What if there were 5 Best Picture nominees?

When the Academy announced back in June that it’s including 10 Best Picture nominees this year, one of the things I thought about was whether, once the nominees were announced, it would be obvious which five films would have been nominated in a typical year and which five were the “extra” nominees. Well, now that I’ve worked up my Oscar-nomination predictions (which will appear in this week’s issue of EW as well as on this blog tomorrow morning), I’m thinking the answer to that question is a resounding yes. If there were only five Best Picture slots, wouldn’t they go to Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, and Up in the Air? Those five seem way ahead of the competition at the moment, while there are probably nine or so films (District 9, An Education, Invictus, It’s Complicated, The Messenger, Nine, A Serious Man, Star Trek, and Up) that are jockeying for the other five slots but would have had a hard time bumping out any of my “top five.”

What do you think? Am I overestimating or underestimating any of these contenders? Which five films would you predict if the Academy were using last year’s rules? And isn’t it a bit ironic, given that the super-size race was meant to include more audience-friendly films in the mix, that Avatar would easily be nominated even with half the slots?

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Image credit: François Duhamel