Oscars live blog on Sunday

Just a heads-up that I'll be live-blogging and—to the extent that I have any leftover quips—live-tweeting the Oscars on Sunday night, so tune into our site for off-the-cuff insights on the awards, likely laced with complaints about how dull the Oscars have gotten over the past decade but hopefully balanced with a little history and trivia. I won't be alone in this endeavor, naturally, but I will be in the presence of writers who are live-blogging for other sites, so Sunday's musings should make for a fascinating case study in how 21st-century media both breed and hinder sociability.

As my friend Phil Wallace, who launched a handy site that will help you organize your Oscar pool, noted the other day, the acting categories seem much more solidified than usual, with Jeff Bridges, Mo'Nique, Christoph Waltz and—for reasons I don't entirely comprehend—Sandra Bullock leading all of the major pundits' predictions. (I'm not exactly sure what that means, frankly, and I'm still miffed that Charlotte Gainsbourg and Tilda Swinton didn't get nominated for their career-best work in Antichrist and Julia, respectively. The voters bear the blame for not seeing those movies, despite the inevitable defenses about how neither film's distributor made a push at the beginning of awards season.)

But excitingly, and for the first time since the awards for 2006, Best Picture is a real tossup. Wisdom in the past would have led me to see Avatar as a shoo-in, but this year the Academy is using a ranked ballot with an elimination system, which should give an advantage to a film that has both broad support and individual passion. (Avatar, I suspect—and others have also reached this conclusion—is likely to be lower down on voters' ballots, as a film a lot of people liked but few people thought was the movie of the year.) That leaves room for my personal fave, Inglourious Basterds—this is the first time I've ever rooted for one of Harvey Weinstein's obnoxious awards campaigns—which has both passionate defenders and outraged detractors, but it's probably too divisive. In spite of its producer's boneheaded e-mail, The Hurt Locker probably still has the right mix of backing to take the grand prize, which would have seemed unthinkable when it played on the festival circuit in 2008. I reserve the right to change my mind until 7pm Sunday.