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How reliable can we take the National Board of Review? Well, on the one hand, in the past five years, the Best Picture Oscar winner has been on their list of the top ten; they also chose Slumdog Millionaire and No Country for Old Men as their best pictures of the respective years. However, in 2003, they not only didn't choose The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King as their best picture, but didn't even put the Oscar-winning film on their top-ten list. It's worth noting, especially because this group doesn't cotton well to science fiction or animation; only WALL-E, of all the sterling Pixar films since 2003, has shown up on their top-ten lists. Also, in four of the past six years, they have missed one Best Picture Oscar nominee, including, most egregiously, There Will Be Blood in 2007.

Of course, it's pretty damn hard this year to handicap the Oscar race, harder than any year in the recent past. Why? Well, for those of you who've been living under a rock (or those of you who avoid Oscar news and chatter until this time of year), this year's Best Picture Oscar will have ten nominees, not five. Granted, this list of ten will more easily match with, say, the National Board of Review, or the two categories of Best Picture nominees that the Golden Globes offer. Still, for many handicappers, the Oscar race for Best Picture has become a complete free-for-all. How does Star Trek sound as a Best Picture nominee? How about District 9? The Blind Side? The Hangover? Then, there are those folks who assume that having ten nominees for Best Picture will only add to the amount of artsy movies nominated, despite no one outside of New York City or Los Angeles having seen them.

Your esteemed Oscar writer assumes neither of those...and both of those, I guess. Of the popular movies I listed above, the two that have the biggest chance, as of right now, are Star Trek and District 9. Before those of you out there who would rather choke on their own bile before seeing James Tiberius Kirk as a Best Picture Oscar nominee (kind of), let me throw out a few names for you: Jaws. Raiders of the Lost Ark. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Star Wars. All of these popular movies have been nominated for Best Picture; for some non-Spielberg/Lucas examples, I can offer The Fugitive and Babe. Are these high-toned arthouse pictures? No. Were they really among the best films of their years? That question, of course, has absolutely no meaning to Oscar voters, nor should it have any meaning to any of us. But if a movie about a killer shark, or a lonely alien, or a talking pig can get nominated for the big award, why not Star Trek? Why not District 9?

Right now, it's still hard to say what movies are locks for the upcoming Best Picture nomination list and what movies aren't. The conventional wisdom has movies such as Up in the Air, Precious, An Education, and The Hurt Locker as being among the movies that could be considered locks for Best Picture. Other solid possible movies are Nine, The Lovely Bones, A Serious Man, A Single Man, and Inglourious Basterds. Of course, the movie that will likely grab the attention of most normal moviegoers and potential Oscar viewers is, still in some ways, the unlikeliest candidate of all: Up. The latest film from Disney/Pixar, about a grumpy old man who lifts his house up on helium balloons to go to Venezuela, is one of the highest-grossing films of the year, having made nearly $300 million domestically and equally high numbers internationally. Does Up have what it takes to be a Best Picture Oscar nominee?

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