Instead of focusing on one hot movie for Total Recall, this week you'll get five. They're a little old now, but I think you'll forgive me -- after all, they're Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood.

I've never been good at predicting the Oscars. Last year, for example, I thought Pan's Labyrinth was going to win Best Foreign. Silly me! So this year, I'm ditching gut feelings and going the experimental route: the Tomatometer. The average Best Picture nominee's Tomatometer hovers in the upper-80 percentile, so critical reception and Best Picture nomination go hand in hand. My mini-experiment: can an ad hoc formula using Tomatometer and box office numbers be used to predict the winner?

To begin with, here are this year's Best Picture nominees:
 

I'm going to predict an upset and say either Juno or Michael Clayton will take Best Picture. I'm probably wrong. And I hope I'm wrong -- I want There Will Be Blood to win. No Country has also deserved all of its momentum. But going on purely Tomatometer and box office statistics, the numbers are against both NCFOM and TWBB. But more on that later.

First, let's talk Atonement. What happened here? It has strong performances, a rousing score, gorgeous panoramas, and a love story that transcends both time and large bodies of water. In other words, the perfect Oscar movie. And director Joe Wright skillfully avoided preening for the award throughout his movie. But, suddenly, it's Atonement, not Juno, that should be happy to have gotten this far.

This week's issue of Entertainment Weekly pegs Atonement with a 10 percent chance of victory, writing, "Aren't the days of the typical 'Oscar movie' over?" Indeed, the smear-and-sneer campaigns the last historical, epic Best Pictures (The English Patient [85 percent] and Titanic [82 percent]) have endured after their wins reveal audiences have had their fill. Plus, Wright wasn't even nominated for Best Director. There's only been three instances that a movie has won Best Picture under those circumstances (Wings [100 percent], Grand Hotel [84 percent], and Driving Miss Daisy [78 percent]), and two of those came at a time when Private Snafu seemed like cutting-edge animation.

I can't decide if either Michael Clayton and Juno will win. They both exist in the now, even as they embody specific eras: Clayton recalls meaty American dramas like Network (90 percent) and On the Waterfront (100 percent), and Juno, with its precious music and Gen Y jive, is a movie with its head in the clouds, leaning ever-so-slightly into the future. If I had a gun to my nose, I'll say Juno will pull the upset. It's been a while since a movie mainly identified as a comedy has won Best Picture. And Juno has much in common with Annie Hall (98 percent): they're both culture-driven products of their time, but their ruminations on love and relationships have universality.

So what does the Tomatometer have against a movie like No Country for Old Men, with its virtual lock on the Best Picture race? Get this: my cursory peek into criticism history shows that in the past 36 years, only twice has the nominee with the highest Tomatometer won Best Picture: Annie Hall in 1977, and Unforgiven (96 percent) in 1992.

Why is that? Ideally, a year's Best Picture is a meeting point between art and commerce: a movie of deep thoughts with the sweet charm to pass them on to whomever's around. Critics, thirsty for something to wow them after watching several hundred movies a year, are likely more wont to praise movies of extreme novelty and subtlety before audiences (and the Oscars) can fully latch onto them.

No Country for Old Men is the only Best Picture nominee that has virtually no backlash against it. The movie is challenging and deliberately obscure, but the Coens' mastery of their medium has kept audiences electrified. I still feel jolts and chills thinking about it. But Tomatometer-wise, NCFOM has a 5.5 percent chance of winning. So if we are heading for an upset, I would normally picture There Will Be Blood sneaking up to take home the statue.

And that would be a remarkable feat for reasons beyond the fact that There Will Be Blood is a sprawling, shapeless movie about an ugly misanthrope. TWBB has grossed the least of all the nominees. And from what I can guess, the lowest-grossing nominee has never, ever won. The reason's fairly obvious: even though There Will Be Blood has been drawing strong per-theater averages, the less a country feels compelled to watch a movie, the less likely they are to vote for it.

The Oscars have suffered a number of embarrassments this year. Snubs for Zodiac (89 percent) and The Simpsons Movie (89 percent). The sheer presence of Norbit (9 percent). And on the rejection of Persepolis (96 percent), The Band's Visit (98 percent), and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (97 percent), foreign Oscar chairman Mark Johnson had this to say: "It's just inconceivable to me that they weren't included." But public humiliations aside, this year's Best Pictures selections are among the most thoughtful, well-rounded crew to represent cinema in decades.

In last month's "The Downsizing of Oscar," Richard Corliss wondered, "Why not just change the name, from the Oscars to the Independent Spirit Awards?" But I don't think it's a matter of the academy out of touch with what the public watches. In fact, it's the opposite: not only do these movies represent the still-smoldering hope of indie fare connecting with audiences, it demonstrates the Academy is finally catching up with the rest of us.

After giving Best Picture to the lazy, self-congratulatory pap of Crash (75 percent), the Academy atoned by giving Martin Scorsese his Oscar last year. And now they're recognizing five movies each relevant in its unique way.  I haven't seen as much online discourse sparked as the complexities of deceit in Atonement and Michael Clayton have, or of the annoying/endearing personality of Juno, the mystique of Anton Chigurh, and the general WTFness of Daniel Plainview. Their stories may not always make a mint at the box office, but they are exactly the thing to rile up the modern community -- the bloggers, the users, the podcasters, the budding scholars and filmmakers. Choose the movies that get us talking. We will be the ones who make them last.