“So what does 10 Best Picture nominees mean? I think what you'll likely see are genre films breaking out of their genre ghetto, like animated films, documentaries, and thoughtful thrillers. Movies like Up, The Hurt Locker, and maybe even Avatar now have a much more significant chance of landing in a field of 10 nominees. I think five new nominees don't necessarily mean five big, dumb Hollywood movies.”

That was my prediction last summer upon the news that the Oscar ceremony was expanding the Best Picture lineup from 5 nominees to 10. How did it all turn out? Your 2009 Best Picture nominees are:

Well, Hurt Locker and Avatar definitely have more than a chance considering one has been sweeping the awards circuit and the other is shaking down America, and the world, for every last nickel. Because the field opened up, we have a fuller more vibrant bushel of nominees that help reflect the various tastes of 2009. Genre movies like District 9 might never have squeezed into a field of five, but here it is, along with something so idiosyncratic as the Coen brothers’ very Jewish, bleakly comic parable, A Serious Man. Pixar’s Up became only the second animated film nominated for the big prize, however, this may not be a direct reflection on Up being a superior product. I imagine every Pixar film could earn a spot in a field of ten (let’s go ahead and just reserve them a permanent space). Sure The Blind Side, a populist sports weepie, sticks out a bit in this group, but the Academy achieved its goal. The Best Picture race is markedly more interesting thanks to a wider field. And people scoffed that there weren’t ten pictures worthy of nomination (my NBC local anchor joked that “ten movies was like 1/10^th the amount of movies shown last year,” and I wanted to punish her for that comment). We were spared the phrases “Best Picture nominee” and “Transformers 2,” though we did come close to the combined phrase of “Best Picture nominee” and “The Hangover.”

The 2009 nominees seem to have something for everyone. There were some welcomed surprise nominations, like Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker, Maggie Gyllenhaal for Crazy Heart, and the team behind In The Loop getting nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. I personally feel like there were fewer outrageous snubs this year, probably because the Academy has embraced celebrated indie films. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds seems to be beloved by every facet of the Hollywood community, and people’s appreciation of his WWII talker got more pronounced after Oscar candidates like The Lovely Bones, Nine, The Road, and Invictus fizzled. Voters looked back to the summer and said to themselves, “You know, those really good genre movies, maybe they were just really good movies, period.”

I am genuinely amazed that The Hurt Locker is wrapping up every award in sight so far (including the PGA, DGA, and WGA awards). I wanted to work the narrative of David vs. Goliath because it seems more than apt. The Hurt Locker is this little seen action flick set in the middle of the Iraq War. It’s total box-office run amounted to about $12 million, which is probably what it cost to make one second of out-of-focus background jungle foliage in James Cameron’s epically expensive, Avatar, now the highest grossing movie of all time. The two main contenders for Best Picture come from opposite ends of the box-office strata, but Avatar has no awards to its name beyond a pair of Golden Globes. This battle between gritty, small-budget ingenuity and massive-scale imagination should make for an intriguing Oscar race.

In the meantime, check out several of our critics' reviews on the nominated films and tell us what you think about the year in film and the 2010 Oscars in our forums.

Nomination Totals:

9 - Avatar, The Hurt Locker

8 - Inglourious Basterds

6 - Up in the Air, Precious

5 - Up

4 - Nine, Star Trek

3 - Crazy Heart, An Education, The Princess and the Frog, District 9, The Young Victoria

2 - A Serious Man, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The White Ribbon, The Blind Side, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Last Station, The Messenger, Invictus, Sherlock Holmes

1 -A Single Man, Bright Star, Coco Before Chanel, The Cove, Food Inc., Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, In the Loop, Paris 36, Coraline, Julie & Julia, The Lovely Bones