Looking over the list of movies up for some Oscar or another, I can't help but notice that the overwhelming majority of them are still in theaters. Even in my midsize California town, I can still go to the movies and see all the best picture nominees save Moulin Rouge. All the movies nominated for Best Director are playing, though Mulholland Drive was admittedly brought back a few weeks ago in anticipation of its being nominated.

Three of the Best Actor nominees are plying their trade in recent releases, while Denzel (Training Day) has been brought back for a week and Ali isn't exactly long gone. Of the Actresses, only Renee has left town while Dame Judi has yet to grace us with her presence. Rest assured, the arthouse theater will be bringing viewers Iris in early March. I could scroll right down the rest of the categories and get virtually the same result, with two exceptions: nominees for Animated Feature Film and Foreign Language Film, a category for which the Oscar nomination often comes before wide U.S. distribution.

So what does this all mean? There are a number of ways we could look at this; all of them likely hold true to some extent and all are slightly cynical.

1. Film studios hold back many of their best releases until late in the year, for fear of being forgotten when nominations come out in February of the following year.

2. Those who book the screens for movie theaters hold onto pictures longer later in the year, as Oscar buzz drives moviegoers to the theater and attendance spikes after nominations are out.

3. Faced with a glut of Oscar releases in the theater, studios lacking large promotional budgets hold off on releasing movies for fear of being lost in the hype.

I could obviously go on like this for quite a while. But the three hypotheses above highlight an obvious chicken-and-egg problem. Are theaters holding onto Oscar-nominated pictures because the studios aren't releasing anything, or are studios holding back new releases because theater owners aren't interested? I have quite a bit more to say on this, but I'm gonna let you guys stew for a bit before I continue.

Sean Weitner | Deeper still

There are always exceptions to this scenario. Erin Brockovich came out very early, and Julia Roberts proceeded to get the Oscar. Gladiator took Best Picutre, and it was early summer.

But, yes, the rule is that the great, great majority of the "good" (in terms of Oscarness) movies come out in the four months prior to Oscar, and really in the last two. Part of it is that summer movies tend to be low on Oscarness (summer is the kids' season, mostly). And those are really the only movie seasons: summer, pre-Oscar nominations and post-Oscar nominations. The last two are very similar, except that all of the movies with low performance expectations also get released in the post-Oscar season. Really: Look at what's come out in January and February. Not the good movies that have gone wide in those months after late-December qualifying runs, but everything else.

It gets insidious, too: Miramax would love to capitalize on the post-Oscar popularity of Nicole Kidman, but she got nominated for Best Actress for Fox's Moulin Rouge, not Miramax/Dimension's The Others. So Miramax dumps the made-three-years-ago Birthday Girl into theaters, not publicizing it at all and instead relying on general buzz to generate slightly greater business than just straight-to-video, but not enough to draw business away from Miramax movies currently in theaters to drum up Oscar support.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros., sure that Denzel Washington will get props for Training Day, has their subsidiary, New Line, dump a ton of money to publicize John Q and open it the Friday following Oscar nominations. He gets good notes for his latest, and it transfers to his Training Day role. (Off-topic, Washington will probably win the Best Actor award because of all the race-related buzz the nominations have gotten).

It also may explain why we have to wait until December to see the previous January's Sundance favorites: They position them to play through the spring's festivals but then sit on them if they think they have Oscar hopes.

Andy Ross | 'Tis the season

I think it's important here not to pass judgment on film for being an industry. No one would fault Target for waiting until spring to put swimsuits out on the racks. I personally find the Oscar season and its flood of good films to be something to look forward to. The rest of the year is filled with work or school, and the holidays offer a break, during which there will be decent films to see. Not only that, but winter is the time to be indoors in the theater — summer, spring and fall are for walks and picnics.

Eric Wittmershaus | Yeah, but …

Your comments about film being an industry are true, to one extent, but it's the right of frustrated consumers to complain about industry's efforts to frustrate them.

To give you an illustration of how frustrated I am by the pre-Oscars/post-Oscars moviegoing climate, I'll list the films playing in my town and why I don't want to see most of them. Note that most of the movies are either up for an Oscar, or they're the studios' dregs, the reason for which Sean has already pointed out.

