Like life, Oscar is not fair.

Martin Scorsese, one of the great filmmakers of all time, didn’t get his best-director Academy Award until last year — decades into a career marked both by genius and profitability. The brilliant actor Peter O’Toole may have received an Oscar for lifetime achievement but he never landed one for a single performance.

So what gives? A lot.

People who don’t belong to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — just about all of us — have no concept of the campaigning, the demographics, the ambitions and the loyalties that go into academy voting.

So that means this reviewer — and cohort Jeff DeBell — have our work cut out for us. Here’s what we think will happen Sunday night.

— Chris Gladden

Best Picture

Nominees:
“Atonement”
“Juno”
“Michael Clayton”
“No Country for Old Men”
“There Will Be Blood”

Chris Gladden
Will win: “No Country for Old Men.” The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, returned to the crime thriller and they delivered a dandy. The direction is as tight as it gets, the language is pungent and the visual compositions elegant.
Should win: Ditto. The quirky Coens by a nose.

Jeff DeBell
Will win: “No Country for Old Men.” It’s capably acted and written, and it has the advantage of being as American as, well, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Should win: “Atonement,” because it’s beautifully acted and because of Christopher Hampton’s literate adaptation of English writer Ian McEwan’s fine novel.

Best actor

Nominees:
George Clooney, “Michael Clayton”
Daniel Day-Lewis, “There Will Be Blood”
Johnny Depp, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”
Tommy Lee Jones, “In the Valley of Elah”
Viggo Mortensen, “Eastern Promises”

Gladden
Will win: Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis plays a monomaniacal oil wildcatter with a driven intensity and few redeeming features. He’s not a man you can like yet he’s as compelling and fearsome and unstoppable as a tornado on the horizon. Like “Citizen Kane” and James Dean’s character in “Giant,” the character Day-Lewis plays crashes and burns after a life devoted to the pursuit of power and money.
Should win: See above.

DeBell
Will win: Hollywood favorite son George Clooney.
Should win: Johnny Depp. I haven’t seen it, but the competing performances don’t rise to Oscar level and Depp’s the critics’ favorite, which oughta count for something.

Best actress

Nominees:
Cate Blanchett, “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”
Julie Christie, “Away From Her”
Marion Cotillard, “La Vie en Rose”
Laura Linney, “The Savages”
Ellen Page, “Juno”

Gladden
Will win: Julie Christie. Christie won a best-actress Oscar in the ’60s for her work in “Darling.” Yet she chose personal and artistic considerations over superstardom. Oscar voters will pick her for this brave and perceptive portrayal of an aging woman with Alzheimer’s.
Should win: Christie. The choice is tough: The new kid? Ellen Page’s wry and poignant Juno? Or the veteran who lit up the screen in “Dr. Zhivago?” Page has a long career ahead of her and Christie delivers some of her best work. Give Christie the Oscar.

DeBell
Will win: Julie Christie, despite strong competition from the other nominees.
Should win: Christie for her heartbreaking and amazingly subtle portrayal of a victim of incipient dementia.

Best supporting actor

Nominees:
Casey Affleck, “The Assassination of Jesse James”
Javier Bardem, “No Country for Old Men”
Philip Seymour Hoffman, “Charlie Wilson’s War”
Hal Holbrook, “Into the Wild”
Tom Wilkinson, “Michael Clayton”

Gladden
Will win: Javier Bardem. Bardem plays a homicidal philosopher with bad hair and he’s unrelentingly scary. When he’s on screen audiences stop breathing.
Should win: Bardem. Bardem’s bad guy is one-of-a-kind. A villain can make or break a crime movie and Bardem helps make this one.

DeBell
Will win: Javier Bardem, the memorably icy murderer.
Should win: Tom Wilkinson for his vivid portrayal of a lawyer done in by his own inconvenient conscience.

Best supporting actress

Nominees:
Cate Blanchett, “I’m Not There”
Ruby Dee, “American Gangster”
Saoirse Ronan, “Atonement”
Amy Ryan, “Gone Baby Gone”
Tilda Swinton, “Michael Clayton”

Gladden
Will win: Ruby Dee. Dee’s long career is marked by good performances and at 83 she’s still capable of delivering them. The Academy will take this opportunity to celebrate a long and distinguished career.
Should win: Cate Blanchett. The amazing Blanchett garnered the biggest buzz for the lead in “Elizabeth: The Golden Age.” That got her the best-actress nomination. But in this visionary treatment of the different sides of Bob Dylan, Blanchett goes from Queen of England to King of the Singer-Songwriters. She BECOMES Bob Dylan.

DeBell
Will win: Cate Blanchett for her androgynous turn as one side of Bob Dylan. It’s really cool, ’cause she’s a woman, ya know?
Should win: Amy Ryan, for bringing irredeemable urban white trash jarringly to life.

Best Director

Nominees:
Julian Schnabel, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”
Jason Reitman, “Juno”
Tony Gilroy, “Michael Clayton”
Joel and Ethan Coen, “No Country for Old Men”
Paul Thomas Anderson, “There Will Be Blood”

Gladden
Will win: Paul Thomas Anderson. Oscar voters have no qualms about dividing best picture from best director, a practice that reeks of unfairness as the director is the person in charge. Think of an art show in which a painting is chosen the Best in Show winner but another painter gets the best-painter award. Yet the voters do consistently divide them and they’ll likely pick the talented Anderson for his muscular and epic approach to “There Will be Blood.”
Should win: The Coen Brothers.

DeBell
Will win: Paul Thomas Anderson — mostly flash, but not so darn unconventional.
Should win: Julian Schnabel for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” which sympathetically and effectively brings the horrors of stroke to the screen. He deserves the statuette for sheer imagination and audacity.

Original screenplay

Nominees:
Diablo Cody, “Juno”
Nancy Oliver, “Lars and the Real Girl”
Tony Gilroy, “Michael Clayton”
Brad Bird, “Ratatouille”
Tamara Jenkins, “The Savages”

Gladden
Will win: Diablo Cody. This charming yet incisive comedy-drama about a pregnant teen is chock full of wit and keen observation. Fine performances would have been wasted without a sparkling screenplay.
Should win: Cody.

DeBell
Will win: Diablo Cody for “Juno,” which generated lotsa buzz but is less breakthrough cinema than a warm-and-fuzzy tale of teen pregnancy like it isn’t but we wish it were.
Should win: Nancy Oliver. For the vividly imagined story of a town that adopted an inflatable life-size doll because a good guy named Lars loved her and the townspeople loved Lars.

Adapted screenplay

Nominees:
Christopher Hampton, “Atonement”
Sarah Polley, “Away From Her”
Ronald Harwood, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”
Joel and Ethan Coen, “No Country for Old Men”
Paul Thomas Anderson, “There Will Be Blood”

Gladden
Will win: Christopher Hampton. The Academy voters pride themselves on their sensitivity to the high-brow literary achievements of our English cousins. With that in mind, this romantic period drama might beat the early odds and sweep the whole thing.
Should win: Again the quirky Coen brothers. These siblings have both the language and visual chops. Though the novel of the same title is Cormac McCarthy’s most commercial work, it still carries the weight of his unique prose. The Coens make it all seem real.

DeBell
Will win: Joel and Ethan Coen for transferring Cormac McCarthy’s grim contemporary Western, “No Country for Old Men,” more or less intact to the screen.
Should win: Christopher Hampton for “Atonement,” in which he created the cinematic equal of the literary novel on which the film is based.