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.!

Michael Haneke

The Austrian director Michael Haneke is in a very exclusive club, having won the Palme d’Or for best picture at the Cannes Film Festival for both of his last two films, the Nazi allegory The White Ribbon (2009) and the end-of-life drama Amour, which will be released in the U.S. this month. Late in his career—Mr. Haneke is 70—the onetime provocateur (whose earlier films contained graphic violence and a strong sense of dread) has come to be embraced by the critical establishment. Amour, and its 85-year-old lead actress, Emmanuelle Riva, are considered front-runners in the coming Oscar race.

“It would be hypocritical of me if I said I didn’t like awards,” Mr. Haneke recently told the Transom, speaking through a translator. “Someone liking my work doesn’t make me sad. Every prize improves your working conditions.” Mr. Haneke was dressed entirely in black and occasionally laughed, not quite derisively, at the questions posed. At the beginning of the interview, he got up and turned the thermostat in the hotel conference room down. His answers were to the point.

Amour is about a long-married couple who hit turbulence as the health of the wife (Ms. Riva, legendary for her work in Hiroshima, mon amour) begins to falter. In some ways, it’s a story about health care; its methodical documentation of physical breakdown is as frightening as the white-gloved killers in Mr. Haneke’s 1997 Funny Games. But its title is appropriate—there’s more love in this film than in most of Mr. Haneke’s work. Asked if this film represented an attempt to break free of his reputation for cruelty, he laughed. “No. Not at all. Each theme has its own appropriate form.”

“I don’t have a list of themes. It’s not a question of themes,” he elaborated. “Rather, it’s about stories that occur to me. The story of Funny Games occurred to me, just as The White Ribbon did. I’m not looking to make stories about issues.” Indeed, Amour is hardly a polemic. “The starting point was the suffering of someone I love very deeply, but it has nothing to do with the specificities of that case,” he said.

The promotional duties for Mr. Haneke will likely include a spin at the Oscars, where he was last nominated for Best Foreign Film in 2010. “Up until now, all the reactions I’ve heard are that people have been moved. It’s some comfort to them. That said, I can only base my judgment of its success on the people who come up to me,” Mr. Haneke said.

Yet despite the success of his past work and the universally comprehensible nature of Amour’s script, he had to fight to get the film made. “Every production company was afraid of making Amour,” he said of the film, which was a co-production between French, German and Austrian companies.

But he was undaunted. “I think fear is a good theme for art,” he said. “Fear is a good motivation.”

Huppert.

It’s always reassuring to see a nutty director go straight. Austria’s Michael Haneke is famous for his lurid, violent and thoroughly sick exercises in torture and sexual depravity. Wait a sec. Did I say famous? Only to the occasional film festival audience. The public has avoided him like a dose of swine flu. Who sat through a pair of homicidal maniacs slicing and dicing up a family in their summer vacation home on a deserted lake in Funny Games, a film he loved so much he made it twice? Or the sight of Isabelle Huppert in La Pianiste, making love to her mother before slicing off her own genitals with a razor blade? No, I’m afraid Mr. Haneke’s career has thus far existed only in the “asylum home movies” department.

All of that is about to change. Amour has set the critics drooling, this time for the right reasons. Beautifully acted, sensitively written and uncommonly refined, this delicate portrait of an elderly couple struggling with fate, mortality and immortal devotion breathes clarity and passion into the verboten subject of old age without the usual attendant sentimental soap opera clichés. This is due, in a large part, to the vibrant talents of two beloved veterans of classic French cinema—Jean-Louis Trintignant (memorable in Bertolucci’s The Conformist,among others) and the incandescent Emmanuelle Riva (of Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour). Probably neither of them ever thought they would live to see the day when their hair was gone and the apple wouldn’t bite. I’m so glad they hung in there. They’re worth waiting for.

They play Anne and Georges, a pair of octogenarian musicians who have been married for decades, their careers largely behind them but their future together in old age cloudless and optimistic. One night, they return home from a concert to find their apartment robbed and their privacy invaded. Anne is so unnerved by the intrusion that the next morning she suffers a small stroke that turns out to be the beginning of a physical and mental decline. Paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, she succumbs to her illness while Georges attempts to care for her at home. Each day presents a new challenge, as they deal with the evolution of senior surrender—immobility, dementia, incontinence. But no matter what cards they are dealt by the devils who nurse our universe, they cling to a love that might even resist death. The daily events in their lives are dramatized indirectly, not in bold strokes. The details of everything that defines them—from the furnishings that make their apartment as familiar as an old sweater to their passive relationship with their daughter (Haneke alumna Isabelle Huppert, in a guest appearance without razor blades)—carry out the director’s theme: that life is not about the big issues, but the sum total of the little things, like what we saved in the attic and the brand of cereal we ate for breakfast. The scenes, like the performances, are meted out quietly, in small, languid sips. Mr. Haneke’s screenplay, like his controlled direction, is lucid, without obvious overstatement. The performances are a miracle, as much about the aging of the two stars as the characters they play. Ms. Riva and Mr. Trintignant are fearless, hiding nothing from the camera. It’s a triumph of subtlety one doesn’t often see within today’s fast pace. As Anne slips sadly away, her private world turns intimate and remote. But love remains, even in the final resolution.

Old age affects us all, but at the movies it’s a subject that defies commercial success. So I have doubts about the box office future of Amour, but no reservations about its compassion and artistry. Even if it moves you to tears, the intelligence and humanity you will experience are worth the emotional stress. That doesn’t mean I want to see a lot of films about Alzheimer’s or that I will even like Michael Haneke’s next film. But don’t let Amour join the legion of “Best Films You Never Saw.” I urge you to share its sweetness and wisdom, and learn something.

rreed@observer.com

AMOUR

Running Time 127 minutes

Written and Directed by Michael Haneke

Starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert

Michael Haneke (Getty Images)

We try to make a point of never missing a Palme d’Or-winning film out of Cannes—we’re still confused by Terrence Malick’s dinosaurs from last year. And after seeing the most recent winner, Amour, at the New York Film Festival, we’re looking forward to meeting its director, Michael Haneke. Though the film has been deemed deeply distressing (as would be expected from a story of love in old age and declining health), the celebration at the home of gallerist Nathan Bernstein and documentarian Katharina Otto-Bernstein is all in good fun. Fellow guests include directors Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) and Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale), contemporaries of Mr. Haneke, albeit less grim in their practice. We’ll let our hair down at the party, but if the Austrian suggests any “funny games,” we’re beelining for the door.

Upper East Side, invitation only.