Until last night, Ms. Spencer's Wikipedia entry noted she was best known for her recurring role on Ugly Betty. Here she is talking about how she'll seduce her crush and imitating Mariah Carey:

Jean DuJardin, your Best Actor winner (Getty Images)

The Academy Awards are this Sunday--and we'll be liveblogging away at observer.com. So as to be optimally prepared for these mythical "Oscar pools" that exist only in the minds of entertainment writers, or at least to shout the winner a second before it happens, we've held the hive-mind of the Internet to our ear so as to decipher the buzz.

Here are your Oscar winners!

Best Picture: The Artist

We're not ruling out a more conventional win from the more-traditional and higher-grossing The Descendants, but it'd be a surprise given the success The Artist has enjoyed among critics and different guild awards so far.

Best Director: Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

It's not as though they're rushing to award this relative newcomer, but his opposition doesn't look credible enough to split Best Picture and Best Director. His toughest competition is Martin Scorsese, who already won this award recently and whose film is thematically similar to The Artist, if less well-loved.

Best Actor: Jean DuJardin, The Artist

Be real. Do you honestly think we live in a world where George Clooney will have won two Oscars for acting as early as this year? While his work in The Descendants was praised early on, we suspect some voters may be attracted to the fresh, new thing in this category.

Best Actress: Viola Davis, The Help

While Meryl Streep really will win in this category one of these years, Viola Davis's movie was an actual hit with audiences and with the Academy--and the weird, hinky truth is that an Academy member will likely feel more virtuous for rewarding a portrayal of a noble, suffering maid than a performance as a controversial political figure.

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, Beginners

One of two utterly dull supporting contests whose frontrunners have been ensconced since, like, November.

Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, The Help

The other.

Best Original Screenplay: Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

The perpetual notion that, if one wills it hard enough, a standard-issue Woody Allen film can be a true comeback picture, became a fixed idea this year. Everyone loves Woody again! This is where this movie gets rewarded.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, The Descendants

And this is where The Descendants, a popular movie with no real chance at other honors besides Actor, gets rewarded.

All the rest:

Best Animated Feature: Rango

Best Cinematography: The Tree of Life

Best Art Direction: Hugo

Best Costume Design: W.E. [we know, it's weird, but the Oscars really love films about the royals in this category]

Best Documentary Feature: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

Best Documentary Short: Incident in New Baghdad [on the shorts categories, one chooses the most portentous-sounding title, except for Best Animated Short, wherein one chooses the loopiest title]

Best Film Editing: The Artist

Best Foreign Language Film: A Separation (Iran)

Best Makeup: The Iron Lady [the fact that the makeup that turned Meryl Streep into Margaret Thatcher is likely to get its own award would seem to take away from the performance that did the same, no?]

Best Original Score: The Artist [the tempest-in-a-teapot over whether this film stole unduly from the score for Vertigo shall likely matter little, as the score blares through the entire running time]

Best Original Song: "Man or Muppet," The Muppets

Best Short Film (Animated): The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore [see the rationale for Documentary Short]

Best Short Film (Live-Action): Pentecost [see above]

Best Sound Editing: War Horse

Best Sound Mixing: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Best Visual Effects: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Viola Davis at the SAG Awards (Getty Images)

Last night's Screen Actors Guild Awards shook up the Oscar race insofar as it was able to be shaken up. Sure bets in the supporting categories Octavia Spencer (The Help) and Christopher Plummer (Beginners) cleaned up again, while frontrunning lead actors George Clooney (The Descendants) and Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) were dethroned.

The beneficiaries were Jean DuJardin, star of The Artist, and Viola Davis of The Help. Both Best Actor and Best Actress races remain occluded going into the Oscars. Mr. DuJardin's speech was charming but Benignivian in its loose grip on the English language, making him an uncompelling threat for the biggest trophy despite the fact that he's already won a Golden Globe. Ms. Davis's speech was brief and moving--dealing with her lifelong dream of acting and her late-in-life breakthrough--but may not be enough to push her ahead of Meryl Streep. (Ms. Davis, a friend and former castmate of Ms. Streep, paid her particular homage--she was inescapable even in her defeat.)

