The recent Golden Globe Awards are the official start to the awards season. However, the biggest award ceremony, The Oscars where we get to see our favorite movies of 2014 get rewarded for their cinematic greatness, has yet to happen. The Oscars this year are full of a plethora of influential and revolutionary films. The top movies include “Cake,” in which Jennifer Aniston plays a drug addict whose best friend commits suicide by jumping off a highway bridge; “Birdman,” about a tortured actor who seems to hate himself and everyone else; “Selma,” which focuses on Martin Luther King and the violent civil rights movement; and “Boyhood,” a bittersweet film about family life and all of its joys and sorrows, with an emphasis on the sorrows.

Nevertheless, even in a year full of seriousness on and off the screen, it is always fun to make predictions about who will win and who will lose. Here are my best guesses. If you see me in the halls and want to make a bet against my bets, feel free.

The Best Motion Picture award: “Boyhood.” For one thing, the movie recently won the Golden Globe for best picture. The movie was filmed over the course of twelve years, the actors and the director (Richard Linklater) met once a year to shoot a segment in order to finish this film. The children in the movie literally grow up on the screen, which is amazing to watch. It is like watching life, condensed into a few hours of brilliance. The movie involves big topics — marriage, divorce, remarriage, parenting, teenage angst. The end of the movie, in my opinion, is perfect: it is both incredibly sad and really happy. If not “Boyhood,” “Birdman” would be my second guess for Best Picture but it is just too relentlessly bitter and dark, so I don’t think it will beat “Boyhood.”

However, I think Michael Keaton, who plays the socially awkward and unhappy actor, named Riggan Thomson, in “Birdman,” will win the Oscar for Best Actor. His character is a fading movie star trying way too hard to get back into the limelight. His role is a suffer-fest — he appears in white underpants walking through Manhattan in one scene, and rips apart his tiny apartment during a temper tantrum in another — and I think he will be rewarded for his brilliantly executed fits of anger.

Next, I believe that the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor will go to J. K. Simmons, the music teacher in “Whiplash” who drives his students to the extreme to achieve excellence. Simmons seems so harsh and mean throughout this film. He yells at kids until they cry, and then he yells at them even more for breaking down and crying. The acting done by Simmons in this film was absolutely top notch and to me made the film come to life and seem real. Because of that, I believe, without a doubt, that Simmons will take home one of those little golden statues.

Every movie critic, including me, predicts that Julianne Moore will win the Oscar for Best Actress. She plays a woman who gets Alzheimer’s disease at a relatively young age in “Still Alice.” Another uplifting subject! I haven’t seen it and I’m not going to, mainly because of the somber subject that the film is on, but my bet is that Ms. Moore wins. It seems like everyone is talking about Alzheimer’s these days. I personally wish the winner would be Helen Mirren, who was outstandingly good in “The Hundred Foot Journey” as the owner of a prestigious restaurant in France who tries to defeat and belittle the struggling Indian restaurant owners across the street.

Patricia Arquette, the mom in “Boyhood,” will definitely win Best Supporting Actress for her hard work in “Boyhood.” Her acting, coupled with the superb performance of Ethan Hawke (her ex- husband in the movie), could drive “Boyhood” into the annals of Oscar history. I could see “Boyhood” winning five or six awards by the end of the evening including the Best Director award for Richard Linklater. He deserves it for orchestrating one of the most revolutionary movies of all time.
Whether you love the Oscar’s or you hate them it is always a heart-touching moment to see someone walk up on that stage and accept an award for a groundbreaking role or a revolutionary movie. So I recommend you grab your popcorn and soak it in!