Like The Reader isn't just any movie — it's the final co-production of the late Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, and the film for which Harvey wants star Kate Winslet to compete against herself for an Oscar next year — these aren't just any tyrants. Someone to had to win, and win now. Goldstein notes that Rudin's talent relationships (Winslet, Daldry and screenwriter David Hare in particular) couldn't withstand the now-regular strafing, adding that Daldry isn't necessarily equipped to complete the film without Rudin guarding his back from a Harvey incursion.

But finish it he will, under contract, assuming Dec. 12 still stands. If so, it's a worst-case scenario for everyone involved: Daldry will rush it, Winslet won't promote it, Rudin won't discuss it and Weinstein will drop the equivalent of a late-term abortion on a skeptical critical corps that can't wait to watch him burn through the last of his nine lives. It's not the film's fault, but hey. it's always the children who pay.

• New Shock Wave Hits 'The Reader' [Big Picture]