I'm sure that the weekend had you anxiously awaiting Sunday night's 3+ hours of Academy goodness -- fiery discussion over who is the most deserving, coordinating diamonds and flamboyant gowns for your own Academy party and carefully concocting your own Oscar pool. Or, more likely, you went on with your weekend as usual, perhaps trying to remember the last time you enjoyed the Academy's night of awards. Either way, you might have missed one of the awards ceremonies that wrapped up the night before. No, it wasn't the Spirit awards. It was the Razzies.

The big winners of this year's Razzies are, not surprisingly, the two films who grabbed the most nominations -- Basic Instinct 2 and Little Man. Sharon Stone's saucy comeback as Catherine Tramell got herself a win as The Worst Actress of 2006, and the movie also grabbed Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay and Worst Sequel. Considering all the crappy sequels out there, you know your film is bad when it's considered the worst of the worst. The Wayans horror came in second, with three wins ffrom Worst Actor for Marlon and Shawn Wayans, to Worst On-Screen Couple and Worst Remake/Rip-Off.

Our current Hollywood trainwreck, M. Night Shyamalan, didn't get through his Saturday night unscathed. He grabbed two Razzies for Lady in the Water, one for Worst Supporting Actor and one for Worst Director. This can't help his current film's struggle, unless he learns to embrace the bad like some others do. Rounding out the Razzie list, Carmen Electra grabbed a win for Worst Supporting Actress for Date Movie and Scary Movie 4, and RV was the Worst Excuse for Family Entertainment. If you're scouring this post for mention of everyone's favorite directorial disaster, Uwe Boll or his multi-nominated BloodRayne, look no further. The man and his movie slid by without big Raspberries to add to his collection! However, while he narrowly escaped this year, I have this funny feeling that we haven't seen the last of Boll's Berries.

(Last week was amazingly skimpy, and this one's only marginally more exciting.)

Recent Theatricals

Basic Instinct 2 (Sony) -- We used to have only one movie about Sharon Stone's crotch. Now we have two. (director commentary, featurette, ten deleted scenes, alternate ending, "unrated" edition)

Foreign and Arty

Koko: A Talking Gorilla (Criterion) -- One of the finest documentaries you'll ever see about the relationship between man and his "lesser" cousins. (video interview with co-director Barbet Schroeder)

Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story (HBO) -- All I've heard is that they took an "unfilmable" book and turned it into one weird piece of cinema. Looking forward to it. (filmmaker commentary, deleted & extended scenes, interviews, behind-the-scenes featurette)

Yi Yi (Criterion) -- A three-hour family drama from China. And I hear it's pretty freaking fantastic. (audio commentary, interviews, essay booklet)

Catalog Picks

The Black Swan (Fox) -- One of those old pirate flicks from the '40s that I've always wanted to see. This one's got Tyrone Power and Maureen O'Hara. (audio commentary, restoration comparison)

Grand Prix (Warner) -- Frankenheimer was a guy's guy. And this flick is his 1966 love letter to the sport of car racing. (retrospective documentary, four featurettes)

Direct-to-Video

The Garden (Anchor Bay) -- A low-budget DTV horror movie starring Lance Henriksen. Bizarre, I know. (director commentary, featurette)

Grilled (New Line) -- Ray Romano, Kevin James, Burt Reynolds, Juliette Lewis, Jon Polito, Michael Rapaport, Kim Coates, Sofia Vergara, and Richard Libertini in a comedy about ... meat. (two featurettes, deleted scene)

For those of you who caught Basic Instinct 2 over the weekend and left the theater wondering who the real killer was, well today we finally found out that answer when the box office numbers were announced. Yes folks, the box office was behind the whole thing. Bet you saw that one coming! Even with the sleazy leaked footage and Sharon Stone parading all over the place promoting her film, the thing barely managed to move an inch.

Though Stone isn't exactly pitching a third installment just yet (better wait for this puppy to hit a crisp 5 mil before that happens), she is running her mouth off about some other sequels she'd love to be a part of. According to Contact Music, via the always reliable "Internet buzz," Stone is set to reunite with Sylvester Stallone for a sequel to their 1994 film, The Specialist. As if that's not enough, she also would love a role in a sequel to Total Recall (if one ever gets made), but feels that's kind of a long shot since her character was killed off in the original. Yeah, something tells me her character was eliminated for a reason. I wonder what that could be?  Is it just me or does it seem she's scrolling through the vault, searching for which films had the biggest stars attached? I hate to say it Sharon, but they're not the biggest stars anymore ... they're the oldest. Good luck!

