You already know Cinematical's Oscar predictions ... now it's your turn to vote. Let us know who you think will win at the Oscars on Sunday. And then be sure to come back Sunday night, when we'll be liveblogging the Oscars starting with the red carpet at 7PM EST. And in the meantime, you can see all our Oscar coverage, including predictions and reviews of Oscar-nommed films, at our Oscar hub.

I wanted to find a group of teens to talk to about the Oscars, but I needed a group in which it was likely that at least some of them had actually seen some of the nominated films. So I turned to the high school youth group at First Unitarian Universalist Church in Oklahoma City where Terry, the religious education director, and Mike and Anne, the high school youth advisors, very kindly allowed me to spend a few minutes with their teens at their Wednesday night youth group.

This is a fun, rowdy group of kids, and as I'd suspected, almost all of them had seen at least one of the Oscar-nommed films, several had seen more than one, and many had vocal opinions -- whether they'd seen the films or not. Mike turned out to have seen quite a few of the films, so I'm including his thoughts as well, even though he harassed me about wanting my job. Sadly for Mike, I'm not going anywhere, but at least he gets to have his opinions seen by Cinematical readers far and wide. If the conversations seem a bit ... discombobulated ... well, that's because they were. You try getting a pack of hyper teenagers to settle down and talk about film.

For the third year in a row, I'm turning to my favorite Oscar predictor of all: my kid brother Stephen. He's not really a kid anymore (he's 25 now), but he still has the funniest Oscar picks around. He's also not a very accurate predictor, since only two of his picks from last year were correct. But that doesn't matter -- I like his rants about the films that weren't nominated and should win even better than the picks he makes that are limited to actual nominations. How many other people have you heard complaining that Michelle Pfeiffer and Josh Brolin were robbed ... and in the case of Brolin, not for No Country for Old Men, either.

I managed to get Stephen on the phone for more than five minutes running, which is a difficult feat, and we had a lively discussion about this year's Oscar nominees, as well as the films and talent who weren't recognized by the Academy this year. My only disappointment is that I can't get him very interested in documentaries -- with one notable exception, as you'll see. I'm not good at predicting Oscars, but before I got Stephen on the phone, I predicted which nominees he would pick for Oscars this year, and I was right in every non-actress category (he's extremely particular about actresses).

It's hard to get a statistical breakdown of the Academy's membership, but over the years I've formed a mental picture of the Academy's average member. He's male; he's been in show business for decades, usually as an actor; he's wealthy enough to be "liberal"; he's white. He sees the nominated films at home, on screeners, possibly while enjoying a sandwich, instead of in the theater. And he's more inclined to go for a glossy feel-good movie over a grimmer one, or for a sweeping, old-fashioned Hollywood period epic over a gritty drama about actual present day concerns. (See also Forrest Gump vs. Pulp Fiction; Gladiator vs. Traffic.)

In short, Ernest Borgnine.

So, when I try to handicap Oscar picks, I ask: WWEBD? This is often a very different set of films from what I'd like to see win, and the Virtual Borgnine process isn't foolproof (last year, VB went 5/6; in 2006, VB tanked with a record of 3/6, somewhat damaged by my overlooking when Borgnine -- the real one, not the virtual one -- publicly stated he wouldn't see Brokeback Mountain). But, mostly, it's an exercise in looking into the thought process behind the maddening nature of the Oscars. All quotes are, as ever, rough intimations of the Borgnine thought process ...

Writers are whores. We love assembling random letters of the alphabet into words, phrases, sentences, and articles, and will happily do almost anything (except sell our integrity) that allows us to ply our trade. That's how I ended up on a Caribbean cruise last week, happily working away as the waves crashed outside and the sun shone brightly on miles of publicly exposed flesh that, in a better world, would only have been revealed in private to a loved one. Travel tip: to keep from overeating on a cruise, simply stroll by the pool before lunch and take a close look at all the out-of-shape bodies. Yuck! I immediately started exercising ...

Movie choices were slim on board. I brought a few DVDs to watch on my laptop computer, and watched a little TV. (It may be a 500-channel universe, but only a handful are evidently available at sea. And did you know that TCM Latin America shows old TV shows with commercials in addition to classic movies?) Yet the eager, if not quite ready for Vegas, live entertainment shows and, especially, the bars consistently lured me out of my cabin.

It's hard not to feel like an over-privileged colonialist when you see how hard cruise ship personnel work. They sign up for months at a time and have very little "free time," which means, for our purposes, that they fall very far behind current theatrical releases. To my mind, that makes them perfect representations of the world at large which will be tuning in for the Oscar telecast with zero advance knowledge of any of the nominees.

