The Best Picture category isn't the only thing that bulked up.

What is it about the Academy Awards? Intellectually, it's hard to muster up that much enthusiasm about who "wore it best" (Ang Lee) or how modest Katniss will be in her acceptance speech, hopefully avoiding a First Wives' Club reference that sounded like she was hating on Meryl Streep this time. And yet ... we still feel compelled to watch. Maybe it's because secretly, deep down, we still find it fascinating that the guy who does the voice of Stewie looks like the host of a reality game show about finding true love by having a dance-off on a stripper pole.

Or maybe it's because we're just suckers, who deep down believe that Beasts of the Southern Wild might still possibly have a chance against Argo or Lincoln.

Come join us, will you, on this the most magical of evenings for producers, people who are married to movie stars, and dress designers? We'll be hosting a live chat below. Just click the big countdown button and you're all set. Got it?

Great.

This year we're making our predictions in order of the film and/or celebrity, not the award. That's because this time ... it's personal. No, seriously: between Kathryn Bigelow and Ben Affleck being iced out of Best Director, the Weinstein Bros. not having a snowball's chance in hell of scoring a big win and the fact that we're practically giving an award to Anne Hathaway just to make her stop sing-crying, there's going to be a lot of sore losers tonight. But don't worry; we're using a time-tested formula for predicting the bitter ceremonies, including taking all of the guesses on Twitter and averaging them against Nate Silver's predictions. Then we throw those out the window and  get ourselves angry over Lincoln’s inevitable windfall of awards that should be going to that movie that had all those great New Yorker articles written about it and stars a 9-year-old who wasn't even an actress when she started the film, which is about 50 percent more method than Daniel Day-Lewis's decision to become an Italian cobbler every time he's taking a hiatus from Hollywood.

So enjoy, and don't forget to tune into our live chat on the Oscars, starting at 7 p.m.!

Christoph Waltz on Between Two Ferns

"You should be off pudding, because you're fat." #InstantGold

2013 Golden Globes, Bill Murray

If you are too busy watching the Australian cycling thing and can't understand what the hell is going on with Twitter (honestly, we don't know who you follow, but no one on our feed actually bothers naming the winners of these things), here are the latest updates for the 2013 Golden Globe Awards.

Best Motion Picture, Drama
WINNER: Argo
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama
WINNER: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama
WINNER: Jessica Chastain, Zero Dark Thirty

Best Motion Picture, Drama
WINNER:

Best Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical
WINNER: Les Mis

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture- Comedy or Musical
WINNER: Hugh Jackman, Les Mis

Best TV Series, Comedy or Musical
WINNER: GIRLS

Best Director
WINNER: Ben Affleck, Argo

Cecil B. DeMille's Lifetime Achievement Award/Freestyle Portion of Evening
WINNER: Jodie Foster

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Comedy or Musical
WINNER: Lena Dunham, Girls

Best Animated Feature Film
WINNER: Brave

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series - Drama
WINNER: Claire Danes, Homeland

Best Foreign Film
WINNER: Amour

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Comedy or Musical
WINNER: Don Cheadle, House of Lies

Best Screenplay
WINNER: Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
WINNER: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables

Best Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television
WINNER: Ed Harris, Game Change

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television
WINNER: Kevin Costner, Hatfields & McCoys
(RUNNER-UP: Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television
WINNER: Julianne Moore - Game Change

Best Television Series - Drama
WINNER: Homeland

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture
WINNER: Christoph Waltz - Django Unchained

Best Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Mini-Series
WINNER: Maggie Smith - Downton Abbey

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series - Drama
WINNER: Damien Lewis - Homeland

Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television
WINNER: Game Change

Best Original Song
WINNER: "Skyfall," Adele

Best Original Score - Motion Picture
WINNER: Life of Pi

Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy
WINNER: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Lining Playbook (Also, best speech? Y/N?)

Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx in 'Djago Unchained'

Quentin Tarantino loves a good revenge fantasy. Besides Kill Bill, his last Academy Award-winning film, Inglorious Basterds, reimagined the death of Hitler and the Nazi regime at the hands of the Jews.

Five years later, we have Django Unchained: the highly-anticipated ode to the spaghetti western in which Southern slave Jamie Foxx and German bounty hunter  Christoph Waltz are on a mission to make Southern plantation owners suffer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rC8VJ9aeB_g#!

The tagline of this film is "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of vengeance," which pretty much tells you where the auteur's head is at. Much like Inglorious Basterds, your reaction to this film will probably have less to do with its style (which is awesome) or its performances (lets just give the Oscar to Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Supporting Actor and forget about holding the Academy Awards this year), and more with how you feel about the director's take on bloody revisionist history.

