Awards season is by far the best time of year for a movie fan. Not only is it an opportunity to see stars and directors in their finest, it’s an opportunity to experience the best (popular) movies of 2009.

My first experience with Oscar was in 2005. Being an overly overt fan of Finding Neverland, I would slam front runner Million Dollar Baby amongst friends and family. Of course after seeing Million Dollar Baby, I admit my narrow mindedness as it is a far superior film.

This morning, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released the nominations for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards. I will try to pilot the major categories as best as I can to give an idea of what to expect on March 7th, 2010.

Best Picture

It is hard to gauge where voters will steer this ship. In an unexpected move, the Academy moved the nominee number to 10 this year. This pegs for a wide variety of material and target audience. Avatar and Inglorious Basterds should get pre-hype as they have captured other organization awards. Avatar took home the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama while Basterds received the Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture award from the Screen Actors Guild. In order to round out the top five, I would bet on The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air, and The Blind Side being favorites.

On to who will win. As Hollywood loves money, Avatar would be the best pick. But as history shows, Hollywood doesn’t always love the hype (a la Brokeback Mountain). Avatar isn’t a great movie (it isn’t really even good) therefore I believe the field is open. A quirky comedy like Up in the Air could finally bring home an Oscar for Jason Reitman (missed on Juno and snubbed on Thank You For Smoking). The Hurt Lockercould potentially be this years Crash, an indie drama about bomb technicians in Iraq. The Blind Side has be known to be a motivating, tear jerking drama that showed the acting chops of notoriously bad Sandra Bullock. Even the animated (lovely) favorite from Pixar, Up, could potentially garner enough voters.

Who will win: I believe Hollywood rewards Avatar as it is the most popular choice

Who should win: Up in the Air or Inglorious Basterds were phenom films of 2009.

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Subcategories are much easier to predict as the field is generally narrowed to four or five. Jeremy Renner was wonderful to watch in The Hurt Locker, a gung-ho American bomb technician in Iraq (although I couldn’t help draw comparisons to his military portrayal in 28 Weeks Later). Morgan Freeman was bland in Ivictus and for further explanation, my review of the movie can be found on this blog. I haven’t seen A Single Man (Colin Firth) and George Clooney (Up in the Air) is always the Oscar darling (received nominations in 2006 and 2007). With the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG) as guidance, I believe it is safe to put money on Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart. Yes, I believe The Dude, Bridges character in The Big Lebowski, will win come March 7th.

Who Will Win: Jeff Bridges

Who Should Win: George Clooney. I haven’t seen Crazy Heart but Clooney was enjoyable in Up in the Air.

Best Actress in a Leading Role

It is a rarity to find an award that Meryl Streep is nominated for and not expected to win. Sandra Bullock’s sweep of the Golden Globe and SAG categories should propel her to Oscar stardom. I don’t believe Carey Mulligan will capture enough voters for her An Education performance and while Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) might be too fresh (first motion picture role) for the award. While Helen Mirren was rewarded for her role in The Queen, Bullock will prevail.

Who Will Win: Unfortunately, Keanu’s sidekick (Speed) will win this year.

Who Should Win: Probably Sandra Bullock. I haven’t seen The Blind Side and I will refrain from knocking it too hard, but it’s Sandra Bullock.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

The Lovely Bones failed to capture the hype it had a year ago. Peter Jackson’s followup to King Kong won’t bring him the record love LOTR: Return of the King did. I predict then that Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones) will rest at the bottom with Woody Harrelson (The Messenger) and Christopher Plummer (The Last Station). While Matt Damon was inspiring in Invictus, it’s still Invictus. All signals point to Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds. Speaking four languages while taking on the controversial role of a rewarded Nazi SS was magnificent.

Who Will Win: Christoph Waltz

Who Should Win: No one other than Christoph Waltz

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

This category is a bit more muddled than Best Actress. The leading ladies of Up in the Air (Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick) will probably cancel each other out. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s nod was greeted as a surprise and that leaves Penelope Cruz (Nine) and Mo’nique (Precious) as the frontrunners. The Academy does like musicals which could propel Ms. Cruz above Mo’nique but, I expect that Mo’nique ultimately wins as she took home both Golden Globe and SAG awards.

