Films that received Oscar nominations last week got a big boost at the box office over the weekend. Still, none of them did as well as the fright flick Hide and Seek or the comedy Are We There Yet? which topped the box office with $22 million and $17 million respectively. Among the best picture nominees, only Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby cracked the top five, with $11.8 million, to place third. (Its receipts were up 642 percent from the previous week as it went from 147 screens to 2,010.) Another best picture rival, Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, placed sixth with $7.5 million, up 56 percent. Sideways, which has received more critics' awards than any other film, finally made it into the top 10 after 15 weeks, taking in $6.3 million, up 123 percent from the previous week. But Finding Neverland, another Oscar nominee, failed to find the top ten, despite adding nearly 400 theaters and seeing a 125-percent jump in revenue. It took in $2.7 million. Hotel Rwanda, which added about 100 theaters, took in $1.8 million, up 39 percent.

The top ten films over the weekend, according to final figures compiled by Exhibitor Relations (figures in parentheses represent total gross to date): 1. Hide and Seek, 20th Century Fox, $21,959,233, (New); 2. Are We There Yet?, Sony, $16,346,395, 2 Wks. ($38,458,267); 3. Million Dollar Baby, Warner Bros., $12,265,482, 7 Wks. ($21,579,631); 4. Meet The Fockers, Universal, $8,026,165, 6 Wks. ($258,372,305); 5. Coach Carter, Paramount, $8,015,331, 3 Wks. ($53,570,689); 6. The Aviator, Miramax, $7,550,128, 7 Wks. ($68,233,031); 7. Racing Stripes, Warner Bros., $6,538,292, 3 Wks. ($35,063,608); 8. Sideways, Fox Searchlight, $6,347,364, 15 Wks. ($40,054,672); 9. In Good Company, Universal, $6,242,825, 5 Wks. ($35,998,497); 10. Assault on Precinct 13, Focus/Rogue, $4,289,986, 2 Wks. ($14,757,794).

The Kansas City Star, which has been running a daily feature saluting past Oscar winners in the run-up to the awards show on Feb. 27, today (Tuesday) selected Disney's 1947 film Song of the South, which won the best song Oscar ("Zip-a-Dee-Doo-dah") and a special Oscar for its star, James Baskett. It is the only Disney animated film never to have been released on home video in the U.S., largely because it was condemned during the civil rights era by the NAACP for "the impression it gives of an idyllic master-slave relationship." A website devoted to the film, www.songofthesouth.net, has collected over 60,000 names on a petition to encourage Disney to release the film, and Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook is being quoted as acknowledging that it has received more requests for a DVD release of the movie than any other film. Cook noted that a similar complaint about racial issues was addressed when the studio released World War II material in the Walt Disney Treasures DVD series "through introductions that place the material in context." Cook said that he was "confident" that a similar solution could be found for Song of the South.

Lions Gate Films is likely courting public controversy once again with its decision to pay $4 million for David Slade's Hard Candy, which screened last week at the Sundance Film Festival. Boston Globe critic Ty Burr described the movie in today's (Tuesday) edition as one of the few at the festival to "draw blood ... make people uncomfortable and angry." Burr said that although the movie starts out as "a carefree drama," it later "takes a left turn into an altogether different movie -- one that owes as much to horror and suspense as to social-message melodrama -- and it is that movie that divided audiences." Burr quotes one volunteer ticket-taker who remarked after hearing a couple discussing whether to see it, "Dude, I saw that thing. ... Stay away. I mean it: Stay away." Slade said that during a Q&A session after a screening, one man "started screaming at me, 'What gives you the right to make this film?' and I thought he was going to attack me.'" One woman who saw it, however, remarked, "I thought it was fantastic ... but I still haven't decided whether I liked it." Another woman remarked: "Everyone should see it. ... Especially men." Lions Gate President Tom Ortenberg conceded that the movie "will shock many people, but I think that's a good thing."

A year ago, the Walt Disney Company's principal financial handicaps could be traced to the poor performance of its ABC television network and lagging attendance at its theme parks. This year ABC-TV appears to be recovering and theme park ticket sales are up, but profits from home video have plunged. The company said that in the last quarter, which includes the crucial Christmas holiday period, it only sold 97 million DVD and VHS units versus 140 million during the comparable quarter a year ago, resulting in a decline in operating income at its studio division of 27 percent to $333 million. Overall earnings were up by about 5 percent to $723 million in the last quarter, according to an SEC filing on Monday.

Under a new deal, PC owners will be able to watch movies from Universal Pictures via the Internet site CinemaNow, but only via "streaming" technology. The studio has balked at Cinema-Now's system, which allows users to download movies, and, for after paying a fee, receive a key to unlock the encrypted file for a limited period. Streaming files offer smaller pictures of lower quality than the full-screen DVD-quality files that CinemaNow provides from other studios. They also require a connection to the Internet at the time they're being viewed, making it impossible to view them, say, on an airplane.

