As a lifelong movie lover, the Oscars are always a special event for me. No matter how much I learn about how movies are made, no matter how many I see, and how much I discover about what goes on behind the scenes, they are always fresh and surprising. I’ve been lucky enough to maintain an innocence, a naiveté, that allows me to suspend disbelief when I’m watching a film.

This year, for the first time, I was able to be in Los Angeles for Oscar weekend. On the day before the ceremony, I saw the Kodak Theater, the ceremony’s home since 2002, and experienced firsthand the massive amount of production that goes into making the Oscar telecast such a memorable event. For someone still able to be moved by movies past and present, placing my hands inside the impressions of Cary Grant, Harold Lloyd, and Matt Damon’s hands in front of Grauman’s Theater inspired a profound connection to the history of the art form I love. I attended an annual event called “Meet the Oscars,” a small exhibit that gives the public the opportunity to be photographed holding an actual Oscar statuette - providing me with a slam dunk snapshot for my Christmas card in ten months.

I share all this not to brag, but simply to note that while watching the telecast at the home of a dear friend in LA I was still as caught up in the show as I always am. Even though I saw first-hand the amount of fakery and construction that goes into the telecast – the red carpet, the cheesy gigantic Oscars that flank the people who enter the theater, the fact that the Kodak theater anchors a mall – I suspended my disbelief without ever thinking about it. I screamed and yelled and carried on when something surprised me, I bitched and moaned when I felt the winner was less than deserving (I’m looking at you editor of The Bourne Ultimatum), and I still marvel at the sheer star-power of great actors and marvel at the mysterious skill of the writers and directors I adore.

And the show this year was as worthy of love as any in recent memory. Here are a few of the many memorable moments and innovations.

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Every year when the Academy Awards roll around, the hardworking staff of the All Movie Guide gets together to nominate and vote on its own version of the best films of the previous 12 months. We call this little ceremony the AMG Awards, our own little alternate Oscars. Winners are presented in boldface.

Best Picture
Juno
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Zodiac

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I have an admittedly unhealthy relationship with the Academy Awards. When you see those articles that ask if anybody actually cares about them, I scream at the top of my lungs, “ME! I CARE!” So in that spirit, what follows are my predictions and desires, my hopes and dreams and expectations for how the awards will flow at the 80th Annual Academy Award ceremony.

Best Actor:
Every year are there are some categories that are far gone conclusions. This is one of those years for Best Actor. Daniel Day-Lewis has won seemingly every award in the world for his work as Daniel Plainview, the driven oilman in There Will Be Blood, and nothing will change February 24 as the greatest actor of his generation will pick up his second trophy.

Will Win: Daniel Day-Lewis
Should Win: Daniel Day-Lewis

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The Screen Actors Guild Award telecast went off last night with the blessing of the striking writers, and for those of us who have an unnatural affinity for these things it was a smashing return to the durable genre’s form. Those of us who love the combination of showbiz obsequiousness, false humility, genuine joy, and heartfelt gratitude probably probably had our spirits raised very early in the night when the disembodied emcee announced, “Ladies and gentlemen…Debra Messing and Zac Efron!”

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With the Directors Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild handing out their year-end awards over the weekend, those of you betting in your office Academy Award pools should be just about ready to go. The DGA and the SAG awards are traditionally two of the most reliable Oscar predictors, so rest assured that Daniel Day-Lewis is a mortal lock to win the Oscar (quite deservingly) for There Will Be Blood. Javier Bardem is a heavy favorite to take home the Best Supporting Actor Academy statuette, although there is a slim slim chance of Hal Holbrook pulling off an upset. Julie Christie is also a safe bet to take home the Best Actress award on February 24, but if anyone pulls off the surprise it just might be Ellen Page. Best supporting actress is still a tough call. After her surprise win last night you have to think Ruby Dee has a slight edge, but Amy Ryan won every critics award and Cate Blanchett is revered (although she has won recently which works against her this year).

