1. "Before My Time" - Frozen2. "The Moon Song" - Her3. "Young and Beautiful" - The Great Gatsby4. "You and I Ain't Nothing No More" - Lee Daniels' The Butler5. "Ordinary Love" - Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom(Alt: "Sweeter Than Fiction" - One Chance) This may be the single hardest category to predict. With so many possible options (75 this year) and very few meaningful precursors, it's nearly impossible to get a beat on the pulse on the Best Song race. When songs like Before My Time get nominated from movies like Chasing Ice, any soothsaying in this category is nothing short of a total crapshoot. In fact, this category is so volatile and unpredictable, that I really only see one spot as a lock, and that's Frozen's one submission, Let It Go, which will likely win the award. Beyond this, I wouldn't be surprised to see any song make or miss the cut. That being said, I feel pretty confident that Karen O.'s The Moon Song, which is used in one of the sweeter and more memorable parts of Her, will also find it's way into the category. After that, who really knows? It would be a shame if Lana Del Ray's Young and Beautiful from The Great Gatsby didn't make the cut, but I wouldn't be shocked if it didn't. It seems like a good possibility that one of the songs from Lee Daniels' The Butler will get in, and I favor Gladys Knight's You and I Ain't Nothing No More, but it could just as easily get blanked. U2 is a starry name that has been nominated before, and a song about Nelson Mandela sure seems like Oscar bait if there has been one, but this branch can resent such shoe-ins just as often as they nominate them. With this much uncertainty, it really is a futile effort, so I'm just going to go with the bigger names and hope for the best.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