The last movie José saw was The Simpsons Movie. And he didn't seem to know much about this year's Oscar race. And he was much more interested in telling me about the fare before me, a beautiful woman who apparently flashed him. But I decided to ask him for at least some random predictions anyway. See, it was late Friday night (actually technically early Saturday morning), I'd had a few too many to drink and I really, really wanted someone to just make sense of the 2008 Academy Award nominees. Aside from the Best Actor race, none of the categories seem to have a sure thing. It's really anybody's guess who will pick up Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress. So why not ask José, a NYC cab driver originally from El Salvador, for his less-than-expert opinion? He's got a good chance of bettering the predictions of the pundits anyway.

Before I get to José's picks, though, I must acknowledge that I borrowed the ask-a-cabbie idea from the NYC publication The L Magazine, which includes in each issue a regular feature called Fare is Fair, in which random cab drivers around the city are asked their opinions on a topical issue. I've never before seen The L do this with the Oscars, so I've done it myself, and I hope they don't mind. Consider it a form of flattery, because really it's my favorite piece to read on the subway every other week when the latest issue arrives in the street corner bins.

And now a transcript of my and José's conversation:

We have lots of fun Oscar predictions posts coming your way, but these are the official predictions of Cinematical's staff. While we can't attest to the sobriety or relative sanity of any of our team members at the time they submitted their predictions, the results were pretty consistent. It's going to be an interesting night next Sunday when the official results are announced over the course of a three-hour (four, if you count the red carpet, which we'll also be live-blogging) orgy of back-patting, self-congratulatory schmoozing, traditionally followed by a lot of boozing. Will the Oscar's actually be somewhat entertaining this year? We're not holding our collective breath around here, but we'll do our darndest to make our liveblogging at least moderately amusing.

Cinematical's staff was pretty unified on our predictions this year. We asked our staff to pick who they think will actually win (as opposed to who they'd personally like to see win), and in several of the categories (Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay) the votes were unanimous. In fact, the only category in which we didn't have pretty good consensus was Best Supporting Actress, which I think reflects the ambiguous feelings a lot of folks have about that particular field this year. Anyhow, without further ado, here are Cinematical's Official Picks for the Oscars, right after the jump ...

In case you didn't know, tomorrow night is the Oscars. One night of glorious, black-tie back-patting, followed by a couple days of chatter about who wore what and who didn't show upand who had the most god-awful hairstyle, and why this movie shouldn't have won that award. There are folks who are still bitching about Crash's win last year (and probably always will be), and no matter who wins the Best Picture this year, you can bet there will be moaning, wailing and gnashing of teeth from various quarters.

Tomorrow night, we here at Cinematical will be live-blogging the Oscars for you, starting at 4PM PST/7PM EST with some chatter about the red carpet, and we'll stick it out until the last, endlessly dull acceptance speech. In the meantime, though, here's what other sites around and about the internet are blogging about in preparation for Hollywood's big night.

Lots of group hug Oscar action after the jump ...

Sure, if you want to get a good read on who the experts think is going to win the Oscars, there are always the Gurus o' Gold. But when it comes to the Oscars, are the experts' opinions really any more accurate than any other random method of guessing who the winners will be? We think not. In the past, we've predicted the Oscars with a tarantula, a game of pin-the-Oscar-on-the-donkey, a Magic 8 Ball and the Virtual Borgnine. Some of those oldies-but-goodies will be making a reappearance for you this week, but today we're getting all scientific: my kids pick the winners -- out of a hat.

The rules of engagement were simple. For each of the categories we're predicting, I wrote down the nominees in the order they are listed on the official Oscars web site. I then assigned each nominee, in that order, a letter from A-E. Wooden letters A, B, C, D, and E from one of the kids' word games went into a bright pink hat, and then, with much ceremony, I announced, "Best Actor!" (or whatever the category was) in a very impressive voice, and one of the kids would draw a random letter. And much excitement ensued. It's just that simple -- and probably not too far off from how a lot of the votes are decided.

For Best Picture, though, a mere hat-draw wasn't going to do it -- hey, we're not slackers around here -- so we went the extra mile and the kids played out a full game of Chutes-and-Ladders, with five players -- each piece representing a Best Picture Nominee. Chutes-and-Ladders is just like Hollywood: sometimes you randomly hit a ladder, and inexplicably climb to the top virtually overnight; sometimes you hit a slide, and go plummeting to the depths of despair while the world watches.

The predictions from our junior experts, after the jump ...

It's been a battle of the rainy-day games on our Oscar derby this week, with Erik's magic 8 ball going head to head with Kim's kids and their post-it plastered paper donkey. Though the donkey method produced the prediction that George Clooney's going home with the biggest bounty on Sunday night, most of our experts are still pinning their tails, and hopes, on the cowboy craze. Elsewhere, we learned that fictional characters from the 70s don't have a *whole* lot to say about this year's races, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman would be wise to stop the Capote press train long enough to take note – Johnny Cash is on his ass.