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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! 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 it go all the way,” wrote Jeffrey Wells. Sasha Stone posed a related theory : “All of the Oscar bluster around it was self-generated inside the bubble movie writers inhabit. As the presumed defacto frontrunner there was simply no way it could win — the hype destroys even the best of films.” Steve Pond was sanguine-ish : “The film is still a likely Oscar nominee, but it would no longer seem as much of a surprise if Spielberg himself was overlooked by the Academy’s Directors Branch.” Grantland’s Oscar oracle Mark Harris, meanwhile, lumped War Horse in with The Tree of Life to gauge two ever-deflating awards bubbles: I would characterize both movies as “down but not out” — with a grim reminder that that’s usually exactly what one says just before, “Okay, they’re out.” I’ve been saying from the beginning that passion rather than consensus will power Terrence Malick’s movie toward a Best Picture nomination, but the fact that it went 0-for-3 with the writers, directors, and producers is not encouraging. I can offer a series of valid rationales — writing was always a long shot, the DGA’s large votership of rank-and-filers is generally inhospitable to art films, and the producers just don’t get it. Still, the hill it has to climb is getting awfully steep. War Horse at least managed to score a Producers Guild nomination. Fair enough. But understanding the first law of Oscar thermodynamics — that energy can be neither created nor destroyed but merely transferred to the campaign of a more palatable movie — as we do, it was hardly surprising to witness the rapid ascent of such guild favorites as The Descendants , Midnight in Paris and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo . The latter pair in particular enjoyed excellent showings this week, with Dragon Tattoo going four-for-four with the aforementioned guilds (too bad it can’t carry the momentum into Thursday’s Critics Choice Movie Awards and Sunday’s Golden Globes, both of which largely overlooked the thriller) and Midnight in Paris drawing at least one persuasive argument that it would not only contend on Oscar night, but in fact has a terrific chance to win . Invoking Annie Hall , The Silence of the Lambs , Gladiator , and other erstwhile Best Picture winners that bucked the convention of a fall release date, Gold Derby’s Tom Brueggemann went way in depth to explain why Woody Allen’s May flower may come up smelling like a rose next month. A sample: None of these films was the obvious winner when they were released. Each had to withstand competition from highly touted late-year entries to prevail under the old “most votes wins” system. Under this method of counting, Midnight in Paris , Hugo and The Artist might split the votes. Each is a period piece centered on creative types in the 1920s and 30s; these somewhat stylized yet smart entertainments appeal to older members. However, under preferential voting, the chances of one of these three winning increases with the one most likely to prevail having the most top-of-the-list support and fewest detractors — i.e., Midnight in Paris . There’s a lot more worthy reading where that came from; Brueggemann’s piece is easily the most sensible, thought-provoking awards analysis I’ve read all week. Anyway, speaking of The Artist , all the guild recognition and forthcoming Hollywood love this weekend couldn’t stop some commentators to from sniffing a backlash. No sooner did Tom O’Neil and Rotten Tomatoes editor Matt Atchity surmise that a fade might be near than The Guardian ‘s Joe Utichi spotlighted the silent film’s thriving subculture of foes. “[A]s the road to the Oscars winds ever on,” he wrote, “it seems this year’s awards favorite, The Artist , isn’t immune to a spirited blogger backlash that sounds ever louder as the film’s five-star reviews continue to decorate its myriad campaign ads.” And then there was Kim Novak Rapegate , the most tastelessly, transparently obvious smear job since someone delivered the L.A. Times mass quantities of weak ammo against The Hurt Locker two years ago. “Today, actress Kim Novak — a noted recluse so out of the Hollywood loop that I doubt most people under 50 know her name — took a full page ad in Variety ,” wrote Roger Friedman, citing Novak’s instantly infamous “protest” that The Artist ‘s brief use of music from Vertigo had “violated” her “body of work.” Friedman, himself a noted Harvey Weinstein ally/mouthpiece, continued in the front-runner’s defense: “It’s hard to believe that Novak was so motivated by The Artist soundtrack -– so full of original melodies and inventive work–that she called up Variety and read them a credit card number.” Who’s behind it? Who knows? However, for those keeping score at home, you’ll note that this would mark the second time in as many months that the subject of rape has entered this year’s awards conversation; previously, David Fincher alleged that Dragon Tattoo contained “too much anal rape” to merit Oscar consideration, which we’re finding now is not the case. And Dragon Tattoo producer Scott Rudin essentially hates Weinstein, so… Coincidence? You’ll have plenty of time to think it over while I apply a few bottles of Purell. The Leading 5: 1. Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist 2. Alexander Payne, The Descendants 3. Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris 4. Martin Scorsese, Hugo 5. Steven Spielberg, War Horse Outsiders : David Fincher, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ; Bennett Miller, Moneyball ; Tate Taylor, The Help ; Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive Thanks for playing last week, Tate Taylor! The prognosis of the upstart Help director — whose Oscar hopes went from meteoric to crater-rific within about 60 seconds of the DGA nominations announcement — received perhaps the best read from Mark Harris: [F]ilmmakers who get DGA nominations but not Oscar nominations tend to have won DGA hearts with crowd-pleasing studio films: Gary Ross for Seabiscuit , James L. Brooks for As Good As It Gets , Frank Darabont for The Green Mile . Between them, Cameron Crowe, Christopher Nolan, and Rob Reiner have eight DGA nominations -— and zero Best Director Oscar nominations. By contrast, here’s a partial list of the directors who, over the last 15 years, failed to score with the DGA but were nominated for Oscars anyway: Stephen Daldry, Paul Greengrass, Mike Leigh, Pedro Almodovar, Fernando Meirelles, Atom Egoyan, David Lynch. Populists and hitmakers need not apply; even when Clint Eastwood pulled off this feat, it was for Letters From Iwo Jima . This would seem to be very bad news for Tate Taylor — a prototypical DGA nominee if ever there was one[.] The thing is, Harris wrote that in the context of assessing Fincher and Allen’s Oscar chances, particularly vis-à-vis those of Spielberg. Oh, yeah — that guy. Remember him? The slumping titan who epitomizes Michael Cieply’s terrific estimation of how 2011-12 “could be remembered less for its winners than for a large array of high-profile contenders who will be struggling — right up until the Oscar nominations are announced later this month — to avoid embarrassment”? Personally, I can’t envision Spielberg shut out of this category; guilds are helpful precursors, but they tend to have biases that the Academy doesn’t share. (To wit, noted Scott Feinberg: “My hunch is that the DGA’s demographics worked in [Fincher’s] favor, in the sense that the majority of the DGA’s roughly 13,500 members primarily work not in film but in TV, the medium in which Fincher first made his name by shooting some extraordinary commercials and music videos.”) But again, it’s just objectively true that multiple precursors can add up to one collective impact for better or worse. This is either the time for Spielberg’s faction in the Academy to commence rallying or for everyone to just resolve to wait for Lincoln later this year. Or maybe DreamWorks buys a really, really big table this weekend at the Beverly Hilton and the HFPA whips War Horse back to a sprint. We’ll find out soon enough. The Leading 5: 1. (tie) Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady 1. (tie) Viola Davis, The Help 3. Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn 4. Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin 5. Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Outsiders : Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs ; Charlize Theron, Young Adult ; Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Marcy May Marlene If a rising tide indeed lifts all boats, then Mara and even Close — whose film finally made some official Oscar headway in the Makeup category — are finding themselves resting a little higher this week. But it hardly matters in light of what’s happening at the tippy-top of the Index, where Streep and Davis are riding their respective waves virtually hand-in-hand. Take their appearances at this week’s NY Film Critics Circle Awards gala, where Davis actually presented Streep with the organization’s Best Actress honors: “It’s a testament to her that she’d do this in this year, which is her year,” Streep acknowledged in her acceptance speech. Streep’s acceptance speech! Thank God we can proceed with class in at least one category here. Well, class and complete and utter confusion, anyway. “[T]here will be questions regarding this race until Oscar Sunday,” wrote Gregory Ellwood — accurately. The Leading 5: 1. Jean Dujardin, The Artist 2. Brad Pitt, Moneyball 3. George Clooney, The Descendants 4. Michael Fassbender, Shame 5. Gary Oldman, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Outsiders : Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar ; Demi