Another seven days of movie watching, another week of Blu-ray releases to be dissected. As we move through the back-end of awards season, it’s going to be time for all of those hot Oscar hopefuls to make their play toward cashing in on all the buzz. The benefit to you is that you’ll get to see or own most of them very soon, and you don’t even have to leave your couch. This week brings us Animal Kingdom, the still under-the-radar crime thriller from down under. It also sees the streak of Criterion continue, with two more of their films ending up in my Buy section. I’m not pandering, I promise. They are just really good at releasing films on Blu-ray. It’s almost unfair to everyone else. Except for those of us who buy their stuff, of course. All this and more is just one click away in the latest entry of This Week in Blu-ray.

The top nominations for this year’s Indie Spirit Awards are no surprise. Winter’s Bone continues its march through the woods to find its father and an Oscar with 7 nominations (which is almost all it was even eligible for). In a close second, The Kids Are All Right finds itself with 5 nominations. If you’re a fan of female directors, this year is celebrating a number of them in the top spots, but it’s also incredibly important to point out that Samuel L. Jackson and Bill Murray are finally up for the same award. The Indepdenent Spirit Awards make a good primer for the films that might make their way into the Academy Award nominee pool. In recent tradition, the winner of the Best Feature prize goes on to be an Oscar contender (and occasional winner). Examples of that include Precious, The Wrestler, Juno, and Brokeback Mountain. The full list of nominees continues below:

The Machete Spanish title worked so well a few weeks back, we figured we should probably stick to a dialect a little closer to home this time around. Therefore, in honuh of The Town, as well the othuh fine films in contention this box office weekend, we’re shipping up to Boston, Dropkick Murphys style. It should be a fairly close race between the newbies. M Night is producing a horror film about some people in an elevator. Lionsgate’s got a new animated flick to drop bomb on us. Easy A is a nice throwback to John Hughes’s comedies. Some of them will hit the Green Monster (this week, that title denotes cold, hard cash) solid, and some will slip into the Charles River without so much as a whimper. Let’s see how it shapes up. It’s about to get wicked retahded in he-uh.

By the time you reach the end of 12 days at the Sundance Film Festival, nothing seems right anymore. After seeing so many movies, it is hard to keep on writing. So I’m going to do my best…

Yesterday we were happy to bring you the Competition Line-Up for the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, which we’ll be covering in January live from Park City, Utah. And today we’ve got the rest of the films, including the Premieres, Spotlight, Next, Park City at Midnight and New Frontier selections.

Apparently what Philip Seymour Hoffman really wants to do is, you guessed it, direct.