Best Picture Unlocked: Alternative Freestyle Predictions

(Colin Firth, leaving the IMAX screening of Avatar because he has more important places to be.)
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Vowed last year that I wasn’t going to do this again before December, but all the other movie writers have taken the plunge so I’ll give it a shot too. This is my own personal speculation. If my list didn’t differ substantially from the Gurus of Gold and a half dozen other predictions of the 10 Best Picture nominees, there wouldn’t any point making it public. But my attitude is different and that effects my results.

The major point of departure is my hesitation to hand out Free Pass nominations to alleged big-name contenders I haven’t yet seen. Choosing movies based on musty pedigrees and past performance is how we end up with predictions like Frost/Nixon. Yes, that was an early assumption that became a self-fulfilling prophecy, but only because the imaginary momentum became impossible to overcome. (If you can call having our feet encased in concrete ‘momentum’). I’d just hate to sit idly by again this year and let the same sort of stubbornly feeble weeds take root. So I’m bucking the trend on 3 or 4 titles that most everyone is else has been calling locks for months.

We know the question all year long has been, What will the Academy do with twice as many BP nominees? My theory is pretty simple: they’ll give us double the amount of the same kinds of movies they always give us. A mostly brilliant double-dose of dazzle and prestige, with twice as many grumbles and groans to make sure nobody is entirely happy.

• An Education
• Bright Star
• (500) Days of Summer
• The Hurt Locker
• Inglourious Basterds
• Julie & Julia
• The Lovely Bones
• Nine
• Precious
• A Single Man
• Star Trek
• Up in the Air

I’m still open to the possibility that everyone else’s ‘locks’ that I’ve dropped might blow me away when I see them. And I won’t hesitate to adjust my predictions if any of them ultimately prevail next month. But for now I’m not giving a free ride to any movie that I don’t have a solid gut feeling about. I need more reason than “The Academy loves _____!” or “Never underestimate _____!” My philosophy: Don’t overestimate _____ either.

Forget all the speculation about expanding the scope to acknowledge animated, international or documentary films. Maybe eventually — perhaps in a year when we have another Ratatouille or Fahrenheit 9/11, or a year when the best foreign language films get earlier release dates in the US. But we’re not seeing that materialize this season. We can also stop pretending that there will be exciting new openings for all the wonderful new types of movies the Oscars normally overlook — blockbuster comedies, tiny indies, popular genre favorites like sci-fi and fantasy/adventure. Because guess what? Those movies have already claimed a seat at the table in recent years, even in a field of five — so the expansion to 10 doesn’t add any new chairs so much as it merely provides more elbow room.

This isn’t an official authorized Awards Daily prediction. And you can see from the absence of international titles that it’s not my personal Top 10 the year either. It’s just my instinctual premature speculation about how the Best Picture nominees could do the same thing thing this year that they always do: surprise us, annoy us, baffle, frustrate, and occasionally delight us.

Call it the RAFTA’s — Ryan Adam’s Freestyle Transcendent Alternatives.