Cinema Connoisseur: Predictions for this year's most pretentious awards

It's the most exciting time of the year for movie lovers — it's Oscar time! The 79th Annual Academy Awards will be handed out on Sunday, February 25, and this year's ceremony has some big questions to answer — will Martin Scorsese finally win the big one? Can Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest capture the coveted Sound Mixing award? And what's the deal with Penélope Cruz's nose?

Being a Cinema Connoisseur, I thought I would take this opportunity to share with you my predictions on which films and individuals will be rewarded, and who will be left out in the cold, like a hobo waiting for the #7 train on a frigid January night. So here goes.

Best Picture
Nominees: Babel, The Departed, Letters From Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen

This is certainly an exciting group of candidates, and I'm sure you couldn't go wrong with giving any of them the Oscar. While I may not have actually seen any of these films, I have seen trailers for at least three of them, and intend on watching two of them, at some point in the indeterminate future. In a perfect world, the winner would be Snakes on a Plane, director David R. Ellis' sweeping epic exploring the state of air travel in our post-9/11 world. However, it is not a perfect world, so the award will go to The Queen.

Best Actor
Nominees: Leonardo DiCaprio (Blood Diamond), Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson), Peter O'Toole (Venus), Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness) and Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland)

This one is a tough call. Four former sitcom stars — DiCaprio (“Growing Pains”), Smith (“The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”), Gosling (“Breaker High”) and O'Toole (“Everybody Loves Raymond”) will battle it out, and if one of them is victorious, perhaps we could see such sitcom notables as Tony Danza, Dave Coulier and Alan Thicke land plum Oscar-worthy roles. If I were a betting man (and the hired goons who stopped by my home this weekend threatening to break my knees caps indicate that I am), I'd say Forest Whitaker, who unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of cousin Balki on another popular sitcom, “Perfect Strangers,” will be taking home the prize.

Best Actress
Nominees: Penélope Cruz (Volver), Judi Dench (Notes on a Scandal), Helen Mirren (The Queen), Meryl Streep (The Devil Wears Prada) and Kate Winslet (Little Children)

If you want to win an Oscar, you should land a role where you get to play someone who is famous, and also either old or dead. It doesn't get much more famous than the head of the royal family, Queen Elizabeth II, who having been born in 1926, also has the old requirement covered. Helen Mirren takes this one.

Best Supporting Actor
Nominees: Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine), Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children), Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond), Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls) and Mark Wahlberg (The Departed)

After years of headlining excellent yet underappreciated films such as The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps, Daddy Day Care and Pluto Nash, Eddie Murphy decided to take a supporting role, and this critic predicts it will pay off handsomely on Oscar night. He faces stiff competition from “Marky” Mark Wahlberg, but the Academy has in the past shown a reluctance to reward rappers turned actors. How else can you explain Anthony Hopkins (Silence of the Lambs) win over Vanilla Ice (Cool as Ice) in 1992? Murphy will take this one, and after watching a trailer for a delightful new film called Norbit, I suggest he could be winning a Best Actor trophy next year as well.

Best Supporting Actress
Nominees: Adriana Barraza (Babel). Cate Blanchett (Notes on a Scandal), Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine), Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls) and Rinko Kikuchi (Babel)

Jennifer Hudson wins this in a cakewalk. By the way, what the hell is a cakewalk anyways? Is it some sort of game where there are two teams, each with at least five players, competing to see which team can have all of it's members walk across a line without dropping a cake? If that is what it is, I would choose Rinko Kikuchi of Babel to do well in such an event. I'm not sure why I feel that way, I just do. But in this Oscar competition, it will be Hudson as the victor.

Best Director
Nominees: Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel), Martin Scorsese (The Departed), Clint Eastwood (Letters From Iwo Jima), Stephen Frears (The Queen) and Paul Greengrass (United 93)

This is a two horse race between Scorsese and Eastwood, and I am quite pleased about that. I am a huge fan of Eastwood. In fact I always thought if I could choose how I would want to die, I would want to do so in a gunfight with Clint. That changed once I did the math. Clint is now in his seventies, so I would likely have to die in my forties. So I now want to die as a result of a coma inducing beating from Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal. But I digress. Clint is fantastic, but so is Scorsese. A more impressive resume you will not find (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York), and I would be shocked if he didn't win this year.