Some thoughts on the Oscar nominations - part 2

Ok - continuing the earlier post we move onto to consder Best Picture and Best Director. The nominees are:

Best Picture
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids are Alright
The King's Speech
127 Hours
The Social Network 
Toy Story 3
True Grit 
Winter's Bone

Best Director
Darren Aronofsky Black Swan
David O Russell The Fighter
Tom Hooper The King's Speech
David Fincher The Social Network
Joel and Ethan Coen True Grit.

There has been a tendancy to see this year's Oscar as The King's Speech  vs True Grit just as last year was Avatar  vs The Hurt Locker, but I have a feeling that neither will walk away with either of the biggest prizes. It has been a long, long time since the winning Best Picture wasn't also nominated for Best Editing, which would count True Grit out. Similarly, you would expect the Best Film to also be nominated for best director, which would count out Winters Bone (which is too small a film to win anyway), The Kids are Alright (too lightweight), Toy Story 3 (too animated); 127 Hours (not quite good enough this time by Boyle) and Inception (too much of a Blockbuster, although Christopher Nolan really should at least be nominated for Director!). Of the remaining ones, The Fighter is probably the outsider, although don't rule it out for Best Picture and I don't fancy The King's Speech to get either award, which leaves us with Black Swan vs The Social Network. I wouldn't be surprised to see them split the awards this year with The Social Network getting Best Picture and Aronofsky getting Best Director.

Screenplays:
Best Adapted Screenplay
127 Hours
Toy Story 3
The Social Network
True Grit 
Winter's Bone

Best Original Screenplay
Another Year
The Fighter
Inception
The Kings Speech
The Kids are Alright

The inclusion of 127 Hours and Toy Story 3 is really quite mystifying here. Its nice to see Another Year getting a nod as it really is a very good film. The Adapted Screenplay will almost certainly be between True Grit  and The Social Network. As a fan of The West Wing, it would be nice to see Aaron Sorkin win for the latter, but if True Grit does miss out on the other big awards I could see it picking this up as a consolation. Original Screenplay is more open, but if I had to guess I would think it might be one for The King's Speech.

Other Categories.

Elsewhere, I'd expect Inception  to do well in effects and other technical categories and Biutiful to win Best Foreign Language film, although that's often a hard one to predict.