In one corner, we have the Piaf Patrol, snapping away at anyone who doesn’t proclaim the second coming over Marion Cotillard’s rolling eyes, puckering lips, and spasmodic tantrums. In the other corner is Roger Ebert, who was good enough to wait for surgery until after he could take the opportunity to tell a certain subset of Oscar voters (we’ll call them the Crash bloc) about his personal crusade for this year: Juno’s Ellen Page. Outside of the boxing ring altogether is the woman whose classy performance has risen above both the fray as well as her would-be competitors in every relevant precursor award up to this point. Julie Christie’s portrayal of a woman with Alzheimer’s has quietly walked away with the SAG, the Golden Globe, and the better portion of the critics’ citations (we’ll even throw in the otherwise irrelevant Broadcast Film Critics award she won, since they explicitly pride themselves for being an accurate Oscar forecaster), and still some would have you believe this is a tight three-way race ripe for an upset. Because we’ve seen Oscar suddenly believe what others say its feeling before, and because La Vie en Rose gives Cotillard the opportunity to forge an unholy fusion of two major Oscar-bait elements (musical biopic spiked by the spectacle of a gorgeous young woman getting fugly for her art), and because those four nominations for Juno give us that Little Miss Sunshine vibe all over again, we have to reluctantly admit that this is likely a much closer race than it ought to be, especially since it’s hard to imagine either Laura Linney’s or Cate Blanchett’s wrathful bitchery helping to tip the race one way or the other.

They doubted me, but then they saw, and then they believed. Yes, it was almost one year ago that I said Marion Cotillard’s bold, freakishly technical thesping as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose was bound for Oscar glory. What I didn’t anticipate was that Cotillard’s performance would infect audiences like the Rage virus. Could it be that if the actress doesn’t win the Oscar, her fans will crash the award ceremony (or press conference) like the vampire zombies from I Am Legend and rip the winner (or Billy Bush—maybe even Dave Karger) to shreds? And if they opt for a more restrained response, will they mount a petition, asking Oscar, as a gesture of comeuppance, to change its name to Edith and forever hand out statues that look like this? This is all to say, if Cotillard is not victorious, blame it on the fans, whose disturbing contempt for Julie Christie’s performance in Away from Her can’t be doing Cotillard any favors. Both of these fine performances are locks for nominations, meaning the remaining slots are pretty much up for grabs. Or not. If talking heads like Tom O’Neil and Karger stopped, well, talking, trying to affect Oscar voters like the news media unmistakably shapes political elections, then maybe the Pavlovian dogs that make up the Academy’s body might have more naturally gravitated to the talents of, say, Ashley Judd and Anamaria Marinca. Instead, the Academy has been told by the award-show pundits that Ellen Paige and Angelina Jolie already have dibs on slots three and four, and that’s exactly how they’ll vote. As for the fifth spot, eeny-meeny-miny-moe your way between Jodie Foster, Amy Adams, Keira Knightley, Laura Linney, and Cate Blanchett, because it’s anyone’s guess.