The opening Best Picture montage bit in the 83rd Oscars Broadcast, satirically visiting each Best Picture nominee within an "Inception" framework, almost had me thinking that they'd pull it off, with James Franco and Anne Hathaway filling the roles of genial, energetic, funny, hip hosts without the squirmy mordant edge of Ricky Gervais.

The late Yilmaz Güney brought international attention to Turkish cinema with Yol (1982), which he wrote and co-directed with Serif Gören. It's a harrowing, visually striking tale of released prisoners who find living under the then military dictatorship ruling the country even more dismal and confining than jail.

Lisa Cholodenko won't win a Best Director Oscar on Sunday night, as Kathryn Bigelow did last year for The Hurt Locker. Cholodenko didn't get nominated. But her film The Kids Are All Right could win for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo), and Best Actress (Annette Bening).

If you survived the weekend's science-fiction marathon, you might be up for an evening with one of the genre's legendary authors. Samuel R. Delany brought deep philosophical insights to his Hugo and Nebula Award winners Babel-17 and Dhalgren while also offering a unique point of view as a gay African-American.

You might think it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on in Luchino Visconti's adaptation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1971): an aging composer, played sublimely by Dirk Bogarde, visits the title city, catches a glimpse of a waiflike youth, and feels the sap flow again. In the Coolidge Corner Theatre's "Science on Screen" program, however, guest speaker Harvard psychologist Nancy Etcoff tackles the basic questions: what is beauty, and why does it make us all funny in the head? The Coolidge is at 290 Harvard St, Brookline | 7 pm | $9; $7 students, seniors | 617.

One could chronicle the film career of Peter and Bobby Farrelly by listing their most disgusting moments, the scenes that would compel the most hardened epicures of gross-out comedy to say, "I can't believe they did that."

That list would include Jeff Daniels prolonged encounter with a broken toilet in Dumb and Dumber (1994).

For some fans, the 1954 film adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a classic. But those attending SF36, the 36th annual Boston science-fiction marathon, will be treated to the really classic version of the fantastic Jules Verne tale - the silent 1916 adaptation by Stuart Paton. At the very least, it will be fun to compare squids.

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp were about as successful at rejiggering Alice in Wonderland as they were at remaking Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. They failed to duplicate Gene Wilder's sadistic charm as the candy impresario, a necessary trait for someone transforming a naughty girl into a giant blueberry or shrinking another brat to six inches tall and then stretching him back to size with a taffy-pulling machine.

Having already committed my Oscar predictions to print (they will appear in next Thursday's "Phoenix"), I feel a sickening surge of anxiety reading this article about Heidi, the cross-eyed opossum, in the Leipzig Zoo. Like her late colleague Paul the Psychic Octopus from the Oberhausen Sea Life Centre, who picked Spain to win the World Cup last year, Heidi is also reputed to have a talent for predicting the outcome of contests, in this case the Academy Awards.

Most films don't really give an audience a chance to see; they're too busy manipulating responses with rapid editing and special effects. The films of French avant-garde artist Rose Lowder, however, are intended to stimulate perception, not reaction. The meticulously constructed frame-by-frame studies of the commonplace - such as Les tournesols colorés, a mesmerizing look at a field of sunflowers - provoke new awareness of what it means to look and discover.

A couple of weeks ago I again had the privilege of serving as one of the judges of the Redstone Contest, the annual short film competition for BU film students, and once again I came away impressed and encouraged by the talent, passion, and originality demonstrated by the participants. You can see what I'm talking about by attending a showcase of the best of the selections (including the winners, which will be announced at the show) that will take place tonight at 7 p.

The turmoil in Egypt dominates the news from the Middle East, overshadowing the recent oppressive measures imposed by the Iranian despots. Apparently in an attempt to stifle any anti-regime resistance inspired by the events in Cairo, the Tehran government has hanged at least 73 people in recent weeks, many of them political prisoners.

Spike Lee burst into prominence in 1989 with one of his best and certainly one of his most provocative films, Do the Right Thing (1989). Lee also stars, as a deliveryman for a white-owned pizzeria in a black Brooklyn neighborhood who gets caught up in the middle of racial conflict. It screens tomorrow at the Museum of Fine Arts at 1:30 pm.

A 300-pound transvestite eating dog shit might seem tame today, but back in 1972, when John Waters's Pink Flamingos came out, it raised some eyebrows. Doing the turd-eating honors is Waters's late muse Divine, as she and her family try to qualify as the filthiest people in the world. But after Edith Massey's egg-sucking Edie and Divine's sex scene involving her son and a chicken, coprophagy seems almost anticlimactic.

Nobody shaped Hollywood genres to his subversive artistic vision as effectively as Alfred Hitchcock, and Vertigo (1958) is Hitch at his best. James Stewart plays one of his darkest and most tormented roles as a San Francisco detective racked by both guilt and the title malady who compounds his troubles by falling in love with a dead woman - and her double.