Widescreen

Though Google's mini-masterpiece of storytelling was obviously the best of Sunday's Super Bowl commercials, Coca-Cola's two memorable ads continued the company's recent tradition of classy, inventive short films that just so happen to be selling you something.

Every few months, a new Coke ad appears before the trailers at your local movie theater. I actually look forward to these. Their movie-theater ads over the last decade have cut across filmmaking genres and conventions, and are, sadly, often more creative than the films that follow.

"Nothing's irreversible."

So says spinal surgeon Jack Shephard, speaking to crippled tourist John Locke in an LAX waiting room, in what is apparently a parallel dimension -- a dimension in which Desmond Hume suddenly appears and disappears aboard Oceanic 815, which lands safely in Los Angeles. A dimension in which Hugo Reyes is the luckiest guy he knows. A dimension in which Charlie Pace wants to die. And a dimension in which the island sits at the bottom of the ocean.

The Oscar nominations were announced this morning, and they don't provide much in the way of suspense. The long awards season has made several things clear as day: The acting winners will be Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Christoph Waltz and Mo'Nique. Best picture and best director will be a clash between James Cameron's "Avatar" and Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker."

There were few surprises, but plenty of annoyances. Let's look at the best and worst of Tuesday's Oscar announcement:

"What did one snowman say to the other snowman?"
-- Desmond Hume, "Adrift" (2x02)

"What lies in the shadow of the statue?"
-- Ilana, "The Incident" (5x16)

If you can answer those questions, you are one of us -- one among a group that is about to be very, very annoying to the uninitiated. (Just ask The Onion.) We are "Lost" fans, and we can't stop talking about the impending final season of our favorite TV show.

... Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones."

I haven't seen many movies in the past year that I would call "bad." Before Sunday's viewing of "The Lovely Bones," I had seen 47 films released in 2009, and the only real stinkers were "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "Hannah Montana: The Movie." Certainly, Jackson's film is more ambitious and well-intentioned than those feature-length commercials, but that's part of why "The Lovely Bones" is so bad.

Mostly, the film -- based upon Alice Sebold's novel narrated from beyond the grave by a 14-year-old murder victim -- fails because Peter Jackson is its director.

Oceanic 815 crashes, "24"-style. Awesome work by a YouTube user called "pyram1dhead."

Oscar ballots are due this weekend, and the new rules allow ten best-picture nominees, which will be announced the morning of Feb. 2. To ensure that a film can't win by merely taking 11 percent of the vote, a pretty complicated process of counting the votes has been implemented, explained here in a piece by Entertainment Weekly. The short version: Each voter ranks their ten favorite films, and an elimination system drops the lowest vote-getter at each rank.

Couple these voting rules with this piece by Pete Hammond which claims many Academy members aren't even filling out all ten slots, and you get the chance for some major surprises on Feb. 2. The example Hammond uses goes something like this: If Voter X writes down four prestige pictures (let's say "Precious," "Up in the Air," "An Education," "Invictus") and then can't think of any other "deserving" nominees, he or she may start listing films that are seen as "lesser" films, but which entertained that voter ("Drag Me To Hell," "Star Trek" and so forth).

If I were a voter, I'd load my ballot with those kinds of movies.

We are 15 days away from the three-hour "Lost" premiere event, and suburban fans looking for a way to share their love for all things Oceanic without hosting a party themselves now have somewhere to go.

Durty Nellie's in Palatine will be hosting a "Lost" premiere party on Feb. 2 for guests 21 and over. According to a press release, the one-our recap show and the new two-hour episode, "LA X," will be shown on 14 big-screen TVs and a 16x19 HDTV. There will be no cover charge for the event, and a "Lost" trivia contest will be staged after the premiere.(The winner gets a $100 Durty Nellie's gift card.) Click here for more info.

UPDATE (1/8/10): "Lost" fans can breathe easy; the speech won't be on Feb. 2. I can't believe White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs actually addressed this "issue" today: http://tinyurl.com/yzptg67

Anyone familiar with me and/or this blog knows I'm a huge "Lost" nerd, but even I have to shake my head at this one.

The big media outlets are now picking up what I thought was a non-story that surfaced online yesterday: President Obama may deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Feb. 2, the same night as the "Lost" premiere.

Disney's return to traditional, hand-drawn animation did open at No. 1 this weekend, but the Mouse House can't be happy about how much money "The Princess and the Frog" actually grossed at the box office: $24.2 million, according to the industry-watchers at Box Office Mojo. That's a terrible total for a film as expensive and as hyped as this -- not to mention a film as good as this. The weekend total pales in comparison to other animated films this year, like "Up" ($68.1 million opening), "Monsters Vs. Aliens" ($59.3 million opening), "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" ($41.7 million opening), and even "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" ($30.1 million opening).

Why did this happen? An obvious answer would be that everyone is too busy with their Christmas shopping to take the kids to the movies. And I'm sure that's true to some degree. But I suspect it all comes down to this:

The movie has the word "princess" in the title.