Theater 1: Big multiplex
Return to Neverland (Kids' movie)
Crossroads (Britney doesn't do it for me. Maybe when I'm older and impotent)
John Q (Too preachy. Even though I agree with what it's preaching)
Hart's War (No)
Monster's Ball (OK, I do want to see this. It just opened a week ago and it's got good buzz)
Collateral Damage (These kind of movies just don't do it for me/too soon after Sept. 11)
Rollerball (Bad buzz, looks terrible)
Brotherhood of the Wolf (Have heard it's lousy)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Read the book when I was a kid. It was all right, but nothing I need to see on film)
A Beautiful Mind (Up for lots of awards, haven't seen it, but plays fast-and-loose with history while portraying itself as a biopic. I'm boycotting.)
I Am Sam (Please; one listen to the soundtrack was enough)
A Walk to Remember (See Crossroads)
The Lord of the Rings (Saw it already, twice)
Black Hawk Down (Moderately interested in seeing, annoyed because of it reportedly doesn't take a political position and is mostly just beautiful shots of things blowing up)

Theater 2: Arthouse (note: all of these movies save Training Day have been at this theater for a month or more)
Gosford Park (Looks like a Merchant-Ivory version of Clue. Every time I'm at this theater, scores of twittering old people emerge from the Gosford Park theater)
In the Bedroom (Looks like it cribs dialogue from a bunch of TV movies.)
Amélie (Saw it, loved it)
Lantana (Maybe)
Training Day (Brought back for one week because of Oscars, not interested)
Mulholland Drive (Saw it already)
Another note about the art house theater: They hang onto movies for too long, trying to milk every dollar possible, while a lot of movie lovers have to wait a month or more for a new flick. Before Training Day came to that theater, they had Kandahar and they pretty much went with the same lineup of films since Jan. 1.

Theater 3: Crappy theater that gets movies no one else wants to show or second-run stuff, owned by the mulitplex people
Jimmy Neutron (brought back for Oscars, looks terrible)
Birthday Girl (it wasn't good enough to release three years ago, why now?)
The Shipping News (Don't want to ruin the book, which I intend to read)
Big Fat Liar, Snow Dogs (nope)
Ocean's Eleven (Just didn't excite me)
Harry Potter (maybe)
The Mothman Prophecies (bad buzz)
The Royal Tenenbaums (Saw it at the multiplex)
Super Troopers (Maybe, I need to read some more about it)

Mostly this roster of films just frustrates me because there are plenty of movies out there that'd be good to see. Just looking at Friday's NYT, I see Last Orders, The Last Man (set it nearby San Francisco) and Scratch (some of the DJs are from SF). I'd see any of those movies over what's playing. What's more, decent-looking foreign fare like Metropolis, Beijing Bicycle, What Time is It There? and The Son's Room, to name a few, would all be welcome. I get that this shit doesn't sell a lot of tickets, but how much trouble would it be to have one screen showing an arthouse or foreign movie that got rotated out on a weekly basis? And where is Storytelling, anyway?

I guess theaters' booking practices would make more sense to me if the venues were making money, but everyone knows the movie business is in the toilet. Theaters are closing everywhere. Maybe it's because our film industry isn't adventurous enough.

Sean Weitner | Zooming — from whom, to whom?

Eric, while I understand your frustration, remember that the "dregs" are based on what a studio thinks will or won't make money, and will or won't compete with what else is being released that weekend. How artful those films are is a different issue.

Rather than look just at what's still playing in Santa Rosa, let's look at everything that's opened since January, with the understanding that the Oscar-type films are also still in theaters:

Impostor
Orange County
Snow Dogs
The Count of Monte Cristo
Kung Pow!
The Mothman Prophecies
A Walk to Remember
Birthday Girl
Slackers
Big Fat Liar
Collateral Damage
Rollerball
Crossroads
Hart's War
John Q
Return to Neverland
Super Troopers

I'll tell you straight-up that Orange Country and Mothman are underrated; Orange County is on the good side of OK, and Mothman is just shy of really good. I've gotten reliable intel that both Birthday Girl and Super Troopers are commendable. And the higher-profile films — Hart's War starring Bruce Willis, John Q starring Denzel Washington, Collateral Damage starring Arnold Schwarzenegger — are being dropped now with the intention to clean up in a weak market; in other words, capitalizing on how bad everything else is (the primo example here happened last year, when Hannibal was released in February and went on to bust blocks). And this list contains the standard holdovers that couldn't cut muster earlier in the year — Collateral Damage, Rollerball and I think Impostor — but as a list of films, I don't know if it's really that much qualitatively worse than any other six-week cycle with the exception of mid-November to late-December. And if you look at that list from a perspective of who the directors are — Jake Kasdan (The Zero Effect), Kevin Reynolds (Robin Hood, Waterworld), Mark Pellington (Arlington Road … well, OK, that sucked), Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), John McTiernan (Die Hard, The Thomas Crown Affair), Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear, Fallen), Nick Cassavetes (She's So Lovely) — I mean, it's as promising or unpromising a list as any other season. And, similarly, your list of gripes is transferrable to any other season, methinks.

That said, things look especially bleak this year; Walter Hill has Undisputed on March 8, but after that, we have to wait until the last weekend in March to get some more maybe-must-sees-but-also-maybe-not opening wide (Death to Smoochy and Panic Room). March also has contenders in Ice Age, Blade 2, 40 Days and 40 Nights, The Time Machine and Showtime, but those are all pretty iffy. (Well, I'm looking forward to seeing Guillermo del Toro do Blade.)

