> Absent from Best Original Song nominees: Randy Newman, Sting, Bruce Springstein, Phil Collins and Bob Dylan. Present: Eminem. This has to be a fluke. Bono will win for his usual song-that-sounds-like-every-other-U2-song-but-is-about-New-York because the Academy loves generic music.

This prediction makes sense. But I can also make a case for another one: the nominated song from Chicago. If Chicago pulls in Best Picture, the first for a musical since 1968, wouldn't it just be, well, odd for it to lose Best Song? What, people love the movie and not the music?

I've got another dilemma over in Best Adapted Screenplay. "The Hours" is not likely to win Best Picture, but it is well-loved, and the Academy is going to want to reward it, IMHO in more than the acting categories. This is a pretty natural place to recognize a literary film like that.

On the other hand, it is competing against "Adaptation," whose nomination for that category is the first ever shared with a fictional person. On top of that, it's (apparently) a brilliant screenplay, albeit perhaps less accessible to Academy members. My thought here is that "Adaptation" may very well win the award if only for the novelty of seeing what kind of acceptance speech Charles Kaufman is going to make on behalf of his twin brother.

Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor are two other difficult categories this year. For the former, it's down to Nicholson and Day-Lewis. Nicholson might lose votes just because he's much awarded with Oscars already (if he wins, he'll have exactly one acting Oscar per decade since the 1970s), but the thing is, Day-Lewis has an Oscar already, too. In fact, Adrien Brody is the only one in that category who doesn't, and I just don't see him as a front-runner.

In the Supporting Actor category, I don't figure that *any* of them have a chance, except that *somebody* has to win. Maybe Paul Newman. I dunno.