To recap, for most of the season a troika of damaged contenders have been assumed to have a lock on nominations, with the assumption that one of them would take the top prize, despite the fact that each has big minuses. The top three have been Precious (too heavy-handed) Up In the Air (just not quite fantastic enough) and The Hurt Locker (too obscure, unseen by the public). And of those three, Up In the Air has remained the front runner with Hurt Locker taking a distant third at the back of the pack.

By weekend's end, however, the big three had been transformed into the big four, with Hurt Locker suddenly making a move on the outside.

The first piece of non-game changing news was the announcement of the slightly influential but important sounding American Film Institute's Top Ten list. The list reaffirmed the big three, giving them all slots. The one real possible game-changer was the stunning inclusion of The Hangover on the list, which has been mentioned as a dark horse contender for one of Oscar's ten best pic slots.

Next to weigh in was the LA Film Critics Association. The dwindling band of full time movie reviewers began what might prove to be a late surge for Hurt Locker, giving the little bomb-disposal movie that could the year's top honors.

A couple of other long-shots kept their dreams alive with the perhaps-not-all-that-influential Broadcast Film Critics nominations. The Weinstein Company's two dark horses, Inglorious Basterds and Nine, (the latter of which has met with very mixed, at best, critical response) led the pack with the most nominations as well as each scoring Best Picture nods.

And finally today, the New York Film Critics weighed in, seconding their LA brethren's support of Hurt Locker; naming the film as the best of the year and giving Kathryn Bigelow the best director nod.

However, the biggest news shaking up the race was not in the awards but in a flurry of reviews that emerged this weekend for James Cameron's long awaited Avatar. While widely assumed to be a stink-bomb in the making (by us at least) the film has met with rapturous, over-the-top hosannas, leading a stunned awards guru, David Poland, to write,"Avatar joins the 3 or 4 locks for an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture."

Here then are the current standings in the thrilling race to be Oscar's Best Picture of the Year, with a mere three months and a half months left to go; noting by the way, that the most important milestone on the Oscar trail, the Golden Globe nominations, happens tomorrow morning, potentially throwing the entire race in uproar once again.

THE STANDINGS:

1. UP IN THE AIR ↔
The Rap: Liked by almost everybody, head-over-heels loved by very few; a vulnerable front-runner. But who could knock it off its pedestal?
Favorable Winds: Continues to make best picture lists.
Negative Winds: Makes lists but leads very few. The "relevant" topicality, as pushed by Frank Rich, is a quality that generally fades in Oscar's mind as the season draws on and hype dies down.

2. THE HURT LOCKER ↑
The Rap: Little film with a lot of very very committed fans in the critical world.
Favorable Winds: Swept critics awards this weekend; possible Cameron vs. ex-wife director Bigelow storyline may be irresistible for Oscar.
Negative Winds: Bestowing the top trophy on a film no one has seen (grosses still total under ten million) is a potentially suicidal move for Oscar.

3. PRECIOUS ↓
The Rap: The little drama's power and messageyness still hits Oscar where it hurts, despite heavy-handedness.
Favorable Winds: Still riding its sweep of the Spirits.
Negative Winds: Hard hitting horror show story showing strong signs of looking less interesting as time passses.

4. AVATAR ↑
The Rap: James Cameron's 3D outer space epic exploded into the race with rapturous reviews this week, but remains unseen by Oscar voters.
Favorable Winds: The reviews have been strong enough that Avatar could potentially be that rare film Oscar prays for; the giant blockbuster with enough critical standing that it comes in and sweeps the table — and boosts ratings, like Titanic or Lord of the Rings.
Negative Winds: Question mark whether the 3D effects and 2D plotting will prove just too much for voters to swallow in a Best Picture.

5. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS↑
The Rap: Quirky war epic may be the Tarantino film with broad enough appeal to win him a seat at the table.
Favorable Winds: Led the Broadcast Film Critics nominations; retains a base of hardcore admirers.
Negative Winds: Remains a highly love-it-or-hate-it film, and with ultimately more post-modern fluff than weighty Oscar appeal.

6. AN EDUCATION ↔
The Rap: Charming little film that won't fade away.
Favorable Winds: Keeps making friends and wears perhaps the best of the Oscar dramas; should pick up lots of acting nominations.
Negative Winds: Too small and non-messagey a film to be a serious contender for the big prize.

7. UP! ↓
The Rap: Pixar cartoon is beloved by many, but Oscar remains no friend of the cartoon.
Favorable Winds: Shows up on almost every ten best of the year list.
Negative Winds: Has yet to show the sort of awards muscle with other prizes it would need to stampede over anti-cartoon prejudice and force its way into the top tier.

