France, Europe’s biggest movie market, has a shot at recording its biggest B.O. year in modern times — thanks in part to a schoolboy.

Through September, Gallic B.O. was up 3.4% over 2008, with 188.82 million tickets sold, according to just-released figures from France’s CNC film board. Box office revenue was E879.6 million ($1.3 billion).

Produced by Fidelite Films, the 1950s-set Gallic family comedy “Little Nicholas,” turning on the adventures of a boy and his schoolmates, grossed $18.4 million in the 12 days following its Sept. 30 release.

Based on a beloved comicbook by Rene Goscinny and Jean Jacques Sempe, “Nicholas” dropped only 10% over its second weekend, distributor Wild Bunch reported.

Banijay buys Nordisk Film TV

“Marketing buzz from multiple March celebrations of ‘Little Nicholas’ ’ 50th anniversary really helped,” said Jean-Philippe Tirel, Wild Bunch distribution topper.

The year-on-year French B.O. rise is already a large feat: Early 2008 saw the release of “Welcome to the Sticks,” whose $184.5 million B.O. take made it the highest-grossing French film ever at Gallic hardtops.

“Nicholas” is also mainstream enough to perform well in medium- and small-sized cities, which have 40% of French theater screens.

Analysts have now upped B.O. expectations for “Nicholas.” Telerama’s Aurelien Ferenczi forecasts a total cume of $36 million-$45 million, while Ecran Total forecasts $41 million. These estimates would make “Nicholas” the highest-grossing French pic to date in 2009.

If “Nicholas” meets expectations, France would have a chance of notching the biggest B.O. year in modern times. That record stands at $1.8 billion in B.O., registered in 2004.

Madrid in 1922 is a city wavering on the edge of change as traditional values are challenged by the dangerous new influences of jazz, Freud and the avant-garde. Salvador Dalí arrives at university at the age of 18 years old, determined to become a great artist. His bizarre blend of shyness and rampant exhibitionism attracts the attention of two of the university’s social elite — Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel.

Salvador is absorbed into their decadent group and for a time he, Luis and Federico become a formidable trio, the most ultra-modern group in Madrid.

Airdate: 5:30-9 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 22 (ABC)
Production: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
Producers: Bill Condon, Laurence Mark
Supervising producer: Michael B. Seligman
Coordinating producer: Danette Herman
Associate producer: Joanne Dillon
Writers: Jon Macks, Jenny Bicks, Bill Condon, John Hoffman, Phil Alden Robinson, Bruce Vilanch
Special material written by: Don Harmon, Rob Schrab, Ben Schwartz, Joel Stein.
Director: Roger Goodman
Production designer: David Rockwell
Music director: Michael Giacchino
Lighting designer: Robert A. Dickinson
Host: Hugh Jackman

List of winners at the 81st Academy Awards, which have been held in Los Angeles.

Best picture: Slumdog Millionaire
Also nominated: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Frost/Nixon; Milk; The Reader

Best director: Danny Boyle – Slumdog Millionaire
Also nominated: Stephen Daldry – The Reader; David Fincher – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Ron Howard – Frost/Nixon; Gus Van Sant – Milk

Best actor: Sean Penn – Milk
Also nominated: Richard Jenkins – The Visitor; Frank Langella – Frost/Nixon; Brad Pitt – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler

Best actress: Kate Winslet – The Reader
Also nominated: Anne Hathaway – Rachel Getting Married; Angelina Jolie – Changeling; Melissa Leo – Frozen River; Meryl Streep – Doubt

Best supporting actor: Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight
Also nominated: Josh Brolin – Milk; Robert Downey Jr – Tropic Thunder; Philip Seymour Hoffman – Doubt; Michael Shannon – Revolutionary Road

Best supporting actress: Penelope Cruz – Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Also nominated: Amy Adams – Doubt; Viola Davis – Doubt; Taraji P Henson – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Marisa Tomei – The Wrestler

Best original screenplay: Milk
Also nominated: Happy-Go-Lucky; Wall-E; In Bruges; Frozen River

Best adapted screenplay: Slumdog Millionaire
Also nominated: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Doubt; Frost/Nixon; The Reader

Best animated feature film: Wall-E
Also nominated: Bolt; Kung Fu Panda

Best animated short film: La Maison en Petits Cubes
Also nominated: Lavatory – Lovestory; Oktapodi; Presto; This Way Up

