Film News: Oscars Double Number of "Best Picture" Nominees, Watchmen Director's Cut in Theaters

- Next year's Academy Awards will have a much larger number of nominees in the running for the Best Picture award. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that there will 10 feature films competing in the category, doubling the number of nominees. The number has fluctuated over the decades -- at times there have been as many as 12 films nominated in a single year -- but the last time there were 10 was back in 1943. [Oscars.org]

- Zach Snyder's director's cut of Watchmen will get a limited theatrical release to promote its upcoming release on DVD and Blu-ray. Starting on July 17, four venues in Dallas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and New York will screen the director's cut for one week. Snyder's cut includes 25 minutes of additional footage. [Variety]

- David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) is in talks to direct The Social Network for Columbia Pictures. Penned by Aaron Sorkin (Studio 60, The West Wing), the film focuses "on the evolution of Facebook from its 2004 creation on the Harvard campus by sophomore Mark Zuckerbuerg to a juggernaut with more than 200 million members." [Variety]

- Topher Grace, Emma Roberts and Hector Elizondo have signed on to the ensemble cast of director Garry Marshall's new rom-com flick titled Valentine's Day. Grace, Roberts and Elizondo join Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jennifer Garner, Shirley MacLaine, Bradley Cooper and Ashton Kutcher for the film. Valentine's Day centers on five "slightly interconnecting stories playing out on Valentine's Day in Los Angeles." [Hollywood Reporter]

- Initial buzz on an upcoming fall movie, The Road with Viggo Mortenson and Charlize Theron, is positive. The Road centers around a father (Mortensen) walking his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) through a post-apocalyptic America. Hollywood Reporter's Roger Friedman describes the movie as "elegiac and moving, artful and yet suspenseful" and says that Mortensen's performance "stays with you long after leaving the theater." Well, there's a description that'll catch a Pop Wench's interest! [Hollywood Reporter: Showbiz 411]