The news, celebrity red carpet edition:

The Oscars are totally back, and you have just over a week to catch up on movies you missed and obsess over your picks. I have to say, I like this brief lead time. We should have a writer’s strike that threatens the Oscars every year.

Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival this week. Variety sums up the plot:

Story revolves around three flatmates living in London. Ukrainian-born aspiring musician A.K. (Eugene Hutz), haunted by memories of an abusive father, now dominates and humiliates pervs for pay. Ballet dancer Holly (Holly Weston), for whom A.K. carries a weighty torch, tries her hand at pole dancing to raise extra cash at A.K.’s suggestion. Finally, pharmacy assistant Juliette (Vicky McLure) dreams of going to Africa to help starving children and thus escape some poorly explicated family strife.

Steven Spielberg quit his Olympics gig over displeasure with China’s dealings with Sudan. And the controversy won’t end there.

This week’s crop:

In On Screen this week: George Romero’s Diary of the Dead (Andrew Wright: “Diary of the Dead, the filmmaker’s faux-camcorder revamp of the mythos for the YouTube generation, might be his jumpiest film yet, as a group of student filmmakers stumble haplessly into a zombie apocalypse. In most other respects, though, this is a bit of a bummer, drowning its predecessors’ virtues in what feels like an endless Mad Lib of Wired magazine buzzwords”), Definitely, Maybe (Megan Seling says that despite its “blatantly ridiculous outline, the movie doesn’t suck), Jumper (Bradley Steinbacher: “At a mere 85 minutes, the film is a blur of set pieces without a backstory, a cool idea never honored with coherence”), and The Great Communist Bank Robbery (Charles Mudede: It “has to do with what Fanonians call ‘the betrayal’”)—which opens Monday.

Limited runs are abundant, as ever.

Especially notable: André Téchiné’s The Witnesses, about AIDS in the ’80s (I know, I know, but it’s not bad); SIFF Cinema’s lineup of double-feature noirs, which don’t look quite as good as last round, but still intriguing (SIFFblog has the breakdown of which films aren’t available or are only available in poor transfers on DVD: The Prowler, The Hard Way, Moonrise, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Woman in Hiding, Reign of Terror, Road House, Conflict, and The Suspect); two programs of Academy Award-nominated shorts (the sucky live action films and the mixed bag of animated films, notable mainly for Madame Tutli Putli, pictured above); three more Finnish films at NWFF; the Seattle Human Rights Film Festival at Northwest Film Forum (I recommend China Blue); Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion at Grand Illusion; a dirty movie called Pets Chained Heat at Grand Illusion late nights; Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding at Seattle Art Museum; and Heathers with screenwriter Daniel Waters at EMP’s JBL Theater.

And last but hardly least, Lindy West takes on the What the Hell Did I Just Watch? Comedy Video Festival (continuing this weekend at the Rendezvous) in Concessions.