Complication With Optimistic Outcome

I'll skip the predictable picks this year; no need to waste valuable pixels talking about Natalie Portman.

Bold = will win
Italics = should win

Best Animated Short

45% Day & Night
25% Madagascar, carnet de voyage
20% The Gruffalo
5% The Lost Thing
5% Let's Pollute

Day & Night has the double advantage of being widely screened in front of Toy Story 3 and of actually being good (although it may lose votes if it is confused with that Tom Cruise biopic). While Madagascar, carnet de voyage is the most visually inventive of the five, I think its schizophrenic style and narrative will hurt its chances with voters. I'll give even money to The Gruffalo which was not available on iTunes (meaning it will probably win).

Best Live Action Short

60% Na Wewe
12% The Confession
10% God of Love
5% Wish 143
3% The Crush

Na Wewe should walk away with the award; it's immediately gripping and packs a profound message: that both genocide victims and perpetrators alike listen to U2. God of Love is cute and charming in that Wes Anderson style, but feels a bit too much like a Senior Thesis Film Project to win an Oscar. And while I want to think that The Crush and The Confession - both grim stories of Catholic school children gone bad - should cancel themselves out, I have a vague feeling that The Confession might win as it is a very "serious" movie indeed.

Foreign Language Film

33.99% Incendies
31% In a Better World
25% Biutiful
10% Outside the Law
.01% Dogtooth

Smart money is on In A Better World, a thinly veiled morality play stocked with all manner of perfectly calibrated plot points designed to get the waterworks flowing. Divorced or widower parents unable to connect with their bullied tweens? Check. Characters staring out of windows as minor key piano plays gracefully in the background? Check. Pregnant African women cut up by their local warlord? Check. It's prototypical Oscar-bait, but it's also forthright with its intentions and still fairly effective. Biutiful also looks like it has the inside track with Javier Bardem's Oscar nod, but reviews have made it seem absolutely dreadful. Finally, although I have not seen it, I have heard nothing but amazing word of mouth about Incendies from when it screened at the Portland International Film Festival and - quite surprisingly - the best film tends to win the Foreign Language Film Oscar. But after The White Ribbon and The Prophet - two of last year's best films in any category - lost, all bets are off.

I'll never understand why these movies aren't released in theaters or on iTunes prior to the Oscars. Four of these films will never have as high an exposure with American audiences after Sunday night.

Documentary

40% Inside Job
35% Restrepo
10% Gasland
10% Waste Land
5% Exit Through the Gift Shop

Restrepo is an impressive feat of filmmaking, but Afghanistan is so 2008. Beyond its indictment of academic institutions being complicit in the financial crisis (Larry Summers was like the Nick Fury of 2010 Oscar Nominees), Inside Job never quite lands a knockout blow like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and instead settles for cheap gotcha journalism and ends on an embarrassingly patriotic note -- meaning it should win the statue. My personal pick is Bansky's mercurial Exit Through Gift Shop which is too elusive to win, but should provide a few brief moments of titillation as the camera pans around the audience for a potential shot of the elusive street artist. Banksy has to be Jacki Weaver, right?

Directing

41% David Fincher (The Social Network)
40% Tom Hooper (The King's Speech)
12% Joel Coen and Ethan Coen (True Grit)
6% Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan)
1% David O. Russell (The Fighter)

I have nothing new to add to the commentary of this category other than the continual disbelief that the academy hates Christopher Nolan. Did he fail his Operating Thetan license exam or something? Also, my 19-year old self is pretty psyched that Fincher, Aronofsky, the Coens, and Russell (to a lesser extent) are all up for Best Director. Hard to believe the director of The King's Speech is the youngest of the bunch.

Best Picture

31% The King's Speech
30% The Social Network
15% True Grit
10% The Fighter
6% Black Swan
4% 127 Hours
3% Inception
.94% The Kids Are All Right
.05% Winter's Bone
.01% Toy Story 3

Trying to predict the Oscars is like playing Rock-Paper-Scissors: it is easy to outthink yourself in what is essentially a game of guessing whether the Academy is going to pick the actual best film (ie. No Country For Old Men, the least offensive M.O.R. movie (Million Dollar Baby, or the one that is Cleared Theta Clear (Crash). After repeatedly selecting typical Oscar fair in the early 00's ("A Beautiful Mind" being the worst offender), the Academy has done a fairly admirable job of rewarding the "best" of the nominees with the Oscar -- much to my prediction ballot's regret. Maybe it's the gambler's fallacy speaking, but that streak has to end eventually. What is Oscar night without the requisite pissing and moaning?

The King's Speech is a proper candidate - it has wide appeal across all demographics, it's fairly tame beyond a few choice curse words, and it glosses over historical realities for the further sanctification of the Greatest Generation. I certainly won't begrudge a victory for The King's Speech; it is a fine film, with a lot of keen elements and Colin Firth deserves a make-up Oscar after last year. In contrast to The Social Network, however, it certainly feels like a reactionary choice.

The one wild card: True Grit, while unlikely to win, did get a large number of nominations and it might act the Ross Perot, splitting The King's Speech core older demographic.