last year, when the Oscar race seemed to come down to a two-film rivalry between "Moonlight," and everyone was pretty sure that the former would be the big winner? Yeah, let's not make that same mistake again.

This year's contest seems to have come down to "Oscar nominations, "Shape," with 13 nods, seems to have a clear edge over seven-time nominee "Three Billboards." But it's easier to find reasons why these movies won't win than why they will. Indeed, that's true of all nine Best Picture contenders. Which makes this year's competition an open and exciting race.

"Shape" not only has far and away the most nominations (it's one of just 13 movies in history to have scored at least 13 nominations), but it also won the top prize this past weekend at the Producers Guild Awards. That would seem to make it a slam dunk, but as Sunday's Screen Actors Guild Awards reminded us, "Shape" had no SAG ensemble nomination, and as "La La Land" proved, movies simply don't win Best Picture without that. (Also, the Academy doesn't tend to reward sci-fi or fantasy films.) The movie that did win the SAG ensemble prize? "Three Billboards."

Does the SAG victory give "Three Billboards" the advantage? Maybe, but it still has fewer nominations overall and a PGA loss. It also failed to score a Best Director nomination, and aside from "Sam Rockwell are front-runners in the Best Actress and ing Actor categories. So there's that.

"Christopher Nolan. Finally, his World War II movie is the kind of all-male historical epic that might have done well 20 or 10 or even five years ago, but which seems less timely in the #MeToo era.

"Meryl Streep's lead performance fits the current yearning for films about female empowerment. But the fact that it was nominated only for Best Picture and for Streep's performance makes it a longshot for the top Oscar.

"Daniel Day-Lewis has said will be his last movie.

"Gary Oldman is the favorite to win Best Actor.

"Boyhood" a few years back.

"Brokeback Mountain"'s filmmakers learned, the Academy doesn't have a great track record with gay romance.

"Jordan Peele (only the fifth black man ever nominated). Its dark social satire on race couldn't be timelier, and it earned more at the box office than any nominee except "Dunkirk." But Oscar seldom rewards horror movies, and it didn't earn as many nominations as some of its rivals.

The Oscars are as much about presenting Hollywood's best possible face to the world as they are about rewarding merit. That's a tricky task at a time when revelations about Hollywood power players accused of sexual harassment and other abuses of power continue to make headlines. In the end, who wins the Best Picture prize and the other categories may just come down to whom the industry feels it can be most proud of -- or at least, not be ashamed of.