2009 Academy Awards predictions - bet on Kate Winslet’s Best Actress Oscar win for The Reader

February 20, 10:15 PMPop Culture ExaminerDominic Patten

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At just 33 years old, she's been nominated six times and yet Kate Winslet has never won an Academy Award. With her performance as the illiterate and seemingly uncomprehending former concentration camp guard Hanna Schmitz in The Reader, that's about to change this Sunday as Kate Winslet wins the Oscar for the Best Actress

We made our predictions when the Oscar nominations were announced in January. Click here for full Pop predictions on who will win and who will lose at this year’s the Oscars Even if you are not a member of the Academy, you can still vote for your fave films and actors! Click here for Examiner's printable Oscar ballot with all the top categories and winners galore

For more up to the minute Oscar coverage, click here for Pop Predictions on why Sean Penn will beat Mickey Rourke for the Best Actor award

Click here for why The Dark Knight's Heath Ledger and Taraji P. Henson of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will win the Best Supporting Actor & the Best Supporting Actress awards at this year's Oscars

And after you’ve done that, click here for why The Dark Knight should have been nominated for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards ... & why it should have won

Now, let's get back to the Best Actress catagory. Anne Hathaway, Angelina Jolie, Melissa Leo and the woman commonly called the greatest living actress, Meryl Streep all electrified the silver screen, but this has undeniably been Kate Winslet's year. Which, as that sense of inevitability can commonly do, has made this Kate Winslet's Oscar to lose. The signs all are that Kate won't lose. Not at all.

Though she is not nominated for an Oscar for her role in Revolutionary Road, alongside her Titanic buddy Leonardo DiCaperio, Winslet won a Best Actress (Drama) award for it at this year's Golden Globes. Remarkably, especially for someone so often nominated, she also won a Best Supporting Actress that same night for her role in The Reader. Before that she won for The Reader at the SAG Awards and subsequently, the English actress won on her home turf wins at the British Academy Film Awards on February 8 Kate's double fisting - click here for more on Kate Winslet's amazing duel victory at this year's Golden Globes ... and more Award season coverage

Rickey Gravis may have had Winslet claiming that “I’ve noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, (you’re) guaranteed an Oscar," when she appeared as a nun in a World War II movie on the first season of the comedian's HBO series Extras in 2005 but the joke did seem to turn on her for a while. In recent months, Winslet's depiction of Hanna Schmitz in The Reader, which was based on the 1995 German novel of the same name, has garnered a fair degree of controversy.Slate's Ron Rosenbaum scathingly called The Reader a "heartwarming fable about the wonders of literacy and its ability to improve the life of an Auschwitz mass murderer!" For Rosenbaum and others Winslet's Schmitz is, in the film and in intent, simply a sacrificial scarecrow for the German people's real responsibility in the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and the horrific murder of over six million Jews and others in the Holocaust. Additionally, some critics like the LA Times' Patrick Goldstein feel that The Reader "simply doesn't capture the chilling intensity of its source material." Still, with all that, producer Harvey Weinstein's campaign to garner Winslet an Oscar has been smart and relentless. This week's TIME magazine cover story indicates that The Reader, which did end up on a number of "Best of" lists by the likes of Roger Ebert, seems to have overcome the controversy and criticism.

In part that question of history has been overcome because of history. As has been the case with a number of Oscars before - Al Pacino’s 1992 win for Scent of a Woman being one of the most infamous - Winslet's win will be just as much because many think it is time she got an Oscar as it is what she put or did not put on the screen for The Reader - and like it or not, that's the way Hollywood works

√ = The Oscar for Best Actress goes to ... Kate Winslet for The Reader

Coming up - the Best Director and Best Picture ... hint, the same person will be on stage for both awards

Don't forget, the Independent Spirit Awards are always a good last minute indicator of where the Oscars might go. Watch Steve Coogan from Tropic Thunder host what it usually a riotous show live on IFC at 5PM ET/2PM PT. on February 21st. Click here for more details.