The 4th Annual Oscar Guess the Plot Quiz

Below are the titles of the 2009 films nominated as best picture. Your job is to guess which of five plots is the actual plot. The other four are fakes provided by the Evil Minions.

Avatar

1. Sam Wazowski lies down for a catnap in what appears to be a tanning bed and wakes up in the body of a graying overweight cartoon character with muttonchops and eye lasers. He soon learns that in order to restore balance to the universe and make Jim Cameron a gazillion dollars he must defeat a renegade alpaca, a giant brown eyeball, and Dave.

2. Geek-queen Charlene gets the chance of a lifetime to play her hero--Lizard Girl--in a made-for-TV movie of her favorite video game, while Oscar, her best friend, plays the first transgender superhero on the small screen. Is this the show that finally knocks American Idol from the top spot?

3. Computer geek Lloyd Burrows has just created a blue-skinned cartoon character as his avatar when an electrical surge not only changes him into his avatar, but transports him into a world of other blue-skinned people. Should he join them in their war against humans, or try to return home?

4. Lonely, obsessive technogeek Phil Ravin is driven to the brink of suicide in his desperate search for an image that will appropriately represent himself on Facebook. Will a chance encounter with beautiful photographer and graphic designer Liesl become his salvation, or just make his stutter worse?

5. In exchange for the spinal surgery that will fix his legs, paraplegic Jake Sully gathers intel as a member of the Marines' "Avatar" program. Will Jake walk again, or is he just being used by the ruthless Colonel Q?


The Blind Side

1. A homeless boy becomes an All American defensive lineman. Sacking quarterbacks is his specialty, and gets him drafted into the National Football League. But what will happen when he runs into a left-handed quarterback, and can no longer rush from . . . the blind side?

2. Brian and his siblings have been pulling off a series of complicated bank robberies to pay for their mother's expensive medical care. But Brian's been keeping a secret from his brothers: he's going blind. Soon, he won't be able to see enough to pull off the jobs. Can they make enough to save their mother's life, or will their leader go blind before he can lead the last job?

3. Biologist Gloria Smitzden discovers a rare breed of vampire bat that seeks out food by heat and smell. Can she discover the bat's blind side before millions of the tiny beasts devour Denver? Also, a revenant.

4. In 1957, the inmates at the Hudson Asylum for the Handicapped group themselves by disability. When a partially deaf black man is accepted, he finds the one part of the cafeteria where he can be accepted is... the blind side.

5. In a world where cars have been replaced with sentient dodecahedrons, perennial loser Harold Mipkis just got suckered into buying a lemon named AL. Every time AL turns left-diagonal-up, he/it crashes into a fire hydrant. Can Harold learn to compensate before the entire city is flooded and his auto insurance goes up?


District 9

1. Private detective Steve Logan, hired to follow a Republican White House aide, stumbles on a square mile area of mass graves in rural Virginia. Can he get to the bottom of who's buried in "District 9," before he gets to the bottom . . . literally?

2. When the star ship bearing aliens nicknamed "The Prawns," showed up, we welcomed them. Now we're sick of them, so we've confined them in a militarized slum called District 9. Maybe if we treat them bad enough they'll move to Mars.

3. When a Congressional hearing uncovers a massive military cover up involving the funneling of billions in taxpayer money to a non-existent district in order to fund illegal black ops, the military’s representative, Col. Dukar, tries to convince Congress that District 9 does in fact exist, it’s just more like, um, District 9 and three quarters, you know, like that Harry Potter thing. Will Congress accept this explanation, or will they press on until the truth is revealed and the corruption laid bare?

4. Sam never believed in reincarnation but when he discovers that his latest incarnation is as a giant cockroach in District Nine, he sets out to build a criminal empire of insects in this post-apocalyptic, nuclear-scarred world.

5. Vice squad cop Harry Polk thinks he's responsible for cleaning up Atlanta's red light district . . . until he discovers all the usual suspects have taken their acts to "District 9," where people can have sex with insectivorous aliens, and where life is cheap.


An Education

1. Unprecedented documentary charting in real time the development of the human male brain from birth until full maturity. (Running Time: 6 Years).