8. INVICTUS ↓
The Rap: The South African rugby picture is widely appreciated, but has few jumping with glee.
Favorable Winds: Oscar's love for Eastwood remains strong; Morgan Freeman's performance almost guaranteed nomination.
Negative Winds: Weak box-office performance has sapped what momentum the film have; Eastwood has been so celebrated by Oscar already that the bar has become very high for him to earn yet another.

9. NINE ↓
The Rap: Huge Oscar pedigree, but early response is very tepid.
Favorable Winds: Topped nominations in Broadcast Critics awards.
Negative Winds: Palpable lack of excitement about what should have been a shoo-in.

10. A SERIOUS MAN ↔
The Rap: What was thought to be the Coen's most obscure and personal film continues to win over fans.
Favorable Winds: Strong showings on ten best lists.
Negative Winds: Obscurity of topic and structure continue to keep it at arm's length from top tier.

11. THE MESSENGER ↑
The Rap: Almost entirely buried in its theatrical release, continues to impress those who have seen.
Favorable Winds: Should get acting nods for its strong performances by Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson.
Negative Winds: Could be the first film that failed to gross a million nominated for Best Picture in recent history.

Third tier contenders: White Ribbon, Lovely Bones, A Single Man, The Road, The Blind Side, In the Loop, Julie and Julia, The Hangover.

COUPLES RETREAT
The Story: Four couples venture to a idyllic island retreat where they are forced to confront what ails their troubled relationships.
The Pitch: He's Just Not Into You meets Wedding Crashers
Who It's For: Stagnating mid-life couples seeking 90 minutes of release from their private hell in mocking the private hells of other mid-life couples.
Cause for Hope: Actually a couple of mild laughs in the trailer; Veronica Mars has not quite worn out her welcome yet.
Cause for Concern: It will not end here. Vaughn has at least three other comedies already in development.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 3

AN EDUCATION
The Story: A teenage girl in Swinging 60's London falls for a debonair suitor (Peter Sarsgaard) twice her age.
The Pitch: Georgy Girl meets Manhattan
Who It's For: The Smart Set
Cause for Hope: No movie set London in the Swinging 60's has ever been there. (No, the Austin Powers films weren't actually set there, so they don't count.)
Cause for Concern: Early Oscar buzz is generally a harbinger of mind-numbing tedium ahead.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 8

GOOD HAIR
The Story: Chris Rock fronts a documentary exploring the complex world of African Americans' hair issues.
The Pitch: Fast Food Nation meets Beauty Parlor
Who It's For: Comedy enjoyers and documentary fans alike.
Cause for Hope: Fascinating, under-discussed topic; restores the hope for the comic documentary genre nearly bludgeoned to death by Michael Moore polemics.
Cause for Concern: If we wanted to learn, we'd go to school.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 8

THE DAMNED UNITED
The Story: A soccer coach (Michael Sheen) takes on the most successful team in the UK in the 1970's, and makes waves challenging their style of play.
The Pitch: Victory meets The Full Monty
Who It's For: Yobs and the yanks who love them.
Cause for Hope: From Peter Morgan, the screenwriter of The Queen and Frost/Nixon.
Cause for Concern: Soccer still just seems like a bunch of guys jogging around a big field and never scoring.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 7

BRONSON
The Story: The based-on-truth story of a British perpetual prison inmate who makes violence his art form.
The Pitch: Clockwork Orange meets Swimming to Cambodia
Who It's For: Any remaining Brit film fans who haven't been swallowed up this weekend by An Education or Damned United.
Cause for Hope: Looks crazy and weird enough to possibly break through the doldrums of Britain's overworked geezers and guns genres.
Cause for Concern: Viewers are cautioned that Guy Ritchie flashbacks are extremely possible.
Defamer Enthusio-Meter: 6

The old guard at Defamer simply lurved An Education, the Nick Hornby-penned movie about Carey Mulligan (so affecting in The Seagull on Broadway last year) falling in love with an older, dangerous Peter Sarsgaard (less affecting in that same production.)

It looks like one of those stirring, sentimental-in-the-right-smart-ways, heartachers that always get Oscar buzz but never actually get invited to the big dance. Though, now that there will be a whopping ten Best Picture nominees, maybe this lil' thing will swoop on in.

Speaking of swooping! Here's also a trailer, that's been out a week or so, yes, for Amelia, Mira Nair's misguided-looking biopic of famed aeronautical lesbo-type Amelia Earhart. And who better to play yet another lesbo-type than one Hillary Swank, the worst actress with two Oscars currently working in cinema today? She looks predictably awful in the movie, with an increasingly bedraggled Richard Gere bringing up the rear. The movie is about flying! Of the body and the spirit!