Who Will Win: Mo’nique

Who Should Win: After staring in Phat Girlz and Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School, this is an unexpected turnaround.

Best Animated Feature Film

I enjoyed Fantastic Mr. Fox and the return to 2D animation by Disney was welcomed with The Princess and the Frog, an Up upset would be shocking.

Who Will Win: Up

Who Should Win: Up…again

Best Original Screenplay

This category should be decided between The Hurt Locker (Mark Boal) and Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino). Up deserves the recognition and any Coen Bros. work (A Serious Man) is sure to not disappoint. Rounding out the category is Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman for The Messenger. All in all, this one could go anywhere.

Who Will Win: I will go out on a limb and say Up. Moving and popular, this touched all ages.

Who Should Win: I enjoyed Hurt Locker but much of the movie was placed on acting and I believe the vulgarity of Inglorious Basterds might drive a few voters away.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner will almost surely win this category for their work in Up in the Air. Although An Education and Precious could prove to be dark horses, I suspect District 9 and In the Loop to provide little competion

Who Will Win: Up in the Air

Who Should WIn: Up in the Air

Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron

Best Director

Interestingly enough James Cameron (Avatar) and Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) were former lovebirds. I believe Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) will be rewarded for screenplay instead of directing and Tarantino (Basterds) and Lee Daniels (Precious) should be on the outside looking in.

Who Will Win: James Cameron if voters want to see another “I’m the king of the world” proclamation (see Cameron’s Oscar acceptance speech for Titanic) or Bigelow if voters want to pick someone deserving of the award.

Who Should Win: Kathryn Bigelow

Odds and Ends

Since I have hit all of the major categories, I will offer some minor predictions for the smaller awards. I suspect Avatar to sweep Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects. Sound mixing will likely be between Avatar and The Hurt Locker. Up and Avatar will compete for Best Original Score and I suspect Best Sound Mixing will be another dog fight between The Hurt Locker and Avatar.

It almost felt like I had entered an alternate reality when I read that certain retailers in the UK and Netherlands were actually refusing to sell Sony’s new PSP-Go handheld gaming system. It was like I had stepped into Bizzaro World, a world where Dane Cook was actually funny, Papa Roach actually wrote wholesome worthwhile music, and people got thin by eating potato chips. Alas, it was the same wailing tones of Papa Roach and the sickening feel of the chips I was eating that brought me back to reality.

Chances are, if you have a X-Box 360 or a PS3, you are likely to have encountered their respective online marketplaces, the X-Box Live Arcade and the PSN – where you can find smaller, more casual games and downloadable addons and expansions at cheaper prices than retail. Chances are if you’ve done PC gaming in the last few years you’ve also encountered Steam, the downloadable PC game marketplace and content manager by Valve – with games, guess again, at cheaper prices than you would find at retail (or find at retail at all, given some outlets’ decisions to not stock many PC games). And if you’ve bought a game from one of these platforms, then congratulations! You’ve joined the thousands that are discovering the DLC (Downloadable Content).

Already, even full-scale game are making it onto online marketplaces. EA re-released their racer, Burnout Paradise onto the PSN and X-box Live Arcade and saw great sales. Console games in a more casual or indie niche have also found succor in these marketplaces – it can be seen by some downloadable games that are now popular on the consoles, such as Fat Princess, Castle Crashers, flOw, Mega Man 8, and Braid. For many in the PC gaming world, Steam has been touted as the savior of the PC as a gaming platform, revitalizing interest in PC gaming and letting smaller developers have access to the marketplace without having to worry about marginalized retail sales.

Is this method becoming prevalent? Not quite. For most console games retail is still where most of the sales are being made.  But it’s earned itself a niche, and gamers who know what these marketplaces can offer are flocking to them to find new products. If you can plug your console into the internet – even on wireless – you can find what these places have to offer. Larger game developers aren’t as keen, but those who develop for multiple platforms are still oft to sell their PC versions on Steam, recognizing the power it has.