2. When Billy and Bobby invade the high school girls bathroom at PS 35, they get an education in the finer points of those hygiene machines hiding in the closed stalls. Plus, plans for balloon animals.

3. Rebellious boys at an oppressive elite prep school threaten to blow the school up if the administration doesn't lift the ban on nude Graeco-Roman wrestling.

4. 17-year-old Jenny's sole ambition is to be accepted in Oxford. Then she meets David, a man more than twice her age, who convinces her that maybe there are more important things than school and books. Like having sex with an old guy. Romance ensues. Ewww.

5. Working on his sociology dissertation, a treatise on inner-city street life, Paul Hodges learns more in one week with prostitute Vera than he learned in sixteen years of school. Not that that's surprising.


The Hurt Locker

1. Hurt locker is soldier slang for "very bad place," which is what soldiers used to say until they decided it sounded childish. Anyway, this very bad place is Iraq, 'cause it's got lots of bombs that go boom!

2. Pete, the nerdy water boy of St Regis High Schools Boys Football team, gets his dream come true when he locks quarterback and BMOC Jason Masterson in his locker, thus solving his immediate problem of low social status. The real question is, how long will he have to live after Jason gets free? Plus, a dog with incontinence.

3. Iraq War vet, Adam Somerall, realizes that the older you get the less there is to love in this world. In fact, the ONLY thing he loves now is sitting in his dark cramped bedroom closet watching Pauley Shore movies over and over and over on his grainy handheld DVD player for 23 hours a day. Unfortunately for Carol, she loves Adam.

4. Every soldier who's been assigned locker 467 has been killed in action within a week. When Charlie Fowkes gets it, he must decide whether to hope it's a coincidence or whether to go AWOL.

5. As punishment for his crimes against cinema for the gorefest of Alien and the sheer misery of 1984, actor John Hurt is sealed in a metal trunk and lowered to the bottom of the Marianas trench. There, he meets a diminutive cartoon mermaid, and the two of them get started on corrupting the kids.


Inglourious Basterds

1. Determined to never fail another spelling test, ten-year-old computer genius Mikey and his friends set out to hack into dictionary.com.

2. A grupe of studints at a presteejis prep skool rebells agehnst cunvenshun by wershipping ded powetts, scipping math klas, and travaling to 1940s Frants ware thayle be doing wun theeng and wun theeng onlee: mispellin Knotzies.

3. Docu-drama providing a behind-the-scenes look at the day-to-day activities of the U.S. Senate.

4. A skwad uv Amairiken soljers hoo R all Jooish & kawl themselvs "The Basterds" R givn a mishin: tairrorize the Therd Rike by skalping Notseas.

5. A lifetime of blowing off high school, smoking pot, eating cheese treats and playing video games prepares Tommy and Timmy for nothing more than to sit in bars and become infamous, inglourious bastards, or--as they misspell it--basterds, until the aliens arrive and conscript them into the galactic terror squad.


Precious

1. Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, the most beautiful girl in the world, Princess Honeysuckle lived in the garden of earthly delights. Lately, she's been reanimated as a salesgirl with big bones at the local mall where she has to deal with vapid blondes, renegade redheads and brunettes with fake boobies. Will she achieve redemption in the makeup world or will she get an AK47 and blow away her rivals? Plus, a shaved schnauzer.

2. An eccentric book collector in Soho stumbles upon an obscure Tolkien masterpiece. As he begins to thumb through the pages, he is magically sucked into an elaborate fantasy world enriched by unique languages, eventually realizing it's the same damn story but told from the perspective of Precious, the ring.

3. Poor, angry, illiterate, fat, unloved and generally unnoticed, Precious Jones is the perfect character to spend a couple hours with. Also, incestuous rape and child abuse.

4. The lives of six old men and a dopey kid, gem wholesalers in modern day NYC, are turned upside down when a runaway teenager named Precious Stone knocks on their door. After she tells them about her mentally and physically abusive aunt in Queens, they allow Precious to stay and for the first time in her life she finds happiness. Until the day her aunt shows up disguised as a Jehovah’s Witness and persuades Precious to take a bite of a poisoned apple. Then she dies, 'cause there ain’t no fairy tales in Brooklyn.

