BBC News has announced that Nowhere Boy director Sam Taylor-Wood, 42, is engaged to Aaron Johnson, 19, who does a decent job of playing the lead role of John Lennon in the film. I wouldn’t make it legal if I were Johnson — I’d just cruise along and see where it all goes. No guy should get married at this age. I just asked a ladyfriend about this; she says “younger boys like older women because older women know what they want in the sack, and a lot of younger girls don’t.”

Nowhere Boy director Sam Taylor-Wood in a pose for a current issue of Bazaar.

In a recently posted riff called “The Rules of Ten,” MCN’s David Poland says two things about Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker. (1) “Among the fifteen or fewer serious contenders for [Best Picture] nomination, it will certainly be amongst the best five, by most standards of quality.” (2) “In years past…a movie like The Hurt Locker would have a very hard road, no matter how good it is, because of its lackluster box office run.”

In other words, he seems to be saying that a standard Academy rule-of-thumb — i.e., if a great or near-great film hasn’t made a hefty pile of dough, it is automatically degraded as a potential awards contender — doesn’t apply as much this year. Is that what he’s saying? I’m not quite sure.

Either way you have no sense of humor if you don’t laugh at this equation. Near-great film opens, is praised to the heavens, makes very little money because the Eloi are too coarse or stupid to sufficiently support it. Awards time rolls around and the likelihood of this same near-great film being nominated for Best Picture is open to question because the Eloi were too coarse or stupid to sufficiently support it.

In the view of Steve Mason, the weekend’s #1 film — Michael Jackson’s This Is It — is a shortfaller due to $8 million earned yesterday and a likely 5-day cume of $33.2 million by Sunday night.

That’s well short of the $31.5 million earned over the first three days by Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (Disney) in February ’08. That film earned a little more than $65 million by the end of its run. So is Mason saying that This Is It won’t make it to that figure? His point seems to be that the potential business indicated by the Jackson doc’s opening-day business hasn’t been fulfilled.

The weekend’s really big box-office story, meanwhile, is Paramount’s Paranormal Activity — made for $15 grand, acquired for $300,000 and destined to reap $83.5 million by Sunday night. It’ll easily crest $100 million.

Keep in mind, by the way, that Couple’s Retreat was trashed by every critic in the country and will still have a Sunday-night tally of $87.2 million. Business is flat this weekend — $2.4 million yesterday, a three-day projection of $6.7 million — but still, $87.2 million ain’t chump change.

Where the Wild Things Are is also dead at this stage — $2.2 million earned yesterday, a likely $6.5 million for the weekend — but a $63.2 million total doesn’t sound too bad from an armchair perspective.