Mid Year Best Picture Predictions: 50 Potentials Ranked

Do you feel like this film year is doomed? That award season is hopeless?

Here's 50 films that could potential be Oscar best picture contenders. 10 films will be nominated, they could come from this group of 50, and I've ranked them based off my current assessment (talent, buzz, distribution, premise, personal bias).

It's a given that in June you can assume that the Academy Award best picture nominations are up in the air as most of the potential nominees are riding on hype and possibility, since no one has actually seen most of these films yet.

However fallible this list might be, I'm ready to jump into award season despite the fact this year's brought more stink than excitement.

Filling 10 spots at first seemed challenging, but that's only due to lack of overtly clear front runners, not due to lack of potentials.

Of course, some nominees could be missed...especially if films get fast-tracked, or a surprise foreign master piece burst into onto the film calendar. Here's hoping! There's could be far more than 50 contenders for the 10 spots.

Feel free to follow the links to previous StrangeCulture post about these films where available. And share your thoughts on these rankings or which films you'd like to see discussed further on strange culture.

Creating an "air of potential" here's my mid-year ranked list of 50 potential best picture nominees...

If I Had To Choose 10
1. The Way Back (dir. Peter Weir)
2. True Grit (dir. Joel & Ethan Coen)
3. Miral (dir. Julian Schnabel)
4. Love and Other Drugs (dir. Edward Zwick)
5. The Kids Are All Right (dir. Lisa Cholodenko)
6. Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan)
7. Another Year (dir. Mike Leigh)
8. Hereafter (dir. Clint Eastwood)
9. Never Let Me Go (dir. Mark Romanek)
10. Get Low (dir. Aaron Schneider)

The Rest
11. The Tree of Life (dir. Terrence Malick)
12. The Fighter (dir. David O. Russell)
13. Conviction (previously Betty Anne Watters) (dir. Tony Goldwyn)
14. Everything You've Got (dir. James L. Brooks)
15. Biutiful (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu)
16. The King's Speech (dir. Tom Hopper
17. The Social Network (dir. David Fincher)
18. Somewhere (dir. Sofia Coppola)
19. Toy Story 3 (dir. Lee Unkrich)
20. Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky)
21. The Next Three Days (dir. Paul Haggis)
22. Jack Goes Boating (dir. Phillip Seymore Hoffman)
23. The Debt (dir. John Madden)
24. Animal Kingdom (dir .David Michôd)
25. Secretariat (dir. Randall Wallace)
26. Shutter Island (dir. Martin Scorsese)
27. You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (dir. Woody Allen)
28. The Conspirator (dir. Robert Redford)
29. Eat, Pray, Love (dir. Ryan Murphy)
30. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (dir. Oliver Stone)
31. Howl (dirs. Rob Epstein & Jeffery Friedman)
32. Robin Hood (dir. Ridley Scott)
33. Tamara Drewe (dir. Stephen Frears)
34. The American (dir. Anton Corbijn)
35. London Boulevard (dir. William Monahan)
36. Brighton Rock (dir. Rowan Joffe)
37. Fair Game (dir. Doug Liman)
38. The Rum Diary (dir. Bruce Robinson)
39. The Company Men (dir. John Wells)
40. Love Ranch (dir. Taylor Hackford)
41. The Tempest (dir. Julie Taymor)
42. Rabbit Hole (dir. John Cameron Mitchell)
43. How To Train Your Dragon (dirs. Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders)
44. Winter's Bone (dir. Debra Granik)
45. The Town (dir. Ben Affleck)
46. The Beaver (dir. Jodie Foster)
47. What's Wrong With Virginia (dir. Dustin Lance Black)
48. Nowhere Boy (dir. Sam Taylor Wood)
49. Blue Valentine (dir. Derek Cianfrance)
50. Barney's Version (dir. Richard J. Lewis)

This at least gives us something to start with...we can whittle it down as the year goes on. There's a lot of room for failure and great surprises in this list.