On the ten possible 2012 Best Picture nominees mentioned yesterday by Gold Derby‘s Brenden Murphy, three are candidates for instant dismissal, at least according to my yardstick: Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained and Marc Forster‘s World War Z.

The Hobbit is out because Jackson has already snagged a Best Picture Oscar for the Lord of the Rings finale and that, trust me, is the very last Oscar Jackson is going to get for any film having anything to do with Tolkien or Middle Earth or dwarves with huge ugly feet. People are on to his game, and the days of knee-jerk Jackson kowtowing are over. The Hobbit may land a nomination, but it cannot, must not and will not win.

Django is out because it’ll just be another bullshit grindhouse B-movie wink-wanker — a neo-Italian spaghetti western (being shot in Lone Pine by way of Almeira, Spain) with everyone duded up in Sergio Leone ponchos and smoking smelly stogies and scratching matches on their six-shooters and wearing rotting-teeth dental implants and chicken-grease makeup, etc, It’ll be loads of “fun,” of course, and probably a big box-office hit but forget any level of serious Oscar consideration….out the window! Tarantino is mentally, emotionally, psychologically and physiologically incapable of delivering a film that comes from any kind of real place. He can only make films about other films, or more precisely whack off to them. He can only make movie versions of what Max Fischer did when he put on those “sampling” plays in Rushmore. He can only compose knock-off tributes to ’60s, ’70s and ’80s movies that he savored when young.

And World War Z is out because it’ll be a cold day in hell when a zombie movie becomes an Oscar contender. And because director Marc Forster, on-the-stick as he was when he made Monster’s Ball, has been seen as over or waylaid for a long while now.

Otherwise Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina, Baz Luhrman”s The Great Gatsby, Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson, Tom Hooper‘s Les Miserables, Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, and David O. Russell‘s The Silver Linings Playbook…yeah, sure, maybe.

Not to mention Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity, Wachowski/Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas and Terrence Malick‘s The Burial (or whatever he’s going to call it), Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines, Andrew Dominik‘s Cogan’s Trade, Martin McDonagh‘s Seven Psychopaths and Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Only God Forgives.