Best Picture Oscar Nominees?

So tomorrow morning we will know the Academy Awards nominees. There will be at least five Best Picture nominees and as many as ten. The Academy’s uses a weighted voting system which is based on the number of first place votes from the members and no film can be nominated unless it receives at least five percent of the total votes cast. Nomination voting ended on Monday.

This year the voting schedule has been accelerated and this has complicated things. More importantly, perhaps, voting is being done online and there have been significant problems and glitches with a lot of grousing by Academy members about it. The real fallout may be a diminished turnout.

If there is a diminished turnout, what impact will it have? Equally important to the size of the turnout is who votes and who doesn’t: Older members, younger members, actors, directors? Different demographics may favor different films.

Nonetheless, fearlessly, here are my picks of the films that will be nominated. I say, fearlessly but frankly, no film on the list (certainly the top five) will be a surprise.

I am picking ten even though I don’t think there will be ten nominees. Here they are in the order of the first place votes I think they may have garnered from the voting members:

Lincoln
Argo
Les Miserables
Zero Dark Thirty
Silver Linings Playbook
Life of Pi
Django Unchained
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Amour
Skyfall.

As I noted above, the demographics of the voters can make a real difference. A controversial film like Zero Dark Thirty or even Django Unchained (a violent film in the aftermath of Newtown, Connecticut) can be helped or hurt by who votes.

We’ll know around 6:30 AM, Denver time, Thursday.