Best Picture

Avatar

The Blind Side

District 9

An Education

The Hurt Locker

Inglourious Basterds

Precious

A Serious Man

Up

Up in the Air

It’s all too obvious which five are the “extra” nominees; they’re out. Of the “real” nominees, Up in the Air and Precious are the least likely. Inglourious Basterds looms as a possible upset. Its distributor, Harvey Weinstein, has been talking smack that it’s going to sneak up from behind and win, but remember that’s what he was saying last year about The Reader taking over Slumdog Millionaire. (Yeah, right.)

Once again Avatar and The Hurt Locker face off, and here is why Avatar is going down. First of all, it isn’t nominated for writing OR acting. In the 81 years of Best Picture winners, 64 of them were nominated in the top three disciplines (directing, writing, and acting), 15 were nominated in two of the three disciplines, and just two films won Best Picture without any other major nomination (Wings in 1928 and Grand Hotel in 1932, both during the first five years of the Oscars, when the rules were changing every year and the results were truly odd winners that don’t really count as precedent for contemporary Oscar races.) This isn’t just arbitrary statistics-keeping (like, say, the number of Best Picture winners that begin with ‘A’ versus ‘H’), this indicates how much support a film has throughout the branches of the Academy. Avatar didn’t impress the Writers’ OR Actors’ branches, but The Hurt Locker did. Which leads to the second reason Avatar will lose: It has been bested by The Hurt Locker at all the major guild awards (and all Academy members are also members of the guilds, so there is substantial voter overlap.) Hurt was nominated for Actor and Ensemble cast at the SAG awards, while Avatar didn’t get a single mention. Hurt beat Avatar for the Writers’, Directors’, AND Producers’ Guild Awards. The PGA victory is the most impressive, because that group tends to favor box office hits over critics’ darlings more often than the WGA and DGA. So Cameron and company will have to dry their eyes with their billions of dollars while the Little Film That Could wins big.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker

Personal Pick: I definitely prefer Bigelow’s film to Cameron’s, but of the nine nominees I saw, I was much more taken with An Education, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, and Up in the Air.)