For the second consecutive year, box office revenue in Japan has set a record, rising to $2.03 billion in 2004, up 3.8 percent over 2003, the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan said Monday. Ticket sales were driven in large part by local films, in particular Hayao Miyazaki's animated Howl's Moving Castle, which alone earned $192 million. Revenue from domestic movies rose to 37.5 percent while revenue from Hollywood films declined 3.1 percent. Ticket sales were up 4.8 percent to 170 million.

Forking over far more than it would likely have to spend for original programming, the A&E channel has bought the rights to The Sopranos from HBO for more than $2.5 million per episode. The channel's principal rival was Time Warner's TNT channel, a part of the Turner Broadcasting division. HBO is also a unit of Time Warner. A&E will be able to begin broadcasting the series in the fall of next year and will retain exclusive rights for four years. The network presumably believes that the gangland series, the most popular ever to air on the pay-TV network, will be able to find a wider audience on basic cable. For apparently that reason it was willing to pay a price that is the largest ever for a previously aired series. "We want this show to take us into the top 10," an unnamed representative for the channel told Advertising Age. HBO reedited some of the episodes for prospective bidders to show how the more egregious scenes of sex and violence could be re-edited without impairing the overall impact. However, given the fact that A&E is a cable network without the regulatory proscriptions of broadcast stations, it was uncertain how many cuts would have to be exacted on the episodes. A&E programming chief Robert DeBitetto told today's (Tuesday) Daily Variety: "If you look at what some of the other ad-supported cable networks are running, I think the challenge we have with The Sopranos isn't insurmountable by any means."

Power companies across the U.S. and Canada expressed outrage Monday over an episode of NBC's reality series Fear Factor in which a male and female contestant were shown racing through a maze of electrical wires, screaming as they were shocked repeatedly. Early in the day, Globel Television, which airs the program in Canada, said it would pull the program after receiving a protest from the Canadian Electrical Association. It later reversed itself but added an audience advisory to the show. In the U.S., Pacific Gas and Electric in Northern California also demanded that NBC pull it. Underwriters Laboratories, the company that tests electrical devices for safety, said in a letter to NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker that it was "appalled" by the episode and reminding the network that it has a responsibility "to not encourage or advocate actions that can lead to severe injury or death by portraying stunts or pranks involving electricity as entertainment, irrespective of any safety measures that may be in place or associated viewer warnings." In New York, Con Edison warned customers that such stunts are "potentially dangerous to untrained individuals." NBC also added a viewer warning to the show and said in a statement that it had been "designed and supervised by an electrical engineer" in order to "ensure the complete safety of the participants."

In a 10-year agreement with the Association of Public Television Stations, the cable industry, represented by the National Cable & Telecommunications Assn., has agreed to carry up to four standard-quality digital programming broadcasts simultaneously from each public TV station or one high-definition broadcast. "This historic agreement achieves our single most important, strategic objective for ensuring universal distribution of public television's new digital channels," APTS President and CEO John Lawson said in a statement. FCC Chairman Michael Powell described the deal as a "monumental marketplace agreement" that will advance the transition from analog to digital TV.

As expected, Time Warner Cable and Comcast submitted a joint bid for bankrupt Adelphia Cable on Monday, but, defying some analysts' expectations, it was not the only bid for the company. Today's (Tuesday) Daily Variety said that the fiercest competition is likely to come from another joint bid -- from buyout firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Providence Equity Partners. CNBC reported Monday that the Comcast-Time Warner bid came in at $17 billion in cash and stock and that the Kohlberg-Providence bid at about $15-16 billion.

David Letterman returned from vacation Monday night and delivered an opening monologue comprised entirely of jokes that Johnny Carson had sent to him. Letterman didn't reveal the source of the jokes until after he had completed the monologue, then interviewed former Tonight show producer Peter Lassally, who had revealed only a few days before Carson's death that Carson had been sending the jokes to Letterman. Later in the show, Letterman remarked, "I moved to Los Angeles from Indianapolis in 1975, and the reason I moved is because of Johnny Carson and the Tonight show. And I'm not the only one. I would guess that maybe three generations of comedians moved to be where Johnny was because if you thought you were funny and you wanted to find out if you could hit major league pitching, you had to be on the Tonight show."

Veteran broadcast newsman Bill Shadel, who covered the D-Day invasion on CBS, became the first host of Face the Nation, anchored the news on ABC in the early '60s, and was the moderator of the third presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, died Saturday in Renton, WA, a suburb of Seattle, at the age of 96.