Is Scorsese kidding?

Now that he’s finally won a Best Director and Best Picture Oscar after four decades of brutal, brilliant filmmaking, Martin Scorsese can settle down and do what he’s always dreamed of -- adapt children’s literature?

Though Scorsese announced on Tuesday that his next project is a collaboration with Mick Jagger on “The Long Play,” the story of forty years in the career of two pals in the music business, a recent Variety story has him working on Brian Selznik’s 526 page innovative picturebook/young adult novel, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.” Set in 1930 Paris, it’s the story of a 12-year-old orphan living in the train station who tries to solve a mystery involving an automaton, his dead father and…Georges Melies! Sounds like Scorsese’s ouvre in a nutshell. And if Scorsese does indeed take on “Cabret,” a lot of his storyboarding will already have been done, as the book is lavished with stunning illustrations including reproductions of Melies fantasy films from the 1900s, such as “A Trip to the Moon.”

Other fallout from the Oscars includes Best Supporting Actor Alan Arkin teaming up with Steve Carell, a dream cast for a movie adaptation of perhaps the funniest sitcom ever made, “Get Smart.” Peter Segal of “The Longest Yard” is directing, so don’t get you’re your hopes up just yet.

Less auspicious is the Weinsteins’ intent to makeover the Oscar Winning German film “The Lives of Others”  as a Hollywood suspense thriller, exactly what Brett Michel in his Phoenix review of this grim subtle, no-guns-blazing mini-masterpiece of a Cold War spy drama said should never happem. But  with Anthony Minghella directing, how exciting could it be? Maybe the Germans should retaliate by adapting “Get Smart”  (perhaps titled “Reissen sich am Rieman!” as our multi-lingual Arts Editor suggests) as a grim, subtle and humorless Cold War spy drama.