In the wee hours of January 22nd (my birthday by the way – Target gift cards are always appreciated!), the nominations for the 81st Academy Awards will be announced by whichever two actors lost the coin-toss at the 80th Academy Awards ceremony last February. (Apparently the nominations were originally supposed to be announced on January 20th, but apparently there’s some big parade or whatever going on that day.)

Anyway, next to making year-end lists and posting cleavagey shots of Scarlett Johannson, there’s nothing your friends at the Screengrab enjoy more than Oscar predictions.

This year, we’re keeping score...and you (yes, YOU!) can play along at home by posting your predictions (down yonder in the Comments section) for the five nominees in each of the following major categories (along with your long-range guess for the winners of each award): Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor & Best Supporting Actress.

After the actual nominees are announced, we’ll tally up the points and see which Screengrabber (or Commenter!) had the most accurate predictions, thus earning the top-seed spot going into the full-scale Oscar prediction play-offs.

For the Screengrab’s individual and collective picks, we'll see you after the jump!

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Like Robin William’s out-of-focus actor in Deconstructing Harry, it’s often hard to really see any new Woody Allen film clearly.

For some, the director is a creepy old relic who shot his load in the seventies and eighties, then slept with his not-quite-technically underage not-quite-technically stepdaughter and keeps churning out ever-more-terrible movies to suck whatever money he still can from the wallets of the aging bourgeoisie pseudo-intellectuals willing to pay for his particular brand of nostalgic, non-threatening real estate porn. For others, the Soon-Yi controversy wasn’t as much of a deal-breaker as the sight of Allen snogging comely young co-stars who (to paraphrase Wooderson from Dazed and Confused) kept staying the same age while he kept getting older. Some just never dug his insular, overeducated, upper-class shtick in the first place. And even for die-hard fans, it’s hard not to greet each new Allen film like each new Prince album, hoping against hope that somehow this time it’ll be Purple Rain again, only to be disappointed when it's not (and wondering vaguely why he can’t just save up all his remaining talent for one last masterpiece rather than cranking out so much sub par material).

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Boy, what's up with all the Woody Allen posts this week?  I mean, sure, he's got a new movie opening today (Vicki Cristina Barcelona), and sure, a lot of critics are claiming it's his best work in a decade.  But someone says that every decade, and have been doing so for approximately four decades.  So who is this jerk who's so obsessed with the Wood-man, that he keeps forcing Screengrab readers to share his mania?  Oh, right -- it's me.  It may surprise you to learn that, given my fascination with the former Mssr. Konigsberg, I am not especially a huge fan of his work, and I'm certainly not one of his more vociferous defenders.  I think he's mistaken about being a Serious Artist, which gets in the way of his being one of the funniest men of his generation; he's got a major Mary Sue complex; he's somewhat technically limited as a director and receives a lot of credit for work that is properly given to his cinematographers; and I agree with Joe Queenan that his work is literally sophomoric -- the intellectual, moral and emotional themes in his movies rarely get past the level of someone who, like Woody himself, dropped out of college his sophomore year.  But in Annie Hall and Manhattan, he made two of the best movies of the 1970s; he's one of the finest comic minds on the planet; and he's managed to make a career for himself so robust that he's made an average of a movie a year for 30 years, which, no matter how similar the themes in said movies, is something like a miracle.  So, after you've watched Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson make out in the Wood-man's latest masterpiece, why not rent five more of my favorites, and make it a festival?

WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY?  (1966)

The fact that the directorial debut of a man many people consider the greatest moviemaker of his generation was little more than a cheap Chinese action-thriler with jokey dialogue dubbed in over it is shocking to some people.  It's as if someone told you that thumbocentric auteur/Kung Pow!  Enter the Fist director Steve Oedekerk grew up to be Jean-Luc Godard.  But it's true:  for his very first film in 1966, Woody Allen got the rights to a junk chop-socky called Key of Keys from American International Pictures, who had judged its plot too elaborate.  Woody and his cast simply chucked the damn plot out the window and turned the entire thing into a goofball James Bond parody, which the studio padded out with some extraneous nonsense and a couple of pop songs by the Lovin' Spoonful (the biggest brush that Woody would ever again have with modern popular culture), released, and went on to make a fortune off of.  What's even more surprising than the fact that What's Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen's first movie as a 'director' is that it works so well -- it's tightly paced, contains tons of funny gags (many of which seemed a lot fresher than when bad comedians and internet wags recycled them 40 years later on the internet and in movie theatres).  A fun, funny piece of detournment , no matter how you view Allen's later career.     

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Oh, the things you find when you're a pretty young movie star out for a night on the town.

According to World Entertainment News Network, the internet equivalent of magazines only available at grocery store checkout lines, Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, and Javier Bardem, the harem of talented folks Woody Allen has collected for his latest flick, Vicki Cristina Barcelona, were out for a night on the town in the small Spanish city of Oviedo, when they happened to discover...a bronze statue of Woody Allen.  No, they weren't drunk -- or, at least, they weren't just drunk.  They'd stumbled upon a statue erected by the Spanish government in  2002 after they awarded the filmmaker with the "Prince of Asturias" award for cultural acheivement.  "We took pictures with the sculpture," says Cruz, "hugging it, and gave the pictures to Woody."

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The marketing team behind Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (due in theaters later this month) must be ready to throw a party for the director and cast on a yacht – or more likely a slow boat to China. Several months ago we told you about Allen downplaying expectations of “torrid sex” in the movie, saying “People who come and expect those exaggerations are going to be disappointed.” Now we’ve got Scarlett Johansson revealing that her make-out session with Penelope Cruz wasn’t all that thrilling – and Cruz declining to speak about it at all.

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