(Click here to see the rest of the Oscar nominees of 2008)

The Oscar nominations came out this morning and here are the Oscar nominated songs for 2008 with clips from the movies:

“Falling Slowly” from “Once”
(Fox Searchlight)
Music and Lyric by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova

“Happy Working Song” from “Enchanted”
(Walt Disney)
Music by Alan Menken
Lyric by Stephen Schwartz

“Raise It Up” from “August Rush”
(Warner Bros.)
Nominees to be determined

“So Close” from “Enchanted”
(Walt Disney)
Music by Alan Menken
Lyric by Stephen Schwartz

“That’s How You Know” from “Enchanted”
(Walt Disney)
Music by Alan Menken
Lyric by Stephen Schwartz

I’m pumped to see Once make it. But seriously three songs from Enchanted and no love for Eddie Vedder and Into the Wild? WTF? I’m definitely rooting for Once and Falling Slowly to be Best Original Song for 2008. We’ll see…

Scenes from Choke, the Chuck Palahniuk novel, adapted for the big screen, have hit YouTube. The Clark Gregg directed film, which stars Sam Rockwell, is scheduled to be released sometime in 2008. Check out these scenes from Choke — interspersed with an interview with director Clark Gregg — after the jump.

New DVD Releases for the Week of January 22nd:

Adrift In Manhattan: Unrated Edition

Adrift In Manhattan Synopsis: The lives of three lonely strangers intersect while commuting on New York’s 1 and 9 subway lines.

Starring: Heather Graham

Box Office: N/A

The Game Plan:

The Game Plan Synopsis: An NFL quarterback living the bachelor lifestyle discovers that he has a 8-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.
Starring: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

Box Office: $89,726,418

The Hunting Party:

The Hunting Party Synopsis: A young journalist, a seasoned cameraman and a discredited journalist embark on an unauthorized mission to find the no. 1 war criminal in Bosnia.

Starring: Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, and James Brolin

Box Office: $796,001

Saw IV: Unrated Director’s Cut:

Saw IV Synopsis: Two seasoned FBI profilers arrive to assist the veteran Detective Hoffman in sifting through Jigsaw’s latest grisly remains and piecing together the puzzle.

Starring: Tobin Bell, Donnie Wahlberg

Box Office: $63,270,259

Sydney White:

Sydney White Synopsis: A modern retelling of Snow White set against students in their freshman year of college in the greek system.

Starring: Amanda Bynes

Box Office: $11,702,090

Even though Cloverfield just came out and many experts just finished adjusting their box office projections for the movie, there is already talk of a Cloverfield sequel. But will it actually happen?

“Only time will tell. While we were on set making the film we talked about the possibilities and directions of how a sequel can go,” says Cloverfield Director Matt Reeves. “The fun of this movie was that it might not have been the only movie being made that night, there might be another movie! In today’s day and age of people filming their lives on their iPhones and handy cams, uploading it to YouTube…That was kind of exciting thinking about that.” [Courtesy Bloody Disgusting]

CHUD is reporting that the Indiana Jones Trailer will make it’s first appearance on Valentine’s Day. According the source, the Indiana Jones 4 teaser will run on Entertainment Tonight on the 14th and launch in theaters on Valentine’s Day as well, with the online debut on the 15th at the crack of midnight.

My initial reaction is disbelief. Why debut on such a small stage when you could run it during what could be the highest rated Super Bowl in history? Valentine’s Day? Entertainment Tonight? Come on. But either way, I’m damn excited to see it.

The Cloverfield monster is here! With Cloverfield opening today, many analysts are changing their initial projections for the monster horror flick and are now projecting much higher box office numbers for opening weekend. Here are some of the latest Cloverfield box-office projections:

Box Office Prophets: $45.3 million
Fantasy Moguls: $40 million

Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason explains his reasoning,

“Tracking falls short of recent blockbusters like 300 and Transformers, but Cloverfield is on the playing field. Un-Aided Awareness for the current fanboy favorite is at 10 percent compared to week-of Un-Aided Awareness of 17 percent for 300 and 26 percent for Transformers. Un-Aided Awareness is the best measure of buzz and anticipation. In terms of Total Aware, Cloverfield is at a so-so 57 percent compared to 63 percent for 300 and a staggering 94 percent for Transformers. In the Definite Interest column, however, the highly anticipated monster movie is showing strength.”

But I think Cloverfield will actually top those projections. With all of the Cloverfield hype and a lack of any big competitors — in addition to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — I think we’ll see Cloverfield push closer to a $50 million opening weekend and then fall off fairly dramatically in it’s second week — similar to how the equally-hyped-youth-demo-movie Superbad performed last Summer.

Now that everyone has seen and digested the magnificent Dark Knight trailer, the new question is when we’ll we get to see the Indiana Jones 4 trailer. Most sources are speculating a February release for the Indy trailer with some suggesting The Spiderwick Chronicles as the best bet. (The Spiderwick Chronicles’ release date is February 15th.)

But as Variety noted, seven studios, including Indiana Jones’ own Paramount Pictures, have already bought time during this year’s Superbowl. While pairing The Spiderwick Chronicles with Indy may work to a certain extent — both are family friendly movies — it doesn’t seem likely that The Spiderwick Chronicles will have the same pull that Will Smith’s I Am Legend did for the Dark Knight trailer.

Paramount could be betting, though, that an Indiana Jones teaser could actually pull some people into the theater for The Spiderwick Chronicles.

