Awards Season Playbook

6:00 AM PDT 10/30/2012 by Todd McCarthy

With only a few highlights like "The Dark Knight Rises," the first half of the year tested this critic's faith, but the fall movies have revived his spirits.

As a critic, I long ago made it a policy never to mention the "O" word in a film review because of a strong conviction that -- despite the tastes of a few thousand people who belong to a certain organization in Beverly Hills -- such a word has nothing to do with film criticism. I used to do very well on awards prediction ballots and betting, but even that's gone sour for me because every year the subject gets beaten into the ground to the point of utter fatigue by so-called experts.