Oscar Predictions: Best Original Song

This year, Oscar nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 16th. 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: “Before My Time” (Chasing Ice), “Suddenly” (Les Miserables), “Pi’s Lullaby” (Life of Pi), “Skyfall” (Skyfall), “Everybody Needs a Best Friend” (Ted)

This year’s Golden Globe nominees: “Let It Go” (Frozen), “Atlas” (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire), “Please Mr. Kennedy” (Inside Llewyn Davis), “Ordinary Love” (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), and “Sweeter than Fiction” (One Chance).

Other contenders: “The Moon Song” (Her), “Young and Beautiful” (The Great Gatsby), “You Don’t Know What It’s Like” (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), “Amen” (All is Lost), “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody” (The Great Gatsby), “In the Middle of the Night” (The Butler)

The rundown: Last year, we got five nominees, and that’s going to happen again this year. Of the Globe list, only “Please Mr. Kennedy” is ineligible. 76 other songs are. It should be noted that the song from the first “Hunger Games” film wasn’t eligible last year, and therefore the tune from the sequel shouldn’t be counted out altogether. It would be hard to ignore the great music from “The Great Gatsby,” and U2 should propel an otherwise less than noticed film to a mention in this category. “The Moon Song” and “You Don’t Know What It’s Like” are gambles of different sorts, but this category has been surprisingly open to strange choices. I’ve been listening to over forty of the seventy-six finalists on repeat, so I’ll have more to say come nominations time and my own awards.

One possible crazy scenario: There could be no odder selection than “The Muslims are Coming,” from the film of the same name. It’s not actually a bad song, but what a weird choice it would be.

Forecasted winner: “Let It Go”