In the absence of any clear front runners in this year’s Oscar race — an unusually large number of contenders, like “J. Edgar” and “The War Horse” have not been screened — the so-called experts have been talking up the Best Picture prospects of some films that I just don’t see getting nominations in end. If the academy hasn’t changed its rules and there were a guaranteed 10 slots, “The Artist” and “Moneyball” might be in the running to fill what looks like, at this point, a relatively weak field compared to last year.

But under rules taking effect for this year’s race, the number of Best Picture nominees will fluctuate somewhere between 5 and 10 — depending on how many films capture 5 percent of first-place votes on a weighted ballot with just five, and not 10 choices. Based on a statistical analysis of ballots for the decade before the field was expanded to 10 nominees, the academy says the number of nominees fluctuated between six and 10. We’re obviously not in Kansas anymore.

I’ve not written previously about “The Artist,” which I missed in Toronto and caught at a screening before its U.S. debut on Friday at the New York Film Festival. Currently rated as the No. 3 Best Picture prospect among the Oscar prognosticators at the Gurus O’ Gold (behind “The Descendants” and the as-yet-unseen “The War Horse”) and Gold Derby (behind “War Horse” and “Descendants”), it’s a crowd-pleaser that the Weinstein Co. acquired in Cannes that won the audience award over the weekend at the Hamptons Film Festival.

Shot in black-and-white with a Franco-American cast, the film has only two lines of dialogue and there’s the rub — the academy hasn’t nominated a film without a full dialogue track since 1929. Not even Charlie Chaplin’s two late silents — “City Lights” and “Modern Times” made the Best Picture cut. I don’t think members’ supposed nostalgia for the early talkie era, the film’s setting, will be sufficient to overcome this handicap.

I’m frankly puzzled by the Best Actor buzz for the film’s lead, French actor Jean Dujardin — I just don’t think he’s as remotely charismatic as the actor his character is apparently modeled on, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. More likely is a nomination for Guillaume Schiffman’s gorgeous cinematography. Ludovic Bourse’s score is quite lovely, but it may not get nominated (or even qualify) because of the inexplicable choice to drop in the quite lengthy love theme from “Vertigo” — something that doesn’t fit and took me out of the movie completely. Because the few words of dialogue are in English, this French production isn’t eligible in the foreign-language category.

I like “Moneyball” a lot — it’s the only film this fall I’ve given 3.5 stars. But though it’s also doing well with Oscar prognosticators — who sometimes have trouble separating their own tastes from the academy’s as last year’s mass victory predictions for “The Social Network” showed — I seriously doubt it will get past the academy’s historic antipathy toward baseball-themed movies. Most likely it will get a nomination in the adapted screenplay category.