At the moment, Ms. Davis appears to be leading Harvey Weinstein's two candidates in the Best Actress field--Ms. Streep and Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn. Mr. Weinstein has little about which to worry--Mr. DuJardin's victory means that even if he can't top George Clooney, the Weinstein Company film in which he stars, The Artist, is stronger than can be fathomed. The Help's win for Best Ensemble poses little threat there.

Michelle Williams--who will be nominated. Who else will join her? (Getty Images)

Tomorrow morning will bring that early-morning announcement of this year's Oscar nominees--with the attention-desperate wrinkle that no one knows how many nominees there will be. Herewith, our predictions, for last-minute entries into your office pool (if yours is the sort of office at which Oscar nominations are the subject of a pool. Ours is not, which is why we're writing a blog post).

Best Picture

The Artist

The Descendants

The Help

Hugo

Midnight in Paris

We know any number of films between five and ten can be nominated for Best Picture, but with The Artist and The Descendants sucking up so much oxygen and so many first-place votes, it's easy to imagine no sixth choice gathering enough steam. The likely sixth entry, if there is one, would be Moneyball--but aren't many of those voters who love "adult dramas" more likely to vote in the buzzier Descendants first?

Best Director

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

Alexander Payne, The Descendants

Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Mr. Allen, Mr. Scorsese, and Mr. Hazanavicius are clear locks, and Mr. Payne will get in on the strength of his film's reputation. For the fifth spot, Mr. Fincher and Steven Spielberg seem the likeliest (The Help's debut director, Tate Taylor, did not particularly distinguish himself), but the total fade of War Horse's repute gives the advantage to Mr. Fincher for what would be his third nomination in four years.

Best Actor

George Clooney, The Descendants

Jean DuJardin, The Artist

Michael Fassbender, Shame

Ryan Gosling, The Ides of March

Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Leonardo DiCaprio has been nominated for all manner of precursor awards for his role in J. Edgar, but that movie's disappeared from theaters and from the minds of viewers who've seen many, many better movies by now (J. Edgar really is uniquely terrible). Anyone who loves biographical films about controversial figures gets to vote one in with Meryl Streep in Best Actress--and the surprise nominee might be Ryan Gosling, who does nothing too special in The Ides of March but who'd be a big enough star to stand alongside Mr. Clooney and Mr. Pitt.

Best Actress

Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs

Viola Davis, The Help

Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn

Ms. Streep, Ms. Davis, and Ms. Williams have all won early awards, and Ms. Close helped produce her own movie, in which she plays a traditionally bait-y role as a female impersonating a male. The notion that four people in Oscar-bait roles would be joined by Tilda Swinton in the avant-garde We Need to Talk About Kevin stretches credulity--silent for long stretches and chronologically disjointed, this doesn't seem like the sort of role that gets an actress to the Kodak. The narrative around Rooney Mara--plucked out of nowhere in the most extensive casting search since Scarlett O'Hara--seems to coalesce towards a surprise nomination.

Best Supporting Actor

Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn

Armie Hammer, J. Edgar

Jonah Hill, Moneyball

Nick Nolte, Warrior

Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Mr. Plummer is so far ahead here that the rest of the nominees seem plucked from thin air--an impersonation of Lawrence Olivier? Sure! A fairly quiet turn by a popular comic? Definitely! An attempt at a comeback in a movie no one saw? Okay! Armie Hammer's nomination seems the least likely, but the energy he brought to J. Edgar could make him the one element of the film they nominate.

Best Supporting Actress

Bérénice Bejo, The Artist

Jessica Chastain, The Help

Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids

Octavia Spencer, The Help

Shailene Woodley, The Descendants

Three movies with huge amounts of apparent support carry their supporting stars towards a nomination, with the addition of Melissa McCarthy, taking the spot that some believe might have gone to Janet McTeer in the little-seen Albert Nobbs.

Best Original Screenplay

50/50

The Artist

Bridesmaids

Midnight in Paris

Young Adult

This category seems fairly open--besides the two Best Picture nominees, the three other top entries are not traditionally Oscar-y comedies. The Writers' Guild of America nominated Win Win, a sort-of comedy also, here, but that movie seems even less up Oscar's alley than Young Adult, a movie in which past winner Diablo Cody deals with her relationship with fame.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Descendants

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Help

Hugo

Moneyball

This category, on the other hand, has the real heat--it's hard to imagine anything sneaking into a set of screenplays this popular. It's also one of the few categories with true suspense as to the winner--because the real speculation only begins on Tuesday.

Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes (Getty Images)

Welcome to New York Observer's Golden Globe coverage of the 2012, where you'll be able to read (and participate!) in real time as Drew Grant and Dan D'Addario take bets on which acclaimed actor will be the first to slap that lopsided grin right off Ricky Gervais' face. Let the fun begin!

Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in 'The Help.'

If fried chicken were really as restorative as the new movie The Help seems to think, Jim Crow laws probably wouldn’t have originated in the South. But in the world of Kathryn Stockett’s novel (and now film), Southern stereotypes are given a retro, glossy sheen, and ingrained racial tension can be resolved by a plucky white debutante’s first novel.

In the real world, the chances of an earnest deb resolving the racial tensions in 1960s Jackson, Miss., with her first writing project would have been pretty slim. But if you can suspend your disbelief that a cute 22 year-old had the power to succeed with civil rights where Martin Luther King and President Kennedy failed, The Help actually has a lot to offer.

Ms. Stockett’s story follows Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), a recent graduate of Ole Miss who returns to her hometown of Jackson to find that her girlfriends have calcified into terrible approximations of their mothers. They’ve been raised by strong black women, but instead of appreciating that work, they are now employing (and mistreating) those same women in their own homes.

The ringleader of this group is Miss Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard), who prances around town spearheading a disturbing initiative to get white families to build separate toilets outside their homes for “the help.”

Disgusted by her peers’s racism, Skeeter decides to publish the stories of some of her friends’ maids in an effort to jumpstart her journalism career and try to achieve some justice for these women.

Inserting a white woman into these maids’ stories is a strange rhetorical trick, which is partly why Ms. Stockett’s novel earned plenty of critics when it debuted in 2009. But that didn’t slow its rise up the best-sellers list, or get in the way of wooing a stellar cast (despite the fact that director Tate Taylor only has one feature under his belt and got the rights because he is a childhood friend of Ms. Stocketts).

And the uneven racial terrain of the film likely won’t stand in the way of multiple nominations for some truly outstanding performances throughout the movie. Unfortunately, Ms. Stone’s is not one of them. It’s not entirely her fault. There is something incredibly unsettling about needing a white socialite narrator to tell the story of abused black women, and Emma Stone does not possess the acting nuance to pull it off. In The Help the sexy, raspy voice and adorable delivery that served her well in light teen films like Easy A and Superbad just aren’t enough. She’s in far over her head here, and so are the many young women who prance around the screen like they’re trying on their mother’s vintage clothes with just a dash of period-piece racism added to the look.

More powerful is how well Viola Davis (as Aibileen Clark) and Octavia Spencer (as Minny Jackson) take to their roles as maids who endure the difficulties of growing up black and poor in the South.

It’s hard to avoid falling into stereotypes when playing such a stock character type, but Ms. Davis and Ms. Spencer expertly draw Aibileen and Minny as smart, agile women struggling to survive in a culture pit against them. Their wisdom and cooking skills may be mystically overdrawn, but these women can make you believe anything. Only Cicely Tyson borders on mammyism as the elderly maid who raised Skeeter, but she brings a strong emotive tug into each of her short scenes.

In general, the older actresses fair better than their younger counterparts. Sissy Spacek has a blast as Miss Hilly’s mother, who often uses bouts of Alzheimer’s to her advantage. And Allison Janney does her best as Skeeter’s thinly drawn mother. Jessica Chastain is the only young actress who manages to own her character, instilling a bombshell trophy wife with humor and depth.

In contrast, Ms. Stone has been given some strange direction to play up her awkward side. She uncomfortably bounces through scenes in a series of improbably awful wigs, and the character of Skeeter often appears naïve to the point of undermining her own efforts.

Which might actually be the most optimistic thing about The Help. Maybe next time these black actresses won’t need a white narrator to get their films made.

Running time 137 minutes

Written and directed by
Tate Taylor

Starring Emma Stone,
Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer

2/4

editorial@observer.com