There are three groups of people that are staying away from Paul Thomas Anderson's next film: a.) Companies afraid to fund a project that can potentially lean to the left, b.) Hollywood players who prefer being on good terms with Tom Cruise, C.) and production companies without deep enough pockets for an auteur film of this stature. Everyone else can apply. While this project won't find a partner in Universal (did they not like the experience funding an auteur film in Basterds?), there is word that the River Road (who backed Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life) are the only ones with the balls or the deep pockets to finance such a project.

Here's hoping that the first purchase out of SXSW receives at least 1/20th of the overwhelming support that Paranormal Activity got in its box office take. After the film's premiere screening at the Austin-based film festival, Magnet didn't waste much time securing the rights to Monsters - the company know for its Six Shooter series have grabbed Gareth Edward's indie film debut which is part road movie, part sci-fi.

There's definitely an air of familiarity with the best actor predictions you'll find below - I get buzzing on future film performances based on the already established filmography, but if I use this year's Oscar winner for Best Actor, then I should expect the unexpected.

You can now refer to Julianne Moore as cinema's Queen of Dystopia. After taking some pretty rough turns in Children of Men and Blindness, she'll now pair with Kirsten Stewart on hubby Bart Freundlich's Backwoods, which should not be confused as a U.S remake of Koldo Serra's The Backwoods starring Gary Oldman.

The trades report that the Weinstein Co. have melted for the small-town America war of the butter sculptures comedy starring Jennifer Garner and the newly added Kate Hudson.

Jennifer Garner might have found her friendly competition in Kate Hudson for the upcoming shoot of Butter - the top tier Black List script from first time scribe Jason Micallef that would see Jim Field Smith (She's Out of My League) begin lensing on April 17th in Shreveport. Conflicting reports have Jim Carrey playing "former" butter carving champ Bob Pickler, husband to Garner's Laura Pickler, but Movieline is reporting that he has passed on the project.

Before I get into my prediction picks and second best choices for Best Original Screenplay, here are some titles that are worth mentioning and that I think are on the outsides looking in. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful (how will he do without Guillermo Arriaga as his wingman?), Mark Heyman and Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (I think the Academy will find the title too risque)...

Come post-Cannes time, ask me about my bottom five nomination predictions I've listed below, and I'll probably want to retract some of my picks - this year's competition in Best Adapted Screenplay is fierce. We have a strong contingent of scribes from the U.K in David Seidler's The King's Speech, Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock, William Monahan's London Boulevard and Alex Garland's Never Let Me Go.

A good 6 weeks delayed from the tentative January start date, Alexander Payne's The Descendants will finally begin filming, setting up shop today, and the entire rest of the cast besides the already named George Clooney have been named. Judy Greer, who has just been named to the Duplass bros. new film Jeff Who Lives at Home, will play the wife in a coma role.

If you don't know the names mentioned in the headline above then its perhaps time to familiarize yourself with French cinema. Actually, I'm fairly sure all three filmmakers showed their last films at the Cannes Film Festival either a year or two years back.

The character of Dickie Eklund should remind voters that when Bale commits to a role, he really does take it one step further than the rest. Unofficial pics show how much weight he lost for a role that originally had Matt Damon and then Brad Pitt attached. Ecklund, fought Sugar Ray Leonard and then fought drug addiction. Then he helped train his brother to an audience friendly ending. His level of commitment should bring him not only his first nom, but his first win - plus Oscar loves its boxers: Rocky, Jake LaMotta, Hilary Swank.

The first role that comes to mind when I think of Barry Pepper is the punishing his character took in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. I imagine the casting folk might have referenced that raw performance and might have subconsciously chosen Pepper because he fits the bill and the name.

THR reports that Focus is potentially tying down Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess for what is described as When Harry Met Sally (I wonder how many pitching sessions in the past two decades use that exact title?)

Hugh Jackman let slip that he'll be on the side of the "antagonists" in the Paul Webb scripted/Lee Daniels directed Selma. The Aussie will play sheriff Clark and thus becomes the third actor to join the project - Bobby De Niro playing Governor George Wallace, and Lenny Kravitz plays activist Andrew Young, but there are a batch of bigger roles that have yet to be filled including the man of the hour, Martin Luther King.

I remember thinking how odd it was when the Weinsteins purchased Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine at Sundance. They would now have not one, but two Ryan Gosling films to release this year. If you're a regular reader of the site, then you know that we've been anticipating the release of Andrew Jarecki's All Good Things for a long time now, and the end-product has suffered tremendously because of the Weinsteins' financial woes.

