Wacky Oscar Predictions Dept.: Michael Jackson and ... Roland Emmerich?

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It’s possible that everyone was just hopped-up on a Halloween sugar rush, but it feels like the Oscar silly season has kicked into full gear with some hilariously outlandish new Oscar pundit best-picture predictions.

My Oscar-obsessed colleague Tom O’Neil has put up a post from an anonymous Oscar voter who, after seeing ‘This Is It’ with an enthusiastic scrum of theater patrons, claims that the Michael Jackson documentary will grab an Oscar best-picture nod. (I wonder if that means that Elizabeth Taylor actually sneaked into a theater over the weekend.) O’Neil also has a batch of goofy forecasts from World Entertainment News Network’s Kevin Lewin, who is predicting that both ‘The Informant’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ will land best picture nominations, which means either that Lewin is an awfully big Guy Ritchie fan or that Warner Bros. (distributor of both films) is paying for his Internet connection.

But our wackiest Oscar prediction of the week comes from New York Post critic Lou Lemenick, who says that one of the 10 best-picture nominees will be ... ‘2012,’ the upcoming end-of-the-world thriller from Roland Emmerich. According to Lemenick, the logic is obvious: ‘Certainly there is more precedent for a disaster film (and this one is expected to open huge) to be nominated for Best Picture (as ‘The Towering Inferno’ was) than for ‘The Hangover.’ ‘ I guess Lemenick likes long shots, since the odds of a Roland Emmerich film being nominated for a best-picture statuette are about as good as Barack Obama deciding to grab a few brews and watch the Academy Awards with Roger Ailes and his pals at Fox News.

Call me old-fashioned, but this is another good reason why all of our nutty Oscar pundits should be required to actually watch a movie before being allowed to publicly predict its Oscar fortunes.

Hey Lou: Just to make it interesting, I’ll put my money where my mouth is. If ‘2012’ gets an Oscar best picture nod, I’ll buy the person of your choice a gift subscription to the Post.