Movie Box Review

Now the only question is when they announce the start of  pre-production on LORAX 2.

OPENINGS:  It turned out THE LORAX (Universal) wasn't frontloaded at all.  Quite the contrary, its 80% Saturday bump put the movie through the roof, a triumph of great marketing over cruddy filmmaking.  Lorax is currently the 3d highest March opening ever, but only $185K behind 300 at #2, so even a slight overperformance on Sunday could lift it up.  PROJECT X (Warners) slipped a bit on Saturday, but even if its Sunday is overestimated, it should still be safely over $20M for the weekend, a very good score for a relatively low-budget studio release.  (The result, unfortunately, will be more lousy "found-footage" movies.)

HOLDOVERS:  Thanks to a nice spread of genres in the Top 10, most of the older movies are holding quite well.  The only 3 movies in the Top 12 to dip more than 45% were JOURNEY 2 (Warners), which was direct competition for Lorax, GOOD DEEDS (Lionsgate/Summit) with a 55% drop that was in keeping with Tyler Perry's pictures, and GHOST RIDER 2 (Sony), which was already mid-collapse.  Particularly notable were the tiny respective drops for SAFE HOUSE (Universal) - 34%, THIS MEANS WAR (20th) - 33%, and the (deservedly) much-maligned GONE (Summit/Lionsgate) - 36%.

OSCAR WINNERS:  THE ARTIST (Weinstein), the 2d least popular Best Picture winner of the last quarter-century (and the lowest among films still in theatrical release when the awards were given out) raised its post-awards theatre count by 80% and could only manage a 34% bump.  And even that number is shaky, because Artist is claiming by far the lowest Sunday decline of the weekend's top movies, so it may well slipi down (and fall out of the Top 10) tomorrow.  Similarly, its stablemate THE IRON LADY (Weinstein) is claiming a 30% weekend increase that relies on a tiny estimated Sunday drop.  Back in the non-Weinstein world, THE DESCENDANTS (Fox Searchlight) lost many of its theatres and fell 36%, and HUGO (Paramount) dropped 14%.  A SEPARATION (Sony Classics) tripled its theatres off its Foreign Language Film win, and gratifyingly went over the $1M mark for the weekend in 243 houses.  

LIMITED RELEASES:  BEING FLYNN (Focus) created little excitement with a $11K average at only 4 theatres, and TIM & ERIC'S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE (Magnolia) could only get to a $4K average in 24.    IN DARKNESS (Sony Classics) lost the Foreign-Language Oscar but tried increasing its theatre count by 50% anyway--the result was a 17% drop for the weekend.  WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (Oscilloscope), another picture that was hoping for Oscar love it didn't get, more than doubled its theatres to 40, and averaged a decent $3300.  

It's a measure of how desperately this year's Oscar needed some kind of surprise that the closest thing to a thrill all evening was Meryl Streep's win as Best Actress.  Streep has been winning Academy Awards since 1979, and she'd been touted for her performance as Margaret Thatcher since months before THE IRON LADY even opened.  By virtually every measure, she'd been a close 2d to Viola Davis as favorite all along.  One could even make the argument that choosing Streep over Davis was actually the more conservative move in the category.  (And a bittersweet one, because although Streep--despite her protestations--will almost certainly have more chances at the prize before she's done, it might not be so easy for Davis to climb that hill again.)  And yet, when Streep's name was announced, it was the night's only jolt of electricity:  Something Finally Happened!

Streep's victory also underscored, for anyone who doubted, that Harvey Weinstein is the master of his era's (maybe any era's) Oscar gamesmanship.  Streep had been a strong contender for THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA and for JULIE AND JULIA, and both times she'd been denied.  Iron Lady was the least successful, least-seen and least-liked of Streep's recent vehicles, but Weinstein's absolutely unapologetic willingness to play the card of "winning 29 years ago is like not winning at all," stressed in every Streep-for-Best-Actress ad, did the trick.  

Weinstein was also behind another surprise, the victory of UNDEFEATED for Best Feature Documentary over the favored PINA and PARADISE LOST 3.  (He can't claim the night's below-the-line shocker when THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO took Best Editing.)  And of course, he was the architect of the night's most inevitable set of victories, as THE ARTIST marched to the podium every time it really counted.

Apart from the Weinstein brigade, the Oscars were mostly widely scattered, as THE DESCENDANTS, THE HELP and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS each won a single award, Christopher Plummer took his unofficial lifetime achievement prize, and HUGO went home with all the awards no one cares about.

Ironically, 2012 will probably be the wrong year to be Harvey Weinstein's touted entry for Best Picture:  after THE KING'S SPEECH and The Artist in consecutive years, the Academy may go out of its way to show its independence from his hegemony.  But if there's any certainty in the Oscar universe, it's that he'll be back.

Here's your complete set of Oscar winners: