If you haven’t noticed, there’s a fierce battle being fought out there for the right to heft a gold statuette at the Dolby Theater on Feb. 24 and forget to thank some vital member of your family.  And though more than a half dozen pictures and performances that the blogosphere is touting as Oscar-worthy have yet to be seen by the public (and, in some cases, the very bloggers who are touting them), the virtual home office at Movieline has decided it’s time to throw open the doors to the Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics and start up the Oscar Index.

How The Oscar Index Works
This year, Movieline’s Oscar Index will be presented differently than it has been in the past.  We’ll soon add the now-iconic graph that tracks the weekly rise and fall of the candidates based on fluctuations in the Institute’s extremely sensitive media seismometers. What will be different is that, with each award category that we track, we’ll present four different rankings.

Movieline Executive Editor Jen Yamato, Managing Editor Brian Brooks and myself will each provide our personal weekly rankings of the movies and actors in the running, and then those results will be weighted and averaged to determine an official Movieline ranking for each category. This week, we begin with the Best Picture category. Next week, we’ll weigh in on the Best Director, Best Actor, Actress and Best Supporting Actor and Actress races.

Oscar for Best Picture 2013

Right now, Lincoln is the picture to beat with its heart-and-soul performance by Daniel Day-Lewis — his world-weary slump-shouldered walk alone is worth the price of admission — a beautiful…