Oscar Predictions: Best Sound

This year, Oscar nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 10th. As a result, most of the corresponding guilds won’t have announced their picks by then, so I’m making predictions in advance without being able to take those into consideration. I’ll be offering detailed predictions in most of the major categories, saving some of the biggest categories for last.

Last year’s nominees: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Hugo, Moneyball, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, War Horse

This year’s locks: Les Miserables, Zero Dark Thirty

Very likely: The Dark Knight Rises, Argo

Possible: Life of Pi, Lincoln, The Avengers, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Unlikely: Skyfall, Prometheus

The rundown: This category tends to offer a mix of Best Picture contenders that meet with other music or action and the full-on technical contenders that wouldn’t ever make an appear in the top races. The former classification bodes well for Les Miserables and Zero Dark Thirty, and could be good for Argo, Life of Pi, and Lincoln as well. This should be a race where The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t have much trouble appearing, and could also be good for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I’m much less confident about the chances for Skyfall, which seems an obvious choice but, historically, it’s been forty-one years since a James Bond film was nominated in this category. Sci-fi hits The Avengers and Prometheus could also show up here too, but I wouldn’t count on it.

One possible crazy scenario: It turns out that someone really likes Cloud Atlas.

Forecasted winner: This is the place to honor Les Miserables.