One Category at a Time: Best Picture (part 2)

Completing last day's 2013 Oscar predictions kick-off, here are the remaining five films I can conceive being in the hunt for next year's Best Picture prize:

Much like the ultimately ill-fated War Horse was twelve months ago, the defacto “frontrunner” on most pundits' lists at this early stage is Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, which will star Daniel Day Lewis as the tall-hatted Civil War president. Based on cast, crew, and concept alone, it seems like a pretty solid contender for the nomination. Even if it tanks, the Speilberg faithful in the Academy can revive it.

Paul Thomas Anderson's masterful There Will Be Blood is going down in the annals of movie history, but it means anticipation for his followup feature The Master, presumably about a cultist and his followers in the 1950s, will be uber high. If it can capitalize in critics honours (assuming critics like it, of course), then it should find enough support within AMPAS to crack the top ten.

By far my biggest personal worry for this year is Tom Hooper's stab at a big screen incarnation of the infallible Broadway musical Les Miserables – quite possibly the only work of art/entertainment that I would ever consider describing as “perfect”. Obviously for Les Mis fanboys like me, standards will be insurmountably high, and for the musical-averse American public it'll be a tough sell. If Hooper can actually derive any level of success from this project, it could be a major player.

The only awards contender this year which has already been seen is Ben Lewin's The Surrogate, which was all the talk at the Sundance Film Festival this past January. John Hawkes (Winter's Bone) plays an iron lung patient who aims to finally lose his virginity with the help of a sex surrogate. Last year's Sundance crop oddly did not yield any nominees, but this one has already drawn acclamations of “Oscar!”.

Following up her groundbreaking Oscar triumph with The Hurt Locker two years ago, Kathryn Bigelow and husband Mark Boal have developed a movie about the U.S. Navy SEALs' hunt for Osama Bin Laden, which only recently acquired the title Zero Dark Thirty. With the man having been found and killed last year, the moment of timeliness may have passed, or maybe the zeitgeist is still fresh enough.

Predicted ten:
Anna Karenina
Django Unchained
Gravity
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Life of PiLincoln
The Master
Les Miserables
The Surrogate
Zero Dark Thirty

Also consider: Argo, The Dark Knight Rises, Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby, Hello I Must Be Going, Hyde Park on Hudson, On the Road, untitled Terrence Malick project

(2011's early Best Picture predix: 5/9 *predicted ten)
(2010's early Best Picture predix: 4/10)
(2009's early Best Picture predix: 1/10 *only predicted five)
(2008's early Best Picture predix: 2/5)