But if I had to bet, (And I think I will…) I’d bet on the Superbowl. A Tom Brady-led-undefeated Patriots team against the all-time-great Brett Favre and the Packers would break all kinds of records — something Paramount is hoping will happen the weekend of May 22nd.

UPDATE: Indiana Jones Trailer to Debut on Valentine’s Day

/Film got their hands on a new Dark Knight billboard from Ontario, California. The billboard is a bunch of ‘Gotham Times’ newspapers plastered onto a board. Click here to see the full Dark Knight billboard image.

No surprise as to what movies top Moviefone’s list of “Flicks We’re Psyched to See.” But it is strange that they landed on 38 movies. Why not find two more and make it an even number? Or why not take a bunch of likely horrible movies off the list? Anyway… Let’s take a look at some of the list:

38. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. I’d put this one closer to 40 or 41-oh, wait- I forgot, they stopped at 38…

35. Tropic Thunder. Could be funny, could be horrible.

32. X-Files Sequel. I’d put this one much higher on the list.

31. Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. Could be funny, could be horrible. The first Harold & Kumar was both.

28. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Any David Fincher directed movie will be high on my list.

22. Cloverfield. Will it live up to the hype?

20. Hellboy II. The first one was surprisingly good. I’m willing to bet this will be the same.

17. Leatherheads. Should at least be interesting, if not good.

16. The Love Huru. Ugh. Why???!!!

14. The Incredible Hulk. Should at least be interesting, if not good.

12. Get Smart. Steve Carell. Period.

11. The Pineapple Express. Apatow/Rogen.

7. Speed Racer. So far, so good.

6. Sex and the City. Again, Why???!!!

4. Bond 22.

3. Harry Potter.

2. The Dark Knight.

1. Indiana Jones IV.

You can check out the rest of the list here. (And maybe you can figure out why they stopped at 38.)

Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull graces the February cover of Vanity Fair and gets the full feature treatment. Included are these beautiful pictures of the Indy cast and crew as well as great interviews with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Some of the highlights:

– Spielberg’s insistance on recreating the look of the first three Indiana Jones movies:

“I needed to show them to Janusz,” Spielberg says, “because I didn’t want Janusz [Kaminski] to modernize and bring us into the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not dissimilar to the work Doug Slocombe [the cinematographer on the first three Indiana Jones movies] had achieved, which meant that both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look, and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.”

– Spielberg goes on to contrast Indy with newer action movies like the last two Bourne films:

“I go for geography. I want the audience to know not only which side the good guy’s on and the bad guy’s on, but which side of the screen they’re in, and I want the audience to be able to edit as quickly as they want in a shot that I am loath to cut away from. And that’s been my style with all four of these Indiana Jones pictures. Quick-cutting is very effective in some movies, like the Bourne pictures, but you sacrifice geography when you go for quick-cutting. Which is fine, because audiences get a huge adrenaline rush from a cut every second and a half on The Bourne Ultimatum, and there’s just enough geography for the audience never to be lost, especially in the last Bourne film, which I thought was the best of the three. But, by the same token, Indy is a little more old-fashioned than the modern-day action adventure.”

photo: Shia LaBeouf and Karen Allen

– Why is Indiana Jones so popular? In large part it’s due to Indy’s “Everyman” status. Lucas explains:

“It’s a classic movie archetype,” he says. “Clark Gable played that role forever, the same role, which is the freelance cynic who eventually comes around, whether he’s a newspaper reporter or a pirate. Humphrey Bogart would play it with a little bit more of an edge. Harrison Ford plays that part really well and can play it with a certain amount of humor, which makes it really charming.”

“You can’t create a character like that without knowing that someone like Harrison can have the right, befuddled, oh-my-God-I’m-gonna-die look. And you’re right there with him. He’s Everyman. He’s us. ‘That’s exactly what I would look like if I were in that situation.’ And it’s an honest look. It’s not contrived. A lot of those guys now try to copy that, the better-looking movie-star types who try to do it. In the end, Harrison is a movie star because he’s a character actor. He is like Clark Gable, who was also a character actor, and Humphrey Bogart, who was a character actor. Those people were not Adonis, superhero guys. But that’s why they’re so endearing. That’s why everybody loves them. That’s why they’re so much fun to watch on-screen, because they’re vulnerable.”

photo: Cate Blanchett as Agent Spalko

– Lucas explains one of the many reasons it took so many years (and so many scripts) to get the fourth film made:

“I’m the one that has to come up with the story, and the MacGuffin, the supernatural object that everyone’s going after … ”

“The Ark of the Covenant was perfect. The Shankara Stones were way too esoteric. The Holy Grail was sort of feeble—but, at the same time, we put the father in there to cover for it. I mean, the whole reason it became a dad movie was because I was scared to hell that there wasn’t enough power behind the Holy Grail to carry a movie. So we kept pushing to have it function on some level—and to make it function for a father and a son. To make it that kind of a movie was the big risk and the big challenge, but also the thing that pulled it out of the fire. So, at the end of it, I was like, No more of these, baby. We’re done. I can’t think of anything else. We barely got by on the last one!”

– Lucas is ready for the criticism that comes along with making the fourth installment of a wildly popular movie franchise:

“I know the critics are going to hate it,” he says. “They already hate it. So there’s nothing we can do about that. They hate the idea that we’re making another one. They’ve already made up their minds.”

“The fans are all upset,” Lucas says. “They’re always going to be upset. ‘Why did he do it like this? And why didn’t he do it like this?’ They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their movie, they get upset about it. So you just have to stand by for the bricks and the custard pies, because they’re going to come flying your way.”

Be sure to check out the Vanity Fair piece, as well as their exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.