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

Uggie (Image Courtesy of Edelman)

Uggie, the dog star of The Artist, spent the day on which his film received 10 Oscar nominations on the observation deck of the Empire State Building after shooting a segment for Today. Eighty-six stories above ground, photographers took their shots as the dog stood on its hind legs, rolled on the ground, and—riskiest, perhaps, for a small Jack Russell terrier on a breezy day—rode a skateboard. He hadn’t had to skateboard in The Artist, in which he cavorts and shows off a cutie-pie personality that overshadows his human counterparts. "Work it!" shouted one photographer. "Over the shoulder!" True to form, not a single photographer felt they’d gotten enough from Uggie when they were escorted downstairs.

"Uggie was snubbed by the Oscars—how do you feel about that?" asked a reporter from 1010 WINS, whose assistant was so nauseated by the altitude that the interview had to be reshot, in exactly the same manner. Uggie’s trainer, Omar von Muller, was himself well-trained, and responded to each of the reporter’s questions patiently, including the question/statement, "Oooh, I just want to pet him!"

The Transom edged up to the safety railing to interrogate Mr. von Muller. "He knows that he’s getting a lot of attention," said Mr. von Muller, but the attention had not made training Uggie more difficult. "It’s always been part of his training, to socialize a lot."

At age 9, Uggie is getting up there in years—past credits include this year’s Water for Elephants (for which he received one of his two Golden Collar nominations this year) and Larry Clark’s Wassup Rockers. "He’s pretty much in his retirement," said Mr. von Muller. "I’ll let him do little things, but not long hours anymore." Uggie was snuffling gently in Mr. von Muller’s arms, asleep. We badly wanted to ask him how he’d gotten here and what he made of it all, but we already knew the answer. ("Woof!")

By the time we reached solid ground, Mr. von Muller was already setting Uggie up on a skateboard to the delight of passersby who knew him only as a cute dog.

Viola Davis (Getty Images)

Best Actress

In the past few weeks, this race--long led by Viola Davis--got a lot more interesting with Golden Globe wins for Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams. Ms. Williams's film may feel too slight, but she's gone on the PR offensive with an in-character GQ cover; Ms. Streep's film has its detractors, and she hasn't won an Oscar in many moviegoers' lifetimes (the Academy likes to nominate her and award a "buzzier" actress, generally speaking).

Best Cinematography

The Artist's black-and-white work is the category's greatest curio, but Hugo's camerawork was widely praised for bringing richness to too-often misused 3-D technology. This is also the only place, realistically speaking, where the Academy could award The Tree of Life for its vision of the beginning and end of life--one accomplished largely through Emmanuel Lubezki's work behind the camera.

Best Director

Whether or not The Artist has Best Picture sewn up, Martin Scorsese--honored in 2007 for his work on The Departed--has shown surprising strength this season for his so-called "love letter" to the cinema of his youth. It's the exact same narrative that accounts for the success of The Artist, with the crucial different of Mr. Scorsese's fame and reputation.

Best Makeup

No widely-nominated films are in this ever-scattershot category--will The Iron Lady team win for making Meryl Streep into Margaret Thatcher? (And does that discount the actress's own skill?) Will the Harry Potter series take a phrryic victory lap here? Will Albert Nobbs win for what we assume is good... make...up? (Still isn't playing in New York.)

Best Original Screenplay

In this category, Oscar has historically rewarded novelty and/or innovation (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Juno, Matt Damon). While Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris would seem to be in pole position, A Separation and Bridesmaids have their supporters (for radically different reasons). One winner elsewhere that may have trouble here? The Artist, which lacks for obvious reasons sparkling repartee.

Academy Award Nominee Rooney Mara

This morning, thousands upon tens of New Yorkers are realizing they have to go see Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, as that film was announced as one of nine Oscar Best Picture nominees.

Big surprises of the morning included that film's nomination for Best Picture, the inclusion of Best Actor nominees Demian Bichir and Gary Oldman, and the breadth of the Best Picture category, which found room for movies as different as War Horse and The Tree of Life after speculation tended towards the notion that there would be fewer nominees about which voters felt more strongly.

The predictions we got right? That Rooney Mara would take the place of Tilda Swinton in the Best Actress race, and that Albert Brooks would fall out of Best Supporting Actor--as well as the first five of those nine nominees. We didn't speculate on Best Animated Feature, speculating to ourselves that the field was a bit fallow, and with nominees including Chico and Rita and A Cat in Paris, we may have been right.

Hugo leads the race with 11 overall nominations, followed by heretofore perceived frontrunner The Artist with 10.

The nominations in top categories are below, and the full list of nominations is here.

