Best Picture: In any other year, right now, The Hurt Locker would be the favorite to win Best Picture in a walk. Having won both Director's Guild and Producer's Guild Awards (two good indicators for who wins on Oscar night), the fact that the film would top off award season with the biggest honor would be almost boringly predictable.
However, due to the odd ranking voting system the Academy has started this year for Best Picture, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, or Up in the Air could still pull off an upset. That, by the way, is the order in which I would place the films as possible winners: Hurt Locker in first; James Cameron's money making machine Avatar as a very close second; Quentin Tarantio's violent take on World War II movies as the third-place dark horse; and recession dramedy Up in the Air is an Uber dark horse in fourth.
I'm picking The Hurt Locker to win, but it wouldn't be all that surprising to me if any of those top three took the top prize. And if Up in the Air wins, we should all throw away our prediction math, and go back to using an abacus.
Screenplay: This award is traditionally given to the loser of the Best Picture category. For whatever bizarre reason, the Academy sees this as the consolation prize for whoever won't be getting the Big One. In any other year, then, Original Screenplay would go to Inglourious Basterds. However, this is not a normal year.
To prove that, Entertainment Weekly picked The Hurt Locker to win Original Screenplay and Best Picture. I'm going against that choice and sticking with the Basterds, but, again, we're not completely sure what kind of impact the new voting procedure will have until it actually happens.
So, Locker might just take everything, which I wouldn't have a problem with.
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Should be an exciitng ending to the (long) evening tomorrow night, and it is nice that the Best Picture race is still up in the air (no pun intended). I still think that if we are going to get a shocking winner, it is going to be Basterds since the actors support it as well as they do, but I would love to get my jaw dropped with an Up in the Air win, much like the Shakespeare in Love win in 1999 did to me. Just curious, if you were ranking the ten Best Picture Nominees, how would you rank them?
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