If you believe this morning's Hollywood Reporter, the primary reason that Basic Instinct 2 (and Jade, and Body of Evidence, and Showgirls) failed so miserably at the box office is because the American political climate is such that, as Paul Verhoeven put it, "Anything that is erotic has [essentially] been banned ... We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values. And Christianity and sex have never been good friends." And it's not just Verhoeven that feels that way - the article is full of quotes from screenwriters and directors, most of whom attribute the downfall of the "erotic thriller" to the country's current "big puritanical mode." Um, what?! Have these people seen any of the movies they're talking about? They failed because they're terrible, not because of politics. I mean, sitting through Body of Evidence and looking at what the makers thought was sexy was one of the most deeply humiliating experiences of my life -- I shudder at the mere memory.

There are, however, some signs of sanity in Hollywood: the calmer interviewees point to factors including the decreasing interest of foreign markets in erotic American films, the lack of good scripts in the genre (Ding! Ding! Ding!), and a fear on the part of agents of putting their clients in films that they see as "risky."

What about you? Would you go see a good "erotic thriller," or do you feel that sort of thing should be kept out of theaters, no matter the quality? And has your opinion changed since the crazy, sexy 1980s?

Ice Age: The Meltdown demolished the box office competition this weekend, coming in with just over $70 million - a total that gives it the second-biggest non-summer open of all time. While the fact that the film was released on such a massive number of screens (almost 4000, the fifth-highest total ever) certainly contributed to the numbers, the total is nevertheless impressive and, depending on the final totals, could leave it tied with The Incredibles for the-second biggest animation debut. Whew.

Spike Lee's hit Inside Man held onto second place, its total of $15.7 million a dropoff of a not atypical 45% from last week's numbers. Finishing a surprising third was (the awesome) ATL, which made a very respectable $12.5 million on only 1602 screens, the second-lowest exposure of any film in the top ten. The fourth and fifth biggest earners this weekend were the still-strong Failure to Launch ($6.6 million) and V for Vendetta, which drew $6.5 million in its third week of release.

Slither, the weekend's third major debut feature, made a disappointing $3.7 million, despite strong reviews and a very wide open. Lucky for Slither, however, it was released in the same week at Basic Instinct 2, which was such an unmitigated disaster ($3.2 million on about 1500 screens) that no one will ever talk about how badly the movie about the slugs did. The full top 10 is after the jump.

Four big new releases this week, and every last one of them was screened for critics. What is the world coming to? A couple of the movies earned surprisingly good reviews (hooray for ATL!), while one in particular is just as awful as we had hoped/feared/expected. In brief: ATL is surprisingly solid, Slither rocks, Ice Age: The Meltdown has a really funny squirrel in it, and Basic Instinct 2 is a huge, insulting, boring pile of crap. Read on for details.

• ATL: I'm not the only one who noticed with pleasure how gentle - no drinking, no juvenile drug use, hardly any swearing - ATL is. Not only does it not follow the expected Urban Drama path, but a lot of critics actually think it's pretty good. The handful who don't like it are are more "meh" than hateful, and generally acknowledge that the film's slew of debut performances are promising.
  

• Slither: Everyone pretty much agrees with Scott on this one: if you're a horror geek, you'll love it. The rest of us, however, probably shouldn't bother - not because it's bad, but because we're not really equipped to appreciate either the movie's clever gore or its references to the genre's illustrious past. (Or, as Robert Ebert put it, "If the name Troma means nothing to you, what are you doing reading a review of Slither in the first place?")
  

• Basic Instinct 2: Shock of shocks, the movie sucks. Suffering alongside James, few critics were able to wring any pleasure whatsoever out of this one, even in the old reliable "so bad it's good" sort of way. I mean, you know things are bad when a critic calls your Sexy-with-a-capital-S movie "unforgivably dull" (it's amazing how many reviews use the D-word), particularly when that's one of the kinder descriptions offered.
  

• Ice Age: The Meltdown: It's a bad sign when virtually every review (including Kim's, which is really the only one you need to read to know what the film is like) talks in glowing terms about a squirrel doing battle with a nut, a bit that is totally unrelated to the movie's plot and takes up minimal screen time. Very, very bad. That said, there are a few critics who disagree with the disappointed masses and think the film outdoes its predecessor - parents, you may want to limit yourself to these reviews, since you're likely to be seeing the movie 700 times.
  

Sharon Stone says after she saw a rough cut of Basic Instinct 2 she pushed for more of the wild sex scenes that had been cut to be put back in the film. "I wanted a lot of sex in the sequel, and I wanted more nudity," Stone said in an interview with The Telegraph. "I was coming from a really kinky place." I suppose if the sex and nudity are there because they make sense from a standpoint of story arc and character development it makes perfect ... oh, come on, who are we kidding? 

Basic Instinct made Stone famous more because she flashed her hoo-hoo at the camera than because of her acting. Her post-Basic Instinct film career has been decidedly uneven. She got the Oscar nod a decade ago for her role in Casino. Since then, we have Diabolique (yawn), The Mighty (a decent enough film that bombed at the box office), The Muse (meh), and a bunch of crapedelic filler (voice acting the "blind art teacher" on Higglytown Heroes? Did she have a high credit card bill to pay off or something?) 

Before I begin, like the uncensored Basic Instinct 2 trailer we told you about awhile back, the scene linked to in this post is definitely NSFW (Not Safe For Work). It could also be classified as NSIFOSO (Not Safe In Front of Significant Other) or NSFATWG (Not Safe For Afternoon Tea with Grandma). Got it? You've been warned.

While our tipster claims this scene was somehow leaked onto the internet or what have you, it's pretty obvious the folks behind marketing Basic Instinct 2 are throwing some unbelievably graphic scenes from the movie out there now in an attempt to get people to show up to the theater. Sex sells, right?

According to our tipster, this is just one of a few scenes deleted from the theatrical version that will sneak online in the coming days. So, if you're at all curious to see what they would leave out of a Basic Instinct flick (Think: Three people playing Monopoly, only without the game and everyone is naked) then feel free to dive right in. Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addition hits theaters on March 31st. 

Looks like the discord in the Middle East will be resolved in a matter of days, now that Sharon Stone is on the case. Stone is in Israel on a "mission to support peace and help children", according to former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, who appeared with Stone at a press conference. Stone playfully suggested she would "kiss just about anyone for peace in the Middle East", but when reporters egged her on to kiss Peres, she laughingly turned them down. I don't know about you, but I'll certainly sleep better at night after this bit of news.

Stone, apparently taking a page from Angelina Jolie's book (and, you know, not thinking at all about promoting Basic Instinct 2, which opens at the end of this month), will spend her five-day tour visiting a series of projects for children and "peace-mediating activities", playing soccer with Israeli and Palestinian kids, and visiting Palestinian kids in a hospital. I guess it's a good thing for celebs to put their famous faces behind causes, but really - does anyone think Sharon Stone is going to broker peace in the Middle East with a five-day visit? I guess I'd feel more warmly toward celebs who take on causes if they didn't go on peace missions with a coterie of photogs following them around taking shots of them visiting with sick kids and schmoozing with politicians. What do you think of celebs and pet causes? Do you pay more attention to an issue if a celeb promotes it? Are you more likely to donate or get involved in a humanitarian cause because a hot movie star says it's worthwhile?

Before I even begin to delve into this post, I sincerely have to warn you (or anyone else in the room) that the trailer (or promo reel) attached is not at all censored. Since we're talking Basic Instinct 2 here, this means there's a plethora of naked activity taking place. Just so you're warned.

In saying that, some sort of trailer-ish promo reel for Sharon Stone's upcoming "I'm still really hot" audition, Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addition has hit the online. As Karina told us previously, the MPAA has slapped a "hard R" on this puppy, and judging from the trailer, someone was feeling quite generous. Oh yes - this one looks nasty folks.

In the film, Stone reprises the role that "made her", novelist Catherine Tramell. Once again, she gets all mixed up with the law and, subsequently, Scotland Yard appoints a psychiatrist to evaluate her. But like all the men that came before him, there's just something about Stone that drives a guy to the Kama Sutra section of Barnes and Nobles. We'll have to see for ourselves whether this one belongs in the theaters or on Cinemax at two in the morning when it hits the streets on March 31st.