British film The King's Speech has been crowned best picture at the Oscars, with star Colin Firth named best actor

The article provides a list of Oscar nominees and predictions regarding the potential winners, as well as personal picks of the year.

With the 2011 Oscar ceremony taking place on February 27th, film buffs all over the world are placing bets on potential winners.
British film The King's Speech has been crowned best picture at the Oscars, with star Colin Firth named best actor.
This cinematic year has been shaky to say the least: audiences had to search extra hard to find sparkling gems in an ocean of duds. To discover poignant, personal features like Never Let Me Go or Rabbit Hole in a year dominated by the likes of Clash of the Titans, The Last Airbender, Killers, Marmaduke, Cop Out, Bounty Hunter and - oh God! - Furry Vengeance, proved to be no easy task, especially if you count those smaller films' lack of promotion. In fact, most of the quality stuff was released with limited distribution - one look at the list of nominees proves that the independent film movement has reached its apex.
As usual, the nominee list inspires both admiration and befuddlement. While some of the nominated features were shoo-ins (hello, King's Speech), others came as a surprise (Winter's Bone) and a few choices certainly raise eyebrows (why is Toy Story 3 nominated both as Best Motion Picture AND Best Animated Feature? Is Jeff Bridges going to pull a "Tom Hanks" and receive two consecutive Best Actor Oscars in a row?)
Below are my predictions for who will win, who I think should win, and my personal favorite for each category - in some cases, excellent features that were left out of the race unfairly.
Note: included are only the major categories, due to limited space.

Best Film

• Nominees: The Social Network, The King's Speech, Toy Story 3, 127 Hours, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, Black Swan, True Grit, Winter's Bone
• Will Win: The Social Network: Though The King's Speech has "Oscar" stamped all over it, its themes of overcoming adversity and friendship are a bit dated (every other Oscar winner has had similar themes and historical setting), while David Fincher's Network truly wowed critics with something new and relevant - a look at a culture that paradoxically decays as it grows.
• Should Win: The Social Network: The allegorical look at modern societal communication, expertly written by Aaron Sorkin, features a solid cast (though I still question the casting of Justin "N' Sync" Timberflake) and a brooding, intense soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor. These elements combine into a tight narrative, which propels the film forward akin to a nail-biting thriller. One of the rare features that demands to be seen twice, The Social Network managed to do the impossible: make a buck by keeping its audiences riveted... with dialogue!
• My Personal Pick: The Social Network

About ten minutes into The King's Speech, I found myself growing increasingly irritated by its monotonous, predictable structure and Colin Firth's bland performance. The film is tailor-made for the award season, and the earnestness can be felt in its every pore.
127 Hours is a well-made survival story that remains more of an experiment than a film. (Check out Buried for a similarly-themed experimental feature that's equally good but didn't get half of the attention).

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Winter's Bone means well and yet ends up being a cold, distancing, low-budget study of a poverty-stricken community and a young woman's struggle to survive, the likes of which we have seen many, many times before. It has some intense sequences, but somehow doesn't add up to a whole, lacking warmth and keeping the audience at an arm's length.
An unexpected detour into conventional Hollywood drama for quirky director David O. Russell, The Fighter is exactly that: a conventional Hollywood drama, albeit with a standout performance by the always-reliable (if somewhat psychotic) Christian Bale. Does this Rocky/Raging Bull/The Boxer rehash deserve a Best Film Oscar? Not by a stretch.
The Kids Are All Right is an excellent feature, led by terrific performances and wise direction by Lisa Cholodenko, but it's too... grounded, its themes, while universal in nature, a bit too "target-audience" for a Best Film Oscar.
I don't even know why Toy Story 3 is on this list, so let's skip right past that...
Inception disappointed me. It takes its rather original concept to unnecessary extremes, over-complicating the story and hence making it difficult for the audience to emphasize with the main characters. Literally, too much is going on - redundant gunfights, slow-motion Matrix-like battles, and perfunctory characters that appear to explain the plot and then fade off into the background. The film, for all its "trippiness", lacked a dream-like quality - the dreams it depicts are too structured and... gray. Christopher Nolan reportedly worked on the script for years, and it shows - sometimes it's better not to over-think things.
A pleasant diversion for the Coen brothers, True Grit is a straightforward Western, more of a re-imagining of the source novel than a remake of the 1969 flick, for which John Wayne got his Oscar. The directors received some criticism for trying something new and ending up a bit too "Disney-fied" for their fans' liking. I didn't really get that sense; while the film was rated PG-13, it contained all the trademark Coens' dialogue, and proved that there is life yet in the Western genre.
Darren Aronofsky has finally hit jackpot with Black Swan. I have always admired the director, yet his films have remained deeply flawed - Pi was too "college thesis" in nature, Requiem For a Dream was all style, little substance (but what style!), The Fountain was an ambitious, overblown mess, and The Wrestler almost made it, touching greatness but ruining it with an overly sentimental ending. Now, with the elegant, disturbing, allegorical Black Swan, he delivers his masterpiece. Akin to the ballet world it depicts, the film is an exaggerated, artistic glance at a young woman's transformation, her battle with her alter ego. This would be my closest candidate for Best Film of the year, and yet...
...yet, in a year that also released gems such as Shutter Island, Greenberg, Cemetery Junction, Splice, Cyrus, Never Let Me Go, Let Me In and Rabbit Hole, it's The Social Network's confidence and brilliance that marks it as the #1 film of the year that will rightly deserve its Oscar.

