It was awfully early in the morning, 5:30 a.m. Pacific, when the nominations for this year's Academy Awards were read by actor Chris Pine, directors J.J. Abrams and Alfonso Cuarón, and Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs. (Also, for the first time ever, the nominees in all 24 categories were read live, meaning we prognosticators didn't have to wait an extra six minutes to find out just how badly we screwed up Best Sound Mixing.) It might even have been a little too early for Ms. Isaacs, who, when announcing their names, approached true Travolta-ness by calling Julianne Moore "Julianne Moren" and Mr. Turner cinematographer Dick Pope "Dick Poop."

Yet it's hard to imagine anyone in Hollywood - especially anyone with a vested interest in the results - falling back to sleep after the official Oscar contenders were revealed, because as wake-up calls go, this one was frequently a doozy.

If you're reading this hot off the (electronic) presses, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences only have an hour or so to submit their online or - less frequently these days - paper ballots for this year's Oscar race. (Voting officially ends today at 5 p.m. PST.) So this seems like an appropriate time to make my own final guesses for January 15's nominees, even if a better time would be January 15 itself - preferably just after the Academy's official announcement of contenders.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK 2: ANGEL OF DEATH

For those keeping track, the newly annual tradition of each film year opening with a horror sequel continues, thanks to the release of The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death. But I should mention that, beyond the presence of the titular ghost, director Tom Harper's follow-up doesn't share many traits with the original. There's no Daniel Radcliffe, for one thing. And instead of taking place in the London outskirts of the Edwardian era, this one is set during World War II. And ... . Um ... . Wow. Does anyone recall anything else about the original?

When Mike Schulz suggested revisiting and updating our lists of favorite movies of the 2000s, I looked back at my early-2010 article and thought: "Ghost Town? What the hell is that?" Sorry, Ricky Gervais, but it took a few seconds to recall anything at all about a movie I'd listed as one of my top 100.

Such are the perils of composing lists covering long periods of time with a memory as leaky as mine. Unlike my colleague Mike, I don't have a record of my thoughts about most of the movies I've seen, and therefore I can't say with much certainty whether I still like the 100 favorite movies I selected for 2000 through 2009. So I started from scratch here, with the idea that I wouldn't include anything so poorly (if fondly) remembered as Ghost Town. (Favorites from the 2010 list that aren't included here haven't necessarily fallen in my esteem; in many cases, I just don't have a recent experience or firm memory of them to rely on).