After years of supporting roles and indie hits, it's time for Jeremy Renner to play the leading man. In this newly released trailer for The Bourne Legacy, he takes over from Matt Damon for the lead of the well-respected Bourne series, punching guys in the head, shooting things, generally acting like an all-purpose can-do secret spy should. Of course, it's not a clean split to a new generation: as the trailer makes clear, Legacy is a direct continuation from the story left off in the last Damon installment, 2007's The Bourne Ultimatum."There was never just one," the trailer's title grimly announce, while an offscreen character tells Renner that "Jason Bourne was just the tip of the iceberg." 

According to this morning’s Hollywood Reporter, The Town—the Ben Affleck-directed, Boston-set heist thriller featuring Jeremy Renner as a thug incapable of making an 'R' sound—is an “Oscar Contender.” I saw the movie Friday night in a packed house in Union Square. And while I wouldn’t say that The Town compares with artistic crime capers on the level of, say, Dog Day Afternoon or Spike Lee’s Inside Man, it certainly gets the job done, both literally and figuratively.

In a new interview with Total Film magazine, Jeremy Renner (who is excellent in The Town) made the sad announcement that The Master—a P.T. Anderson film based on the origins of Scientology, and starring Renner and Philip Seymour Hoffman as an L. Ron Hubbarb-type figure—has been “postponed indefinitely.” This is frustrating for a number of reasons.

The last time I ran into a celebrity in a public bathroom was back in 1998, when Blur played a sold-out show in Atlanta. I had been home for summer break, watched the band perform, and afterward driven my friend, who was flying back to Boston the next day, to the airport. It was her lucky day: Blur was on her flight. Maybe it was my lucky day, too, as I ran into Damon Albarn at the Hartsfield Airport Terminal B bathroom and congratulated him on the show, swooning the whole drive home. My most recent celebrity bathroom run-in? Jeremy Renner at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall, where the premier of his new movie—The Town—was held this past weekend. Renner wasn't my only celebrity encounter that night, either. During the screening, I found myself seated between Edward Norton and Channing Tatum, while an unusually red-faced Greg Kinnear sat just a few rows away. The Town, debuting in theaters on September 17, is Ben Affleck's new Hollywood blockbuster, a crime thriller that he directed and stars in. Before the movie began, he came out with co-stars Jon Hamm, Chris Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and Blake Lively (who surprisingly plays the "ugly role" real well in the film) to introduce the film.

Every year the Oscars try their damnedest to tap the pulse of American moviegoers and every year they cock it up. Some years ago, Crash won Best Picture and we head-desked until the only thing left on our necks was bloody pulp. Renée Zellweger won one of those gold statuettes for talking in a southern drawl in Cold Mountain and we asked the universe what we had done to have such mediocrity rewarded. Sometimes the Oscars do nice things do, too. Like tossing a win to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive for Best Director or giving a nod to Babel's Rinko Kikuchi. If the Grammys' fault lies in trying too hard to appeal to Joe Plumber, the Oscars' fault may lie in trying too hard to appeal to Joe Plumber's gender-queer niece who's hopping beds around Vassar. So it's a cause for celebration that this morning, when the 2010 Oscar nominees were announced, more than snubs, there were some real gems on the list. Nine of the very best, after the break

On bombs and short fuses