So let’s get back to the PSP-Go and see the other impact of this disputed and tenuous march towards a possible DLC age. The PSP-Go is a new take on the Playstation Portable handheld device – it does not use the UMD format (mini-discs for games and movies) that other PSP models use. Instead, it is Sony’s experiment to create a handheld platform that downloads material exclusively from PSN, allowing you to play your purchased titles anywhere. Among gamers, the main argument is that many already have numerous games on UMD. Others point to the ridiculous price tag – $250 US – as a reason not to invest in it.

However, if you followed my links earlier, you’ll find that the retailers have a very different reason why they are refusing to stock the PSP-Go – and it’s not to give “Power to the Players” (maybe need to find a trademark symbol or link for this – this is Gamestop’s new ad phrase). The retailers refusing to stock the PSP-Go don’t want to sell it because it doesn’t encourage consumers to come back to their store to buy UMDs – why would they if everything is online?

This is perhaps the more insidious and dangerous implication of a move towards a disc-free gaming universe – retailer backlash. Why sell a console that when you can’t sell the games that come with it?

Of course, retailers only have themselves to blame if this is a key reason why some manufacturers try to move away from retail and into DLC – after all, it’s the new, disturbing trend among retailers of trading in games and marking them up for retail again and cutting publishers out of the used product profit (a practice popularized by EB Games/Gamestop that has to date cheated developers, producers, and publishers out of millions of dollars in potential sales) that is causing the people who actually make the video games to question why they need to go to them when there are different market choices now available to the consumers. For god sake, even Toys-R-Us is doing trade-ins and used sales now.

Thankfully, the trend with the PSP-Go is not universal, and even a pawn shop like Gamestop is still stocking the product.  But imagine if Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo tried to sell a full-sized console with DLC only for their “next-gen” product. Would the same thing happen? (Fun fact: there is a company developing a console just like that, with a 3G-based DLC management system, but it is being focused in non-North American markets. If you have some free time look up the Zeebo)

Perhaps it’s a case of “too good too soon.” The market is definitely moving towards DLC, but when we as consumers will be ready to accept it is a very different story. And when the consumer accepts the format, the retailers will have to.

August flew by pretty quickly, but bear with me. Where was Ozzy Osbourne performing in August?

If your answer wasn’t Blizzcon, then you’re wrong, and try again.
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By Nick White

Wii would like to provide you with another chance to view Nintendo as something only for children and adults with sick Princess fantasiesAllow me to preface: I do not own a Wii, nor do I play one on a highly frequent basis. Both of these can be justified by the fact that the Wii’s pricing point, when compared with the game selection, is simply not reasonable. Before I buy a console, I have to be able to mentally list off fifteen games I know I cannot get on a system I already own, that stand a reasonably good chance of staying exclusive titles. This, in turn, is why the Wii has been a problematic buy for the hardcore gamer audience, in addition, in a multiplatform universe, the Wii is often underwhelmed button-wise to handle control schemes of more “button demanding” titles, and has to result to gestures commonly utilized to signal ships via a system of flags back in 1800s. This is where the Wii could have developed a niche in the market, in the realm of intuitive controls. Instead, they induce carpal-tunnel, and generally result with a Wiimote embedded in one’s television.

It can’t compete visually or control-wise, and so, by definition, the only games that tend to fare well on the Wii are those that are custom developed as an exclusive Wii title. Again, one would be inclined to believe that when working with a laid-back set of hardware that many employees were already quite familiar with from the previous generation, this would encourage developers that wanted to lower their development costs to develop games for the Wii. Instead, developers saw the Wii as a veritable “dumping ground,” a place to “recycle” games of the past generation by porting them to the Wii, without any optimization for the Wii’s (while limited) increased capabilities, either in the controls or visuals department. There will be exceptions, like Okami or Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, but for the most part, this holds true.

