James Bond and Billy Elliot are being pushed out of Oscar contention by the credit crunch.
Daniel Craig and Jamie Bell had been expected to figure in the Academy deliberations for Defiance, the new Ed Zwick film about two Jewish brothers who joined the Russian resistance to the Nazis in the forties.
Defiance was expected to get a major release this December, but will now open in just two cinemas, qualifying it for the Oscars but virtually guaranteeing that it will be overlooked.
Paramount, who made Defiance, also announced the delay of another awards hopeful, The Soloist. This stars Robert Downey Jr and Jamie Foxx as a newspaper columnist and a brilliant but homeless violinist respectively.
The studio is officially blaming the recession, claiming the current crisis "might have made November an awkward time to release a movie about homelessness".
But Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times scoffed, "That's the kind of whopper you'd only hear in Hollywood. I think the appropriate response to that would be - when exactly would be a good time to release a film about homelessness? Halloween? The Fourth of July?"
He speculated that the delays may be down to more prosaic reasons - and that perhaps they're just not any good.