Oscar 2010 New Streaming Live

Who Will Win at the 2010 Oscars?

OSCAR 2010 New Live Streaming

By Kevin Polowy

Want to win your office Oscar pool? We're here to help.

While the Best Picture and Best Director races are almost too close to call -- with 'Avatar' and 'Hurt Locker' going the distance and awaiting the judges' decision, so to speak -- the acting races are a little easier to navigate (expect first-time winners in all four categories).

And since there's little fun in engaging in an Oscar pool where you don't take a few risks (and also since some races are too close to call, thus may require you either choosing your favorite or closing your eyes and pointing), we've broken down our categories into Will Win, Could Win and Dark Horse, though not every category has each.

BEST PICTURE

For as lacking in suspense as the acting races are, the contest for the biggest prize couldn't be any closer. It's David vs. Goliath here, with 'Hurt Locker' and 'Avatar' seemingly trading "favorite" status every other day.

Unless they somehow split the votes and the Weinstein-backed 'Basterds' revises more history with an upset, the Oscar will go to either the highest-grossing Best Picture winner ever (duh), or the lowest (in half a century, anyway). Be warned: This one is flip-a-coin close.

Will Win: 'Avatar'
Could Win: 'Hurt Locker'
Dark Horse: 'Inglourious Basterds'
More on this race:

BEST DIRECTOR

The only thing that could make this race more intriguing would be if ex-spouses James Cameron ('Avatar') and Kathryn Bigelow ('Hurt Locker') actually hated one another (instead, they insist they're still chums).

So we'll settle for the still-dramatic battle between the man who revolutionized 3-D and big-budget filmmaking technology, and the woman who created one of the most realistic, intense war films of all time -- and who, lest you foolishly dismiss the significance of Oscar politics, would be the first female ever to win the directing prize.

Will Win: Kathryn Bigelow
Could Win: James Cameron

BEST ACTOR

Colin Firth ('A Single Man') and George Clooney ('Up in the Air') each enjoyed brief windows of frontrunner status in the fall, but this one's turned into a one-horse race, and that horse's name is Jeff Bridges ('Crazy Heart').

"It's his time" is the popular refrain: The veteran actor Bridges -- who gives a career-best performance and does his own singing -- has been nominated four times in the past but has never won. And who doesn't freaking love The Dude?

BEST ACTRESS

Though they refuse to play into the "head to head" rivalry that's been brewing through awards season (fake-kissing aside), two of Hollywood's most lovable leading ladies, Meryl Streep ('Julie & Julia') and Sandra Bullock ('The Blind Side') compete in the closest acting race.

Despite the fuss over the fact that Streep hasn't won gold in 26 years, it'll be hard to top the lovefest that's surrounding Bullock -- a first-time nominee, a comedienne doing drama, and a popular favorite, all which should help push her to the top.

For the past decade or so, the selection of movies competing for the Best Picture Academy Award has come mostly from a boutique of small indie films — Juno, The Reader, Little Miss Sunshine. This year, with the expansion of the nominations from five to 10, it's more like a Walmart. Half of the Best Picture finalists — Avatar, Up, The Blind Side, Inglourious Basterds and District 9 — earned more than $100 million at the domestic box office; and Up in the Air, with nominations for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay and nods for all three of its lead actors, stands a good chance of reaching that mark. If the elders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — which doubled the number of slots after a host of worthy little political dramas pushed megahit The Dark Knight out of the Best Picture category last year — wanted a more populist, or at least popular, list of finalists, they got it.
(See the top 10 Oscar-nomination snubs.)

So what impact will the five extra Best Picture nominees have on the race? None. It's like filling out the Kentucky Derby field with five Central Park carriage horses. The movies that surely would have resided in the top five — Avatar, the Iraq bomb-squad thriller The Hurt Locker, the comedy-drama Up in the Air, Quentin Tarantino's revisionist World War II movie Inglourious Basterds and the indie inspirational Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire — stayed secure in their slots.

Veteran handicappers figure this is a two-horse race, between James Cameron's Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, both of which led the morning's haul with nine nominations each. (Inglourious Basterds got eight.) Both are stories of a U.S. military contingent in an alien land; other than that, and the fact that they're both terrific pictures, the movies are polar opposites. In The Hurt Locker the soldiers are the heroes; in Avatar they're mostly the villains. One film trucks in gritty realism, the other in soaring fantasy. Avatar is on pace to be the highest-grossing movie of all time; The Hurt Locker would be the lowest-grossing film to win a Best Picture award. In addition to that category, the two films will be fighting it out for Best Director, Cinematography, Film Editing, Music (Original Score), Sound Editing and Sound Mixing.

The rest is filler. The Blind Side, a low-budget movie kidnapped by the mass audience, gives the Oscar list a People's Choice tinge. The inclusion of District 9 is pretty cool — the inventive sci-fi parable came from nowhere (actually, South Africa) to charm critics, mall rats and, now, the Academy. Bless the voters for including Pixar's insta-classic Up, which is also nominated for Best Animated Feature Film, which it will probably win. Some analysts predicted that A Serious Man and An Education would be hurt by accusations of anti-Semitism by members of the Jewish community. But the backlash turned out to be mere ankle nips; both films were among the 10 Best Picture finalists and received screenplay nominations as well.
(Read about the Avatar-District 9 brawl on Techland.)

More Best Picture nominees mean fewer wallflowers. This year the big ignoree was Clint Eastwood's Invictus, which earned a couple of acting nominations but was excluded from the élite group. Eastwood is a grand old lion at the Academy, and a project with his directing Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela might have seemed a dead cinch. It wasn't, and neither was The Hangover, the raucous comedy hit whose fortunes probably fell as The Blind Side's rose. But these movies were fighting only to see who gets to stand at the back of the group photo. Planted in front are Avatar, The Hurt Locker and maybe, if it regains the lifting wind that made it an early favorite, Up in the Air. We'll find out on Oscar night, March 7.


The 2010 Oscar nominations were announced this morning by actress Anne Hathaway and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Tom Sherak. Here are the contenders for the most coveted statue in show business:
BEST PICTURE
Avatar
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
A Serious Man
The Blind Side
Up
Up in the Air

BEST DIRECTOR
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
James Cameron, Avatar
Lee Daniels, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Jason Reitman, Up in the Air
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

BEST ACTOR
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
George Clooney, Up in the Air
Colin Firth, A Single Man
Morgan Freeman, Invictus
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

BEST ACTRESS
Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
Carey Mulligan, An Education
Helen Mirren, The Last Station
Gabourey Sidibe, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Matt Damon, Invictus
Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Woody Harrleson, The Messenger
Christopher Plummer, The Last Station

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
Mo'Nique, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Penelope Cruz, Nine
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart

See the full list of nominees here.
The 82nd Annual Academy Awards will be handed out on March 7 at Hollywood's Kodak Theater, in a live ceremony hosted by Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, and broadcast on ABC.
Plus:
- Hollywood's Best and Worst Red-Carpet Moments
- It's Time to Play...Awards Show Bingo!
- Cast Your Vote in iVillage's Entertainment Awards!
Which film do you predict will win Best Picture? Chime in below!


Read More http://www.ivillage.com/oscar-nominations-2010/1-a-84145#ixzz0hcLL9RPw
Sign up for iVillage Special Offers




Watch Live Stream

Watch live streaming video from theoscars at livestream.com