Ever wonder how someone gets a 20 out of 24 score on Oscar predictions?  We here at Awards Daily do.  This year’s winner, Brandon Jones, tells us the secrets of his success:

AwardsDaily: What made you choose both Cotillard and Swinton?
BJ: Swinton, I think, gave one of the best performances of the past few years.  She is also an actress that is consistently good (and one of my favorites.)  I picked her because I had convinced my little brain that they wouldn’t let Michael Clayton go home empty handed.  It was such a good film, (I loved it) and it was critically well received.   Unfortunately, the film was always nominated in categories with heavy, heavy favorites.  Supp. Actress was the only category that had a window of opportunity.  And when she won the BAFTA, that sealed the deal.

I picked Cotillard because of Tilda Swinton.  She also gave an INSANELY amazing performance.  I had a strong hunch that the Oscars were going to mirror the BAFTAs in most ways (except for Picture.)  I think Marion’s reaction at the BAFTAs was too cute to pass up in the USA.  Also — for some oddball reason, I always think the Academy loves to have a “theme” for its voting.  I could be wrong — and have no true substantial evidence — but having 4 foreigners win seemed likely this year.  (I know Christie is a Brit but she lost to Marion at the BAFTAs and was also a previous winner.)

Do I sound crazy??
[AD: Are you kidding?  Not in a mil]

AD:  How did you go about making your choices?  Were they based on hunches or what?
BJ: I usually make my choices based on the Guild & Critic Award wins.  Also, based on hunches.  The Globes only come into play in my mind when it’s a tie breaker.  Other categories are based on a general consensus from critics.  I have no idea what differentiates a movie with great sound editing vs. a movie with good sound editing.

AD: Are you always a good Oscar predictor?
BJ: I generally fair pretty well.  Better than my friends — but that’s simply because I am obsessed.  It’s kind of embarrassing…ha ha.  Awards Daily is really a source for a lot of my predicting material.  (It’s my secret weapon for Oscar Pools.)  This year, however, I did win the movies.com Oscar contest as well.  And a few years ago finished in a close 2nd on that contest, too.

AD: Is this your best record?
BJ: This ties my best record.  The year of Million Dollar Baby, I got 20/24 but missed Best Pic and Best Director (I went with Aviator/Martin S.) .  But I consider this my best.  I generally score between 14-17, though.

AD: Have you entered our contest before?
BJ: Yes.  It is usually the first contest I enter during the year. so my scores have never been too good.  But I have to say it is my favorite contest to enter.

That’s what we like to hear!  You can take a gander at Brandon’s picks after the cut.

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-1ebhoYozY[/youtube]
A fan’s tribute to Terrence Malick

I’ve been following the slow-building saga of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life for a while now and there has been some definite movement in recent days. For one thing, Brad Pitt, who has replaced Heath Ledger, and fam have moved to Smithville, Texas, which locals are now calling “Pitville.” Austin 360 is keeping tabs on the production has found three YouTube videos of what looks like the 60,000 pound old oak tree they’ve chosen for the shoot. Production designer is Jack Fisk, cinematographer is Emmanuel Lubezki. Sean Penn also stars.

The notoriously private director is keeping things quiet for now but with Brad and Angie in town, something tells me it won’t be much of a secret for long.

There isn’t a good deal of information out there about Tree of Life, which is also written by Malick, but it is supposedly a project he began working on in the 1970s and looks to be a kind of sweeping epic of the evolution of mankind. You know, just a simple story.

Thanks to Ed for forwarding the last column by our pal Jack Matthews, who signs off his decades-long column to “write books and enjoy the view”:

When I began reviewing and seeing everything, I was warned by a veteran critic that for every movie that would inspire me, nine would drain my soul. I thought, “He just doesn’t like movies as much as I do.”

Some 6,000 screenings later, I’d say he had the ratio about right. But those exceptions – that “Pulp Fiction,” that “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” that “No Country for Old Men” – kept my glass half-full and the passion alive.

That passion has been with me since I was younger than those kids in Detroit, and I get as excited by movies now as then. But as I return to civilian filmgoing, I will be counting on other critics to do for me what I’ve tried to do for you: cut through the hype and publicity and tell me which films are actually worth seeing.

The forums ARE back online.

