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The last awards - Best Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Best Animated Feature, and Best Foreign Film - are likely to be run through quickly during the first part of the evening. I'm picking Up, the instant Pixar classic from last year, as the obvious winner for Best Animated Feature (though Fantastic Mr. Fox has a chance of swooping in), and the winner for Best Original Score. The fellow nominees here, which are The Informant!, Avatar, A Single Man, and Where The Wild Things Are, are all solid contenders, but there's just something sad and moving and memorable about the Up score, from Michael Giacchino, that gets me where it counts. I would assume, however, that the other movie that's got a strong chance is The Informant!, mostly because of the retro throwback courtesy of Marvin Hamlisch, an awards favorite. He's got a great chance here, and also at the Oscars.

For Best Screenplay, I would normally tell you to expect Quentin Tarantino will get a Golden Globe for his Inglourious Basterds script (and he's the easy second choice to me), but I'm picking the script for Up in the Air, written by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, to win. There's no question that Tarantino's work is as solid as ever in the World War II film, but I feel like the HFPA is going to mostly target a lot of award-winning wealth to one movie, Up in the Air. District 9, The Hurt Locker, and It's Complicated, the other three nominees, are all popular scripts, and the first two have been well-lauded; however, for the writers involved, it's an honor to be nominated. In my opinion, this one is between Reitman and Tarantino, and the wily Canuck is going to win this fight, despite being attacked by proverbial scalping devices. Reitman's not the safe choice, but sometimes, the risky choice is the right one.

With the Best Original Song and Best Foreign-Language Film categories, I'll be perfectly honest here: your guess is as good as mine. The latter category, featuring nominees Baaria - La Porta Del Vento, from Italy; Broken Embraces, from Spain; The Maid, from Chile; A Prophet, from France; and The White Ribbon, from Germany, is likely one that I'll get wrong. I've chosen A Prophet, which has been garnering amazing reviews. However, don't be shocked if Broken Embraces, from Pedro Almodovar, or The White Ribbon, from Michael Haneke, win. Both of these directors are very well-known in the States, and the latter film has been getting raves from most voices. For Best Original Song, I'm favoring "Cinema Italiano", if only because it's from Nine, and it's a song that crows about the beauty of being Italian. Talk about playing into someone's hand. That said, any of the five nominees, from movies such as Avatar, Crazy Heart, Brothers, and Everybody's Fine, could walk away with the trophy.

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