5. When a baby is abandoned on the steps of a New York police precinct, and the detectives can't find her parents, they take turns caring for the child, leading to numerous amusing situations. Okay, semi-amusing.


A Serious Man

1. Professor Larry Gopnik's wife is leaving him for one of his colleagues, his son's lazy, his daughter wants a nose job, and his beautiful neighbor torments him by sunbathing nude. Can anyone help him cope and become . . . a serious man?

2. Once, President Barstock was a Serious Man but ever since the tri-sexual, three headed Greevves of Gygax, a small world orbiting Alpha Centauri, zapped him with the cosmic silly ray, he's been partying like there's no tomorrow. Can Shakeela Shortbread find the raygun of serious and un-zap the President? Or are we destined to have a clown for president until the next election.

3. Juan O'Reilly has never laughed in his life. Which is going to make a great game show ("Make Juan Laugh!") until Juan falls in love with his producer and can't stop laughing at her terrible puns...

4. Theodore Prescott Dursk has lived his life the best way he knows how, finding work as a tax accountant, an undertaker, a court stenographer, an annuity consultant, a scholar of ancient Etruscan literature, and a monk. After suffering a heart attack at age 45, Theodore decides it’s time to kick back and have a little fun, and pursues his lifelong dream of becoming a Royal Guard in front of Buckingham Palace.

5. Comedian Gary James has made a career of mocking the elderly and infirm. Now he's 73 and dying of cancer. Oddly, it suddenly doesn't seem so funny.


Up

1. In search of happiness and enlightenment, new age couple Skye and Chad find a mysterious book that reveals the location of Nirvana.

2. Despondent demon, Iscrap, makes up his mind to be all that he can be. Deep in the bowels of hell, he finds a scroll that can redeem him and return his status as one of the Angels. The only thing that's holding him back is that he must go UP in a hellish world where everyone else is going down.

3. An hour in the life of a drug addict as he prepares his next dose of crack, argues with his prostitute girlfriend, and has a debate with the fish crackers.

4. When mild mannered accountant, Richard Johnson, accidentally swallows a genetically modified radiation-saturated pill, he develops superhuman abilities that enable him to satisfy every woman's desires. But on day 729, disaster strikes when Richard walks in on his bathing grandma, and the as-yet-unsatisfied women of the world shudder to think that Richard might not be able to keep it... Up.

5. Sentenced to live in a retirement home, Carl Fredrickson embarks on a solo flight out of the country, little knowing that his aircraft has a stowaway aboard. Also, a bird named Kevin.


Up in the Air

1. Look, up in the air, it’s a bird, it's a plane, no, no, it's genetically engineered cows with wings. Plus a talking dog and a cat with three pairs of buttocks.

2. Ryan Bingham loves his job, traveling the country firing people for corporations that want to downsize. Then his boss hires Natalie, who develops a method of video conferencing that will allow termination without ever leaving the office--essentially threatening Ryan's job. Irony ensues.

3. Sequel to Up. The hour after Up, our hero, now high on crack cocaine, aimlessly falls around his apartment seeking solace for his high from the likes of a bottle of gin, a tub of cookie dough, and the power of scrubbing bubbles.

4. The highly anticipated sequel to Up. This time around, Richard Johnson must battle motion sickness, a sore back, and Al-Qaeda terrorists while servicing all of the world's female flight attendants.

5. George Clooney turns in an Oscar worthy performance in this epic biopic of high flying traveling trapeze artist Leandro Azevedo, the only person on earth to have traveled the entire Amazon without a boat or shoes.


Correct answers below.


Fake plots were submitted by:

Dave F., Blogless Troll,
Sarah from Hawthorne, Evil Editor,
Anon,
Landra G., Dominique,
Whirlochre. Angie

BTW, fake plots are currently needed for all titles in the query queue.

Answers

Avatar: 5
The Blind Side: 1
District 9: 2
An Education: 4
The Hurt Locker: 1
Inglourious Basterds: 4
Precious: 3
A Serious Man: 1
Up: 5
Up in the Air: 2