Predicting the Oscars 2014

LOS ANGELES. KAZINFORM - It's that time again, time to pull out the ballots and read the tea leaves and see who's going to take home the trophies at Sunday's 86th Academy Awards.

Will it be "12 Years a Slave"? Leonardo DiCaprio? "Let It Go" from "Frozen"? Oscar forecasting is a lighthearted parlor game for many and a "who cares" shrug for others. (Go ahead, commenters, let us know how you really feel!) But to studios, agents, managers and many of the nominees, winning the Oscar is not only first-line-of-the-obituary recognition, but it also means "cold, hard cash," as Oscar winner Wendy Hiller once bluntly put it, in box-office receipts and future contracts. With that in mind -- and with the possibility of some of this article's readers taking home cold, hard cash for winning their Oscar pools -- here are a few key indicators to follow at the 2014 Oscars Sunday night. Of course, the Oscars being the Oscars, nothing is guaranteed, Kazinform quotes CNN. What are the best picture front-runners? There may be nine nominees for best picture, but only three have a good chance of winning, says Tom O'Neil of the awards handicapping site GoldDerby.com: "12 Years a Slave," "Gravity" and "American Hustle." "12 Years" is the favorite among his 30 experts, with "Gravity" second at 10-3 odds and "Hustle" at 50-1. Everything else is 100-1. The site TheCredits.org agrees. Its social awards season app, DataViz, crunched the numbers based on mentions on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and film-related sites. It determined that "12 Years" has 42% of the online mentions (as of February 24) and "Gravity" is second with 33%. But, points out Clayton Davis of AwardsCircuit.com, in a year with divisive choices -- and "12 Years," though widely hailed, is not necessarily widely loved -- the preferential voting system for best picture can favor everybody's second choice. That's "Gravity," which also has the benefit of being the people's choice as the highest-grossing film among the nominees. Read more