The ceremony approaches, and everyone wants me to make predictions: I was on CTV Newsnet Friday morning, and went straight from the studio to the NOW offices to record a podcast with Susan and Glenn, and I’ll be live-blogging the action somewhere at NOW Daily tonight.

Will “Slumdog Millionaire” take the big prize? Will “The Reader” snatch it away at the last minute? Are any of the other three films — “Frost/Nixon”, “Milk” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — still in contention?

Well, I don’t know. But it’ll be fun to find out, right?

It’s all Oscar, all the time this weekend — I’ll be liveblogging Sunday night’s ceremony, along with seemingly everyone else in the media — but over at Sympatico/MSN, we’ve carved out a little space to do something a little different.

With “The Necessities of Life” opening on Toronto screens this weekend (scheduled to capitalize on an Oscar nomination that never happened), we figured we could offer a little love to Canadian movies. So here’s a gallery of eight distinctly Canadian films, for your consideration and your love … and no, “Goin’ Down the Road” did not make the cut. We need to get past that, as a society.

You know I’m right, eh?

This is how fatigued I was when I wrote yesterday’s post about talking to Steven Soderbergh: I didn’t realize I’d written virtually the same exact post a few days earlier, in the service of saluting “The Limey”. Sorry for the redundancy; I hope there was enough new material (like, um, the actual interview) to justify your reading it again.

In other news, it’s Friday and there are movies opening. Shall we?

“Cadillac Records“: Darnell Martin compresses perhaps the most contentious period  in the history of American popular music into a Chess Records greatest-hits album, and when Jeffrey Wright’s Muddy Waters and Mos Def’s Chuck Berry are on the screen, it totally swings. (Mixed metaphor, I know. But appropriate to the characters, I think.) The trouble is, when they’re not on-screen, this is one awfully simplistic movie.

“Che“: I won’t lie to you: It’s a massive undertaking, and it doesn’t fully work. But it doesn’t not work, either, and it’s a fascinating film to unpack after you’ve had time to digest the experience. Does this mean you should run out and sit through the four-and-a-half-hour roadshow version as soon as possible? Well, no. Unless you want to. In that case, maybe it’s worth it. (Frustrating, isn’t it?)

“Fired Up”: A comedy about guys who join a cheerleader camp to meet hot girls. How could this plan possibly go wrong? And is it bad that I kind of like the trailer, and am curious to see it just because it reunites Eric Christian Olsen and Philip Baker Hall from the short-lived but fondly remembered Fox sitcom “The Loop”? Yeah, probably. Stuart takes it down.

“The Necessities of Life”: Set in 1954, Benoit Pilon’s quiet, powerful drama follows the cultural journey of a tubercular Inuit man (“Atanarjuat” star Natar Ungalaaq) brought to a Quebec City hospital for a cure he can’t even begin to understand. It’s really quite something. Try not to let anyone spoil it for you.

“Stone of Destiny“: Yeah, this just sucked. I want to dissect it at length, but it doesn’t merit the effort; sure, the determined Scottish nationalist students who plotted to steal a big rock from Westminster Abbey pulled off something impressive, but the movie that supposedly pays tribute to their venture is predictable, sloppy and utterly inert. So that’s a problem.

Oh, and the World’s Best Commercials program returns to the Bloor Cinema today to delight anyone yearning for several dozen quick hits of high-energy storytelling (and, yes, salesmanship) for an Oscar-weekend distraction. Admit it: A great big movie-theater screen beats click-and-stutter YouTube viewings any day of the week.

Okay, so sometimes the online presentation is a little better than YouTube. But still. Big screen! Happy audience! Go on, you know you want to.

“The Reader” wasn’t last year’s only expensive, exacting and utterly hollow awards-season title; Sam Mendes’ “Reservation Road” is equally guilty of that weird combination of prestigiously buffed shell and needy, grabby interior.

It’s got top-flight actors — Kate, Leo and Kathy, together again! It’s based on a key American novel of the 1950s! No expense was spared in re-creating the prefab suburbia in which their characters are inescapably trapped! It’s no more incisive or moving than a weak episode of “Mad Men”, but — damn, check out the period detail on the appliances!

Over at Slate (which is putting out some of this year’s best Oscar coverage, if anyone’s keeping score), Willing Davidson explores the disconnect between great novels and their unworthy big-screen adaptations. Bottom line: Books can be about emotions; movies are usually about plot.

Truer words, baby. Truer words.

With the Oscars just a few days away, all manner of odd things are happening in the magical world of Hollywood buzz.

