Oscar spoilers

That noise you'll hear near the end of Sunday night's Oscar telecast will be the collective boom of film buffs' heads exploding around the world.

L.A. Weekly's Nikki Finke has revealed eight surprises that await us during the show, including the news that Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola will be co-presenting the Best Director Oscar.

Since Martin Scorsese is guaranteed to win the prize, that means all four of 1970s Hollywood's most successful and influential directors will be onstage together.

Scorsese's win will leave only one of the four without an Oscar of his own. But since he's also the richest of the three, he probably doesn't care.

Summer in February

This weekend's box office grosses look like the numbers you'd find in late July or early August. Ghost Rider grossed a whopping $44 million, proving Sony Pictures did the right thing by not screening the movie for critics (even Harry Knowles slaughtered it).

Disney's Bridge to Terabithia came in second with $22 million, while Eddie Murphy's widely reviled Norbit placed a respectable third, bringing its cumulative gross to $59 million. Who needs Oscar gold when you've got the real thing?

Even Pan's Labyrinth has been raking it in, subtitles and all, selling another $2 million worth of tickets for total earnings of $30 million to date. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon's record gross of $128 million - the highest for any foreign-language film in the U.S. - is still a ways off.

But Pan's Labyrinth has already dethroned Like Water For Chocolate to become the highest-grossing Spanish-language film in the U.S. of all time. Plus something tells me there's at least one Oscar in director Guillermo Del Toro's immediate future.