The Second Gurus Chart Goes Up

Here it is, folks.

A couple of mistakes on my list РAn Education is not on the Best Pic list and Julie & Julia is. Definitely swap the two. I think Julie & Julia is a dark horse. But who knows what I was thinking when I compiled mine to exclude An Education. Thanks to Dominik for pointing it out. Seriously, what good am I, as Bob Dylan would say. To make matters worse,  I had forgotten to add Morgan Freeman on my Best Actor list and I do think he is going to be nominated Рso please disregard his absence from my list.

Here is how it looks now:

1. Colin Firth
2. George Clooney
3. Jeremy Renner
4. Viggo Mortensen
5. Matt Damon

These five have all been seen either by me or by groups of people. Morgan Freeman is still in the unseen category so it’s hard to think of him as winning the race already. On the other hand, this could be Freeman’s best and most powerful role. So keeping an open mind here but take it all, as always, with a grain of salt.

By the Gurus list, the top ten for Best Pic right now looks like this:

1. Up in the Air
2. Precious
3. The Hurt Locker
4. Invictus
5. An Education
6. Up
7. Nine
8. The Lovely Bones
9. Inglourious Basterds
10. A Serious Man

Avatar is next, at 11. Let’s do a little Gurus digging and analysis after the cut.

Last year, the earliest Gurus chart I could find was November 18, 2008. That is a couple of weeks from now, and a lot can happen in a couple of weeks. At that time, here is how it looked:

1. Slumdog Millionaire
2. Benjamin Button
3. Milk
4. Frost/Nixon
5. Revolutionary Road

Only one film was replaced off of this list. Funnily enough, though, the following week, Slumdog and Button had flipped.

Going back to 2007, in early November, more like now, it looked like this:

1. Atonement
2. No Country for Old Men
3. American Gangster
4. Charlie Wilson’s War
5. There Will Be Blood

Michael Clayton was number 6, Juno was trailing at 9.

Going back to 2006, we don’t have an early November chart, just a late one. It looked like this:

Dreamgirls
The Departed
The Queen
Babel
Little Miss Sunshine

So only Dreamgirls turned out to be wrong. Going back to November 2005, it looked like this:

1. Brokeback Mountain
2. Munich
3. Walk the Line
4. Memoirs of a Geisha
5. Good Night, Good Luck

I think this is a funny year because only one Guru, Jeff Wells, had Crash on his list. Kris Tapley had it at number 6.