I don’t know if many caught the awkward moment where Diablo Cody snatched the winner’s envelope out of poor, stoned Harrison’s Ford’s hands as the actor was trying to console her or congratulate her or something – but Ms. Cody, wrecked with tears and a slit-to-the-hips dress, simply rebuffed Ford. Cody, it has been announced, will write a memoir about her trip from the midwest as she became a blogger, quit her marketing job to create the Diablo brand (blogger/stripper turned screenwriter). She will write about her experiences on the road to Oscars — something tells me Ms. Cody will have her revenge on the haters. ONTD posts the USA Today story:

Cody doodles again: Diablo Cody, who walked away with an Oscar for best original screenplay for Juno, has gone from critical and alternative darling to blogosphere-backlash bait overnight. Consider it juicy fodder for the stripper-turned-screenwriter’s next book. Cody, who flashed tattoos and a leopard-print gown at Sunday’s ceremony, will re-live her Hollywood triumphs — including Oscar night — in a new, untitled memoir due from Gotham in 2009. “It’s about a geeky girl from the Midwest who moves to Hollywood and her adventures writing screenplays,” says Gotham’s Beth Parker. This will be Cody’s second memoir. Her first, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper (Gotham, $14, paperback), recounted her days in a Minneapolis strip club.

I find the whole “Oscars through the eye of a hipster blogger” thing a little unsettling, I’m not sure why. It freaks me out. Maybe it’s just too close to home or maybe it’s really an “us and them” type situation. Either way, looking at Cody’s MySpace with her Oscar and her caption of the nominees labeled “nominizzles” is just so strange.

As Dave Lettermen observed, “I think it takes a lot of nerve for a show that is 4 1/2 hours long to give out an award for editing.” The most popular annual complaint about the Oscars is that the show lasts too long. The speedy pace of the SAG awards fit tightly in a two-hour time-slot, and they had time for just as many awards with nobody rudely rushed offstage before they had time say, “Thanks.” Personally, the length never bothers me. I’d be happy if the Oscars started right around noon and lasted till a couple of hours past midnight — like the Super Bowl seems to. And maybe there’s the key to the length question. Back in high school, weren’t football games played in a couple of hours? (Stop calling those time-outs and they could wrap it up an hour and 15 minutes, technically, right? Time-outs are for sissies. Get on with it! Run your asses off like the real men in soccer do. 90 minutes, tops.) So why does the Super Bowl need to last all damn day? Possibly something to do with the ad revenue of $2.5mil per 30-second spot, ya think? The Oscars bring in a little less, locked in at $1.8 mil, but that’s still plenty of incentive to pad the show in order to squeeze in as many plugs as possible for Big Macs and Cokes, L’Oreal and Amex, GM & M&M’s.

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Here with your Daily Dose of Diablo, is The Huffington Post, apparently just catching up to the “price of fame” angle that we’ve been talking about for the past 4 months. Seems like there’s a “backlash to the backlash” now, with a new wave of haters hating on the original haters, and all kinds of huffiness about selling out and cashing in. Which has everybody tittering and all aflutter since it’s never happened before in the history of Hollywood.

“She always seemed like a rebel, a social rebel who now seems to have cashed in and joined the club. And I think what we’re witnessing is resentment to that,” said O’Neil, who noted that Cody’s raunchy backstory likely proved irresistible to Hollywood types who don’t get a chance to show their bohemian, darker sides in public.

Except for the Smoking Gun (we should all look this good in our mugshots, Shia). Or MSNBC (how much more bohemian can you get than Johnny Depp?) Or on the red carpet (ok, maybe not bohemian, but it’s fun to watch). Publicity junkies wish they could whip up a dark side as playfully bohemian as Cody’s. Or maybe they just wish their pimps PR people worked half as hard as hers have. The Cinderella story now has a Ruby Slippers slant too, with some sort of brouhaha still simmering over a pair of million dollar shoes.

“They’re using me to publicize their stupid shoes and NOBODY ASKED ME,” wrote Cody, who ultimately wore gold flats. “I would never consent to a lame publicity stunt at a time when I already want to hide.”

“…but hell. since that horse already trotted out the barn door, I might as well straddle the sucker and ride him bareback for a piece longer,” she forgot to add (with a strangely Sheriff Bell syntax and accent).