SPOILER ALERT: She dies.

We called it. SPC picked it up in a roughly $4 million buy. Emboldened, we'd now recommend that Lionsgate take a look at Push: Based on a Novel by Sapphire. Work that Tyler Perry circuit, get assured spots on Oprah and The View, and thank us later (a supporting actress campaign for Mo'Nique would be payment enough).

• Sony Pictures Classics Nabs North American and Latin American Rights to An Education in $3-$4 Million Deal [MCN]

· As noted this morning in our roundup of Lame Sundance White-Guy Tropes, Fox Searchlight acquired the quirky drama Adam for low, low seven figures. Other buyers are not impressed, but Searchlight could probably make money out of a parking-garage surveillance video, so... Benefit of the doubt, etc.

· That said, the instant classic An Education was neither instant nor classic enough for Searchlight to bow on its reported $1 million offer, which co-sales reps CAA and Endeavor countered with a price tag of $10 million. Good luck with that, guys.

· And at least until someone opens a wallet wide for Education, this is the sweetest Sundance story we've heard all week.

· And the sweetest review we've read all day belongs to Spout's Karina Longworth, whose disapproval of the Michael Cera/Charlene Yi entry Paper Heart warns, "Put on your helmets, there’s falling meta in the synopsis tunnel." And that's being kind; the word "vile" has come up more than once in conversations with Heart survivors we've encountered in town. Can't! Wait!

· While we're parsing reviews, did Variety really just attribute "perhaps [Robin] Williams' best (at least largely) dramatic performance to date" to his Bobcat Goldthwait collaboration World's Greatest Dad? Huh! Our investigation forthcoming...

Hornby persuaded his wife, producer Amanda Posey, to option the memoir by Lynn Barber — a British journalist known for "devastatingly accurate profiles of celebrities," in Hornby's words. It was the author's first adaptation in 11 years (and his first ever of work besides his own); at Sunday's premiere, he described the learning curve that yielded arguably the festival's best film.

"When you get to the end of a screenplay, you realize you hadn't done anything you set out to do," Hornby said. "It's almost over before you know it. So the process of drafting and redrafting, to me, is much more important in film because it feels like an undercoat of paint, and then a coat on top of that, and a coat on top of that. That's the only way to give it the texture that you want. Whereas writing a book, my first drafts tend to be in reasonable shape. You have all the time in the world to get things going. And of course all that business about murdering your darlings: There are scenes that have to go. There's no reason, when you're writing a book, why any scene should have to go. If it's working, no one's going to tell you it costs too much money to print those three pages.

"The reason I want to do film is because I want to be part of a collaborative process. I'm happy writing my books, but for 15 years, I've been sitting on my own in a room. It's nice to discuss what I'm doing as I'm doing it, rather than years after finishing it. I really enjoyed the process of working with Lone, working with the producers and working with the actors. It's really a lot of fun. But now I'm back on the book side. I miss it."

Fine, Nick — take your time. And if you really want to challenge yourself next time, give us a sequel.

An Education all but blew the marquee off the Egyptian Theater, where over 100 latecomers were turned away onto a swarming Main Street before director Lone Scherfig nervously announced not even she had yet seen her film outside the lab. She had nothing to worry about: Led by 23-year-old Carey Mulligan in a breakthrough that makes Ellen Page's Juno turn look like a Lifetime reject, Scherfig's ensemble cast wrings a spry, otherworldly beauty from Nick Hornby's script and its corrosive glare at early '60s London. We have no idea if it's the festival's best film, as some have said, but if there is a likelier candidate for life beyond Park City —- as in awards-season, even canonical immortality — let's have it.

Mulligan plays Jenny, a middle-class 16-year-old with an eye on Oxford and a weakness for David (Peter Sarsgaard), the 30-something suitor who charms her domineering parents and introduces the girl to his swinging society lifestyle in the city. Suddenly determined to cultivate the high life, Jenny subordinates her studies in favor of romance, travel and adventure — naturally too good to be true, as David's professional and personal indiscretions soon reveal.

The chemistry between Sarsgaard and Mulligan — who yields an equally, almost unfairly sublime secondary performance in the otherwise blah The Greatest — would be enough to recommend An Education; as predatory as he is tender, Sarsgaard's David respects his intellectual match in Jenny even as he erodes her independence. And Mulligan, with a face as vulnerable and expressive as the soft smoke burnishing her voice, radiates authority even in the push-pull of submission. But abetted by supporting cast Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Emma Thompson, Dominic Cooper, Olivia Williams and, in a haunting late cameo, Sally Hawkins, the lovers' respective endgames have their own charismatic coaching staffs watching from the sidelines and an able, attentive referee in Scherfig.

