Oscar Predictions

Best Animated Film

• Howl's Moving Castle, Hayao Miyazaki
• Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, Tim Burton and Mike Johnson
• Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Nick Park and Steve Box

This is a tough one: we love Hayao Miyazaki, Tim Burton, and Nick Park's cheese-obsessed claymation duo. All three nominated movies are thoroughly enjoyable, but we felt that none of them broke much new ground. That's why our vote goes to Revenge of the Sith , the most lavishly computer-produced and art-directed eye-candy of the year, which also happens to integrate animated and real characters in the most mind-boggling ways since Jessica Rabbit seduced Bob Hoskins.

Best Adapted Screenplay

• Brokeback Mountain, Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana
• Capote, Dan Futterman
• The Constant Gardener, Jeffrey Caine
• A History of Violence, Josh Olson
• Munich, Tony Kushner and Eric Roth

Tony Kushner and Eric Roth's complex screenplay successfully fuses a classic thriller that hurtles from climax to climax with layers of paradoxical questions about the morality of revenge. A pressing, timely, and compulsively entertaining achievement.

Best Original Screenplay

• Crash , Paul Haggis & Bobby Moresco
• Good Night, and Good Luck., George Clooney & Grant Heslov
• Match Point, Woody Allen
• The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach
• Syriana, Stephen Gaghan

People often assume Jurgen is making a lame joke when he praises the screenplay for George Lucas' final Star Wars film. Not so. While the dialogue isn't what you'd call realistic (but who wants realism in their space operas?), the precision with which the six-film saga comes to a climax with sly cross-references, loudly echoing themes, and Wagnerian inevitabilty is one of the primary joys of the film. Word has it that England's greatest living playwright, Sir Tom Stoppard, lent a hand.

Best Documentary

• Darwin's Nightmare, Hubert Sauper
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Alex Gibney and Jason Kliot
• March of the Penguins, Luc Jacquet and Yves Darondeau
• Murderball, Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro
• Street Fight , Marshall Curry

Everybody loves those adorable penguins, but Hubert Sauper's harrowing account of the effects of globalization on Tanzania is the more gripping--and the more important--movie.

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