Mad Max: Fury Road</em>, the post-apocalyptic poster child for the improved Best Picture race.

Mocking the Oscars – or any made-for-TV awards spectacle with the fool’s errand of crowning the “best” in the arts – is a time-honored tradition. Sometimes it’s even important, as with last year’s backlash against the whiteness of that Academy Awards slate of Best Picture and acting nominees. (That paleness was a bit of an anomaly in recent times, as I’ll show in a bit.)

So let’s give the Academy its due: Expanding the Best Picture field – starting with 2009 movies – from five nominees to as many as 10 was a smart and ultimately necessary change with substantial benefits, no matter how you parse it.

Best Actor Daniel Day-LewisSeth MacFarlane, I thought, did a fine job hosting the 85th Academy Awards ceremony. He turned out to be a fine choice for the frequently thankless Oscar-emcee position, tossing in some fine jokes in between the generally fine production numbers and mostly fine acceptance speeches ... .

I'm sorry, but I am alone in thinking that last night's telecast, in the end, was just a little too "fine"?

Best Actress Meryl StreepThe first trophy handed out at the 2012 Academy Awards ceremony was for Best Cinematography, a prize that I predicted would go to The Tree of Life but that instead went to Hugo. (Seriously, after his undeserved losses for 2006's Children of Men and now the Terrence Malick film, exactly whom does Emmanuel Lubezki have to do to win an Oscar?) But that was actually my second incorrect assumption of the evening, because as soon as host Billy Crystal stepped on stage, I said to the others at my viewing party, "Here comes the standing ovation," and the audience - despite giving the man a warm reception - remained seated. Did the crowd have a collective premonition of just how spectacularly Crystal would bomb last night?

Before getting into what went wrong at last night's Academy Awards ceremony - and sadly, quite a bit went wrong - let's begin by addressing the one portion of the telecast that, for maybe the first time in Oscar history, went magically right.

[Author's note: In the 11 days since this article was first published, a number of generally reliable pre-Oscar-nomination indicators have seen the light, including the nominees for several guild awards and the British Academy of Film & Television Awards (BAFTA), and the overall mood of the rooms during the Critics Choice Awards and Golden Globes ceremonies. Consequently, with less than 40 hours to go before the Academy Awards nominations are announced, I've changed my official predictions in a number of categories. Let's see if I turn out to be smarter or stupider in the wake of my last-minute changes! My new picks, along with some commentary, will follow the originally published predictions.]

 

No novelty with a newly expanded field of 10 nominees for the big prize. No ex-spouses dueling for the Best Director trophy. No nutty, left-field Best Picture contenders along the lines of Star Trek and Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Hangover. Where's the fun in reading predictions about this year's field of Oscar nominees?

Why, in the possibility of Mike falling flat on his precognostic face, that's where!

Best Actress winner Sandra BullockAll told, I thought this year's Academy Awards telecast was awfully satisfying, and I'm not saying that because I predicted 18 out of 24 categories correctly.

Yup. 18 out of 24.

Tying my personal best.

And three of my incorrect guesses were in the short-film categories, where no one knows what the hell is going on.

But I digress.

Jeremy Renner in The Hurt LockerOkay, yes, we've been trying this for years. But this time, I think I've finally figured out how you can score 24 out of 24 in your office's annual Academy Awards pool.

Granted, I was in Illinois when I watched this morning's announcement of the 82nd Annual Academy Award nominees. But I'm still reasonably sure that, as Anne Hathaway finished reading the list of 10 Best Picture nominees, I could hear Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science President Sid Ganis sigh with relief - along with the Academy's Board of Governors, Oscar-telecast producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic, and everyone at ABC.

Jeremy Renner in The Hurt LockerA Best Picture slate for the Oscars with twice as many titles as usual? A female front-runner for the Best Director trophy? Not one, not two, but three science-fiction films potentially up for the big prize? What the hell is going on this year?!?

We'll know more when the nominees for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards are revealed on Tuesday, February 2. In the meantime, there's no harm -- although there is the possibility of an eventual loss of dignity -- in my making a few predictions... .

OscarsSeriously, by the end of Hugh Jackman's opening number during the 2009 Academy Awards telecast, did it even matter if the rest of the show was any good?

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