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Norbit; Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events; The Wolfman; Alice in Wonderland; 102 Dalmations; Australia; Click. If I were to ask you what all of those movies have in common, your answer would probably be something like “I hate all of those movies,” which is a reasonable answer, but so is this one: these are all movies that will go down in history as being Academy Award nominees. Seriously, and it's all the fault of those damned arts categories.

I will admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for Best Art Direction, Best Costumes, and Best Makeup. The first year I paid attention to the Oscars was 1998, when I correctly predicted Men In Black's win over Titanic in Best Makeup. 2001 was the first year I filled out a prediction ballot, and while I did appallingly badly, I did successfully predict Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for Best Art Direction. I have no cute anecdote to share about Best Costumes, but I suppose I like that category too.

What makes these categories tricky to predict is that the branches who choose the nominees often march to the beat of their own LSD-fueled drummer. Best Picture cred helps films in categories like Cinematography, Film Editing, Sound Mixing and Score, but here it isn't good for much. Sure, films like The Queen or Milk probably wouldn't have scored nominations had they not been getting so much attention, but you're just as likely to see weird independent films (The Tempest, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) and Hollywood blockbusters (can we make sure to always refer to it as “Academy Award winner Harry and the Hendersons from now on?) as a Best Picture nominee. In the last seven years there has never been more than three Best Picture nominees represented in Art Direction and Costumes, and only one of 21 Best Makeup nominees was also up for Best Picture (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

What does make things slightly easier is that the same films often turn up in more than one of these categories, which makes sense; if a film has great sets, it probably also has great costumes or great makeup. Most years either two or three films get both Art Direction and Costumes nominations, and often at least one of the Best Makeup nominees will show up in one of those categories (Benjamin Button and Lemony Snicket were the last two films to score the trifecta). 2003, which you might remember as the easiest Oscar year ever for predicting, had an almost perfect matchup: the same five films were nominated for Art Direction and Costumes, and two of those films were also Best Makeup nominees.

So let's start by looking at the films that could find support from two or three of these branches, and as always, the Best Picture contenders lead the way. Two of the Best Picture frontrunners are big, sweeping historical films, which almost always play well in these three categories. Both Hugo and The Artist were nominated by the Art Directors Guild and are on the shortlist for Best Makeup (a group of seven films that will be whittled down to three nominees) which puts them both in a very good position to score at least two nominations.

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