The American Film Institute has announced the top 10 films of the year.
The institute honors the best in film and is always a good predictor of which films the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences end up choosing for Best Picture.
This year "12 Years a Slave," "American Hustle," "Captain Phillips," "Fruitvale Station," "Gravity," "Her," "Inside Llewyn Davis," "Nebraska," "Saving Mr. Banks," and "The Wolf of Wall Street" made up the list. As a result, these films have become the front-runners for the Best Picture award.
The list is only made up of American films and therefore a number of Best Picture candidates were not eligible for the award. Notable omissions from the list included "Philomena" and "Rush."
American films that were surprisingly omitted included "All is Lost," "Lone Survivor," "Prisoners," "Before Midnight," "Labor Day," "Lee Daniel's The Butler," "August: Osage County," "Blue Jasmine," and "Frances Ha."
The AFI list is generally a good predictor of what films receive Oscar nominations for Best Picture. Last year, eight of the nine Oscar nominees were selected on the list: "Argo," "Beasts of the Southern Wild," "The Dark Knight Rises," "Django Unchained," "Les Miserables," "Life of Pi," "Lincoln," "Moonrise Kingdom," and "Zero Dark Thirty." "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Moonrise Kingdom" were not nominated for the Oscar but "Amour" was. However, "Amour" did not qualify for the AFI list as it was an Austrian film.
In 2011, seven of the Oscar nominees were chosen on the list. However, the AFI gave "The Artist," which was not eligible, a special mention.