TCM Starts Its 31 DAYS OF OSCAR February 1

For more than ten years, Turner Classic Movies has created a special lineup around the Oscars as a way to ramp up to the awards ceremony. They call it TCM's "31 Days of Oscar," with some sort of connection among the films to play off the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game. Bacon himself has been the connection among all their "31 Days" films in the past, although others years didn't center on a person, but a instead some theme cooked up by the masterminds at TCM. This year, the schedule features a list of Oscar-winning and nominated movies, each of which connects to the one before and after it, like little links on a long and winding chain.

That means that February's first movie, Gigi, has something in common with the second, The Merry Widow (the 1952 version), and that Merry Widow also has some link to The Broadway Melody of 1936, which comes after it. And then Broadway Melody is linked to Calamity Jane, and Calamity Jane connects to Billy Rose's Jumbo... All the way to March 2, where Around the World in Eighty Days closes out the Oscar fest and connects to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which immediately precedes it, as well as back to Gigi at the top of the list to complete the circle.

Whew! It's 360 (complicated!) Degrees of Oscar.

I don't know the answers in this mighty trivia quiz (and if TCM has an answer key, I didn't see it), but I can think of a couple of links between Gigi and The Merry Widow off the top of my head. They're both set (at least partially, in Widow's case) in Paris and they both have scenes at Maxim's, the risque restaurant famous for flowing champagne and beautiful women. I'm guessing Maxim's is not what the quizzers at TCM had in mind, however, since the connections otherwise seems to be about the personnel. So, for example, the fourth piece in the puzzle is an easy one, since Doris Day starred in both Calamity Jane and Billy Rose's Jumbo.

It's quite a list, including Oscar powerhouses like Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sting, An American in Paris, The Apartment and The Best Years of Our Lives. If you think Oscar nominees and winners past were better than Oscar nominees and winners current, this is your chance to reacquaint yourself with the back part of that equation, as well as more recent winners like 2001's A Beautiful Mind. Plus some of my personal favorites like Top Hat, Tootsie, The Awful Truth and Ninotchka. And the lesser-known Fred Astaire pic The Sky's the Limit, a musical from 1943 that cast Fred as a Flying Tiger who meets Joan Leslie on leave. It's not that great a film, but it was nominated for two Oscars, for Best Original Song (Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen's My Shining Hour) and Best Score.

If you can figure out the whole list of links from one film to the next, be sure to let me know. That's a gargantuan task, but so was figuring out a whole schedule of Oscar-iffic movies that tie together like that.

Oscar Nominations Will Be Announced Thursday January 10th

Everybody knows the Oscar nominations will be announced Thursday, right? And everybody seems pretty clear on who will get those nominations this year.

The website Gold Derby is in the prognostication biz, combining opinions from experts and regular old folks to come up with odds and predictions for the Golden Globes and the Emmys and the Screen Actors Guild and... Of course, the Big Kahuna, the Oscars. Gold Derby updates their odds as movies get released over the year, and today's predictions are that Lincoln will lead nominations with 12, Les Miz will be right behind with 11, and Life of Pi will pick up 9 nods. The Gold Derby crystal ball also sees 7 nominations for Zero Dark Thirty and 5 for Argo and Silver Linings Playbook.

We'll see on Thursday whether they hit the target with those predictions. I always hope for some upsets, mostly because the Academy Awards have become so obvious, so predictable, and we need some interlopers to knock the likes of Lincoln and Les Misérables off their perches. Or maybe that's just me. In any event, this is how the individual races break down:

For Best Picture, predictions are a little tricky since no one knows exactly how many nominations there will be. The Academy opened it up a few years ago, allowing more than five for pictures with a certain percentage of the total votes. Gold Derby has ten: Lincoln, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, Les Misérables, Silver Linings Playbook, Life of Pi, Django Unchained, Beasts of the Southern Wild,  Moonrise Kingdom and Amour, in that order, with The Master as a dark horse coming up on the outside.

