Hot on the heels of Oscars Week, Oscilloscope Laboratories announced that it had acquired Scott Hamilton Kennedy's Academy Award-nominated The Garden for a spring theatrical release in North America, followed by a DVD release of the film this summer.  Oscilloscope, formed last year, by the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch, previously handled Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father and Carolyn Suh's Frontrunners, among its documentary offerings.

There was a kind of hush all over the world when the much lauded Waltz with Bashir was snubbed in the Foreign Language category. Despite having earned over 70 accolades and nearly $2 million at the box office, Ari Folman's animated meditation on memory and war lost out to Departures, the entrant from Japan. The film has yet to be released, much less reviewed, so, knowing that Academy voters had to have seen all five films to be able to vote for their favorite one, the distributors went directly to the voters, offering, according to a commenter on David Carr's Carpetbagger blog in The New York Times, "fewer than ten screenings for Academy members." Not having seen Departures, I can't speak for its quality, but given the knocks the Foreign Language branch has taken from scribes like Anthony Kaufman for non-nods like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, coupled with the stealth-to-homeopathic release strategy for this year's winner, my hunch is that Waltz was robbed. It recalls the days when The Thin Blue Line, Hoop Dreams, Crumb and Sherman's March were all denied Oscar nods-and then went on to earn their places in documentary history and inspire a legion of docmakers.

Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis' chilling 1974 documentary about the Vietnam War, scored the dual coup of nabbing an Oscar and earning its spot in the firmament of bona fide classics. Rainbow Releasing will bring a new digitally remastered and restored version of the film to theaters next month, opening March 20 at the Cinema Village in New York, then rolling out across the country. For more, and a trailer, here's the Rainbow Releasing site.

And here's an earlier trailer of Hearts and Minds: