Among the front-runners for this year's Best Picture Oscar are a previous Academy Award winner's loving salute to his childhood nanny; a period bio-pic about revered music icons; a feel-good dramedy in the vein of Driving Miss Daisy; and Spike Lee's cinematic confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan that ends with searing indictments of the 2017 rally/riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, and, by extension, the president of the United States.

Guess which of these films, at present, is the least controversial.

Will a comic-book movie finally be nominated for Best Picture? (Probably!) Will a Grammy-winning pop star be nominated for Best Actress? (Almost certainly!) Will the ceremony ever find a host? (At this point, I couldn't care less!)

Regardless, it's prediction time, Oscar hounds! Nominations for the 91st Annual Academy Awards are scheduled to be announced at 7:22 a.m. CST on Tuesday, January 22, with me no doubt burying my face in prognostic embarrassment at roughly 7:40. The boldface names and titles below are my predicted nominees, non-boldface denotes runners-up, and predictions are in order of probability.

Heading into this morning's announcement of nominees for the 90th Annual Academy Awards, there were loads of questions waiting to be answered. Would The Shape of Water set a new record for most nominations? Would the late release dates for The Post and Phantom Thread damage their Oscar chances? Would the announcement of James Franco's name result in spontaneous booing?

In recent years, I held off on composing my annual Movies of the Year roundup until one or two January weekends had passed, hoping to catch at least a couple of those acclaimed, Oscar-friendly titles that generally get to our area just prior to the announcement of Academy Award nominees. (This year's lineup will be unveiled on January 23.) But I'm just as relieved to be bidding farewell to 2017 as you likely are – and, after a year of disappointing grosses and endless scandals, as Hollywood no doubt is – so what say we get right to it?