The drumbeats for the action-thriller Argo winning the Best Picture Oscar became louder after Ben Affleck, the film's lead actor, director and co-producer, snatched top honours at the Directors Guild Of America (DGA) last Saturday.
The win should mean that the Best Director prize at the 85th Annual Academy Awards, to be held in Los Angeles on the evening of Feb 24 (on Feb 25 in Singapore), is as good as his, while giving Argo a leg-up for Best Picture.
Or that would be the case in a normal year.
This year, in a snub that has left many puzzled, Affleck was not even nominated in the Best Director category.
In the history of the Academy Awards, only three Best Picture winners were not nominated for Best Director - twice before 1940 and most recently in 1989 for Driving Miss Daisy.
Affleck was not the only odd absence among Best Director nominees. Kathryn Bigelow, director of the acclaimed controversial Osama bin Laden hunt procedural Zero Dark Thirty - another Best Picture contender - was also absent from the list.
Why the disparity? The best explanation is that the academy closed its nomination voting earlier than usual this year, on Jan 4, shielding its 400 or so director-members from the psychological influence of the DGA list which was released on Jan 8.
It worked - to a fault. The academy's Best Director shortlist is its most idiosyncratic in a long time because of its omissions.
Another interesting fact of this year's awards is that Silver Linings Playbook, a romantic comedy about a man with bipolar disorder (played by Bradley Cooper) and a widow (played by Jennifer Lawrence), has the rare distinction of being nominated in what is known as the Big Five categories: Best Picture, Best Director (David O. Russell), Best Actor (Cooper), Best Actress (Lawrence) and Best Screenplay (either adapted or original).
The last time a film was nominated in these five categories was in 1993 - the period drama The Remains Of The Day. But it is likely that only Lawrence will walk home with a prize.
BEST PICTURE
1 Argo
2 Beasts Of The Southern Wild
3 Zero Dark Thirty
4 Lincoln
5 Les Miserables
6 Life Of Pi
7 Amour
8 Django Unchained
9 Silver Linings Playbook
There is the usual mix of weighty-but-mainstream choices and arthouse oddballs on this list, with the most extreme choices being the two indies, the French-language drama Amour and magic-realist fable Beasts. That an Oscar nod is worth a fortune in box-office takings has in recent years been on the minds of the 6,000-strong voting bloc of the academy, who use their votes to give small productions, such as Beasts and Amour, a quick injection of publicity.
Contrast this list with the Golden Globes, whose voting membership comprises the foreign press corp, which lean towards more populist film choices. For example, the Globes gave Best Comedy/Musical nods this year to the gentle comedies Moonrise Kingdom and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, two films largely ignored by the academy although Les Miserables took home the prize.
But both the Globes and the academy gave the brushoff to what many are calling the best Bond film ever, Skyfall. The Dark Knight Rises, the last film in the Batman trilogy, was given a miss, as was The Sessions, based on the true story of quadriplegic poet-journalist Mark O'Brien.
TIPPED TO WIN
Argo - An overwhelming number of industry watchers have put their money on this story of the CIA plot to disguise a group of Americans as members of a Canadian film crew to smuggle them out of Tehran during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.
The signs are good. Ben Affleck's Best Director win at the Directors Guild Of America awards joins the same prize he picked up at the Golden Globes. At the Globes, Argo also won Best Drama to go with the Outstanding Cast Performance win at the recent Screen Actors Guild Awards.
And do not forget that Argo is a movie about Hollywood, a theme which helped make last year's Best Picture Oscar winner, The Artist, a sentimental favourite.
BEST ACTOR
1 Denzel Washington, Flight
2 Joaquin Phoenix, The Master
3 Hugh Jackman, Les Miserables
4 Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook
5 Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln
This and the rest of the Big Five categories have not been as fraught with controversy as the nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, but there have been surprises all the same. The larger pool of academy actors (compared with directors) who draw up the shortlist means that the opinions of the mainstream are better represented. So an actor like Phoenix, who has told a reporter that film awards are "total bull****" will still get a nomination, presumably because a larger pool tends to dilute any small pockets of ill-feeling.
This and the Best Actress category tend to get heckled for rewarding gimmicky, showy performances in roles featuring mad or damaged characters. This year, the critics' eye-rolling continues: Bradley Cooper's character is possibly deranged and beset by hallucinations, as is Phoenix's. Washington hams it up as an alcohol-abusing pilot, while Jackman's Jean Valjean is anything but restrained. Notable omissions: John Hawkes in The Sessions, a comic look at a quadriplegic's attempt at losing his virginity, and Jack Black in Bernie, playing the charming murderer of the title.
TIPPED TO WIN
Daniel Day-Lewis - for playing the title role in Lincoln. This is a shoo-in for Lewis, who nabbed the Best Actor prize at the recent Screen Actors Guild Awards, the most important barometer of the feelings of the academy members in this category. If he wins, it will be his third Oscar, after There Will Be Blood (2008) and My Left Foot (1990).
BEST ACTRESS
1 Naomi Watts, The Impossible
2 Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty
3 Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook
4 Emmanuelle Riva, Amour
5 Quvenzhane Wallis, Beasts Of The Southern Wild
This year, the surprise is that none of the actresses here play a historical figure with the help of facial prosthetics (as did Meryl Streep, who won last year for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady), nor play anyone going crazy (like Natalie Portman, who won in 2010 for her part in Black Swan, did). Nor, as comedian Ricky Gervais had joked, has anyone here played a woman involved in The Holocaust. The biggest newsbite here is the inclusion of Wallis, who at age nine is the youngest person nominated in this category, while Riva, 85, is the oldest. Omissions: Marion Cotillard in the French drama Rust And Bone and Maggie Smith in the comedy Quartet.
