It’s that time of year again. Time to make the final predictions about how this Sunday’s Academy Awards is going to turn out as well as which nominee(s) I feel to be the most worthy of taking home the award.

Awards seasons and the Oscars in particular are always very divisive. People will argue for hours and hours on end about which film deserves to win, and which film didn’t deserve to be nominated. More often than not, the Academy completely misfire and award just the wrong movies the big prize when there are better movies battling against them.

Before you start yelling blasphemy, allow me to explain. I am in no way doubting Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, Tom Hardy or anyone else involved with The Dark Knight Rises. I fully believe that this film will be huge, massive, gigantic and any other synonym that would be apt to use. I fully believe that it will make over $1 billion dollars and I fully believe that it will have the impact that everyone is expecting it will have. I also fully believe that it will be an exceptionally well done film that will leave most moviegoers with their most memorable theatre experience of 2012. I really do fully believe all of that.

The Hunger Games is only a few months away from hitting the silver screen and I couldn’t be more excited. We’ve already given you our dream cast for the film’s sequel, Catching Fire, but now we’re bringing you our dream cast for Mockingjay, the sequel to Catching Fire. Lionsgate has already ordered up both Catching Fire and Mockingjay, so we know that they’re coming and while casting hasn’t been announced, we have our own ideas of who we’d like to see.

I could sit here and argue the relevance of The Golden Globes and make snarky comments about the Hollywood Foreign Press but it wouldn’t change the fact that many important people in Hollywood take this ludicrous award seriously. With that in mind, I will treat The Golden Globes with enough seriousness to examine the nominees and decide which movies will win and tell you which movies I believe deserve to win.

With the Golden Globes coming up tomorrow night, it seems a good time to go ahead and lay down some predictions for who will be taking home the awards. The nominees were announced last month without many surprises (the biggest was probably that The Ides of March got several unexpected nods), but overall we saw the same suspects we’ve been seeing throughout awards season including The Artist, The Descendants, Hugo, Moneyball, and Midnight in Paris.

Last year, after The King’s Speech was crowned Oscar’s Best Picture many people looked forward and began discussing who would be the big contenders for this year’s Academy Awards. The film on everyone’s lips was War Horse, the film that would bring Steven Spielberg back into contact with the genre of war film, with highly acclaimed material which was transformed into an adored and critically lauded stage play. In other words: pure Oscar material.

It was an interesting year for film. Perhaps not as notable or memorable as 2010, but 2011 certainly had its moments and there were many films released that will likely leave their mark on the world of cinema for years, perhaps even decades to come.

2011 is the weakest year of film in recent memory. That’s not to say there weren’t some pretty good films out there, but it is the first year in which I can recall not having seen a movie that has earned a four-star rating. Whereas some critics give them out like candy, it takes a little more for me to award such a rating. I have to be absolutely blown away by a film for such a rating to be given. For example, last year I saw three four-star films: Inception, The King’s Speech, and Rabbit Hole, each of them a superb achievement in cinema.

2011 has been a pretty good year for film and so far, out of the films that I have seen, quite a few that I didn’t have overly large expectations for really blew me away. Unfortunately, living outside the US means that there are quite a few key films that will be big fixtures in this year’s awards season that I haven’t seen yet. What this means is that this list probably won’t be my final top 10 of the year, rather, it’s more a top ten of what I’ve seen thus far.