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Has it reached the point where we all can finally accept the inevitable? After months of people trying to come up with viable alternatives to The Artist as this year's Best Picture winner, the evidence has now become virtually insurmountable that this is, without a doubt, the movie that is going to win Best Picture. The Academy obviously loves this movie, and the guilds have been throwing awards at it. The Producers Guild gave their Best Picture award to it, Michel Hazanavicius took Best Director from the DGA, and even the actors fawned over it, as Jean Dujardin upset George Clooney to win Best Actor at the SAG awards.

However, if you are really pinning your hopes on The Artist not winning Best Picture, I'll indulge you for a moment. Winning three SAG Awards offers all the proof we need that The Help is the most beloved film by the acting branch of the Academy, and since that is by far the largest branch, The Help is the basket in which to place your eggs if you're looking for an upset. Can it pull a Driving Miss Daisy, winning Best Picture without a Best Director nomination? Looking at how much broad support Miss Daisy had, almost certainly not. Miss Daisy was nominated for nine Oscars, including Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Costumes, and Film Editing, all categories in which The Help is notably absent. Miss Daisy won four Oscars, which is pretty much the minimum a Best Picture winner should get (not including Grand Hotel, which is famous for winning Best Picture without being nominated for any other award). The most The Help can win is three, but that's not realistic. Sorry, kids.

So let's not talk about the movies that barely scraped by with Best Picture wins. Movies like The King's Speech, No Country for Old Men, and The Departed only won four Oscars apiece, proving that support was divided that year. What we're looking at today are the movies that finished with a bundle of Oscars, and how they pulled it off. Because if the love for The Artist is as rampant as it seems, we could have a sweep on our hands. The only question is, how big a broom will The Artist bring on Oscar night?

The last decade has not been much for Oscar sweeps. Only two movies managed to win more than six Oscars: Slumdog Millionaire with eight, and Return of the King with 11. The Hurt Locker and Chicago each managed to pull in six. The '90s were a different story, however. Over three consecutive years The English Patient, Titanic, and Shakespeare in Love combined for 27 Oscars, with earlier Best Picture winners Schindler's List and Dances with Wolves each throwing in an additional seven. What is most remarkable is that of those nine films, six of them went home without an acting award, with the Slumdog and Return of the King not even being nominated for any.

So let's look at the categories that The Artist is counting on to pull off a sweep. Best Director is not as sure a thing as one might expect. The last time that a film won the DGA but lost Best Director at the Oscars was Chicago, which lost to Roman Polanski for The Pianist. There are some uncomfortable similarities here: a light, musically-oriented throwback film from an unknown director, clearly the fan favorite, losing Best Director to a respected auteur. Hazanavicius has to be seen as the favorite in this category because of his DGA win, but either Martin Scorsese or Terrence Malick could pull off an upset here.

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