Oscar Predictions: Best Animated Feature

This year, Oscar nominations will be announced on Thursday, January 14th. I’ll be offering detailed predictions in most of the major categories, saving some of the biggest categories for last.

Last year’s nominees: Big Hero 6, The Boxtrolls, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Song of the Sea, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

This year’s locks: Inside Out

Very likely: Anomalisa, The Good Dinosaur

Possible: Shaun the Sheep Movie, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, The Peanuts Movie, When Marnie Was There, Minions, Boy and the World

Unlikely: Home, Hotel Transylvania 2, The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie: Sponge Out of Water, Moomins on the Riviera, The Boy and the Beast, The Laws of the Universe – Part 0

The rundown: It’s hard to hold on to anything in this category after sure thing The Lego Movie was snubbed. Still, there’s no way that Inside Out is getting left off, and I don’t really see Anomalisa being cast off either. I wouldn’t bet against The Good Dinosaur, but I think things get trickier after that. The Golden Globe list and the Annie Award nominees for Best Feature included The Peanuts Movie and Shaun the Sheep Movie. The Producers Guild of America swapped out the latter for Minions. The likeliest of the other nine eligible films to show up are Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, When Marnie Was There, and Boy and the World. In 2011, 2013, and 2014, we got too such more eclectic nominees, but in 2012, we got none, with “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” taking the fifth spot. I’m betting that “The Peanuts Movie,” the one Globe contender I haven’t seen, will miss out in favor of one of the other three.

One possible crazy scenario: The peculiar adaptation of a Finnish cartoon that I had the chance to screen, Moomins on the Riviera, earns a nomination.

Forecasted winner: How could it not be Inside Out?