It’s still more than three months until Hollywood gathers together for its biggest night of the year — the Academy Awards — yet, the film awards season will officially start this Thursday when the National Board of Review announces its picks for the best in film for 2009.

Since 1929, the NBR has been the first critical body to announce its annual awards. Although the board started out only naming the 10 best English-language movies of the year and the best foreign films, NBR has expanded over the years to include many of the same categories as the Oscars, including Best Film, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay. Because of this similarity in categories and the early date, the NBR’s picks are seen by many as a means of predicting who will take home the Oscar come March. In reality, though, the NBR picks do not often coincide with those of the Academy.

Over the past 25 years, the Academy and the NBR have agreed only 36 percent of the time for Best Film, 40 percent for Best Actor, 32 percent for Best Actress and 24 percent for Best Director. In fact, there were three times — in 1984, 1998 and 2002 — when the two critical bodies didn’t agree in any of these four categories.

One reason for this discrepancy is the type of people who make up the voting members of the Academy and the NBR. The Academy includes just under 6,000 members — approximately 20 percent of which are actors — who are chosen on the basis of whether they have made a significant contribution to the field of motion pictures. The NBR, on the other hand, is a selective, 110-member board of knowledgeable film enthusiasts, academics, film professionals and students.

Of the two groups, the NBR often strays away from the mainstream more when handing out awards. However, when it comes to nominations, the NBR often includes a couple of major box office hits in its top 10 list — “The Dark Knight” and “WALL-E” in 2008 — that you won’t find in the Academy’s nominations.

The inconsistency in the two group’s picks is also a result of the NBR announcing its awards more than three months before the Academy. Because the NBR makes its picks in the first week of December, some of the films in the pool have yet to receive a wide release. This means that some of the films won’t have the same kind of buzz surrounding them as they will three months down the road.

For example, “The Reader,” a Best Picture nominee that featured an Academy Award-winning performance from Kate Winslet, didn’t even make the NBR’s top 10 list because the film didn’t start picking up steam until late December.

In fact, out of the 16 times the NBR and the Academy disagreed on the year’s best film in the last 25 years, nine of the films picked by the Academy as Best Picture were released after the first week of December.

However, while the NBR awards may not be the most reliable in terms of predicting Oscar winners, the Board’s top 10 list plays a more interesting role this year now that the Academy has decided to pick 10 nominees for Best Picture instead of five and changed the voting system for the award. Instead of members making one pick for Best Picture as they did in the past, they will now rank the films from one to 10. If a film does not have 50 percent of the No. 1 votes after the rankings, the film with the lowest percentage of first-place votes will be dropped and those who voted for that film will then have their No. 2 votes counted instead. As a result of this change, the film with the most No. 1 votes isn’t guaranteed the award by any means, making the list of nominees more important than ever. The question, then, is how closely will the NBR’s list of nominees coincide with the Academy’s?

If you look at the past 25 years, the NBR’s film list usually includes four or all five of the Best Picture nominees for that year. Therefore, in the past, you could reasonably expect to find all the nominees for Best Picture within in the NBR’s top 10. Yet, it’s difficult to tell whether the same will hold true now that there are 10 Best Picture nominees. If I had to guess, I would say six or seven will translate over from the NBR’s list to the Academy’s.

So who will be on the NBR’s list when it comes out on Thursday? I think “The Hurt Locker,” “Invictus” — Clint Eastwood’s biopic starring Morgan Freeman as former South African President Nelson Mandela — “Precious,” “Up,” “The Lovely Bones” — Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel of the same name — and the George Clooney-driven indie “Up in the Air” are all safe bets. As far as the final four go, I’m going to take James Cameron’s “Avatar,” the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man,” the star-studded musical “Nine” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” I would also add “Star Trek,” “(500) Days of Summer” and “An Education” as potential dark horses.

As far as the winners in the top four categories go, I’m going to take “The Hurt Locker” as Best Film, George Clooney (“Up in the Air”) as Best Actor, Gabourey Sidibe (“Precious”) as Best Actress and Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) as Best Director.

Tony Lewis is a senior majoring in journalism and legal studies. Have your own picks for who will be awarded on Thursday? Send your opinions to [email protected].