Just for an example: how do we feel about the protagonist's salvation coming from a  German bounty hunter/dentist? Anyone else having flashbacks to Marathon Man? (Though Mr. Tarantino is far too keen on film references for that to be an accident; we're sure the phrase "Is it safe???" will be uttered at a crucial juncture in the film.)

A coworker pointed out another issue for viewers: while the film is ostensibly a Western, it also has elements of a Blaxsploitation movie. This is not new territory for Tarantino, but might rankle those who feel that the director consistently appropriates black  culture in an effort to ramp up his quotability quotient.

Unless the idea of watching people get murdered at an alarming rate appeals to you—no, we will not be seeing Halloween 2 or Final Destination: 3-D—the summer movie season is officially kaput. Where has the time gone? At least with the book closed we can now look back fondly on the joys Hollywood had to offer. There are usually no Oscars given to summer movies, but maybe there should be. We’d name The Hangover as the summer’s Best Picture and, of course, we’ve already found our Best Supporting Actor: Eric Bana’s scene-stealing brilliance in Funny People was so good, in fact, it should be singled out during the more traditional Oscar season, too. Here are some of our other Summer Oscars picks. 

Best Actor: Brad Pitt, Inglourious Basterds

When it comes to awards bait, most critics have singled out Christoph Waltz’s performance as Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s World War II revision as the one to watch. And with good reason: Mr. Waltz is by turns terrifying, bizarre and oddly charming as “The Jew Hunter.” However, give us good ol’ Brad Pitt instead. As Lt. Aldo Raine, head of the titular unit, Mr. Pitt appears to be having more fun than any role he’s tackled since the Ocean’s movies—and quite possibly a bit more. Sporting a pencil-thin mustache and speaking with his jaw pushed out in a manner that recalls Marlon Brando circa The Godfather, Mr. Pitt is the glue that holds Inglourious Basterds together. Some have accused the Pitt-led sections of Basterds as being the weak link, but don’t believe them: Without him, QT’s latest would be a horse of a different color.

Best Score: (Tie) Michael Giacchino, Star Trek and Up

Forget John Williams. If you’re a director in need of a blockbuster orchestral score, look no further than Michael Giacchino. The Bad Robot stalwart—who cut his teeth on Alias and Lost—was all over theaters this summer, providing the score for no less than three films: Star Trek, Up, Land of the Lost. Well, two out of three ain’t bad. With Star Trek, Mr. Giacchino combined the familiar sounds of the original Star Trek theme with the same somber bombast that he provides weekly on Lost; meanwhile, in Up, his compositions were light fluffy and wholly wistful; there was an almost European quality to their nature. In both cases, Mr. Giacchino’s scores made already great movies that much better. Maybe this year he’ll get a real Oscar too.

Best Cinematography: Eric Steelberg, (500) Days of Summer

We had major problems with the movie itself, but not even we can deny that (500) Days of Summer was a technical marvel. Director Marc Webb and his cinematographer Eric Steelberg created many memorable shots and scenes and we’d be damned if any other film looked so good over the last few months. Interestingly, Mr. Steelberg has officially become the twee cinematographer of the moment: In addition to (500) Days of Summer and his previous work on Juno, he also shot Juno director Jason Reitman’s follow up, the highly anticipated Up in the Air, starring George Clooney set for release this December.

Like all Quentin Tarantino movies, Inglourious Basterds is exasperating, absurd, cruel, cynical, sneeringly arrogant, racist, elitist, naïvely derivative and viciously funny. It is also one whale of a rigorous entertainment.

The wild plot: In World War II–occupied France, a band of bloodthirsty American Jews form a battalion of renegade guerrilla soldiers without approval or military supervision, dedicated to the merciless torture and death of all Nazis. They don’t take prisoners. They butcher their captives, performing shocking acts of execution, mutilating their corpses and bashing like eggshells the skulls of their victims with baseball bats. Their leader is Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), an Indian from the Smoky Mountains with a rope burn around his neck from a narrow encounter with a hangman’s noose; his specialty is scalping Nazis while they’re still alive—a talent that earns him the nickname “Apache.” Under Apache’s command, the unit’s war crimes escalate, littering the 1941 landscape with more corpses than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and Saving Private Ryan combined. With little attention to narrative detail, the movie suddenly jumps to 1944, and Apache leads the “basterds” to Berlin to blow up a movie house where Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and the entire leadership of the Third Reich are attending the movie premiere of a Nazi war propaganda film during a Leni Riefenstahl film festival. Preposterous, of course, but according to Mr. Tarantino, what more logical way to end the Holocaust than to go up in flames from flammable nitrate film stock in three-strip Technicolor with the cameras rolling? Would you believe the basterds’ chief allies in this big, noisy finale are a revered Marlene Dietrich–style film star and a covert double agent who is really a British film critic with an expertise in German cinema? You gotta love it.