As to the larger issues of how movie chains work, how indie theaters work and how foreign films are distributed, well, I mean, that's a huge kettle of fish. Suffice it to say that theaters will only play what puts people in seats, and when something stops doing that, then they'll drop that film as soon as they're contractually able. But like I said, it's deeper and darker than that.

Update: I just saw a TV spot for Ice Age and am dowgrading it from "contender" to "almost certainly unbearable."

Eric Wittmershaus | An annual problem

Sean, you're right about this being more of an every-year problem than a this-year problem. I think I just notice it more because I got spoiled by the film scenes in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland. It's just not the same up here (about 50 miles north), but there are a dozen movies I'd go see down there. I didn't mean to imply the problem of not enough movies to see is specific to this year. I'm just feeling it more. Yet another reason to cave in and buy a car.

Nonetheless, you say movie theaters won't carry movies that won't sell tickets. But I say the industry isn't doing everything it can to sell tickets contributes to the problem nearly as much as which movies they decide to show.

Sean Weitner | Flyover Land includes Northern California

I hadn't meant to argue that it was an every-year problem (though it is), but that it was a year-round problem. Over the next six weeks, try to get a feel for how happy you are with the selection in Santa Rosa compared to what being advertised or reviewed in The New York Times. Do it every six weeks, in fact; unless you're a big fan of summer popcorn movies, the discrepancy will always be enough to make you beat your head in.

Why? Why do movies only open in New York and Los Angeles, then, after some weeks, make it to Chicago, Boston, San Fransisco, etc., and then, after some months, make it to any city with enough of an arthouse theater to give them a screen?

Is it that they want the national critics to build up the buzz around smaller, less publicized films so that when they are released, it's in a cloud of praise, or, at least, commentary? Yes and no. When a well-made movie gets praise in The New York Times or on "Ebert & Roeper," sure, that puts it on the radar of conscientious viewers. But often the delay is so great between its national exposure and when it arrives in theaters or, heaven forfend, on video that I have to imagine this strategy backfires; either the buzz is forgotten, or the realization of how long ago it was that the viewer had wanted to see the flick sours the whole affair. Iris is a great example; assuming it doesn't win any of the awards for which it's nominated, the time to drop it into as many theaters as possible is right now, with the heat of the Oscar nominations behind it. Where is it?

Is it that they want to show favor to the NY/LA audiences? Not really, I don't think, except that a movie does have to play in a Los Angeles theater in a week starting by, I think, Dec. 28 to qualify for the Oscars. So favoritism, per se, is not the issue.

Is it that they can't show it in multiple places at once? Often, yes. A 35mm print of a film is a significant cost to someone with less than seven or eight figures to throw around. The increasing buzz from a positive NY/LA reception can be enough to coax more moolah from the moneymen to which the film's distributors can appeal, but there are other costs as well of opening in multiple cities; namely, multiple ad campaigns.

I could pose similar questions to myself ad infinitum. But the reality of the situation is that you and I live in third-tier cities when it comes to movie exhibition. We have to put up with what we got. I'm happy to have the University of Wisconsin Cinematheque, and the Wisconsin Film Festival, and the programming of the Wisconsin Union as means to increase what I can see, but by and large, it's a tough spot.

As far as theater owners being more adventurous is concerned: Theater owners spend a lot of time with the fuzzy end of a lollipop. Their contracts for any given film often stipulate either a flat rental fee or a percentage of the ticket sales, whichever is greater, so there's no real way to get ahead there. And, increasingly, studios will attach riders to contracts that would make pork-loving Congressmen blush; for instance, you can get this blockbuster, but you have to show it for 10 weeks, and it has to be on your best screen for three weeks, and you also have to show another, less profitable film of ours for six weeks, etc. You can see where the national chains and the multiplexes have the competitive advantage here.

And none of those individual costs are inexpensive. For a theater to support a one-week run of a film, including film rental, regional advertising, the opportunity cost of not showing a proven moneymaker, etc., is a lot to bear. For the most part, I really feel for theater exhibitors, which is why I sneak into a lot of movies.

Eric Wittmershaus | On the contrary

Well, yeah. The discrepancy sucks. But at other times of the year (I've been here for exactly one year), I have to say I've been pretty content with the film selection here. Movies moved in and out of the theaters at a reasonable pace, and the presence of a theater that shows only art-house movies meant that I could find something I wanted to see on probably three weekends a month. Until Oscars came along. A lot of independent movies make their way up here not too long after they're in SF. Just not for the past two months. It's like we're stuck in quicksand. Thankfully, neither of us lives in fourth- or fifth-tier movie markets.