Ultimately, Lance Elko defended his late lead in the contest against other contestants who also picked No Country For Old Men to win Best Picture. By a seven-point margin, Lance beat Ezra Olson, who finished second. The last-place Booby Prize was closer: Amy Helen Johnson edged out Leslie Mizell by a single point.

Lance is the editor of US Airways magazine. He finished second last year and has entered Tom's Oscar Contest almost every year since the 1980s, but this year is the first time he finished first. (Read his acceptance speech). Lance lives in North Carolina, where he enjoys playing his acoustic-electric guitar at nightclubs and special events.

Ezra, a 15-year-old high-school student in Wisconsin, is a first-time contestant. He is the son of Julie Vosper, a friend of Kathy Yakal's. Ezra is a cinophile, high-school newspaper assistant editor, unicyclist, and amateur filmmaker. He ended with 95 points, second only to Lance's 102 points. (Read his brief acceptance speech.)

Amy won the Booby Prize by scoring only two points. (Read her brief acceptance speech). She won the Booby Prize last year, too. Amy is a Seattle freelance writer who reports that she was so busy remodeling her house that she saw very few movies, which greatly contributed to her near total ignorance of this year's nominees. She barely beat frequent Booby Prize winner Leslie Mizell, whose attempt to finish last was torpedoed by her choice of Taxi to the Dark Side for Best Documentary Feature. Taxi won, and Leslie happened to be the only contestant who picked it.

• Check the real-time scoreboard that is continually updated during the Academy Awards show on TV. Tom's OscarCalc program automatically calculates the scores after each Oscar is presented, then posts the results online within seconds. Simply click the Reload or Refresh button on your browser toolbar to update the scoreboard screen after each award. You can also view any contestant's ballot.

• See the Oscar predictions made by OscarCalc, the miracle program behind Tom's Oscar Contest. Each year, in addition to automatically tabulating the scores, OscarCalc predicts with uncanny accuracy who will win an Oscar in each award category. (These predictions form the basis of the computer-generated virtual contestants.) This year, despite several upsets, OscarCalc correctly predicted the winners in 13 of 24 Oscar categories.

• See the final scores from last year's contest. The top winner was Robert Lock.

• Visit the Hall of Fame for Tom's Oscar Contest. You can see the names of all winners from 1989 to 2008. (Sorry, earlier years are not available.)