If you played it on the Gamecube, you’ve got a lot of bonus conent and a completely new satisifying way to play it here. If you didn’t play it on the Gamecube, wellcome to civilization, consider this your passport.Of course, the natural intuitive response is to play the blame game. Just who is culpable for this scenario? While most hasten to blame the developers, or Nintendo themselves, I’d first point the finger at the marketing team of Nintendo, as well as the public. There is no denying that Nintendo has repeatedly marketed the Wii as a system that is played as a family, as their initial advertising campaign clearly demonstrated. Two Japanese men show up at the quaintly suburban home, suggest that “Wii would like to play” and are invited in, to demonstrate to the non-threatening white family just how much clean wholesome fun can be had on the Wii. We’ve (pardon the pun) all seen such an ad. Perhaps this can be contributed to Nintendo’s launch titles, which have never really incorporated more than one or two “Mature” games. Due to such, they’ve always “set the stage” for each system as another “safe” buy for parents, only to have to sporadically defend this image as Mature games went through the production cycle.

Now, let me be clear, there is not a 1:1 understanding between Mature games and hardcore games. Titles like World of Goo and Braid clearly demonstrate that a game can be hardcore without utilizing the tropes that a mature game generally does. But, for the most part, this tends to be the case. Consequently, game developers are afraid to release more “hardcore” titles on the Wii, they tend to not sell well, and frequently are admonished for placing a “profane-laden” title on the doorstep of Mario and the Princess. Someone needs to get the message to the public that the Wii is no different than any other gaming console: it sells games for varying age groups and demographics, and it is the parent’s job to display the basic understanding of the alphabet to discern whether or not the child should be playing the game. Parents are inherently lazy however; they assume that in selecting the Wii as their console, that Nintendo will do the rest to make sure their kid has a 0% chance of encountering something objectionable. But that’s not Nintendo’s job, to be a digital babysitter for today’s youth. The Wii should not be scared into pigeonholing itself to the pre-teen or “bingo and bedsores” demographics. Sony brought us God of War and Killzone, but also Crash Bandicoot and Katamari Damacy. We don’t see anyone calling them out on this theoretical act of hypocracy.

However, a few brave souls have ventured to provide Wii owners with exclusive titles that are genuinely good, but perhaps don’t have the marketing bucks or mass appeal of Wii Sports. Then again, what does? This doesn’t excuse the fact that games like the wonderful port (to call it a “port” is a disservice to the title, perhaps “reimagining” is more appropriate) of Okami, or the recent entry in the Fire Emblem series should have to fight to crack a half million sales worldwide. Hardcore gamers may complain and bemoan about the relative lack of “hardcore” games, but when given the chance to “vote with their dollars” they’ve abstained. This is why No More Heros, Suda51’s masterpiece of meta-gaming criticism couldn’t even sell four-tenths of a million copies, or why Steven Spielberg’s Boom Blox was left straining to sell a million copies. Even a new entry in the Resident Evil series, The Umbrella Chronicles, which attempted to capitalize on the “light-gun” capabilities of the Wiimote, was barely able to reach 1.5 million copies sold. These are numbers that the decidedly “above average” Army of Two and Perfect Dark Zero were capable of on the Xbox 360.

People, this looks beautiful. Yes, it’s violent, I get that. Just wait until your kids are asleep to play it. Set their bedtime earlier if you can’t wait.Perhaps Wii gamers don’t realize that passing up every one of these in apathy, and waiting for the next dyed-in-the-wool Nintendo mascot game is intrinsically damaging to the system. For every title that fails to sell (many of these do fine becoming critical darlings, mind you) it sends a message to the developer that creating Wii games that don’t follow the exploits of plumbers with high blood pressure or a mute sexually androgynous protagonist with a green windsock for a hat, is a waste. It tells the publisher that investing in developers with these interests is unprofitable. It tells Nintendo that, despite whatever cross-demographic plans they might have had in mind, adhering to the model that the abovementioned individuals have doctored up for them, is the only way to survive.

To those who want to see a revival of the utopia that was the Super Nintendo era, BUY House of the Dead: Overkill or Madworld, or The Conduit. Send the message that these games can sell on the Wii. People need to realize that if these games were on the Xbox 360 or PS3, none of this “killing simulator” talk, or complaints of excessive violence would be levied. But until these games can sell well, and provide a foothold for Nintendo as a company to cater to the hardcore gamer once more, they will be forced to cater to their only other stable user base: Wii Fit users and Mario fans. Hurry! before all that’s left is the Mario Party series and Wii Bowling: The Sequel.

White is the author of A Vastly Ironic Life, which covers the gaming industry and game culture