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First I am going to summarily dismiss The Avengers, because it is about superheroes, and the Academy is far too pretentious a bunch to nominate a movie about superheroes unless it is one that is totally impossible to overlook. Yes, The Avengers has made a bajillion dollars, but so did Harry Potter 7.2. The Academy clearly found it easy to ignore The Dark Knight, and I don't hear anybody arguing that The Avengers is as good or important a film as The Dark Knight. Inception and Avatar were made by highly respected directors and were cultural phenomena. The Avengers is made by the guy who made Dollhouse and is nothing more than a really popular superhero movie. It shouldn't be in the conversation.

Now let's talk about The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which you probably know as "that movie with all those young folks in it." Marigold Hotel is an enjoyable, lighthearted, uplifting film, and the cast has quite a few Oscar nominations to their names, but it is extremely rare for these types of comedies to get nominated for Best Picture. Sometimes a film will be hugely popular and/or have the power of Weinstein behind it, but while Best Exotic is proving itself a small hit, it doesn't have the power needed to still be remembered in January. By comparison, Exotic Hotel has a 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, while The Kids are All Right has a 93%, Juno has a 94%, and Little Miss Sunshine has a 91%. Without an enormous amount of guild support (and I don't see that happening) it is impossible to consider Best Marigold a legitimate contender.

Finally, we have Moonrise Kingdom, the only film for which one could make a reasonable argument, although it still wouldn't be a very convincing one. Yes, it has gotten very good reviews, but it is still a Wes Anderson movie, and Wes Anderson's films combined have as many Oscar nominations as the residents of Tennessee combined have teeth: one. The Academy has never bought what Anderson is selling, and even people who love the film say that it is Anderson at his most Andersony. I will not rule out a nomination for Moonrise Kingdom as a possibility, especially if it turns out to be the indie hit of the summer and no other comedy is able to steal it's thunder, but right now it is a long, long shot.

This year I would be only mildly surprised if not a single film released before September was nominated for Best Picture, especially if they revert back to five nominees. Right now Prometheus is a few points behind Madagascar 3 on Rotten Tomatoes, which is not a good sign, and makes it unlikely that it can accomplish what neither Alien nor Aliens could. The Dark Knight Rises is, of course, the big question mark, because if it is even more amazing than The Dark Knight I suspect it will make a ten-nominee slot mostly out of respect, but that's still iffy. Brave looks like a very different animal from the usual Pixar fare, and therefore might not be a hit with the Academy. Still, if there are ten nominees, you can expect Brave to be one of them.

Then there are two wild cards from Oliver Stone and John Hillcoat. It's been a long time since Stone won his second Oscar for Born on the Fourth of July, and it's been two decades since he's had a film up for the big prize. John Hillcoat has made two gritty violent films, The Proposition and The Road, both of which were completely ignored by the Academy. Will the brutally violent new films of either of these directors, The Savages for Stone and Lawless for Hillcoat, earn some love? I don't see it happening.

So if you want to use your walker to hobble over to your computer and make some valid rebuttals to the points I'm making, I would love to hear them. Or you can just yell at me to get off your lawn and make some more cracks about how I'm a young whippersnapper who still has his hair and his original hip bones, feel free. Those jokes, unlike you, never get old.

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