The Road, the troubled adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel that was bumped from its original fall 2008 release date, has been announced as part of the lineup of the 2009 Venice Film Festival. It’ll screen alongside new films by (take a deep breath) Jacques Rivette, Abel Ferarra, Werner Herzog, Michael Moore, Claire Denis, fashion designer Tom Ford, Joe Dante, and Oliver Stone. The full lineup is here.

Yesterday, for the second time in two weeks, In Contention’s Kristopher Tapley confessed to being done with 2008 and noted a bunch of anticipated 2009 films. These aren’t necessarily titles he’s looking forward to seeing, though; it’s basically a preliminary jump on next year’s Oscar season. Because apparently this year’s Academy Awards are all but handed out, the winners properly predicted and expected, and now it’s time to think about what will be up for what in 2010. Those titles Tapley lists are Rob Marshall’s Nine, Peter Jackson’s Lovely Bones, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, Clint Eastwood’s “Mandela“ (formerly The Human Factor), Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked, Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart and the latest from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Steven Soderbergh (The Informant), Paul Greengrass (Green Zone), Martin Scorsese (Shutter Island) and James Cameron (Avatar).

Oh, and then Jeff Wells had to go and hint that Spielberg’s Lincoln is likely to arrive by year’s end. What and who else is being foreseen as nominated this time next year? Check out the links after the jump.

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When you gather with your loved ones this week, be sure to give extra thanks for that turkey or soy-based equivalent on which you’re about to dine. Times are hard, but for most of us, we’re still able to eat. Nevertheless, we need to prepare for the even tougher times that inevitably lay ahead. As countless movies attest, desperate times call for desperate measures at the dinner table. Like cannibalism.

The circumstances under which “eat or be eaten” becomes the rule vary widely. Plenty of films have taken on this ancient taboo; in fact, a search for the tag “cannibal” on Spout.com yields eleven pages of results. For your holiday viewing pleasure, I’ve narrowed the list down to ten.

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• Brad Pitt will produce and may star in an outer space version of The Odyssey for Warner Bros., and the studio is looking to sign George Miller as director. It is indeed an interesting project for Pitt since he also starred in Troy, which was kind of an adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad. But even more interesting is the fact that this isn’t the first Odyssey in space movie announced this week. On Monday, Ridley Scott described his next project as “The Odyssey by way of Blade Runner.”
• Pitt may also play Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (labeled one of the “New Einsteins” in the latest Mental_Floss) in an adaptation of the nonfiction book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game from screenwriter Steve Zaillian (American Gangster) and director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada).
• Star Wars geek Kevin Smith is at last making his own sci-fi movie, a father-son comedy set in outer space that “will reference other sci-fi movies.” Hopefully it will be as good as Spaceballs and Galaxy Quest, but looking at both the history of sci-fi comedies and the Bluntman and Chronic stuff at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back leaves me thinking it will be more 2001: A Space Travesty.
• It’s that time of the year when studios decide if their Oscar hopefuls are ready or not. Dimension is currently weighing the possibility of The Road being pushed to 2009, and now Paramount has announced that expected contender The Soloist won’t be released until March while Defiance will barely make the calendar cut with a limited drop on December 31.
• On this crowded news day, here are some other notable bits: David Bergstein is consolodating several companies, including THINKfilm and Capitol Films, for a new venture headed by former New Line exec David Tuckerman;  F. Gary Gray replaces Frank Darabont as director of Law-Abiding Citizen; Bourne 4 moves ahead with a screenwriter; Max Payne is expected to be #1 at the box office this weekend, unless of course some figures from Florida are miscounted permitting Oliver Stone’s W. to win the top spot.

• Dimension Films has “quietly” pushed back its highly anticipated adaptation of The Road from November to December, and there’s speculation that the film may be taken completely off the 2008 calendar because the film might not be ready in time.

• Meanwhile, Dimension head Bob Weinstein admitted at the Media and Money conference yesterday that he and Harvey would pretty much be shit out of luck if they were trying to fund The Weinstein Co. today. Fortunately for them, they borrowed enough when they could and will continue to make it last for awhile. He also fueled the Weinstein vs. Rudin fire by taking a shot at Rudin’s Oscar chances now that he’s off The Reader.
• 20-year-old porn star Sasha Grey (Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge) has been cast as the lead in Steven Soderbergh’s prostitute pic, The Girlfriend Experience. A fan of the films of Godard, Bertolucci and Breillat, she reportedly told Adult Video News that she’s honored to get to work for an “auteur” like Soderbergh.
• Steve Carell has been typecast into another “clueless-man” role, this time as the titular French soldier in Brigadier Gerard, based on the Arthur Conan Doyle stories set during the Napoleonic wars.
• Da film! Da film! Sacha Gervasi, who scripted Spielberg’s The Terminal, is set to write and direct a biopic about diminutive actor Herve Villechaize, who starred as Tattoo on TV’s Fantasy Island.