OK, so there will be eight for Oscar

Brad Pitt in Tree of Life

For months now I have been championing the fact that seven films will be nominated for Oscar’s top prize when the nominations are announced next month. That’s because I didn’t think the stodgy ol’ folks at the Academy could get their arms around Terence Malik’s The Tree of Life. I mean a film that digresses during its opening moments to give us the story of creation and whose view of eternity is a banal beachfront just did not seem like typical Oscar fare. If it was, why wasn’t a Federico Fellini film ever nominated for the big enchilada? But Tree is winning too many year-end awards to be ignored so I’m going to have to go with it and these other seven films to capture nominations (listed in alphabetical order):

The Artist
The Descendents
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse