With Nine Oscar nominations and middling competition, box office forecasters say it will be smooth sailing for Fox’s long-legged “Avatar” in its eighth weekend, topping the charts yet again with a figure in the mid-20’s. Sony’s “Dear John,” a four-handkerchief Nicholas Sparks adaptation with Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried, is rated the more appealing of the two newcomers, with tracking indicating a finish in the mid-to-high teens. I found the callous use of 9/11 as a device to separate lovers (a Hollywood first, I believe) to be the only interesting thing and gave it one star; it’s not getting a whole lot of critical love with 28 percent positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. A mid-teens gross is predicted for Lionsgate’s terrorist thriller “From Paris With Love,” which teams John Travolta and Jonatan Rhys Meyers and comes from Lionsgate via the Luc Besson factory. The latter scored a surprise hit a year ago with “Taken,” which also counter-intuitively opened over Super Bowl Weekend. Kyle Smith gives new this latest effort one star and the RT rating is 33. Box office watchers will also be interested in how much of a bump Oscar nominees will be getting, now that there are 10 Best Picture nods. One of them, Sony Pictures Classics’ “An Education” is expanding to a near-wide 760 locations and Fox Searchlight’s “Crazy Heart,” which boasts Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress nods, is widening to 819. “Precious” is re-expanding to 669 to hopefully cash in on its Best Picture nominaton and Summit is promising that “The Hurt Locker,” which arrived on DVD last week, is going to be back on around 100 screens.