TIPPED TO WIN
Jennifer Lawrence - for playing Tiffany, the widow who will not stop pursuing Cooper's character Pat despite his mental problems. She took home the title of Best Actress at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, clearly showing her popularity with voters.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
1 Christoph Waltz, Django Unchained
2 Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master
3 Alan Arkin, Argo
4 Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook
5 Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln
Arkin's part as the producer who makes up a fake film to smuggle Americans out of Iran is tiny compared with his rivals here, especially when placed next to Hoffman's part as Lancaster Dodd, the leader of the cult in The Master. But like De Niro and his female counterparts Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith, the academy goes gaga for these veterans and deservedly so. Left off the list: Leonardo DiCaprio, for his turn as the sadistic slave owner in Django Unchained. He was given a nod at the Golden Globes. Also Matthew McConaughey, playing the leader of the stripper clan in Magic Mike.
TIPPED TO WIN
Tommy Lee Jones - playing abolitionist Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, a man with eviscerating wit. Again, a winner at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
1 Sally Field, Lincoln
2 Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook
3 Helen Hunt, The Sessions
4 Amy Adams, The Master
5 Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
As in the Best Supporting Actor category, some roles here are bigger than others. Hunt should correctly be competing as lead actress; her inclusion here is probably a strategic move. Hathaway's part, too, is enormous compared with those of Weaver and Adams. Left out: Maggie Smith, in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and Samantha Barks, whose Eponine in Les Miserables tugged at the tear ducts in a film already awash with tragedy.
TIPPED TO WIN
Anne Hathaway. Despite the play made by Hunt's studio and her striking performance as sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen-Green, the 1997 Best Actress Oscar winner (for As Good As It Gets) is a long shot for the award. She will be pipped by twice Oscar-nominated Hathaway, who clinched the Best Supporting Actress prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for her part as the doomed Fantine in Les Miserables.
BEST DIRECTOR
1 David O. Russell, Silver Linings Playbook
2 Ang Lee, Life Of Pi
3 Michael Haneke, Amour
4 Benh Zeitlin, Beasts Of The Southern Wild
5 Steven Spielberg, Lincoln
With Ben Affleck not even nominated, this year will see a bizarre result in this category. Argo looks set to win Best Picture, but its director will not be among the top five of the year. This is in contrast to most other years, when the Best Director and Best Picture prizes go to the same movie. A situation similar to Affleck's - where the Best Picture is not even nominated for Best Director - has occurred only thrice: twice in the early days of the awards, before 1940, and most recently in 1989, for Driving Miss Daisy.
The Best Picture statuette (considered the most prestigious prize at the awards and given out at the end) is collected by the producers, but this is taking it too far. A poorly directed film should never win Best Picture. Each award serves as a check on the other and, together, they validate the quality of the film.
But this outcome does shine a light on the disparities in the voting process between categories. For Best Director, the 400 members of the academy who are directors do the nominations, which are then put to the vote by every one of the academy's 6,000 members. Best Picture is the only category in which every member is asked to nominate.
As the nominations in Best Director are made by a coterie of practitioners, the list is less immune to industry politics and biases, as seen here in the selection of Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke, an artist whose work tends to be polarising, and Benh Zeitlin, a 30-year-old making his feature debut far outside the Hollywood system. If either of these two artists were not on this list, it is likely that Affleck would have made the cut.
Directors joining Affleck out in the cold include Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty and winner of the Best Director award two years ago for Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker), Tom Hooper (LesMiserables), Richard Linklater (the comedy Bernie, 2011) and Juan Antonio Bayona (the 2004 Asian tsunami film The Impossible).
TIPPED TO WIN
Steven Spielberg. With Lincoln's 12 nominations, the most of any film this year, the biopic of the American president's last four months of life looks set to give Spielberg his third Best Director statuette, after the ones won for Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY1 Zero Dark Thirty
2 Django Unchained
3 Moonrise Kingdom
4 Amour
5 Flight
1 Lincoln
2 Silver Linings Playbook
3 Argo
4 Life Of Pi
5 Beasts Of The Southern Wild
Moonrise Kingdom, a gently comic tale of two children who fall in love and run away into the woods, co-written and directed by Wes Anderson, gets noticed in this category. Anderson should have also been recognised for directing. Notable omissions here include the time-travel thriller Looper, the Batman chapter The Dark Knight Rises and the young adult drama The Perks Of Being A Wallflower.
TIPPED TO WIN
Zero Dark Thirty for Original Screenplay (Mark Boal, above right) and Lincoln (Tony Kushner) for Adapted Screenplay. While Quentin Tarantino walked away with the Best Screenplay Golden Globe for Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty's screenplay by Boal has nods from Bafta, the Golden Globes and Writers Guild Of America. The guild has also given Lincoln a nomination, as have Bafta and several other bodies.
This article was first run in The Straits Times newspaper on February 6, 2013. For similar stories, go to sph.straitstimes.com/premium/singapore. You will not be able to access the Premium section of The Straits Times website unless you are already a subscriber.