Oscar Index: They Shoot Horses, Don?t They?

What a week at Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics, where the pundits' hustle harmonized with the guilds' bustle to create a heavy-duty wake-up call for some otherwise dormant awards-season underdogs. They also telegraphed danger for a few juggernauts once thought unassailable. What does it all mean as we head into the Critics Choice and Golden Globe Awards weekend? To the Index!

Oscar Index: They Shoot Horses, Dont They?

The Leading 10:
1. The Artist
2. The Descendants
3. Midnight in Paris
4. The Help
5. Hugo
6. War Horse
7. Moneyball
8. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
9. The Tree of Life
10. Bridesmaids

Outsiders: The Ides of March; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Drive

The awards race always begins to feel a little more real around this time every year, when the New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review officially hand out their hardware, the guilds weigh in with their reliably precursory nominations, and the black-ops Oscar mercenaries hired to cut the competitions' throats are finally turned loose by their monied studio masters. No such barbarism will be necessary, apparently, for the foes of War Horse, which the Directors Guild, Writers Guild, American Society of Cinematographers and Art Directors Guild -- all containing valuable membership overlap with the Academy -- each ignored in their respective nomination announcements over the last week.

It was the bitchslap heard 'round Hollywood -- or at least around the awards punditocracy, where experts hastened to digest what on Earth happened to the mighty-turned-slight-y Steven Spielberg epic. "My own oft-repeated view is fact that anyone with a smidgen of taste or perspective knew from the get-go that Spielberg's film didn't have the internals that would make…

Source: http://www.celebrities.com/celebrities-gossip/oscar-index-they-shoot-horses-dont-they/

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