For those of you who go to the best Oscar parties or enter the toughest prediction contests, you may have to pick from some of the categories filled with more obscure titles like “Best International Feature” or “Best Live Action Short Film.” I’ve got you. These are the categories where the films are almost always (but, as you will see, not always always) excluded from the feature film categories. They don’t necessarily go together except that they are the “other” categories. But either you need to know them to make your picks or you need to know that I really do know what I’m talking about. Either way, here we go. I’ll do these in order from the most likely for you to have seen them to, “Why do they have a category for these?”

Best Animated Feature – Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

An Oscar-winning director making a stop-motion animated feature is like candy to the Academy voters. That del Toro’s darker, more grown-up version of Pinocchio was well-reviewed guaranteed this win.

Look out for: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Marcel will not win. I consider this a crime against humanity. But I will always know that this was the best animated feature of 2022.

Best International Feature – All Quiet on the Western Front

Did I mention that All Quiet got a bunch of nominations? I did. Yeah, so that makes this category incredibly easy to pick. Oscar predictably goes with any movie in this category that gets nominations in other categories: 2018’s Roma, 2019’s Parasite, 2020’s Another Round, 2021’s Drive My Car…you get the idea. This year will be no different.

Look out for: The Quiet Girl. The first Irish-language (it’s like Gaelic, but apparently not the same) movie nominated for Oscar had some early buzz, but it doesn’t really have a chance. But it will always have that AARP Movies for Grownups Award win!

Best Documentary Feature – Navalny

The story of Russian opposition leader and dissident Alexei Navalny’s poisoning by the Putin regime, flight to America, and return to imprisonment hits all the right notes for this category. It’s a timely political doc with a lot of first-person footage and a bad guy that everyone not influenced by Tucker Carlson hates.

Look out for: Fire of Love. This look at the life of married volcanologists (right?) and their passion to understand the world’s most dangerous volcanoes was a big deal throughout 2022 after a successful debut at Sundance. But, at this point, it’s only a worthy runner-up.

Best Animated Short Film- The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

There is no Disney/Pixar short running before a feature that made the list this year, so this category is kind of wide open. This lovingly hand-drawn adaptation of Charlie Mackesy’s 2019 book has been streaming on Apple TV+ and has a really great voice cast of Idris Elba, Gabriel Byrne, and Tom Hollander. It’s the favorite for a reason.

Look out for: My Year of D*cks. Ice Merchants had some buzz for a while but it seems to have faded. That leaves this story of a teenage girl’s quest to lose her virginity as the most likely competition. But I still can’t believe that enough Oscar voters would be willing to actually vote for it based on the title alone, let alone the content of the film.

Best Documentary Short Film – The Elephant Whisperers

Netflix carries a lot of these documentary shorts now; fellow nominee The Martha Mitchell Effect is also on Netflix. In this one, an Indian couple takes care of orphaned baby elephants. Yeah, that’s all that needs to be said.

Look out for: Stranger at the Gate. Activist Malala Yousafzai (My Name is Malala) executive produced this story of a would-be domestic terrorist who learns to love those he hated. A powerful story worthy of the win. We shall see.

Best Live Action Short Film – An Irish Goodbye

This, the most obscure of the categories, is usually a random guess based on which title sounds the most impressive. But two things help. First, this movie about estranged brothers coming back together after the death of their mother, has a little bit of humor, which helps. Second, it won this category at BAFTA (the British Academy Awards), which helps as there is some voter crossover. Third, people actually bet on this category, and An Irish Goodbye is actually seeing some considerable action. So, this is the best educated guess.

Look out for: Le pupille. Director Alice Rohrwacher is a “real” filmmaker”; her 2018 feature “Happy as Lazzaro” was well-received. It’s also on Disney+, and exposure can’t hurt.

Okay, that’s it! I wish you good luck!