Some useless statistics to help you handicap this year’s Oscar race.

Only three movies in the past twenty years have swept Best Picture, Director, screenplay, cinematography and editing. They are Dances With Wolves (1990), Schindler’s List (1993) and last year’s Slumdog Millionaire. Best Picture and Director awards have been split between movies five times in the last twenty years but no Best Picture winner in that same period failed to at least secure a Best Director nomination. Similarly, all of the last twenty Best Picture winners were also nominated for editing, though those awards were split nine times. Six of the last twenty Best Pictures lost the award for cinematography and seven others didn’t even get nominated in that category. That means 65% of the time the Academy does not think excellence in cinematography is necessary for a Picture to be the Best of the year.

Only one Best Picture winner in the last twenty years had a screenplay that was not nominated, but it happened to be James Cameron’s Titanic. His first narrative film since then is in position to repeat that anomaly. You have to go all the way back to The Sound Of Music in 1965 to find another example. Not counting Titanic, six of the last twenty Best Picture winners lost the screenplay award.

There have always been ten nominated screenplays each year, split five apiece between separate categories for originals and adaptations. Those did not map out one-to-one this year with the expanded Best Picture category. Only four of the five of the nominees in each screenplay category made it into the top category. Original screenplay nominee The Messenger was left out, as was adapted nominee In The Loop, which I never even heard of. The two Best Picture nominees with lousy scripts not worthy of nominations were, as already pointed out, Avatar, an original, and The Blind Side, an adaptation.

Furthermore, the Writers Guild Awards share only two nominees in common with the Oscars in each category: A Serious Man and The Hurt Locker (original) and Up In The Air and Precious (adapted). The original scripts the Guild liked more than the Academy are Avatar, Fox Searchlight’s (500) Days Of Summer, and the Golden Globe winner for Best Musical or Comedy, The Hangover. The three adapted scripts competing for WGA awards on February 20 but not for Oscars are Crazy Heart, Julie & Julia and Star Trek.

Usually there’s one mismatch between the Best Picture and Best Director categories. This year, with ten Best Picture nominees, five of them didn’t get directing nods. Maybe we can rule out those five and think of the directing category as what the top category might have looked like if the rules hadn’t changed? The same could be said about editing based on the statistics. But there is one mismatch between Directing and Editing: Up In The Air is only in the former category, while District 9 is only in the latter. That leaves Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Precious and Inglourious Basterds as the only four serious contenders for Best Picture.

Enough of the statistics. On to my predictions. Best Picture and Best Director is a two-horse race between Avatar and The Hurt Locker. I see a split this year. Avatar will win the top prize, while its director’s third ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow, will be the first female in history to win the directing award. The screenplay awards will go to The Hurt Locker and Up In The Air.

Jeff Bridges is a lock for Best Actor for Crazy Heart. For Best Actress, I was most impressed with Carey Mulligan in An Education, but it’s really between Sandra Bullock and Meryl Streep. That said, this is Streep’s year. She’s won twice, but that was thirty years ago. With a dozen more nominations in the interim, they really like her.

Christoph Waltz is the only Supporting Actor nominee getting any buzz. He’s winning all the other industry awards, indicating he’s going home with Oscar next month. The Supporting Actress category has some really good choices. Last year’s winner in this category, Penelope Cruz, was the only interesting part of Nine. I also really liked what Anna Kendrick did with her role in Up In The Air. But Mo’Nique’s monologue at the end of Precious was incredibly moving and will likely win her the gold.

As for omissions, I’m surprised not to see Toby Maguire and Natalie Portman in the acting categories for Brothers. I’m not so surprised, but disappointed, to see Matt Damon nominated for his South African accent in Invictus instead of his hilarious, Golden Globe nominated lead performance in The Informant!, the overlooked summer comedy that was also robbed of nominations for Marvin Hamlisch’s Globe nominated score, not to mention the adapted screenplay by Scott Z. Burns.

Fox Searchlight had a 4-out-of-5 run of screenplay Oscars for their small, quirky, indie films the last five years, beginning with Sideways, and followed by Little Miss Sunshine, Juno and Slumdog Millionaire, which, of course, also won Best Picture. What happened to them this year? Nothing but two acting nods for Crazy Heart and the score for animated feature nominee Fantastic Mr. Fox. And while I’m there, shouldn’t Avatar be eligible in the animated feature category? Since it isn’t (it was 60% cartoon blue people; the rules require at least 75%), Best Picture nominee Up winning a consolation prize down in animation is even more of a sure thing than Jeff Bridges.

And no love for Zombieland? Well, there’s always the MTV Movie Awards.

Dan Margules is a Hollywood screenwriter. His award-winning short film, Begleiter, is available in a Special Edition from Amazon.com or happy-the-dog.com. He also co-founded, and was president of, San Diego Filmmakers. SDF’s guest speaker last August, Greg Helvey, was nominated for an Academy Award last Tuesday for his live action short film Kavi.