Facetious, and sprawling over two and a half hours, the film is often unintentionally hilarious but, I hastily add, never tedious. Both the German barbarism and the testosterone-infused American brutality are exploitative in styles that borrow freely from every war movie Mr. Tarantino has ever discovered in the video rental shops he calls home. In all of his films, he specializes in exposing, with imagery and well-crafted vignettes, humanity’s capacity for violence and stupidity. But when he’s accused of film school smugness and fractured plagiarism, I can’t entirely disagree. Inspired by everything from the German cinema of Murnau, Pabst and Josef von Sternberg (Emil Jannings even shows up for the premiere!) to Hogan’s Heroes and (most glaringly) Paul Verhoeven’s fabulous Nazi saga The Black Book, Mr. Tarantino borrows and steals so many clichés from other people’s movies that I’m surprised he didn’t throw in the little girl in the red coat from Schindler’s List. A monstre sacré for Gen Xers who like their movies loud, outrageous and obnoxious, Mr. Tarantino is so immune to opinion that he can’t even spell the title right, and nobody challenges him. By the time he gets around to rewriting the end of World War II, his arrogance is positively de rigueur. He’s like an idiot savant.

If you crave Holocaust accuracy, see Heimat or all nine hours of Shoah. If you want the most disgusting, patronizing and manipulatively sentimental crap movie ever made about the subject, revisit Life Is Beautiful. Mr. Tarantino aims for neither end of the scale; as war movies go, this one never rises to the level of Elem Klimov’s 1985 epic tragedy Come and See or sinks to the depths of The Dirty Dozen Hollywood heroics. The important thing to remember is that Inglourious Basterds is in no way intended to be taken seriously—and as pure hokum, it delivers. Mr. Tarantino is pretty generally considered, in serious circles, as a wickedly overrated amateur, but in his defense I admire the way he makes no claim to “art,” so you can’t say he’s pretentious. He’s as self-conscious and referential a movie “fan” as mainstream entertainment can be, which makes him a welcome adversary of the kind of creeping art-house paralysis I generally hate—phony, self-conscious, and booooring! (Lars von Trier, anyone?) His limitations are obvious. He sees everything from the viewpoint of a teenage faux-cool dude, which means his films rarely delve any deeper than juvenile posturing. So, as with Pulp Fiction, he makes Inglourious Basterds stylish and riveting without producing any remotely profound insight. It totally reflects not the age of its setting, but the age that has informed its director—a time of pop videos, Playstations, the Internet, CGI and 24-hour digital TV with ads inserted every eight minutes for bathroom breaks. So expect World War II as seen through an issue of DC Comics. The gung-ho “basterds” are louts who storm the barriers like Hogan’s heroes; the comic-book Nazis are Katzenjammer Kids; and nobody displays much icy wit except for one Nazi colonel who steals the picture. (More about him in the next paragraph.) Among the casting errors, comedian Mike Myers plays a British officer with makeup and prosthetics that render him unrecognizable; the terrific Irish actor Michael Fassbender (devastating in Hunger as Bobby Sands, the IRA prisoner who starved himself to death in prison) plays the undercover movie critic who parachutes behind enemy lines to kill off Der Führer; and a bulbous Rod Taylor makes a guest appearance as Winston Churchill. The dismally miscast Brad Pitt, upstaged by an exaggerated Southern accent that imitates choking on grits and grillades, acts with a grim intensity, like he’s the only one who’s not in on the joke. The film turns ludicrous when he crashes the premiere, festooned with swastikas, pretending to be an Italian extra and sounding like Gomer Pyle.

On the plus side, I was bowled over by Christoph Waltz, a juicy, flamboyant Austrian actor who speaks perfect English, in the unforgettable role of the finger-licking Gestapo Colonel Hans Landa, a combination of every handsome, blue-eyed movie Nazi from Otto Preminger and Helmut Dantine to Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. Passionate about gourmet food and fresh milk, oozing a lethal charm that thinly veils a capacity for murderous outrage, Mr. Waltz emanates such energy and discipline that he’s one 35-millimeter Nazi who deserves an Academy Award. The funniest thing in the movie is his final offer, with the war coming to a disastrous end, to help kill the leaders of the German high command in exchange for the Congressional Medal of Honor, U.S. citizenship and a house in Nantucket.

Mr. Tarantino knows how to frame a scene. The color, movement and sound are as good as in Pulp Fiction, the dialogue is a slight improvement over Reservoir Dogs’ and the scene where the Gestapo invade a French farmhouse to massacre a Jewish family hiding under the floor is better than anything in Kill Bill. World War II was more serious, complex and horrifying than all this comic embellishment, but if I sound critical, I apologize in advance. I had a helluva time watching Inglourious Basterds. It’s as frenzied as a dog in heat. Mr. Tarantino lacks nuance, but he’s an erratic, awkward and often brilliant filmmaker. In time, he might even become a mature one.

rreed@observer.com