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Granted, the Academy had some trouble on the way while attempting to navigate the newfangled technology that is the internet, but the moment has arrived nonetheless: It's Oscar night. The 85th annual Hollywood self-celebration kicks off this evening at 8:30 p.m. EST, and while we can't actually predict who's going to win — and after Nate Silver has entered the game, why bother? — we can tell you who we think really deserves to take home the shiniest, baldest symbols of Hollywood popularity in all the major categories. Check out our picks in the gallery, share your own in the comments, and tune in tonight to see how reality measures up.
— Jason Michelitch Photo: Sony/Columbia Pictures
Best Movie: Zero Dark Thirty
Actually picking a "best movie" of a given year is a nonsense game. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; classics take time to reveal themselves, and there's no way of knowing for sure that the actual best film won't languish in obscurity, only to be discovered by grandkids who will scoff at our philistinism and ignorance. So the Best Picture Oscar isn't really about picking the best movie of the year. Instead, it's about finding a great movie that somehow speaks clearly and powerfully to the America of right now. A film that reflects or dictates a zeitgeist, that captures the moment, that shows us to ourselves with honesty and eloquence. For better or worse, Zero Dark Thirty is that film for 2012. Everything about Zero Dark Thirty is attuned to our consciousness as a people: the incredibly strange pace of our lives where our years feel condensed into minutes but seconds impatiently stretch to feel like hours; the obsessiveness with which we fixate on villains, icons, dramatizations of good and evil to distract ourselves from the cold, technocratic, self-perpetuating war of information and death surrounding us; the uncomfortable shifting sands of gender relations in our society of strong, successful women who nevertheless struggle through a sea of isolation, suspicion, and skewed expectations that they themselves are reluctant to admit exists. Bigelow and Boal's film unassumingly encompasses all of these issues, presenting them through deceptively lean storytelling and world-beating ensemble acting, planting ideas and questions in moments of strange ambiguity and tension. Argo may be how we appear to ourselves on the surface, but Zero Dark Thirty cuts through to the bone and pulls out the marrow, showing us what's really going on underneath. As upsetting as it may be to admit, this is the film of the moment, and the Best Picture of the year.— Jason Michelitch Photo: Sony/Columbia Pictures
