Ghost Rider, #1 again, will have about $19,421,000 by this evening, off 57% from last weekend. Business for The Number 23 significantly dropped from Friday to Saturday (i.e., indicating cruddy word-of-mouth), so figure $15.533,000 for late tonight. The Bridge to Tarabithia (or whatever it’s called) is #3 with $13,655,000, off 39% from last weekend. Reno 911 is #4 with $10,646,000. Eddie Murphy‘s Norbit is fifth with $9,954,000, off 41%. Music and Lyrics, off 43%, is sixth with $7.964,000. Breach is #7 with $6,159,000. Daddy’s Little Girls is at $4,.950,000 — off 50%. The Astronaut Farmer is a fizzle — $4536,000, $2100 a print. Amazing Grace, playing in only 1388 theatres, is at $4,232,000, $5300 per print.

The box-office champ next weekend is going to be Walt Becker‘s Wild Hogs, a.k.a., Easy Rider with pot bellies (John Travolta, Tim Allen, William H. Macy, Martin Lawrence). General interest is 75, definite interest is 41 and first choice is 9 (as of last Thursday). Figure $30, maybe $35 million.

The likely #2 film among new 3.2.07 openers, Craig Brewer‘s thoroughly satisfying and self-aware Black Snake Moan, is at 51, 26 and 2…not much.

You won’t find a greater aesthetic gulf next weekend than the one over Zodiac next weekend — a gap between big-gun critics and Fincher buffs (except for David “too Alan Paklula!” Poland) doing cartwheels on one end, and Joe Schmoe ticket-buyers going “meh” on the other. David FIncher‘s masterpiece is tracking at 59, 31 and 3.

Let’s face it — it’s going to open mildly and then go nowhere after this unless general audiences suddenly decide to step out of their popcorn-munching sleeping bags and go, “Oh, yeah…sometimes there’s something to be said for extremely well-made thrillers that don’t do the exact same thing that my girlfriend and I have seen happen in 87 other catch-the-killer movies.” Will they do that? No. 90% of paying audiences go to theatres expecting to eat meat loaf with gravy, mashed potatoes and green beans.

“If Paramount thought they had something, they’ve have snuck Zodiac this weekend,” a marketing guy confided this morning. “They’re spending the money in the right places, but it’s just not penetrating. People are looking at the trailer and it’s not a story they want to see. Awareness is modest and It’s not filtering through. They wanted it to do $18 or $20 million but It’s going to do $10 or $12 million….definite interest at 3% with a week to go tells you that. If a movie is going to be a hit a week out definite interest levels should be in the middle 30s, and first choice should be at 6 or 7.”

Wells to readers saying I should stop wiggling around and stick to my guns about predicting the Best Picture Oscar…fuck that. This is a crazy year, nothing is adding up, nobody knows anything and if the wind changes or I pick up a fresh scent or hint of some turn, I’m going to listen to that and re-calculate accordingly. Stating once again: my final, final call is for Little MIss Sunshine to win the Big Prize. And that’s really and truly it. No more changing my mind unless some new, wild-ass revelation hits me this afternoon.

Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke has responded to The Envelope‘s Steve Pond‘s saying some of her Oscar show spoiler calls are wrong by saying she was right when she reported them but that some bits have been changed or dropped at the last minute, partly in response to her having spoiled them in her column. She goes over every forecast, bit by bit…here it is.

“A rash of recent Oscar winners have been rewarded for playing real people, from Ray Charles to Truman Capote to June Carter Cash,” reads the NPR promo copy for Pete Hammond‘s just-posted aural report. “Are the acting categories turning into best imitation of a real celebrity life?” Obviously. The Academy clearly prefers handing out awards to actors playing real-life people, i.e., those whom viewers know quite well for their voices and tics and body language. Hammond suggests the creation of a new Oscar category — Best Celebrity Impersonation.

Hold on…more Steve Pond swat-downs of Nikki Finke‘s previously posted Oscar show spoilers. The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has just spoken to Pond and been told that “a lot of her stuff is either misleading or wrong.”

Wrongo #1: Finke “claims that each of the Dreamgirls will sing each others’ songs — that’s misleading,” says Pond. “All I can really say is that the number is very collaborative, but if you love Beyonce singing ‘Listen’ or Jennifer Hudson singing ‘Love You, I Do,’ you’re not going to be disappointed.”

Wrongo #2: “It’s true that one of the supporting awards will not be handed out in the first third of the show,” says Pond, “which is the usual, but if you break the show into thirds, there’s one acting award in the first third, one acting award in the middle third and two acting awards in the last third.”

Wrongo #3: Finke has written that the Oscar show will “kick off with an extensive and inspired piece of CGI trickery” and that “dead wrong,” says Pond. “There is no extensive and inspired piece of CGI trickery in the Oscar show. There may be something in the pre-show. I’m not sure. But there is nothing like that in the show.

