EW Popwatch has it wrong: The Academy does not favor boxoffice when it comes to the animated Oscar category. If they did, then Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” wouldn’t have won the Oscar in 2003. Which movie is the best work of art is the question to ask. Is it Miyazaki’s “Howl’s Moving Castle?” It also matters if the voters see the movie, or if they favor their home studio, like Disney or DreamWorks. “Corpse Bride” is also a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. The question to ask is if stop motion animation (”Corpse Bride” and “Wallace & Gromit”) has any advantage against CG “Madagascar.” My sense is that “Wallace & Gromit” is the front runner here.

From Sheigh: flickskinny tackles “Zathura”.

From Sheigh: the perfect plush toy for the Monty Python and the Holy Grail lover on your Christmas list. A full-sized killer bunny with flashing red eyes and razor sharp teeth.

Posted at moviethinker.

Schwarzenegger teams with Jackie Chan to fight overseas piracy.

And this Arnold spoof is circulating.

David Lynch talks about meditating and movies to John McMurtrie on greencine.

Assuming that all goes well with installment number one, “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe,” for the next “Narnia,” producer Mark Johnson was hoping to film the C.S. Lewis prequel “The Magician’s Nephew.” But in order to follow his young cast as they grow, “Harry Potter”-style, he’ll probably proceed with “Prince Caspian,” followed by “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” That Narnia adventure not only features the four young leads on the high seas, but a nasty piece of business named Eustace who turns into a dragon. Cool stuff.

Pop art ephemera from Sheigh: A Scarface poster created by using every word in the 300 page script.

MCN has the list of ten animated features that will be winnowed down to three on Oscar nominations morning. Which will they be?

It’s Oscar season, and Oscar watchers are blogging furiously. There are a lot of Oscar blogs out there. The L.A Times’ new blog experiment “The Envelope” has taken over the eyeballs for Tom O’Neill’s old homegrown site, Goldderby.com, to which I used to contribute. There was something wonderful and independent about Goldderby, as well as collegial, as a group of us Oscar prognosticators posted our predictions through the season. I’ll miss it. Now O’Neill and Premiere’s long-time Oscar watcher Steve Pond, who both know their Oscar stuff, are blogging on The Envelope. But their site seems institutionalized. What do they call the L.A. Times? The velvet coffin.

It goes without saying that MCN’s David Poland and Jeff Wells know their Oscar shit, although they are easily thrown by their own taste: Wells is too manly to appreciate Keira Knightley in “Pride & Prejudice,” for example, and Poland actually went to the mat forecasting “Phantom of the Opera” as a best-picture slam dunk last year. (I’m no angel: I prayed for “Beauty and the Beast” to win best picture, when an animated feature getting a nom at all was a feat.) I’m also impressed by another blog, in contention, which Poland is linking to on his Awards Central site. The excellent Oscarwatch also exhaustively covers everything Oscar.