The Academy Awards nominations come out tomorrow, and every year I take a stab at predicting the major categories. Last year I went 36/45, which is kind of low for me.

BEST PICTURE
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech
The Social Network
The Town
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

BEST DIRECTOR
Darren Aronofsky- Black Swan
David Fincher- The Social Network
Tom Hooper- The King’s Speech
Christopher Nolan- Inception
David O. Russell- The Fighter

BEST ACTOR
Jeff Bridges- True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg- The Social Network
Colin Firth- The King’s Speech
James Franco- 127 Hours
Ryan Gosling- Blue Valentine

BEST ACTRESS
Annette Bening- The Kids Are All Right
Nicole Kidman- Rabbit Hole
Jennifer Lawrence- Winter’s Bone
Natalie Portman- Black Swan
Michelle Williams- Blue Valentine

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Christian Bale- The Fighter
Matt Damon- True Grit
Andrew Garfield- The Social Network
Mark Ruffalo- The Kids Are All Right
Geoffrey Rush- The King’s Speech

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Adams- The Fighter
Helena Bonham Carter- The King’s Speech
Melissa Leo- The Fighter
Hailee Steinfeld- True Grit
Jacki Weaver- Animal Kingdom

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Another Year
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
127 Hours
The King’s Speech
The Social Network
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

I went 38/45 with my predictions, although I bungled which screenplays were original and which ones were adapted.

Some nice surprises here (Winter’s Bone, Exit through the Gift Shop, Dogtooth), but I can’t believe Christopher Nolan and, more importantly, Inception’s editor Lee Smith didn’t get nominated. Good thing these awards are pointless exercises in self-congratulatory narcissism.

I went 35/44. I didn’t expect there to be nine Best Picture nominees, so that’s three wrong right there. I don’t know who’s watching stuff like Albert Nobbs. On the other hand, pretty much every prestige film that positioned itself as a Best Picture was perceived that way.

I don’t get upset by the Academy Awards anymore. I just get confused. 

“With her deep voice, her gravity, and her gift for restrained sorrow and quiet moral authority, Davis often gets cast as responsible people — detectives, doctors, social workers, cops. Once she was a mayor; once she was the head of the CIA. Either she hasn’t been asked to play a maid very often, or she has declined those roles; before The Help, her one memorable stint as a housekeeper was in Todd Haynes’ brilliant Far From Heaven, in which she and Haynes seemed to collaborate on an onscreen deconstruction of the qualities of a 1950s film domestic. The Help was different: At 45, Davis was finally given the opportunity to play the lead in a studio movie. (Are we really still not going to talk about race, and how much sooner that opportunity might have come otherwise?) But it meant wearing that uniform and holding a little blonde white girl in her lap while saying, ‘You is kind. You is smart. You is important.’

I don’t know what it cost Davis emotionally to go there for her first high-stakes starring role, or what argument, if any, she had with herself beforehand. I’ve talked to tough, smart black actresses who say that a great part is a great part, and other equally tough, smart black actresses who simply, categorically, do not want to play maids or slaves, just as I’ve met Arab-American actors who felt they had to turn down the golden opportunity to be killed by Kiefer Sutherland on 24. You don’t get to call them prima donnas unless you yourself have spent years facing the hard knowledge that regardless of your talent and training, a huge percentage of what you’re going to get offered is the chance to play an ethnic cliché. Yes, Hattie McDaniel elevated a caricature by dint of sheer talent. It was 72 years ago. In 2012, we should be further than we are past the sentimentality of Mammy’s ‘I done raise that chile from a baby.’ The Help’s racial politics aren’t Gone With the Wind’s, but, as I wrote when the movie opened, it’s far too comfortable trafficking in cliches about super-maternal black women whose compassion and capacity to nurture always trumps their anger.”