“The show starts off with a film by Errol Morris that involves all of the nominees. Otherwise, Ellen DeGeneres does not appear doing anything with movie scenes. She’s not dancing with the Happy Feet penguins. The Happy Feet penguins make two appearances in the show. Neither of them involves Ellen. As I say, maybe there’s something in the pre-show, but not in the regular show.”

The hell with it: I’m switching my Best Picture prediction to Little Miss Sunshine.

An older friend told me this morning “it’ll probably be The Departed,” pointing the tendency of older Academy members to shy away from comedies in choosing Best Picture winners plus the lack of Sunshine Best Director and Editing noms, blah blah.

I say throw out the stats. The bottom line is that we’re living in weird times. Everyone knows the world is coming to an early end unless some big changes, and Bill Maher was totally dead-on the other night when he said that if people knew or an absolute fact that not using their TV remotes would eliminate global warming completely, that most people would still use their remotes. And yet people are also quietly freaking inside and want a measure of emotional comfort more than anything else when it comes to anything and everything, including the matter of Best Picture.

So the hell with the precedents and stats — Little Miss Sunshine is the only “us” movie with a Best Picture nomination. It’s not as moralistic or grounded as Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment, but that was a “dark comedy” that won the Best Picture Oscar 46 years ago. Sunshine is light-ish, yes, but it’s fundamentally a serious comedy about losing, hurting, despair and darkness, but finally about family love and sticking up for one another, and I think it’s going to win because of this combination. I really do. If I’m wrong, screw it….I don’t care.

If the Best Picture choice of the majority is going to be/has been about selecting the film with the most accessible emotional current (i.e., one that fulfills and satisfies by affirming some commonly-shared realization about life as Academy members know it), then Little Miss Sunshine is going to win the Best Picture Oscar tonight. “If,” I say…

We all know that the statistics are against it with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris not having been nominated for Best Director and the film also not receiving a Best Editing nomination. I don’t know how to calculate this…nobody knows. At the very least tonight’s Oscar show is going to be the best in many years because of the Best Picture headscratcher factor. It’s a real cliffhanger and a puzzler.

Repeating the basics: my personal preference is for The Departed to win because it throttled me in a richer, artier and more dazzling way than any other film. But I’d be perfectly delighted if Little Miss Sunshine takes it because it resonates thematically, it understands itself perfectly, and scene-for-scene and line-for-line it shoots one bulls-eye after another (except for the motorcycle cop-and-the porn magazine bit and the deux ex machina of the ex-boyfriend at the gas station).

One thing for sure (I think, I suspect…maybe) is that I was probably wrong in predicting Babel to win Best Picture. It’s almost definitely going to be The Departed or Little Miss Sunshine, and I have to make a final, final call within the next few hours.

Little Miss Sunshine won the Spirit Award for Best Picture yesterday, and with that an extra-special hooray for Academy-snubbed producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, who ought to take the stage tonight at the Oscar and when LMS wins Best Picture. Sunshine helmers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris also won for Best Director, and Sunshine author Michael Arndt won for Best First Screenplay.

Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt prior to yesterday afternoon’s Spirit Awards — Saturday, 2.24.07, 1:15 pm

Sunshine producers Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa after the big Sunshine wins — Saturday, 2.24.07, 4:12 pm

The wi-fi in the big Spirit Awards tent was twitchy — worked, didn’t work, sorta worked — so I threw up my hands after 40 minutes or so of futzing around. And then it was party time at Shutters for two, two and a half hours, and then a 90-minute horizontal…forget it. I blew it, slacked off, dropped the ball and, from a filing perspective, basically shined my Hollywood Elsewhere responsibilities.

The Lives of Others director-writer Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck fielding questions in the rear press tent at the Spirit Awards — Saturday, 2.24.07, 3:25 pm

But a 20-gun salute to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and The Lives of Others for having won the Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film. The odds, of course, have been telling us for several weeks that the great Pan’s Labyrinth will take the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar tonight, but I’m sticking with The Lives of Others on my ballot, even if it means losing money. Because Others has, for me, a better, more satisfying ending.

I’m not revealing anything if you’re watching the Spirit Awards on IFC, but it’s 3:36 pm — the show’s been running for 90 minutes — and the winners so far that I admire and care about a lot are (a) Little Miss Sunshine‘s Alan Arkin, Best Supporting Male; (b) Michael Arndt, Best First Screenplay, Little Miss Sunshine; (c) Frances McDormand, Best Supporting Female for Friends With Money; Shareeka Epps, Best Female Lead for Half Nelson; Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck, director-writer of The Lives of Others, winner of the Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film; and Guillermo Navarro, winner of the Best Cinematography Spirit Award for Pan’s Labyrinth.