Looks like won't be the be all and end all for The Duplass brothers, as Jason Reitman's Right of Way Films and John Malkovich's Mr. Mudd have signed on as producers for Mark and Jay Duplass' new project entitled, Jeff Who Lives at Home.

James Franco digs poetry and filmmaking, and while Howl is the perfect marriage between the two, looks like multi-tasker is set to take on more projects of the same vein.

Currently in post-production with The Hereafter, the Warner Bros. thriller that I think has a legitimate shot at a Cannes showing, Clint Eastwood might be turning back the years to another period pic that would would receive the same product value that The Changeling did. The trades report that he is considering making this Dustin Lance Black's penned untitled J.Edgar Hoover biopic as his next project.

I think the Best Supporting categories are the toughest nuts to crack, often a fine performance counts as a rare sympathy vote for a film that isn't nominated in any other category. This year's real wild card are the actresses involved in Woody Allen's latest which employs a trio of supporting ladies in Freida Pinto, Anna Friel and Lucy Punch - but at this point its anyone's guess on how pivotal they become to the assigned male characters.

Recent winner for Best Documentary at the Césars (the French Oscars), Serge Bromberg's and Ruxandra Medrea's Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno has been picked up theatrically for the play in the U.S. (via The Flicker Alley - I never heard of you guys) - I'm imagining a traveling, art-house circuit release for the doc.

Zeitgeist Films are partnering once again with the folks that produced Up the Yangtze - returning to the same country but instead of the brown waters of the Yangtze, this journey takes place in and on the sides of the train tracks.

Part of a double docu Sundance and New Directors/New Films selected pick-up, Zeitgeist have acquired The Oath from helmer Laura Poitras and have pegged it with a release sometime this May. This makes it two for two between the distributor and Poitras - they last paired on the release of My Country, My Country in 2006.

I guess this means that the adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road is proving to be more of a perilous project, as Walter Salles appears to be moving onto a Hollywood biopic in the interim.

I wanted to change my body. I wanted to be a little bit more masculine and get rid of my female body. I wanted to be more like a boy. I wanted to be able to do all the fighting scenes, so I wanted to go into martial arts training. I trained a lot in Thai boxing and kickboxing with this crazy Serbian guy five days a week. I did a lot of preparation, and I also took motorcycle driving lessons, and I cut my hair and pierced myself.

Now he returns to Zodiac-lite territory with a script that goes the direction of the mystery comedy sub-genre. Aptly titled Murder Mystery, this project reminds me of how much I hated the Clue film. Screen Daily reports that free-range director Kevin MacDonald will direct.

Now, almost a decade later, those films might have crossed paths, as Despentes has cast Beatrice Dalle (she starred in Trouble Every Day) in the lead role for Bye Bye Blondie.

Christoph Waltz will want to make sure that his next moves are the goods ones, or else the good fortune of Inglourious Basterds will wash away. The Austrian actor has according to Deadline.com, dropped out on a chance to play with David Cronenberg’s The Talking Cure for an antagonist role in Francis Lawrence's Water For Elephants.

That's right folks. The gold dust for the 2010 Oscar winner list has barely settled, and I'm already attempting to figure out the 2011 Oscar nominations might look like. Why? It's more of a curiosity factor than anything else, seeing what's out there, what we can look forward to - so for the next nine days, I'll unveil my predictions in nine categories, beginning with the category for Best Cinematography.

After a moment of reprieve in 2009's Hadewijch, it looks as if Bruno Dumont will was again explore the nastier side of the human species with a film that will be featured in the backdrop of the sand dunes of Pas de Calais, France -- which appears to be the northern region above Normandy.

The Berlin Film Festival which took place early last month had a pair of in competition for the Golden Bear entries in Der Rauber (The Robber) and Jud Suss - Film ohne Gewissen (Film without Conscience). Neither films won, but there was some controversy surrounding Jud Suss - Film ohne Gewissen which is Oskar Roehler's latest venture.

School is now in session. Cannes' La Residence de la Cinefondation, is celebrating its 20th session and this year's lucky "students" well representing South America include the feature debut projects from Yaelle Kayam, Dominga Sotomayor, Franco Lolli and Daniel Joseph Borgman with sophomore projects from Cristian Jimenez and Michel Franco.