[Ed.Note: Check out David Warner's Oscar post here.]

The 82nd annual Oscar nominations were announced this morning, and leading the pack with nine nominations each are James Cameron's Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Hot on the heels of the front-runners are Quentin Tarantino's World War II epic Inglourious Basterds with eight nods and Jason Reitman's terrific Up In The Air with six.

I can already see the storylines beginning to take shape:

THE POWER OF 10

How will having 10 nominees for Best Picture dilute the voting? Normally, I'd handicap this as a race between Avatar and Hurt Locker, with Basterds and Up In The Air as possible spoilers. But with six other movies to choose from, spanning multiple genres (bio-pic, sci-fi, drama, action, war, WWII, inspirational), there is bound to be some sub-dividing of the loyalties of the voters. For example: Will District 9 pull votes from Avatar? Will The Blind Side hurt Precious? With double the nominees, every vote is bound to count even more — leaving the race for Best Picture as wide-open as ever.

This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 2, 2010.