Sadness. The beloved French actor Jean-Claude Brialy died Wednesday. He was most critically a fixture in French New Wave films, having appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's "A Woman is a Woman" and Truffaut's late-period Gothic, "The Bride Wore Black." But he worked with everybody including Jacques Rozier, Eric Rohmer, Agnes Varda, and Claude Chabrol, as well as directing for films of his own. He'd been ill but kept working up to the end.

MTV and Yahoo have teamed up with reality-television pimp Mark Burnett to introduce a new spot to the MTV Movie Awards: a user-generated category for best movie spoof. 400 submissions have been whittled down to five finalists that Christina Norman, MTV's president, is really psyched about. See, despite what Sarah Silverman thinks, it's all about the fans at the MTV Movie Awards. President Norman explains, “It's their show and not only are we giving them a voice to celebrate their favorite movies, stars and moments, but we are truly making them the stars of the show." So we proles are running the asylum this year. Awesome. Later today, I'll watch the finalists.

"I don't like to put too much emphasis on what the opening weekend means." -- Buena Vista senior vice president/general sales manager Chris LeRoy, on "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"

I love this quote. The only time you will ever -- I mean ever -- hear such words issue from the lips of a Hollywood studio VP is when a movie hasn't performed up to expectations. So what were the expectations for "POTC: AWE"? At 11,000+ screens in 4,362 theaters over the four-day Memorial Day weekend, nothing short of galactic domination.

Instead, the movie made "only" $142 million -- the best Memorial Day opening ever, and one in which one movie took 55% of all ticket sales. Make that $156 million if you factor in the Thursday night preview showings, but $115 million if you're counting only the traditional Friday/Saturday/Sunday weekend.

That three-day take, interestingly, is a good deal less than the $137 million that "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" made in the same span last year, and less than "Spider-Man 3" and "Shrek the Third" made this year. It's possible there are studio suits this morning who are feeling abject failures for having engineered merely the fourth highest three-day opening of all time. Look at it this way, fellas -- you matched the 2006 gross domestic product of the Marshall Islands. There's no place to go but up.

Also bereft this weekend: Teenage girls hoping Elizabeth would somehow end up with Jack Sparrow, Orlando Bloom enthusiasts expecting Will to come through without a scratch, and those looking for narrative continuity. Anyone who understands what freeing Calypso actually accomplished, please send me an e-mail. I tried explaining to my editor but ended up more confused than ever.

Why didn't "POTC: AWE" perform better? (And, again, let's stress that this thing printed money all weekend.) A number of factors; pick the one you like best. Three-quel fatigue after Spidey and Shrek. Pretty good weather over the long weekend (well, not on the Franconia Ridge trail where I was on Sunday when it dumped all over me and the family... but you're not interested in that). A 168-minute runtime that cut into the number of times the film could be shown. And (here's the one I favor) a sense that this series had peaked commercially and zeitgeist-wise with #2, and that #3 would be more (or less) of the same.

Still, add in the international box office for the new "Pirates" and the total through Sunday is $335 million. That brings us up almost to the 2006 GDP levels of Vanuatu.

In other box-office news, "Bug" opened to $3.3 million. Ashley, we hardly knew ye. "Waitress" expanded to 500 theaters and got a nice bump up for a nice little movie. The wonderful Irish musical drama "Once" played well at 20 frames. (Note obscure pun.) And, for pity's sake, the middle-aged-biker comedy "Wild Hogs" washed up at the No. 10 spot like a whale carcass at a beach party. Isn't that thing on DVD already?

More box office whittling at Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady.

P.S. In my Friday review of "Once," I described Glen Hansard's character as a subway busker. I goofed: Dublin does not have a subway. Now please stop sending me e-mails.

The national cinema of choice right now? Romania. Following the success of Cristi Piui's "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," Cristian Mungiu's “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” won the Palme d'Or, which was not a shock. What was surprising was Konstantin Lavronenko's being voted best actor for his performance in “The Banishment,” a Russian film directed by Andrei Zviagintsev. “The Mourning Forest” by the Japanese director Naomi Kawase won the Camera d'Or, which is like the second place award.

Best actress went to Jeon Do-yeon for her work in the Korean film “Secret Sunshine,” directed by Lee Chang-dong. Meanwhile, Asia Argento, who appeared to be the toast of the festival, appearing, somewhat notoriously, in three movie's, one of which (Abel Ferrara's "Go Go Tales") has her French kissing a dog. She might be the most fearless woman in the movies.

Julian Schnabel won the directing prize for "The Diving Bell and Butterfly."

The jury this year was an interesting as usual: Maggie Cheung, Sarah Polley, Toni Collette, Maria de Medeiros, Michel Piccoli, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Bellochio, Abderrahmane Sissako, with Stephen Frears presiding. Those deliberations would make an awesome reality show.