monday morning box office

Nicolas Cage Is A National Treasure

On these final few hours before the sugarplum-gorging orgy that begins at dawn, we dutifully tabulate for you, like a trembling Bob Cratchit scratching figures with a quill pen into the margins of the Scrooge & Marley ledger, the weekend's box office numbers:
1. National Treasure: Book of Secrets - $45.5 million
Frankly, we don't know what took infallible superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer and supermuse Nicolas Cage this long to bring us another Treasure chapter: With Secrets conquering this weekend's box office (and bringing in $10 mil more than the original), the American-history-corrupting adventure serial has now graduated to official franchise&trade status. We're eagerly anticipating all future installments, including National Treasure: Three Dollar Bill, in which Cage and his ragtag band of bookish fortune-hunters discover that the Lincoln Memorial's head spins to the left when a Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony dollar are placed in its orbital sockets, revealing a secret tunnel to J. Edgar Hoover's fabled lingerie closet.

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the campaign trail

For Your Consideration: Just Give Him All The Damn Awards Now

Even if Walk Hard—the Jake Kasdan/Judd Apatow send-up of Oscar-bait musical biopics like Walk the Line, Ray and the upcoming Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds—turns out to be a letdown, we're at least being entertained by their recent For Your Consideration campaign in the trades. Following John C. Reilly/Dewey Cox's bird-flipping invitation for Academy members to recognize his bravura performance is a new ad in today's Variety, in which Cox, obviously in the throes of whatever substance was fueling a creatively fertile, experimental period in his career, even more defiantly demands the recognition of his peers.

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short ends

F Your Consideration: Walk Hard

· Is this the best For Your Consideration ad we've ever seen? Could be. Though we're still partial to one from 1993 in which Jack Nicholson was depicted defecating into Tom Cruise's Navy officer's hat to support his Best Supporting Actor candidacy in A Few Good Men.
· If the strike drags on, we wonder if call-to-action videos like this one will start featuring the home phone numbers for Les Moonves and Jeff Zucker instead of their office lines.
· Here's what you missed, signage-wise, if you didn't make it down to the Fox rally.
· Guys named O.J. Simpson should probably start avoiding Vegas.
· The strike's hidden victims: coffee shops.
· Avoid these drinking establishments unless you're looking for representation.