You can't really fuck up technically with talent like this, but you can overblow the prestige. The blockbuster Sunday premiere did neither, instead confirming Mulligan's arrival and An Education's status as one of the four or five most coveted competition titles of the festival. No sooner had the lights gone up than Sony Classics co-president Michael Barker and his deputy Dylan Leiner raced out of the theater; we hold fast to our prediction that it's their acquisition to lose, but who knows at this point, and who even cares? For another four or five Sundance audiences this week, the future is pretty much now. See it while — and whenever — you can.

Amid the contraction and pocketbook panic gripping the independents and mini-majors this winter, predicting a Sundance bear market seems a safe, obvious choice for 2009. But it also seems relative — especially following a year when sales of festival films reportedly plunged 66 percent from their collective 2007 high of $45 million, and eight-figure buys like Hamlet 2 (and its subsequent seven-figure gross) signaled a reality check that had little or nothing to do with an imploding economy. Distributors need content; they just don't need to walk away with one film to show for $11 million.

So what will they be spending on — and for how much — over the next 10 days? We scoured this year's selections for a few intrepid predictions:

· I Love You Phillip Morris. Jim Carrey is a cop who turns to crime, goes to prison and winds up falling in love with a fellow inmate played by Ewan McGregor. Adapted from a true story by the guys who brought you Bad Santa, Morris may not be the first film that goes (it doesn't premiere until Sunday), but it's already commanding the highest going rate at the fest and could tempt a Miramax or Fox Searchlight — the latter of which is one of the few potential suitors with the proven alacrity and class to successfully sell a film like this — to write a $9 million or $10 million check in the wee hours of Monday morning. If it's not this year's What Just Happened?, languishing overhyped, unfunny and out of place in Park City.

· An Education. Nick Hornby adapted his novel about Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a 16-year-old London girl whose coming of age is kick-started after meeting an older man (Peter Sarsgaard) in 1961. She's on her way to Oxford, he's on his way to a nightclub, holy Christ what will she choose? Word is that An Education is a starmaker for Mulligan, aided by another anticipated film at the fest (see below) and a supporting cast — Sarsgaard, Emma Thompson, Alfred Molina, Sally Hawkins — that will attract the likes of Sony Pictures Classics, Miramax and Focus Features for at least $4 million.

· The Greatest. Setting itself up as an In the Bedroom without the undercooked revenge subplot, The Greatest thrusts Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon into grief over the loss of their teenage son in a car accident. Mulligan appears as the dead kid's girlfriend, lessons are learned, Oscar clips ensue — again, if it's any good: Sundance's bead on middle-class white mourning is growing tired, and Brosnan's executive producer credit whispers "vanity project." But to the extent they even show up with any money at all, the Weinsteins and Paramount Vantage are suckers for this kind of stuff. It may not leave Park City with a deal, but we'll probably hear numbers between $4 million and $5 million throughout the week.

· Cold Souls. Paul Giamatti plays himself in the story of an actor, tormented by his forthcoming role as Uncle Vanya, who turns to a futuristic soul-freezing enterprise as a means of assuaging his anxiety. Which works great — until his soul is stolen and enlisted for use by a Russian soap star. On one hand, the quirk potential here is kind of skin-crawling. But on the other, director Sophie Barthes blew us away with her 2007 short Happiness, which skimmed similar themes with warmth and sincerity. Sony Classics won't want anything remotely Kaufmanesque after Synecdoche, New York, but IFC Films and Magnolia Pictures will probably fight over this in the $2 million range for its potential in both the theatrical and VOD arenas.

· Bronson. It may turn out to be this year's Wrestler — not for any stirring actorly comebacks but rather for an edgy tour de force take on crime, celebrity and class as seen through the psychotic eyes of Charlie Bronson (Tom Hardy), Britain's most notorious prisoner. Hardy will pull out an Eric Bana-style prison-saga breakthrough thanks to director Nicolas Winding Refn, whose Pusher Trilogy endures as one of the decade's great (and greatly underrated) cinematic achievements and whose style fuses hyperrealistic violence with Scandinavian chamber drama. It will polarize Sundance and stimulate salivary glands around the Fox Searchlight and Magnolia condos, from one of which (probably Searchlight, who's seen genre risks like Night Watch pay off before) will come a $3 million buy late next week. Bet on it.