Over at Huffington Post, Michael Hogan and Christopher Rosen are looking at eight, with Rosen thinking Skyfall will sneak in as a nominee instead of Beasts, Moonrise, or Amour. And IndieWire's Peter Knegt is hedging his bets with choices for five nominees (Lincoln, Argo, Zero, Les Miz and Silver) with extras Django, Pi, Beasts, Moonrise and Amour if the nominee list is expanded.

Everybody expects Best Actor nods to go to Daniel Day-Lewis for Lincoln, Hugh Jackman for Les Misérables, Denzel Washington for Flight and John Hawkes for The Sessions. Who will get the last slot? Bradley Cooper for Silver Linings Playbook? Or Joaquin Phoenix for The Master? Cooper seems to be the name on most lists. Sorry, Bill Murray (Hyde Park on the Hudson) and Anthony Hopkins (Hitchcock). According to the those in the know, your name will not be called on Thursday.

How about Best Actress? To be perfectly honest, the Best Actress race is seldom as interesting as the one for Best Actor, mostly because Hollywood banks on movies with men front and center. (See the poster images accompanying this article. Boys, boys, boys. Oh well.) Youngsters Jennifer Lawrence (who gets half a face on the poster of Silver Linings Playbook) and Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty) are expected to duke it out for the win, with Marion Cotillard (Rust and Bone), Naomi Watts (The Impossible) and Emmanuelle Riva (Amour) as also-rans, according to Gold Derby. At HuffPo, Rosen is picking Quvenzhané Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild) instead of Riva for the last slot, while IndieWire is on board with Riva, but picks Wallis instead of Cotillard. It would be fun to hear last year's Best Actor winner Jean Dujardin say Quvenzhané, wouldn't it?

The Best Supporting Actor field should include Lincoln's Tommy Lee Jones, Philip Seymour Hoffman from The Master, Robert DeNiro in Silver Linings Playbook, Alan Arkin for Argo and either Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson or Christoph Waltz from Django Unchained, if the experts are correct. It's kind of a wild race, given all those Django choices plus Eddie Redmayne from Les Miz and Javier Bardem from Skyfall and maybe... Matthew McConaughey as a veteran stripper in Magic Mike? You gotta be kidding, right?

Supporting Actress isn't any more settled, although Anne Hathaway and her Les Misérables haircut are expected to lead the pack. (Hathaway is shown at right on a different Les Miz poster, pre-haircut.) Sally Field is probably a shoe-in as Mrs. Lincoln in Lincoln, and Helen Hunt (The Sessions) and Amy Adams (The Master) are front-runners for spots 3 and 4. Maggie Smith, as a cranky oldster in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, was expected to roll right into this category, although Nicole Kidman's surprise Golden Globe nomination for The Paperboy has some thinking she may be able to push Dame Maggie to the side. And how about Samantha Barks as Eponine in Les Misérables? Or a different Dame, Judi Dench in Skyfall? I actually liked Dench better than Smith in Best Exotic Marigold, but Smith does have the Downton Abbey fans on her side. I guess we'll see on Thursday.

And last, the Best Director race centers on Steven Spielberg, whose Lincoln is the prestige pic of the year, followed by Ben Affleck for Argo (the Academy does tend to get behind actors-turned-director), Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty and Ang Lee for Life of Pi. It's always that last spot that gets tricky. Gold Derby gives it to Tom Hooper for Les Miz, but the HuffPo guys think it'll be David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook, and IndieWire is going out on a limb with Quentin Tarantino for Django. I think I'm with Gold Derby on this one. Hooper got a Directors Guild nomination, announced just this morning, giving him the inside track on an Oscar nom, as well.

Who will win? Let's save that for after the nominations are announced. That will be Thursday, January 10, at 5:30 in the morning in Hollywood. That's 7:30 am for us. You can get the scoop on the Oscar website just as soon as Seth MacFarlane and Emma Stone announce them.