Take One Last Look at the Oscar Nominees!

With just two days to go until Sunday’s 82nd Annual Academy Awards, we at RT have our classy monkey suits and lucky undies pressed, ballots checked and ready, and homeopathic Tomato brews boiling in our dungeon/pantry to take us through our coverage of the show. We’ve made our picks, collected nearly 60,000 of your poll votes, gone through hundreds of your reviews of the nominees, and created an Oscar ballot for you to use during the show. So before you make your final picks with your feather dipped in ink from the neighborhood nightingale, we’re going to sum up all the biggest awards for you and give you the opportunity to vote on every remaining category and see who others think will win. This way, you can wear the winner’s crown at every Oscar party you attend this weekend (we won’t even ask for a cut of the proceeds!).

Don’t forget that you can watch the Oscars with RT this coming Sunday night! Our Editor-in-Chief Matt Atchity will be on Twitter live from the Oscars and you’ll be able to follow him on our Awards Tour Oscar headquarters. There, you’ll also be able to use your Facebook account to share your reactions to the show with RT staffers and RT users from around the world who will be merging with you onto our exit of the information superhighway. And to bring it all together, we’ll be placing the newest Best Picture winner in its correct historical context with our latest Best of the Best Pictures guide on Sunday night!

With imminent Oscar-age and all the urgency of a Biggest Loser last chance workout, here’s one last look at this year’s biggest nominees and your last chance to vote on the rest of the categories before we leave it all in the envelope-opening hands of this year’s presenters. See you on Sunday!

Best Picture

With over 40% of RT readers’ votes, a 92% RT Community Tomatometer (only topped by Up at 94%) and an arguably as impressive endorsement from RT’s editors, The Hurt Locker looks like the front runner for this year’s Best Picture race. Avatar and Locker appeared to be headed to a photo finish in our poll, but the Iraq War drama pulled away in the latter part of the week to take a sizable lead. RT user Ambrish Gokuldas believes The Hurt Locker “will be the best war movie ever made in our times” and so with that being said, and a little producer drama aside, it stands as the movie to beat.

Achievement in Directing

Winning our Oscar poll with half of the total vote, sustaining the highest RT Community Tomatometer score, and representing RT’s pick for the category, The Hurt Locker completes the prediction trifecta for the Best Director category. RT user Alex G. says Kathryn Bigelow “achieves what few are able to; make a war film that is unbiased, suspenseful and emotionally draining.” Beating out both her former beau James Cameron (28%) and a crowd pleasing Quentin Tarantino (18%) by a sizable margin in our poll, Bigelow’s chances at taking the “big two” look pretty strong.

Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role

With all the momentum of a New Orleans Saints (“WHO DAT?!”) run through the NFL playoffs, we named Jeff Bridges’ performance in Crazy Heart as our pick for the Best Actor category. Garnering over 60% of the votes in our Oscar poll, followed by Up in the Air‘s George Clooney and The Hurt Locker‘s Jeremy Renner, both of whom have won awards this year, Bridges is the far and away favorite in the collective eyes of our users. Bill D 2007 says, “Let’s hope this is Bridges’ Oscar year at last. It’s been a long time coming. Perfectly coiffed movie stars like George Clooney and Brad Pitt get all the attention, but Bridges has put out vastly more interesting material than they have for 25 years running.” Interestingly, Invictus‘ Morgan Freeman, who took home Best Actor honors from the National Board of Review, received the lowest number of votes in our Oscar poll, trailing A Single Man‘s Colin Firth, who has yet to take home a Best Actor award this season.