And the Oscar Nominees Selected for Best Picture of 2009 May Be ...

Just one week before the Oscar nominations are announced and industry insiders are already waging their bets for Best Picture. As I mentioned in my past article, the Academy will be nominating ten Best Picture nominees as opposed to their usual five. Nobody knows who the ten nominees will be, but in light of some prestigious award ceremonies that have come, gone and are still on the way, there are at least six films I could name that are shoe-ins for nominations.

Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq War film The Hurt Locker is making the most noise, winning the Critic's Choice Award for Best Picture and the Producer's Guild of America (PGA) Award for Best theatrical motion picture. The aforementioned award is 61.5% (8/13) when compared to the Best Picture Oscar winners of the same year, while the latter is 65% (13/20), good indicators for Best Picture. But of recent, the winner for the Screen Actors Guild award for best ensemble cast in a motion picture reinforced any notion of the actor's strong influence for Best Picture Oscar, with the Actors Branch being the largest in the Academy with 1,205 members. Such an influence played a role in the undeserved win of Crash for Best Picture of 2005. This year's best ensemble cast award went to Inglourious Basterds. As for the newest box office champ Avatar, James Cameron's epic sci-fi won the Golden Globe for Best Drama, not that the Golden Globes is a trustworthy predictor for the Oscar. In fact, the Hollywood Foreign Press rarely sees eye to eye with the members of the Academy. Nonetheless, you can count on nominations for The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds and Avatar.

The other three of my predicted six shoe-ins are Up in the Air, An Education and the overrated Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. The films mentioned here were nominated for everything from the Golden Globes to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards (BAFTA) for best film.

Rounding out my list of predictions to match with the ten to be nominated are Invictus starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, Pixar's latest hit Up, the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man and District 9.

Who will win the Oscar for Best Picture? Well, so far, things are favoring The Hurt Locker to win both director and Best Picture. But I won't be too sure until after the Directors Guild of America (DGA) announce their winner for Best Director of a theatrical motion picture this Saturday, January 30.

I'll be back with my final predictions after the Oscar nominations on Tuesday, February 2^nd.