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We can look at Saw II much like the USC Trojans in the Reggie Bush/Matt Leinart era. It was a powerhouse that emerged from a group of talented people after a shaky beginning. Saw II opened October 28th - 30th last year and crushed every horror film released that year. But the Saw franchise has faded since last year in the same way that the Trojans are fading now. Unfortunately, no other movie at the box office could come up the equivalent of OSU's Jeff Van Orsow, the defensive lineman who batted down USC's pass on a 2-point conversion attempt in the last seconds of the game, so Saw III continued the franchise's winning streak by beating out The Departed ($9.8 million), The Prestige ($9.6 million), and Flags of Our Fathers ($6.4 million).

Catch a Fire opened with a titch over $2 mil with a per-venue average of $1,541. The only weekend performance more uninspired than this was the San Francisco 49ers defense.

This weekend did produce some interesting developments among the early Oscar contenders - The Departed, Flags of Our Fathers, Marie Antoinette, and Running with Scissors. The first three films are performing well enough to continue generating Oscar buzz, but we'll have to wait until the end of the year to see the final contenders emerge. After two weeks of steadily worsening reviews, Running with Scissors has dropped out of serious Oscar consideration (though Annette Bening should still get a nomination) faster than Oklahoma dropped out of BCS contention.

The Departed earned close to $10 mil in its fourth weekend with only a 27% drop-off from last week, thus establishing itself as the proverbial "force to be reckoned with." Early expectations are that we'll see Martin Scorsese and The Departed going head-to-head with Clint Eastwood and Flags of Our Fathers at the Oscars. Think of this expected match-up like Jim Tressel and the Ohio State Buckeyes clashing with Lloyd Carr and the University of Michigan Wolverines. However, Marie Antoinette is lurking in the background much like the West Virginia Mountaineers are haunting the BCS standings. Critics completely dismissed the film early on, but the unexpected performance of Marie Antoinette over the past few weeks is completely disrupting these early stages of the Oscar race, much Oregon State's victory over USC has thrown the BCS rankings into complete turmoil.

Actually, Marie Antoinette is really more the University of Tennessee among current movies, not West Virginia - it's just not getting the respect it deserves. The early criticism of Marie Antoinette unfairly lingers and clouds current judgments of the film just like UT's one-point loss to Florida early in the season unfairly lingers and clouds current judgments of the team in the polls. The film is a stronger contender than the conventional wisdom recognizes and placing it behind other awards contenders (e.g., Running with Scissors) is a travesty not unlike Tennessee being ranked behind California in the BCS.

But getting back to the early Oscar predictions, I think The Departed has the edge now and should garner several nominations. Expect it to do well at the Golden Globes and emerge as the front runner heading into the Academy Awards. Yet, I think it will fall short in the major categories in the same way that Brokeback Mountain did last year. I imagine that Martin Scorsese will be left in the audience (rather than invited to the stage) scratching his head and feeling much like USC's head coach Pete Carroll did at the end of the third quarter on Saturday - overwhelmed by a sense of surreal disorder in the universe and wondering if what he's seeing is reality or some cruel trickery of the mind.

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