All of a sudden Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's "love letter" (ugh) to Mumbai, is the frontrunner to take the top award at next month's Academy Oscars Awards for Movies and Things. Bet on it!

Oscar nominations will be announced on Thursday. But already the film, which barnstormed through the Golden Globes, is the betting favorite on Intrade to win best picture. It's also got the highest Hollywood Stock Exchange, and a top panel of awards-predicting journalists have unanimously named it their favorite to win as well. The days of the exciting Dark Knight whispering campaign are long over, gone the way of the long-dead wispy Wall-E hopes.

The film's swelling possibilities make sense, though. The film is a feel-good underdog orphan—not bleak or overly-quirked enough to be art-house, too sideways and foreign to be mainstream—and who doesn't like to feel that they're being kind and welcoming some poor kindly mongrel into their home? In this case "home" is America, and the kindly mongrel is the, you know, entirety of long-thriving Bollywood cinema. It took us a few years to catch on, but we finally got there! Obama!

The only risk the film could run is if its quick ignite takes it too far, too fast. Academy voters might grow tired of everyone caterwauling about the film, as they did when Crash swept the $9,000 designer rug out from under gay old Brokeback Mountain. (Yeah, that was a gay thing, but it was also a fatigue thing. Enough already with the cowboys, the Crash voters said.) Slumdog's real advantage is that it doesn't really have terribly strong competition. Milk is too small and too gay and too studied. Frost/Nixon is talky and just never caught enough buzz. Benjamin Button woulda won hands down like fifteen years ago, but not anymore. And Dark Knight, if it gets nominated (we'll find out on Thursday morning)? Well, it could have a late surge to victory, but it's probably too late in the game, and the picture is probably just too actiony. There's nothing about that movie that lets voters pat themselves on the back (as they could with Crash). So we're calling it. Slumdog takes it all. Final answer.

(Oh, and you really should go see it. It's quite good.)