My Award Nominees: Best Picture

And the big category is at last unveiled. I don't know who these people are that say it was a weak year for cinema. It thought it was pretty great. Maybe not quite as many four-star knock-outs as last year, but more than your average year if you ask me.

These are the five that knocked me out. My five Best Picture nominees (plus the five runners-up that round out my top ten) are:

One Category at a Time: Director

Most years, the Oscar for Best Director goes hand-in-hand with the Oscar for Best Picture. It stands to reason that if you really love a movie, you love the way it's directed, but sometimes a tight race between two films can result in enough of a discrepancy for the categories to split. What we have this season is not simply a tight race between two films, but between four or five films, meaning dozens of winner permutations are possible.

Point is, we could see a Picture/Director split for the third consecutive year, and even though the critics have made it clear who their preference is, that frontrunner is not necessarily as safe in the hands of the Academy.

My Award Nominations: Best Director

These directors are all master storytellers, but what I particularly love about this group is how they've all told their stories in such different ways. They represent a rich array of stylistic voices and I can't wait to see what they churn out next!

But before looking ahead too far, one look back at the Best Directors of 2014:

Review - Foxcatcher

If you're a fan of the sport of wrestling, you may be familiar with the story of the Schultz brothers, a pair of Olympic champs who caught the eye of a millionaire philanthropist following the '84 L.A. Olympics.

But you needn't be a wrestling buff to appreciate this stranger-than-fiction true story, brilliantly dramatized by Cannes prize winner Bennett Miller in Foxcatcher. Just like his swell previous feature Moneyball, what Miller has achieved here is a sports movie that's not actually about the sport, but about something far bigger and more elusive. Incidentally, like Moneyball was in 2011, Foxcatcher is also one of the finest films of the year.

Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) is obsessed with being the best, but doomed to never feel like the best. Even his Olympic gold medal seems outshone by that of his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), whose personal life is far more fulfilled.

Dave is more famous, a better wrestler/coach, a happy family man, and still quietly exudes his protective instincts towards his baby bro. A beautifully staged sparring sequence early in the film between the two brothers tells us everything we need to know about their relationship with hardly a single word of dialogue.

Early Best Picture Predictions

I've been slower than usual this year at pulling myself out of March's Oscar withdrawal and gearing up for next year's awards, so my apologies to all two of you who have been impatiently itching to see my early predictions. Rest assured they'll be posted on the sidebar by the first of May (my normal deadline for early guesses), but I'll only bother doing a write-up for one category; Best Picture. And here it is:

Review - Moneyball

Like the game of baseball itself, Bennett Miller's Moneyball is mostly a slow-moving affair that picks up here and there, but carries a payoff that's well worth it for those who stuck the whole thing out.

Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, player-turned-scout-turned-GM whose promising MLB career fell through and left him embittered towards the whole system. He despairs that the league is governed by a financial hierarchy that sees the rich teams get richer and the poor teams (specifically his own Oakland As) get poorer, and he's equally cynical about the archaic scouting philosophy faithfully practiced by his older staff. Naturally, he's intrigued by the number-crunching sabermetrics of recent Yale graduate Pete Brand (Jonah Hill), a system that emphasizes statistical player projections for runs and wins while minimizing cost. It flies in the face of conventional wisdom about drafting superstar players, but Beane, unsatisfied with what he considers an unaccomplished life, is willing and eager to rock the boat.

One Category at a Time: Best Director

I think it's safe to say that the days of the lone Best Director nod are over. With ten nominees for Best Picture, your Directing nominees are going to be five of those ten. From my ten predicted Best Picture nominees, the five I'm guessing to land a Director nod are the ones who have been nominated there before.

The first, and most famous of whom, is Steven Spieberg. who was last nominated in 2006 for Munich. He looks to have a high-profile year with The Adventures of Tintin likely to make a big box-office impact and War Horse to tantalize awards-voting bodies at year's end. Spielberg has been one America's most important filmmakers since the 1970s, and assuming that he'll earn the Academy's attention is seldom far-fetched.

Also nominated in 2006 (for Capote) was Bennett Miller, directing this year's baseball-centred drama Moneyball. Some are quick to chalk his Capote nomination up as bit of a fluke in a weak year, but he's a sensible director who works well with actors. With Oscar-winning screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian handling the script and an impressive cast signed up, Miller has a good opportunity to make something really good out of this.

