Ridley Scott finally sheds some extra Nottingham weight. [NY Post]

With The Reader and Australia in the awards-season rearview mirror, Hollywood desperately needs a new soap opera to occupy its time. They might have it with Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott's oft-delayed Nottingham.

Nottingham Lives: Mere days after we moved our old Nottingham files to the basement, leave it to Brian Grazer to revive talk of his presumed-dead Robin Hood retelling for another round of casting speculation. To wit: It'll make everything easier if Russell Crowe just plays all the roles himself. "[W]hat Robin Hood does is he sees Nottingham in battle very early in the movie and Nottingham dies," Grazer told MTV News. "And Robin Hood takes over the identity of Nottingham. That's how it plays out." Call it a spoiler alert, if films opening 10 years from now can have such things. [MTV]

As first noted here a few weeks back, ye olde stalled Robin Hood epic Nottingham is all but dead in the water now at Universal, where Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Sienna Miller were locked in to start shooting this month before a flurry of setbacks delayed it indefinitely. As presumed, labor woes and casting haggles were indeed among the pitfalls, but you have to know that an implosion of this magnitude can't simply stop there — as described after the jump, Crowe's weight, Scott's attention span, script haggles and other factors also conspired to keep Hollywood out of the forest this time around.Keep in mind this is the same script Universal bought more than a year ago for seven figures, piling on none-too-cheap rewrites by Brian Helgeland and now, according to Patrick Goldstein, British playwright Paul Webb. But that's the least of his problems, said Uni chair Marc Shmuger:

Announced in April as approximately the 20th collaboration in development between Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott, Nottingham promises the duo's stylish, "revisionist" take on the Robin Hood legend — produced by Brian Grazer, natch, thus establishing the film as a sure-fire front-runner for the 2011 Oscars among people who keep track of these things. They're out there, and we hear them twittering a little louder this morning as Sienna Miller is officially so! thrilled! to be attached to portray Maid Marian:

· Frank Langella will reprise his stage role as Nixon for Imagine's big screen version of Peter Morgan's celebrated play, Frost/Nixon. The casting suggests director Ron Howard will remain true to the source material, though that doesn't completely rule out Akiva Goldsman being brought in for an eleventh-hour rewrite that incorporates several make-believe characters that exist only in the disgraced President's paranoid imagination. [Variety]
· In further Imagine news, Ridley Scott signs on to direct Russell Crowe in Nottingham, the "Robin Hood but where the Sheriff's the good guy" movie, hoping the two can reignite Gladiator, not-so-much A Good Year, magic. [Variety]