Best Picture

The Artist; The Descendants; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; The Help; Hugo; Midnight in Paris; Moneyball; The Tree of Life; War Horse

Best Director

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris; Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist; Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life; Alexander Payne, The Descendants; Martin Scorsese, Hugo;

Best Actor:

Demian Bichir, A Better Life; George Clooney, The Descendants, Jean DuJardin, The Artist; Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Brad Pitt, Moneyball

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

Best Supporting Actor:

Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn; Jonah Hill, Moneyball; Nick Nolte, Warrior; Christopher Plummer, Beginners; Max Von Sydow, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Best Supporting Actress:

Bérénice Bejo, The Artist; Jessica Chastain, The Help; Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids; Octavia Spencer, The Help; Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs

Best Original Screenplay

The Artist; Bridesmaids; Margin Call; Midnight in Paris; A Separation

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Descendants; Hugo; The Ides of March; Moneyball; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best Animated Feature

A Cat In Paris; Chico and Rita; Kung Fu Panda 2; Puss in Boots; Rango

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.

Genuine class. (Getty Images)

Last night’s Golden Globes—which we covered live!—were notable for yet more star worship than even the perpetually star-worshipping Globes usually get up to, and most of the stars were of a somewhat aging vintage. Awards went to practically anyone who might have been on People’s Most Intriguing People of 1998 list: Steven Spielberg for Tintin over the makers of Rango, Madonna over Mary J. Blige, Meryl Streep over Viola Davis, Jessica Lange over Evan Rachel Wood, Matt LeBlanc over Johnny Galecki, Laura Dern over Zooey Deschanel, George Clooney uber alles. If this show was too self-consciously snarky to be a tribute to so-called “Old Hollywood,” it was at least a tribute to the period about fifteen years ago when the stars were bigger and shined brighter.

Host Ricky Gervais, who spent more time recounting his past comedic triumphs at this awards show than engaging in anything risky or new, joked about Johnny Depp’s career failures—then welcomed Mr. Depp to the stage, giving the show a feel less of a no-holds-barred slugfest that had been advertised and more of the world’s most loving Comedy Central roasts. Of all that could be said about winner/presenter/synecdoche of the evening’s nostalgic feeling Madonna, Mr. Gervais went with a “Like a Virgin” joke. She countered with a joke about her 2003 kiss with Britney Spears. The past, ladies and gentleman! Mr. Gervais saved his meanest material for Kim Kardashian, who’s an easy target for a roomful of movie stars trying to shore up their shrinking claim on cultural currency.

The evening’s big winners stuck close to the theme of navel-gazing, with George Clooney presenting a tribute to Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt presenting a tribute to George Clooney, Madonna citing Fellini and Godard as seminal influences, and Meryl Streep shouting the names of actresses she liked in lieu of a traditional speech. The evening’s big winner, the French film The Artist, gave the game away, dragging the film’s canine star onstage with the rest of the cast in an antic attempt to entertain, to make some statement about “movie magic.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

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!

Gossip columnist Liz Smith made her way through the dining room of the Monkey Bar on Monday afternoon, where Harvey Weinstein, Diane von Furstenberg and George Stevens, Jr. were hosting a promotional lunch on behalf of The Artist—the black-and-white silent movie that Mr. Weinstein is gently, persuasively shepherding toward an Academy Award for Best Picture—and surveyed the scene, perched side-saddle in a red leather booth. Ms. Smith, who is supposedly in her eighties, looked a few decades younger in a black leather jacket with white stitching from Carlisle.

She said she’d yet to see the film, an endearingly meta mash-note to Golden Age Hollywood, but admitted that her first-ever movie experience was also a silent picture. “Frozen Justice was the name of it, and it starred Lenore Ulric as a half-white, half-Eskimo girl who kept rushing between the igloos and the lights of Nome,” she noted with the astonishing recall of someone who  has written a best-selling memoir (Natural Blonde).

Ms. Smith was just four when she saw the movie, and growing up in Fort Worth, where the Tivoli Theater chain had yet to purchase the requisite equipment for talking pictures. “The movies were the ultimate babysitter, so the maid took me to see it, and I loved it, except when the dogs and the sled fell into a crack in the ice, and I started crying.”

You may have heard there’s a dog in The Artist, too, a Jack Russell terrier named Uggie, who has been ferociously guarding the spotlight like a juicy cut of brisket since his Cannes debut. It’s a task made easier by the fact that his costars, while highly talented, are, you know, from France—as the Coneheads used to say. Actually, Jean Dujardin is; Bérénice Bejo is Argentine. Both attended the luncheon, which was hosted by Dom Pérignon and featured a different vintage (’03, ’00, and ’96) with each course. Director Michel Hazanavicius also showed, as did half the cast of The Book of Mormon and an impressively ecumenical sitcom triumverate: Candice Bergen (Murphy Brown, CBS), Carol Kane (Taxi, ABC), and Dan Hedaya (Cheers, NBC).

Ms. von Furstenberg floated over.

“Well, hello beauty,” Ms. Smith said. “How’s my boyfriend? I sent him a picture of himself with hair.”

“Barry with hair?” replied the designer, who is married to mogul Barry Diller. “That must be a very old picture!”

“I said, ‘You see? You still look better than ever.’”

“I’ve known him 37 years. I’ve never seen him with hair.”

Ms. Smith hedged. “This wasn’t total hair, it was on the sides.”

Ms. von Furstenberg leaned in close. “I told him yesterday,” she said, “‘I’m hosting this event, do you want to come,’ and he said, Maybe. Is the dog coming?’”