And the nominees are …With those four words, Academy President Tom Sherak and Academy Award-nominated actress Anne Hathaway put an end to months of speculation and unleashed the nominations for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards. With the Oscars set to be handed out on March 7, those few lucky enough to hear their names called that morning have kicked it into high gear, making the rounds at precursor award ceremonies and campaigning for the big prize.

At the moment, most pundits give Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War-set drama The Hurt Locker the edge in the Best Picture race after it swept the top prizes at the Producers’ Guild Awards and Writers’ Guild Awards. Bigelow is herself favored for Best Director after having won the Directors’ Guild Award. If she were to win the Oscar, she would be the first female director to win.

Strongly considered her film’s biggest competition is Avatar, the box office record-breaking science-fiction film directed by Bigelow’s ex-husband, James Cameron, which finds itself somewhat in the underdog position despite winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture. One point against it is that Cameron’s screenplay for the film was not nominated by the Academy, despite making it into The Writers’ Guild nominees after a number of top contenders for those nominations were deemed ineligible for not fitting into that guild’s strict guidelines—among them Inglourious Basterds and Up.

That being said, the last time a film won Best Picture without at least a corresponding Best Screenplay nomination was in 1997 when a little film called Titanic took the top prize. Its director? James Cameron.
Alongside Cameron and Bigelow, the nominees for Best Director are Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds, Lee Daniels for Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire and Jason Reitman for Up in the Air. Interestingly, in a year in which the Academy expanded the number of nominees for Best Picture from five to 10—the first year with more than five nominees in that category since 1943—pundits have suggested that it’s pretty clear that the Best Director nominations clearly delineate what the top five vote getters would have been, leaving films like An Education, District 9 and Up off the list in any other year.

Along with the expanded Best Picture list, the Academy has adopted a new voting system that some pundits predict might make more room for a surprise.

Under this preferential balloting system, as described by Steven Zeitchick of The Los Angeles Times, “Voters will be asked to rank their best-picture choices from 1 to 10 (though they are not required to complete the ballot in full). Then the Academy will gather the ballots and separate them in piles according to voters’ first choices. Each movie gets its own pile.”

After this initial counting, the Academy will take the stack of the film with the lowest number one votes and re-disperse it among the remaining films according to the number two vote, and so on. The first film to get more than 50 percent of the votes is the winner. Under this system, it’s believed that films that are less divisive are more likely to garner votes in the top three or four positions, putting them at a distinct advantage.
Outside of the Best Picture and Director races, the race in the major categories is much less competitive, with most pundits predicting a win for Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side for Best Actress, Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart for Best Actor, Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds for Best Supporting Actor and Mo’Nique in Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire for Best Supporting Actress. The latter two have been frontrunners for months, winning most of the precursor awards, with Bullock and Bridges emerging from behind late in the season over frontrunners like Meryl Streep in Julie & Julia, Carey Mulligan in An Education, George Clooney in Up in the Air and Colin Firth in A Single Man. Though some give Streep and Mulligan dark horse chances for the win, most concede that the Best Actor statue is all but engraved.

Outside of these races, Up in the Air is poised to win Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, while Mark Boal’s Writers’ Guild win for the original screenplay of The Hurt Locker bodes well for his chances of repeating.
However, as Tarantino’s script was ineligible in that Guild’s awards for his original screenplay for Inglourious Basterds, some predict this year will be a repeat of 1994 when his script for Pulp Fiction—along with Roger Avery—was that film’s consolation prize.

Regardless of all of this, the Academy has proven that it can be foolish to assume that everything is sewn up. Upsets like Adrien Brody’s Best Actor win for The Pianist in 2002 and Crash’s Best Picture victory over favored Brokeback Mountain have given pundits greater room to predict surprises and dark horses hope for a come from behind victory.

In other words, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

The Academy Awards will be handed out on the night of March 7, televised live on ABC and hosted by Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin.

For a full list of nominees in all categories, visit the Academy’s official website at www.oscar.com.