This was my first year actively following the pre-nom season, and I learned two lessons the hard way:
1. Foreign is damn near impossible to get in for BP. If Pan's didn't teach us this, Diving Bell certainly did.
2. The Brits get their shit in. I guess I never realized this before because their noms usually seem deserving, but Blanchett and Atonement proved otherwise.

And a final, cliched lesson:
Stick with your instincts. I relied too much on guilds this season. I wanted to think Atonement would get in and Diving Bell would miss, but the facts wouldn't let me do so.

Also, despite being maligned as too liberal for the mainstream (which is realy just the actors), there is a big neo-conservative streak in the academy: snubbing 4,3,2 this season. Other evidence:
not getting behind Brokeback because they couldn't deal with real gays, so awarding something that they thought dealt with racism (Crash) to make up for it.
Snubbing Do the Right Thing.
Snubbing animated in the BP race.

Everyone is always wrong every year. People shouldn't really have to write these replies. Nobody should attack you for your previous projections.

The Oscars aren't the be-all, end-all to films. It doesn't mean Zodiac is a bad film. It doesn't mean Elisabeth II is a good film. It's just industry awards that have multiple influences (including people who are owed awards, fame, etc.).

It's just Fantasy Football for movies.

The words lock or dead should never be used ever. Yes there's some instances like No Country DDL's nominations that say otherwise, but for every one of them there's 2 Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Angelina Jolie's and 2 Iwo Jima and Reitman's who we thought were done. No-one knows anything.

Oh, and Haggis has the academy on his payroll

Yep.

Words are just words.

When someone says something "Is a lock" they are essentially saying "There is no way you are going to convince me that my logic is wrong at this point".

We should base our predictions based on the buzz during the peak of the voting period (i.e. around the time Dr. Lecter made his "Okay, so what's your Best Picture line-up?") thread, rather than trust the precursor awards based on a different time frame of voting.

Well, some things are locks (like DDL, Ratatouille for Animated and Bardem), but generally, yeah, sometimes the wiord is being thrown around too often.


Other lessons we have learned:


- Box-Office (even potential box-office apparently) matters. Into the Wild and The Diving Bell would have grosses less than all other 5 contenders even with their BOP noms.

- A movie won't get nominated for Best Picture with just three noms overall. It'll somewhere find a fourth nom (see Juno)

- The anti-racism quota matters