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Looking back since 2003, the year after A Beautiful Mind rolled to an Oscar, it has become a rare thing for the pre-race favorite to perform well. Instead, it has been films that have either slowly built support or charged in from nowhere that have won big. Let's look:

2003:

Pre-race Favorite- Gangs of New York

Winner- Chicago

2004:

Pre-race Favorite (and winner)- The Return of the King

2005:

Pre-race Favorite- Aviator

Winner- Million Dollar Baby

2006:

Pre-race Favorites- Brokeback Mountain and Munich

Winner- Crash

2007:

Pre-race Favorite- This one is complicated. Before the race really got going, the early favorites were Dreamgirls and Babel. Once both of those faded to the back of the pack (Dreamgirls fell off completely when it failed to get a nomination) people thought Letters from Iwo Jima was going to storm in and take over the race.

Winner- The Departed

2008:

Pre-race Favorite- That year there wasn't really one, but you could point to Atonement, Sweeney Todd, and Charlie Wilson's War as favorites at various points before the race kicked into gear.

Winner- No Country for Old Men

2009:

Pre-race Favorites- Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Winner: Slumdog Millionaire

One trend you might notice is that the prerace favorites tend to be the more typical “Oscar Bait” films; they were clearly made with the assumption that they would be serious awards contenders. They are the biopics, the period pieces, made by respected directors like Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese (notice that Scorsese finally got his Oscar when he stopped making projects that pandered to the interests of Oscar voters). Clearly something changed between 2001, when typical Oscar fare like The English Patient, Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, Gladiator, and A Beautiful Mind, cleaned up at the awards, and 2002, when the darker, more cynical films began being rewarded.

But as much as I love talking about the effects of September 11, 2001 on the film industry, this is not the place for that discussion. We are talking about frontrunners. So the question is, what film is the unquestioned leader of the pack heading into the 2011 Oscars? Who is going to pick up that mantle and declare to the world “I am the movie to beat at this years Oscars!”? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

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