Before I lose anybody with this longish post, here's a reminder for anybody interested: during the Oscar ceremony this Sunday, there will be, as always, a dedicated room in RinkChat for it, including a running tally of the winners and how people are doing in the Academy Awards Predictions Game. Fire up a TV and a computer on Sunday night and join us.

--

It's nice, for a change, having an Oscar race that's actually a race. This year is the tightest Oscar race since at least 2001 (A Beautiful Mind vs. Moulin Rouge vs. Fellowship of the Ring) and probably since 2000 (Gladiator vs. Traffic vs. Crouching Tiger).

The WGA awards, which went to Sideways and Eternal Sunshine, did little to clarify the Best Picture race, except to reinforce preexisting suspicions that the Academy would be spreading the wealth around, instead of piling all the awards onto a single film.

The races that make me the most uneasy to predict are the supporting and writing categories. The most likely winners here seem to be Freeman, Blanchett, Eternal Sunshine, and Sideways -- which would be a perfect alignment with the guild awards for the corresponding categories. But as good as the guild awards are for Oscar prognostication, they never quite line up exactly, so the question becomes, in which categories will the Oscars vary?

Interestingly, there is really only one viable alternative in each: Haden Church, Madsen, Hotel Rwanda, and Million Dollar Baby. I think the most likely variation is Madsen for Supporting Actress, but who knows? Madsen seems to be picking up steam, but the due date for the ballots is long over, and most votes are cast at the beginning of the voting period, not the end. Is the fluctuation in favor of Madsen too late, or are Oscar prognosticators merely picking up on it too late?

The Picture/Director races are weird as well. Because it's such a two horse race between Million Dollar Baby and The Aviator, a lot of people are predicting a split between the two films, but nobody can agree on what the most likely split is. Many have The Aviator winning Picture and Eastwood taking Director -- on the sound grounds that The Aviator is the epic, self-referential film that Hollywood likes to honor, while Eastwood is phenomenal and well-liked in Hollywood.

Others surmise the other way around, saying that Million Dollar Baby is the better film, tighter, and more emotionally involving, while the long snubbed Scorsese is the sentimental favorite for an overdue career Oscar.

How is anybody supposed to cast confident guesses here? The smallest wrong thought could cost anybody playing the predictions game gravely. Because not only does guessing Picture/Director incorrectly cost you those points, but it could potentially cost others as well.

Let's say, as many are predicting, Million Dollar Baby takes both Picture and Director. This would lead me to think that voters would throw The Aviator more votes in the technical categories, leading it to victory in dead heat places like Art Direction and Cinematography. With The Aviator taking Picture and/or Director, there is probably more room for diversity, with Lemony Snicket taking Art Direction and A Very Long Engagement taking cinematography.

This potentially impacts Sound Mixing as well, where The Aviator *could* pick up a consolation prize, but otherwise the race is between the loudest (Spiderman 2) and the most sound-oriented (Ray).

Makeup, again, is the oddball of the technical awards, as its nominees are free from trickle-down effects. Will Lemony Snicket win for Most Makeup, or will Passion of the Christ win as a bone thrown toward a film Hollywood may not like but may nevertheless feel obligated to recognize?

Once again, the music categories are giving me the toughest time. The (barely) majority opinion out there seems to be that John Williams will pick it up for Harry Potter, but I don't see it. The score for Harry Potter 3 is largely derived from the scores for the earlier films, and a glance at Williams' wins doesn't suggest that his work in Harry Potter would be at home in their company. I think I'm guessing Finding Neverland, because it seems like the kind of thing it would win, for lack of any other, but, historically, I'm so bad at predicting this category that maybe the best idea would be to guess something I would perceive to be totally out of left field -- The Motorcycle Diaries?