The hot new meme in Oscar prognostication: what if the two “serious” Best Picture frontrunners split the sane vote, thus clearing a path for Juno to take the year’s top prize with a mere fraction of the Academy’s total support? Scott Feinberg elaborates:

[Juno] is heating up at just the right time. Also, I am presently of the belief that No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood will split the vote of those who feel the need to support a completely ’serious’ film, and that Juno—which might have enough passionate support anyway—would be the most obvious beneficiary…

I believe to this day that Little Miss Sunshine would have won Best Picture last year had Martin Scorsese not been in the Best Director race… Try as they might, No Country backers will not be able to elicit the same sense of obligation among Oscar voters to seize this opportunity to honor the Coens, and so there will be no coattail effect this year—in fact, I think we probably will see a Picture-Director split.

It could happen. But ST Van Airsdale––otherwise known as The Reeler, now also blogging at Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men awards sub-site––really, really hopes it doesn’t.

[N]ot everyone wins come February 24, and, frankly, I don’t want to see Juno within a thousand feet of the Kodak Theater. I want her and her twee champions stopped at the metal detector…Juno could conceivably sneak to victory with less than a third of the Academy in its corner, thus completing its underdog lap around Hollywood and bulletproofing the myth of the Academy as a meritocratic institution. It would be politics as usual, and two years after Crash, we just can’t have that.

Look, I’m on the record on this: If Juno wins, it will be equivalent to Oliver! being declared, in the same year in which 2001 and Faces were nominated in other categories, as the best film of 1968. But it could also be a good thing in the long run: in the wake of that shame, the Academy took a sharp turn the following year and gave Best Picture to Midnight Cowboy, and nine nominations to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They. If There Will Be Blood falls to a film that blatantly rips off So I Married an Axe Murderer, I can only imagine what the disgruntled, disenfranchised Academy voters might do next year as a corrective.