Best foreign language film: Departures – Japan
Also nominated: Revanche – Austria; The Class – France; The Baader Meinhof Complex – Germany; Waltz With Bashir – Israel

Best documentary feature: Man on Wire
Also nominated: The Betrayal; Encounters at the End of the World; The Garden; Trouble The Water

Best documentary short subject: Smile Pinki
Also nominated: The Conscience of Nhem En; The Final Inch; The Witness – From the Balcony of Room 306

Art direction: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Also nominated: Changeling; The Dark Knight; The Duchess; Revolutionary Road

Costume design: The Duchess
Also nominated: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Australia; Milk; Revolutionary Road

Make-up: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Also nominated: The Dark Knight; Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Cinematography: Slumdog Millionaire
Also nominated: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Changeling; The Dark Knight; The Reader

Best live action short film: Spielzeugland (Toyland)
Also nominated: Auf der Strecke (On The Line); Manon on the Asphalt; New Boy; The Pig

Visual effects: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Also nominated: The Dark Knight; Iron Man

Sound editing: The Dark Knight
Also nominated: Iron Man; Wanted; Slumdog Millionaire; Wall-E

Sound mixing: Slumdog Millionaire
Also nominated: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; The Dark Knight; Wanted; Wall-E

Film editing:Slumdog Millionaire
Also nominated: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; The Dark Knight; Frost/Nixon; Milk

Best original score: Slumdog Millionaire
Also nominated: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Defiance; Milk; Slumdog Millionaire; Wall-E

Best original song: Jai Ho – Slumdog Millionaire
Also nominated: Down To Earth – Wall-E; O Saya – Slumdog Millionaire

Worldwide already owns 60% of the business while Woolworths controls the remaining 40%.

On Tuesday, Woolworths suspended trading in its stocks as talks were held to save parts of the business.

In a statement, the BBC confirmed that the two parties were talking about a potential sale.

“BBC Worldwide can confirm that it is in discussion with Woolworths Group plc about our joint venture 2entertain, which is a healthy, profitable business,” it said. 2entertain’s portfolio of BBC fare includes DVDs for such titles as “Doctor Who,” “Blue Planet” and “Cranford.”

2entertain performed strongly for Worldwide, according to its last set of annual results, with DVD sales, including coin from 2entertain, up 29%.

Before a sale is agreed, the move will have to be greenlit by the BBC Trust, which regulates the corporation’s commercial activities.

The Trust is under pressure from private companies to rein in the scope of Worldwide’s businesses and last week rejected a plan for local U.K. video-driven news websites.

However, commentators would be surprised if the Trust blocked the bid for the Woolworths’ stake in 2entertain.

Courtesy of Steve Clarke

PARIS — “W.,” Oliver Stone’s biopic about the outgoing American president, has just opened here. So has a French film about Coluche, the country’s most popular postwar comedian, Michel Colucci, who became a kind of anarchic candidate for president in 1981, an opponent of anti-immigrant sentiment, a champion of the poor. 

The French movie hardly bothers with politics, dwelling on Coluche’s love life instead. Cultural gulfs can sometimes reveal themselves in these small details. France, it turns out, remains, even all these years later, not insignificantly caught up in the cinema spawned by the Occupation, offering diversion, self-flattery and escapist fiction about itself.

Serious-minded Americans traditionally love to idealize the French movie industry, but as French cinephiles tend to see it, it’s their own filmmakers, unlike those in the United States, who shy away from tackling head-on tough issues like contemporary French politics, scandals and unrest. Contrarians will note “La Haine” (“The Hate”), a much-talked-about movie anticipating the violence that exploded three years ago in some of France’s poor immigrant suburbs. But “La Haine” was released in the mid-1990s.

Meanwhile, never mind poor box office results, the United States keeps churning out ambitious pictures with big stars or directors, like “In the Valley of Elah,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Rendition,” “Redacted” and “Body of Lies,” questioning American policy in the Middle East or otherwise seizing on the headlines. France hasn’t made a significant movie yet about the 2005 riots.

The country has censored politically charged films, including Jean-Luc Godard’s “Petit Soldat” (made in 1960 but not released until 1963), a rare French picture about the Algerian war of independence. “The Battle of Algiers,” the greatest film about that war, was an Italian-Algerian production, not a French one, directed by an Italian. It was banned for many years after its release in 1966.

