Oscar Augury: Predicting the Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress 2008 Academy Award Nominees

The Oscar nominations will be announced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences on Tuesday, January 22, 2008. There are the likely nominees for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress:

Best Picture

No Country for Old Men, a critics' darling that won a good deal of critics awards not claimed by There Will be Blood , has yielded its position as the favorite in the Oscar sweepstakes to Atonement.

Academy members traditionally love Masterpiece Theatre-style productions from Britain. America in general and the film industry in particular have long suffered from an inferiority complex when it comes to culture, despite this being the country that gave the world the motion picture, an industry the U.S. still dominates. Due to this feeling of inferiority, anxious Americans use British films-for-export (so-called "Heritage Films", as they are called in Britain) as a type of cultural tranquilizer. This is the type of cultural inferiority that has resulted in Brits being hired by the New York-based print media and expanding their influence among America's punditocracy, with the result that the New York Times has taken to calling male politicians "Mr.", TV news anchors pronounce the capital of Russia -- Moskva -- as "Mos-ko" instead of the American Mos-cow", and the proliferation of a redundant "S" after a proper name or object ending in "S" such as Jones's.

For people who are afraid of art or who are unable to tell what art is, let alone quality, a British Heritage film like Atonement ameliorates their middle-class anxieties they thought they have left behind.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly will be nominated as Best Foreign Film, which may mean it will not get a Best Picture nomination, though its quality might mean it gets a nod in both categories. Other likely Best Picture nominees are Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Charlie Wilson's War, and Michael Clayton. If The Diving Bell and the Butterfly does not get a Best Picture nod, it will open up a slot for Enchanted or Juno, both of which are long-shots to cop a nomination.