***

Graphic video of what looks to be a single unarmed man shot and killed protesting the Egyptian regime has appeared on the internet and in network news broadcasts in the United States.

As of this writing, no confirmation of his identity or that of the shooter has been released. Several news outlets attribute the shooting to the actions of a member of Egypt’s notorious secret police.

Accompanying notes suggest the shooting took place on January 28 in the port city of  Alexandria.

The award for best adapted screenplay went to the Aaron Sorkin-penned film, The Social Network, based on the non-fiction book written by Ben Mezrich.

Best original screenplay went to Christopher Nolan‘s science fiction action picture, Inception.

The favorite at the moment in the best picture race, The King’s Speech, was not eligible because of guild rules. Writer David Seidler is a member of the WGA in good standing, but his project was first optioned as a stage play by the producers rather than a film. For that reason, the initial deal did not fall under the auspices of the writer’s union.

Also ineligible were the indy darling, Winter’s Bone, as well as Toy Story 3, Blue Valentine and Another Year.

Sony Screen Gems’ campus thriller, The Roommate, led Friday’s domestic ticket sales and bested second-place finisher Sanctum by a couple million in early returns from the nation’s theaters Saturday morning.

The film starring Minka Kelly, Leighton Meester and Cam Gigandet took in more than six million dollars. Sanctum, a deep-water, spelunking 3-D adventure, earned 3.6 million.

Weekend totals for The Roommate should surpass 15 million or more — easily reaching its production budget costs in its first week in play.

She was a fresh-faced young French newcomer co-starring in a movie considered quite sensational in many ways, still well beyond anything an American actress might have been expected to tackle opposite an actor such as Marlon Brando, but then-nineteen-year-old Maria Schneider was from France, after all, where sensibilities were far different than what passes for conventional in American society, and not much has changed, and on that score not much has changed for the last three decades.

The movie that cemented her place in film lore raised more than a few eyebrows and helped define  the decade of cinema  it helped usher in.  Last Tango in Paris, with it’s torrid, steamy sex scenes, earned an NC-17 rating — X in those days. Shot for under two million dollars, the box office totals were in excess of 36 million, a certifiable hit, especially in 1972 dollars.

The actress appeared in some two dozen films throughout her career. She was 58.

***

Oscar-winning composer John Barry known for the music of 11 James Bond films and for the stirring theme from the soundtrack of Out of Africa died earlier this week. He was 77.

In his long career, Barry won a total of five Oscars. Notable works among his many compositions include Dances With Wolves, Born Free, and The Lion in Winter.

John Barry Prendergast was born November of 1933 in York, England. He died January 30 in Oyster Bay, New York.

One of the most anticipated films of 2010, Fincher’s film hit movie screens around the country as a prohibitive awards darling early on with the kind of mega audience appeal rarely seen in what is essentially a truncated biopic about an inventor.

But this was no run-of-the-mill gadgetmeister.

Columbia Pics honchos knew what they were doing when they snapped up the not-quite-tell-all tome about the inception (there’s that word again, and no – it’s not a plug for the largely lauded yet strangely indecipherable film from critics’ darling Christopher Nolan) of the online juggernaut, Facebook.

The Social Network was based on or inspired, if you will, by writer Ben Mezrich’s somewhat controversial book, The Accidental Billionaires, a work some have criticized for going deep background on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg without presenting Zuckerberg’s perspective. Zuckerberg did not sit for an interview, and the book follows a creative nonfiction approach with a narrative told largely from the viewpoint of Zuckerberg’s one-time partner, Eduardo Saverin.

The book’s film adaptation, then, offers moviegoers what we’ll call a catbird seat’s perspective filtered through an evolutionary process parsed from Saverin’s recollection of events, Mezrich’s resulting prism of how those events played out with Zuckerberg, Saverin and others – filtered finally through the adapted screenplay by Aaron Sorkin.

This sort of layering of informed realities is hardly the exception today in cinematic story-telling, and sophisticated moviegoers have come to expect the phrase “inspired by” to accompany any similar film taken from real world events.

As a cinematic offering, the film enjoys a certain poetic license. Call it, perhaps, an inherent freedom to present the essence of a phenomenon so many of us have participated in or been touched by: how an iconoclastic computer nerd with an idea ignited an intellectual firestorm that changed the way more than half a billion humans communicate across cultures. Another nonfiction book refers to this social networking explosion in its title as The Facebook Effect (The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting The World by David Kirkpatrick).

Jesse Eisenberg stars as Zuckerberg; Justin Timberlake plays his sometime mentor, Sean Parker, known to millions as the creator of the revolutionary music-sharing site Napster.

IMDB gives The Social Network 8.2 stars out of 10. Rottentomatoes.com grades it a stunning 97 from critics and 89 from audiences.

Is The Social Network the favorite to take home gold come Oscar night? Odds makers at William Hill say yes and place it at 8/15 to win. Likewise, David Fincher picks up a 1/3 shot at taking home the award for Best Director. Bookies Ladbrokes give it even better chances both for picture and director.

Oscar nominations won’t be revealed until January 25.