One Category at a Time: Best Picture (part 1)

With the 2012 Oscar season now a happily distant memory, it's time to look ahead to what films might find themselves in Oscar's company eleven months from now. While it's always next to impossible to pinpoint the unassuming charmers (like The Artist) that can be molded into awards juggernauts from this far out, deciding which high-profile studio projects might tickle the Academy's fancy is easy enough, if not necessarily accurate. Here are the first five of ten such Oscar lures which I'm sure many pundits will be watching with close interest throughout the year:

The last time Joe Wright made a lavish period epic (2007's Atonement), it wound up with seven nominations including Best Picture despite a chilly critical reception. Anna Karenina ticks many of the Academy's boxes on paper, and presents an opportunity for broad support from the guilds. Sight unseen, it's as safe a bet as any.

Quentin Tarantino's pictures always stimulate fevered anticipation from fanboys, but are generally hit-or-miss with AMPAS – more often miss than hit. But his most recent historically revisionist film did well by Harvey Weinstein to the tune of eight nominations (2009's Inglourious Basterds). With Weinstein backing his “Southern”, Django Unchained, it could prove another unlikely awards contender.

Alfonso Cauron's first feature since Children of Men, Gravity, is an intriguing prospect that pits a lone astronaut on a frantic journey back home to Earth. Will it be an Apollo 13 or a Lost in Space? We'll obviously just have to wait and see, but with the crew that's been assembled, you can count me in the “excited” column.

Nine years after the third in his career-defining trilogy The Lord of the Rings dominated the Oscars with a record-tying eleven wins, Peter Jackson returns to Middle Earth with the first of a pair of films that will take on Tolkein's Rings prequel The Hobbit. This remains a big Oscar question mark; How eager are voters to return to this world less than a decade after wrapping it up?

Literary adaptations are sometimes tricky to predict because the subject matter might not seem intuitively cinematic. Ang Lee's upcoming take on Yann Martel's reknowned bestseller Life of Pi, which tells of an Indian boy shipwrecked with a bunch of animals, doesn't scream “Best Picture nominee!”, but Lee's a great filmmaker, so he gets the benefit of the doubt for now.

Part 2 to come.