For years, the Oscar-contender marketing strategy for art-house movies has been this: Keep your movie on theater screens until after the ceremony, so should you win, the thousands of viewers who haven't seen the winner will rush out to do so and put many more dollars in the box-office coffers.

This year, however, distributors are trying a different strategy: Get the movie on the shelves, and even more people will buy a copy.

Though no date has yet been set for the home video release of "Letters From Iwo Jima," and "The Queen" won't be available until March 12, two favorites in the best-picture contest, "Little Miss Sunshine" and "The Departed," are on sale already.

Tuesday they were joined by "Babel" (Paramount), the third film from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga.

"Babel" is a series of seemingly unrelated stories involving people in different social and personal circumstances. Then they connect to make a larger point about the condition of mankind.

It's heady stuff, and "Babel," nominated for seven Oscars, is nothing if not ambitious. It sends Americans Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett to Morocco, where their tour bus comes under what appears to be sniper fire. Back in California, their Mexican nanny (nominee Adriana Barraza) and her reckless son (Gael Garcia Bernal) take the couple's children across the border for a wedding. And in Japan, the daughter of the man who once owned the gun that ended up in the shooter's hands in Morocco reacts to her mother's suicide with some dangerous sexual acting-out.