The closest thing to a French “Apocalypse Now” or “Platoon” about Algeria is “L’Ennemi Intime,” made last year, close to half a century after the war ended. As for a French version of “W.,” any film skewering a sitting French president “would be nearly impossible to make here,” said Caroline Benjo, echoing what other French filmmakers contend.

They cite a mix of politics, stylistic habits perpetuating the national “brand,” financing and a collective anxiety about postwar French identity. The problem, you might say, goes back to de Gaulle’s selling the country on the idea that it won World War II, along with the culture of denial that that mindset promoted.

Ms. Benjo is a producer of “Entre les Murs” (“Within the Walls,” marketed in English as“The Class”), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. A drama about schoolchildren from a multiethnic neighborhood of Paris, it has so far done well at the French box office. Like the promiscuously awarded “La Graine et le Mulet” (opening next month in the United States as “The Secret of the Grain”), directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, which is about a community of immigrants in a seaside town in the south of France, “Entre les Murs” is “l’exception culturelle.”

That phrase ordinarily connotes not “exception to the rule” but the exceptional status of culture here. Money for French films comes partly from a percentage of ticket sales for American blockbusters, and from French television networks, which by law must underwrite films.

This means that French movies now at the multiplex, like “Faubourg 36,” a nostalgic music hall story about bygone France, or “Le Crime Est Notre Affaire,” a nostalgic mystery based on an Agatha Christie story, are effectively supported by French revenues from American films like “Blood Diamond,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “Syriana” and other news-hungry, Hollywood vehicles of precisely the sort that France doesn’t make.

Public television is government-run, of course, and the country’s most popular network, TF1, happens to be owned by Martin Bouygues, a close associate of the president, Nicolas Sarkozy. “Naturally television executives try to influence content,” Jean-Michel Frodon, the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, noted the other day.

That said, France likes to boast, for good reason, that with more than 220 films made here a year, the country’s movie industry lags behind only those of India and the United States. Among these 220 movies, a modest number of high-quality documentaries or fictional dramas detailing poverty or immigrant life here are released, but they’re generally “small films made in the shadows,” Mr. Frodon said.

As Antoine de Baecque, a film historian, put it, “French cinema since Nouvelle Vague deals with reality in a certain way.” He was talking the other afternoon about the French New Wave of the late 1950s and ’60s, led by François Truffaut and Mr. Godard. “We like to fracture, distort and romanticize — to see trauma but obliquely, abstractly. In this sense French cinema is the opposite of American cinema. It values style over realism, the small form over the epic.”

Mr. de Baecque chalked this approach up to a French “inferiority complex, a feeling that since World War II, France, despite what we like to tell ourselves, is downgraded from the front rank of history, which creates melancholy, a malaise,” he said. “The romantic comedies, the sentimental affairs, they are fictions that remove us from real life and are precisely the kind of movies that emerged out of the Occupation.”

The most popular film ever made in France was released this year, “Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’tis” (“Welcome to the Land of the Sh’tis”), a harmless comedy about a postal employee from the South forced to work in the North. Largely unnoted by the French, admirably or out of avoidance, was that the two main stars of the movie, imitating regional clichés, both happened to be Frenchmen of North African descent.

On the other hand, newspapers were full of stories the other week about the burning of cars belonging to Luc Besson’s film crew. In Montfermeil, a poor town outside Paris, Mr. Besson has been shooting a big-budget American-style thriller with John Travolta. But it’s not about the riots in that neighborhood in 2005.

For that, French people these days must turn to programs like “La Commune,” a dark television drama that ran this year on Canal Plus. Its inspiration was not French cinema but American cable series like “The Wire” on HBO. “La Commune,” glowingly received by French critics, was canceled when the network decided its audience wasn’t large enough; never mind that other shows on Canal Plus with similar audiences were renewed.

Mr. Dafri lately wrote the screenplay for “Mesrine,” which just opened to good reviews that noted its Americanness. About a real-life French gangster of the 1960s and ’70s, Jacques Mesrine, who became a kind of populist outlaw, a French Pretty Boy Floyd, the movie has a definite political undercurrent. Mr. Dafri said he looked to Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, to Showtime and “Prison Break,” “24” and “The Sopranos.”

“In the United States,” he said, “you know how to make films and television series that are intelligent and political and don’t forget the entertainment factor. In France we just want to be intellectual.”