Best Picture Winner

Avatar and the Hurt Locker are the front runners for the Best Picture winner, which will be announced at the end of the academy awards tonight.

Best Picture Winner nominees

The Category has been expanded this year, and 10 films will compete for the little golden man.  In previous years, the category has been half that size.

1. Avatar.  James Cameron’s blockbuster hit which has already made more than $2 billion worldwide.  If you haven’t seen this futuristic, 3D sci-fi fantasy, you must be the only one.

2. The Blind Side, staring Sandra Bullock, traces one family’s adoption of a black football player and America’s continued unease with race.

3. District 9, an old fashioned alien invasion thriller with a modern twist.

4. An Education, about the seduction of a 16 year old English Schoolgirl by a wealthy and sophisticated older man.

5. Inglorious Basterds, perhaps Quentin Tarrentino’s bloodiest film yet, stars Brad Pitt as a take-no-prisoners Nazi hunter.  It is perhaps charting a new genre of “blood-porn” films.

6. The Hurt Locker, a timely film about an elite bomb squad unit of the US army in Iraq who is charged with detonating IEDs.

7. Precious, the story of an obese, African-American woman from the inner-city.  A rare  look into the life of America’s poor.

8. A Serious Man, the Coen brother’s latest, is a look into modern America and the troubles that befall physics professor Larry Gopnik.

9. Up, pixar’s latest film, is the only animated film in the Best Picture category this year.

10. Up in the Air, starring George Clooney, traces the life of a lonely man who spends more time in Hotels and Planes than in his home town.  A portrait of the tragic mobile spirit of Americans.

Stay with Breaking Global News all night for live blogging at the 82nd annual academy awards and find out who will be the Best Picture Winner.