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It's the middle of January, and as the doldrums of the new movie season come upon us, let's take a look in today's In Contention at two very important sets of nominations, and analyze some highly touted movies that have fallen from favor in the Oscar hunt. Before we get to those fallen idols, we'll talk about the Writers Guild of America nominations, the American Society of Cinematographers nominations, and the American Cinema Editors' nominations. These are the last three major guild nominations, along with the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, and the Screen Actors Guild. In short, when it comes to potential Oscar nominations, we've come to the point where all of the precursors have been unveiled. What does this mean for the supposed frontrunners of the Best Picture race? Which movies are moving up in the world?

First up, it's the Writers Guild nominations. The WGA, as mentioned last week, made a hefty helping of Oscar contenders ineligible for its awards, mostly because none of the scripts were written by WGA members or the films were not made under a WGA agreement. Thus, we have the nominees for Original Screenplay: (500) Days of Summer, written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber; Avatar, written by James Cameron; The Hangover, written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore; The Hurt Locker, written by Mark Boal; and A Serious Man, written by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. The nominees for Adapted Screenplay are Crazy Heart, written by Scott Cooper; Julie & Julia, written by Nora Ephron; Precious, written by Geoffrey Fletcher; Star Trek, written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci; and Up in the Air, written by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner.

Before any of you Trekkies (or is it Trekkers? I honestly don't know) get too excited, and the same for those fans of The Hangover, let me remind you that among the ineligible nominees were Up, Inglourious Basterds, In the Loop, District 9, and An Education, among others. With the exception of the highly underrated In the Loop - available to rent this week, so get thee to Netflix after this article - those scripts are very likely to show up in the Oscar nominations. The obvious choices to disappear are Star Trek and The Hangover, but it's just as possible that A Serious Man, a movie that hasn't received a lot of awards buzz in terms of nominations or awards, won't show up in the Oscar nods, or even - hold your breath, fanboys - Avatar. Yes, the highest-grossing movie of 2009 may not end up with an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Before you target your hate mail to me, let me remind you of Titanic: a movie that won the Best Picture Oscar without getting a writing nomination.

It's hard to quantify what these nominations mean, thanks to all of those major disqualifications. Still, the likely frontrunners are the same frontrunners for Best Picture: The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air. Though Avatar and, to a lesser extent, Inglourious Basterds, is making a solid push to dethrone these two more art house films from taking the top prize at the Oscars, the scripts are likely going to win out. When it comes to Avatar, don't be surprised if its script doesn't get nominated; though it threw out no clunkers as bad as "This is bad" from Titanic, the script is not the film's selling point. Among the adapted screenplays, Star Trek may seem the likely film to be thrown out at the Oscars, but the movie could be something of a dark horse. I would imagine, though, that film and Julie & Julia are most likely in danger when it comes to the Oscars. Until then, we have to wait and see for the uniquely stubborn WGA to award its top scripts.

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