april oscar predictions complete: TALLIES and COMMENTARY

Well after much toiling, my first round of Oscar predictions are now on record.  There's a handy-dandy widget in upper right column of the blog to navigate through my initial thoughts on this year's Oscar race.  While I'm quick to say that everyone's confidence in The Tree of Life being this year's big Academy Awards movie is premature and a little misguided (I fear it'll fall flat come May just from sheer over-hyping), I ended up declaring it the eventual nomination count leader nonetheless. Such is life.  From the previews, it's hard to deny that it'll have technical and visual appeal, which is something we've come to expect from Terrence Malick's films anyway.  A lot of my reliability, though, is resting on a couple of movies that are currently slated for a 2012 release, but have already begun filming - so they could just as easily get snuck in in December:  J. Edgar and Carnage.  We'll just have to wait and see how those two fare for 2011.  So go ahead and check out the individual category pictorial write-ups amidst the linkage in the upper left corner of the blog, and look no further than directly below for the final tallies for my current predictions for Oscar 2011.

April Oscar Tallies

8 nominations

The Tree of Life

7 nominations

Hugo Cabret

6 nominations

J. Edgar, Moneyball, War Horse

4 nominations

Rango, The Iron Lady

3 nominations

Adventures of Tintin, Albert Nobbs, My Week with Marilyn, The Descendants, The Ides of March, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Water for Elephants, Young Adult

2 nominations

A Dangerous Method, Carnage, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, The Muppets, The Skin I Live In, X-Men: First Class

1 nomination

Beginners, Captain America: The First Avenger, Cars 2, Coriolanus, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 2, Jane Eyre, Rio, Source Code, The Eye of the Storm, The Help, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Winnie the Pooh