Well the big night is here and I haven’t heard a word about it here, nor have I heard anything about an Oscar pool. I attribute it to Arnab’s exhaustion and the fact that the date has been moved up. Some predictions, no better or worse than Bill Murray’s. The Queen will be the suprise winner for Best Picture. why? It has broad appeal, i.e. is middlebrow enough for a general consensus, while the others are too specialized ( Little Miss Sunshine and Babel ), too alien Letters from Iwo Jima ) or too violent/cynical ( The Departed ). Scorsese will win the oscar for Best Director, though this film is the weakest of those he’s been nominated for. Pan’s Labyrinth will be the suprise total winner, getting awards for Best Foreign Film, Art Direction, Cinematography, Makeup and Original Score. It will,however, lose best screenplay to The Queen . Children of Men which should have been nominated for Best Picture will win only Best Adapted Screenplay. Babel gets shut out. The highly touted Dreamgirls wins for Hudson, Murphy and Best Song (it has 3 of the 5 nominations–please god let us not hear them all tonight). The main acting goes as expected–Mirren and Whitaker. Whitaker will give the most unusual speech and Ennio Morricone, winning the lifetime award, will charm as with his broken English, as those wacky foreigners do! Jokes will be….lame. Peter O’Toole will be there drunk and Nicholson will shout out something profane.