Two years ago, an Aaron Sorkin won an Oscar for his The Social Network screenplay and the film that was initially and eye-rollingly dismissed by the majority of folks as "The Facebook Movie."  So in putting together a serious, classy film based on the life of the late Apple co-founder and Patron Saint of Personal Electronics Steve Jobs, Sony Pictures wisely sought to reunite with Sorkin. 

At Miramax, Harvey Weinstein justifiably gained a reputation as something of an Oscar kingmaker, very effectively earning Academy Awards for often unlikely or unexpected features.  Last year, The Weinstein Company, the professional home of the brothers Weinstein, campaigned well on behlaf of The King's Speech, and it's looking increasingly likely that the distributor can do it again this year with The Artist.  See, French helmer Michel Hazanavicius just won the feature film award at the 2012 Director's Guild of America Awards.

The Directors Guild of America has announced the five nominees for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film at the 64th Annual DGA Awards.  Last week we saw three separate professional organizations formally announcing their awards contenders, with the Art Directors Guild, Producers Guild, and Writers Guild all dropping press releases.  To those folks who assiduously track every blip on the awards season radar, though, the DGA Awards are a bigger deal than any of those.  Why?  Because the winner of this DGA honor has only ever failed to correspond with the Best Director Oscar six times, and the directorial Oscar also tends to go to the Best Picture winner.

Sony Pictures has made no bones about its intention to adapt the entirety of the late Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium Trilogy, starting with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  That film is performing reasonably well in theaters right now, and the studio is continuing development on the first sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, though it's unknown whether or not director David Fincher will return.  Given the obvious franchise intentions, it's no surprise that the opening title sequence for the first film visually incorporates moments from all three novels.

That title sequence strongly recalls some of Fincher's distinctive work as a director of both commercials and music videos, as well as (to a lesser extent) the titles to his 1995 thriller Se7en.  The titles feature a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" by composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, along with Yeah Yeah Yeahs lead singer Karen O, and its a testament hypnotic, at times assaultive style that the song doesn't simply overwhelm the visual presentation.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is now in theaters, and it's the first big, studio-backed American adaptation of an international bestseller by the late Stieg Larsson.  Naturally, Sony Pictures planned the film as the starting point for cinematic adaptations of all three novels in Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, but in the two weeks since The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo hit theaters, the film has, fairly or not, been carrying the faint whiff of  commercial disappointment.  Despite that perception, the studio intends to go ahead with The Girl Who Played With Fire and trilogy-capper The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

With some notable exceptions, 2011 was not the most robust year at the American box office, and studio soothsayers are no doubt hunched over chicken livers, divining better fortunes for the impending year of 2012, packed as it is with much-anticipated blockbusters.  For the penultimate weekend of this odd-numbered year, though, multiplexes across the nation were packed with new releases, all dropped willy-nilly throughout the week, creating a strange brew of eclectic releases.  For the holiday weekend, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol emerged as the big winner, with fellow sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows in second place, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo getting all Swedish in third place, along with two Steven Spielberg joints down the line.

Synopsis: A discredited journalist (Daniel Craig) and a mysterious computer hacker discover that even the wealthiest families have skeletons in their closets while working to solve the mystery of a 40-year-old murder in this David Fincher-directed remake of the 2009 Swedish thriller of the same name. Inspired by late author Stieg Larsson's successful trilogy of books, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo gets under way as the two leads (Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara) are briefed in the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, whose uncle suspects she may have been killed by a member of their own family. The deeper they dig for the truth, however, the greater the risk of being buried alive by members of the family, who will go to great lengths to keep their secrets tightly sealed.

Film producer Kathleen Kennedy may have co-founded Amblin Entertainment with her husband, Frank Marshall, and director Steven Spielberg, but she is also responsible for producing some of the most beloved films of the 20^th Century. Together, Kennedy and Spielberg are the most successful producing team of all time and collectively their films have grossed over $5 billion in domestic box office receipts. In addition to working with Spielberg, she has also collaborated with legendary directors such as Clint Eastwood (The Bridges of Madison County), Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future), David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), and Martin Scorsese (Cape Fear).

Kennedy’s resume reads like a grocery like list of the greatest films of our generation including Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Gremlins, The Goonies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Jurassic Park, The Sixth Sense, The Color Purple, Munich, and the Oscar-winning Schindler’s List. She is currently in the process of promoting two new films that she made with Spielberg, which open only days apart from each other. War Horse, based on the popular book and stage play of the same name, and The Adventures of Tintin, which is based on the fan-favorite series of comics by Belgian writer and artist Herge and opens in U.S. theaters everywhere on December 21^st.

With the 84th Academy Awards only three months away, it’s time to go on record with some Oscar predictions. The race is officially on, with front-runners beginning to take the lead and dark horses waiting in the wings to shake things up. Several movies have still not yet been released, but every film that hopes to qualify for the Oscars will be in theaters by the last day of December. Let's take a look at how the six major categories are taking shape, with the top ten contenders fighting for five coveted slots…

The American adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has yet to actually hit theaters, but Sony's marketing and David Fincher's flair for the iconic have already made the film's central figures and its overall somber tone instantly recognizable.  As such, the yet-to-be-released thriller is ripe for parody, and the good folks at Funny or Die have obliged with a spoof trailer for a nonexistent movie entitled The Girl With the Tramp Stamp Tattoo.

Standing for Lisbeth Salander, the resilient, borderline autistic title character* in Stieg Larsson's novel is a vacuous, texting party girl clad in Juicy Couture and making references to "the Jager shits."  Emma Roberts plays the Vespa-riding investigator, a boozy contemporary of Lisbeth, played in the feature by Rooney Mara.  And standing in for improbably handsome Michael Blomkvist Daniel Craig is none other than Joe Manganiello, familiar to fans of True Blood and How I Met Your Mother.  Oh hey, and there's deadpan comedy expert Ray Wise filling the role played by Christopher Plummer in Fincher's film.