The Coen Brothers snagged the award from the Directors Guild making them a huge favorite to take home the Oscar. The winner of that award takes home the Academy Award over 90% of the time. And since best director and Best Picture go hand in hand more often than not, No Country for Old Men seems at this point to be the odds on favorite for that prize. Only There Will Be Blood, which is the only film this year to successfully run an old-school prestige-pic Oscar campaign, could manage to take it away. Either way, a genuinely worthy film will take home the big prize

The full list of 2008 Oscar nominees can be found here, but the following is a quick run down of the big winners.

1. Paul Thomas Anderson: There Will Be Blood tied for the most nominations among all films with eight. Anderson garnered his third screenplay nomination and his first Best Director nod for a film that was marketed as the prestige pic of the season. That plan worked, making it more than likely this film gets the biggest boost at the box office this weekend.

2. Cate Blanchett: The woman considered by many to be the best actress of her generation became one of the handful of performers to score multiple nominations in the same year. Odds are low on her capturing her first Best Actress statuette, but she is certainly in the running for the Supporting trophy for her work as one of the many faces of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.

3. Paramount Vantage and Miramax: These two studios claim co-ownership of both There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, the two films that led all films with eight nominations each.

4. Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz: The composer and lyricist collaborators scored three nominations in the Best Song category for their work on Enchanted.

5. Joel and Ethan Coen: The brothers each picked up four nominations, one each for screenwriting, directing, producing, and editing as Roderick Jaynes is the name they take when working together in that capacity.

In the spirit of the no-frills Golden Globes telecast last night, here’s a quick list of why the show – hosted by Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush and Nancy O’Dell - was a disgrace that failed both as news and as entertainment.

1. They didn’t read all the award winners. If you’re going to present the telecast as a news event, you should report all the news. Anyone watching last night didn’t hear who won best screenplay (The Coen Brothers for No Country for Old Men), best foreign language film (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), best original score (Dario Marianelli for Atonement), or best original song (“Guaranteed” by Eddie Vedder for Into the Wild). Anybody watching this telecast is going to be a hardcore awards junkie, so why would they leave out any information?

2. Make the hosts watch some movies. When Samantha Morton won an award for her work in the spectacular Longford, the hosts looked shocked and dismayed, most likely because they had not seen it. In that same vein, Billy Bush opined after a win for Sweeney Todd that Johnny Depp and Tim Burton have one of those great collaborations like Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. One must assume that Mr. Bush thinks Robert De Niro is nothing more than a straight man for Ben Stiller.

3. NBC overdid the self-promotion. They chose a clip from The Simpsons Movie that name-checked Access Hollywood, and even worse, Bush and Nancy O’Dell felt the need to comment on that right after it aired. And I didn’t have a stopwatch on this, so I’m not sure if it’s true, but it sure felt like the clips from NBC shows like 30 Rock went on just a little bit longer than the others.

4. The banter was even worse than the usual awards show patter. Biggest offender: Billy Bush, after Jon Hamm won an award for his work on Mad Men, remarked on the irony of an actor named Hamm. Please settle the writers’ strike before Billy Bush is let anywhere near a microphone in prime time again.

5. The few attempts at analysis and insight they offered lacked any real substance whatsoever. Case in point – in the movie categories, all but one of the acting awards went to performers born in a country other than the United States. (Even the lone US-born nominee, Johnny Depp, played a Brit.) And the four best picture winners – Atonement, Sweeney Todd, Ratatouille, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - all transpire in a foreign country. The Hollywood Foreign Press going outside America for all of its winners is certainly an interesting trend worthy of some perspective or analysis, but you didn’t get a word of any of that last night.

Reuters reports that Tom Hanks sounded off about the Writers Guild of America strike and the possibility of it preventing an Oscar telecast.

“The show must go on, that is one of the tenets of everything…I just hope that the big guys who make big decisions up high in their corporate boardrooms and what not get down to honest bargaining and everyone can get back to work.

As a big cheese within the academy, and one of the most visible members of the Screen Actors Guild, don’t discount that Hanks’ words might have some influence, even if it is only on fellow actors who might begin speaking out more vocally on behalf of their WGA colleagues.