Robertses together for Valentine's Day

Aunt and niece to grace screen together as Bergman items are auctioned and Oscar best film nominees increase to 10.

Julia Roberts is set to star alongside her niece, Emma, in the Hollywood film, Valentine's Day.
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Emma Roberts is set to act with her aunt, Julia Roberts, for the first time in the New Line comedy Valentine's Day, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Also joining the cast for the Garry Marshall film are Topher Grace and Hector Elizondo. Anne Hathaway, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jennifer Garner, Shirley MacLaine, Bradley Cooper and Ashton Kutcher have previously been cast in the film, which follows five interconnecting stories one Valentine's Day in Los Angeles.

Spider-Man musical cast Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming have joined the cast of Julie Taymor's Broadway musical Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark. Wood will play Mary Jane Watson, the girlfriend of Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, who has yet to be cast. Cumming has been cast as Spider-Man's enemy Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin. Bono and The Edge are providing the lyrics and music. The musical will put a new spin on the Marvel comic-book hero. The production is scheduled for a February 2010 opening at the Hilton Theater in New York, The Associated Press reports.

Janet Jackson reprises role? In what one website called a "severe case of bad timing", Variety announced last Thursday that Janet Jackson will reprise her role in the Tyler Perry comedy sequel Why Did I Get Married Too. (The sudden death of Jackson's brother, Michael, that same day sent Los Angeles into a King of Pop frenzy.) It is not known if Jackson remains attached to the project, but at the time of the announcement she was set to play a successful author and psychologist who prefers to analyse other people's relationship problems rather than her own. Perry will write, direct and star in the film for Lionsgate.

Bergman items auctioned The magic lantern that the late Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman claimed inspired him to become a filmmaker will be auctioned this September in Stockholm. Altogether, 400 items will be up for grabs, including the desk where Bergman wrote many of his scripts. Bergman asked for the proceeds of the auction to be divided among his heirs, Variety reports. The Bergman Foundation, meanwhile, is hoping to raise enough money to turn his 84-acre estate on the Baltic island of Faro into a film centre. Bergman died in 2007.

Reynolds to play contractor Ryan Reynolds is going the indie route with his next film, Buried, in which he will play a civilian contractor who finds himself buried in a coffin in the Iraqi desert. The film will begin shooting in Spain this month, Variety reports. Rodrigo Cortes will direct from a script by Chris Sparling, with Peter Safran and Adrian Guerra producing. Reynolds was most recently be seen in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and The Proposal.

Rules for release revisited The French government is reviewing the release windows for films after the Palestinian-American feature Amreeka became available on video on demand two days before Memento Films distributed it to cinemas, Variety reports. The move caused an outcry from the film industry, which has been cautious of any experimentation with existing film-distribution models. Big change for Oscars

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences will increase the number of films nominated for Best Picture at the annual Academy Awards from five to 10. The move follows accusations that the Academy is elitist and prone to omitting crowd-pleasing films from its shortlist. Fincher for Facebook David Fincher is in negotiations with Columbia Pictures to direct a film about Facebook, according to Variety. Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) would direct from an Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) script about the rise of the social networking site, which was dreamed up in 2004 by the Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg. Scott Rudin, Michael De Luca, Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti are producing.