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Drive and The Tree of Life

Drive's Guild Nominations: ADG Best Art Direction-Contemporary, CDG Best Costumes-Contemporary
The Tree of Life' Guild Nominations: ASC Best Cinematography

Why They Have to Be Considered: Because the rule is this year that a film has to receive at least five percent of the total votes to be nominated. This means that you have to get a lot of number one votes just to be in the running. While Tinker Tailor, Bridesmaids, and Moneyball are the sort of film that might be hindered by their lack of number one votes, Drive, The Tree of Life, and The Ides of March are the sort that will be helped by it. These are the films with small bands of passionate defenders, who foam at the mouth at the mention of Malick, or cream themselves over the sight of a leather jacket with a scorpion on it. The people who love these movies are loud, and they will do everything they can to get their cinematic crushes nominated.

Why They Almost Certainly Won't: These movies are the Ron Paul of this year's race. The people who love them really love them, but for the majority of voters they are too polarizing and too weird to ever get mass appeal. Drive is extremely silent and stylized. Directors like Eastwood, Scorsese and The Coens can pull off that kind of intense violence and still get support, but this is not that kind of movie, and it will certainly turn off many of the older voters. And The Tree of Life, well, it's clearly not for everyone. It is beautiful, yes, but the narrative is difficult to follow. How many voters will get lost in the long surreal montages and just decide that the movie isn't for them? Enough to keep it from a nomination? Almost certainly.

This new setup for Best Picture also provides a new challenge to predictors: how do you list your predictions? Personally, I think that in order to guess exactly how many films will be nominated for Best Picture requires not just the skill to predict the Oscars but also the ability to read minds, and since the radioactive iguana that bit me didn't give me that power (or really any other powers; iguanas are fairly useless animals) I'm not going to try. But at the same time I think just listing ten films is taking the easy way out. You are just as right if there are five nominees as if there are nine, assuming you picked all of the ones that made the list. That's why I decided to list my Best Picture nominations in order of likelihood of being nominated. That way, if there are only seven, as long as I got those seven right, I'm good as gravy. Personally, I have a hunch that there will only be six nominees this year, but I'm not willing to bet on that.

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