It's time to trudge back to work—sticky with champagne, coughing up confetti—now that New Year's is over. "Work" for some of us means awards season, this morning marking the beginning of the real full-court press coverage. What's new:

Jumping early and often into the heap is New York's Vulture, which has created an awards hub worthy of all the blathering excitement of having ten movies—kids movies and action movies and black people movies—vying for the Best Oscar crown instead of the usual, boring, puritanical five of years past. Their best feature so far is an analysis of those hilariously self-aggrandizing (and often woefully misguided) For Your Consideration campaigns, a batch of pitiful begging that includes lots of pictures of Betty White (so searing and honest in Werner Herzog's The Proposal) and an ad that forgets to include the movie's title (it has something to do with Roy Scheider).

The New York Times has been dutifully updating their Carpetbagger awards blogpage, today's latest trumpeting about that lady-directed action flick about nerds getting stuffed into lockers or something that has everyone finally thinking about how difficult it must be over there in Iraq. We really miss that old scratchbox David Carr, who quit the Times' awards beat to pursue greener, but less glittery, pastures. But they still do a good job!

Entertainment Weekly's square-jawed gay quarterback Dave Karger has been rolling out predictions and awards tally roundups for months now, and has even dared to publish a list of who he thinks will get nominated come the big February 2nd announcement of cinema's homecoming court. He, among others, thinks that Sandy Bullock is going to earn a nomination for The Blind Side, in which a white southern lady adopts a pet colored for tax and football-related reasons. We hope he's right, and that Bullock's next movie will be about her rescuing Precious from Harlem and taking her to live with Betty White (a white) in Alaska.

The Los Angeles Times takes an obvious interest in their hometown's big Jewish Olympics, hosting a raft of blogs, chiefly Tom O'Neil's thorough deep-dive Gold Derby. Yesterday he told us a sad story about Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges, one of whom has won almost every award for everything ever, the other who has won inexplicably nothing. Not even for K-Pax! Not even for that.

For our part, we at Gawker have our #beautifulawards hash tag or whatever we're calling these pound sign things, so check there frequently to read as we gurgle and poke sticks at the awards season, glad for the various joys it gives us and depressed about the fact that we have never won one of our own, and likely won't ever. Or at least I won't. Pareene probably will. I touched an Emmy once, but it wasn't mine. It belonged to a guy from Ed. Which is just not the same at all.

Anyway, I saw Avatar over school vacation and thought it was *so good*, really I did, and I wouldn't be mad if it won things for the way those blue people looked so real and the way Zoe Saldana managed to be sexy even though you couldn't even really see Zoe Saldana. And Sam Worthington's bullet-headed good looks! Those should win something. As should District 9, because it also said things about aliens that were really about us. 2009: The Year We All Became Space Nerds.