Best Actor

• Nominees: Javier Bardem for Biutiful, Jesse Eisenberg for The Social Network, James Franco for 127 Hours, Colin Firth for The King's Speech, Jeff Bridges for True Grit
• Will Win: Colin Firth: It's unfortunate but true - Colin Firth will win the Oscar for stuttering his way through a two-hour Oscar-bait feature. Though highly praised by critics, I find the actor's performance - and the film - bland and irritating. Firth is basically doing Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones's Diary, only in costume and with an annoying stutter. The actor lacks charisma and inner depth to carry a film; he is immediately upstaged by Geoffrey Rush, a veteran actor who made me wish I were watching him in a better movie.
• Should Win: James Franco: The earnest young actor has been struggling to be taken seriously since his days on Freaks & Geeks, the cult TV show that propelled him, along with the likes of Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen and Jason Segel, to stardom. He's gone back to college to receive a Masters degree, written a book of short stories and appeared in numerous indie features, none of which - until now - have left much of a mark (Howl, anyone?). Danny Boyle presented him with the opportunity to finally divulge his acting chops with this survival story, which centers on Franco... and stays centered on him for two hours. The actor makes it more than watchable, his decline into madness fascinating to observe. More importantly, we are finally watching the character and not the actor.
• My Personal Pick: Leonardo DiCaprio for Shutter Island: I liked Jesse Eisenberg's brooding, introspective act, and Javier Bardem's forceful performance in Biutiful is hard to ignore (though the film itself leaves much to be desired). As for Jeff Bridges - well, he deserves an Oscar for every other flick in which he stars. In a year filled with great male performances, it's DiCaprio's character in Shutter Island who stayed with me the most. Upon first viewing, his performance in Martin Scorsese's shadowy throwback to 1940s film noir seems slightly erratic and somewhat confusing, like everything else about the mind-bending film. But then we realize that the film's narrator/protagonist may not have been as reliable as we thought... and the actor's performance gains nuance and power. A truly astounding feat that grows in complexity the more you think about it.

Best Actress

• Nominees: Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right, Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole, Jennifer Lawrence for Winter's Bone, Natalie Portman for Black Swan, Michelle Williams for Blue Valentine
• Will Win: Natalie Portman: A powerful performance, no doubt - and one that will be rewarded by the academy. Aronofsky's camera is relentlessly fixed on Portman's face, and she manages to portray her character's darkly sexual, agonizing transformation with brutal force. It's by far the most "show-offy" of this year's female candidates' performances, both physically and emotionally demanding.
• Should Win: Michelle Williams: While I respect Portman's achievement, I tend to lean towards the more subtle, restrained kind of roles, and her performance, while spectacular, isn't singular - in other words, I feel like another actress of equal caliber could have pulled it off. Michelle Williams had the trickier role in Blue Valentine, expressing a world of pain and remorse with barely a wink, as well as portraying a woman's maturity and discovery of herself with utter conviction.
• My Personal Pick: Michelle Williams: Nicole Kidman finally shed her "glacial glare" for a gentle and sad tour-de-force act in Rabbit Hole; Jennifer Lawrence elevated an otherwise flawed feature with her mature-beyond-her-age performance, Annette Bening does deserve to finally win an Oscar, and Portman single-handedly carried Black Swan... but it's Michelle Williams that melted my heart in Blue Valentine.

Best Director

• Nominees: David Fincher for The Social Network, Tom Hooper for The King's Speech, David O. Russell for The Fighter, Ethan and Joel Coen for True Grit, Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan
• Will Win: David Fincher
• Should Win: David Fincher: After cult classics like Seven and Fight Club, Fincher has proved that he can handle a wide variety of genres. In addition, he's matured significantly as a director, preferring to take the subtler route instead of going for broke (which I admittedly kind of miss about him). But there is no question - the man deserves his Oscar.
• My Personal Pick: Martin Scorsese for Shutter Island I know, I know, I love that movie, but there is no denying the director's complete confidence in his craft, and the way he incorporates elements of film noir, Hitchcock, Twilight Zone, concentration camp drama and dark comedy into an explosive cocktail that makes you reevaluate reality itself marks Shutter Island an unparalleled achievement. I defy any other director to attempt this feat.

My other candidates include Mark Romanek, for his subtle, elegiac direction of sci-fi drama Never Let Me Go, and Matt Reeves, for surprising us all (or the six of us who actually saw it) with his faithful remake of Let The Right One In, entitled Let Me In. After action blockbuster Cloverfield, the director took a detour that proved him an auteur - let's hope that the fact he was completely ignored at the award ceremonies doesn't put a dent in his future career.