The first Gurus of Gold went up today, the pre-Toronto version, where a few folks take a stab at the fifteen most-likely. I found this especially difficult as I am not, nor have I ever been comfortable with, sight unseen predictions. Nonetheless, they, like Ryan’s reader polls, are interesting to look at after the fact. Notice how I’m dangling out there with A Serious Man, the Coen fan in me can’t help this. I also wish District 9 had gotten a little more love. And you all will happily gloat that I didn’t include Up on my list, though plenty of others did, kicking it into the top fifteen! So there you go. Here is how it went down — the top fifteen:
The Hurt Locker
Invictus
Nine
Up
Up in the Air
Precious
An Education
The Lovely Bones
Bright Star (I actually did add this to my list but too late perhaps)
A Serious Man
The Road
Amelia
Capitalism: A Love Story
Avatar
The Informant!
Inglourious Basters (I didn’t add it at the time – I probably would now)
Julie & Julia
District 9
Where the Wild Things Are
Star Trek
The Tree of Life
500 Days of Summer
The Fantastic Mr. Fox
There are also films that got one votes, like It’s Complicated (lol, Pete!), The Hangover, etc.¬† Jeff Wells at Hollywood-Elsewhere threw his own picks into the mix, and those are here. He added Tree of Life to the mix.
Then there are the Actor, Actress categories wherein you’re supposed to find a dark horse. All but two of them on the list are valid dark horses. But, sorry, neither Jeremy Renner nor Matt Damon can be considered as such: they are pretty much known potentials at this point. The rest of them, yeah. Sharlto Copley for District 9, Hal Holbrook for The Evening Son, Tobey Maguire for Brothers, Alfred Molina for An Education, Viggo Mortensen for The Road (maybe not a dark horse either actually), Liam Neeson for Chloe (my choice), Peter Sarsgaard for An Education, Paul Schneider for Bright Star and Michael Sheen for The Damned United (love that pick).
Actress would be Abbie Cornish for Bright Star, again, hardly a dark horse at this rate, Gabourey Sidibe for Precious, Robin Wright Penn for Pippa Lee (my choice), Catalina Saavedra for The Maid, Melanie Laurent for Inglourious Basterds, Carey Mulligan for An Education (you’ve got to be fricking kidding — dark horse? Dave Karger! Cough, frontrunner…), Natalie Portman for Brothers, Charlieze Theron for The Burning Plain and Shohreh Aghdashloo for The Stoning of Soraya M.
It would seem that some people are confused by the whole dark horse thing. It should be someone no one is really expecting to be in the race, no?