As with last year, the annual Oscar nominations game will be played at http://www.rinkworks.com/awards/. This post is basically a ploy to lure Trip out from hiding for his annual visit to RinkWorks.

Anyway, the Golden Globe nominations were announced today, and while the influence the Globes have on the Oscars is controversial, I think you can average the Globes with the Critics' awards and bring the Oscar forecast into focus.

It's interesting to me to see the early stages of the Academy Awards Predictions Game guesses. Apparently the RinkWorks readership thinks Tarantino, Thurman, Mortensen, and Wood are due nominations -- dark horses from commercial cinema, all, and yet Sofia Coppola has the second highest number of guesses for Best Director, whose only disadvantage at the Oscars is on the completely opposite side of the coin: if she's not nominated, it'll be because Lost In Translation wasn't commercial *enough*.

Some early comments:

Best Picture

Return of the King, Mystic River, and Cold Mountain seem assured of nominations, but it's interesting how quickly the favorites for the fourth and fifth spots jump in and out of rotation. Seabiscuit was in early, then out, and now it's gaining steam again. Ditto Master & Commander, but with a weaker start and stronger momentum now. Lost In Translation was out and in. Big Fish was in and out. In America was out and in. Last Samurai was in and out.

I should make a special note about The Human Stain, which, despite no other recognition anywhere on the map, either in terms of press or critical awards or box office receipts, somehow managed to be selected by the AFI for inclusion in their annual unordered Top 10 of the year list. Good for it.

Best Actor/Actress

Sean Penn is considered a shoo-in for a nomination for Mystic River, despite that he's competing against himself for his performance in 21 Grams. For some reason, nobody seems to be acknowledging this, or if they do, they dismiss the possibility that he'll split his votes. Meanwhile, Cate Blanchett is in the same situation, with viable performances in The Missing and Veronica Guerin, but despite recognition from some quarters for both films, she's not a frontrunner. Some are saying Naomi Watts has the edge on her competition, while others have yet to realize she was in a movie this year.

Best Animated Feature

An interesting thing is happening here. Finding Nemo, currently the biggest moneymaker of the year, one of the best reviewed films of the year, beloved by critics and commercial audiences of all ages, more loved than any animated feature since Shrek, to the point where it was an early dark horse for a Best Picture nomination, is actually facing some serious competition from a foreign animated film, The Triplets of Belleville. Triplets has been quietly pulling in critics' awards, and its momentum is building. I wouldn't be concerned for Nemo, except that last year the surprisingly broad-minded win for Spirited Away seems to indicate that the Academy isn't necessarily going to reflexively vote for Pixar. Then again, last year there really wasn't a viable American contender for the award.

Other than this potential complication, though, I think the first real Animated Feature race to watch will be next year's, when Shrek 2 takes on The Incredibles.

Best Visual Effects

The question here is, "Where is the Matrix?" The original film swept the technical awards out from under Star Wars, which was visually dazzling at the time, whatever you might have thought of the movie itself. The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions has become something of a Phantom Menace in the eyes of audiences, however, and worse: although I thought the visuals were stunning, many felt they were severely lacking. But this category has a history of awarding films with the most conspicuous effects, not the most well done, and that bizarre tendency could be enough to win a nomination for Revolutions. (My understanding, perhaps incorrect, is that only Revolutions is being submitted for consideration for the technical awards.)

If the backlash against the Matrix sequels is strong enough, that leaves a spot open for T3, which did old-fashioned crashing buildings effects better than I've ever seen them done anywhere else. Either way, count on the more ambitious effects of Gollum and pirate skeletons to dominate.