Since my last 17 predictions have failed to come true (I hope none of you were wagering on me), I’ll go slightly out on a limb again and predict a Best Picture Oscar nomination for Terrence Malick’s bizarre but at times exhilarating “The Tree of Life,” which opens next week. One slot on Oscar’s shortlist these days seems to be reserved for the weird artsy film (and one for a blockbuster), and the back story behind “The Tree of Life” is exactly the kind of thing Oscar loves: Malick has been trying to make a version of this movie (originally called “Q”) for some 30 years.

I don’t pretend to know quite what the film is saying at the end, but it’s a religious parable about making the choice to be good as outlined in the story of a tragedy-stricken middle-class Texas family in the 1950s headed by a stern Brad Pitt. (Jessica Chastain proves more than capable as the wife, in a role that will make her a name.) The couple raises three boys, and plants a tree in the front yard, as each of them alternately speaks to God and begs for guidance about the mysteries of life and death.

This is fairly huge stuff that Malick illustrates with some of the most breathtaking images ever projected on screen, haunting vistas of the Big Bang, primordial ooze, the eternal, the vast and the sublime, much of it backed by gorgeous operatic scoring and all of it presented with impeccable Oscar-worthy visual effects, editing and cinematography. The general direction of all this is that man is very, very small and yet somehow essential to a divine plan.

Some of Malick’s films strike me as more lethargic than beautiful, particularly “The New World,” but to me “The Tree of Life” is a big comeback that will justly inspire much fulsome praise and fervid discussion about its ultimate conclusion. I expect it to be the art film of the summer, if not the year.