In a couple of hours, I’ll post results of yesterday’s poll in some kind of semi-organized manner, complete with the pretty pie charts. It’s already easy to see which write-ins were most predominant. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Dark Knight were far and away the two summer movies you guys think might be poised to be this year’s Bourne Ultimatum. It might be fun to do a shorter and less elitist poll of movies we go see purely for the mindless thrill of it — films that sometimes manage to plumb surprising depths in the hands of skilled directors, writers and other craftsmen. Aside from the tentpoles just mentioned, what other big tent populist films are you most looking forward to this year? Your answers will determine the make-up of the poll. Iron Man, Speed Racer, Wall-E… you know, not the Indies, but the Indys of 2008.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-aTmzuw7FI[/youtube]

Seriously, watching Daniel Day Lewis in this video makes it painfully obvious that not only are Brits and Irish smarter than we Americans but we think they’re smarter and we treat them like royalty. Check out this interview with Day Lewis and how the reporters are almost afraid to ask him questions regular folk might be interested in hearing. Come on America! We’re not dumber than Europeans! We really arent. Are we? Maybe we are. Oh god, maybe we are.

(thanks, of course, to ONTD)

You know, I’ve never been one to defend the sometimes silly decisions AMPAS makes, but reading all of the post-game stuff is a bit tiresome. Yes, the show got the worst ratings ever. No, it wasn’t a great show. Yes, it was probably Plan B after all. Here is Patrick Goldstein giving his suggestions as to how to get more eyeballs to tune in:

Our family’s version of the Oscars, thanks to the magic of TiVo, didn’t drag a bit. If academy chieftain Sid Ganis is going to staunch the bleeding, he needs to put the telecast under the knife. Although I’m sure it will cause a firestorm inside the academy, the technical awards — sound editing, sound mixing, visual effects, makeup and costume design — have to go. No one outside of the academy wants to hear acceptance speeches from people they’ve never heard of, no matter how heartfelt. The Oscars may have once been a celebration of craft, but the world has changed. Today’s audience wants a horse race. The show is just bad TV.

From The Film Experience:

Maybe I love the split screen for the same reasons that everybody else loves sports and reality TV. The thrill of victory (solitary) and the agony of defeat (multiplied)

I find the actors generally boring when it comes to the split screen box… and the DVR shut off before Best Actor so I couldn’t look at the leading men again. Note to self: Always set the DVR to record the program AFTER the Oscars too. How could you forget? They always run over

In Supporting Actor Javier Bardem is the only one with any readable interesting emotion… so I’m not showing the whole box. Plus Jennifer Hudson killed the drama (it’s because she’s not really an actress) by reading the sentence like this

“and the Oscar goes to Jarvier Bardem”

WHERE WAS THE ELIPSIS? There has to be one or you kill the tiny quintupled drama. Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer. Do-Over.

“And the Oscar goes to … Javier Bardem”

See what a difference that makes. Make us wait. You have to have the elipsis!

Riffing off Kris Tapley’s early-bird predictions in the post below, how about we throw open a poll. Choose the Top 5 films you feel are most likely to make it through the process this year and be among the final nominees for Best Picture. Vote for only 5, please. I’ve expanded the list to include films you guys have already mentioned and added a couple of my own (Miracle of St Anna is the title of the Spike Lee WWII film). Feel free to suggest other titles that we’ve left out in the “write-in” box or in the comments, and if enough interest is generated then they’ll be added to the poll.

Kris Tapley thinks it’s never too early for Oscar predictions. Herewith, what he’s got for 2008:

[Motion Picture]
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
“Doubt”
“Frost/Nixon”
“Revolutionary Road”
“The Soloist”

[Directing]
David Fincher
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
Ron Howard
“Frost/Nixon”
Gus Van Sant
“Milk”
Sam Mendes
“Revolutionary Road”
Joe Wright
“The Soloist”

[Actor in a Leading Role]
Benicio Del Toro
“The Argentine”
Jamie Foxx
“The Soloist”
Frank Langella
“Frost/Nixon”
Sean Penn
“Milk”
Brad Pitt
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”

[Actress in a Leading Role]
Vera Farmiga
“Nothing But the Truth”
Angelina Jolie
“Changeling”
Julianne Moore
“Blindness”
Meryl Streep
“Doubt”
Kate Winslet
“Revolutionary Road”

The rest.

Reelzchannels is still doing their sweepstakes, featuring the world’s easiest questions, for a chance to win a trip to Hollywood (grand prize), a Blu-Ray disc player (first place), and twenty five more people get a gift bag of movie swag.  You have to play every day to up your luck.  Give it a whirl.