AOL Moviefone offers an amalgam of Oscar predictions from all over the blogosphere — including Alt Film Guide — on their website.
The best picture and best director categories are dominated by No Country for Old Men (above) and its directors, Joel and Ethan Coen.
Daniel Day-Lewis (for There Will Be Blood) and Julie Christie (for Away from Her) are shoo-ins for best actor and best actress, respectively.
Curiously, Javier Bardem — as much a best supporting actor shoo-in as can be for his performance as a cold-blooded killer in No Country for Old Men — is shown losing out to Hal Holbrook (for Into the Wild) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (for Charlie Wilson's War) in a couple of cases.
Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight dominates the documentary feature category, while Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters (Austria) is the top choice for best foreign-language film. (I'd put that in second place, after Andrzej Wajda's Katyn. Film Threat is a fellow Katyn-ite.)
As expected, Ratatouille is the favorite in the animated feature category. (Film Jerk, however, opted for Persepolis.)
Juno (Diablo Cody) and No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen) are the top choices for, respectively, best original and best adapted screenplay, though there were quite a few dissenters.
Best supporting actress is a total mess. I predict Ruby Dee, the winner of this year's SAG Award, for American Gangster. The only one in that list who agrees with me is Andthewinneris.blog.com. The others went for Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton), Saoirse Ronan (Atonement), Cate Blanchett (I'm Not There), and Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone). In other words, the only consensus seems to be that one of the five will win. That is, unless there's a tie.
Photo: Richard Foreman / Miramax Films
In hindsight……
Didn't Tilda Swinton win the British Awards? And she had a pretty good role in Michael Clayton, bigger than Ruby Dee's in American Gangster. I believe that makes a big big difference.