And would you look at this, another person who was last nominated in 2006 (for Goodnight and Good Luck), the multitalented George Clooney. His political drama The Ides of March, which he also wrote and produced with collaborator Grant Heslov, lands this year and is poised to be a force to be reckoned with on the circuit. Clooney has a terrific cast with lots of awards potential. Multiple acting nods is often good news for the director's chances.

Last nominated in 2005 for Sideways, Alexander Payne has not made a feature film since. Everyone's very excited to see him return this year with his take on the acclaimed novel The Descendants. Payne is adept at tackling drama and humour in balanced measure, and the story of a soon-to-be single father trying to reconcile with his two daughters may benefit from his sense of poignancy and levity.

Terrence Malick has only ever made one film the Academy really responded to (The Thin Red line for which he was nominated in 1999), but he's only ever made a handful of films anyway. His filmography is so small and spread out that fans of his are always hungering for his next feature, often forced to wait several years. It feels like we've been waiting for The Tree of Life forever, but now that it has a release planned this spring, we can finally see if it was worth the wait.

Predicted five:
George Clooney, The Ides of March
Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Bennett Miller, Moneyball
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Steven Spielberg, War Horse

Also consider: J.J. Abrams Super 8, David Cronenberg A Dangerous Method, Cameron Crowe We Bought a Zoo, Drake Doremus Like Crazy, David Fincher The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Jodie Foster The Beaver, Phyllida Lloyd The Iron Lady, Jason Reitman Young Adult, Tate Taylor The Help.

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

As attested by those who attended it this past February, the Sundance Film Festival apparently did not offer up much in the way of Oscar fodder this year. But one that did turn some heads, especially for its breakout star Felicity Jones, is Like Crazy, a romantic drama about a British woman separated from her American lover upon expiration of her student visa. You may as well consider this prediction a placeholder for whatever small independent film happens to win the Academy's favour this year. There's always at least one (probably two, with ten slots open).

This past year's Oscar winner for Best Adapted Screenplay, Aaron Sorkin, may be back in the race sooner than we'd expect for Moneyball. He and Steve Zaillian, another past winner of Adapted Screenplay, have fashioned a script from the non-fiction book by Michael Lewis about how Oakland Athletic's general manager Billy Beane assembled a competitive team on a shoestring budget by employing analytical statistic methods. I'll admit it doesn't exactly sound rivetting, but neither did the origin story of Facebook, and we all saw how well Sorkin's take on that turned out. The film will be directed by Bennett Miller (nominated five years ago for Capote) and star Brad Pitt.

Let's not forget the reason the Best Picture field was expanded to ten nominees in the first place; to make room for critically-respected blockbusters. That said, it's quite conceivable there might not be any films that fit the bill this year, given how many sequels and superhero movies there are, but one original premise that already has the Internet abuzz with a titillating trailer is Super 8, from J.J. Abrams, whose Star Trek only just missed out on a Best Picture nomination last year. I'm not at all confident in this prediction. It'll need positive reviews to even stand a chance.

I've been predicting Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life for three consecutive years now, only for it to continue to linger in distribution limbo. Finally, this Spring, at long last, it will see the light of day, and I must say I'm excited. But will expectations be too high? Cinephiles have been waiting a long time to see this film. Can it survive after literally years of extended hype? And even so, is it the Academy's type of movie? I'm hoping for the best.

Steven Spielberg hasn't been a Best Picture nominee since Letter from Iwo Jima, but he could be back next year with another Academy friendly movie called War Horse, which tells the story of a young man who follows his beloved horse into World War I after it is sold to the cavalry. Nearly all the same department heads from Saving Private Ryan have joined up with Spielberg on this one, giving it massive across-the-board potential, and that sentimental storyline can only help matters.

Take these ten predictions lightly. It's just a shot in the dark. If even four of these make it into the Big Ten, I'll consider myself successful.

Predicted ten:
A Dangerous Method
The Descendants
The Help
The Ides of March
The Iron Lady
Like Crazy
Moneyball
Super 8
The Tree of Life
War Horse

Also consider: Albert Nobbs, The Beaver, The Conspirator, Coriolanus, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Jane Eyre, One Day, Water for Elephants, We Bought a Zoo, We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Whistleblower, Winnie, Wuthering Heights, Young Adult.