Best Picture, The Hurt Locker
Also in the running: Avatar, District 9, The Blind Side, A Serious Man, Precious, Inglourious Basterds, An Education, Up, Up in the Air.
Having won most guild awards, The Hurt Locker is the favorite to take home the 2010 Academy Award for Best Picture. Even so, the Iraq war drama isn't a lock (no pun intended) in that category. That has been the case even before veterans began complaining about inaccuracies in the film and before the e-mail scandal — about a couple of weeks ago, Nicolas Chartier, one of the Hurt Locker producers, sent out e-mails to various Academy members asking them to vote for his film and not for Avatar. Things haven't really changed.
In other words, even if Kathryn Bigelow wins the Best Director Oscar — and that's a given — James Cameron's Avatar could well win the Best Picture Oscar. We're not sure if the preferential voting system will change matters all that much here. It might alter the rankings of movies with fewer #1 votes — say, fourth or fifth or sixth place — but not necessarily the ranking of the top couple of films, those that'll be most often placed at or very near the top of voting Academy members' top-ten lists. (Once one movie gets 50 percent plus one of the vote, it's the official winner. In previous years, an absolute majority was all that was needed; so, a movie could win the Oscar with a mere 20 percent plus one vote.)
Inglourious Basterds, the SAG Award winner for Best Cast, is another possibility, but Quentin Tarantino's World War II revenge fantasy will probably have to content itself with a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Christoph Waltz and possibly another statuette for Best Original Screenplay. The other seven movies have almost no chance at all of winning.
Photo: The Hurt Locker (Jonathan Olley / Summit Entertainment)
Hurt Locker was a good movie…not the best. That is Avatar.