Just this weekend, Kate and I witnessed the bizarre spectacle of Larry King interviewing Danny Boyle, Dev Patel and Frieda Pinto on his show; the increasingly disconnected King clearly had no idea who any of these people were, and spent most of the interview making goo-goo eyes at Pinto. Seriously, he’s old enough to be her grandfather … well, her great-grandfather … how old is Larry King, anyway?

What’s not happening, much to my barely disguised joy, is a lot of love for “The Reader”. And with good reason: It’s crap. But don’t just take my word for it; take a hop over to Slate, where Ron Rosenbaum takes the film apart conceit by repugnant conceit, putting it firmly in its place alongside the manipulative Holocaust tripe men call “Life is Beautiful”.

(I do think he misreads “Downfall”, though; that film doesn’t present ordinary Germans as innocents, because there are no ordinary Germans in that film; there are outsiders to Hitler’s bunker, certainly, but they’re still Nazis. Traudl Junge may have her illusions shattered about the Thousand Year Reich, but she’s still a true believer.)

Yeah, Kate Winslet’s still the front-runner for the Best Actress prize. But that’s an issue of attrition; everybody likes her, it’s her year, yadda yadda yadda. Me, I’m hoping Streep pulls ahead at the last minute. Everybody likes her, too, you know.

Just as there will always be stupid, horny teenagers, there will always be people who flock to the megaplex to watch those stupid, horny teenagers be brutally murdered: The “Friday the 13th” remake owned the weekend with a gross of $42.2 million, the best-ever opening for a horror film. Expect to see a lot of hockey masks this Halloween.

Surprisingly, the Clive Owen-Naomi Watts thriller “The International” opened at a distant seventh — below “Confessions of a Shopaholic”, even — with just $10 million. I guess that’s what happens when your evil bank doesn’t turn out to be run by an evil computer.

When will they learn? You can never have enough evil computers behind things. It’s the only way to explain Facebook … obviously, social data-mining is how Skynet keeps finding John Connor. Seriously, see if it doesn’t turn up as a plot point in “Terminator: Salvation”.

It’s a pretty big week for theatrical releases, but I’ve been working on so much other stuff — like the second annual Toronto Romanian film festival, about which more here — that I’ve managed to miss just about everything. And, as you can tell from the lateness of this post, I’m still working. So here’s a quicker-than-usual roundup:

“Confessions of a Shopaholic”: You know, a movie about a ditzy compulsive spender might not be the best thing right now. Dierdre feels the same way.

“Friday the 13th”: Both Andrew and Adam find Michael Bay and Marcus Nispel’s reboot of the venerable ’80s horror franchise more bearable than their ill-advised run at “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. Maybe it’s the lack of pesky subtext this time around?

“The International”: Neither Barrett nor Jason is particularly thrilled by Tom Tykwer’s paranoid actioner, which pits Clive Owen and Naomi Watts against an evil bank. I will be very disappointed if the evil bank is not run by an evil computer. You need levels on this stuff, people!

“Saving Luna”: A documentary about a stranded orca is getting mixed reviews — Adam liked it well enough, while Susan doesn’t have much time for it. (Check out the comment thread developing beneath Susan’s review — you’d think she’d just slammed “Toronto Stories”.)

“Trouble the Water“: Finally, a movie I’ve actually seen. You should see it, too. It’s really something.

“Under the Sea 3D”: I can never resist a 3D IMAX film, and this one was short, so I was able to squeeze in a screening earlier this week. It’s the usual large-format travelogue (narrated by Jim Carrey!), but the images are gorgeous, and it’s got playful sea lions! Awwww! Rad proved similarly vulnerable.

Okay, that’s everything. Well, not everything; there’s plenty of other stuff left to do this afternoon, so I’ll see you all tomorrow …

Another issue of NOW, another interview — this one with Tia Lessin, co-director (with Carl Deal) of the excellent Katrina documentary “Trouble the Water”, which opens in Toronto tomorrow after a year on the festival circuit.

That’s not them in the photo, by the way; that’s their subject, Kimberly Rivers Roberts (and her husband Scott), whose camcorder footage of the disaster provides a ground-level context for the disaster that struck New Orleans, and whose return to the city several weeks later — accompanied by Lessin and Deal — puts an immediate and human face on a story that still seems almost inconceivable three and a half years later.

There aren’t a lot of recent docs that I’d argue need to be seen on the big screen: “Standard Operating Procedure“, maybe, for its exquisite imagery and its mood, but even that works pretty well as a Blu-ray disc. “Trouble the Water”, though … well, here’s a story that needs to be experienced on an overwhelming scale. Because it was.